Lily imagined her mother giving Shirley a puzzled look. She imagined Shirley avoiding that look and quickly making her last few steps down the stairs, and a moment later, the door closed behind her. Hurriedly, Lily grabbed her scarf from the chair and went to hang it on the coatrack on the landing. She heard her mother’s footsteps slowly ascending, and then she came into view, carrying two white bakery boxes. She placed the boxes on the bench as she removed her coat and shoes.
Lily was standing nervously outside the kitchen. A paralyzing anxiety had overtaken her, making her head throb.
“What’s going on?” her mother asked calmly. “Did you and Shirley have another fight?”
Lily remembered that Aunt Judy and Uncle Francis were arriving that night, and Uncle Sam was bringing his entire family tomorrow morning. The thought of them all converging on the flat now—they would be here the entire week, for the New Year festivities—made the throbbing in her head even worse, so that she had to reach out and clutch the kitchen doorframe to keep her balance.
“Are you all right?” her mother said.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, taking a shallow breath in a futile attempt to tamp down her rising panic. Wallace Lai’s a gossip. There was an unmistakable threat in what Shirley had told her, and she realized that she had two options: she could wait for the gossip to spread through all of Chinatown until her parents found out, or she could tell them herself right now. She didn’t know how long it would take for the rumors to spread, but given that it was New Year week, they would probably spread quickly—and it was likely that her whole family would be here when they heard them. The idea of facing her uncles—oh God, her grandmother was coming, too—
She could barely breathe anymore. She felt nauseated, and her mother asked, “Are you sick? Maybe you do have what Frankie had.”
“No,” she said, but she didn’t resist when her mother came over to her and led her by the arm back into the kitchen—right past the spot where Shirley had looked at her as if she were a pervert.
“Sit down,” her mother said, and Lily obeyed. Her mother placed a cool hand on Lily’s flushed forehead, and went to get her a glass of water. It was the same glass she had tried to drink earlier, and the sight of it paradoxically calmed her because it seemed so ridiculous. Everything was moving in circles. She couldn’t get out of the kitchen; it was only the person she spoke to who changed. Here was her mother sitting down across from her, reaching for her hands and chafing them as if she were frozen. She felt the rub of her mother’s wedding ring against her skin, and her mother’s face swam into focus, her brown eyes full of the sharp worry of love, and Lily thought, You will never look at me like this again.
40
Lily went to the trash can and retrieved the crumpled-up newspaper. She brought it over to the kitchen table and spread it out, smoothing down the wrinkled, wet corners. The right half of the front page was ripped, and the letters of the headline were smeared, but the story was still readable.
“What is this?” her mother asked.
“I was there last night. At the Telegraph Club. Shirley came over to tell me that someone saw me.” Lily sat down again and waited, lowering her gaze to her hands. The ink from the newspaper had stained her fingertips gray.
“I don’t understand. This story has nothing to do with you.”
“I was there,” she repeated. “I don’t know how else to tell you,” she added a little desperately.
Her mother pulled the newspaper toward her and leaned closer to read it. When she turned the page to read the second half of the story, Lily closed her eyes. The ticking of the clock over the stove sounded like a countdown. She felt almost as if she were floating untethered from her body. She wasn’t all here—she couldn’t be.
“You’re not in the story,” her mother said, sounding very far away.
“No, but I was at the club,” Lily said. “Wallace Lai saw me outside.”
Where had he seen her? She remembered the men on that side street, their glowing cigarettes.
“You couldn’t have been anywhere near that place,” her mother said. “You were at home last night, asleep!”
Lily opened her eyes. Her mother’s face was pale beneath her powder; she looked unnaturally white.
“I went out,” Lily said. She was sure her own face was bright red; she felt the blood rushing to her head as she spoke. “I went to that club. Wallace Lai saw me there, and Shirley came to tell me. Everyone’s going to know soon. I thought I should tell you first.”
Her mother’s gaze dropped down to the newspaper again. There was an ad for ladies’ hosiery on the page next to the second half of the story, with an illustration of a woman’s legs dressed in sheer nylons. The ad seemed deliberately obscene to Lily, and as if her mother agreed, she closed the newspaper and flipped it over.
“It must have been a mistake,” her mother said tightly. “You’re a good Chinese girl. Whoever Wallace Lai saw—it wasn’t you.”
Lily felt as if she were stuck on a broken track in a diorama, as if she were not herself but merely the figurine of a Chinese girl that kept jerking back to the beginning rather than continuing through her miniature world. It was clear that if she agreed with her mother—and Shirley—if she would only tell them what they wanted to hear, then she could move forward on her prescribed path. But that would mean erasing all her trips to the Telegraph Club; it would mean denying her desire to go at all. It meant suppressing her feelings for Kath, and at that moment, her feelings seemed to swell inside her so painfully that she was terrified she might burst. Was this what it felt like to love someone? She wished she could ask Shirley how she had known.
Her mother was waiting for her to say it had been a mistake, but Lily couldn’t do it. “No,” she said. Her voice sounded ugly to her ears, but it relieved some of the pressure building inside her. “He didn’t make a mistake,” she insisted. “I was there.”
“Lily, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying,” she said, frustrated.
“You’re saying you were at this—this club for homosexuals?”
Her mother’s voice rose on the last, shocking word. Lily had never heard her mother say it before. All she could do was nod, and her mother’s face went even paler.