“Hey,” Ralph says, tapping on my bedroom door after the house has calmed down. He tilts his head toward our parents’ shut door. “What gives?”
I shake my head. “They got a letter from school. God. I’m so sick of everything. I can’t talk about it anymore.”
“Okay.” He waves his hand. “Then just come look at this. It’s different.”
“No.”
“Please!” He pulls me into his bedroom and opens the door by his closet that accesses the attic steps. He turns on the light. Displayed on the step right under his candy collection, which is mostly empty Bit-O-Honey and Necco wrappers, is his Boy Scout collection. He painted the attic stairs bright blue, something our mother allowed during the period right before now when she believed he could do no wrong. Before Ralph turned eleven he could have painted his carpet blue or built a campfire in the bathtub without a peep from her. He is still a master at working around her. Much better than I am. He plays smart, then dumb, he tiptoes, has tantrums—whatever works. Dad knows it too. “Crazy like a fox,” our father calls his protégé.
Displayed on the stair is a scraggly strip of fur, an old stick of polished wood, the chunk of swirly rock he threw at me the other night, and the cap to a bourbon bottle.
We kneel on the floor. “It’s not finished, yet,” Ralph says. “I’m looking for more stuff.”
“Ralph, normal Boy Scouts collect coins or stamps, or how about matchbooks?”
“Well, this was easier than Hog and Pork Production or Bugling or writing a report on the dangers of laxatives or bandaging my own finger.”
I point at the fur. “Where’s the rest of the squirrel?”
Ralph slashes a flat hand across his neck.
I shiver. “Ick.” I sit back on my heels and rub the stick. It’s about a foot long, wider than a ruler, with one flat side and another that’s curved, like a wooden cylinder cut in half lengthwise. “What is this?”
Ralph shrugs. “Don’t know. I thought you might.”
“Why not collect things that go together, have a theme?”
“Oh, I am.” He raises three fingers. “Scout’s honor.” He puts the stick back, organizes his measly junk, and glances up into the dusky rafters. “I’ve found lots of strange stuff up there.”
* * *
Saturday night.
My parents are out. So is Ralph. If I joined the Boy Scouts I’d at least have an indoor campout tonight instead of sitting here with a stale popcorn ball stalking myself in last year’s yearbook. I guess it’s better than reading our Bible, although lots of people at school think the yearbook is the Bible. The freshman pictures look like God dealt a bad deck of miniature face cards: I giveth you pimples. To you I bestow a hooked nose. You shall look like a turtle. But ye, oh blessed one, can have a smooth, sculpted white face and blond hair. Actually, every single face is white, cover to cover, except mine. Mine’s grayish. My mouth is a dull dash mark, my eyes black pinpricks, and my hair flat. No wonder I never look at myself.
The yearbook makes school seem shiny and organized, all of us packed between the padded silver covers. Everybody is lined up, achieving great things—winner after winner. Yearbooks don’t include the taunts and discrimination and cliques. There is not a group picture of the Students Prejudiced Against Chinese People, because the members are secret, or they used to be, until Korea. Now prejudice is free to eat in the lunchroom, ride the bus, join fraternities, sneeze, cough, speak up. Prejudice is big at Wilson High School.
Also unpictured are the sorority girls, because sororities and fraternities aren’t school sponsored. They’re social clubs outside high school. Patty and Anita are dying to become cupcakes despite our old oath of allegiance.
And there’s no picture of the gang of greasy guys who grab their chests on the bus and whisper, “Hau ru, Tea Cups?” as if I wouldn’t comprehend what “cups” of mine they’re talking about.
A bus is a battleground if you look like the enemy.
What would Mother say if I asked her for advice? Go quietly to the bathtub, Lillian, and soak in bleach water.
Dad’s advice? Make a joke of it.
Ralph’s? Be a hero.
My advice to myself? Carry Kleenex.
When I walked out of social studies, it looked like running away, but it wasn’t—it was the first Chinese thing I have ever done. But what now? Fight back every time somebody says something? Walk out? Drop out? Gone Mom must have felt tested living here with illegitimate me. Or maybe she was really a spy or a tramp or she was sick or broke. Who knows why she left me in Missouri and sailed away?
I flip more pages.
Elliot’s caricatures are everywhere. He drew the Future Homemakers of America Club as hobos. The ROTC rifle team holds boomerangs. The Typing Club president is all thumbs—slightly funny, but not very. I see his drawing of himself in the Brush and Pencil Club—thick glasses on a lanky stick figure with paintbrushes for fingers.
I see my tiny face peeking out of the Red Cross Club group picture. Ugh. I shut the yearbook, look away, close my eyes. I won’t be in this year’s photo because I quit going. I’m too Red for the Red Cross now.
* * *
On Wednesday Elliot James says, “Thank you so much for throwing my clothes away.” He flips the fringe of his scarf. “I dug it out of the trash.”
Thanks for calling me stupid. I tilt my head, shrug, neither admit nor deny it.
Mrs. Van Zant, the art teacher and yearbook sponsor, walks through the door carrying a thick folder. She steps around me, makes a beeline for Elliot, because they are getting an early start on the yearbook. They consult about page layouts and his drawing of the front of the school building. “My vote is a double spread for the title page. The Sentinel 1951. You will make Wilson High look regal.” She moves her hands together in prayer point and bows to Elliot.
They talk about the theme this year, “Patriotism,” and the Student Council’s vote last fall to eliminate homecoming because of the Korean War. Boo hoo hoo. Not everybody liked it, but I guess patriotism was more popular than popularity.
I look at Mrs. Van Zant bent over Elliot. I imagine a cartoon with him holding an umbrella as she drools all over his talent. “I hope you’re planning something wonderful for our Fine Arts Showcase in March,” she says, shaking a finger at him.
From their conversation I learn that he takes advanced life drawing and sculpture classes at the Kansas City Art Institute. I learn that Mrs. Van Zant believes Elliot should be teaching the classes.
She glances at my whisk broom. Yes, Mrs. Van Zant, I am the truant with no artistic talent. I am the custodian’s apprentice. “I remember you,” she exclaims. “Lillian Firestone, isn’t it? Why haven’t I seen you in here this semester? You showed promise your freshman year.”
I did? I smile to be polite, but she’s wrong. “I—I’m left-handed,” I stutter as Mrs. Van Zant heads out the door.
Elliot stares at me like I’m crazy. “So what? So am I! They tried to make me switch but I couldn’t.” He sharpens his pencil with a pocketknife, drums his fingers. He gestures come over here. He’s about to prove his left-handed drawing brilliance.
I meander over with my dustpan.
“Tilt your head up,” he says. “Turn this way.” I don’t. I stare at the pile of pencil shavings he is creating on the floor. “I’ll clean it up,” he says. “Just turn here a sec.”
He holds a pencil vertically, horizontally, and diagonally in front of my face. He squints, covers one eye, and measures the space between my eyes by sliding his inky thumb along the length of his pencil. His glasses look like he has finger painted them with dust and spit.
“Drawing your face,” he says, pointing the pencil right at me, “I’d exaggerate the triangle shadow along your nose, and the cleft in your chin, and your cheekbones.” He taps his own cheeks, looks off, puzzled, as if my face is an unsolvable geometry problem. “You know, the combination.”
Elliot stretches to get a side view. My cheeks burn. I turn from his dissection of my face. “When did you come from China?” he asks.
“I didn’t.” I stare at spots of paint the color of dried blood on the floor. “I was born in San Francisco. In Chinatown.”
“Interesting,” he says. I know he’s figured out that I’m adopted. No secret there. Elliot dives back into his yearbook drawings, his pencil turning paper into people.
I remember almost nothing of Chinatown. My new mother explained my history to me when I asked about her big stomach. She had gotten pregnant with Ralph soon after my adoption. I didn’t have you in my tummy, Lillian. A lady who came here from China did. We know nothing about her. That’s all over now.
My new mother couldn’t carry me because she worried that the baby inside her would stop growing like all the others had. So she lay on the divan, and whenever she sat up, the lap I wanted to climb onto disappeared. Even before he was born Ralph overtook it.
In sixth grade, when Patty and Anita and I discovered the facts of life, I tried for the first time to imagine the man “involved” with Gone Mom. We didn’t dare mention it out loud, but we all thought my birth mother wasn’t married to him and had committed a mortal sin and would go to hell if she didn’t get forgiveness. I actually pictured her coughing and moaning in hell, all smoky and overcrowded. How could I know if she had ever properly asked for forgiveness? Done penance. Chinese people were heathens, not Christians. She might not have even known she was supposed to confess.
Any other record of her existence is sealed forever. She has been sealed off inside me, too. But since I walked out of class, Gone Mom has been creeping in—turning my tear faucets, twisting my stomach, and unwrapping memories, like the one that awoke me last night. We were together in a dark room reaching for a giant, glowing pearl hanging from the ceiling by a chain.
And now Elliot James has started poking at Gone Mom with his pencil.
The door bangs open. I jump. Elliot is off without a word. I watch him tramp across the empty practice field to his car parked on the street. I mop my face with a handful of damp paper towels that smell like dirt. I straighten the stools and wipe a cluster of round mirrors on gooseneck stands. They’re self-portrait supplies. Broken flashes of my face bounce up at me—my teeth, the view up my nose, a Cyclops.
I squeeze my eyes shut, hold my cheeks. Go away, Lily.