“I don’t feel well.”
I look past her to the baby rocking chairs, to the window framed by curtains just a shade whiter than our bedspreads. The curtain borders are edged with the same lace as Raggedy Ann’s apron.
“You are bor-ing,” Marty says to me, and slams the door on her way out. I hear that irregular clomp that means she is taking the stairs two, sometimes three at a time.
Mrs. Lister, my third grade teacher, writes my mother a note:
Although Sarah has always been a reserved child, for the past month or so she has been unusually withdrawn, and I’m a little concerned. When I called on her today, she put her head down on the desk and refused to answer. When I asked her if there was anything wrong at home, she said no. I suggest you make an appointment with your family doctor.
The doctor says that I am healthy as a horse. I sit outside in the waiting room, while he talks to Ma, wishing I really had a disease. I just know she’s going to say something about waste, wasted money. But when the door to the office opens her face is normal.
“Come on, Sally. We go home now.”
I know for sure she’s not mad when we get to the car, because she lets me sit up in front with her. When we’re out on Whitney Avenue she begins to hum to herself—some old Chinese tune. In church Marty and I used to be embarrassed because she sang way louder than anyone else, with shakes in her voice. Then one day at coffee hour the organist came up and asked whether she wanted to join the choir. “Your mother has perfect pitch,” he told Marty and me. She didn’t join, but I noticed she sang more in the kitchen. Hymns, old-time songs like “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat.”
“You know what this is, Sally?” she asks me now.
“No,” I say, although it sounds familiar. Sad, like all Chinese songs.
“It’s a folk melody called the flower drum. They made it up in China a long time ago. The empress decided that she wanted all the flowers in the summer garden to bloom, even though it was winter. So she called out all the musicians and told them to play play play until the flowers come out.”
“So what happened?”
“It worked. In the middle of winter, the peonies and jasmine and plum blossom, they all burst into bloom. Your Nai-nai used to sing this to me when I was a little girl.”
We are going past Lake Whitney now, a couple of blocks before we make the turn onto Coram Drive. It’s winter, like in Ma’s story, but everything is flat gray or white—the lake water, the lone seagull huddled on the wire fencing. The gull makes me think of the ocean.
“I wish we could visit Nai-nai,” I say.
“Sealy,” my mother says. That was my nickname, from a long time ago, when Daddy still liked me. “You know what I think? I think we need a treat.” Instead of making the turn onto our street, we keep going straight and then turn right and head all the way up to Ridge Road.
“Where are we going?” I ask, but my mother just smiles.
It turns out to be Knudsen’s Dairy, where we go in the summer, on Sundays, when Daddy is in a good mood. Next to the ice cream shop is a giant milking barn, and our family usually sits on the terrace where we can watch the cows being led up the ramp. Once Mr. Knudsen, bald and pink-faced like Mr. Clean, gave us a tour of the barn. It smelled awful, like throw-up. Today Ma and I sit inside at one of the sticky yellow tables.
“You used to have so many friends,” she says, poking at the bulb of orange sherbet in its metal flower. She always gets a different flavor, though it has to be sherbet. Sometimes I think my parents like Knudsen’s more than Marty and I do. I have a double scoop of chocolate almond fudge on a sugar cone.
I eat and say nothing. Ma reaches over and flips one of my braids over my shoulder so I won’t get ice cream on it.
“Remember, you always play with Darcy?”
“Darcy’s boring.”
“How about school? Don’t you have friends at school?”
“Some.”
“Why don’t you bring them home?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Next Saturday I take you to see Mei Shie.”
“Who?”
“Mei Shie is special lady, can help you.”
“A doctor?”
“Better than a doctor. She lives in Chinatown. We go there, just you and me. No Daddy or Marty. You can wear your play clothes.”
We take the train in and then a taxi. The place where Mei Shie lives is over a noodle shop. The downstairs foyer has pale green walls like the nurse’s room at school and the floor is dirty white tiles. As we climb the stairs skeleton cats brush against our legs.
My Nai-nai is the only other old person I know, and the woman who opens the door doesn’t look anything like her, although she has a bun and wears the same shoes, shuffly black slippers. Big red spots bloom on her cheeks. She puts her sagging face right down in front of mine and says something in Chinese that I recognize to mean “Come in, come in,” although her voice is loud and crabby.
The main room of the apartment is full of low, black carved furniture, and over at one end there is a beaded curtain, like they have at the Sung Trading Company. It’s dim, there don’t seem to be any windows, the only light comes from small pink glass flower lamps along one wall. The smell in the air is sweet and rotten. Ma and I sit down on a scratchy black couch and wait for the lady to bring us Chinese tea in tall glasses that have plastic webbing around the bottoms. Ma picks up her glass and takes a sip. It always embarrasses me, the way my parents slurp when they drink tea, but then the lady does the same, making an even louder noise.
Ma and the lady are talking in Chinese, and I hear my mother tell her my Chinese name.
“Ah,” the lady says, making a clicking sound with her teeth. She leans over to peer at me, and now I can see the wrinkles on her cheeks like spiderwebs beneath the makeup. Then she reaches across the coffee table and puts both her thumbs hard right on my eyelids and stretches them up. It feels like getting sand in my eyes at the beach. Finally she lets go and says something to my mother. Then she scuffles into the other room, through the clicking curtain.
“Mei Shie says your energy is too yin,” Ma tells me. She lowers her voice and adds: “Mei Shie not completely Chinese, you know. Her mother is Greek.”
The lady comes tottering back, carrying something carefully in both hands. When she gets close I see that it’s a tall glass jar with a screw-on lid, filled with some kind of murky liquid. My mother tries to help her with it, but Mei Shie nudges her away. She sets the jar down on the table in front of me and says something to my mother.
Ma translates: “Sally, you put your hands on the lid.”
I do as she says, and it’s just an ordinary lid, like on a peanut butter jar, only bigger.
“Close your eyes,” Ma whispers.
With my eyes shut, the smell in the room is worse, and my throat swells so I think I might choke. The metal of the jar lid is cool beneath my palms.
It’s the smell. I open my eyes to dark and there’s a change in the air, a new body in the room. The bed sagging gently as someone sits down.
In the faint light from the window I can see his outline: the long curving torso, the bulbous head set onto a thin neck, just like pictures in the book. There’s no tail, but I imagine it curled underneath like a worm.
“Be quiet,” says Monkey King.
Look, Marty, I want to say, but of course Monkey King is right, I am not allowed to talk. It would break the spell.
So I lie still, as still as if I were dead. The hand, pushing up my nightgown. I can feel the ridges on his fingertips against my skin. Then my underpants are dragged down to my ankles, a flood of cold, and I think I might wet myself, but I don’t.
Nails as rough as crab claws between my thighs. That stick he has, that he can make bigger or smaller when he feels like it. Or is it his tail? I can’t tell. Ma said it hurt like this when I was born. Like she wanted to die. Like it would never stop. It cracks my bones apart. The curtains are flapping. Go to the ceiling. But sometimes I don’t fly up there fast enough, or else drop down too soon.