Marty and I get very tan, and Nai-nai scolds us. “You become like peasants. Why don’t you stay under umbrella?”
But she softens when she sees how hungry we are after our days at the beach, how we wolf everything down, no matter how strange. When we first got here we were picky, polite. Nai-nai corrected the way Marty held her chopsticks and made her cry. Our grandmother serves the meal in courses, unlike Ma, who sets everything down on the table at once.
Now we compromise. Marty is allowed to use a fork, and Nai-nai sometimes gives in to our pleas at the grocery store. “Hawaiian Punch? You sure you want red drink?” One night she even makes hamburgers, following the recipe from Joy of Cooking, although we forget to get buns so we have to have them on toast.
On the first rainy day, Nai-nai climbs the stepladder and takes out boxes from the top shelf of her bedroom closet. They are filled with presents from her admirers, back in her youth when she was a lieder singer. She kept everything: dried sprays of orchids, brittle and black-edged; a collection of music boxes from Switzerland; perfume, never opened, the bottoms of the crystal flasks coated brown. I imagine the perfume to be like orange juice concentrate: if you added water it would be as good as fresh.
Nai-nai lets us try on the silk shawls embroidered with dragons, phoenixes, and butterflies. “You girls so big,” she mourns, measuring with her hands the breadth of my shoulders as I stand before the dresser mirror. “Your mother big too.” Even Marty can’t fit her feet into the black satin slippers, so tiny they’re almost round, stacked neatly in a bottom drawer. My grandmother keeps her jewelry tucked into the toes of the slippers. Mostly earrings, heavy gems in elaborate gold and silver settings, although I’ve never seen her wear anything but plain gold hoops.
She shows us photographs of our parents’ wedding. “Handsome couple,” she says. My mother doesn’t look too different, except for more makeup and wavy hair, but my father is unrecognizable. The man in the picture has dark, thick hair and a smooth confident face, as if nothing bad had ever happened to him.
At the wedding my grandmother is wearing a tight high-necked silk gown from her singing days, a gardenia pinned at the breast.
“Why didn’t you have an orchid?” I ask and she shakes her head.
“Some flowers for youth only,” she says.
From the glass-fronted bookcase in the dining room Nai-nai takes out an old book called A Dream of Red Mansions. We can’t read it, it’s in Chinese, but my grandmother shows us the color plates beneath their crumbling tissue. Princes and princesses wear elaborate headdresses like little Christmas trees, and flowing robes of turquoise and crimson sweep over their feet so that it looks as if they are floating from courtyard to courtyard.
Marty points out that the princesses have their hair loose.
“They’re royalty,” Nai-nai explains. “They have servants to comb.”
My hair is as long as the princesses’ but I am not allowed to wear it loose except at night. Nai-nai washes it for me in the kitchen sink. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she says the first time because I’m shivering so much. I force myself to stand very still, although I get a crick in my neck and the water from the spray nozzle tickles. “In China, now, it’s not the style for girls have long hair like this,” my grandmother tells me. “Everyone the same, short, like your sister.”
Once, after my hair has dried enough to brush out, Nai-nai puts it up into a bun like hers. I watch her in the dresser mirror, trying to memorize the motions, but my grandmother is too fast. When she’s done she gives me the hand mirror so that I can examine the back of my head. I see that she has anchored the bun with a single pale green hairpin, like an arrow through a valentine.
“It’s jade,” my grandmother says, patting my shoulder. “You keep.”
People ask about Connecticut: how’s school there, do you like your teachers, who are your friends, and I lie, like I did about the seals in Monterey. I tell them I skipped two grades. I tell them there’s a girl in my class who got pregnant and kicked out of school. If my sister happens to overhear she just looks at me with a frown.
I feel like I’ve been here forever in my grandmother’s house, among these wide streets, with flowers crawling over the weather-beaten picket fences that separate the yards, the salt smell in the air, especially strong in the mornings when we go grocery shopping. It’s Marty who counts off the days on the opera lady calendar hanging on the refrigerator in Nai-nai’s kitchen, who starts saving shells in a plastic bread bag to take back to Connecticut.
“Don’t you remember when David Katz fell off his bike and broke his arm?” she prods me. “Or when Mrs. Augustine gave me detention?”
“No,” I say.
The Nancy Drew girl and I start a magazine about our street—she does the writing and I draw the illustrations out on the picnic table in Nai-nai’s backyard. “So talented,” my grandmother says. We show it to the two teenage girls, who say, “Fantabulous” and giggle at the picture I’ve drawn of them, in miniskirts and gold chain belts. My sister scowls and bounces the kickball so hard against the foundation of Nai-nai’s house that it leaves a black scar.
I draw other things too that I don’t show anyone, not even Marty. If they were to find them and ask, I would tell them that this is Monkey King, this is his tail, this is the stake through his heart and the blood pouring out. But no one finds them. I do my drawings secretly, in the morning before Nai-nai comes in and my sister is still asleep, and afterward I rip them up into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet.
The Monkey King is crafty, my mother said. Because he is a god, he knows everything, but he never tells it unless he has to.
Almost every day, postcards arrive: a Chinese cabbage made of jade sitting on an ivory stand in a glass case, a stone lioness with curly hair and a cub under one paw, red and black buildings with winglike roofs stacked on top of one another. On the back are messages from our mother in her angular printing: “Today we go to museum” or “Last night we have dinner with my cousins, there were nine courses and cherry soup for dessert.”
“Relatives,” Nai-nai sighs. “So many Chinese relatives.”
Late one evening the phone rings and in the kitchen I can hear Nai-nai speaking loudly in Shanghainese, her telephone voice. She shouts for us to come. “Your ma-ma and ba-ba, hurry, hurry.”
It’s the next morning there, Ma tells me. Her voice sounds so close by, I suspect a trick, until my mother says it is 105 degrees outside and they have to sleep underneath mosquito netting. Then I can imagine so much blistering sun, a humid hotel room with a fan on the ceiling, the pedicabs Nai-nai has described clattering by the window.
Marty gets on and tells about the beach, about the school of dead flounder we found washed up the last time we went. She talks fast, kicking the rungs of the chair, biting her knuckles the way she does when she’s excited.
She hands the phone back to me.
“Hello, Sally, it’s your daddy.”
“Hi, Daddy.” My voice sounds creaky. I try to swallow, and I can’t.
“You reading a lot of books?”
“Yes,” I say. I don’t tell him it’s mostly Nancy Drew.
“When we get back, you tell me about them, all right?”
“Okay.”
My mother again. “Sally, remember you’re the elder. Be sure you help your Nai-nai. I count on you.”