Girl in Translation (28 page)

“Because I went along with Greg teasing you. In seventh grade. You remember.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him then. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“I know. I was a little shit. I’m sorry.”

“It’s been a long time. People change.”

“So you’re not still holding that against me?”

“No. And you stood up for me with that Tammy incident.”

“So, what is it, then?”

An image of Matt drifted into my head but I pushed it away. “I guess I’m only in love with your body.”

Curt burst out laughing. “Well, I guess that’ll have to be good enough.”

And we left it at that.

Dr. Weston, the guidance counselor and psychiatrist for the school, called me into her office.

“Where would you like to go for college?” she asked.

I responded without hesitation. “Yale.” Annette and I had talked about colleges. Unlike me, she had ordered dozens of catalogs and read thick books of college guides. In the end, she’d chosen Wesleyan as her top choice. My selection was much more random. I knew Yale was a top school and I loved the photos of Yale in her catalog.

“Good. Let me see your application before you send it in and I’ll give you my comments.”

“Do you think I really have a chance?”

Dr. Weston stared at me with her little eyes. “Kimberly Chang, if you’re not the type of student who gets into Yale, then who is?”

I typed out my application on the typewriter at the library, and Dr. Weston hardly made any changes to it. I asked her if it would be possible to waive the application fee. She wanted to see a copy of our tax return to see if I qualified, and when she took a quick glance at it, her face became still. Then she’d immediately given me the waiver.

When I told Ma what I had done, she was appalled. “Why didn’t you pay the fee?”

“It’s a lot of money.” This was the same month that we had finally managed to pay off our old debts to Aunt Paula. Our financial situation was much better than it’d ever been, especially since I was still working extra hours at the library. But if we were ever going to move, ever going to change our lives, we needed to continue to save every cent we could. I understood this. Even without debt payments, our income was paltry.

“But maybe they won’t consider your application. Why would they read it when you didn’t give them money for it?”

The next day, Ma brought home a stack of cheap china plates she’d bought.

“Here, throw these on the floor,” she said.

“Why?”

“Breaking china brings good luck. It will help you get into college.”

I didn’t believe in these superstitions but I broke them anyway. If I didn’t get into a college with a need-blind financial aid policy, I wouldn’t be able to go at all. We couldn’t even afford a state school.

I began to worry even more when I heard about what other students had put in their applications. Julia Williams’s family kept a Steinway in a soundproof practice room for her. Julia practiced five hours a day and had competed in international piano competitions since she turned sixteen. Chelsea Brown sang in the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus.

The jocks were a group unto themselves. “Speedy Spenser,” as he was called, won every race with his long spider legs, and Harrison’s field hockey team took the title in our region. Alicia Collins qualified for the Junior Olympics in gymnastics. Once, when a few of the football guys challenged her, she’d dropped to the floor and matched them in one-handed push-ups until the guys fell off in exhaustion. The jocks were just as serious as I was.

Most of the kids had had lessons in something, like dance or violin, since they were seven. If their standardized test scores needed a bit of boosting, they received private tutoring. They could write their college essays about picking grapes in Italy, bike tours of Holland, sketching in the Louvre. Often, their parents were also alumni of the schools they were applying to.

What were my chances? I was just a poor girl whose main practical skill was bagging skirts faster than normal. Dr. Weston’s confidence in me gave me some hope but not much. I was good at school but so were many of the other kids, most of whom had been groomed since birth to get into the right college. No matter how well I did in my classes or how well I managed to fake belonging to the cool circle, I knew I was not one of them. A part of me believed the colleges would sense this and shut me out.

Mr. Jamali thought Annette had learned enough to be cast as Emily, the lead in Our Town.

“I can’t believe it!” Annette couldn’t seem to stop jumping up and down. “You have to come see the play the day it opens.”

“I will!” I clasped her hands in mine.

“You swear?”

“I do. No matter what, I will be there.”

But later, when she told me the date of the opening and I checked my schedule, I saw there was a problem.

I told her in the cafeteria. “Annette, I have my naturalization exam that afternoon.”

She bit her lip. “No. But you promised.”

“I know. I’m so sorry. I can’t do anything about this. If I don’t get U.S. citizenship, I won’t qualify for most financial aid.”

“Why can’t you take it on another date?”

“This is the first time I can take it after I turn eighteen. So I can’t take it any earlier. And if I take it later, I won’t be able to say I’m an American citizen on the financial aid forms for colleges. I’ll come see your play the very next show.”

“I know.” Annette’s eyes were still downcast.

“What’s the matter, then?”

Now she looked at me. “Kimberly, I don’t mind if this is really true, but is it just another one of your excuses?”

I’d given her so many false explanations over the years, I couldn’t blame her for doubting me. “Of course it’s true.”

Annette said no more about it.

Every time Aunt Paula gave us one of my score reports, she would come by a day or two later to complain about some aspect of our work. We were careful not to let her know how good my results were, but she must have guessed anyway. If we hadn’t done something at the factory perfectly, we had to redo it. If a shipment was going out, she would come days in advance to harass us about completing everything on time.

“If you send this out late, I cannot be responsible for the consequences,” she said one day.

“We’ve always been on time,” Ma had answered quietly, but I saw the sorrow in her eyes that her sister was treating us like this.

Aunt Paula pushed past Matt at his steamer and then was gone.

He walked over to me. His hair was spiked and dripping wet from the steamers. “What kind of a problem does she have?”

“Jealousy,” I said.

“Why?”

“I think I’m doing better at school than her son is.”

Matt nodded, then started to turn around to go back to work.

To keep him there just a moment longer, I asked, “Where’s your ma and Park? I hardly see them anymore.”

“Ma doesn’t feel so well these days, and when she stays home, she keeps Park with her. I can take care of them now.” He was obviously proud he could be the breadwinner of the family.

It still tore at my heart to have him so close. “You’re doing really well, Matt.”

He looked at me intently, then he finally spoke. “I miss you.”

Heat rushed to my eyes. So that he wouldn’t see my sudden emotion, I turned away. “You have Vivian.” When I finally looked up, he was gone.

Sometimes Curt told me stories that made me realize how different we were. Once, he was talking about his meal at an Italian restaurant with a few friends.

“We waited but that arrogant waiter still didn’t come with the bill, so we just left. I looked back as we walked out the door and you should have seen his face! Like he was going to have to pick up our tab himself.”

“He probably did have to,” I said.

“Really? Well, serves him right.” Curt looked a bit shamefaced.

I didn’t say anything more, but I thought about the fathers and brothers of the kids at the factory who worked as waiters, “standing by tables,” as we called it. What would they have done if they’d had to pay for such an expensive meal out of their tips? Many of them weren’t paid anything but their tips. This was something Matt would never do. Curt had no comprehension of what it was like to be working class.

But he was also surprisingly sweet sometimes.

Once I was sitting with him in the art studio when he said, “I just went to the junkyard this past weekend. You can find the most incredible things there. I brought you back something.”

I thought about where I lived. “I, um, already have much junk.”

Curt reached into a garbage bag and pulled out the skeleton of an umbrella, but he had put in metal supports, twisted and twirled the metal prongs so that it looked just like a flower. The silver links shone, as if he’d polished it.

“Beautiful,” I said, caressing an intertwined petal.

He lifted an eyebrow. “I can assure you that this will never be worth a lot of money, so you can feel free to accept it.”

“This is now my favorite piece of junk.”

The day of the naturalization test was in the middle of January. I was at home when I was surprised by a knock at the apartment door. The thick door downstairs hadn’t been closing properly lately, and I’d hurried upstairs after school that day, probably without getting it to latch. Earlier that year, Ma had failed the examination yet again, but I was eighteen now and could take it myself. Though I expected to pass easily, I still wanted to do a bit of last-minute studying before going to the naturalization office later that afternoon.

When I opened the door, Annette was standing there in her lumber-jack jacket and her L.L. Bean boots. She looked over my shoulder to stare at the cracked walls and open oven; then her gaze found the stuffed-animal vest I was wearing. Her mouth fell open, but when she saw the white clouds from her breath, she snorted in disbelief.

Instead of pity or embarrassment, there was pure anger on her face. “You should have told me,” she said.

I faltered for an answer. “I didn’t know how.”

Now her face became blotchy and she looked like she was going to cry. “I knew you didn’t have a lot of money but this is ridiculous. No one in America lives like this.”

I stated the obvious. “Actually, they do.”

The words poured out of her. “This is the stupidest place I’ve ever been. I spent years wondering why you never let me see your apartment. I told myself I shouldn’t do something you didn’t want me to do. I had theory after theory: that you were hiding your father here, that it was some kind of Chinese secret, that your mom was incredibly sick and you were taking care of her. When the show got canceled today, I just wondered if you were telling me the truth about the test and why I never got to come here, so I decided to visit.”

I pointed at the naturalization book on the table.

She nodded, acknowledging the book. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. But if I hadn’t come here, you’d never have told me. You would have lived here all these years and you would never have asked me for help.”

At this, the idea that she would have helped me, I reached out and hugged her. She didn’t pull away.

I said, “There was no use. Look, once I get a bit older, I’ll be able to get us out of here.”

“I don’t want you to stay here one day longer.” Annette gave me a quick squeeze and started walking around the apartment. She glanced down at the kitchen table and recoiled. “Your soy sauce has iced over! And there’s a roach drinking from it!”

I had been in the middle of putting the food away when she knocked. I ran over and banged on the table to scare the roach away, then hurriedly dumped the saucer in the kitchen sink. I had to wash it right away so as not to attract any other creatures, and Annette continued her own tour of the apartment.

“Why did your show get canceled?” I asked.

“There’s some kind of electrical problem with the lights, and the whole system blew out during dress rehearsal yesterday. They still haven’t been able to fix it.”

She called over her shoulder, “Good thing you’re so smart.”

“I’m lucky.”

She was back now and she crinkled her nose. “I wouldn’t say that. You need to report your landlord. This isn’t legal.”

“I can’t. It’s complicated.”

“Well, you can’t stay here any longer. We have to talk to my mom.”

“No, I don’t want anyone to know. Annette, don’t tell.”

“Kimberly, you remember my mom’s a real estate agent. I bet she could help you.”

“We don’t have any money.” Now that it was so obvious, I could say it.

“Please, let me ask her and see if she can figure it out.”

“I don’t want her to know.” The utter shame of it burst upon me now, like a garden hose turned on full blast.

“I won’t tell her. I’ll just say that you’re looking for something dirt cheap.” At my look, she added, “I mean, not expensive.”

“Take it from me, Kimberly, life in the suburbs is hell on earth.” Curt and I were taking a break from his tutoring session. He lay sprawled across the floor of the classroom we had borrowed, leaning on his right elbow, the math book closed in front of him. A few other books were scattered around him in a semicircle.

Life in the factory is hell, I thought, although aloud I said, “It doesn’t sound too bad to me.”

“You only say that because you’ve never been there.”

“How would you know?”

“Well, have you?”

I was stumped. “No. But when have you ever lived there?”

“Actually, never. But aside from this”-he tapped the paperback cover of Rabbit, Run by John Updike, which he was reading for English class-“I’ve seen movies about it, which naturally makes me an expert. Life in a suit, nine-to-five job, that’s not living.”

“What do you want, then?”

He was silent, and then he let himself fall backward on the floor. The mane of his hair spread gold across the dark carpet. “Greatness. To exalt myself. And to be free.” He sat up again and stared at me with his sapphire eyes. “No one can live an extraordinary life in the suburbs.”

“I don’t need to have such a special life.”

“You could never be ordinary. That’s why I like you.” He leaned over and kissed me.