Last Night at the Telegraph Club(103)
Aunt Judy reached for the cleaver, gently easing it out of her grasp, and said quietly, “You’re all right. It’s just a little cut. You’d better go put on a bandage.”
* * *
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There were eight dishes, plus lotus root soup and rice: poached whole chicken with ginger sauce; roast duck from a Chinatown deli; lo-han chai, a vegetarian dish traditionally eaten by monks; hsün yü, the cold Shanghai-style fish; steamed whole fish Cantonese style; the nien-kao; oyster sauce lettuce; and for dessert, pa pao fan, a steamed sticky rice filled with sweet bean paste.
Lily had been starving all afternoon—it felt like an eternity had passed since her scrambled eggs at Lana’s apartment—but although the food was delicious, she had lost her appetite. Aunt Judy, who was sitting next to Lily at the makeshift table for twelve, noticed. She selected some pieces of hsün yü and deposited them in Lily’s bowl, urging her to eat.
At least no one was making an effort to talk to her. Lily’s mother, Uncle Sam, Aunt May, and her grandmother spoke Cantonese together at one end of the table, while Lily’s father and Aunt Judy fell into Shanghainese. Uncle Francis, who had grown up in Los Angeles, stuck to English with the kids. Sometimes she caught her mother or father glancing at her, but they didn’t speak to her.
She began to feel as if she had been split in two, and only one half of her was here in this living room. That was the good Chinese daughter who was delicately chewing her way around the bones in each piece of hsün yü, carefully extracting them from her mouth and laying the tiny white spines on the edge of her plate with her chopsticks. The other half had been left out on the sidewalk before Lily walked in the front door. That was the girl who had spent last night in the North Beach apartment of a Caucasian woman she barely knew. Everything would be all right, Lily understood, as long as she kept that girl out of this Chinese family.
Perhaps one day she’d get used to the way it made her feel: dislocated and dazed, never quite certain if the other half of her would stay offstage as directed. But tonight she felt as if she were constantly on the edge of saying or doing something wrong, and the effort of keeping that unwelcome half silent was making her sick. Her stomach rebelled against it, and her head hurt, and she was so tired she felt as if she were in danger of falling unconscious there at the table, her head dropping right into her bowl of rice. The image struck her as ridiculously funny, and she had to swallow hard to prevent herself from breaking into hysterical laughter.
* * *
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Finally, dinner was over, and A P’oh was calling for the lei shi* to be distributed. Uncle Sam went out to the hall, and when he returned his hands were full of red envelopes. Minnie and Frankie both squealed as the adults laughed indulgently. Lily’s father produced several lei shi from his jacket pocket; Uncle Francis went and got his from his coat; and A P’oh instructed Frankie to bring her purse from Lily’s bedroom.
The red envelopes were handed out to all the children, Lily included: four each, stuffed with crisp new bills. The little ones got only a dollar in each envelope, but Lily received thirty-five dollars this year, with twenty coming from her parents. The money was a gift, but it also felt like a warning. It came with the expectation that Lily would do as she was told.
The lei shi marked the end of dinner, and Lily helped her mother clear the dishes away. Afterward, the men disassembled the temporary table and lit up cigarettes. Aunt Judy opened the living room windows to let out the smoke, and the sound of firecrackers popping could be heard coming from Grant Avenue.
Frankie ran to the window to peer outside, his brother and cousins close behind. “Can we go see the firecrackers, Papa?” Frankie asked.
It was the New Year, after all, so the adults agreed, and Uncle Sam, Uncle Francis, and Lily’s father put on their jackets to accompany the children down the block. They asked Lily if she wanted to come, but she shook her head and went to help her mother and aunts wash the dishes.
When they finished, and her mother and aunts put the kettle on for tea, Lily said she would go to bed. Her mother looked at her—really looked at her for the first time all day—and Lily looked away.
“Take some blankets from my room so you can sleep on the floor in your brothers’ room,” her mother said.
“I’ll help you,” Aunt Judy said, rising quickly.
They found a quilt and the old army blanket and took one of the pillows from Lily’s bed, arranging everything on the floor between her brothers’ beds. She said good night to her grandmother, who would sleep in Lily’s room during her visit. She brushed her teeth; she changed into her nightgown; she took clean clothes for tomorrow into her brothers’ room, and closed the door. The floor felt very hard beneath her, and immediately she remembered the soft give of Lana’s sofa.
She closed her eyes. She thought about the first time she had seen Lana, in the hallway of the Telegraph Club outside the bathroom, but the memory was disjointed and vague, with snatches of color and disembodied voices. It seemed so unbelievable now—the idea that she, Lily Hu, had ever snuck out of her house and gone to this homosexual club in the middle of the night. How could she ever have done such a thing? A few hours at home and the Telegraph Club seemed more like a fantasy than a real thing. This troubled her. It felt as if someone had taken an eraser to her memory—to her very self—and rubbed at it, then blown away the remains.