On the way home, Eddie stopped at a liquor store and bought a quart of gin. When we got back to the apartment building, he didn’t invite us to share it with him.
HELEN: A Tide of Emotions
By Thanksgiving, we were “on the beach”-no work, no bookings in sight. Our dinner that night: ten cents’ worth of buns picked up in Chinatown. Grace and I needed jobs, but getting employment anywhere-as Americans who looked Chinese-felt as futile as plowing the sand and sowing the waves. That said, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, Grace and I lucked (ha!) into positions making hot fudge sundaes at C. C. Brown’s on Hollywood Boulevard, a block from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and practically across the street from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The job allowed us to eat a little, and sometimes people left us nickel tips under their saucers. The manager, Tim McNulty, was nice. He was tall, soft-spoken, and kept his hair neatly trimmed. I’d never worked in a restaurant before, but Tim was patient and easygoing, teasing me about the deliberate way I sprinkled the slivered almonds and set the cherry just so. And really, making and serving hot fudge sundaes to people hungry for a mouth-happy experience wasn’t all that bad.
When Tim asked me out just four days into the job, I surprised myself by accepting. I was lonely, and I’d been lonely for a very long time. I liked having a man take my hand when I got out of the car, hold my elbow when we walked on the street, put an arm around my shoulder when we sat in the movie theater. Hours later, Tim kissed me on the front porch of the boardinghouse. It wasn’t like Eddie’s performance kisses. I’d never kissed a lo fan before, and it made me wonder if everything would be different with him. The next day, when I went to work, he was attentive without being overbearing. A sensation of light burning the edges of my loneliness allowed me to say yes to a second date a couple of days later. We didn’t do anything fancy-no big night on the town-because he didn’t have much money either. He was just a sweet man, who invited me back to his apartment after dinner. His room was clean and orderly. The way he made love to me… His skin was so white against mine, and for a few minutes I forgot everything as a familiar warmth started to overwhelm me, washing me to the precipice… Then, from deep inside me, I felt darkness well up and brutally grasp my heart. Inwardly I pulled back, but I had nowhere to escape. I didn’t try to get Tim to stop. I forced my body to go numb and waited for the final spasms of pleasure to shudder through him. And then, and then…
I began to cry. How could I have let Tim touch me at all? I knew that making love could be good and comforting for wives and mothers, but this was a terrible mistake for me. I’d been trying to quench my thirst by looking at plums, console myself with what could be, but now I felt wretched.
“It’s all right,” Tim comforted, but he couldn’t possibly understand my feelings. I sat up, making sure the sheet kept me decent, and began pulling on my clothes. The whole time, he kept talking. “Don’t go. Don’t leave like this.”
When I put on my shoes and stood, he slipped out of the bed too. Naked. I covered my eyes.
“I’m not this person,” I said. “I don’t do this.”
Tim got dressed and drove me back to my apartment, even though I said it was unnecessary. He offered to come up and sit with me until I felt better. I said no. He asked if he could bring me anything. I said no to that too.
I told Grace what I’d done, and she was about as shocked as a country-bumpkin virgin could be.
“At least he’s nice,” she said, acting like she knew all about it. “That’s how it’s supposed to be, right? You do it with someone nice? Are you going to see him again?”
“We both have work tomorrow, so I guess so.”
But it was hard making hot fudge sundaes with Tim coming up to me and whispering, “Are we square? I’m so sorry you’re taking it this way. Can we go out later and talk about it? Oh, Helen, I thought you enjoyed it.”
I wanted to stick it out, but I quit at the end of my shift. I had lasted as a sundae-maker exactly one week and a day.
“Okay,” Grace said, “we’ll find other jobs.”
“You don’t have to leave-”
“Of course I do! We’re sticking together!”
We went to Sam Yuen in Chinatown that night. When the owner made his customary offer of employment, Grace and I accepted. If my father saw me, he would have died from shame.
A COUPLE OF days later, Eddie banged on Grace’s and my door. When I let him in, he threw the new issue of Life magazine on the coffee table. The cover showed a pair of long legs that went up, up, up until they reached a giant bubble that covered… well, what it covered was left to the imagination. The woman’s face was obscured-turned alluringly away from the camera lens-but the headline billed her as PRINCESS TAI-STAR OF SAN FRANCISCO’S HOT SPOT-THE FORBIDDEN CITY. The three of us squeezed together on the love seat and pored over the pages, looking first at the photographs.
“Hey! Irene and Jack!” Eddie’s breath told me he’d been drinking. “I bet she’s learned all his tricks by now.”
“Seems like Ida’s put on a few pounds,” I observed.
“Charlie and Bob Hope?” Grace exclaimed.
The writer labeled Princess Tai the world’s only Chinese bubble dancer. “She’s straight from China,” Eddie read, his words slurring. “When she moves that pale orb just so, visitors imagine they can see all the way to China. They don’t, but the looking sure is fun.”
“Everyone reads Life,” Grace said, “which means everyone is going to see this, which means everyone is going to visit the Forbidden City, which means Charlie’s troubles are over-”
“Do you think we could go back?” I asked, hopeful.
But Eddie was like a frog at the bottom of a well, limited in his perspective and seeing only what he wanted to see. “Max is working on things,” he said. “He’ll get us something.”
But even with all the holiday shows, Max couldn’t get us a single booking. No one wanted Chinese faces ruining their holiday tableaux.
ON CHRISTMAS DAY, the weather was perfect-warm and sunny-but little cheer brightened Grace’s and my room. We had a tree eighteen inches high, which we’d decorated with homemade popcorn strings, a box of miniature red balls the size of holly berries, and the cheapest tinsel we could buy. Eddie arrived with a pot of winter melon soup he’d thrown together on his burner. I gave Grace some rouge; she gave me a hat she’d knitted. I gave Eddie a necktie; Grace gave him a scarf she’d knitted. Eddie gave Grace and me a one-pound box of See’s Candies to share.
It all felt bleak, but not as bleak as New Year’s Eve. Eddie made plans of his own, so Grace and I got dressed up and spent the evening walking along Hollywood Boulevard. We saw happy couples swirling into the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel for a night of dancing, drinking, and entertainment. We saw revelers weaving along the sidewalks. When midnight came, we made rosy predictions for the new year. After that, we had nothing to do but go back to the boardinghouse. When we turned onto Ivar, we came upon two policemen roughing up a man in evening dress-Eddie-while another ran down the street.