Pioneer Girl (8 page)

But of course, my mother wasn't about to let me get away so easily. After her shows she walked into my room without knocking and said, “You going to the restaurant tomorrow?”

I sat up from the bed, feeling like I'd been caught at something far worse than wondering if maybe the
Little House
books had so much food in them because they'd been written during the Great Depression. She made a face, of course. She thought it was a lazy thing to do, reading. Like who did I think I was, some leisurely empress dowager?

“Yeah.” I closed the biography partway, keeping my place with the edge of my pillow.

My mother was dressed in what Sam and I referred to as classic Old Asian Lady garb: loose, comfortable pants with an elastic waist, button-down tunic blouse, velvet-trimmed house slippers. Hers was a wardrobe of clearance items and clothes kept so long they'd become vintage. Sometimes her look crossed over into accidentally hip, like when she rolled up the sleeves of a nineties plaid shirt and paired it with Bermuda shorts and a sun visor.

Surveying the room, the clothes I'd thrown over the back of the chair, the books I'd piled on the floor, she made a little
hmmph
sound, the one I knew too well, had memorized from my earliest days, earliest memories. That sound managed to express disapproval, disbelief, and disdain all at once. She was good at that, and she was punishing me for going to Iowa.

“You get a job for the fall?”

“Not yet.”

“Why can't you get a job at the college here?” she asked for about the thirtieth time, referring to the community college where Sam had halfheartedly taken classes.

“Because that's not how it works. I already told you that.”

“It's a job. You go in, you apply. It's just a job.”
Don't think you're so special
, her tone conveyed.

Both Sam and I had learned, early on, that it was usually easier to lie or play dumb or both. This shirt? I got it on sale, five dollars! That iPod? Great deal from the university—practically free! I had always lied about where I was going. Lied about the roommates I lived with. Everything was a bargain; everyone was always nice, quiet, and studious.

“What were you doing in Iowa?”

“Helping out a friend and doing research.”

“They must have very special libraries there,” she remarked. “Well, now you're back. You can have Jennie's job now.”

“You let her go? Why'd you do that?”

“You should be happy to have a job.”

And with that—midargument for me, the finale for her—she turned and left, not even closing the door. I heard her own door shutting and I pictured her peeling back the old bedspread that I had smoothed out less than a week earlier, worried she would suspect that Sam had searched her room. I pictured her opening the bottom dresser drawer and realizing all the jewelry was gone.

I understood that my fleeing to Iowa had wounded my mother more than it had angered her. Which was worse, because instead of triumph there was just that strange sensation that I could only call immigrant guilt. If my mother had ever felt this way, she never let on. She was one of those stoic Asians that my other Asian American friends and I would sometimes joke about. No nonsense, all business, and a little scary.

Once, on a holiday visit home back when I was an undergrad, I had asked my grandfather if she'd been different years ago, before my father.

“No,” Ong Hai said. He laughed as he said it. “Your ma is always serious. Even when she was very young. Little serious girl. That's your ma.”

It's what made her a hard worker, he said. She had apprenticed her way into running her own business. She knew how to balance books, keep track of cash flow, maintain supplies, and do the taxes. She did as much as she could herself, because she was cheap and because she liked to be in charge. But it seemed that whenever I began to respect her for this she would pick another fight and I wouldn't back down. By this point, we had spent more years unhappy with each other than anything else.

—

T
he days resumed in pointed silence. We woke up early, worked at the Lotus Leaf, watched TV. But Rose had made me restless. With every swipe of a customer's credit card and every fold of a spring roll I was planning my next departure.

Sam sent me a text on the day of the week when my mother and Ong Hai liked to watch a dance competition show involving D-list celebrities. Ong Hai asked me to join them, so I sat on the sidelines, in a creaky wicker chair my mother had picked up a decade ago at a garage sale. Like most of our furnishings, it was a temporary solution that had become permanent. Any effort I'd made over the years—a throw pillow or decorative vase—only looked pitiful. My mother called such things a waste of money, and she went out of her way not to use them, making a point to serve food on the Fiestaware she'd had for decades instead of the Crate & Barrel outlet dishes I'd brought with me from Madison.

 

In Calif,
Sam wrote.
What did you find out?

 

I thought about taking my time answering—wait a few days, as he had. On the TV screen a couple was gyrating around, some kind of dirty dancing hip-hop mix.

Nothing
, I texted back. Which was true. I wasn't going to be Sam's personal assistant. And what was there to find, anyway? I didn't remember Hieu's last name, so I couldn't look him up. Ong Hai had made it clear he wouldn't be talking about the subject. And my mother was the unapproachable fortress she'd always been.

Sam persisted.
Did you find out about the $

Where are you in CA?
I wrote.

SF.

I didn't answer his question about the money. Instead, I looked up at my mother and grandfather.

Ong Hai was nodding off on the sofa, having had a rare third beer. The TV show hadn't even gotten to the judging yet but he stood up and said good night. I got up too, went to the kitchen to get something to eat. The refrigerator was packed with leftovers but I put a pot of water on for pasta. I waited there, flipping through clothing catalogs.

My mother appeared as I was about to drop a handful of spaghetti into the water.

“What are you doing?” she asked, in her voice that meant,
What's wrong with you?
“Don't use so much spaghetti. You waste it.”

“I'll eat it.”

“You better,” she said. She got herself a few saltines, letting the cupboard slam shut.

Don't engage
, I told myself, but I couldn't help it. “You don't even like pasta.”

“You think I need to eat it to know it? I know you waste it. Next day you make it all new again and waste it some more. You never know how much to make.”

I didn't reply, hoping she'd go back to the living room.

But then she said, “Lee,” in that universal mother voice of command.

Whatever she was going to say I didn't want to know—didn't want to hear it. So I said, “Sam's in San Francisco.”

She kept her focus on the saltines, crunching them. She said, “Tell him we buy a house. He always wanted one. Maybe one of those condos. What they call a town house.”

So she was going to pretend I hadn't thrown her off at all.

“I like a brand-new house,” she said, like one of her customers considering a menu.

Of course she remembered that Sam had always envied his friends' homes and never brought anyone over to wherever we lived. Neither had I. Nothing could ever be ours, Sam had complained, until we owned. We couldn't even paint the walls. My mother had, in the past, made vague promises of buying—
Soon, soon
, she would say—but we knew better than to believe her. How could we cement ourselves to a home and mortgage when there was, at any time, a chance of moving somewhere else?

Here was my doorway to the Hieu question. “How could you even afford it?”

“That's not your business.”

“Hieu?”

Whether I'd finally uttered the word for Sam's sake or my own, I couldn't have said, but I felt myself backing away a little, preparing for my mother's wrath.

Again she surprised me. “Not your business,” she repeated simply.

Sam had figured out how to make it his business, by leaving. I pushed: “I don't think your plan is going to bring him back. He's not a kid. He's twenty-seven years old.”

“
You're
here.”

“Temporarily.”

She waved a handful of crackers. “Same stupid talk. You'll learn one day. You just make sure Sam is back.” She returned to the living room, stepping out of her pink Dearfoam slippers and leaving them next to the sofa.

I'd done so well resisting her, but I couldn't resist following her. I would have muted the television but my mother had the remote in her grip.

“I'm not going to do that, even if I could.”

“You do what I say.” It wasn't a threat; it was a forecast. She was counting on me to follow her directions.

Without another word she aimed the remote, increasing the volume of an insurance commercial. She wasn't going to look at me again.

She had won. I went back to the kitchen. Even before I drained the spaghetti I knew my mother was right again: I had made too much. I always did. I was the kind of person who always had to add a little bit more, just in case. Just one of my many deficiencies. And as my mother knew, behind every deficiency lurked a greater danger and menace.

Once, when I was in eleventh grade, she'd announced, “Your friend Erin might have leukemia. She's always sick, always sneezing.”

“She has allergies,” I'd explained. “She has to get shots for them.”

My mother shook her head and said, “You just wait and see.” I worried about Erin for years.

If Sam or I showed a hint of a cough or stuffy nose our mother would make us eat enormous bowls of a flavorless rice soup called chao, and apply the noxious-smelling Tiger Balm to our chests. She had a way of making us believe that we would perish if we didn't heed her directions. I didn't recall ever going to a doctor for anything but vaccinations, because my mother suspected that Western medicine was one big scam. She was convincing—so able to mix her conviction with our fears—and if I didn't exactly trust her, I couldn't help believing her.

At the time, I'd chalked it up to the stereotypes I'd absorbed at school:
That's how old-school Asian people are
. But what if it was something else? What had my mother suffered that made her so fearful of others' secret intentions and maladies?

The previous week, at the café, my mother had glared so intently at a customer using an hour of WiFi over one cup of coffee that he finally left, probably never to return. Later I joked to Ong Hai that only she could manage to turn free WiFi into a detriment to business. But of course my mother would be suspicious of the Internet. She had wanted no part of it in the first place. It was the apotheosis of a wild wood, with too many ways to get in trouble.

Sam's abandonment must have felt to her like a confirmation of all her worst suspicions about us and the world we'd grown up in—and into, despite her attempts to cloister us. Yet she had spoiled Sam, was what I'd always insisted to Ong Hai, whether he agreed or not. I blamed her for not making Sam grit his way through school like everyone else. I blamed her for relenting. If she got upset when the school called again about his cutting classes, Sam would tell her she was too controlling. He'd go off with his friends, sometimes returning drunk, hung over, or smelling of weed, and the next day my mother would glower, but that was it. She didn't ground him, or even, as far as I could tell, stop giving him money. And eventually the argument would recede and the flow of our household would go on. We all got along fine, I would have said to anyone. But I also wondered how we had ever managed. Did we have laughs? How had we spent all those years?

—

O
n the morning that Sam left for the first time, my mother was just two weeks away from opening the Lotus Leaf. It was a couple days after Christmas and my plan had been to sleep in, have lunch with Ong Hai, then drive back to Madison. But I awoke to the sound of arguing: my mother's voice rising, reaching every part of the house. She was yelling about Sam's car.

I got out of bed and lifted a slat of the window blinds. Outside, the gray Honda Civic my mother had bought for him was smashed in along the front and one side. One of the headlights looked like it had been cleanly carved away.

In the living room, Sam was slumped on the cracked leather sofa, somehow managing to yawn and roll his eyes at the same time, while my mother stood over him. He'd gone out the night before and it looked like he'd slept in his clothes, a uniform of dark jeans and hooded sweaters. Now he was chumbing through one of the cookware catalogs my mother kept on the coffee table. Our artificial Christmas tree, prelit and predecorated, stood near the altar to our father and Buddha, looking sorrowful in the morning light. Ong Hai had left the fleece-lined slippers and winter boots we'd given him under the tree.
It's a foot-themed Christmas
, he had said, and I thought of that later. An ominous thing that Sam and I had accidentally done.

My mother grabbed the pages from Sam's hands. “Drunk driving,” she told no one in particular. “So much money to fix the car! Maybe it can't even get fixed!”

She was mixing her English with Vietnamese, her hands balled into fists. Ong Hai popped in from the kitchen, holding a carrot and a peeler. “Hey, Lee,” he called out, as if a fight weren't erupting before us. “Come over and help.”

As I went to the kitchen Sam said, “It's not like I got a DUI. It was just an accident.”

Ong Hai pointed me toward a bowl of mung bean noodles, freshly rinsed and ready to be chopped into smaller pieces. It would be mixed with shrimp, pork, carrots, fish sauce, sugar, garlic, and seasonings, spread carefully into cha gio egg rolls. I took scissors and, as he had taught me years ago, started cutting within the bowl of noodles, lifting up handfuls of the fine, translucent threads and snipping whichever ones seemed too long. The noodles gave off their peculiar sweetish, musty scent that always reminded me of browsing through the narrow aisles of Asian grocery stores.