The Bathing Women (13 page)

Where the Mermaid’s Fishing Net Comes From

1

Dr. Tang came again, and this time he brought his niece Fei.

Tiao was immediately drawn to Fei, who was fifteen that year, but to Tiao she already appeared to have the body of a grown woman. Her dark eyebrows, red lips, and deep chestnut curls on her forehead lit up Tiao’s eyes. It was a time when makeup wasn’t allowed, so how were Fei’s lips so brightly coloured and gorgeous? It was also a time when perms were banned, so how did Fei get her curled fringe? How did she dare? The vivid lips and curled fringe made Fei look like a visitor from another planet; those slightly skewed eyes of hers gave her a touch of boldness and decadence. Tiao learned the word “decadence” from political posters. It was a bad word, but for some reason this bad word made her heart race. Even though she didn’t completely understand the meaning of decadence, she was already sure it applied to Fei precisely. Perhaps by associating this word with Fei she unconsciously expressed her own attraction to evil: the female spy, the social butterfly … in the movies she used to watch, those women, constantly surrounded by men, always wore expensive and beautiful clothes, drank good wine, and looked mysterious. That would be decadence, but why were decadent people so pretty? Fei was decadent, and that vague decadence in her excited Tiao. She had never met a female before Fei who thrilled her so much. She felt that somehow she’d already started to worship Fei, this beautiful, decadent girl. Because of this, her loathing for Dr. Tang lessened somewhat.

Dr. Tang brought two movie tickets, distributed by the hospital, for an Algerian film,
Victory over Death
. “Let Tiao and Fei go, otherwise who knows how long they’ll have to wait for the school to buy them group tickets,” Wu said very agreeably, seemingly eager to please, which annoyed Tiao a little. Although she liked going to the movies, especially with someone like Fei, she didn’t like Wu’s tone. The more ingratiating Wu sounded, the more she heard a dismissal—she was sending Tiao and Fei off so she could be with Dr. Tang. So Tiao said she didn’t want to go; she had to do her homework. She just wanted to make a little trouble for Wu.

Then Fei stretched out her hand to her uncle, not her entire hand, but two of the fingers: index and middle. She wiggled her fingers at her uncle and said, “Tickets. Tickets. Give me the tickets.” Tiao wasn’t surprised by her Beijing dialect; she believed a person with Fei’s looks had to speak Beijing dialect. It would have been strange if she hadn’t. The way she wiggled her fingers seemed indecent, and the tone in which she spoke to the adults made her sound impudent. Tiao had never come across anyone who behaved in this manner and spoke in that tone. She was probably stunned, so when Fei almost grabbed the tickets from her uncle’s hand and gestured with her head, Tiao stood up and left with Fei as if she had received an irresistible command.

The movie was showing at Da Guangming Theatre, three bus stops from Tiao’s home. They didn’t take the bus—they walked. For a shortcut, they wound through some alleys single-file. Fei walked very fast, pretending not to notice Tiao’s quivering eagerness to follow her. She didn’t talk to Tiao and didn’t bother to walk beside her. She wore a plissé shirt, white background printed with bean-sized strawberries, and a pair of blue khaki uniform pants that perfectly hugged her swaying bottom. On her feet, she had on a pair of black T-strap leather shoes, which weren’t for adults, but were hard for a middle school student to get. The shoes didn’t just represent wealth, but also a style and taste beyond those of an ordinary Fuan family. Shoe factories in Fuan didn’t make leather shoes of this kind; one could immediately tell they came from a big city, even though they were just made of fine pigskin. Fei swung her bottom, raised her chin slightly, and stuck out her already-developed chest, walking in front of Tiao all the time. She rolled her plissé sleeves above her elbows, revealing the layer of soft, fine yellow down on her forearms, dazzling in the sunshine. She was so striking that there were always passersby who stopped to look at her: men, women, adults and children … Two young men in worker’s clothes came toward them on their bikes. They swung around after passing and caught up with Fei from behind, purposely sandwiching her from both sides. Swaying and squirming on their bikes, they brushed their sleeves on her bare arms and then darted off. She didn’t call them “Obnoxious!” or “Pervert!”—just walked more proudly, as if no one else existed. She didn’t pay attention to them at all; they were not worthy of her spit or her curses.

At last they entered the narrow, quiet alley that led to Da Guangming Theatre. Noticing there was no one around, Fei suddenly stopped, as if waiting for Tiao to catch up. Excitedly, Tiao caught up with her, feeling it was a gesture from Fei showing that she regarded Tiao as her equal and would finally walk with her side by side. Tiao rushed to her, only to be forced by Fei into a corner. Backed against the wall, face-to-face with Fei, Tiao thought she was going to tell her some secret, which sometimes happened when two girls walked together. But before she could react, Fei slapped her hard across the face. The crisp, loud slap, echoing in the alley, made Tiao see black in front of her eyes, followed by thousands of golden sparkles dancing around her head. It didn’t hurt; she had no memory of pain. Maybe what Fei said blocked the pain that Tiao might have felt, or transferred the feeling to somewhere else in her. After she slapped Tiao, Fei got very close to her face and said something terrible with that pretty mouth of hers. She said, “Your mum is a bad woman, a whore!”

Tiao opened her eyes; the alley was still the same alley, and Fei stood before her, with her hands on her hips and sweat on her face, as if awaiting Tiao’s counterattack. “Your mum is a whore.” Tiao couldn’t believe she had really heard it, that the vulgar, explosive words had really come out of Fei’s mouth. She never wanted to hear those words again in her whole life, but she felt compelled to repeat them over and over in her mind. Her heart raced, every hair on her body seemed to stand up, and hot blood rushed to her face, the swollen face that Fei had slapped. Tiao was angry, but a terrible shame kept her from raising her head. For a moment, she was about to agree with Fei. She suspected that her mother’s being a whore involved Dr. Tang, and the things she had written about in the letter to her dad. She now believed the only people who knew about Wu and Dr. Tang were her and Fei, but her instinct was to protect Wu. For a stranger to insult her mother this way was intolerable. She intended to retaliate but didn’t know how; she felt guilty because what Fei had said was true, and she couldn’t quite find the words for a reply. Tears started suddenly and she tried to turn around to walk back. The good things about home came to her mind and she wanted to go there. “Don’t you dare leave!” Fei said behind her, and she stopped, compelled by Fei’s voice. She really didn’t know why she would listen to Fei.

Fei grabbed Tiao’s arm and forced Tiao to keep going to Da Guangming Theatre with her. She was very strong and Tiao was unprepared for such physical proximity to Fei. She was escorted to the movie theatre and pushed into a seat. When the movie started and the theatre was all dark, Tiao settled down a little bit. The dark made her relax and let out a long sigh, long but uneven: shivery and halting, as if she were restraining herself. She felt hurt, and reached up with her hand to touch the side of her face; it was numb. With a numbed face, she tried to focus on the movie, but Fei’s words kept ringing in her ears. She couldn’t concentrate on the movie until a good-looking woman guerrilla appeared on the screen. The movie was about the fight between Albanian people and the Nazis during the Second World War. Tiao kept imagining herself as the heroine, the woman guerrilla Mira, beautiful and strong. After a while, Mira’s leader, a woman captain with a big black mole on her upper lip, appeared on the screen. The captain was interrogated and tortured after her capture. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth; white skin was peeling from her cracked, dry lips. (Later, Tiao would learn the “white skin” was makeup, a layer of dried rice soup.) Then a pitcher of water was placed in front of her, the clear cut-glass making the water seem even more precious. The Nazi officer poured a glass and handed it to the woman captain. She swallowed her saliva, opened her puffed lips with difficulty, and sneered at the officer: “Thanks. Fascists’ humanitarianism, I know!” This was really excellent, a once-in-a-lifetime retort; so witty and proud that Tiao was thrilled. At this point, she decided that she didn’t want to be Mira anymore; she wanted to be this woman captain with the black mole on her upper lip, although she was truly ugly, and her thin, bow-shaped eyebrows, which seemed to have been drawn with a pencil, were particularly hideous. But she refused to surrender even under interrogation and torture and could also come out with heroic utterances. Tiao gazed at the screen with a numbed face; the slap in the alley never stopped reverberating in her heart. Who else could be the woman captain if she weren’t? And the Nazi officer was Fei. She would hand Tiao a glass of water and Tiao would sniff at her and say, “Thanks. Fascists’ humanitarianism, I know.” Unfortunately, Fei hadn’t given her a glass of water; instead she had given her a slap. What should Tiao say to a slap? “I’ll fight you to the death!” Or, “I don’t know. Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell.” She tried to recall all the anti-Japanese movies she had seen before and make up all the lines that she should say when confronting a slap. She mixed up movies and life, her mind confused and her heart welling up with her sense of having been wronged.

When the theatre lights came on again, the audience stood up one after another, whacking back the plywood seats, and Tiao realized the movie had ended. She didn’t want to leave, especially not with Fei. She didn’t want to go outside with the burden of that sentence, a shame that she couldn’t throw off. She planned to stay here alone, here where people’s eyes fix on the screen, not on each other. But Fei grabbed her arm and asked, “Are you leaving or not?”

“No, I’m not leaving.” She answered Fei with a good measure of the revolutionary’s determination, as if the movie that had just ended had injected some strength into her.

“Are you really not leaving?”

“What can you do about it if I don’t?”

“You wouldn’t dare!” Fei reached out with her other hand to grab the back of Tiao’s collar as she was speaking. Tiao was in her grasp; she really couldn’t believe such a pretty girl would grab people by their collars. She had never been slapped or seized by the collar in all her life, and now she had been treated to both insults on the same day. With Fei clutching her arm, she left the theatre and entered the quiet alley. Seeing no one around, Tiao suddenly stopped, this time determined to take the initiative on whether she would go or stay.

“Why don’t you keep walking? Want another good slap?”

Tiao collected her courage and said, “Puh—let me tell you, my mum is not a whore. Your mum is a whore.”

“Unfortunately,” said Fei, “I don’t have a mum.” She put out a foot as she was talking, turning her hip to one side and standing at ease, in a relaxed stance. “Allow me to repeat: too bad I don’t have a mum.”

This, Tiao hadn’t expected. Since Fei didn’t have a mum, obviously her eye-for-an-eye counterattack not only failed but also appeared crude. She also saw clearly, when Fei said “too bad I don’t have a mum,” how she grinned at Tiao. It seemed she wanted to make Tiao angry with this grin, to annoy her: I don’t have a mum, so you’ve said something stupid. And Tiao couldn’t do anything about it even though her insides ached and itched. But the grin made Tiao feel a little sad. Almost at the moment Fei grinned, Tiao forgave her fierce slap and her shouting.

The grin stayed on Fei’s face, which made Tiao feel she should help relieve her of it with an apology. “I’m sorry, Fei,” she said, “I didn’t know you don’t have a mum.” The grin diminished but still lingered at the corner of Fei’s mouth, as if she were not capable of withdrawing it completely. She hadn’t reached the age where she could let it come and go at will; after all, she was only fifteen. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to apologize. You can talk about somebody else, for instance, my uncle. I don’t have a mum, but I have an uncle. Try saying my uncle is a bad man. Maybe you can say my uncle is a hooligan. Say it. You say it.” Fei started to tremble as she was talking, and the corner of her mouth, where the grin persisted, twitched strangely, making it hard for Tiao to tell whether it marked the end of laughing or the start of crying. Maybe there is no real difference between laughter and crying, and Fei’s crying was born in the middle of laughter. She still kept her head high and chest out, but the bossy air she’d had most of the night was gone. She repeated the technique of backing Tiao, step by step, against the wall, but this time she had tears streaming down her face, and she whispered to Tiao, “I know you hate my uncle. You must hate my uncle, just like … just like I hate your mum. You can curse him in front of me, just one sentence, they … they …
ai,
why would I say these things to you? What do you know?” Fei wiped her tears with the back of her hand and stood against the wall with Tiao, side by side. She cocked her head lazily and squinted her tear-stung eyes, like the yellow cat with the long legs and thin face who sunbathed on the roof all year round.

Tiao couldn’t say any bad words about Dr. Tang aloud to Fei. The fact that Fei was motherless touched her, and the way Fei cursed her own uncle comforted her. From now on she would no longer be alone. They were in the same boat. She felt that they understood each other and that part of the understanding could only be felt, not put into words. But they didn’t have to put it into words.

“Can we talk about something else? Where is your mum?” Tiao asked.

“She died. She died in Beijing. We used to live in Beijing.”

“As soon as I saw you I knew you were from Beijing. My family moved here from Beijing, too. I used to go to Denger Alley Elementary School.”

“Me, too,” said Fei. “My mum was a teacher at Denger Alley Elementary School. Teacher Tang.”