Beijing Prepares Herself for Company
Meg Eden When I arrive at her apartment, Beijing cracks open the door just enough to snap, What makes you think you can just walk in at a time like this? It’s 2006, and the world is waiting for her. On the hook above her door, a red silk dress. Her hair’s still in curlers, no Maybelline yet. There’s bras on the floor, and other things I can interpret, but rather not think about. She tells me to come back in one year, but I tell her that’s too late. Outside, there is a compost pile, surrounded by a line of artificial trees. Beyond, the world is as flat as Megiddo, with sprouts of construction all the way up to the sun. Before she will let me in, she locks all the closets, kicks the trash under her bed. I hear the door unlock and her heels snap across the floor. When I come in, she’s sitting in a chipping bathroom, putting on heavy lip- stick. Won’t turn around, but says she’s getting a White Beauty facial in an hour. I ask her what’s so great about white, my own Scotch-pink skin, blotching from the cold, and she turns around, her eye-shadow dark like a stage dancer. It’s nice for people to not recognize who you are, she says, and only now do I understand how generic her face, her lips, the space between her eyes—how every day, her hair was curled, straightened, wigged blonde or cut, and how, if I saw her on the street today, I might not find the girl who hosted me in her place for seven days. Beijing Explains Her Twelve Year Old Gymnast She isn’t twelve, she’s sixteen. Her name is He Kexin. She was in the Olympics before but now is retired; too old. No one believes me—you think we want to look so young? That we don’t want American breasts, full Western hips? And lips? I have no daughter, but if I did she would fly like He. She would live in the air, and only come down to eat moon cakes and taunt us. She would be afraid of no men, and no men would enter her. Her body would be tight like a branch, unbending but beautiful—no one would educate her, she would sing too loudly. She would not be known by name, but by the way her legs whip through the air like a bird. The way she vanished so young without demands, without fathers to condemn and harness her wildness. |
About the author:
Meg Eden's work has been published in various magazines, including Rattle, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, and Rock & Sling. Her work received second place in the 2014 Ian MacMillan Fiction contest. Her collections include Your Son, Rotary Phones and Facebook and The Girl Who Came Back. She teaches at the University of Maryland. Check out her work here. |