Fiona and Jane(42)

She asked how Won was doing. I said he was fine.

“He asked me to marry him,” I said.

Mah looked up.

“He was joking,” I said.

“I need your help,” Mah said finally, as if making an announcement. She pushed her soup bowl away from her. “You won’t like it,” she added. “But my toenails grow long. I can’t bend down.”



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? ? ?

I sat on the edge of the tub, waiting for the plastic basin to fill up with warm water from the faucet. While I was trimming her nails, I noticed the dirt and lint crusted between her toes, on the tops of her feet, and remarked on it. Mah had sighed and given an embarrassed smile. Six months after her surgery, Mah seemed fine, except for the slight limp. She didn’t need her cane anymore. Mah was back at work, driving herself to appointments, eating out with the church ladies, just like before. Last week she told me proudly the deacons had reinstated her Sunday school role with the first and second graders, a job she enjoyed more than anything else she did the rest of the week. She was kinder to those brats and far more lenient, I was sure, than she ever was with me. Some of their crayon drawings hung taped to the wall in our living room, next to the upright piano I hadn’t touched in years. One of them portrayed three crosses on a green hill, indistinct figures pinned on them with their arms outstretched—morbid, I thought—but the others were of normal kid stuff: cats and dogs, blue skies and white clouds, houses with windows, families of people wearing giant smiles. I was amazed at how fast she seemed to recover. Seeing the dirt caked on her feet, though, depressed me. How long had she waited before she felt she had to ask me for help?

I carried the basin over to the sofa where Mah sat waiting, watching TV. She’d turned it back to LA-18. I set the water down next to her, and she lifted one of her feet in the air, dipped a toe in to test the temperature.

“Too hot?”

She shook her head and submerged both her feet. I watched her face. Her eyes were soft. I asked about the soap opera. A rich family going bankrupt, she replied. It was a popular Korean miniseries, dubbed over in Mandarin. Mah pointed to the actress on-screen, a beautiful woman with disdain in her eyes and full, dark red lips. “They hire her to trick the uncle,” she said. “But falling in love.” Then she said, “This girl, a little bit like your friend Fiona.”

I studied the actress for a few seconds. “She’s pretty,” I agreed.

I sat down cross-legged on the carpet in front of Mah, the white plastic tub between us. I wet a clean towel I’d found, wrapped it around the nub of soap I’d grabbed off her bathroom sink, and worked up a good lather. I cupped one of Mah’s heels in my left hand under the water. The bottom of her foot was smooth, flat. Mah had no arch in her foot at all.

With the towel, I started washing her shins, her calves. Her sweatpants were rolled up to her knees. The skin on her legs was as white as tofu custard. Blue veins branched underneath the surface, from her knees to her ankles. She rested her toes on the edge while I rubbed the towel over the top of her foot, and lifted it so I could clean her toes individually, sliding the towel in the spaces between each of them. After I finished her right foot I moved on to her left. By the time I finished, the water in the basin was gray with dirty suds.

“All done,” I said. Mah said thank you. I felt embarrassed all of a sudden and stood up to carry the filthy water out from sight.



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? ? ?

I opened up the blue notebook again that night, back at my apartment.

Dear Fiona, I wrote.

I don’t know what to say. Won told me to write to you.

I broke up with a girl I was dating. Her name was isCarly.

I’m sorry I haven’t called.

How are you?

Hey, remember the time . . . you said . . . and then I

Remember how we

I was just thinking . . .



* * *



? ? ?

We drove everywhere in Shamu, her Civic hatchback. The 91 to the 605 to the 5. The 110 to the 10. She wore that spaghetti-strap dress, those patent leather Mary Janes. Her ponytail was tied with a strand of pink ribbon. Or, her hair was down and parted in the middle, loose and tumbling over her shoulders, caressing the small of her back. The feeling I had when Fiona was by my side: like we could do anything. Get everything we’d ever wanted—until I realized that what we wanted didn’t match up anymore.

She left, of course, after high school. Me and Won stuck around. I got my license, finally. He enrolled in Vidal Sassoon Academy, and I convinced Mah I was on a gap year, which turned into two, then three.

I thought maybe she’d come back home after Berkeley, but Fiona only kept leaving. She followed her boyfriend to New York. Won and I had met Jasper when we drove up north for Fiona’s graduation; on the way back down we’d dissected him in the car for hours, from Pleasanton to Kettleman City. “She likes him too much,” Won had said. “And he knows it.”

I missed her, but I didn’t know how to say it. Fiona’s life seemed serious. Grown-up. When she was in town over Christmas, she’d told Won and me that she planned to be engaged in the next six to nine months, the ring on her finger by next Christmas for sure. I still thought of her as my best friend, though more and more she was becoming a story to me, one whose plot I couldn’t make sense of because either I was missing information or maybe I’d forgotten something from before—something important—and it was too late to ask about it now, because it would mean admitting I hadn’t been paying attention. Like: Why did she want to marry Jasper? Why had she gone with him to New York in the first place?