Last Night at the Telegraph Club(57)
Lily looked at her friend; she had a slight scowl on her face as she watched the skaters. “We could go ice-skating if you want,” Lily said.
Shirley took a sip of her hot chocolate. “No. I don’t want to. That’s not what I mean. It’s just . . . ice-skating is so silly. Why would anyone do it?”
“For fun?”
“Exactly. For fun.”
Shirley sounded bitter, which was unlike her. “Is something bothering you?” Lily asked. “Did something happen?”
Shirley shrugged, as if she were trying to slough off the black mood that had fallen over her. “No, nothing. I just get tired of the . . . the smallness of Chinatown, you know? Everybody knows everybody, and they’re always poking their noses where they don’t belong, and you can’t do anything just for fun.”
Lily wasn’t sure how to respond. She took the last few sips of her hot chocolate. It was too sweet now, and sugar coated her tongue like sand. Shirley was right; Lily felt those constraints too. And yet she also felt protective of Chinatown. She didn’t want anyone to disparage it—not even Shirley. When they were children, Chinatown had seemed wonderfully free to Lily: a neighborhood full of friends, with shopkeepers who would give her candied fruit and lumps of rock sugar. Of course everyone knew each other; it was like a densely packed little village, and her father was the well-respected village doctor. It was safe. Outside Chinatown was a different story. Everybody knew the boundaries. You stayed between California and Broadway, went no farther west than Stockton, and no farther east than Portsmouth Square. It wasn’t until junior high, when she had to walk through North Beach to go to school, that Lily became comfortable with leaving Chinatown. Even then, she heard stories about Italian boys who beat up Chinese kids who made the mistake of wandering off Columbus Avenue.
“I want to go to New York,” Shirley said abruptly. “Or Paris. Maybe London—or Honolulu! One of my cousins lives there. Anywhere but here. Don’t you want to go somewhere?” She looked at Lily then, challengingly, and Lily suddenly wondered if Shirley somehow knew about the Telegraph Club.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Lily bent to set her empty cup on the floor at her feet, which allowed her to look away.
“You do. You want to go to space.” Shirley gave a half laugh, unable to hide the trace of condescension in her tone.
Lily bristled. “Why did you want to me to come out with you today? Did you just want to pick on me?”
“Pick on you!” Shirley humphed and finished her hot chocolate, swallowing her own grainy dregs with a grimace. “I just wanted to get away for a few hours, that’s all. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been a lousy friend, I know it. I’m sorry. Forgive me?”
The sudden turnabout took Lily aback. She wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her.
“Come on, let’s go walk around. There’s a whole museum in here, isn’t there? Let’s go.” Shirley got up and reached for Lily’s reluctant arm to drag her to her feet. “Come on. Be my friend today, okay? I need a friend.”
Beneath Shirley’s joking tone was something urgent, even a little desperate. Lily saw her friend’s eyes gleam for an instant as if she were forcing back tears. Abruptly she dropped Lily’s arm, picked up Lily’s empty cup, and went to toss it along with her own into the trash can nearby. When she returned she had a contrite expression on her face, and Lily had to give in because she had known Shirley her entire life, and this was the first time Shirley had asked for her forgiveness.
27
Sutro’s Museum was full of what some people would call junk: a lineup of horse-drawn buggies straight out of the Old West; a collection of Egyptian mummies in their ancient carved coffins; dioramas of ghost towns that would come to mechanized life with the drop of a few pennies. In one room there was a life-size mannequin of a Japanese woman called Mrs. Ito. She looked subhuman, crouching on the ground with one half-bared arm pointing to the side, her head balding and faintly apelike.
Lily and Shirley approached her dubiously. She had been carved out of wood and painted, and Lily wondered if she had been based on a real woman, and if so, what woman would have consented to have this mockery made of her.
Several Caucasian children were peering at the statue while their mothers stood behind them talking to each other. One of the little boys pointed at Shirley and Lily and announced, “Mommy, they’re like Mrs. Ito!”
One mother had the grace to look embarrassed, but another said, “How wonderful! Excuse me, girls, are you Japanese? Would you talk to my boys?”
Lily froze.
Shirley grabbed her hand to pull her away, calling over her shoulder in a false accent, “No speak Engrish, sorry!”
Once they were outside the room they fled, running through the Dolls of the World display—Lily was sure there were some terrible Chinese dolls there—and back up to the gallery overlooking the skating rink as if they were being chased. The running made the whole thing funny rather than awful, and when they reached the Marine Deck, where a long line of windows overlooked the ocean, Shirley said snidely, “鬼佬,”* and Lily laughed, even though it wasn’t really funny.
Telescopes were mounted every few feet in front of the windows to enable visitors to zoom in on the Seal Rocks out in the ocean. The marine layer had finally lifted, and the rocks were now visible offshore. Shirley went to one of the telescopes and peered through, then glanced over her shoulder at Lily. “Come look—you can see the seals.”