Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

Aside from violating the child labor and minimum wage laws of the state of New York for eight hours a day, Mary Ma was more or less on her own. From the age of ten she had worn the latchkey necklace, that badge of striving families, and saw her parents mainly at work, where Mrs. Ma was a prep cook and Mr. Ma a waiter. Mary Ma had started school in Guangdong in the PRC, continued in Hong Kong, and had been registered in public school on the second day after the family’s arrival in New York, speaking little English, and that with a faint British accent. She was lonely, as all such children are and more than most, since she was a member of the Chinese generation that has no siblings by order of the leaders of the PRC. In the fourth grade, however, she had with uncharacteristic boldness advised the gwailo girl at the next desk, who was having incomprehensible difficulty with a math problem that Mary Ma had solved in eight seconds, and to her immense surprise the girl had thanked her profusely in Cantonese.

Thus was born her friendship with Lucy Karp, and thus was she brought into the charmed circle of the Chens and the Karps, and supplied with the role models every immigrant child needs to become American. From Janice she learned how to be Chinese and cool, she learned that thick leather boy’s oxfords are never appropriate no matter how well they wear, that iridescent blue-framed harlequin-shaped eyeglasses are a bargain for a good reason and that small wire-framed ones are better and nearly as cheap, she learned that makeup is not the unmistakable sign of prostitution, that the cheap brands of blusher are about as good as the costly ones, that it is not a sin against the ancestors to have some spending money of one’s own, that parents deserve respect and obedience but do not necessarily represent the source of all earthly wisdom.

From Lucy there came lessons more thrilling, even terrifying: about films and music-who is hip, who not; that girls are the equal of boys, and often smarter, that making a boy look a fool is not a sin but amusing; that the correct response to insult is not shame but counter-insult and aggression; that the street has its own rules, some of them not thought of by Confucius; and (this, of course, indirectly, but the most important of all) that a big part of growing up in America is the invention of the self, and there are no real constraints on this choice-not class, not race, not even sex.

And Lucy introduced the immigrant child to the bosom of the American family. (With what difficulty did Mary Ma explain to her parents what a sleepover was, and its purpose, and assure them that they would not have to reciprocate, and that there was no loss of face in this!) Used to analyzing the deeper meaning of every act for political consequences, the Ma parents were flabbergasted that their offspring was being entertained in the home of a public prosecutor (the honor!), something that could never have happened in the Red mandarin society of the PRC, but naturally they were terrified that she would let something slip about the provenance of their green cards. Mary would never have revealed to her parents that Lucy Karp knew all there was to know about this aspect of the Mas’ American journey, and that secret was one of the things that tied her most closely to Lucy and Janice. A certain amount of foolish secrecy is involved in most friendships among girls of that age, but in this case the secrets were not foolish at all, were real and dire. It made the friendship closer, more intimate, and as water to the thirst of Mary Ma, who had almost no one else to love. That was another lesson: there was American stuff that your folks could never, ever understand, even if, as in Lucy’s case, they were Americans born.

The disaster at the Asia Mall had thus affected Mary Ma’s life even more than it had that of her friends. Suddenly Janice was distant and vaguely “busy,” Lucy was practically incommunicado, and the phone conversations Mary had with both of them were brief and unsatisfying. Unlike her friends, however, Mary could not afford to sulk, her social resources being much thinner. Besides this, she was compelled by a sense of shame about the way she had lost it and blubbered in the aftermath of the killings.

On a Monday morning, then, ten days after the events in the storeroom, she left her family’s tenement apartment on Eldridge Street and strode down Canal, her round face as grim as a round face ever gets, her fists clenched, looking much like one of the girls marching boldly out of the picture plane on one of those flower-colored Maoist posters touting the Great Leap Forward. She was headed for Lucy’s home, with what in mind she hardly knew, but resolved to fight for friendship in whatever way might present itself.

She walked by the Asia Mall, looking sideways to see if she could catch a glimpse of Janice through the windows. She thought of just bursting in and demanding to know what was up, but quailed at the thought of going into that place just yet. She was cursing herself for a spineless wretch when she spotted a familiar face emerging from the glass doors.

“Hey, Wang!” she called out, just as if she were a boy, which was permitted in America.

Warren Wang looked up, saw who it was, and waved.

She continued west on Canal, and he fell in with her. He was carrying two large plastic Asia Mall shopping bags.

“Where’re you going?” he asked.

“Wherever I feel like,” said Mary Ma, and added, “The highway is my home.”

“No, really.”

They stopped to let traffic pass on the corner of Broadway. She pointed at a phone number on the side of a passing truck. “I’ll tell you if you tell me what’s interesting about that number.”

“What, 4937775?” His eyes unfocused briefly. “Um, it’s a Smith number. The sum of the digits equals the sum of the digits of its prime factorization minus one. Forty-two. So, tell me, where?”

“I’m going to Lucy Karp’s.”

“Forget it. She locked herself in a closet and swallowed the key. I’ve been trying to talk to her for a week.”

“You have? I didn’t know you were a friend of hers.”

He laughed ruefully. “Neither did I.” Upon which he related the strange incident involving Janice and the two ma jai . “I called her up as soon as I got home,” he continued, “but it was like nothing ever happened. ‘Forget it, Warren.’ Okay, I’ll forget it, and then I ask her if she wants to go hang out or something, hit the arcade or the movies, but nothing.” He sighed. “I guess it was like a scam, them being, you know, nice and all.”

Mary was silent for so long that the boy stopped and looked into her face.

“What’s wrong?” No answer. “Earth to Mary. .”

Mary’s face had gone the color of old parchment. She forgot to breathe for a long time, and when she did it came in a strangled whoop. When her mind unfroze, she found that she was running up Broadway. At Grand she looked around wildly, but all she saw was the normal street traffic and poor Warren Wang standing there, his shopping bags drooping from his hands, his mouth open in surprise. The terror she had felt in the storeroom was back again, redoubled. There was only one reason for Janice and Lucy to be followed, which was that somebody knew they all had seen the murders. This thought, once comprehended, blasted through Mary Ma’s considerable intellect like a gas explosion, leaving behind it a single bare instinct, similar to the one that drives the whooping crane two thousand miles to a tiny patch of Texas. In five minutes she was at Crosby off Grand, her finger jammed into the button for Lucy Karp’s loft, imploring Guan Yin, goddess of compassion, that Lucy might answer. Which she did, but coolly.

“Um, Mary, I’m kind of involved-”

“ Wah! Louhsi! ” Mary sobbed, and then started babbling in Cantonese, at which point Lucy, without another word, pressed the button that would send the elevator down to the street.