Last Night at the Telegraph Club(106)

“Yes,” Aunt Judy said. “I know this must come as a surprise.”

Lily stared at her father, and then at her aunt. Her head throbbed painfully; it was the only real thing in the room. Everything her father and aunt said seemed utterly unbelievable.

“We think this will be best for you,” Aunt Judy said. “It’ll get you away from—from the complications here.”

It would take her away from Kath. She understood that immediately; it was like a gut punch.

“This is for your own good,” her father said. “You’ll be safe in Pasadena.”

They were afraid, Lily realized, that there would be more trouble if she stayed—trouble for herself, trouble for her father. And they wanted to make sure she wasn’t here in Chinatown, inviting gossip. They wanted to hide her away until people forgot what had happened.

“I don’t want to go,” she said, shaking her head.

Her father looked at her bleakly. “You’ll have to learn that sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do.”

Lily gazed at her father in disbelief, and then in growing anger.

“I live very close to the high school in Pasadena,” Aunt Judy said. “You’ll be able to walk there. Once we get home we can go right away and make sure you can enroll. If you can’t, your father said it might be possible for you to finish your senior year by correspondence. And, you know, maybe we can find you a part-time job or something at the lab. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Lily could barely register her aunt’s words. They were splitting her up from Kath.

“We want you to be happy,” her father said. “You’ll be free from distractions in Pasadena.”

Even though she didn’t know where Kath was or if she was all right, she had believed that eventually she would find out, and they would be together again. The idea that she might never see Kath again took her breath away. She felt faint; she felt as if she might dissolve into thin air.

“I’m going to call Galileo to see if you need to collect any paperwork for your transfer,” her father said.

She felt Kath’s hand letting go of hers again and again; her fingers sliding through hers over and over. Everything she and Kath had done could be erased so easily. It could be erased by her family pretending it had never happened. It could be erased by her parents uprooting her from her home and sending her away so that Kath would not know where she was. It could be erased because they were her parents and she was their daughter, and they loved her, and she could not disobey them even if it broke her heart.

“You should pack your things,” her father said. “Be ready to leave tomorrow morning.”





48





Lily’s father brought out an old brown suitcase and gave it to her to use. A luggage tag with an address in Chinese hung from the handle. Lily could read her father’s name and the characters for Shanghai, China.

She opened the suitcase on her bed. Her grandmother’s powdery scent clung to the blankets; already the room was no longer hers. She packed her clothes quickly, without looking at them. She shoved in the new dress she’d worn to the Telegraph Club two nights ago, not bothering to fold it. She tossed in her black pumps and a hairbrush. Her father came into the doorway, looking anxious. She ignored him and kept packing. She didn’t want to speak to him; she didn’t want to speak to any of them.

“I knew a doctor once, a woman, who was a lesbian,” he said.

The sound of the word was startling, and she froze for a second, but she refused to acknowledge him.

“She was a very successful doctor,” he continued. “She was Chinese too, like you.”

This slowed her down for a moment, but only a moment.

“I admired her skill as a physician. But everyone knew about her personal life, and she never married. There were rumors, of course, but she lived alone. I think she still lives alone. This is what your mother and I are worried about. We want you to marry and have children. You should have a full life, not a stunted one in which you wind up alone, with no one to care for you. Remember this.”

He was imagining a tragic future for her as if she were one of the strangers in the Eastern Pearl that she and Shirley liked to invent stories for. It only made her more angry.

When she didn’t respond, he exhaled in resignation and left.

She continued to roughly throw her clothes into the suitcase. She thought about Lana and Tommy in their cozy if cheaply furnished North Beach apartment. They were not stunted. She thought about Claire and Paula, and the indulgent tone in Claire’s voice as she described Paula as solid. They had full lives. She thought about Kath, and a hollow seemed to open up inside her. It had gravity; it pulled at her in a way that made her sway on her feet. She had to sit down on the edge of her bed, and suddenly she remembered the Collier’s magazine that Kath had given her, but it wasn’t on top of the stack of books that made her nightstand.

She began to unstack them, hunting for the magazine, but although she found the one her aunt had given her, Kath’s issue wasn’t there. She moved all the books aside in case it had fallen against the wall, but there was nothing. She looked around the room, wondering in rising panic if someone had stolen it from her, or if her mother had come into her room and thrown it away. It was only a magazine, but she had to bring it with her. Kath had given it to her.