There were four bedrooms off the central living room and she told me to take my pick. They each had a bunk-bed with a desk built in underneath and there were fancy pin lights on the underside of the bed to light the desk. I took the one nearest the hall, climbed the little ladder in all my clothes and lay down in the underglow. I was in college. I was in America. Fly me to the moon.
I stayed in the room for weeks. I couldn’t sit in the living room and the kitchen belonged to Li and Wambui. They put things on to marinate before they went to class: bowls of liver covered in honey and chilli, or fish turning grey in some strange sauce. Amazing food. They giggled in there like children and cooked like grown-ups. I didn’t even know how to boil an egg. Karen, wouldn’t you know, got in takeaway.
I did want to go into the bathroom but she showered three times a day in there. Vast amounts of water, then the sound of her humming, and the low squirt — the slap or squelch of her ‘products’. Little grunts, as well. I had to wait until everyone was asleep before I could take a crap. One night I stumbled out in a T-shirt and Karen was sitting at the living-room table. All the time we were talking she looked at my legs like she wanted to retch. I think it was the hair. I think she found it morally offensive. Karen would rather have an abortion than a bikini line. Or so I said to Li who looked at me and blinked a few times. Then, chomp!
‘Alison.’
‘Yes?’
‘What is a bikini line?’ Of course she knew what an abortion was, being mainland Chinese.
Karen had a boyfriend, who was built like a brick shit house, and made no noise at all. They closed her bedroom door and disappeared. Complete silence. Afterwards, he would sit in the living room and look us over. Wambui stayed out in the hall talking on the phone all evening, which was one way of dealing with it. I just said the first thing that came into my head.
‘God,’ I said, coming out of the bathroom. ‘Why does hair conditioner always look like sperm?’
The next morning the hair conditioner was gone. Bingo. I was good at that sort of thing, though I hadn’t really had a lot of sex myself. I mean, I had done it — or I did it that first term — and I liked it, but it also freaked me out. I shaved my head, for example. Though I had wanted to do that for a long time. But the next day I woke up and decided that today was the day to shave my head. So when the guy saw me across the dining hall, he nearly ducked. Physically. He flinched and checked the floor for a piece of cutlery he might have dropped. Anyway. I made him do it one more time, with my bald head, and then I didn’t want to see him any more. But I liked the stubble. For a while, I looked pretty jaunty with my bristles and the little Muslim prayer cap I had bought in a thrift shop, embroidered black and gold.
I used Karen’s razor to shave my head. I’m pretty sure she noticed, because the next day she had a new electric gizmo and all the old plastic razors were in the bin. Neither of us said anything, but that kind of thing makes you feel dizzy, you could shoot yourself, actually shoot yourself through the head. Or you could just not give a damn. Like the fact that I know Li stole a pair of my knickers; plain cotton knickers, that I saw distinctly one evening being stuffed into her drawer.
‘Shit,’ said Karen when I told her. ‘No shit!’
Neither of us had ever seen her underclothes. We said maybe she didn’t have any, but Karen discovered a pair of nylon socks tucked into a pair of plasticky shoes under her desk. They were see-through nylon, like pop socks but even shorter. Like ankle-high tights.
‘Oh, God, don’t touch them,’ said Karen. ‘Oh, what are we going to do about her?’ she said. ‘What are we going to do about the smell?’
It was pretty clear that Li didn’t wash her clothes, because the week before she had asked me how the laundry machines worked; so we were looking at three months here. But the smell wasn’t that bad — sort of dry and old and sexless.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Karen. ‘Oh, my God.’
We had gone in during Li’s early-morning class. Karen wanted to get out of there, but Li never cut a class. She used words like ‘catalepsy’, and ‘dramaturgy’, which amazed me. She was from China and knew more English than I did. She was nineteen.
I opened one of the drawers in her desk and found it was full of tablets. Rows and rows of little plastic jars with Chinese labels. I tried an orange one, and a purple one. They were huge. They tasted of talcum.
‘Come on,’ said Karen, who was holding the door handle and bobbing up and down, like she wanted to pee. Karen was at law school. If it didn’t work out she would become a realtor. I had to ask her what a realtor was, and when she told me it was selling houses I felt pretty stupid, but not as stupid as she was for wanting to sell them.
The more I got to like her, the more she drove me mad. She said Wambui was a lesbian because she had a friend who slept over all the time. I just looked at her. Every time I got annoyed with Karen, the word ‘douche’ came into my head. She just had clean and dirty all mixed up. Douche douche douche! Instead, I said, ‘You know, girls sleep with each other all over the world and no one says anything. All over the world, except here.’
Wambui’s friend was called Brigid and I really liked her. She said she was taught by Irish nuns in Nigeria, then held out her hand for proof. ‘Look at the scars.’ She was funny, really deadpan. She told Karen she should consider getting corn-rows in her hair. Karen was really interested and asked a load of questions. After she left, Brigid and Wambui laughed until they were hanging on to the furniture. Li got the joke, about half an hour too late — or some joke — and that set us off again. Li made a funny noise. I think she was uncomfortable laughing out loud.
But as my hair started to grow out I realised how really unhappy I was. I went to the college doctor and said I thought I had a lump in my breast, and he felt both of them and asked me about contraception and gave me some sleeping pills. He told me to go to the counselling service and I did, but the woman there just thought everything I said was really funny. She said she loved my accent. She said the very fact that I was here meant that I was among the brightest, and that I should nurture my self-esteem.
But I didn’t think I was among the brightest. I thought some of them were pretty thick actually. Apart from this guy from New York, who was massively clever in a dull sort of way. At mid-term I got my assessment essay back with a B despite the fact that ‘you do not know what a paragraph is’. After that I stayed in more, and grew my hair.
At night I walked down to the lake. I stood with my back to the water and checked the lights of all the rooms I knew, to see who was in and where everyone was. It took me weeks to realise that they were all working. Actually working. They weren’t having a good time somewhere that I didn’t know about. There was no secret good time.
One night I woke up and saw Li standing in my bedroom with a pillow in her hands, or maybe she was clasping the pillow to her chest. It was Li and a pillow, anyway, in the dark, and I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming.
‘Oh, Li,’ I said. And in my half-sleep the words came out all worn and fuzzy. Almost loving. Then she turned and walked out again.
Maybe she just wanted some company. It was the first night of the Christmas break; Karen had gone home and Wambui had friends in Chicago. I didn’t have the money to go anywhere and Li, I suppose, had even less. So it was just the two of us, feeling a little left behind.
The next day, I said nothing. There was nothing I could possibly say. I felt a bit sorry for her, that’s all. I wondered did she just want to sleep with me, like I told Karen women do everywhere except here. Or did she want to sleep with me the way women actually do (especially here)? The thought of her skinny little bones gave me a sort of rush, but it wasn’t really a pleasant one.