“Oh, let’s go inside. This is awful,” Lily said, as the wind whipped her hair into her eyes.
“I kind of like it out here,” Shirley said, but she relented at the look on Lily’s face.
Inside Sutro’s, they climbed the central stairway to the gallery overlooking the ice-skating rink. Signs posted all around the perimeter advertised the many attractions awaiting them: DOLLS OF THE WORLD and VICTORIAN ART and SEE ITO NOW! In the gallery, children were banging at the Goalee game, causing it to ring and ring and ring, and others ran back and forth, freed from their parents temporarily as they sought out the other coin-fed games. Several tables were covered by gaily striped awnings as if they were outside, but the daylight coming through the glass atrium roof was weak and gray. Down in the ice rink, the lights were on as if it were nighttime.
“Let’s get some hot chocolate,” Lily said. “I’m so cold still.” She bought two paper cups of hot chocolate from a cart, and then she and Shirley found a bench overlooking the ice-skaters and sat down.
Carnival music played throughout the vaulted building, and Lily watched the skaters below attempting to move in time to the music. Only a few were actually good: a girl in a fluttering skirt that swirled out as she spun; a boy who leaped up and then landed, arms flung out for balance. Lily was surprised that more people didn’t crash into each other. She had never skated herself and imagined she would be terrible at it.
“Don’t you ever wish you could be like them?” Shirley asked, turning her cup of hot chocolate around in her hands.
“Like who? The skaters?”
Shirley nodded. “They just go out there and—look! That one fell over. Oh, he’s getting up. He’s terrible. I think he just wants to hold on to his girlfriend.”
They watched for a while longer in silence. The hot chocolate was powdery and not quite mixed together. Lily tried to swirl hers around in her cup, but it didn’t make much of a difference.
“I mean, don’t you ever wish you weren’t Chinese.” Shirley spoke in a low voice, as if she were afraid to say it. “You wouldn’t have to live in Chinatown, and you could do anything you wanted. You could go ice-skating anytime.”
Lily looked at her friend; she had a slight scowl on her face as she watched the skaters. “We could go ice-skating if you want,” Lily said.
Shirley took a sip of her hot chocolate. “No. I don’t want to. That’s not what I mean. It’s just . . . ice-skating is so silly. Why would anyone do it?”
“For fun?”
“Exactly. For fun.”
Shirley sounded bitter, which was unlike her. “Is something bothering you?” Lily asked. “Did something happen?”
Shirley shrugged, as if she were trying to slough off the black mood that had fallen over her. “No, nothing. I just get tired of the . . . the smallness of Chinatown, you know? Everybody knows everybody, and they’re always poking their noses where they don’t belong, and you can’t do anything just for fun.”
Lily wasn’t sure how to respond. She took the last few sips of her hot chocolate. It was too sweet now, and sugar coated her tongue like sand. Shirley was right; Lily felt those constraints too. And yet she also felt protective of Chinatown. She didn’t want anyone to disparage it—not even Shirley. When they were children, Chinatown had seemed wonderfully free to Lily: a neighborhood full of friends, with shopkeepers who would give her candied fruit and lumps of rock sugar. Of course everyone knew each other; it was like a densely packed little village, and her father was the well-respected village doctor. It was safe. Outside Chinatown was a different story. Everybody knew the boundaries. You stayed between California and Broadway, went no farther west than Stockton, and no farther east than Portsmouth Square. It wasn’t until junior high, when she had to walk through North Beach to go to school, that Lily became comfortable with leaving Chinatown. Even then, she heard stories about Italian boys who beat up Chinese kids who made the mistake of wandering off Columbus Avenue.
“I want to go to New York,” Shirley said abruptly. “Or Paris. Maybe London—or Honolulu! One of my cousins lives there. Anywhere but here. Don’t you want to go somewhere?” She looked at Lily then, challengingly, and Lily suddenly wondered if Shirley somehow knew about the Telegraph Club.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Lily bent to set her empty cup on the floor at her feet, which allowed her to look away.
“You do. You want to go to space.” Shirley gave a half laugh, unable to hide the trace of condescension in her tone.