If You Lived Here (4 page)
For a long time, he holds me. Then we sit for a while longer. We can’t manage to stand up and drag ourselves back home. It’s hard to close a day like this one, the last day that we could hope to adopt this little girl. I feel as if I’m living in some in-between time, as if moving at all would constitute the final acceptance that we’ve lost her. Martin makes no move to get up, either. He tips his head against the wall of the building. “We’ll get a child,” he promises.
Talk like that used to comfort me, but I have trouble believing it now. “We might not,” I say.
“We will.” I hear in these words an attempt to conjure up the old Martin, the strong one, the one with endless reserves of strength and solace.
The night is warm and breezy. Martin raises a finger and points up through the branches of the dogwood trees, the blossoms glowing pale yellow in the darkness. He says, “One. Two. Three, over there.” It’s a game we sometimes play, counting stars.
“Four,” I tell him. “It’s a paltry night.”
y mother didn’t
approve of wasting time. On winter nights in Hanoi, while my father and I played Chinese chess and my older
sister, Lan, went off to visit friends, my mother would mop, or practice her French, or boil leftover bones for soup. My father often said he’d never expected my mother to become such a competent housekeeper. She had grown up the only child of the richest landowners in her village, a pampered girl destined for even greater wealth and privilege. She could have married a high-level official, or gone to university in France. But my parents grew up in revolutionary times, when you couldn’t think of much but war. Instead of living a life of comfort, my mother became an orphan, then a soldier, and, now, an industrious homemaker in barren Hanoi. Instead of studying French literature in Paris, she learned to wring three dinners out of a sack of water morning glory, a handful of dried shrimp, and a few scoops of rice. My father himself taught her how to mop.
From my father, I inherited the ability to relax; from my mother, the need to feel guilty about it. And I do still feel guilty, after all these years, that my own life, unlike that of my parents, has become so luxurious. I
have my own business here in Wilmington, an expensive SUV, a house without a mortgage, a Jacuzzi bathtub. My mother is long gone now, and I am long gone from my life in Hanoi and everyone I ever knew there. After twenty-three years, though, I still sometimes glance across my store and imagine my mother standing there, tapping her foot impatiently. My business impresses her, but she doesn’t like to see me doing nothing. She crosses her arms impatiently and I hear her say, “Nobody put a man on the moon by wasting time.”
But my job is not rocket science. If I vacuum every day, my customers will come. If I don’t, they’ll come anyway. I don’t run a hospital in this town. I run an Asian market. People come here to buy persimmons in season, frozen duck, garam masala. I keep my shop very clean. I wish that my mother could see the high marks I receive from the city health inspectors. (We didn’t even have health inspectors in Vietnam!) I am the purveyor to Wilmington’s immigrant population, Latinos included, and the brave Caucasian cooks who decide to try “international” for dinner. I do an excellent business, and five days a week I sell take-out lunches, too, but none of this keeps me on my hands and knees every minute. In the afternoons, I usually get a lull between the lunch crowd and the commuters who stop by on their way home from work. Sometimes, I go over receipts then, or take an inventory, or call Far East Distributors to see if they have taro powder or some other item my customers can’t get at Wal-Mart. I like the quiet in the store then, and the way the sun streams through the blinds, making stripey bands of light against the palettes of rice in the corner. If I’m not busy, I watch
Oprah
.
Today, she is asking, “Is Your Spouse Also Your Friend?” and, though
that’s not an issue in my life, I still find it diverting.
The guest is a psychologist. He uses a questionnaire and claims he can predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a marriage will last. He holds a sheet containing answers to the questions he asked O.’s partner, Stedman, in advance.
I’d like to hear, but my employee, Marcy, has begun to argue with her mother. “Will you let me live my life already?” she demands.
Her mother, Gladys, says, “You make big mistake.”
“I need quiet!” I yell at both of them.
For a moment, silence, then Marcy wanders over to watch with me, Gladys close behind.
The guest asks O., “What is Stedman’s favorite music?”
O. cocks her head as if she’s thinking, but you can tell she already has her answer. “Marvin Gaye,” she announces.
The guy checks the sheet, then looks at O. apologetically, as if
he’d
gotten the wrong answer. “Actually, it’s the Bee Gees.”
O. looks appalled. “The Bee Gees!” she cries. The audience moans.
Marcy pulls her hair back and twists it into a messy bun held in place with a pencil. Apparently, that’s high fashion these days. “The Bee Gees. Cool,” she says.
“Bee Gees uncool,” I tell her. I don’t know the Bee Gees. But I know O. “The Bee Gees are so uncool, they’re cool. Like Perry Como. ‘How
Deep Is Your Love’ is very cool.”
Marcy and O. know what they’re talking about, even if they don’t agree with each other. You have to have grown up in this country to know, and Gladys and I grew up in Vietnam. Gladys doesn’t care that she doesn’t know, which is its own kind of cool, actually.
“You could get kidnap!” Gladys says to Marcy, circling back to the subject she does care about—Marcy’s threat to get a job at the Gap.
“You can’t get kidnapped from the Gap, Ma!” Marcy grabs a broom and marches back toward the coolers. Her mother follows.
I pick my lunch, a bowl of
ph
d
,
off the counter and balance it on my knees. Turning the rice noodles gently with my chopsticks, I examine the strands of scallion, flecks of chili and mint, the few tender pieces of chicken caught like fish in a net. The scent of the broth forms a warm, rich cloud around my face. I can smell cinnamon, lemon, the slightest bite of salt. The ingredients of a
ph
d
would seem so obvious to someone who doesn’t cook: noodles, shredded meat, broth, and herbs. But that simple word “broth” contains a whole universe of flavors. Really, it only looks simple.
Even on the other side of the store, Marcy and Gladys make so much noise arguing with each other that I lose my appetite. Marcy opens a crate
and starts to shove packages of frozen fish into one of my freezers. Gladys stands next to her, miserable, her arms knotted across her chest. Marcy works hard, which explains why I keep her around, but I get tired of hearing them fight all the time.
“You’re invading my space,” Marcy says, flicking her hand into the air as if her mother were an insect.
“You going to have problem,” Gladys whines in her onion-paper voice. Gladys is hardly fifty, but she already stoops like an old lady and has begun to lose her hair. She grew up in the central highlands, near Kon Tum, I think, and she speaks Vietnamese with such a thick central accent that I can barely understand her. Her English is even worse, but her daughter refuses to communicate in Vietnamese, so she has no choice but to use English. “Gap no good,” Gladys says. “Not good people.” The final word sounds like a shriek: Peeeeeeeeee-pul. Hearing her accent makes me feel better about mine.
Marcy slides the last package of fish into the freezer, then stops for a moment, pulling at her cold fingers. She looks at her mother. Sometimes she pretends that she doesn’t understand what Gladys is saying. Now she says, “Just give me a break.”
Gladys yells across the store in Vietnamese. “Mai, you tell Marcy.”
I don’t get involved. Marcy’s worked for me for three years already and tells me, when Gladys isn’t around, that she won’t leave. She just likes to taunt her mother.
Gladys glares at Marcy. “Honestly!” It’s her favorite word. She will insert it, in English, into even the most monolingual Vietnamese conversations. Out of her mouth, in fact, it sounds Vietnamese:
On ech ly!
Then she stomps out of the store, her maneuver of last resort.
Finally, some quiet. I touch the tip of my pinkie to the broth, but it’s lukewarm now. Somehow, I force down a few bites. I often feel like a par-ent, coaxing myself to eat. After all these years, you can see it in my face, which has become pasty and loose, like the skin of a grape that’s sat too long in the sun. Everyone used to say I looked like my mother, but up until the year she died my mother still had smooth, healthy skin. Even during the war, when we had nothing to eat but potatoes, my mother’s
cheeks were full and rosy. And here I am, in America, and rich, looking older than she looked during the worst years of the war.
The front door jingles and I look up just as the funeral director pushes her way inside. You recognize her first by the hair, wild and red, thick with curls, as unusual as a talent the rest of us lack. “Hey, Mai. How are you?” she asks, as if we’re the best of friends. Her gaze settles on me, waiting for an answer. Her fingers rest on the edge of my counter.
“Okay,” I tell her. Might as well forget about eating. The woman will stay for ages, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to hang around my grocery and pester me. Maybe she’s losing her mind. She’s shopped here for years, coming by every couple of weeks to stock up on her supplies of ginger tea, or chutney, or whatever it is she usually buys. I never had a problem with her before. Once, when the Vietnamese manager of Hardee’s died in a car wreck, I helped her out by setting up a prayer altar for the funeral. She seemed completely normal then. She never got chatty. In the past couple of weeks, though, she has rematerialized as a kook. She appears every couple of days, asking questions. Not normal questions, like, “How long do you cook this fish?” Or, “Is chicken good with Hoisin sauce?” She asks bizarre questions, like, “Do people eat ramen noodles in Hanoi?” And, “What do Vietnamese cook for New Year’s?” I end up spending fifteen, even twenty minutes responding. The conversations grow like weeds, distracting me.
Several times, I’ve managed to avoid these sessions by pretending I’m busy. But still, she lurks. Her voice sounds discreet, but it is actually focused and prodding, and it carries across the aisles from where she hovers near Gladys or Marcy, pressing them for answers, too. They love the attention. She has the kind of hair that you see on the heroines of soap operas, and a look on her face that says you’re the most fascinating thing on the planet. Gladys has rarely conversed with an American, and she responds to the woman Shelley’s notice with giddy gratitude, as she would a proclamation from the government that she has succeeded here. Marcy, who can be careless and moody, swells with maturity at the idea that someone older, and attractive, has turned to her for information. As soon as the woman approaches, they stop whatever they’re
doing and address her questions with the concentration they normally reserve for their own conflicts. But their answers meander. Once, when she asked Gladys, “Who is the most talented Vietnamese composer?” Gladys explained that she had to quit school and go to work at the age of eleven. Another time, she asked Marcy, “Why is red considered such a lucky color?” Marcy ended up describing an elegant Chinese wedding she attended in Charlotte last year. What are they thinking? If a customer asks for tofu, would you give them cheese? The truth is, the woman wants to know about Vietnam and Marcy barely remembers it. And Gladys? Well, Gladys grew up in a village a three-hour walk from the nearest town. Try asking a redneck from Castle Hayne to name the most talented
American
composer. They’d probably say the Beatles.
“Van Cao,” I told her, but I did not offer to loan her a CD.
This afternoon, the funeral director sets her purse on my counter and makes to fan herself with her hand. “What do you make of this weather?” she asks, feigning exasperation. “Freezing one day, a scorcher the next.”
