Atticus Lish: Preparation for the Next Life

SHE CAME BY WAY of Archer, Bridgeport, Nanuet, worked off 95 in jeans and a denim jacket, carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone number, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.

They picked her up on the highway by a plain white shed, a sign for army-navy, tires in the trees. A Caravan pulled up with a Monkey King on the dash and she got in. The men took her to a Motel 8 and put her in a room with half a dozen other women from Fookien and a liter of orange soda. She listened to the trucks coming in all night and the AC running.

They gave her a shirt with an insignia and a visor, the smell of vaporized grease in the fabric. Everyone told her you have to be fast because the bossie watching you. They didn’t speak each other’s dialects, so they spoke English instead. Her first day, her worn-out sneakers slipped on the grease. She dropped an order, noodles popping out like worms, and that night she lay with her face to the wall, her jaw set, blinking.

The Americans parked out front, their pickups ticking in the sun, and came in slow and quiet in bandanas and tank tops. They would lean an elbow on the counter and point a thick finger at the menu and say that one there. The blacks came in holding what they were going to spend in their hands, the wadded dollars and change.

Is y’all gonna let me have them wings? Y’all tell me what I can get with this then.

She knew how to say okay. When they pointed at the menu, she got it fine. In Nanuet, they wanted the all-you-can-eat. She could understand that. You need to get some more of this. Okay. She knew how to hurry up and get something, to work because she had to, to work fourteen hours a day every day until the tenth or eleventh day, until they got a smoking day, as the boss called it, because it was better than picking through the trash in the brigade field south of the river.

In the motel, they kept the TV running to practice English. They squatted on the carpet, moving their mouths in the blue light, seeing the grocery store aisles and the fast cars. Unbelievable, they said. This Tuesday on Fox. A grim day in Iraq. She watched goggled soldiers and radio antennas driving past adobe houses in the desert, which she had lived in.

Camel, she pointed. The animal, it’s very good.

Too hard, they said. It can’t be absorbed. Mind is a wooden plank.

Someone yawned.

Have to practice it a lifetime.

When they had finished their work at night, they crossed the parking lot to the one car still there, the Caravan waiting to take them back to the motel. They gave the man his takeout, and he put it on the newspapers open to Hong Kong stories. She watched the large sweeps of the night go by as they drove home, the black areas of the forest, the slate highway and sky. He had a gold chain and a green card and he drove with the lights off, watching for cops.

The women were from Begin to Celebrate, Four Meetings, Connected Mountain, and Honesty Admired. She told them she was from south of the river.

But you’re from somewhere else, they said.

I’m Chinese, like you.

You don’t look it.

In the sun, you could see Zou Lei’s hair was brown and not black. There was a waviness to it. She had a slightly hooked nose and Siberian eyes.

Our China is a big country, she said.

You sound like a northerner.

Northwesterner.

She’s a minority, one of the women said.

You can teach me your language.

That’s meaningless. You’ve got People’s Terrace, Peaceful Stream, Placid Lake, Winding South, Cotton Fence, Zhangpu, Convergence of Peace, Swatow, Common Tranquility, Prominence, Samyap, Jungcan, Broad Peace, Three Counties, Next-to-the-Zhang-Family Dialect, and a hundred more. Which one we teach you?

Zou Lei thought for a moment. Then tell me how to say heaven is high. She smiled and pointed at the stained ceiling. Heaven is high and the earth is wide.

Some of them nodded, a few smiled, revealing bad teeth. That’s true, that’s true, they agreed, and one of the women sighed.

What she learned instead was how to take an order. The fortune cookies were in the box under the Year-of-the-Goat calendar and the little plastic shrine. The napkins, straws, and chopsticks were all together on the shelf. Give everybody plastic fork no matter what. When a customer came in, you asked him what you having? Then you shout his order in the back: chick-brocc, beef-brocc, beef-snow, triple steam, like that, to make it fast.

No one had to teach her how to mop and take the trash out and go through a sack of greens, chopping off the part you didn’t eat. They saw she was a hard worker. Most of what you did was something she already knew. Squatting, she washed her clothes in the bathtub, wringing them out with her chapped, rural, purple-skinned hands, and hanging them up on the shower curtain rod with the others’ dripping laundry, the wet sequined denim and faded cartoon characters.

At the counter, she put a piece of cardboard in the bottom of a bag, stapled the lips of a Styrofoam shell together, and set the shell in the bag on top of the cardboard. The other containers went on top with cardboard in between. She stapled the menu to the bag and handed it over the counter to a lean guy in a red baseball hat and long blond hair. Taking an extra menu, he said, You’re gettin a whole lot better. I timed you.

The boss said the women needed someone to supervise their well-being, a big sister who would report to him. He gave them a phrase to memorize — It’s not a matter of time, it’s a matter of money — that he wanted them to repeat a thousand times a day as fast as they could say it.

What does it mean? she asked.

It is not significant. Its significance is unknown.

One of the women was mentally imbalanced, given to bouts of silence, and then saying the police had given her a forced abortion in Guangxi.

When the weather turned cold, some of them slept together. They squatted in front of the space heater, their wet clothes hanging in the shower, all of them sick, coughing and spitting up in the wastebasket.