The Leavers(74)

“Who doesn’t have water?”

The woman at the other table held out a plastic bottle. “Here, you can have mine,” she said in Fuzhounese.

I hesitated, not wanting to share a stranger’s bottle.

“Take it, it’s fine,” she said.

I was so thirsty I didn’t care if I was being rude, so I uncapped the bottle, wiped its rim on a napkin, and took a long swig. “Thank you.”

“No problem, sister,” said the woman. Her clothes were well-made, tall brown leather boots, a long skirt printed with purple flowers, and a loose, chocolate-colored sweater. An empty food container was on the table in front of her. She had a wide, pretty face. “How long have you been in New York?”

“A long time,” I said. “Ten years.”

“I’ve only been here for three. But I’m leaving soon.”

The woman smiled and exposed a crooked incisor that seemed familiar, as if I had seen it in a movie or on a relative I’d only met once.

“Leaving for where?”

“California. San Francisco. I hear it’s beautiful.”

“You been there before?”

“I’ve only seen pictures. I knew a man that moved out there, but he’s somewhere else now.”

“So you’re going out there by yourself.”

“Sure, why not? It’s time for a change. New York is hard.” The woman tossed out her container. “So long, now.”

“Good luck to you, sister.” I watched the woman walk out, skirt swishing, hair hanging down to the middle of her spine. Once I might have become this woman, free to move across the country because she heard a city was beautiful. Instead I had become a woman like Vivian, watching TV, cooking for you and Leon, making sure the dumplings were fried and not steamed, unsure if I should marry my boyfriend but not wanting to lose him either. An uneasiness settled into me. This October would be followed by another winter, another spring, until it was time for October again.

It wasn’t until I was on the subway that I realized whose crooked tooth the woman’s had reminded me of: Qing, my old friend in the factory dormitory in Fuzhou. The more I ruminated on it, the more I was convinced. This woman was Qing, ten years later. They spoke a similar dialect; they were around the same age. She had called me yi jia, big sister. Qing, I remembered, had wide-set eyes and a wispy voice that sounded like she had a little spit in her mouth. The woman in the takeout joint had wide-set eyes, and her speech could’ve been a little wispy. She hadn’t recognized me, but perhaps I no longer resembled my younger self.

The subway went express through midtown Manhattan. I leaned against the door, absorbing each bump on the tracks. I knew I should get back on the train to Brooklyn, leave a note in the restaurant asking Qing to call me if she ever returned. But I remained inside, locked down by indecision, as if I was allowing something valuable to slip away.

When I got off at Fordham Road, the sun was already low. I walked up the stairs to our apartment, passing Tommie from next door. “Not-bad-not-bad-not-bad,” he said. Flustered, I dropped my keys, and he bent down to retrieve them for me.

For days after seeing the woman who might have been Qing, I slept poorly. Eight-hour shifts at the nail salon seeped by in a haze, and Leon only registered at the periphery of my vision. To your delight, I heated up frozen pizza for dinner. You asked if you could have money to buy bootleg DVDs from the lady who sold them in the Colombian restaurant and I handed the cash over without a word. When I came home from work to find you and Michael and Vivian engrossed in a movie about a man blowing up people with a machine gun, I went into the bedroom and shut the door. It was too much effort to protest. Soon it would be winter again.

I sat at the window, looking down at the block, the darkening sky filling me with a strange terror. I saw a man with a cane making his way across the street, Mrs. Johnson walking arm in arm up the hill with her daughter, the two women talking close to each other. I went into the living room and joined you in front of the TV.

THE BUS TO ATLANTIC CITY smelled like feet, its upholstery dusty, faded into uniform shades of beige and brown, and its seats were at capacity, rows of heads protruding from ski jackets, topped with baggy knit hats in primary colors. Leon and I sat in the back, half the age of the other riders, eating pork buns from a bag emblazoned with a yellow happy face. The bus emerged from a tunnel onto a garble of highways. The high-rises flattened and spread into parking lots and concrete dividers, dim and gray in the winter light. Only the signs were bright green, the names of New Jersey towns I read aloud to myself: Hacken Sack. Pah Ramus. Old people snored against the windows, some coughing and hacking and rattling, as if they were running low on batteries. My sneakers produced kissing noises as they moved against the floor. I took the last pork bun, sinking my teeth into the sweet, spongy dough.

Atlantic City was a gift from Quan, who’d bled so much money at the casinos they gave him vouchers for free hotel rooms, dinners, drinks. Didi had accompanied him in the past, but this time gave a voucher to me and Leon, though we weren’t gamblers. “You need the time away more than I do,” she said. “It’s a pre-wedding gift.” Besides, Quan had quit gambling. Now he was attending weekly meetings for people who gambled too much.

So Leon and I checked into Caesars for free, a carpet-padded casino of ringing noises and lights. We bought a bottle of Hennessy and drank too much, which gave me a headache. Yet the freshness of being out of the city, even in this too-bright room that felt like the oxygen had been sucked out and run through a machine and pumped back in, made me reach for more Hennessy. Two shots, slammed fast, and the heaviness receded. Four shots and Leon was reshaped into the man he had been when I first met him, a prize I had wanted to win, whose attention was sudden, precarious, instead of this man whose aging sometimes took me by surprise, like when he was putting money on his card at the subway station and I noticed how his body was stiffer, his neck thinner, the skin around his throat loosening. There were days his arms hurt so much he couldn’t work. And I was different, too, though I lived in the same body that had once slept with Haifeng, been packed into a box, delivered a baby, craved Leon so much its hands shook. A body changed in increments, and while this shifting seemed slow, it was unstoppable. The flesh got weightier, the skin coarser. Hairs in places they hadn’t been before. But it was the same body, even if there was no visible sign of its past. Like muscle memory, a body could recall things on a hidden, cellular level.