In her Book for Business-Minded Women, Mrs. Lowry attributes the success of her cattle ranch—the largest in Texas—not just to hard work but to her education at Radcliffe College. Only one school in this town can give me a similar education, and my way in lies through the chocolate shop.
Jack’s eyes grow hungry. Even with my poor French accent, he knows chocolate when he hears it, ever since I bought him a Li’l Betties chocolate drop last month.
“Let’s go!” Jack shoots to the door without bothering to fold the map or snip the towel from his pants. I leave a note for Ma, who’s out visiting clients.
Moments later, Jack’s dragging me through the narrow alleyways of Chinatown, wanting to go faster than his lungs will let him. We pass under three-cornered yellow flags denoting restaurants and pick our way around the squashed blossoms of a narcissus stand. Sky lanterns sway from building eaves, the same lanterns that inspired Tom’s Floating Island.
Though Tom’s ba, who I call Ah-Suk for uncle, expected him to be an herbalist, Tom has always been fascinated by flying things—moths, paper gliders. It had been his dream to join the Army Balloon Corps, until he learned the Corps disbanded. When the Wright brothers launched a new bird into the sky, Tom wrote to Orville Wright, asking if he needed an apprentice, but Mr. Wright never wrote back.
Jack looks back at me. “Faai-di!” Hurry up!
“English only, Jack.” Today we shall be as American as President Theodore Roosevelt himself. Folks are more apt to do business with people who do not seem foreign. “And I am hurrying. It’s these boots that are taking their time.”
Perhaps borrowing Ma’s too-big boots wasn’t my brightest idea, but Mrs. Lowry stresses the importance of looking tall when negotiating. Taller people inspire confidence, and the boots put me in the neighborhood of five foot five. Blisters are already forming on my soles, and I long to hop onto the cable car that clangs past us down the Slot. But trolleys cost a nickel per rider, and I have only one to spare.
“The longer the wait, the sweeter the taste,” I tell Jack.
He knots his mouth into a tight rosebud, and his sticky hand stops yanking so hard. The sight of his bruised knuckles where his first grade teacher tried to hit the stammer out of him squeezes my heart. Jack’s lungs and speech development were never the same after the city forcibly inoculated us against the Black Death a few years ago.
It won’t always be this way, not if I can help it. One day, we shall have a map of the world and a chest full of pennies to throw at it.
The baker’s wife stands in the doorway of her Number Nine Bakery, using a fan to sweep the golden smells into the street. The number nine sounds like the word for everlasting in Chinese, and it is hoped that a business with that number will have permanence.
A frown burrows deep into her face as we pass. “Bossy cheeks,” she mutters after me. She has always disapproved of my free-spirited ways, so different than her daughter, Ling-Ling. The girl sits as still as a vase inside the shop, a basket of buns on her lap.
I force myself not to react, herding Jack toward Montgomery Street, the main route through North Beach. Cheeks are a measure of one’s authority, and my high cheekbones indicate an assertive, ambitious nature. They were a gift from my mother, and I am proud of them, even though men shy away from women with that attribute.
Is that why Tom has been acting so funny? We’d been as close as two walnut halves growing up, and it only seemed natural that we would end up together. At least to me.
If I were more demure, perhaps Tom would be less ambivalent about our fortuitous match. A respected herbalist needs a proper wife, someone who doesn’t parade down uneven streets. Someone who doesn’t bribe her way into elite schools.
I nearly collide with a water trough, scaring away thoughts of Tom.
Jack pumps his free arm as if to propel us there faster, risking a rip in the too-tight sleeves of his jacket. The towel flaps against his thigh with every step. I pull him slower again. Ah-Suk tonified Jack’s internal energy with his five-flavor tea, but we must avoid overexertion.
“You think they’re as good as Li’l Betties?” he asks.