“I’m sorry,” she said to her brothers—to everyone—and then she sat down beside her grandmother, who took her hand. Her grandmother’s skin was loose over her bones and dry as paper, but her grip was quite firm. “阿婆好,” Lily greeted her. “幾時到咖?”*
“我今早到咖,”* A P’oh said. She gave Lily a canny look that made Lily wonder how much she knew about what had happened. “大家好擔心你哬. 千其无再咁做.”* Her grandmother’s tone was soft, but the warning in it was unmistakable.
Lily flushed. “對唔住, 阿婆,”* she said, lowering her gaze. She told herself she hadn’t done anything wrong, but she still felt guilty.
* * *
—
She changed out of the clothes she had slept in. She washed her face and brushed her teeth; she combed her hair and pinned it away from her face. In the bathroom mirror, she looked like a good Chinese girl.
In the kitchen, Aunt Judy and Aunt May were chopping vegetables at the table while her mother fried nien-kao* on the stove. Her father was making a pot of tea, and he saw her first, his face relaxing into sudden relief.
Her mother turned. Her expression softened, but only briefly. “Come and help your aunts,” she said.
Lily pulled out a chair and sat down beside Aunt May at the table, while Aunt Judy, who was about to start mincing ginger, slid the chopping board over to her along with the knobby root.
Her father placed the teapot on a small round tray along with a stack of teacups, and headed out of the kitchen. Lily thought he might say something to her—he even hesitated next to her chair—but he remained silent. A hot shame rose within her. She didn’t know what her family knew, but their silence told her they knew enough.
She focused on the ginger, mincing it as precisely as she could, and eventually her aunts and her mother picked up their conversation. Each time Lily finished a task, Aunt Judy gave her another one: peel and chop garlic, then the scallions, then the water chestnuts. Every surface in the kitchen was crowded with ingredients for the other dishes that would be served: two kinds of dried mushrooms, dried lily flowers and bean thread, all soaking in separate bowls of liquid; a mound of washed lettuce air-drying in the battered metal colander; bottles of soy sauce and oyster sauce and cooking wine. A pot of lotus root soup was simmering on the back of the stove, and Lily’s mother was turning out the nien-kao onto a platter, while Aunt May took a whole fish out of the refrigerator.
It was exactly like every other New Year, and it was that sameness that made Lily feel as if she wasn’t all there. Her fingers were doing the work, but she could prepare vegetables in her sleep. It left her mind plenty of room to wander, and it returned over and over to those last moments in the Telegraph Club with Kath. The running and jostling through the back hallway; the flashing lights and the women shouting at her to move; Kath’s hand squeezing hers before letting go.
Lily’s eyes grew hot and she willed herself not to cry. She should never have let go of Kath’s hand. She should have held on to her and dragged her out the back door.
Her hands trembled, and the cleaver slipped, and the blade nicked the tip of her left index finger. A droplet of blood welled up instantly, bright red. She stared at her finger in shock as the blood splashed onto the cutting board.
Aunt Judy reached for the cleaver, gently easing it out of her grasp, and said quietly, “You’re all right. It’s just a little cut. You’d better go put on a bandage.”
* * *
—
There were eight dishes, plus lotus root soup and rice: poached whole chicken with ginger sauce; roast duck from a Chinatown deli; lo-han chai, a vegetarian dish traditionally eaten by monks; hsün yü, the cold Shanghai-style fish; steamed whole fish Cantonese style; the nien-kao; oyster sauce lettuce; and for dessert, pa pao fan, a steamed sticky rice filled with sweet bean paste.
Lily had been starving all afternoon—it felt like an eternity had passed since her scrambled eggs at Lana’s apartment—but although the food was delicious, she had lost her appetite. Aunt Judy, who was sitting next to Lily at the makeshift table for twelve, noticed. She selected some pieces of hsün yü and deposited them in Lily’s bowl, urging her to eat.
At least no one was making an effort to talk to her. Lily’s mother, Uncle Sam, Aunt May, and her grandmother spoke Cantonese together at one end of the table, while Lily’s father and Aunt Judy fell into Shanghainese. Uncle Francis, who had grown up in Los Angeles, stuck to English with the kids. Sometimes she caught her mother or father glancing at her, but they didn’t speak to her.
She began to feel as if she had been split in two, and only one half of her was here in this living room. That was the good Chinese daughter who was delicately chewing her way around the bones in each piece of hsün yü, carefully extracting them from her mouth and laying the tiny white spines on the edge of her plate with her chopsticks. The other half had been left out on the sidewalk before Lily walked in the front door. That was the girl who had spent last night in the North Beach apartment of a Caucasian woman she barely knew. Everything would be all right, Lily understood, as long as she kept that girl out of this Chinese family.
Perhaps one day she’d get used to the way it made her feel: dislocated and dazed, never quite certain if the other half of her would stay offstage as directed. But tonight she felt as if she were constantly on the edge of saying or doing something wrong, and the effort of keeping that unwelcome half silent was making her sick. Her stomach rebelled against it, and her head hurt, and she was so tired she felt as if she were in danger of falling unconscious there at the table, her head dropping right into her bowl of rice. The image struck her as ridiculously funny, and she had to swallow hard to prevent herself from breaking into hysterical laughter.
* * *