FOR MAY, WHO HAD ALWAYS HAD A FACILITY, AN impossible nimbleness, with languages—was it being otherwise hobbled that inspired this?—the movements of swimming seemed letters of a sublime new alphabet. It took months to develop the required strength, to learn to eat instead of smoke, and to use rather than ignore her body, but after initial falters and founderings she made almost inhumanly swift progress. As if assisted by angels, or demons—some unseen force—a keen, secret joy shook May. Her first unassisted laps reminded her of when she had at last mastered English and could hear herself speak sentences, whole paragraphs, without hesitation. Now each stroke was formed as surely, every kick produced an exultant spray; the skin on her face tightened with pleasure.
She conquered the pool quickly, and then it bored her. She said good-bye to the instructor; she had her driver take her to the shore. “Don’t wait,” she told him. “Come back in two hours.”
She couldn’t hobble over the pebbles, but at the far end of the beach one of the sanitariums had built a stair to make sea bathing possible for invalids, and with her cane May could slowly navigate its steps. It took as much as a quarter of an hour, but she got there. And seawater—how alive it was, how strong; its salt buoyancy did half the work. Nothing less than a revelation to move unhindered by her feet, to travel without help, as fast and as gracefully as any other person, and now unconstricted by the tiled barrier of a pool wall. How easily she moved, her body sufficiently occupied to set her mind free, to allow her thoughts to choose their own direction. Nonsense sometimes, disjointed images, scattered fragments.
A low table in a blue room, a table set with white cups, porcelain so thin the sun shone through them. Translucent, they glowed like candles. May snorted into the water. What pitiably small hopes the cups had represented! How surprising to remember a self, herself, who might hope for the happiness shed by such meager light. Though wouldn’t it be good—better—to be that person again? Could it be true that she’d once possessed a soul that thrived on bright morsels?
To forget the cups she conjugated an irregular Italian verb, she listed the principal rivers of Africa, she recited from Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, a book she’d first consumed during her years of feverish reading. In the passage she’d committed to memory, a man had swum the Thames. Infected, he’d outswum the plague, he’d outwitted and escaped his own illness.
May stroked; she breathed in deeply, exhaled lines of poetry, reviewed the rules of contract bridge and how they differed from duplicate. Strategies for chess, mah-jongg. Hangchow-Soochow binding style versus Canton versus the so-called Tientsin Trick for making the foot seem even narrower. Finger positions for the flute. Scruples, drams, and ounces; gills, pints, quarts. A quart was 2 pints, 8 gills, 32 ounces, 256 drams, 512 scruples.
Her mother, Chu’en, had liked to cook but Yu-ying wouldn’t allow it. Vulgar for a lady to be caught in the kitchen. Tiny feet on a hot clay floor. Chu’en could fill dumplings with bean paste so pink and so sweet, it made marzipan a disappointment.
Too strong, too big to resist, the tide carried May backward. Returned her to a time she wanted to forget. To stories her grandmother had told her, trying to distract May as she bound her feet. In the town where she was born, Yu-ying said, it used to be that each spring a girl was selected for marriage to the sea dragon. Clothed in rich gowns and placed on a bed, she floated out on the tide, approaching the depthless pit that lay far to the east, the pit into which all the waters of the world poured—even the celestial waters, the great rivers of stars. At last the girl disappeared, they could see her no more.
“But that was a long time ago,” May said, before her name was May.
“Yes, Chao-tsing,” her grandmother agreed, sewing the white cloths tight. “Many, many years ago. A century.”
“And I am not marrying the sea dragon.”
May used to picture the girl on her bed. She’d give her an oar with which to paddle, turn sheets into sails bellying out in the wind. She’d save her.
“No,” agreed Yu-ying, and she told May of the mythic island kingdom, a place no boat could reach. The water surrounding the island supported nothing heavier than a solitary swimmer, and only a woman who could swim as lightly as a feather drifting on the tide. All the women on this island lived peaceably together. Each month when they bled, they bled jewels, they bled rubies, and they used those rubies for money. As there were no men, they opened their legs to the south wind. Impregnated, they bore only daughters.
May could swim lightly. If there was any woman who could navigate treacherous water, it was she, accustomed to an undertow that returned her not only to her mother and grandmother, but to the daughters she’d lost.
Rose died too young for May to picture her as a woman, but May had seen Agnes as an adult, she’d seen her face clearly. She had made the mistake of memorizing it. What would life hold for a daughter who lived in a convent and yet turned her back on its promises, the consolations of heaven and God, mystery and glory? Sometimes when May thought of Agnes she couldn’t help but adjust things, endowing her daughter with fantastic gifts, like those granted in the old stories of the immortals. She’d make Agnes an archer and give her Shen I’s divine bow. Then May would kowtow to her daughter, she’d rend her clothes to expose her breast, she’d hold her head still so Agnes could put out her eyes. Unnecessary, as Shen I’s arrows always found their mark.
May swam quickly out past the breaking waves and swells. She let Agnes chase her, and now Agnes was Agnes with the nostrils of Heng. Nostrils that beamed deadly light and annihilated all in their path.
MAY SWAM AT all hours and in all weather, but there was nothing she preferred to the beach at night, when the stairs leading to the water were damp and cool. When there was no moon, and clouds obscured the stars. When the water was black, so black. She entered without hesitation, excited, her heart beating quickly. It was like meeting a lover. No—it was more like meeting a lover than meeting a lover could ever be.
May, who knew the sound of girls drowning, swam. They’d drowned in ponds, in streams, in rivers and lakes. They’d drowned in vinegar barrels. But she swam.
Soft-hearted mothers put a heavy stone in their daughters’ diapers to prevent the brief but piteous cries. And the next year it wasn’t difficult to guess who had scrambled through the dark with a kicking, muffled bundle. They were the ones who spread their porridge thickly, who emptied whole basins at the gates to the graveyard. Lakes of sticky gruel, their guilt soiled everyone’s shoes. They burned wads of spirit money, and the light it cast on their faces betrayed them.
Some had been cowardly—or were they brave?—and drowned themselves along with their daughters. Vindictive, they jumped into wells and poisoned the town’s water supply.
Li-kuei. Hungry, wandering. Unable to tell night from day. Even hell denied such a ghost her place. Once a year, a bellyful of porridge licked from the dirt, a fistful of burning money. She could never reincarnate. The only escape would come when another woman drowned, when another drowned and agreed to take her place.
Still, until that time, a suicide had power she hadn’t had in life. Brave, cowardly—did it matter?—she had made herself fearsome now.
May swam far out, stroking evenly. Even when she realized she should be frightened, when she heard a boat whose pilot couldn’t possibly see her black, bobbing head in time to stop, even then she felt no fear. She was a good enough swimmer to take risks.
“There is no such thing!” Alice had argued, frightened when she discovered May leaving for the beach after dark.
May shrugged.
“Not at night. Not when there’s no one to see.”
“See what?”
“See if you get into trouble.”
May turned on her, eyes wild, hair long and unbound, flying out around her. “Who are you!” she’d cried, “to tell me what I can or cannot do! Do you listen to me? Do you!”
Alice said nothing.
The two of them stared at one another.