The Year She Left Us (12 page)

CHAPTER 15

ARI

I
needed six hundred dollars for a one-way ticket to Beijing, plus three hundred more to keep myself alive once I got there. I worked part time at Pen and Parchment and looked for a second job. Nights I spent at Kurt's place, striving against his slack bulk until he expended himself, his final sale of the day. Afterward, I sat alone in the kitchen, drinking black tea and searching for airfares on the Internet. Katie and I avoided each other, and Niall quit, moving with Drue to Oakland. A.J. started the semester. I told Charlie that I was hanging out with Katie and gave her a made-up phone number “in case you ever need to call the house.” I knew she wouldn't. I texted her from time to time to keep her off my back. I said I would think about starting at Bryn Mawr in January, that I wasn't quite ready to leave California. I left clothes and books scattered in my old bedroom to convince her that I was coming back.

Mostly Kurt assigned me to the stockroom, where he could come in for a grope. Sometimes I took a turn in the blank-book section, a hundred square feet of empty journals waiting to be filled. Shoppers spent hours considering their choices: lined, unlined, graph paper, spiral-bound. Plaid cover, animal print, pressed flower, and leatherette. There were hand-sewn leather books we kept locked in a display case. Young women hovered, shyly asking to view the goods. I didn't like them to approach me. I felt outside of their world and immune to their earnest faces. I had no inner thoughts to spill, no impulse to express myself, for all I felt was numb. “This is the kind I use,” I told the young women, steering them toward the cheaper versions that were glued and bonded, a bad sales practice that royally pissed off Kurt.

Once in a while I helped Ines at the front of the store in the fine pens department. Those were the only moments when I felt something other than frozen. Ines knew everything about old-fashioned fountain pens, those relics of labored times. I admired how deliberately Ines worked to be out of step. She was an unlikely expert: twenty-four years old and begrudging. She wore black lipstick and hoop earrings and moved her thick body with such deliberate slowness that customers were cowed by her insolent boredom, or maybe by the rows of gleaming wares that she arranged like flaunted jewelry in the long glass vitrines, the ballpoints and roller balls and fountain pens and mechanical pencils. A $10,000 Montblanc Masterpiece with a solid gold nib rested center stage on a raised satin pillow. Ines's uncle Gerardo had given her his grandfather's fountain pen when she graduated from SF State, the first in her family to go to college, and from that first acquisition, she had started to collect. She was writing a couple of screenplays, I think—she didn't say, but I snuck a peek at her notebook.

Most people came in wanting roller ball refills or ink for their Parker Sonnets, but once in a while, an older man or two who shared Ines's passion stopped by to consult her. They had to work hard to get Ines to talk. Hers was a perverse sort of obsession, I decided, since it seemed to give her no pleasure. One guy named Martin came in twice a week to fondle a Visconti Black Ripple, specially imported, that Ines kept under lock and key. He was about fifty-five, sandy-haired, with smooth cheeks and an Irish brogue. He carried a stand-up briefcase with a brass clasp at the top.

“Ines,” he said one time when I was helping. He was trying the Visconti again, writing his name on the pad we kept on the counter. “I need your help. I can't make up my mind. Please just tell me to buy it.” It cost over a thousand dollars.

“What are the contenders?” Ines asked, and then they were off, talking of the Parker Duofold and the Sheaffer Balance and some we didn't carry. Martin kept stooping low over the display case and bobbing up to exclaim. He produced his phone to show Ines pictures of other models. Ines answered him in her usual military manner, matching him name for name, description for description, without showing the merest glimmer that the subject warmed her, though she must have spent hours poring through catalogs and books. She had taught me a little about what to look for: the barrel, the cap, and the nib.

“The mechanism is important,” she said. “How is the ink delivered? Does it fill easily and flow well?” She took out her great-grandfather's pen, a Waterman Red Ripple, to show me. She let me cap and uncap it and write on our scribbling pad.
Ines, Ines, Ines
, I wrote. I couldn't bring myself to write my own name. To see my signature looking back at me made me feel as if I were shrinking. The pen balanced perfectly against the bump on my finger, but then I pressed too hard and scratched a hole in the paper.

“I'm more of a pencil person,” I said. I showed her my grandfather's mechanical pencil and the leather case with Grandpa Kong's initials.

“It's a decent design,” she said, testing it briefly. “Parker Seventy-five. They sold a lot of those.” I liked her diffidence; there was no way we could be friends. “Grid pattern, an excellent writer. It feels instrumental, if you know what I mean. But next to a fountain pen, it's insubstantial. It doesn't announce to your hand that you've really got hold of something. It's less fun to use.” She handed it back to me. I thought that “Ines” and “fun” didn't belong in the same sentence, but she probably thought the same of me. “I like the whole business with the inkwell, the nib, the wiping cloth, and the blotter. Using a fountain pen is better than smoking. It gives your hands something to do when you're thinking of what to write.”

It was the most Ines had ever spoken to me. I wondered if she was willing to talk because I cherished Grandpa Kong's pencil the way she cherished her great-grandfather's pen. I had noticed that before she slipped it away in its case, she touched it briefly to her lips, the way that Charlie had used to check for fever by brushing her mouth to my forehead.

“Did you notice Martin's shirt?” Ines asked. “You can always tell the true collectors. They have a big blotch of ink on their pocket. Like this.” She displayed her right breast pocket. A large stain spread over the area, dark blue and feathered. The heavy spot at the center mimicked the nipple underneath.

“That's your favorite shirt,” I said. A blue denim work shirt she often wore as a jacket.

“I don't care. I like things messy. You know how it is.” Ines looked at me shrewdly. “You're kind of a mess, I'd say.”

That much was obvious. I didn't care, either.

I
started looking at fountain pens on eBay, more out of curiosity than as part of any plan. I thought about lifting a couple of good ones and selling them for cash, but it wasn't a good option: I needed the job at Pen and Parchment, and stealing the merchandise would get me fired or worse. It was better to think about domestic sources of funding. Charlie didn't keep cash in the house, so I went through her bookcase when she was at work and filled a box that I took to the Bookdrop, my favorite bookstore in the Richmond District on the western side of the city. The buyer sorted through my box quickly. He set aside a couple of hardbacks and my old childhood favorites—my two volumes of d'Aulaire and the Greek myth picture books—but he put most of the books back in the box with a shrug.

“I can't use these,” he said, pushing the carton back across the counter. Behind him were stacks of cat books, cookbooks, graphic novels, and first editions. Ordinarily, I'd browse for at least an hour—in the middle of the store was a groaning table of alluring volumes—but I hadn't read anything for weeks.

“I can take a few,” he said. “Do you want cash or store credit?”

I took the cash: sixteen bucks and a few pennies. I was hungry for lunch and standing on Clement Street, where the dumpling and noodle shops could take me to wherever I wanted, Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Beijing, but I had an apple in my pocket that I had swiped from Kurt's. I ate it slowly, nibbling it down to the core. I didn't want to lug the box back on the bus. Katie would have driven me if we had still been friends, or A.J. would have borrowed her parents' car. I could have taken Charlie's car, but I didn't want to smell her deodorant or look at the files strewn across the backseat or see the image of her worried face in the mirror. Instead, I carried the box a couple of blocks to the Goodwill store and dumped it in front, to the protest of a Chinese grocer who wanted the sidewalk kept clear.

By late September, I had saved less than five hundred dollars. Once again, I went to the apartment one morning after Charlie had left for work to look for things I could sell. In the living room cabinets and hallway closet, I turned up nothing, not even mementoes. For all her trembling belief in the vast potential of the human race, Charlie wasn't sentimental. No sterling silver keepsakes or class rings or fake Chinese antiques cluttered our apartment. There was only one shoe box of photos of me when I was younger.

I glanced at the clock; I was due at work in an hour. In Charlie's bedroom, I searched more slowly, going through her dressing table, her cherry armoire, the plastic bins in her closet. There were books stacked on the floor alongside her bed, mostly biographies of modern-day powerhouse women that Les had given her for Christmas. The bed was queen-sized, spread with an old quilt, underoccupied for years. When I was little, I used to snuggle with Charlie and read to her from my book until we fell asleep, curled up together, but I never came in here anymore except to snoop and pilfer. I sat on the edge of the bed to rummage in the bedside table and wondered, not for the first time, what my mother did for sex. Les had someone—someone who was a secret—but Charlie had no one. Whenever I asked, she said she didn't have time for a boyfriend. Had she ever had a boyfriend? I had wanted to know. Oh, one or two, she'd said, but she didn't miss them. It was much more fun having a daughter. She dated occasionally, mostly friends of friends, and once or twice I had stayed with Les for a weekend, but Charlie had always come home saying she was glad to be back in our cozy apartment with just the two of us: I was enough for her.

Crossing the room, I opened the top dresser drawer and wormed my hand through socks, underwear, and bras. I palmed something rough and lumpy. Tucked in a pair of oversized ski socks was a rolled-up, zippered pouch.

Inside were four things I had never laid eyes on before.

The first was a gold ring, the second was a set of jade buttons, the third was a necklace, and the fourth was a picture of my father.

W
hen A.J. and Becca and I were twelve years old, our parents took us on a heritage tour of China. We had been promised the trip since we were eight. First we would tour together, and then split up for the orphanage visits—Becca to Guangzhou, and A.J. and I to Kunming.

A.J. and Becca were studying hard for their bat mitzvahs, which were coming up in the next year, and the trip for them was a kind of pre-reward for all their hard work and dedication. Charlie was determined that we should make the trip, part of the generally recommended procedure for international adoptees to come to terms with their adoption. Several of the Whackadoodle girls had already been: Bree and Molly had come home gushing, showing off the butterfly barrettes and knotted bracelets their parents had bought them in the street markets, though another girl, Larkin, came home unhappy. She said that China was dirty, that children wore split pants so they could pee and poop in the gutter, and that she'd never go back again. That didn't worry A.J. or Becca. They had already been on family vacations to Portugal and Israel and Guatemala and said it was cool to check out other cultures. We would take lots of pictures of ourselves doing fun things, like posing in our Whackadoodle T-shirts on the Great Wall and sunning ourselves on a riverboat cruise, and it wouldn't be so bad going to our orphanages. It's not like we remembered anything. The babies would be cute.

I couldn't share their excitement. Except for my first five months of life, I had never been outside of the United States. My Chinese was lousy compared to the other girls'—I knew only a few sentences from our weekly Whackadoodle lessons, while A.J. and Becca both had after-school immersion—and I wasn't so sure it would be fun to visit the orphanage. What if they found out that they'd made a mistake and weren't supposed to have let me be adopted? Bree and Molly had told us that their parents were allowed to look at their orphanage files. What if, when they pulled out my file, they found something had been overlooked? Would they tell me I couldn't leave the country? Would Charlie have to run around to fix things, or pay money, or prove that she was my mother? Her Mandarin was almost as bad as mine was. It helped a little bit that she was a lawyer, and when she said that Les was coming, I felt slightly better: the two of them together were formidable. But I was so nervous about what we might find out that I couldn't ask myself the scariest question of all: What if my real parents showed up and wanted me back?

I didn't say any of it out loud to Charlie. She was looking forward to the trip, her second visit to China, and Les had never been, so they were in high spirits. “The trip of a lifetime,” they called it—whose lifetime, they didn't say. Charlie talked often on the phone with Robyn, discussing the itinerary and the gifts we should take with us. It was important to take little presents for the tour guides, like cable car key chains and American cosmetics and Wisconsin ginseng for the orphanage aunties. They consulted other Whackadoodle parents about what kind of big gift they should bring to the orphanage. Some people gave cash, but that left them uneasy. “Who knows what they'll spend it on?” said Les. “They'll probably blow it on name-brand luxury goods. It's so perfectly absurd: they buy real Louis Vuitton handbags, and the tourists buy the fake ones. They're better capitalists than we are.” Experienced visitors suggested things that the babies could use: infant formula and disposable diapers, or picture books for the older children, though whether those should be in Chinese or English, nobody quite knew. Still others said to wait till we got there and then buy a useful appliance, like an air conditioner or a washing machine or a dishwasher for the kitchen.