The Leavers(47)

Xuan, who was the prettiest girl in our dorm room, with thick hair and puffy lips, had a city lover, a man who was nearly thirty. Her boyfriend, who had stayed in their village for high school, didn’t know about the older man. I asked why she didn’t leave her boyfriend, and she said she had to keep her options open because her city lover already had a fiancée who also had urban hukou, and she didn’t want to marry him, anyway. He bought her sweaters and pointy shoes and gave her spending money she sent home to her younger siblings. I was impressed by how matter-of-fact she was.

“My boyfriend’s ba wa is long and skinny,” Xuan announced. We were hanging out in the dormitory bunks before bedtime. “And my city lover’s is shorter, but fatter.” She ran her hands through her hair and pulled it over her shoulder.

“Shorter and fatter is better than long and skinny.” Qing wrinkled her nose and shivered elaborately. Her eyes were set far apart, and she was a little chubby. She had an older cousin who lived with four roommates in an apartment near downtown Fuzhou, and one Sunday the three of us had visited, taking buses across the city. Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the apartment with its own flush toilet, the closet where the roommates kept their clothes and shoes. I wanted Yi Ba to visit me in my own apartment, remove a pair of guest slippers from my closet.

“My city lover has more experience,” Xuan said. “He likes to do it standing up.”

“Oh,” said Qing, exposing the crooked incisor she usually tried to hide. “That’s nice.”

Xuan turned to me. “What about you, Peilan? Which do you prefer?”

A checkered bedsheet hung over the edge of the top bunk. “Long and skinny, I guess.” I hadn’t had sex with Haifeng, but my friends didn’t know this.

“You need to compare. What if you say you like long and skinny and you’ve never had short and fat? You’ll never know which you’d truly like the best.” Xuan pursed her lips at the tragedy.

“Rural people don’t shop around,” Qing said, though she was from a village so small it didn’t even have a road. “Shop around more, sister.”

“You could get a city man if you had this.” Xuan removed a lace bra from a bag printed with the name of the store: LOVERS. The bra had two heart-shaped cutouts, and the panties had a heart printed on the crotch. “My city lover bought these for me.”

ONE NIGHT, WHEN I was late getting back to the dormitory, Qing and Xuan went to eat without me, and I listened to my other dorm mates talk about getting jobs at newer factories. The room was hot and stuffy. It had been so long since I’d smelled clear air or seen the sea.

I went downstairs and waited for the phone booth. After being passed to three people on the other end of the line, I reached Haifeng.

“Peilan.” It had been months since we had talked. “You called me.”

You called me. “Can you meet me next week?”

We went to a motel Xuan recommended. Lied about our ages and bribed the desk clerk with my money. My initial excitement shriveled when I felt Haifeng’s clammy fingers and saw, when he removed his clothes, that he was scrawnier than before. But I had already resolved to become a grown-up like Xuan.

The first time was over too quickly. We tried again.

“I missed you so much.” Haifeng kissed my cheeks and shoulders. “My sweetheart.” I smoked one of his cigarettes as he slept and looked out the smudgy window at the construction scaffolding of another building in progress. Then I left early and returned to the dorm.

My period didn’t come for two months in a row. How can I tell you how scared I was? My snipping grew sloppier, and Foreman Tung said he would fire me if I didn’t shape up. In the motel room, Haifeng had said things like “when we move back to the village” and “when we’re living together as husband and wife.” I lay awake at night, saw the long march through the village in a rent-by-the-hour wedding gown, seamy with sweat from the armpits of the last bride and the bride before that, the neighbors snickering about the upcoming wedding night. If I told Haifeng I was pregnant, he would act like marriage was inevitable. He would expect me to be happy, or worse, grateful. I saw it written to the end, all the years of my life: village, 3 Alley, babies, me and Haifeng hating each other to death.

Payday. I borrowed Qing’s Walkman and went to the music store, bought a tape with the money I was supposed to send to Yi Ba. I walked and walked and there was the highway. A bus came by and opened its doors and I climbed on. The driver asked where I was going and before the doors closed, I jumped off. Until now, I had done anything I wanted to, without repercussions. SHIT! I walked along the side of the highway. Trucks honked as they passed, kicking up clouds of dust. There were married women who brought their children to the factory with them, kids who napped in stacks of XXXL jeans awaiting shipment to American warehouses. But I wanted to go home to the village, have Yi Ba take care of me.

Sure, I’d been lonely, but I should have known better than to meet Haifeng at the motel. I knew we were taking a risk, but I hadn’t thought I would end up pregnant. What were the chances? But I had walked into a trap, proving my father right. Yi Ba thought anything bad that happened to a woman was her fault. It made me sick. If a woman was unmarried it was her fault for being ugly or independent; if a woman was too devoted to her husband it was her fault for being mushy and desperate; if a husband had a girl on the side it was the wife’s fault for driving him away and both the mistress and wife’s faults for letting themselves get taken advantage of. If I told Yi Ba, then he and the neighbors would be satisfied that this was whom I’d always been behind my bluster, a girl who would do exactly what was expected of her.