Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

After Miss Cathy had painted the last of Fan’s toes, she rose and sat before the basins and the mirrored wall in the swiveling salon-style chair, one of the girls automatically ready to brush her hair. The rest of the girls as well as Fan gathered about her, and the picture of them grouped thus was something one might imagine in a catalog for the strangest kind of institution, this most bizarre and intramural of schools. But their number did seem off. Something flashed then in Miss Cathy’s face, as though she had just finally reached an ancient mountaintop ruin that she had half feared was a fantasy, the shadows breaking over its tumbled ramparts, darkening all. She now asked the girls to go check on Four and Five, which was cause for gleeful sighs all around, everyone immediately curtailing whatever she was doing and stowing the mani-pedi paraphernalia. It was as if the whole time they had been awaiting such word, whereas Fan was just beginning to think how mistaken her strategy had been, that she should have taken harder, more extreme measures right from the start. But as they made their way back out, Miss Cathy asked Fan to stay. She had Fan sit in the salon chair, standing behind her and regarding her as a stylist might, even weighing the ends of her hair in her palms. She took up a brush and worked it through the straight, thick tresses. The tines sometimes grazed Fan’s neck and she tensed for the strokes to become harder, harsher, but they stayed steady and full, the sound like heavy threshing.

Finally Miss Cathy said: When I was a girl, my mother brushed my hair every night. Yours must have, too.

Fan shook her head; sometimes she and a cousin might sit up with each other, but more for play than in some familial bonding.

But it’s wonderful to brush hair like yours, Miss Cathy said to the mirror. My mother would have admired it. She would have said yours was a pony’s mane, sturdy but still tender and lustrous. She would complain that my hair was too fine and broke and tangled too easily, which is why I had to go to her each night before bed. I think she hoped to train it to grow thicker and straighter, but naturally it never did.

Fan said it must have been a good feeling, to have such a ritual.

Miss Cathy smiled weakly. She unfurled the towel from her head, her hair damply clumped in fraying ropes. Fan moved to hop down from the chair but Miss Cathy placed her hand on both of her shoulders, bending so that their faces were side by side.

I know you can’t see it, so you don’t have to agree, the woman said, her eyes wide and focused. But I see a lot of me in you. Not me now. You’re so fresh and alive, and I have nothing more of those things. But when I was younger, even younger than you, you would be surprised by the girl I was. I used to walk to the edge of the village and wait for the gatehouse guard to take a bite of his lunch and then slip out between the bars. I was that skinny! And you know what I did?

Fan shook her head.

I would run.

Fan said, Where to.

Away! Miss Cathy cried, her face, in fact, suddenly alive. I would just run, at first as fast as I could so the guard wouldn’t see me, but when the road started getting rough, I would slow down and try to stay out of sight. I’d keep going the whole day. Sometimes I saw cars and people but then I hid. It’s amazing that I didn’t get hurt or lost.

Fan asked if her parents got frightened or angry.

They never knew, Miss Cathy said. My father only came home after supper, and my mother was busy all day with her projects in the garden and with her friends. Our helper was terrified for me, but I made her promise not to tell.

You must have traveled far.

I don’t know exactly. You should tell me. How far can a little girl really go? Miss Cathy paused at this notion. One time I was caught in a thunderstorm and I wasn’t sure anymore where I was. I had to hope the sun would break through so the rainbow from the village’s sky screen might reappear, which it must have. Otherwise I might not be here now. I’d be someplace else.

Fan, no doubt sensing the woman’s yearning, said: Where do you think?

Not a Charter, probably. Though I’m not sure I would have lasted out in the counties.

I think you would have, Fan replied, saying it as if surely believing it.

Miss Cathy seemed to gleam with this notion. She then said: Sometimes I wish I could see myself like I was then, but from above. Out there.

But you can, Fan told her. You can see it.

How?

You can see whatever you want.

And it was then that Fan did a funny thing. Without asking, she clasped Miss Cathy’s hands, which were still resting on her shoulders. Miss Cathy instinctively pulled back — she might touch you, but it was never the other way around — but Fan held them firmly, Miss Cathy looking alarmed in the mirror. And before the woman could say or do anything else, Fan closed her eyes. She asked Miss Cathy to do the same. She could feel her pulling, but Fan could be very strong physically when she needed to be. Miss Cathy shouted for her to let go. But she wouldn’t. Then Miss Cathy was thrashing against her, their hands locked together while they boxed at Fan’s ears, her temple, her jaw. The blows, dense and mean, fell heavily on her, and though she wanted to cry out or groan, she kept as still as she could, as if she were not made of flesh but the oldest stone. And just at the moment that it seemed Fan might yield, when tears began to wet her cheeks, when she felt her clutch finally giving way, the woman relented. She could hear Miss Cathy breathing miserably behind her. And it was then Fan described the scene she wanted Miss Cathy to picture: a counties landscape, mottled sage with dense growth, and run through by gravelly roads, and pocked with the rusted shanty-tops of cottages with the smoke from cooking fires spiraling forth, and there, in the shadows of the underbrush, a wispy, pale-shouldered child with fine strawberry-hay hair stepping sprightly through the thickets, almost dancing, skipping free.

When Fan peered again in the mirror, Miss Cathy’s eyes were still shut, though barely, her face slightly uptilted, as if she were taking in a rare gentle spring sun. She might have stayed that way, and Fan no doubt would have let her, had a commotion outside the bathroom not dispelled the reverie. When they stepped out, the Girls’ door was flung open, as were the double doors of Miss Cathy’s suite. Had all fled?

But inside the room everyone was assembled, the large space suddenly feeling much smaller for all the new and different people; it was not just the other girls who were there but also Mala, and then Tico, who stood alongside a pair of EMTs almost as hulking as he; and to Fan’s particular surprise, and what must have been a small burst of happiness in her, there was also young Dr. Upendra, too. He had come back. He had not abandoned them. He caught her eye but just as instantly went back to Five. She was in distress. No one was making a sound, not even Miss Cathy, because it was clear there was not enough time to take her back to the medical center. And as we regard the moment and all and sundry gathered, we suppose that they must have figured the doctor would certainly save her, that this whole situation, if deeply fraught and shocking, was one in which a state of normalcy would prevail, or would at least be reverted to. That however stunted and peculiar these girls’ lives were, their days would inexorably string along, if only adding up to a thickening in the torso and the flowing colors of their intricate mural work that no one but they and a few others would ever see.

Five stirred in her bed, her feet finally moving, if in shivers. Then she hiccuped, or spasmed, pivoting onto her side, pushing out a sound that her dear sisters would later hear as something like I can or My Fan . Spent, she rolled onto her back. Tears trickled down her tensed-up cheeks. She was smiling widely and the tears seemed to be only those of joy. But Miss Cathy gasped, hands over her mouth. Upendra dropped onto his knees and listened to her chest. Then he used an air bag, next his own mouth, as well as compressions on her chest. Her pupils stretched wide, space black, the whole of her looking as if every drop of her blood were turning to plainest paint.