Lucy stepped out of the subway station, blinked in the bright June sunlight, took a left, and walked into Asia. The outposts of Chinatown had taken over much of Canal Street in her own lifetime, pushing up from the south via Mott and Mulberry streets and spreading east and west on the broad thoroughfare. Lucy knew Chinatown. She was practically a native, having been born a few streets north on Crosby Street, where Little Italy meets Soho, and had from an early age been a presence on its streets, gadding about with the four Chen children and their parents, cousins, in-laws, and associates. And Chinatown knew Lucy. Hardly a merchant on its streets had not done a double-take when the gwailo infant had addressed him or her in the clanging accents of Guangdong. For when Lucy’s mother had unexpectedly rescued the Chen family’s honor, she had created an enormous burden of bao, a debt of reciprocity owed to her not only by the Chen family proper, but by the Chen name association, its allied name associations, the tong to which the family belonged, and, to a lesser extent, the county and village associations of the fifty-millionfold Chens. That Lucy’s mother had only been doing her job was a laughable concept to the old-country Chinese, to whom life was largely a meshwork of unspoken obligations. Thus it happened that Lucy Karp, being first her mother’s daughter, and second, the foster daughter of the Chen clan, and thirdly a miraculous and rather spooky speaker of perfect Cantonese (and arguably not less than a reincarnation of Chen Renmi, the dead sister), had achieved a status that few Caucasians are ever granted in that community: she had become a real person, someone with mihnhai, with face, and no longer merely a white ghost.
She had emerged into a fine New York summer evening, Canal Street packed with trucks and cars going to the tunnel or the bridges, sending up a fine stink of fumes to the sky, which was just going slatey blue, the stink mixing with the higher notes of fried fat, starch, spice, and decay to make the true Chinatown perfume. The wide sidewalks teemed with shoppers just out of work, enough of them Asians of various tribes to make the gwailo among them stand out. Lucy threaded through the crowd and into the Asia Mall, a wide double storefront on the north side of Canal, and a typical enterprise of the district. Its show-windows were nearly covered with hand-lettered ads on white butcher paper, Chinese characters in red paint touting shoes, clothing, fabric, drugstore items, and food specialties of the Orient. It was a great success and the result of over twenty years of backbreaking labor by the Chen family.
As she passed through the Asia Mall, she greeted the checkout ladies in Cantonese, assured them she had eaten, inquired after their families, and they about hers (their hands never stopping to punch in and stuff bags, never pausing in the accumulation of wealth), and she moved on to the back of the store, and through the swinging door to the storeroom. She made her way down the aisles of the cavernous space, treading familiar pathways until she came to the pillow section. She scampered up the pipe scaffolding like a young monkey, crawled through a space in the chicken wire, and wriggled through fake-fur passages until she came to a void, a cave about ten feet on a side, entirely surrounded by fluffy beanbags dyed colors so garish that they were hardly salable, even to Filipinos. A space had been left above, like a hairy skylight, through which a sickly fluorescent glow penetrated, enough to read by. It was a perfect hideout, if you ignored the stink of cheap plastic, and here she found, as she had expected, Janice Chen and Mary Ma.
They say that two boys is half a boy and three boys is no boy at all; it is as true of girls. Janice Chen was supposed to be “helping” in the stockroom and had asked Mary Ma to share the burden and goof off. The two-Lucy’s closest friends, Janice as good as a sister-might have stood in a pattern book for the two most familiar types of Chinese girls. Mary had the flat moon face, rosebud mouth, cheeks like peaches, and the bowl cut with bangs, while Janice was slender and golden as a flute, with high cheekbones, a sharp small nose, and forty inches of black hair running down her back in a braid like a python.
“Lucy!” the other girls both cried, but not too loudly. “We thought you were getting your brains scrambled at Columbia,” Janice added.
“I was, but I got out early and took the train.”
“What did he make you do?”
“Strip naked and walk around on my hands. He’s really a little bit of a sex maniac.”
“No, really!” Mary insisted.
“Oh, just science stuff. I had to wear this like old-fashioned bathing cap with wires coming out of it and translate from Guondungwa and guoyu and French and Vietnamese, back and forth. Totally boring. But he’s going to pay me. A lot.”
“Really?” asked Janice. “Are you going to keep it?” In her world earnings were the property of the family.
“Of course,” said Lucy, “and don’t tell anyone, okay? What’re you guys doing?”
“We’re supposed to be breaking boxes,” answered Janice. “My brother’s being a total dork about it. He loves to give orders-big deal, he’s in charge of us. So we’re hiding.”
Mary added responsibly, “We should go back. He’ll tell your dad.”
“Oh, let him wait,” said Lucy. “Later we’ll all do it together and get it finished. You want me to read you more Claudine?”
Glittering eyes and giggles. Lucy got out her book and translated the part where the schoolgirls have a fight in a hotel room with their chemises rucking naughtily up around their various interesting parts. The rural dialect in which much of it was written gave her some trouble, but she bulled through, in the process adding some lubricious details omitted by Colette. Like the girls in the novel, the three of them were, in fact, as pure as boiled eggs, but, in the manner of many such children, they very much wished to think of themselves as sexy devils. Of course, they had swiped copies of Playgirl, and they had weathered copies of Zap Comix-they were 1980s rather than 1880s girls, after all-but still the lush and sensuous language of a ninety-year-old French novel provided them with the required combination of secrecy and salaciousness. The three of them lay stretched out, belly down on the fur, with Lucy in the center, their bodies touching, and Lucy toyed with Janice’s long rope of hair as she read. Each would remember this span of time-it could not have been more than forty minutes-with regret and a certain longing, as the pinnacle of something sweet and absolutely lost. So intent were they on what they were doing, so deliciously close and intimate was the atmosphere of the furry cave they had made, that it took some little time for it to register that strange voices were rising through the beanbags from directly below them. Lucy stopped reading, and they all listened.
“Sssh! Listen!” Janet interrupted in a hoarse whisper.