I waited every night for Bobby to find me in the attic. On the nights he visited, I knew I loved him. On the nights he failed to show, I decided in my torment that I hated love.
One night I decided I was not the sort of girl to be kept waiting, and I went looking for him in the garage. He had rolled the buggy into the driveway and made a room for himself in the stall next to Monster’s stable. His bed was a horsehair cushion from a discarded sofa; his pillows were lumpy sacks stuffed with batting and straw. He had a crate for a table and another crate to hold his basin. His boots and a few odd bits of clothing were folded and tucked. The garage smelled of oil and metal and of Monster, next door.
Bobby said nothing; I said nothing. He opened his blanket and I crawled in.
There must be a hundred, a thousand sorts of kisses, touches—we discovered them all. The air in that shack held us, the air buzzing with what else we were not yet doing. The not-doing was impossible. At last Bobby climbed to his feet and said, “You have to go now.”
“Why?” I whispered. “Don’t you like me?”
“No. Anyway, I don’t like you.”
“I… don’t understand.” I didn’t want to understand. Had it been up to me, we’d be making love. We’d be doing anything and everything.
Bobby pulled me to my feet, blanket and all, and breathed into me, his lashes tickling my neck. “When will you be sixteen?”
“April.”
“Okay, then April.”
“Bobby, that’s months from now.”
“Yeah, damn it, I know.”
I wanted to argue; it made me suspicious, scratching an old hurt place inside: to be cared for by being sent away.
“Well, damn you, Bobby,” I said.
He seized me by the wrists. “Don’t. Don’t say what you’ll regret.”
“The only thing I’ll regret is if you send me away.”
He pulled me to him, kissed me, and whispered, “Go.”
I returned to the sewing room, where I did not sleep.
In the morning, Tan was waiting for me in the kitchen. He looked beside himself, muted, in that way of his, when he was most angry or distraught. He wouldn’t meet my eye.
“What is it?” I asked sharply. I expected that Tan saw me sneaking into the garage and that I was in for some withering disapproval.
“Lifang,” he said, “is she with Rose?” I told him that’s what I would expect, if she wasn’t with him. Then I reminded him that I didn’t usually bother with Rose till midmorning, after she had eaten her breakfast. All this, Tan already knew.
He studied the floor and, holding still, waited for me to read his mind. Tan’s ways were maddening, but there was a poetry to them too. He didn’t just feel, he combusted.
“I’ll go up and check,” I said, and I hurried upstairs, thinking of how much I missed Bobby and of the breakfast I wanted to eat—thinking that the house had too many hearts, and all of them wanting, and that was the greatest shaker of all.
Lifang was in Rose’s bathroom, rinsing some underthings. “What? What?” she demanded.
I supposed I had the shine from being with Bobby—of wanting him—on me, for Lifang studied me in one of the many mirrors, and said simply, “Ha!”
“Ha, yourself. Your father’s looking for you,” I said. “He’s worried. Does he have reason to be?”
She shook her head fiercely and went back to rinsing her bloomers along with Rose’s.
I went down to tell Tan that I’d seen Lifang. Relieved, he turned to the business of breakfast, cracking the few eggs we had left in the larder.
But you see, I wasn’t the only girl looking for love as the weather turned colder. Lifang had been sneaking out at night. For a good long while, she had managed to keep Tan at bay by varying the pattern of where she slept—one or two nights with Rose, then a night in the basement.
But Tan figured it out. She must have known he would. After all, he was the original conspirer. But, like me, Lifang was beyond caring.
I expect Tan’s greatest fear was that she had been seduced by one of the tong boys. But it was worse than that: Lifang was sneaking into the square at night to be with a soldier she’d met while waiting in the relief lines. Worse still, he was white, a navy recruit from Seattle, where he kept his wife.
Tan discovered them making love in one of the tents. He beat the soldier with a belt that had a brass buckle at one end. Then he marched Lifang home.
Cap, Valentine, and I huddled in the kitchen as we listened to the shrieks coming from the basement. Tan was using the belt the way he’d whipped General—without mercy. It was awful. And it went on.
We never heard Lifang cry. No, it was Tan’s keening that shook the house. With every stroke he roared. She was the love of his life, and he had failed to protect her. She was living with him, but she was gone.
When at last Lifang appeared at the top of the stairs, she was unsteady on her feet. Yet her body looked unscathed. What a tough, tough girl, I thought.
Later, when Tan showed his face, I understood. He had whipped himself and made her watch. And when she refused to bend or cry, he pulled out his hair, patch by wretched patch. His skull was a map of wounds.
Tan prohibited Lifang from visiting Rose’s suite, or any room upstairs. He confined Lifang to the kitchen, reducing her once again to the scrubber of dirty pots. Capability took over tending Rose.
That night, when I couldn’t sleep, I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and found Lifang. She’d been waiting for me. She nodded and dared me to unsee her misery—her tears that flowed, now that her father wasn’t
