Where The Long Grass Bends

“My girl’s in Chinatown. Gives a good cut. Pretty, too. You could get me a newspaper; there was a flood near Guilin.”

He watched her hands, the knuckles fat and crippled. She put the brush to paper, her strokes lean; the two black characters shiny.

David took the subway to Grand Street, his mother’s directions and the name of the newspaper in his pocket. A heat welled from the sidewalk. He eased through the crowds to a produce stall selling cabbages, spiny leechees, winter melon. His mouth watered when he saw the pomegranates.

To avoid a huddle of tourists, he walked in the street. He passed stalls crammed with wind chimes, wicker birdcages, calculators, dolls with motorized, wagging heads, black cloth shoes with tin buckles, then consulted his mother’s directions. Get off subway. Go south and east. Second right. Chicken store on corner.

There, plucked and hanging in the window. Four of them, with talons, and glazed, blue eyes. Chickens had dangerous feet. On the plate, in pieces, they seemed harmless. He turned right.

It was an alley, not a street, and it smelled of fish. Laundry flapped from the fire escapes. A woman in a white shirt leaned from a window, smoking a cigarette.

The door swung open, inward. His mother’s girl. She was Chinese, of course. With dyed-blonde hair and square, pink-painted nails. She said, “Ni hao ma.”

She led him from a dark foyer to a wide, square room. On a couch was a woman filing her nails. David sat down. The nail file rasped, rasped.

There was only one counter, one mirror, one chair. Pictures of cats and Tom Cruise were taped in neat rows around the mirror. The girl stood in front of it, scissors in hand, and snipped at the ends of her blonde hair. She wore a pink tennis dress and white high heels. There were Band-Aids across the backs of her ankles.

There was a knock at the door. The girl dunked the scissors in a container filled with Windex-colored fluid and black combs.

The girl laughed, “My mother washes hair, my father works at bank,” and walked with light taps to the door.

A brunette and a red-haired girl stood glowing in the stairwell light. Both girls held transparent, plastic bags. The brunette went through the red beads for a hair-washing. She had curly hair, tight, thick curls, hair that grew out, not down. Her body curved with the softness of porn stars, a good shape over nice bones. As the red beads clicked around her, she lifted her shoulders and cringed.

The other girl was hard-faced and deeply tanned. She moved the nail file and sat down on the couch with David. “So, Ming,” she said, “do you want to hear about my dress?”

“I got it at Bloomie’s. It’s black organdy with a trim of pearls. Strapless. My mother says it looks perfect with my red hair.”

“Nice,” Ming said, but her lips stuck to her teeth, dry and false. The girl waved her mother’s check between her fingers, its amount line blank. When Ming did not walk over to collect it, the girl dropped it on the floor next to the couch.

To David she said, “Me and Marcy come to Chinatown just for Ming. My mom discovered her last year. Our cleaning lady comes here, too. She’s so cheap, it’s scary. Ming, I mean, not our maid.”

What a voice. Husky, like she’d been smoking twenty years longer than she’d been alive. David picked up the magazine lying between them and cleared his throat. The hard-faced girl used her pinkie to clean lipstick from the corners of her mouth.

“How you want it?” Ming asked Marcy as the girl parted the beads and entered the room, a towel draped over her shoulders, her hair wet and heavy around her face. She held out a magazine picture of a model with gleaming, pin-straight hair. Ming snatched it away and jammed the picture into the side of the mirror. She pumped a bar at the bottom of the chair, raising it a few inches.

First, Ming combed Marcy’s hair, yanking her head backward with each stroke. Then she removed a spiked brush and hair dryer from a hook at the side of the counter and tilted the girl’s face upward, scrutinizing her. Sighing, Ming pointed the hair dryer at the picture in the mirror. “No good,” she said. “We do my way.” Marcy started to protest, then leaned back in the chair.

Scowling, Ming pulled at Marcy’s hair. She used some purple goop, then sprayed something from a plastic bottle. Except for an almost imperceptible twitch of the eyelids, Marcy was still. David felt sorry for her. She wanted a different self, but her hairdresser wouldn’t allow it.

He watched Ming rotating around the girl. At times Marcy’s hair looked awful, stuck with metal pins and plastic clips, but when Ming released a section from its confines, it fluttered down elegantly. Ming worked fast, her mouth set and determined, blonde hair swinging. Her black roots spread from the crown of her head in a star shape.

The sweetness of hairspray made David drowsy. He closed his eyes, daydreaming about the hard-faced girl. He pictured her stepping carefully into her strapless black dress, afraid to muss her hair. Her shoulders were freckled. He saw her sitting stiffly in a chair, looking at a clock.

Marcy was hugging Ming. Her hair was beautiful, still curly, but twisted into long, smooth spirals. She smiled at David.

Ming held up a hand mirror so Marcy could see the back of her hair. The hard-faced girl sat on the couch, legs crossed, licking the tips of her fingers and turning the pages of a magazine. She would be a paradigm First Lady, polished and brisk, MADE IN THE USA labels sewn into her blazers, a compact and travel-size tissues in her purse. When it was her turn to be coiffed, she allowed Ming to swathe her in a plastic apron that snapped shut at the neck like a bib. She looked directly at herself in the mirror, sure of how she would turn out.

David wondered how he appeared to the prom girls. Did they think he was old? Did they know he was Chinese? He had said only three words—for all they knew, he could be fresh off the boat. But no, his shoes and pants were obviously American. And he had no accent. His brown hair graying on the sides; his brown eyes, deep and gathered. Epicanthic folds, his ex-girlfriend, Kerry, a med student, had said.

Sometimes people could not tell he was Chinese; other times it was all they saw. It had always been like that. He suddenly wished he could have the constancy and assurance of Ming and the prom girls. Made of one thing, they knew who they were. So young, and they already knew.

His mother had liked Kerry. They still kept in touch, sent holiday cards: Kerry is starting a private practice; she’s married; they had a boy.

When the prom girls left, Ming stood in front of David; “You’re uneven on the sides,” she tugged on her blonde hair. “I’ll fix it. No problem.”

Heels tapping forcefully, she led him behind the red beads into a small room. By a filmy window he saw a sink with a scooped neckrest. Shampoos and dyes stacked the shelves above the sink. An olive green hat with a peaked brim hung on the wall. It looked like a Communist cap. To the left of it was a narrow staircase. David saw a pile of folded towels on the bottom step.

When he settled his neck and head in the sink, he was practically lying down. He was surprised when Ming began washing his hair, but he did not ask about her mother.

Vigorously, she scrubbed his head. Her long nails scratched at his scalp, hurting and tickling. David closed his eyes and let her clean him, relaxing as she cradled his head with one hand and rinsed the back of his neck with the other. A breeze from a fan moved the beaded partition. It clicked softly.

He thought of the painting above his mother’s bed. As a child, he had liked to look up at it. A snowcapped mountain, deep in wispy clouds. Shan Shui, mountain and water landscape—his mother had told him. One day, he realized there was a man in the picture standing with a staff at the base of the mountain. It made him feel strange to think he had looked at the painting for years without ever noticing the tiny figure.

Bing-Chen, Bing-Chen? he could hear his mother calling him. By his name, his Chinese name. She only called him David if she was mad at him—or his father. Sometimes she called him Little Rat. As he had left her apartment earlier in the day she had said, gently: “Things will get better. It’s your year, Little Rat.”

The smell of peanuts and red-bean paste filled the room. From upstairs, he heard a sizzling, then smelled chicken. Ming was leaving. He should follow her.

He lay back in the chair, his head resting in the curved sink. The smells here were familiar, homey. His mother cooked chicken with bok choy and straw mushrooms. He looked at the exposed pipes hanging above his head.

He remembered the shock on Laney’s face when he introduced his mother. “I didn’t know you were Japanese,” she said. She had blinked.

“OK. It’s time,” Ming said, and led him to the counter. She stepped on a pedal, lowering the chair. This part was always uncomfortable. He didn’t know where to look—in the mirror, at the wall? Maybe he should close his eyes.

Ming circled him, tilting his head up and down. She combed his hair forward, then parted it down the middle, drawing her finger up the line of his scalp. Snipping and sighing, muttering and tugging, she moved around him. His hair was black with wetness. She did not seem to be cutting much, just, somehow, shaping.

Switching on the hair dryer, Ming feathered her fingers through David’s hair. He closed his eyes and thought of his mother sitting in the same place, the same chair. Her gnarled hands in her lap. Ming was her girl. They probably chatted the entire time, telling stories and jokes.

He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to sit there, under the warm stream of air and Ming’s light, soft hands.

Scattered around the chair was a pile of shorn hair, rising slightly in the wind of the oscillating fan. His black, Marcy’s brown, the hard-faced girl’s red, sprinkles of Ming’s blonde. The fluffy heap was like an animal. With a push broom, Ming swept the pile to the side of the room. She straightened the magazines and put the hard-faced girl’s check on the counter between a can of Aquanet and a statue of Future Buddha. Mi-lo Fuo, who predicted the weather and carried a cloth bag of treats for children.

His hair was shiny and even on the sides. He looked younger. Like his mother’s first cousin. Ming hadn’t asked his permission. But the dye-job did look good.

He would get his mother’s newspaper and drop it off on his way home. They would have tea, listen to the radio. She would tell him about the flood near Guilin.