Chapter 14 Lina
LINA
It was the Long Hot Summer of Jimmy Ruffin and The Underdogs, Loving v. Virginia, Newark and Detroit. Twenty-three-year-old Lina Rodriguez Armstrong stood on Livonia Avenue below a sign that said CHOW MEIN HERE!
Hands on her hips, she squinted at a piece of paper taped to the door of the building.
RESTERANT CLOSED. ROOMS FOUR RENT —
CALL MR. WONG 212-525-3959.
In high school, she’d eaten there while on a date with a guy named Ricardo. She hadn’t felt anything for Ricardo, but that egg roll had been something else. All that yellow crunch, that tasty mix of carrots, pork, and cabbage—she could survive on a desert island with a bunch of those.
She looked up and noticed that one of the windows was planked with wood. Had some boys broken in and robbed the Chinese restaurant? Shame on y’all. Where am I supposed to get my egg rolls?
She was on the hunt for her first apartment, and what a kick it would be to live in the old restaurant.
While she was copying down the number on the back of her mother’s pharmacy receipt, she heard the train hurtling into the station, then the meow of a kitten.
It was eyeing her from behind a pillar of the elevated rail.
“Miss Kitty!” she exclaimed. “What do ya think, should I try this place out?”
The kitten stared unblinkingly.
“I could get used to the El. I don’t mind it, do you?”
Lured by the warmth of Lina’s voice, the kitten gradually emerged into view and crept toward Lina until they were nearly in reach of each other. Yet as soon as Lina squatted to pet the creature, the cat darted away and across the street.
“I’ll take that as a yes!”
That night, back at Van Dyke Houses, Lina dialed the number and spoke to a man who said that the “big room” was still available for rent—only fifty bucks a month. She should come by the place with her stuff next week.
It was going to be her first pad. And she’d worked for it: since graduating with her bachelor’s from City College, she’d earned her teacher’s certificate while also working as an assistant to a SoHo artist who made sculptures with rotted beef steaks.
At least she’d earned enough from that job to pay back her mami’s medical bills and save cash for a security deposit.
Now it was finally time to move out of her family’s apartment.
Altogether, there were eight of them squeezed into that two-bedroom at Van Dyke Houses.
Lina loved kids, but not enough to take craps in the next-door neighbor’s bathroom.
She didn’t want to leave Brownsville, though; she’d just been hired to teach art at J.H.S.
271. She wanted to be close enough to keep watch over her nieces Gabby and Tania, especially on the evenings her sister Sofia went to accounting class.
The following week, Lina packed paintbrushes and sketchbooks in a suitcase and the spare caldero in a cardboard box, then loaded up her mother’s laundry cart.
Dragging the cart in one hand and holding her suitcase in the other, a lampshade on top of her head, she pushed her things the ten blocks from Van Dyke to Canton Kitchen.
Lina was tall with spaghetti limbs, though her chest wasn’t as flat as she would have liked.
She had a frizzy Afro that her little sisters begged her to straighten, and thick arched eyebrows that Callie had said made her look like Frida Kahlo.
Though she preferred a pair of jeans and sneakers, her mother insisted on a skirt and tights that morning to make a “buena impresión” on “el lanlor.” And yes, she was a chocolate girl, though as her father had liked to say, she was Sugar Baby brown, darker than her Caramel Cream sisters, lighter than her Peppermint Patty brothers.
In high school, a bunch of guys had chased her: Black boys, Puerto Rican boys—none of them could take a hint.
When she told them she would rather join the Carmelites, they thought she was playing hard to get.
Some still thought she was ready for the taking, and her mother wasn’t helping.
All summer, Isabella had been trying to pair Lina with that Boricua Sunday school teacher.
When Lina reached the block, she found the restaurant owner waiting on the sidewalk.
She recognized him, had seen him taking orders.
Suddenly, she found herself wanting to know everything about him.
When had he come to America? Could he teach her how to say her name in Chinese, and how to write it with a calligraphy brush?
Mr. Wong was short and muscled, and with the pomade in his jet-black hair, she thought he styled himself more like an Italian than a Chinese.
“You the girl?”
“Yeah,” she said, tucking her lamp hat beneath one elbow and stretching out the opposite hand. “Glad to meet you, sir.”
Ignoring her hand, he rummaged in his pocket for the keys.
“This key goes in the lower lock and this one in the top lock.”
It was a half-Chinese, half-Brooklynese accent, syllables sharp, but the r’s knocked off. “You lock both, coming in and out, and you lock the windows when you leave.”
On the first floor, she heard the laughter of several brothers from the American South, then Alvin and the Chipmunks on a record player. Already, the place felt homey.
The building must have been a hundred years old or more—the stairs so worn that the steps dipped like spoons. She was remembering more about that date with Ricardo: the way he’d wanted to hold hands even while they were climbing the tapering staircase.
And then she remembered, her brother Lou had liked the restaurant. Lou had loved Chinese food: shrimp dumplings, beef lo mein. Before his deployment, he’d even joked that he’d be fine over there. A chance to try Vietnamese food.
Swallowing her thoughts, Lina refocused her attention on dragging the heavy suitcase up the stairs.
“Sir, if you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been living in Brooklyn?”
He unlocked a door and led her inside. She realized she was getting the dining room, and it was huge, at least compared to what she was used to.
“You take this room. There’s other tenants in the back room. You share the bathroom. One bathroom on each floor. Every first of the month, I’ll come collect the rent. You’re late, you’re out.”
The tables were gone, and the walls needed a paint job, but even with that one boarded window, the light was marvelous.
“So what happened to the window?”
“I’ll fix it later.”
“Why’d you close the restaurant?”
“You people don’t eat Chinese food.”
“Whatchu talking about?” she exclaimed, sitting down on her suitcase. “I love Chinese food. Those egg rolls? The best food I ever tasted!”
Paying her no attention, he scrunched down on the floor to examine a stain on the wood, then straightened himself and dusted off his hands.
“No dogs, no cats—I don’t want animals damaging the wood.
” He motioned her over to the kitchen appliances.
“You turn the lights out when you go to work and you make sure the faucets are off. Water’s not cheap.
Make sure the gas is off when you leave the house.
The ceiling fan works, but don’t keep it on the first setting. I don’t want the ceiling to fall down.”
He suddenly turned to look at her, his narrow eyes narrowing farther.
“You got kids?”
She closed her lips, breathed out through her nose.
“Not one child,” she replied dryly.
“No guests. I don’t want to hear about guys coming in and out all day and night. You’ll get me in trouble with the city.”
“Sir, I can assure you, there won’t be no men.”
The two waited as the train screeched into the station, and then Mr. Wong put the keys on the kitchen counter and descended the stairs without a nod goodbye.
In any case, Lina wasn’t giving up the apartment.
She would paint the walls. Yellow and pink, fruit salad colors.
She lugged the rest of her stuff up the stairs, then took a slower, self-guided tour of the apartment.
On the back of the door, she found a red knot with a long tail of silk tassels, and under the kitchen sink, a pot shaped like the bell of a horn.
In the bathroom, there was a wall calendar.
Someone had etched five little dots between March 2 and March 7, and then another five dots twenty-eight days later, from April 4 to April 9.
For several minutes, Lina stared at the dots.
Then she realized it was a language she knew, a language known to half the world.
Mr. Wong had a sister, or a wife.
As she danced around the apartment and planned out her wall murals, she stubbed her toe on a piece of plastic: a tiny, white-clad, yellow-skinned nurse doll with a medical cross on her removable cap and a head that could be rotated through a series of facial expressions.
She opened her suitcase, threw off the dress, unhooked her bra, and changed into her paint-splotched jeans and Danny’s T-shirt—her baby brother was exactly her height, and she often stole his clothes.
Her next-door neighbor didn’t answer the door, but she managed to introduce herself to the two households on the top floor and the two on the bottom.
In 3R lived fortysomething-year-old siblings, Sam and Sylvia Jenkins, both fresh up from Florida and on the superstitious side—they didn’t like the black cat that climbed up the fire escape and peeked in the window.
In 3L lived old Patricia Taylor, who wasn’t fretting over no fire escape cats, and her six grandchildren, who enjoyed feeding the cats one another’s hash browns.
On floor one, Lina met Harry Eugene, a WWII veteran with an amazing memory, and also John Coleman, “Daddy J,” from Baltimore. She offered a hand to everyone.