“Young Wong, amazing isn’t it? There are no labels on any of those drawers and yet he moves with such certainty, such directness, knowing exactly what to retrieve and from where. You have the same directness when you move about in your store.”
Da Wong is surprised again by this second compliment, that Miss Rosen would have noticed that he knows his stock intimately. Although he refuses to call himself such, his father insists that it is a great honor to be a third-generation seafood specialist, wishes Da would wear the special white apron Fùqīn had embroidered with the honorific in red. Da will wear only a plain apron, unadorned, does not want to proclaim to his insulated world a title that makes him feel small, that he is not in his right skin, when, to his family, such should make him strong and powerful. He is rebelling these days, eating no fish, has not in more than a year. He may have to sell the fruits of the sea, he may live his life surrounded by their eyeballs, their mottled or rainbow skin, may have to care for them like his children, and clean and devein them, but he does not have to make himself one with them. Now he keeps his own innards free, no more fish sliding down his gullet.
They are nearly past the windows of the Double Crispy Bakery when Miss Rosen stops and says, “Let’s go in here.”
The bakery is filled with its homemade sweet and savory offerings and ready-made delights. Plastic containers of their good almond cookies are piled high on the counter. Inside the cases are endless trays of tiger-skin cheesecakes, melon-puff pastry cakes, snow skin moon cakes, Macau-style egg tarts, fluffy pumpkin buns, all manner of creamy desserts, then the seaweed buns, the pork floss buns, everything so colorful and ripe, including a tray of desserts that confuses Da’s mind, looking like American hamburgers with some strange pink blob on top, or like ripe breasts with nipples, like he has seen in Bai’s dirty magazines, either way he tries to see those particular desserts makes his stomach roll. He looks away fast, finds his eyes taking in all manner of Swiss rolls packed up in tight plastic, orange sponge, and chocolate tapioca, butter sponge, strawberry, peach, mocha, and Da Wong is suddenly ravenous.
“Almond cookies might be a nice touch,” Miss Rosen says, and Da Wong hopes she is talking to herself.
The exchange happens quickly—a bag with eight containers of almond cookies slides up Da Wong’s arm, knocking against a bag filled with fish, a piece of Tiger Skin Cheesecake is placed in his mouth, which he opens automatically, like a hungry child, Miss Rosen’s curiously thick fingers barely missing his teeth.
He reaches up to hold the cake steady as he bites it in half, fish banging against his cheeks.
“Say nothing,” Paloma Rosen says. “My treat. Un petit merci for carrying my goods home.”
Da Wong could not speak if he wanted to, his mouth crammed with such sweetness. He could eat everything in the bakery and still not find himself stuffed.
To the woman behind the counter who is handing Miss Rosen her change, Miss Rosen says, “Madame, s’il vous pla?t, please also two of those Swiss rolls, strawberry tapioca and orange sponge, and two of those split balls, whatever they may be … Oui, oui, the flashy magenta one, and that one, quelle est la couleur? Would you say it is chartreuse?” Da knows Miss Rosen has seen him staring at those pastries.
The counter woman gives Paloma a disgusted look. “We are not fancy here. Only simple colors. Pink, red, yellow, green.”
“Then one of the pink ones and one of the green ones. Merci,” Paloma says, the tone of her voice not rising a beat, as if the fifty-dollar bill she handed over for the almond cookies and the rest has not been thanked with rudeness. Da Wong is embarrassed by such treatment. He does not like what he does for a living, but never would he treat a paying customer in such a way.
The woman tallies Paloma’s additional bakery goods, extravagantly yanks bill after bill out of the pile of change, hands Paloma a single dollar. “Good day to you,” the bakery woman says, and huffs past a red curtain to the back.
Back on the sidewalk, Paloma says, “Some people get up on the wrong side of the bed all of the time. Nothing one can do about that. Ici,” she says, and removes the bag of almond cookies from Da Wong’s wrist. “I’ll carry the pastries home, but they are all for you. Well, not the almond cookies, but the rest.”
“It’s not necessary, Miss Rosen,” Da Wong says, wondering how to lick his fingers clean of the tiger-skin cheesecake without looking gauche, or like a beggar, or knocking himself again in the face with her fish.
“Young Wong, because I am old, I get my way, and as a result, I am in charge of determining what is necessary. D’accord?”
Da stares at her.
“How is it that at my age I find myself all at once consorting with people who speak no French? Somewhere along the line I have made some kind of cosmic mistake. What I said was, ‘Okay?’ So you and I, Young Wong, are we okay?”
“We are very okay, Miss Rosen.”
“Très bien. That means ‘very good.’ Now, what do we have here?” and Da Wong is catching on. She doesn’t expect him to respond to her casual comments. Her casual comments are intended to put him at ease, to feel that a young fishmonger walking a beautiful old lady home with forty pounds of fish on his wrists on a hot August day is nothing unusual. He wonders if his father and grandfather ever provided door-to-door service for customers. He nearly hopes he is breaking new ground here, or shattering some taboo, fraternizing with the clients, doing something father and grandfather might have quite liked to have done for Miss Rosen, providing such personal care which Haiyang Best does not need to do, the way the fish flies out the door, on the backs of people, in their bags, in ice-filled crates shoved through the open doors of vans. There is a handsome chef with a restaurant in Harlem who comes down twice a week, spends an hour and no more, selecting exactly what he wants. Tight skull, dark-brown skin, dressed in interesting clothes. In winter, he wears brightly colored socks that Da thinks of as Mr. Marcus’s happy socks.
As they pass the GoodLuckJade/Crystals store, its jades and crystals jumbled together, Miss Rosen says, “I’ve often wondered if such things work,” and Da Wong thinks of his special crystals, his large piece of deep-green jade, all set out on a clean cloth on his windowsill, how he picks them up one at a time and puts each to his forehead, rubs it between his fingers, feels its warmth, its vibrations, tries to believe completely, and yet nothing ever changes.