Last Night at the Telegraph Club(85)

Children loved the Opium Den—they especially loved to giggle and point at the cobra—but the more times Judy saw it, the more it repulsed her. The cobra, with its bulbous head and thrusting motion, seemed obscene. And the opium addict in the rear alcove bouncing up and down was humiliating. He was powerless, unable to escape this mechanized depiction of a real-life tragedy.

“How long do we have to stay?” Lily asked, sliding onto the bench beside her.

“Lily! Finished already?” Judy said. She had been so absorbed in her anger over the diorama that she hadn’t noticed Lily approaching.

Lily’s gaze followed Judy’s over to the Opium Den, and she frowned as she watched the repeated humiliation. “I hate that one,” Lily said.

“Me too,” Judy said. “Let’s go. We don’t have to stay here.”

Sometimes Judy felt a deep and burning anger at her adopted country, and she never knew what to do about it. She had come to America for an education and had intended to return home, but first she had met Francis and then the Communists had taken over and now, unfortunately, she couldn’t leave. America had given her so much in the four years since she arrived, but it also regularly reminded her of how it saw people like her.

“Where are we going?” Lily asked, running after her.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Judy said, opening the door.

“What about Eddie and Frankie and Uncle Francis?”

Judy glanced at her watch. “We agreed to meet at the Fun House at three o’clock. We have forty-five minutes. Come on—I want to see the ocean.”



* * *



—

Judy had fallen in love with Ocean Beach the first time she saw it almost four years ago, right after she first arrived in San Francisco. That had been a chilly day, too, and she remembered the wind whipping her hair against her face as she climbed over the sand dunes.

It wasn’t a warm and sunny beach like the ones in travel guides. It was cold and vast like the Pacific Ocean, which roared in on wild, foam-crested waves. She loved Ocean Beach because when she stood here she could finally grasp, in her bones, how large the Pacific was. She could almost see the curve of the earth on the ocean’s horizon—or she imagined that she could—and it gave her a physical sense of how far away from home she had traveled.

Yes, she truly had come that far. No, she really wasn’t going home anytime soon.

There was a strange sense of freedom in those thoughts. They left her free to be here, in this place, right now.

The ocean was gray today and blended almost seamlessly into the sky at the horizon. She remembered her passage across that ocean, sixteen days on a converted American troop transport ship in a second-class cabin with several other young Chinese women. She had spent so much time with those women, and yet now she barely remembered them. She wondered if they ever thought about her: studious and quiet, head down in her math and English-language books the entire voyage. She was sure they had thought her strange.

Now Judy watched Lily walking away from her down the hard-packed sand near the edge of the waves, looking for seashells. Lily went past a clump of seaweed that had washed ashore. It looked like a mass of dark green snakes tangled together, and when the water rushed back over it, one tail jerked back and forth like the cobra in the horrible Opium Den.

Just like that, Judy remembered the snakelike twist of blood and tissue in the toilet last April, when she had miscarried. It had been so early in the pregnancy that she had barely begun to accept it herself. She and Francis had been married for ten months, and it was time to start a family—everyone said so—but she had been reluctant to go to the doctor to confirm that she was pregnant.

Afterward, she secretly wondered if her reluctance had doomed the unborn baby. She had been planning to apply for Ph.D. programs in mathematics when she got pregnant. She’d dreamed of continuing her studies, not having a baby.

She had been overwhelmed by guilt. She still was. How could she have been so careless? She should have gone to the doctor earlier. She should have known, somehow, that something was wrong. It was probably her fault for not paying closer attention to her body. She’d always been lost in thought, in numbers and patterns and theorems. She’d always been an oddity, not like normal girls who cooed over babies and put all their heart into planning and preparing and waiting for them. She wasn’t one to coo; she never had been. Perhaps that meant there was something wrong with her, and her body had known that and had rejected motherhood.

In some ways, the guilt was more painful than the miscarriage.

She lifted her eyes from the snaking seaweed and sought out Lily, down the beach. She started to walk toward her niece. She felt shaky, the way she always did when she remembered that awful time last spring. She wondered when it would pass. Sometimes she caught herself fearing that it never would, and then she told herself that she was being melodramatic. She had experienced horrors during the war that she learned to forget.

(That woman torn open on the side of the road after the bomb; the shine of her organs.)

“Lily!” she called, deliberately pushing away those thoughts.

(Her father nailing planks over the windows, blocking out the daylight.)

Lily heard her and turned around, waiting for her to catch up. Lily was so fortunate. To live in the same country she had been born in, to have never experienced war on her doorstep.