That doesn’t mean we were all buddy-buddy. No touring for us ever again, but we got together to rehearse our television appearances as the Swing Sisters, ran into each other on sets, and gabbed like old friends on special occasions. Helen came and stayed with me when I had my babies. I also saw her when she visited San Francisco for what she called compound business-funerals, weddings, and one-month birthdays for that extended family of hers. She became a real estate tycoon, just as I predicted, first selling houses to veterans, then building tracts, then developing condo complexes. She’s a seriously wealthy woman. Together we went to all five of Ruby’s weddings. (So much for Ruby not being the marrying kind! Her most recent hubby is twenty years her junior. I’ll bet any and all takers a hundred bucks he won’t be able to keep up with her.) Ruby is the only one of us who never retired from show business. She’s followed every wave: she had her Dancing Chopstix drop their pasties when the topless fad came in, she put them in white go-go boots in the sixties, and taught them to gyrate to a disco beat in the seventies. Journalists still like to interview her, and she’s as vivacious and naughty as she was when that reporter from the Associated Press interviewed us in our beds. She’s had staying power, our Ruby.
I exit the freeway and maneuver up Nob Hill to the Mark Hopkins Hotel. After leaving the car with the valet, I take a deep breath to steel myself, construct a pleasant expression on my face, and enter the lobby. Eddie spots me right away. Even though he’s considerably older than I am, he’s as handsome as ever-tall, graceful, nattily dressed, still and forever the Chinese Fred Astaire-but the gauntness around his eyes, the sores on his neck, and the hollowness to his cheeks let me know just how sick he is with this new disease that’s taken so many men in the city the last few years.
“You look exactly the same,” he whispers softly in my ear as he wraps his arms around me.
“How many others have you said that to already today?” I tease him.
“Oh, plenty. You know me.” He chuckles. “Come on. Everyone’s asking for you.” He loops his arm through mine and sweeps me down a hallway and into the Room of the Dons, with its murals of early California painted in sumptuous earth tones against a background of gold leaf. Almost as one-and before I have a chance to search for Ruby or Helen-my old cohorts glance in my direction to see who’s come through the door. It looks to be about fifty people so far. Some sit at tables. Others mill around a buffet, where coffee and some treats have been laid out. Those closest to me hurry over. Well, they hurry as fast as anyone who is fit and in his or her sixties, seventies, or eighties can. Once a chorus girl, always a chorus girl! (I’m not sure of the male equivalent. Once a show boy, always a show boy?) And they all talk at once.
“You look great.”
“Where have you been hiding?”
“Are you going to join us for our follies?”
“You look great too. I’d know you anywhere,” I answer Chan-chan. “I’ve been where I’ve always been, just over the bridge,” I inform Bernice Chow, who was once billed as the Chinese Ethel Merman. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty busy at home. I have grandchildren now,” I say, offering my regrets to Irene. I take in the disappointed faces and add a small salve. “But I’m sure there’ll be other ways I can help.”
The Lim Sisters elbow their way through the little crowd.
“Hi, Grace. What’s cooking?” Bessie, the eldest, has to be something like eighty-five, but to my eyes she hasn’t changed one bit. Ella and Dolores stand on either side of her, and one foot back as always. They wear matching kelly-green polyester jumpers over cream-colored turtlenecks. I bump into the sisters occasionally-in the Chinese markets in Oakland, at funerals, or at the Chinese Historical Society’s annual banquet. Sometimes I see only two of the sisters, which makes me wonder if one of them is on the outs or dead. Then I’ll see a different pair, or just one Lim sister out on her own, and it’s all so confusing. But all three are still alive, still connected, and still living just one mile apart from one another.
A man-middle-aged, with a bit of a paunch, and a young woman in tow-approaches. It’s Tommy. I remember how comfortable Helen had been holding him as a newborn, and the ways she’d both smothered him and let him have his way-out of love and fear. I never thought he had much of a future, but he grew up to be a doctor, just like Eddie’s father, and married a woman not unlike Helen. Go figure.
“Auntie Grace,” Tommy says, “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Annie. She’s a graduate student at Cal. She’s living in the compound with Dad, my aunts and uncles, and the rest of the family while she’s in school.”
Annie is pretty-long, silky black hair, and high cheekbones.
“You look a lot like your grandmother,” I say.
“I’ve heard that before,” Annie answers in a voice that mysteriously combines petulance, challenge, and pride. She reaches into her bag, pulls out a pen and a notebook, and rattles off a string of questions. “When did you first know you wanted to dance? What was your first break? When did you meet my grandmother? How did you feel being billed as an Oriental performer, dancing in an Oriental club?”
I’ve heard this accusation-or is it criticism?-from my sons and my grandchildren too, and I answer Annie the same way I answer them. “Oriental, that’s what we were called back then. And whites were called Occidentals.” I leave out that in my head I still say Oriental and Occidental. I’m stubborn and set in my ways, and I think, What’s the big deal? Why do these young people make such a fuss about this? It’s not like saying Jap-like Helen and Joe always said-or colored or something even worse. Or is it?
Annie peppers me with more questions. “Did you know you were perpetuating Asian stereotypes? How could you dance at a place called the China Doll or even tolerate being called a China doll?”
That smarts, and I glance at Tommy. I want to ask, “Have you not taught this girl any manners?” In response to my unspoken question, he says, “Annie’s doing research on the Forbidden City and the different clubs where you all performed.” He gestures to the others in the room. “She wants to capture this history before it’s lost.”
My eyes drift back to Annie. “We aren’t that old.”
“Things happen. People die,” Annie replies, and it seems pretty callous, given that the reason for today’s reunion is to help raise money for her ailing grandfather. “What you did was extraordinary for your time. Don’t you want there to be a record? Will you let me interview you? Wouldn’t you like to share your stories?”
Hell, no! Instead, I ask, “Is your grandmother here?”