Pioneer Girl (20 page)

—

T
hat night Ong Hai opened the free bottle of prosecco from the wine shop. It had been another placid day, rare, absent of the bickering and passive-aggressive jabs that my mother and I so often exchanged, and we lingered at the table. My mother was clearly relieved to be able to keep the café going, and Ong Hai was happy that he had heard the hipsters comparing the banh mi favorably to New York.

But I had been thinking of little else but my father and Hieu and Ong Hai. Had it really always been Hieu who had taken care of us, who had found future jobs, who had moved us from place to place? All these years, had my grandfather been bending the stories about my father, shaping him into a man that his children could admire?

If Ong Hai had any sense of what had been changed for me, he didn't show it. He wanted to talk about ways to promote the Lotus Leaf through social media. “I been paying attention to the news,” he said. When the café had first opened I'd created a Facebook page for it, but almost nothing had been posted there since.

“Eh, focus on the food. It's more important,” my mother said.

When I looked at my grandfather he seemed lost in his plans. There were some people who seemed to wear a smile even when they weren't smiling, and he was one of those. Other people looked pissed even when they weren't, and probably that described my mother and me.

Ong Hai
, I imagined saying.
What is the truth about ba?
But I knew I wasn't going to say that to him. Not at that moment—maybe not ever.

My mother picked through the mail on the table, setting aside the thick fall catalogs for gardening gear and furniture. Then her hand froze for a second, reaching for a plain envelope, and I saw why: Sam's distinctive artsy handwriting, spelling out Durango Road in Franklin, Illinois. There was no return address.

She turned it over and tore it open with her thumb. Inside, wrapped in three pieces of blank white paper, were ten one-hundred-dollar bills. That was it. No note. No apology. I had never asked how much he'd stolen from the café or how much he'd gotten for my mother's gold jewelry.

The money, its crispness, its crudeness in the way it lay there on the table, tilted the whole evening. The juice glasses we'd been using for the prosecco seemed pathetic, and the three of us sitting together, plotting the future of the café, became ridiculous, incomplete. Leave it to Sam to disrupt everything again, to make a mess and do it obliquely, to deliver a slap without a word of explanation, and to do it all without ever having to make an answer to any of us.

My mother left the money on the table. She said, “I was thinking before that I don't like that new sign. It's too orange. Lotus leaves aren't orange.”

I didn't answer. She walked out of the kitchen.

I couldn't feel any anger toward her. Ong Hai and I left the money there too, soon retreating to our separate spaces.

Later, I was rewriting a paragraph when my mother came into my room. She stood in the doorway, looking around, perhaps noting the bag I'd already packed, gauging what I might be taking when I moved. It was almost midnight; usually she was asleep by then.

“Sam's phone number,” she said quietly. It wasn't a question, but it was.

I picked up my phone, located his number, and wrote it down on a half sheet of notebook paper. When I handed it to my mother she folded it into a smaller square without even looking at it.

“He's happy in California,” she said, another statement that doubled as a question.

“He seems to be,” I said.

We regarded each other, my mother and I, and I had to wonder if I appeared to her as she appeared to me: at some measure lost, irretrievable. I could not name the last time we had deliberately hugged or even touched. I thought of Hieu trying to take her hand and my mother pulling away. She had always known the stories Ong Hai had told about my father. She had neither demurred nor agreed. Her silence had allowed the stories to perpetuate, to take the place of the actual man—whoever he was.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the hundred-dollar bills Sam had sent. She held them out to me, saying, “Here.” When I didn't move, she shook the bills a little, impatiently, and said, “Take.”

I went to her and took the money. “What for?” I asked.

“You're moving soon. Probably need this.”

“Okay.” The bills were folded; they felt like Post-it notes in my palm. I imagined Sam collecting the money from Judson, then going back to his barely furnished room in that cantaloupe-colored Victorian. I saw him taking sheets of paper from the printer tray, wrapping them around the money, and maybe hesitating a minute, wondering if he should write something. What could he say?
I'm sorry
? That was no more likely of Sam than it was of my mother. Quickly, Sam would have put the money into an envelope and addressed it to our rental house in Illinois. Then he would have carried the envelope around for days while he remembered to get a stamp—the Liberty Bell in mid-ring—before sliding it into a corner mailbox somewhere in San Francisco.

“Thanks,” I said. My mother turned to leave and, in a burst of sadness, with those bills in my hand, I said, “He's sorry, you know. That's what he's trying to say.”

My mother paused her step. She said, “You don't remember what it was like. When you and Sam were kids. We worked hard—Ong Hai and I worked hard. Sometimes it wasn't enough.”

She was acknowledging, perhaps for the only time, what Hieu's money had signified. When she left a moment later she closed the door.

A thousand dollars. I was grateful for the gesture, and needed the money.
Now, take this for the monetary value it's worth
, I told myself,
and nothing more
. But, critic that I was supposed to be, I knew it would haunt me for a long, long time. As an allowance I'd never before been given. As a transfer, a payback, a slight reversal of the favor my mother had always shown one child over the other, a handing down from my mother to Sam to me. I would think of it as blood money. I would think of it as my mother's offering—if not of love, exactly, then something in its general vicinity, something having to do with protecting and, equally, relenting. Since I'd told her about the postdoc she hadn't made any remarks about how all the Vietnamese kids she knew stayed at home and understood that their first priority was family. She hadn't rolled her eyes at the idea of a doctorate in literature or talked about how so-and-so's son or daughter had just opened up his or her own dentistry practice. I wouldn't have gone so far as to say she'd accepted my decisions. Maybe she had just given up fighting them. Maybe she had learned something from Sam, and didn't, after all, want to risk losing contact with both of her children. Though if it was that, then she didn't know how impossible that would have been for me—to leave as Sam had done, to escape without looking back. For that was one of my biggest problems: I looked back all the time, too much, too often. Like Rose, I would be circling my mother the rest of my life.

I
n my new college town I found a studio apartment overlooking a park where kids and moms and strollers hang out by day and skateboarders clatter by night. I set up my desk so I could watch these people come and go, waiting for the first hints of autumn, and later snow, and later green, to stain the big-branched trees. I had an inflatable bed that doubled as my sofa and a blanket-covered box that worked well enough as a nightstand. From Craigslist I scored a TV for twenty bucks. Only the desk, a back-to-school special from Target, was new.

I didn't have much to unpack. Still, it took me two weeks to find Rose's gold pin. My mother had wrapped it in layers of tissue and tucked it into one of my garbage bags of clothes. Looking in the bathroom mirror, I affixed the pin to my T-shirt, trying it on for the very first time. Laura and Rose had worn it at the base of their throats, to set off the high-necked, lacy frills that were the style then. In the mirror, from any distance, the pin reminded me of something a flight attendant would have to wear. Only up close could the jewelry offer its surprise, that little lone house coming to life in just the right light, at just the right angle. I didn't know what to do with it, so I folded it back in the tissues and kept it in my desk.

Each day I walked to campus, usually to the office that came with my fellowship, sometimes to the library, where students stared at computers in the quiet of the great reading room. Some days I wrote. Some days I read about Homesteading Acts of the late 1800s. In the evenings I cooked in my little kitchen while watching eighties reruns. Whenever I was invited to gatherings with professors and grad students in my department, I went.

At the end of September I flew back to Chicago for a friend's wedding. I spent an extra night in Franklin because Ong Hai wanted to have a dinner out—a real dinner, he said, because we'd never actually celebrated my degree or my postdoc. So we went to a seafood restaurant in Downers Grove, with entrées that hovered in the thirty-dollar range. We never ate at places like that; when I graduated from Illinois and when Sam and I graduated from high school we had gone no fancier than Ong Hai's choice of P. F. Chang's. It was strange to see my grandfather in a new button-down shirt, sitting at a table with cloth on it instead of paper.

My mother was running late, held up over a disputed bill with the guy who had come to fix one of the café's refrigerators. Ong Hai and I ordered crudo appetizers and helped ourselves to the heaping bread basket. He said he'd been wanting to try the restaurant for years. He buttered the heel end of a baguette and chewed away.

There were many moments when I could have asked him about my father and Hieu. It wouldn't have been difficult but it wouldn't have been assuring, either. If I knew Ong Hai, I knew he would answer vaguely, more or less sticking to his story, then shift the subject.

I had come to accept, if not his version, then his belief in it, or at least his insistence on that belief. I couldn't blame him for wanting me and Sam to see our father in a better light, to keep him in our minds as someone who would have done so much if only he'd had the time. In Ong Hai's version of events, the wars in Vietnam needn't be dwelled upon. In his version, his old Café 88 had been a welcome haven for neighbors and tourists alike, even a mysterious American woman who had taken a liking to him, who had left him with a part of her history.

At the moment, Ong Hai's story was about the reinvigorated Lotus Leaf. Business had improved since the banh mi, and there were almost more orders than he could handle. It was a trifecta of banh mi, pho, and summer rolls, and now a Chicago magazine wanted to include the café in a feature titled “The Best Sandwiches in Chicagoland Right Now.”

“They're going to take a picture,” Ong Hai said. “I wish you could be in it.”

“You're the better representative,” I said. I asked if Hieu was still in town. I suspected that with his backing the café might stay open regardless of how it did.

He had started to come by the café more, Ong Hai said, and stayed for lunch or tea a couple of times a week.

“That's good for her, then,” I said.

“So we'll see.”

What about Sam, I asked—had my mother spoken to him?

Ong Hai didn't know. There'd been no mention of Sam since that day the thousand dollars had arrived in the mail, and Ong Hai's stance, as usual, was to be patient. He was certain Sam would return, certain that anything could be mended. As for me, there'd been no communication with my brother since that morning in San Francisco. Not even a text. Some days I felt resigned about the silence—what was there to say? Other days I insisted to myself that he would have to contact me first.

When my mother arrived at the restaurant, irritated from arguing with the repair guy, she didn't look like someone whose business worries had been allayed. And if she did have a suitor at her doorstep, then she wasn't showing it: as ever, her clothes, this time faded floral blouse and corduroys, looked bound for Goodwill or retrieved from there, hard to tell which.

Sitting down, she exclaimed at the prices on the menu and refused to get anything more than a shrimp appetizer and a glass of water. When the shrimp arrived she loudly pointed out that there were only two on the plate.

Ong Hai insisted we both try some of the miso-glazed black cod he'd ordered. She ate one forkful reluctantly, refusing to admit that it was good. But I saw her glance back at his plate.

“You coming back home for Christmas?” my mother asked.

“I guess so.” I'd never had another or better place to go during the holiday break.

“Sam too,” she replied, offhand. Ong Hai and I stared at her. She bit into a piece of bread and went on, “If he doesn't have to work. I talked to him yesterday.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“I just told you.”

“Is he still in the pharmaceutical industry?” I couldn't resist.

“That's a big money business right there,” my mother said.

“Did you tell him I moved?”

“I don't remember.”

“So you talk to him now,” I said.

“Well, geez, tell him to give me a call sometime too,” Ong Hai said. He laughed, diverting the tension of the moment.

I let it drop. I had wanted to leave my mother in a way that wouldn't nag at me for the next few weeks and months. I didn't want to fly back to my studio apartment thinking of all the things I could have batted back to her, the rejoinders left unsaid. I didn't want to be pressed to her will and words like that. But I should have known that I didn't have any such power to change that feeling of anticipated regret, at least not just yet.

We paid for the expensive seafood and went back home to the rental house in Franklin, and we watched television and drank more tea, and I slept again in the bedroom where I had spent much of the past summer. Later, when my mother and grandfather were asleep I got up to see my father's altar again, still decorated with extra candles from the memorial of his death in August. The only fruit in the house was a half bunch of bananas, so I set that in front of him, feeling how visibly they seemed to represent diminishment, a coming up short. What would my father have done with the rest of his days—where would we have all ended up? Would we have been together? When I closed my eyes I asked him to look out for us, if indeed he was a spirit, if indeed he could do such things. I'd been asking him some variation of that since I was six years old.

In the morning my mother left for the café before I even got up, and Ong Hai drove me to O'Hare. Then I was on a plane back to Philadelphia, looking down at the clouds and fields that separated us, stretching away like so many silences.

—

S
ince the fall semester of my postdoc was supposed to be devoted to writing, it was assumed that I would be revising parts of my dissertation and submitting them as articles to various journals, as well as doing preliminary research for my Next Project. I was an Americanist after all, my field and degree stamped and filed, and when the job market list appeared I dutifully sent out applications for two dozen different assistant professorships. I knew I didn't stand much of a chance, but figured it was better than doing nothing.
Those jobs have to go to
somebody, my adviser always said, her version of a pep talk. Amy and I still talked about living together in San Francisco and I kept that offer safe—a backup plan. Whatever happened, I wouldn't be going back to Franklin.

I might have easily driven up to the Mount, Edith Wharton's estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, a pilgrimage many of my colleagues had already made. I might have, but more and more my thoughts were turned instead to Danbury, Connecticut, four and a half hours away, where Rose Wilder had finally bought a house in 1938, at the age of fifty-one. She'd settled there, more or less, for the rest of her life, keeping it her home base through the next thirty years of traveling. By the time Laura died, in 1957, Rose had become only an infrequent visitor to Rocky Ridge. The fateful copy of
Free Land
, if indeed she'd inscribed those words on its pages when I thought she had, would have found its way into the farmhouse well after she'd stopped calling it home. Another mystery, another crux.

I made the drive to Danbury at the height of the fall colors, taking in the blaze of sugar maples and oaks as I stood outside the white colonial that had once belonged to Rose. It was someone else's now, a private residence, and I didn't see any marker or sign to indicate the history held there. Most people, driving past, would not have guessed that several of the
Little House
books had been shaped, rewritten, and edited within those walls. It reminded me to send a long-overdue e-mail to Gregory, telling him I was thinking, after all, of writing about what we had discovered, even if it was half or even wholly speculation. He wrote me back, then called, talking about his family, and mine, and the Ingallses and Wilders who had brought us together. By then Gregory was well into the secondary texts. By Thanksgiving we were exchanging notes and documents, starting to collaborate on a family history that seemed to belong, in a sense, to both of us.

True to my mother's word, Sam was in Chicago when I went back for Christmas. He told me he was still bunking in Judson's house, and though he would soon be able to afford his own place, what was the rush. Like me, he stayed in Franklin only a few days. We watched movies together; we pretended we had never argued. Whatever deal he and my mother had worked out, I didn't pursue. I knew that she and Ong Hai had already forgiven him every theft and transgression. My mother would let him go to ensure that he would return. In that way, Sam had won. In another way, my mother had. While the two of them shopped the holiday sales, Ong Hai and I cooked banh xeo, spring rolls, and lemongrass beef noodles. When he told his stories about Saigon I listened, then started, finally, to ask more questions.
Did you plan on having Café 88 forever?
(Never.)
Did anyone else in our family cook?
(His mother, who could tell the quality of a dish by its scent alone.)

Later, Hieu showed up for dinner, surprising me and Sam into near-meekness, all of us working to keep the conversation on food, or celebrities, or people who had nothing to do with us.

In this way I could imagine the future washing the past, not negating it exactly, but nonetheless polishing it, wearing down the stones.

Across the street, the old man had died. The kids were moving their mother away right after the holidays.

In early spring, after a last-minute Skype interview for a visiting teaching gig at a small college in southern Colorado, I received word that the job was mine. It was another temporary reprieve, another chance. In spite of all doubts, I didn't know any other track. Gregory was the first person I told, and the second thing we talked about was the school's proximity to Independence, Kansas, and the former “Indian Territory” site of the original
Little House on the Prairie
. We made summer plans to meet there, and to travel to the Hoover Library, where Gregory could read Rose's journals, and to drive to De Smet and Mansfield and perhaps even Burr Oak, Iowa, and Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and finally Pepin, Wisconsin, where Laura Ingalls had been born in the winter of 1867.

And now it is May, the month of my father's birthday, and I am packing up again. Whatever will fit in my car. The rest to sell, give away, leave at the curb.

Whenever the Ingalls family moved, Ma took extra care with her china shepherdess figurine and a decorative wooden bracket that Pa had carved for her. That these were objects of design, for pleasure rather than utility, has always stayed with me. And so I take particular care of the gold pin that I have, in whatever sense, inherited from Rose. Whichever Rose that was. Whoever she turns out to be. I take my computer full of notes and pages: my writing, whatever that will turn out to be. I retain, always, in the back of my mind, the twinges and fringes of guilt, about Alex, about Amy, about my family, and about Sam—more unfinished pages. Maybe it's my chronic, lifetime second-generation problem. Looking forward and looking back, trying to locate the just-right space in between. Always translating, and often getting the words wrong. Trying to figure out the clearest line of narrative, only to find more knots, more clouds. So far I have spent almost half of my life studying and thinking about American literature, and the landscape has seemed one of incredible, enduring, relentless longing. Everyone is always leaving each other, chasing down the next seeming opportunity—home or body. Where does it stop? Does it ever? I want to believe it all leads to something grander than the imagination, grander than the end-stop of the Pacific. Or is that it: You get to the place where you land; you are tired now; you settle. You settle. You build a home and raise a family. There are years of eating and arguing, working and waking. There are years of dying. No one knows what the last image will be. Rose might have stood in front of the Stellensons' house in her old age and wondered, guessed, ached. Or maybe she had not. Maybe she had sworn she wouldn't. Maybe she had thought,
Too late, too old, too late
.