Yesterday's Weather

PILLOW

‘Alison,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘What is a homosexual?’

I did not know what to say.

‘It’s a man who loves another man.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what is it?’

‘They are in love,’ I said.

‘But how?’ she said. ‘How are they in love?’ And I thought I knew what she meant then. I said they put their things up each others’ bottoms, though I used the word ‘anuses’, to make it sound more biological.

‘Ah,’ she said and I tried to see what she was thinking.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

But I didn’t feel right about it, so when the next day Karen says to me, ‘What are you telling Li about gay sex for?’ I felt awful already.

‘She doesn’t even know the other thing,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t even know what people do.’ Then she gave me a very hard time. She did not try to make me feel better, at all. I think that is one of the things about Americans: when they decide to blame you for something, they really want you to know that you are to blame.

Karen had requested me from the college accommodations office. She told me this when I arrived; that they liked ‘an ethnic mix’, so she had asked for someone Irish. I was a bit jet-lagged. I said I’d be Irish for her of a Tuesday, but could I have the rest of the week off? Actually, I couldn’t believe this place, the size of it. When they said ‘dorm’ I expected rows of beds. I put my suitcase down and asked when there was hot water for a shower. Karen didn’t understand. She said that there never wasn’t hot water, unless something was broken — the tap had an ‘H’ on it because the water that came out of it was ‘hot’.

There were four bedrooms off the central living room and she told me to take my pick. They each had a bunk-bed with a desk built in underneath and there were fancy pin lights on the underside of the bed to light the desk. I took the one nearest the hall, climbed the little ladder in all my clothes and lay down in the underglow. I was in college. I was in America. Fly me to the moon.

I stayed in the room for weeks. I couldn’t sit in the living room and the kitchen belonged to Li and Wambui. They put things on to marinate before they went to class: bowls of liver covered in honey and chilli, or fish turning grey in some strange sauce. Amazing food. They giggled in there like children and cooked like grown-ups. I didn’t even know how to boil an egg. Karen, wouldn’t you know, got in takeaway.

I did want to go into the bathroom but she showered three times a day in there. Vast amounts of water, then the sound of her humming, and the low squirt — the slap or squelch of her ‘products’. Little grunts, as well. I had to wait until everyone was asleep before I could take a crap. One night I stumbled out in a T-shirt and Karen was sitting at the living-room table. All the time we were talking she looked at my legs like she wanted to retch. I think it was the hair. I think she found it morally offensive. Karen would rather have an abortion than a bikini line. Or so I said to Li who looked at me and blinked a few times. Then, chomp!

‘Alison.’

‘Yes?’

‘What is a bikini line?’ Of course she knew what an abortion was, being mainland Chinese.

Karen had a boyfriend, who was built like a brick shit house, and made no noise at all. They closed her bedroom door and disappeared. Complete silence. Afterwards, he would sit in the living room and look us over. Wambui stayed out in the hall talking on the phone all evening, which was one way of dealing with it. I just said the first thing that came into my head.

‘God,’ I said, coming out of the bathroom. ‘Why does hair conditioner always look like sperm?’

The next morning the hair conditioner was gone. Bingo. I was good at that sort of thing, though I hadn’t really had a lot of sex myself. I mean, I had done it — or I did it that first term — and I liked it, but it also freaked me out. I shaved my head, for example. Though I had wanted to do that for a long time. But the next day I woke up and decided that today was the day to shave my head. So when the guy saw me across the dining hall, he nearly ducked. Physically. He flinched and checked the floor for a piece of cutlery he might have dropped. Anyway. I made him do it one more time, with my bald head, and then I didn’t want to see him any more. But I liked the stubble. For a while, I looked pretty jaunty with my bristles and the little Muslim prayer cap I had bought in a thrift shop, embroidered black and gold.

I used Karen’s razor to shave my head. I’m pretty sure she noticed, because the next day she had a new electric gizmo and all the old plastic razors were in the bin. Neither of us said anything, but that kind of thing makes you feel dizzy, you could shoot yourself, actually shoot yourself through the head. Or you could just not give a damn. Like the fact that I know Li stole a pair of my knickers; plain cotton knickers, that I saw distinctly one evening being stuffed into her drawer.

‘Shit,’ said Karen when I told her. ‘No shit!’

Neither of us had ever seen her underclothes. We said maybe she didn’t have any, but Karen discovered a pair of nylon socks tucked into a pair of plasticky shoes under her desk. They were see-through nylon, like pop socks but even shorter. Like ankle-high tights.

‘Oh, God, don’t touch them,’ said Karen. ‘Oh, what are we going to do about her?’ she said. ‘What are we going to do about the smell?’

It was pretty clear that Li didn’t wash her clothes, because the week before she had asked me how the laundry machines worked; so we were looking at three months here. But the smell wasn’t that bad — sort of dry and old and sexless.

‘Oh, my God,’ said Karen. ‘Oh, my God.’

We had gone in during Li’s early-morning class. Karen wanted to get out of there, but Li never cut a class. She used words like ‘catalepsy’, and ‘dramaturgy’, which amazed me. She was from China and knew more English than I did. She was nineteen.

I opened one of the drawers in her desk and found it was full of tablets. Rows and rows of little plastic jars with Chinese labels. I tried an orange one, and a purple one. They were huge. They tasted of talcum.

‘Come on,’ said Karen, who was holding the door handle and bobbing up and down, like she wanted to pee. Karen was at law school. If it didn’t work out she would become a realtor. I had to ask her what a realtor was, and when she told me it was selling houses I felt pretty stupid, but not as stupid as she was for wanting to sell them.

The more I got to like her, the more she drove me mad. She said Wambui was a lesbian because she had a friend who slept over all the time. I just looked at her. Every time I got annoyed with Karen, the word ‘douche’ came into my head. She just had clean and dirty all mixed up. Douche douche douche! Instead, I said, ‘You know, girls sleep with each other all over the world and no one says anything. All over the world, except here.’

Wambui’s friend was called Brigid and I really liked her. She said she was taught by Irish nuns in Nigeria, then held out her hand for proof. ‘Look at the scars.’ She was funny, really deadpan. She told Karen she should consider getting corn-rows in her hair. Karen was really interested and asked a load of questions. After she left, Brigid and Wambui laughed until they were hanging on to the furniture. Li got the joke, about half an hour too late — or some joke — and that set us off again. Li made a funny noise. I think she was uncomfortable laughing out loud.

But as my hair started to grow out I realised how really unhappy I was. I went to the college doctor and said I thought I had a lump in my breast, and he felt both of them and asked me about contraception and gave me some sleeping pills. He told me to go to the counselling service and I did, but the woman there just thought everything I said was really funny. She said she loved my accent. She said the very fact that I was here meant that I was among the brightest, and that I should nurture my self-esteem.

But I didn’t think I was among the brightest. I thought some of them were pretty thick actually. Apart from this guy from New York, who was massively clever in a dull sort of way. At mid-term I got my assessment essay back with a B despite the fact that ‘you do not know what a paragraph is’. After that I stayed in more, and grew my hair.

At night I walked down to the lake. I stood with my back to the water and checked the lights of all the rooms I knew, to see who was in and where everyone was. It took me weeks to realise that they were all working. Actually working. They weren’t having a good time somewhere that I didn’t know about. There was no secret good time.

One night I woke up and saw Li standing in my bedroom with a pillow in her hands, or maybe she was clasping the pillow to her chest. It was Li and a pillow, anyway, in the dark, and I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming.

‘Oh, Li,’ I said. And in my half-sleep the words came out all worn and fuzzy. Almost loving. Then she turned and walked out again.

Maybe she just wanted some company. It was the first night of the Christmas break; Karen had gone home and Wambui had friends in Chicago. I didn’t have the money to go anywhere and Li, I suppose, had even less. So it was just the two of us, feeling a little left behind.

The next day, I said nothing. There was nothing I could possibly say. I felt a bit sorry for her, that’s all. I wondered did she just want to sleep with me, like I told Karen women do everywhere except here. Or did she want to sleep with me the way women actually do (especially here)? The thought of her skinny little bones gave me a sort of rush, but it wasn’t really a pleasant one.

Meanwhile, she worked in her room as usual, and blew her nose, as usual, under the running tap in the bathroom, making me gag a little at the sound. Other times, she was so quiet I wanted to check if she had died.

We collided from time to time in the living room and she might throw a question at me — What did I think of advertising? or, Was it true they give medicine to children, here, to calm them down? or, Was I short-sighted? Had I read Voltaire? After one particular silence she decided to show me a series of eye exercises they did in China, which meant that many people there ‘did not need glasses’ (Oh, yeah?). You had to rub your thumbs between your eyebrows and rotate your forefinger on particular points of the eyeball and around the socket, and when you were finished, stare into the distance for a while. So we sat there, in an empty block, in the middle of this deserted campus, while the rest of the Western world hung up fairy lights or wrapped their gifts, and we rubbed our eyeballs. Then we looked out the window.

Actually, I think it sort of worked.

She never knocked at my door, but I still found myself staying up all night and sleeping into the afternoon: I felt safer that way. When I staggered out on Christmas Day, she was working at the living-room table. She got up really quickly and handed me a tiny package saying, ‘Happy Christmas, Alison,’ with a shy little duck and twist of her head. Inside was a little calendar printed on a plastic card. There were two cutie-pie babies holding a ribbon with the year written on it. I said, ‘Oh, thank you, Li. Thank you,’ and she seemed horribly pleased.

Later in the afternoon, I stole some late winter roses from a college flower bed and put them on the table along with a burnt chicken and a heated-up tin of sweet-corn. My life was too short to do potatoes. My life would always be too short to do potatoes. I said this to Li who stared at her plate with a snake-like fascination. Does everyone do this? What does turkey taste like? Is it a sacrificial animal? I was worn out just listening to her. I tried to make her drink some wine and she finally took a glass, which made her giggle immediately. I drank and ranted on about advertising, which seemed to interest her, and nuclear power, ditto. She asked about Irish ‘Catholicism’ (with a funny imprecision, I realised she’d never spoken the word out loud before) and I put my head on the table, and said, ‘Oh, Li, oh, Li, oh, Li,’ which we both seemed to find quite funny.

I’m not very good at drinking, I suppose. I’d only done it three or four times and I felt quite dizzy. Before I knew it, I was tackling her about the whole homosexuality thing. She did know about it — she must know — so why did she ask me? She said no, no, they have no such thing in China, they do not even have a word for homosexual in China. There must be a word for it, I said, it’s nothing to do with culture, it’s just a natural thing, but she laughed, as though she was quite sophisticated and I was the simple one. No, she said. Really. Perhaps there was a word once, but not any more.

The phone in the hallway started to ring — my family wishing me a Happy Christmas. So, I did all that ‘Yes, you too. Yes, you too,’ through brothers and sisters and aunts, shuffled at high speed on the long-distance line. When I came back, Li had washed the dishes. She came into the living room and stood in front of me.

‘Thank you for a lovely “Christmas,” Alison,’ she said, with a little squirm. Then she walked past me, into her room.

They were sweet, nothing days. I managed to sleep through all the hours of daylight; the nights I spent reading or looking at the weather as it fell past the street lamp outside: a slight snow, or drizzle, or just the night itself in a long yellow cone. This little slice of weather made me think that the air is really busy and there is an awful lot of it, and it was good to be inside and small and barely, just barely, existing. I felt almost flayed — peeled bare and true. It was so peaceful I jumped at the smallest sound: a plastic bag subsiding in the kitchen; my own breath.

It was a kind of spell, those endless night-days of sitting and pacing and breathing. At four in the morning, I might look at the street lamp and want to cry for the melancholy beauty of the light, or the air fizzing about beneath it, or for the millions of street lamps and the millions of windows and all the drops of rain. Li was in there somewhere too, sleeping her Chinese sleep in those nylon pyjamas: not quite a Buddha but, still, my little plastic charm.

We met over her breakfast, which was my supper, and we murmured at each other like people who live together but have other business in hand. Everything was quite easy. When Karen put her key in the door, I thought we were being burgled. I realised that I had missed New Year’s Eve, somehow. And I was sad. Whatever had happened, it was all over now.

Karen was in a complete rage after the holidays. Something about her father’s girlfriend and a dog, I think, or a car. Whatever. Her father’s girlfriend was Superbitch, and so Karen snapped at us all day and cried herself to sleep at night. We could hear her through the wall. Then, suddenly, I was in love with the massively-clever-but-a-bit-dull guy from New York — completely obsessed. I talked and talked, and paced down to the lake and back again. I finally got him to call for some notes he wanted to borrow and, when he left, I shut the door behind him and slid down it on to the floor. ‘Oh, Li,’ I said, laughing. ‘Oh, Li.’

For some reason it became the roomies’ joke. ‘Oh, Li!’ we said. ‘Oh, Li.’ When anything funny or desperate happened, like a burnt saucepan, or peculiar-looking hair. It was better when she was there, but we said it sometimes when she wasn’t. As for Li, she seemed flattered by the attention: she always made that silly, laughing sound. But it confused her, too.

One evening she announced, quite carefully, that Li was what we call a surname. Her given name, which came second in Chinese, was Chiao-Ping. But mostly Ping. Then she was silent. It seemed that she didn’t want to do anything with this information, she just wanted to say it.

‘Oh, Ping,’ I said, after a moment’s silence. ‘Oh, Ping.’ And we couldn’t help it, we just dissolved, we just laughed and laughed until we were on the floor.

The next night, I found myself struggling through a horrible dream. It was one of those dreams that soak right through you, a sickener. I think the guy from New York was in it, and he was absolutely evil. I fought to wake up and the dream lurched. My mother was there, warning me, I swear it. My mother was there saying, ‘Wake up, wake up, darling,’ though ‘darling’ was never her sort of word. So I did wake up, and my body was flailing on the bed. My head was stuck and there was something wrong with the darkness. I tried to breathe but it didn’t work, somehow. I couldn’t catch my breath. My hand connected with something, a face, and I pushed into it with all my strength. I pushed my fingers into the eyes.

Ping was trying to smother me. Finally. I suppose if it hadn’t been a bunk-bed I might have died but, when I pushed, she overbalanced on the ladder and fell. I looked down and she was on the floor, scrabbling for the pillow. She grabbed it and looked up at me, then she said something in Chinese. It sounded really strange and vicious. I had never heard her speak Chinese before.

I might have left it. Isn’t that funny? Like the razors and the knickers and Karen crying all the time. I might have said nothing and just gone on, or dealt with it in some other, sidelong way. But the noise of her falling woke everyone and, the next thing, Karen was knocking on the door, ‘You OK in there?’ and when she opened it, Ping was still on the floor, and I was still looking down at her.

After that, everyone tried to make me feel guilty again. Ping was sent back to China (to where? to a camp?) and I had about three college counsellors, just in case I might want to sue. They all talked about racism. They sidled up to it. But I said it wasn’t the fact that she was Chinese that mattered, it was the fact that she was insane. Besides, I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t care. I couldn’t tell them what really happened to me, the weird thing, the real thing. Because, sometime after my mother called me ‘darling’ and before I pushed Ping off the ladder, I felt the strangest feeling. It was a thing, it was me, it was my very self, fluttering in my chest and trying to get out of there, exultant, like it had been living in the wrong person and was finally going home.