By tenth grade, I was one of the best students, despite my continued disadvantage in English. Unlike the other kids, I hid my test scores immediately and never spoke about them.
Annette was my source of information. She told me on the phone one evening, “You would not believe the things they say about you. I heard Julia Williams telling this other girl that you never sleep and you never study.”
It was true that I didn’t manage to sleep much, but I couldn’t imagine how Julia Williams, a girl with tight golden ringlets, could possibly know that. My only opportunities to do homework at the factory were snatched during the brief breaks and on the subway, and we usually arrived at home after nine o’clock. By the time I got my homework done, I was so exhausted that I dropped straight onto my mattress and went to sleep.
There was a pause on the line and I could hear the low rumbling of static. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“The way you are in class. And like that last history test-I know you hardly studied for it. I mean, the day before the test, you hadn’t even read the chapters yet.”
I stared down at my hands. “I don’t know. It’s like being born with an extra head or something.”
But in a way, now that my English was fairly fluent, I didn’t find my academic achievements to be so remarkable. I simply did what the teachers assigned as best I could and regurgitated what I had learned on the tests. Sometimes I had to do all the preparation at the last moment because I had no choice, but I always got it done. School was my only ticket out and just being in this privileged school wasn’t enough; I still needed to win a full scholarship to a prestigious college, and to excel there enough to get a good job.
In tenth grade, I enrolled in AP classes, even though they were generally for juniors and seniors. Later, at the end of the year, I would receive the top score, a 5, on all of my exams. For this kind of thing, the other Harrison kids looked at me with mingled respect and jealousy, but not with what I longed for, which was friendship. Despite Annette’s presence, I was lonely. I wanted to be a part of things, but I didn’t know how.
My skin was now clear and Ma had finally let me grow my hair out. I was a perfect size six and I could take samples from the factory, which made my attire less noticeably inadequate. But my obligations to Ma and the factory didn’t allow room for social ambitions. And even if they had, I was perceived as-or I really was-too serious. I never went to parties or dances.
On the rare occasions when I was invited somewhere, I made excuses without even trying to ask Ma for permission. I kept a deliberate distance from the other girls because I knew it would inevitably lead to an invitation to their house, and I wouldn’t be able to go. I already snuck off once in a while to see Annette; I couldn’t fit anyone else in.
And at least I had Annette, who understood and accepted the things I couldn’t do, even if she had no idea of the true details of my life. She often came to the library when I was working there and had become a great admirer of Mr. Jamali. In private, she’d go on and on to me about how incredibly wise and beautiful he was. Annette’s likes were always intense. Her crushes were fleeting and left no real imprint upon her heart. She’d even had an interest in Curt, who had broken up with Sheryl over the summer. For a period of about two weeks, Annette had raved about how artistic he was, how creative and free. Sometime in the last year, he had stopped wearing his neat designer clothes and now went around in worn cotton trousers and old T-shirts underneath his blue blazer. But a few months after the crush began, she found him boring because too many other girls liked him too. All of this happened without any actual interaction with Curt himself, of course. For Annette, a crush was an activity more than a feeling, and she liked it best when I pretended to like the same boy she did so we could talk about him together, much the way other kids shared a passion for a hobby like baseball.
I didn’t mind. I enjoyed pretending to have more of a normal life when I talked to Annette. It allowed me the luxury of imagining I was richer and better off than I actually was. It was also too hard to tell someone how we lived when there was so little chance of change. We had long ago given up the idea that Aunt Paula would do anything to improve our situation. We were still paying off our debt to her, which left little money to spare. We could barely afford the things I needed to buy, like new shoes when I grew out of my old ones. Our only hope was when the building would actually be condemned and she would have to move us out.
In my other life, I could feel the buzz of Matt’s presence whenever he was at the steamers, whenever he went to take a break. He seemed to walk around in a halo of light. It was as if every excruciating detail of his face, his hands, his clothing was imprinted upon my mind.
I once made the mistake of saying to him, “Your pants look different.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I don’t know, something about the way they fit,” I faltered, realizing I was getting onto unstable ground.
He looked at me strangely, then said, “Actually, if you have to know, it’s probably because I’m not wearing any underwear today.”
I laughed awkwardly, as if it were a joke and I were the sort of girl who could laugh casually at such things, but the truth was, I was secretly an expert on Matt’s ass and I’m quite sure he was telling the truth. I never did dare to ask the reason for the omission, although I imagine it was because he’d run out of clean underwear.
On the rare occasions when Park, Matt and I had some extra time, we would gather for a few precious moments outside. One day, when I came downstairs, I saw Park fixing the chain on Matt’s cargo bike while Matt watched.
Matt shrugged. “What can I say, I’ve got slippery hands.” Clumsy ones. He hastened to add, “My body has heavenly skills, though.”
These half-flirtatious remarks of Matt’s thrilled me, but they also made me even more uncomfortable around him than I already was. I pretended I hadn’t heard his comment about his body and bent over the wheel next to Park. Park had good hand skills, dexterous hands, and he refitted and tightened the chain in a very short time.
“Will you teach me how to do that sometime?” I asked Park.
As usual, Park didn’t meet my eyes, but he nodded. I smiled and patted his arm.
“If you two mechanics are finished,” Matt said, “can I have my bike back before the pizza place goes out of business? It’s hard enough for a bunch of Italians in Chinatown anyway.”
In many ways, I had an easier relationship with Park than with Matt. On the surface, Matt and I were friends and I lived for the moments when we could talk or laugh, no matter how briefly. My feelings were so intense that I associated being close to him with a tightness in my breathing. I was always careful to preserve the space between us, as if he were something forbidden, from which I needed to keep my distance. When he brushed against me, I would move my entire body away as if I’d been stung and what made it worse was that Matt seemed to enjoy touching me, often laying a hand on my back or arm. In a way, I think I was afraid that if the distance between us were bridged, I would be swept away from all I had worked for, everything that I was.
I was a fool. I should have grabbed him when I could have had him all to myself, snatched him up like a ripe mango at the market. But how was I to know that this was what love felt like?
One day, she was there, waiting for Matt outside the factory, and she was everything I was not. It was the flirtatious skirts and the perfect fingernails, the melting look in the eyes that said, “Save me.” It was the flick of her glossy black hair that tossed the scent of wildflowers into the wind. Ah, her hair was short but it only lengthened her graceful neck, swept forward to point at her perfect lips. Even now, I want to remember her as a feminine doll, manipulating him with her weakness, but the truth is that Vivian used to smile with genuine warmth whenever she saw me, even though other girls sneered at my cheap clothes. Let me be even more honest: when I say she was everything I was not, I mean that she possessed whatever virtues I may have had and more.
I made it my business to find out how they’d met. According to the gossip at the factory, her father was a tailor from Singapore, one of the best, and he owned a small shop, specializing in custom-made, expensive clothes, down the street from Matt’s apartment. Vivian helped out there and somehow, she’d been standing outside often enough when Matt passed by that they’d gotten to know each other. Of course, I suspected her of planting herself in his path on purpose, but who can blame her?
At the beginning, she was an inch or two taller than Matt. With the passage of time, she dwindled as he grew, until he stood over her with his new broad body and large hands, an arm slung protectively over her delicate shoulder. Matt was as kind to me as he’d ever been, but there was a new absentmindedness to him, as if a part of him was always with her. I would watch them walking away together, away from me, and ache with regret.
Curt broke his left leg skiing in January of tenth grade, when I had just turned sixteen. He had to have surgery before he could fly back and was stuck in Austria for several weeks. We’d hardly spoken after that incident with Tammy in eighth grade, when he’d defended me to Dr. Copeland, although we did continue to have some classes together. Curt had been much too busy being cool, as he began to fulfill his promise of becoming someone special. He made paintings and polished wooden sculptures that our Art department made a great deal of fuss over. Last year, he’d been featured in the Visual Arts Festival. And he was attractive, even I had to admit that, with a smoldering quality in the way he moved. I had seen even our Latin teacher blushing when she spoke to him.
One evening that winter, our phone at home rang. It was close to nine-thirty p.m. and I was sure it was Annette, but when I picked up, it turned out to be Curt. His voice was deep. I was so surprised he had called me that I didn’t even ask him how his leg was.
“Listen, Kimberly, I’m back in the U.S. but I’m not even allowed to get out of bed for another month. The truth is, I’m on the verge of flunking out anyway, and now that I can’t come to school at all for a while, I’m sunk unless you help me.”
“I didn’t think you were doing that badly.”
“My grades are borderline, but then I’ve had a few other scrapes as well. Remember the fire alarm someone pulled, right before Christmas break?”
“Was that you?” It had caused a huge commotion: the buildings evacuated, fire engines and squad cars on campus, all classes canceled, students and faculty standing shivering outside for hours.
“Yeah. They were ready to kick me out but my parents did their best. I had to write a letter of apology and swear to maintain a B minus average and be a good boy from now on. Which I’m trying to do, but now my neck’s on the line.”
I asked him the question that had been on my mind since the phone call had begun. “Why me? Anybody would be glad to help you.”
“Come on, Kimberly. No one’s smarter than you. I need serious help here. My folks are already threatening to send me to boarding school.”
I agreed to give him my notes from the classes we shared, couriered daily by his little brother. They were copied and I got them back the next day. I saw other kids delivering notes to his brother too, probably for his classes in math and science. Once in a while, Curt phoned me with questions about any of his subjects. I don’t know if he ever tried calling earlier in the evening, but the calls I received came quite late at night, as if he’d been waiting for me to be home. He never asked me what I’d been doing earlier in the day, which I appreciated. Even though I was a few years ahead of him in science and math, I remembered the material and could explain the topics he was doing.
Although he could have, he didn’t keep me private. When he finally returned to school on crutches, there was a rush to sign his cast, but he saved the most central spot for me. He openly sat next to me whenever he could, and in a way, I was brought into his sacred circle. I don’t know if he did this mainly out of good manners or genuine appreciation. The end result was that I became accepted by the popular group, though still not liked. I had a kind of power that made other girls want to be seen with me but they were careful around me, tentative and distant. Nothing like Annette, who, amused by my sudden rise in status, remained my one true friend.
With my pseudo-popularity, there seemed to come a new awareness of me by the boys at school. Not every guy, of course. There were plenty who thought I was beneath their notice, but there were also always a handful who seemed to like being with me. I felt strangely relaxed with them. Now that Matt was gone from my life as a romantic interest, it was as if he had been the single repository of all my shyness, and with other boys, I was liberated.
The popular girls at school eyed the cheap factory samples I wore, and any warmth they showed me was far from genuine, but every weekend, after we got home from the factory, the phone would ring and it would be a boy. I would lean against the yellowing wall and twirl the long knotted cord around my fingers as we spoke-twirl, untwirl, twirl-and when I finally disentangled the cord from my hands and hung up the phone, it would ring again and it would be another boy. This drove Ma crazy, especially if they phoned late in the evening. Talking to a boy on the phone was bad enough but doing it in the dark really crossed the line.
Ma’s standard way of answering the phone became “Kimberly not home” and then hanging up. She spent her time pacing around me, calling loudly, “Dinnertime! Dinnertime!” which was pretty much the only other word she had learned in English. Ma was particularly anxious because she couldn’t understand what the boys and I were talking about, but she needn’t have worried. The calls were all about inconsequential things like homework, motorcycles, mean teachers.
I didn’t consider myself pretty at all. With time, I had grown too long-limbed and skinny for Chinese tastes, and despite Annette’s best efforts, the intricacies of makeup and clothing remained incomprehensible to me. I was not beautiful and I was not funny, nor was I a good buddy or a particularly good listener. I was none of the things that girls think they need to be for boys to love them. Mostly, I stayed on the call with my eyes closed, listening to the thrum of the phone line underneath our words. I knew what these boys really wanted-freedom. Freedom from their parents, from their own unsurprising selves, from the heavy weight of the expectations that had been placed upon them. I knew because it was what I wanted too. Boys weren’t my enemy, they were co-conspirators in a mission to flee. My secret was acceptance.
At school during my free periods, I spent a lot of time taking walks hand in hand with boys. We would walk and we would make out. This was exactly what Ma had warned me not to do with boys, which only made it more fun. I was forced to be responsible in so many other ways that I was glad to have the freedom over my own body. I could only go so far-there’s only so much you can do in fifty minutes on school property-but the boys didn’t seem to mind much.
“I don’t know how you stay so detached,” said Annette. “Don’t you ever fall in love?”
The fact was, I didn’t worry about these boys the way other girls did. The details of whether a particular boy called or not, of an invitation to a dance or a party or a movie, didn’t matter to me. Despite my own strange access to the popular crowd, I didn’t care if a boy was popular or not, a good athlete or not. Of course, I did have a slight preference for a smart boy, sometimes a handsome boy, but I could also be won over by a certain shy way of smiling or even the shape of their hands. The boys at Harrison Prep were merely a dream to me: delightful and delicious but evanescent. The blistering reality was the deafening thunder of sewing machines at the factory, the fierce sting of cold against my skin in our unheated apartment. And Matt. Despite Vivian, Matt was real too.
Even though Curt was now back at school, we still met once a week for me to tutor him in whatever he needed. The subject was usually math, at which he was atrocious. The school scholarship program counted this as working time for me, so I was initially glad to do it. As Curt emerged from the immediate danger of failing out, however, he reverted to his old ways. Sometimes he came to our sessions with a joint in his hand. And stoned or not, he never missed an opportunity to flirt with me. I didn’t take him seriously because I’d seen him doing the same with other girls. I understood he was just practicing.
There was quite a bit of swooning over his eyes, which were a startling dark blue with a glimpse of white in their depths, but I found them to be too empty to be intriguing. He was not interested in math or most of his other subjects at all, and was hardly ever prepared when we met, which annoyed me. A few times, he was late or didn’t come at all. I learned that when he was working on a piece of sculpture, he forgot about the time. Curt had taken over a corner of the enormous room used for Shop and he had a pile of wood pieces there that he worked on endlessly.
Finally I asked him, “Why do you bother coming, Curt?”
He raised his eyebrows flirtatiously. “Don’t you know?”
“Maybe another tutor would be better for you. Someone stricter.” I hated feeling like I was wasting my time.
Now he looked alarmed. “No. I like you. Sometimes I even understand stuff after you talk about it.”
“It should not be sometimes, it should be all the time. You don’t listen very well.”
“Yes, I do. And for me, sometimes is really good.”
“All you do is flirt with me. I would like it more if you just do your homework.”
“Sorry about that. It’s kind of a habit. And you have such great legs.”
I glared at him and he immediately added, “Oops, did it again. I’ll try, okay?”
After our talk, Curt did improve. He stopped coming stoned and he was usually punctual. Most of the time, he still hadn’t done his homework but at least he seemed to make a real effort to listen more. I realized that he was intelligent; it was only that he didn’t care for school. He was my complete opposite.
I found that he was more present in his workspace and I started trying to have more of our meetings there. He made abstract carvings out of separate pieces of wood that he glued together and then polished. I was walking around one piece that looked almost like the simplified Chinese character for water, a vertical stroke in the middle with two wings on the sides.
“This is beautiful, but why do you not ever sculpt something from real life?” I asked.
He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “If you’d pose for me, maybe I would.”
He saw my annoyed expression and sighed. “Believe it or not, some girls like it when I say things like that.” Then his face turned serious. “Because when something is not realistic, it becomes a container for whatever you want it to be. Like a word or a symbol or a vase. You can pour anything you want into it.”
I hated the idea of so much choice. “But that means it’s empty by itself.”
“That’s the beauty of it. There doesn’t have to be any meaning.”
“I cannot live a life without a purpose.”
He looked at me. “You don’t care about superficial things, do you?”
“Like what?”
“Money, clothing.”
I had to laugh. “Yes, I do. I need to.”
“No, you don’t, not really. I’ve been watching you-you don’t even notice what the other girls are doing.”
“You think that because my clothing is different from theirs. It is actually only because I do not understand what they are doing.” It felt good to admit this to someone. “I wish I could look like them!” An image of the lovely Vivian flashed across my mind. “But I don’t know how.”
“Because you don’t really care. Even if you could, tell me you would really spend your free time in front of a mirror trying to make your eyelashes look longer?”
I was silent.
He continued. “You’d be too busy inventing something to save the world.”
“Just because I am better at math than you are does not make me into a paragon of virtue.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“What?”
“Where did you learn that-I mean, did you hear someone say ‘paragon of virtue’ at home or something?”
I paused. “I memorized it from a book.”
“See?”
“Don’t they talk like that at your home?”
“Actually, they do. I’m the son of two editors-my parents talk like that all the time, God help me.”
“So how come you didn’t think they’d do that at my home?”
“Do they?”
I looked away. “No.” To change the subject, I started talking about his sculptures again. “But I do wonder if you could make something real. It is very difficult.”
Curt didn’t answer but the next week, he had made a small carving of a swallow. I immediately saw it lying next to his usual sculptures.
“This is wonderful,” I said.
“You like it?” His eyes were a bright, warm blue. “You can have it, if you want.”
“Oh no,” I said quickly. I had been trained by Ma not to be beholden to anyone. “Someday this will be worth a lot of money. I cannot take it.”
The light in his eyes was quenched then but it was already time for us to start our tutoring session anyway.
In eleventh grade, Annette fell in love with the theater. It started when she was at the library, visiting me, and talking about Simone de Beauvoir.
“She’s writing about how women are excluded when they’re seen as the mysterious Other and how that has led to our male-dominated society. People from different races and cultures can also be classified that way and it has always been done by the group in power.” Annette gestured with her hands, as she always did when she was passionate about something.
Mr. Jamali had come up behind me. “Look at her, her gestures. Everything is so big, so dramatic. You should be onstage.”
“Really?” Annette put her hands on her hips, thinking. “I never thought about it.”
“Tryouts are in two weeks. You could explore your relationship with otherness by being yourself and yet not-you in a role.”
That was enough to pique Annette’s interest. Although she only started in small roles, I saw that Mr. Jamali was right: she did have a certain flair onstage. Her flamboyant hair and her passionate, questioning nature combined to make her compelling under the spotlight. Mr. Jamali said she had a great deal of talent but it needed to be channeled and refined.
He was always there in his beautiful embroidered tunics, saying, “Very good, that was almost perfect. Now, shall we see it again, with just a bit more restraint, yet losing none of our intensity?”
I was filled with pride when I sat in the darkened theater and watched Annette rehearsing. Since the actual performances were often in the late afternoons or evenings, I never got to see her perform otherwise.
Nelson was on the debate team of his school, and since he was sure to be so good in competition, we’d been invited to come admire him as well. We were all crammed into their minivan together. Ma and I sat in the rear-most row of seats, but we could hear everything that was going on in the front of the car.
“It’s my nicest shirt,” Uncle Bob said. He’d put on a silk shirt for the occasion. “I brought it back from China. I was just trying to-”
“You’re going to embarrass me in front of my friends,” Nelson said.
“Yeah,” Godfrey, who was now thirteen, piped up. “What a stupid shirt.”
“You look gay,” Nelson said. “You look like a pimp.”
Finally, we had to turn the car around and go home so Uncle Bob could change. Nelson also made Aunt Paula take off her gold jewelry because he said gold was tacky, especially Chinese twenty-four-carat gold.
“Ah, the children develop their own taste,” Aunt Paula said. “What about you, Kimberly? You must have many extracurricular activities too?”
“I don’t have time,” I said.
“What a pity. They’re so important for colleges.”
Aunt Paula still believed that I was doing as badly as I had been at the beginning of Harrison Prep. Ma and I had never corrected this impression, since it seemed to lessen Aunt Paula’s anger and jealousy.
“And how are you doing on your standardized tests?”
“Fine.” I was doing well but Ma, on the other hand, had failed the naturalization exam, as we’d both known she would.
Before we left their apartment again, Nelson looked Ma’s simple clothes up and down. He opened his mouth to comment.
I stood in front of her and said in English, “Don’t even think about it, Nelson.”
“What?” he said.
“Just don’t.” And he didn’t.
I saw that his private school on Staten Island was much smaller than Harrison. Nelson seemed to shrink once he was onstage, becoming a red-faced, shy boy. His debating team lost.
It should have been obvious that the oven wouldn’t be able to take the constant abuse of being on morning and night, winter after winter, but it was still a great shock when it finally broke. The cold crept in over the floor, freezing the water in the toilet, thickening the layer of ice over the inside of the windows. Ma and I huddled together on her mattress for warmth the whole night long, with everything we owned heaped on top of us.
Ma called a man recommended by one of the button-sewing ladies. He was cheap, he worked under the table, and the lady said he had some kind of certification for his work from China, which told me he didn’t have any here.
The man’s dirty shirt and overalls were too big for him, as if they’d been stolen. He dragged his toolbox across the floor, leaving a mark on the vinyl. I winced when I saw him bang on the control valve with his hammer. I knew it was a delicate piece of equipment. After a great deal of noise, which I believe was designed mainly to impress us with his exertion, he emerged from behind the oven to tell us that it was unfix-able and his visit would cost us a hundred dollars.
“I don’t have that much money here,” Ma said, lifting her hand to her cheek.
At this, I spoke up. “You’ve made it much worse than it was! You are trying to beat on our leg bones!” He was trying to take advantage of us. Indeed, the stove had been dismembered and some of its entrails now rested in the kitchen sink.
He loomed over me. His accent was from the north of China. “I spent my time here, I want my money.”
Ma tried to push me aside. “Let me handle this, Kimberly.”
“Get away, kid,” he said.
I was afraid Ma would cave in and agree to pay him later. I was sixteen and I had the confidence then of a teenager who’d had to act like an adult for too long. I didn’t know enough to be afraid but I did know that I helped earn our money and I wasn’t going to give it up so easily. A hundred dollars was 10,000 skirts, a fortune.
“You want your money, you show me your papers first,” I said.
“For what?”
“Your passport, please.”
At this, my implied threat, he seemed to swell up like a blowfish. “You want my papers?!”
I was standing close to the phone on the wall of the kitchen and I strode over and grabbed the receiver. I started to dial Annette’s number.
“Who are you calling?”
“The police.”
His eyes were very still, wondering what he should do. I heard Annette’s little brother pick up the phone on the other end.
“Hello,” I said in English. “Could you please send someone over to house number-”
At this, the man grabbed his things and ran down the stairs, though not without one last baleful look at me. Time seemed suspended until we heard the door slam downstairs. Ma slumped into one of the chairs in relief.
“Wrong number,” I said rapidly, and hung up, hoping Annette’s brother hadn’t recognized my voice.
“What a thief’s head and thief’s brain he had,” Ma said weakly.
“With a wolf ’s heart and a dog’s lungs.” Untrustworthy and vicious. My heart was still leaping about like a frog in my chest.
At least he was gone. But the stove was still broken and temperatures were expected to be below freezing for the coming days.