Stealing Time

CHAPTER 32

L

in Tsing hadn't been feeling well on Tuesday. But she hadn't felt well in so long she'd almost forgotten what it was like to have no sores and no pain. That morning she'd been hotter than usual and knew she had a fever again. The aunties always scolded her when she was sick and made her go to work anyway. She was sitting at the sewing machine, on the stool that was backless so she couldn't slack off or fall asleep, when Annie Lee marched over to her, face frowning.

Right away Lin knew more trouble was coming to her. This certain knowledge that her troubles were not over made her homesick for China, where she'd lost her mother and almost starved to death more than once. To save her life, her cousin Nanci had paid for her to come here to this land of golden opportunity, but it hadn't been so golden for her. Lin knew everything that happened after she got here was her fault, but fault or not, Lin did not know how she could have done anything any other way. She had traveled with the two aunties, who were at least as old as her mother would be if she had lived, more than thirty-five. Lin was half their age and by far the prettiest of the three. She had worked in a factory before, and knew that she could not do any of the jobs her cousin expected of her. She'd been convinced by the two aunties that she could get a good job right away even though she didn't speak a word of English, and further that she was obliged to do this for them to repay for the care they had given her after her mother died.

The aunties' confidence in Lin was rewarded by immediate good luck. Some people in the apartment where they stayed told her of a job that paid ten dollars a day and required no English. Lin could have it right away. She went to the place at eight in the morning. A Chinese woman, who turned out to be Annie Lee, talked to her and made her sew a seam to prove she could use a Singer machine. Within half an hour she was hired and had the two aunties claiming to be her dependents. Still, Lin had considered herself lucky to be independent of the cousin who made her feel stupid, told her so many lies about her future, and frightened Lin with her certainty about the bad things that could happen to her if she didn't listen.

But Lin hadn't believed her cousin, and she got in trouble right away. The very first day, after she'd sewed all her pieces, the Chinese boss, Annie Lee, asked her to get more work from the space upstairs. Lin went where Annie told her to go and picked up a stack of unsewn pattern pieces, balancing it on her head. The stairs were narrow. When she started to come down again, the big foreign boss was down at the bottom, blocking her way. He said something and laughed. She thought he wanted her to move away to let him pass, so she backed up a few steps into the space upstairs where broken furniture and rubbish were stored, along with the cut garments to be sewed. The pieces came in thick stacks and were tied up with long strips of the same fabric. She still remembered what the fabric was that day: yellow-brown corduroy the color of sesame-seed candy.

It had been August then and the air was stifling up in the attic space. The bundle of heavy fabric on Lin's head weighed her down. The red-faced man said something she didn't understand. He pointed to her head. She could see his mouth laughing. She didn't know what she was supposed to do, come up or go down. It was three o'clock. She'd been there only since the morning and didn't want to do the wrong thing, anger the boss, and lose her job after she had been so lucky to get it.

On the floor below, eleven sewing machines roared, chewing up the miles of seams like hungry animals devouring easy prey. The red-faced man came up the stairs and Lin stepped back, frightened that she would be fired and the two aunties who depended on her would be angry and they would all have to leave the place they lived. All these fears crowded into Lin's head. Her heart hammered in her chest as she searched behind her, looking for a place to hide from the man's view so he would not try to talk to her.

She did not think this was like the moments she had known before, when rough bosses in China teased the girls and did things to them that were not allowed but not prevented either. She thought the red-faced man wanted her to do some work she did not know how to do because she was so new in the golden city. But when the boss reached the top of the stairs, he did not seem angry. He pointed and laughed at the bundle on her head. He closed the plywood door on its squealing hinges and waved his hand at her to come with him to another stack of cut fabrics across the attic space. She let her breath out; she must have taken the wrong pieces. When she came to where he pointed, he reached over and lifted the bundle off her head. This caused her to let her head drop the way she'd been told by her mother and the aunties to do when men were talking to her. She'd been told not to look in their faces and tempt the devil. Later, whenever she had a fever, she saw herself like this, with her head turned away from trouble, then trouble coming after her anyway. She was busy warding off shame when his hand reached out and squeezed her breast as if it were a piece of fruit in the market. The vibration from the sewing machines roaring below was like her heart sinking to her feet, then beating helplessly on the floor as he took his other hand and seized her other breast. Time stopped.

It had been so hot that August day; all Lin was wearing was a thin T-shirt and cotton pants with an elastic waistband. She was seventeen and had never owned a bra. He was an old man, a heavy man, smelly and red-faced, the big boss and source of her lucky job. He pushed his hands with spread fingers against her breasts, flattening them, then opened and closed his fingers around her nipples, pulling up the T-shirt so he could look at her stomach. He pushed the waistband of the pants down, so more of her stomach showed. He pinched her ribs. Then he said something in English and she was so terrified she thought she'd pee in her pants.

Her eyes were on the ground, her chin was glued to her collarbone. Her tongue was frozen in her mouth. She could not look up. He had to pull up her chin to get where his mouth and brown teeth and big tongue wanted to go. He was in a hurry. He bent his knees to get lower, shoved his chest and hips at her. She was small and thin, undernourished, and so shocked she was shaking all over. He dragged her pants down to her feet, pulled her legs and her buttocks apart and held her up like a dummy for public ridicule then stabbed into her with deep, determined jabs like someone who was used to entering closed, unwilling places where nothing had ever been before. He hurt her so much she thought her body would split apart, but she did not dare to make a sound. She didn't want anyone to know.

When the man was finished with her, he let her go. Her legs wouldn't hold her up; she fell to the floor. He let her sit there a few minutes and then made the motions for her to go back to work. When she went downstairs with the stack of unsewn garments, Annie Lee did not look at her. No one looked at her, and she looked at the floor. She did not tell the aunties. She did not tell her cousin, who was married to a rich man and would be angry because Lin hadn't listened to her. She could never go and live in their house, never look at either of them. She could not tell anyone, and she could not leave this place because she had no place to go. Her life was over.

After that the red-faced man had no need to speak to her. He told her to go upstairs with his chin whenever he felt like it. One time only did she shake her head, and that week she got no fifty dollars to give the landlord and to pay for food for the aunties. When the old man tired of one way, he made her lie down, or mounted her from behind. He also pushed her down on her knees and put his thing in her mouth, then made noises as he pushed up and down her throat, until the white fluid pulsed out in her mouth. The only time she cried was the day he stuck it in her behind. That day, with a big smile, he gave her a ham as a present. Another day he gave her half of his big meat sandwich. Then he gave her some sweatshirts and some pants to hide her body when it swelled and hardened. He gave her some pills to stop her from throwing up. And he kept doing the same things to her until two days before the baby was born.

Annie Lee was the one who shocked Lin with the news that she was going to have a baby. She didn't know what was wrong with her. She'd thought she was sick with a tumor, a cancer like her mother had died from. In the past she'd missed her period for months at a time. She was so irregular that she missed it more often than she had it. She didn't connect the sickness she felt and the swelling with having a baby. And she was not relieved to hear that she didn't have cancer, she was having a baby instead. She considered hanging herself, the way a young girl from Lin's village had done when Lin herself was very small. That had been a big event because the girl was only thirteen and no one would say who did it to her. Everyone had come to see the dead girl's bloated body and black face, Lin and her mother included.

Annie Lee was the one who reassured her and told her she was a lucky girl. She promised she would not tell anyone and would not throw her out. It would be their secret. She would let Lin keep her job and she would help her when her time came. She said nothing about the red-faced boss. The father of Lin's baby was of no interest to Annie Lee. She also said nothing about what would happen to the baby after it was born. Lin didn't think about it. She was just grateful because her Chinese boss was as good as her word. Lin had been able to keep her job and hide her condition, and when her time came she did what Annie told her to do. She gave birth to her baby in the storage room of the factory. And when the baby was born, and she did not hear it cry, she was not unhappy when Annie told her it was born dead. It seemed to her only fair. The birth was one month ago. One month ago she'd thought her troubles were over.

But on Tuesday when she still wasn't feeling well, Annie Lee came over, scowled angrily at her, and told her she'd made a mistake when she said the baby had died. The baby hadn't died. A lady had taken it away, but now the lady had changed her mind about keeping it and was bringing it back. And by the way,

gongxi, gongxi,

it was a boy.

Congratulations!

Lin was so stunned she almost fainted on the spot. She didn't know what to say.

Finally she asked, "

Weishenme?"

"None of your business

why,

you stupid girl," Annie snapped. "Just take it away. Your fault, your problem."

"Take it away?" Lin panicked. "Take it where?" She was whispering. She still didn't want anyone to know. She didn't want the aunties to know, nobody. She didn't know what to do with it. Throw it away in the garbage?

"Take it away during your lunch break, then come back to work or you'll lose your job. And don't tell anyone."

Her lunch break was ten minutes. She wasn't supposed to leave the building. What could she do with a baby in ten minutes? She didn't want a baby. She'd never wanted a baby. But why didn't the woman who took him want him, either? Lin couldn't understand why this was happening. Agonized, she finally asked, "Is something wrong with him?"

"Nothing's wrong," Annie said coldly.

"Why?" she couldn't stop asking the question. It was the only one she could think of. Why was the bad luck coming back to her? Why was this baby not dead and gone as Annie had told her it was? Must be a no-good baby. She thought of running out and putting the baby in the garbage. Then she and the aunties could disappear. They would cross the river and move to New Jersey where no one would ever find them.

But that didn't happen. She didn't wait for her lunch break. She left the factory right away. She stood on the street for more than half an hour, waiting for the woman to bring the baby no one wanted. Lin watched her get out of a taxi; she was a rich woman. She was crying when she handed him over and told her more than once that he was a wonderful baby who deserved to be with his mother.

Lin was too frightened to ask why give him back if he was so wonderful.

"He's a good baby. Take good care of him," she said one last time.

Lin didn't even look at his face before she got rid of him. By eleven-thirty, he was out of her life. Then she went home and lay on the old blankets, refusing to say anything about anything to anybody. And the quarrels about what to do with her floated around her.

Seven women lived in the apartment. They didn't like her taking up space on the floor for twenty-four hours a day, not taking turns as she was supposed to do. They talked about her bad cousin with no sense of family responsibility, who would probably not even come to take the corpse off their hands if she died. No one in the apartment thought Lin had a simple flu. She heard voices talking about taking her to the hospital. The aunties gave her special tea and tried to reason with her. But nothing they said helped Lin Tsing get over her fever. That same day Annie Lee from the factory came to talk to her, but the aunties hid her and said she wasn't there anymore, because they didn't want Annie Lee to find out that Lin was sick and fire her from her job.

The next day the aunties agreed that something had to be done about Lin, but they weren't sure what. They did not want to leave Lin on the street in the hope that an ambulance would come for her, because even if such a lucky thing were to happen, the girl would disappear into some hospital and they would not be able to find her again. Or she might be put in jail or deported without their ever knowing. If she got well, she might tell who her friends were and have them all deported. Early Wednesday morning Annie Lee came to ask about Lin a second time. This time the white-haired woman was so worried and concerned about the girl, so far from angry about her being sick, and so eager to care for her, the two aunties were happy to accept the fifty dollars' goodwill money and let the good-hearted woman take Lin away for medical treatment.

But Annie didn't take her to the hospital. She took her upstairs to that closet. Annie Lee promised she and the boss would take Lin to the doctors as soon as she told them what she'd done with the baby, but Annie had lied to her when the baby was born, and now Lin did not trust her anymore. She was as afraid of doctors as she was of the red-faced boss and Annie Lee, so she did not tell them what they wanted to know. She had no idea how long she had been in the closet when the boss came up to talk to her himself. He had forgotten that she couldn't speak English and didn't know what he was shouting at her. If she had been able to answer he wouldn't have known what she was saying. All she knew was that he was very angry. Then Annie Lee came back and made him stop. A little while later, the hitting and shaking started. She was pulled off the mattress and taken out into the attic room where the red-faced boss had raped her so many times. Her head was slammed against the floor and against the wall until she had no feeling. And still it went on.