Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

“I’m going to ask you to stay here on the weekends from now on. I don’t want you to go down to the city anymore. You’ve gone there all summer, and with school in session you ought to be studying more on the weekends.”

“I haven’t been going to the city,” she said, handling a pair of aluminum crutches. She started using them, pretending to favor the knee that was skinned. “So there’s nothing to change.”

“Are you saying that you’ve been at that man’s house, as Officer Como mentioned?”

“There and other places,” she said. She ambled awkwardly to the far end of the store. The crutches were for a taller person, and she had to hop up slightly over the arm pads with each step. “What did you think, that she was making it up?”

“I assumed she was making a point.”

“She wasn’t.”

“What are you doing there, then? Tell me, I want to know.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes! Now tell me!”

She had turned back and slowly lurched forward, landing on both feet. She collected the crutches and looped them on the display hook.

She said, “I have friends there. But Jimmy Gizzi isn’t one of them.”

“The house is his?”

“I guess so. He’s hardly there.”

“Is he a dealer of drugs?”

“I suppose so. But I don’t do them. I’ve never done them.”

I believed her, for Sunny had never hidden anything from me, or told me untruths. It was actually mostly a matter of my confronting the issues, simply posing the questions.

“So then what do you do there? Are there other girls with you?”

“Some. Not always.”

“So you’re there alone, sometimes.”

“It happens.”

I asked her: “Are you having intimate relations?”

Sunny chuckled a bit and said, “What exactly do you mean?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I guess I do,” she answered. “Is that what you had with Mary Burns?”

“Please don’t speak about her like that,” I said. “You know very well we’re not spending time together anymore. It’s disrespectful.”

“I guess you’re not,” Sunny said, her expression souring. “I’ve been wanting to ask you about that. It’s like she never was, isn’t it? You just decided it was finished.”

“I did nothing of the kind. The decision was mutual. But this is none of your concern.”

“You’re right,” Sunny said. “Why should I care? What does she mean to either of us anymore, right?”

“I’ve asked you a question, Sunny.”

“Yes, then.”

“Yes?”

“I’m having sex, yes,” she answered, “if that’s what you want to know.”

I could hardly speak in the face of her bluntness. Then I said, “Are you in love with this person?”

“What?”

“The person you’re involving yourself with. Are you in love with him?”

“Are you kidding?” Sunny said savagely. “What do you think I’m doing, having a love affair?”

“I don’t know,” I said, confused by her sudden anger. “I’m trying to understand what you’re seeking. What you may want for yourself.”

“I don’t want anything,” she said, as though saying the words harshly enough would make it so. “Nothing. I don’t want love and I don’t want your concern. I think it’s fake anyway. Maybe you don’t know it, but all you care about is your reputation in this snotty, shitty town, and how I might hurt it.”

“This is nonsense. You’re speaking nonsense.”

“I guess I am,” she said. “But all I’ve ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big house and this store and all the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You’re always having to be the ideal partner and colleague.”

“And why not? Firstly, I am a Japanese! And then what is so awful about being amenable and liked?”

“Well, no one in Bedley Run really gives a damn. You know what I overheard down at the card shop? How nice it is to have such a ‘good Charlie’ to organize the garbage and sidewalk-cleaning schedule. That’s what they really think of you. It’s become your job to be the number-one citizen.”

“I am respected and valued in this town. I’m asked to comment at all the critical council meetings. You have little idea what my position is. People heed my words.”

“That’s because you’ve made it so everyone owes something to you. You give these gifts out, just like to that policewoman, Como. She can’t stand to cross you because you’re this nice sweet man who’s given when he didn’t have to or want to but did anyway. You burden with your generosity. So even when I’m being troublesome, they can’t bear to upset you. It was even that way with Mary Burns, wasn’t it? You made it so that she couldn’t even be angry with you.”

“There was nothing to be angry about,” I replied, trying to remember what it was that Mary Burns had finally said to me, after I had asked for one more chance to convince her of my feelings. You always try, Franklin, but too hard, like it’s your sworn duty to love me.

“I never gave her any cause.”

Sunny shook her head and walked past me to leave but I caught her by the arm.

“Let me go!”

“I don’t want you sleeping at that house!”

“I’ll sleep where I want,” she said bitterly.

“Then I won’t have you living in my house anymore,” I told her, my blood rising. “I won’t allow it. It disgusts me to think of what you’re doing there. You cannot degrade yourself and expect for me to provide you with things.”

“Whatever you want,” Sunny answered, shaking herself loose from my grip. “I’ll go right now and get my stuff from the house.”

“You’ll also lose the allowance I give you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, trying to open the door and walk her bicycle out at the same time. “I can get by.”

“Sunny…”

She turned around to face me, her eyes moist and fierce, a hundred-meter stare. “I don’t need you,” she said softly, and without remorse. “I never needed you. I don’t know why, but you needed me. But it was never the other way.”

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I didn’t see Sunny. Not for nearly three weeks. One would think that in a small town, I’d catch sight of her, coming and going into a shop on the main street. But not even that. I did call the school and subtly inquire whether her attendance was satisfactory, and the school counselor told me it was. He seemed to know Sunny somewhat and spoke glowingly of her exploits last fall on the field hockey team, though he wasn’t sure if she was playing again this year. I told him she’d decided to concentrate more on the piano, that she was afraid of injuring her fingers and hands, all those players knocking the hard ball about with sticks. I could say this with confidence because I knew Sunny had in fact quit all her activities at the start of the fall, including the piano, and that really the only thing she had continued to do, strangely enough, was study, particularly her history books and world literature, piles of which always littered the surfaces and furniture of her room. She never ceased being the most avid reader, and I knew she was truly gone from the house when I got home that night weeks earlier and found the stacks removed, the shelves emptied save those books from her childhood, the ones I’d read to her when she first arrived, nursery and bedtime stories in a language she didn’t know.

As I suspected, she was living now in the Gizzi house, on Turner Street, an unpaved dead-end road on the far east side of town, near the village line of neighboring Ebbington. I knew where it was from Officer Como, who was the only one I’d told of Sunny’s leaving the house. I didn’t want her officially listed as a runaway, as I was afraid the designation would remain indefinitely on her personal records, and I knew I could count on Officer Como to keep a watch on the place and its frequent visitors — mostly men in their twenties and thirties, many, according to her, known troublemakers and felons — and be publicly discreet about Sunny’s habitation. Of course it was fairly common knowledge that she often hung out there, but most of my fellow merchants and colleagues thought she was simply wayward and difficult and not completely gone from me. I wanted to hide the real depth of the trouble, put it away not (as Sunny always contended) for the sake of my reputation or standing but so I could try to forget she was my daughter, that she had ever come to live with me and had grown up before my eyes.