Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

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.