World and Town (3 page)

“Do you speak English?” Slower this time.

A pause.

“Lit-tle,” he says finally. He pronounces the word with equal stress on both syllables.

“Well, welcome to town,” she says, trying not to speed up. Half the trick with English language learners, she knows, being the maintenance of a certain stateliness. “My name is Hattie. Hattie Kong. I live across the way, in the red house. See it over there? The red one.”

She inclines her head in the general direction of her place—a two-bedroom cottage, one floor, with aluminum roof flashing that does, well, flash in the sun. She isn’t the kind of city close where you can chat just fine without availing yourself of a phone, but by country standards they are cheek by jowl. Nobody would have picked it. Her neighbors’ front door faces west, like hers, and if they’d been set the same distance from the road, she’d probably have found it intolerable. It is just lucky her new neighbors are set downhill and a little farther back than she is. They can’t see into her place; nor she, she doesn’t think, into theirs. Of course, with a little figuring she could probably set a basketball to roll from her back porch down to the milk crate, but never mind.

“I came to say hello and welcome,” she says again, politely enough. “And to give you back your drawer.”

Nothing.

“I came to return your drawer.” Repeating herself like a record with a skip in it, if anyone even knows what a record is anymore. But there, at last: He glances down. Belatedly registering, it seems, that there is a white-haired lady bearing a kitchen drawer at his door.

“It’s yours. It belongs to you. Part of the trailer. I believe it fell out while they were moving it. The trailer, I mean.” She motions with her chin in case “trailer” is new vocabulary. “My name is Hattie Kong. I saw the men bring your house here.”

Silence.

Somewhere in the woods a woodpecker pecks its brains out.

“Chi-nee?” he asks finally.

A stress on both syllables again.

“Half,” she says, with a twinge. She has no earthly right, of course, to expect others, Asian or not, to perceive what she is. But having been asked all her life—well, there it is, a well-established little neural pathway, or should she say rut. “My father was Chinese, my mother was white.”

“Peo-ple say you Chi-nee,” he says.

“Well, that is half true.”

“Half Viet-nam,” says the man.

Viet-nam
, accent on the first syllable—Vietnamese?

“No no no,” Hattie says. “My mother was American, my father was Chinese. Do you know what a mutt is?”

“You speak Chi-nee?”

“I do. I grew up in China—a city called Qingdao. When I was growing up they spelled it T-S-I-N-G-T-A-O. Like the beer.”

He does not appear to have heard of the beer.

“I came to the U.S. when I was sixteen. Ten years ago,” she jokes.

No laugh. His eyes go on with their roving.

“You speak English good,” he says.

“My mother was an English teacher at a Methodist mission. Before she married my father, that is. So I guess I got the phonemes when I was a baby.”

Phonemes.

“Sounds, I mean,” she says. “I heard the sounds.”

“You speak Chi-nee too,” says the man. “Boat.”

Boat
. Both.

“Yes,” she says. “I speak both.”

“Amm-erri-ken.”

Amm-erri-Ken
, with a rolled
r
—American.

“I’m American now. Yes.”

The woodpecker pecks.

“Eat Chi-nee food?”

“Do I eat Chinese food? Of course.”

He brightens. “Chi-nee food number one.” He puts his thumb up. His eyes seem to focus, his face to broaden and regularize—a handsome man, once upon a time. For a moment she can see him in a suit and tie, with slicked-back hair and a cell phone.

She changes her grip on the drawer. “And your name is?”

“Ratanak Chhung.”

Ra-tanak. Ra-tanak
. She repeats it to herself to fix in her memory. Accent on the first syllable.
Chhung
is easy.

“Chhung is your surname?” Checking because though Asian surnames usually come first, people do often switch things around when they come here.

He nods, but with nothing like the woodpecker’s energy, she has to say. He is more like the tree being pecked.

“May I call you Mr. Chhung?” Somewhere she has gotten the idea that respectful forms of address are important to Cambodians—from Greta, probably. Greta the well informed.

“American call me Chhung,” he says. “Just Chhung.”

“Ratanak is too hard,” she guesses. “Not that hard, but too hard for some. Too long.”

A delay. But then finally he nods, as if in accordance with an order sent from afar.

“Americans can be so lazy,” she goes on. “Hardworking as they are.”

A more definite bob.

Such an odd sound, pecking.

Hattie did not teach English as a Second Language back when she taught high school; she taught Biology and Mandarin. Still, in-house immigrant that she was, she’d been called in to help with the English Language Learners all the time, and had heard, over the years, all manner of accent. And yet she’d never encountered one quite like Chhung’s. The chop of his speech, certain features of his grammar, that trouble with ending consonants—all these resemble problems native Chinese speakers have. Problems her father had, and that she probably had too, fifty or sixty years ago. But Chhung has that bit of a rolled
r
, in addition—kind of a Spanish-lite deal. Also those very short syllables, and an odd stress pattern. She has to still herself to understand him. Concentrate.

And so it is that she is concentrating—carefully casually asking about his wife and children or some such—when a corner of the crate sinks. She shoots her hand toward the doorframe but still half steps, half falls off the crate, turning her bad ankle and dropping her drawer clean into the mud. Her bad ankle!—she works it a bit, to make sure it’s all right; this being her right foot, her bad foot—one of the reasons she always wears lace-ups with real support, though don’t those sheepskin jobs look easy on.

Chhung diplomatically says nothing. But then he answers, “One boy, one girl”—as if that information, like the instruction to nod, has finally reached him. He forwards it on with a gentler voice than before, though—not wanting to go knocking her over again, maybe. “One baby. And two udder one, not here.”

Two other whats? And why aren’t they here? Well, never mind. Hattie goes on with her joint trials.

“Please say hello,” she says. “Please tell them welcome to the neighborhood. Tell them they can drop by anytime. Okay if I leave you your drawer?”

It does seem unmannerly to leave it there on the ground, but then this Chhung is not exactly Mr. Manners himself.

“I’m going to leave you your drawer,” she says. (A good helping of her mother’s
sorry-to-do-this
in her voice, she notices.) “The cookies are for you and your family.”

He nods, more or less.

Pecking.

A porta-potty sits in a dry spot up behind the trailer—a ladies’ toilet they have, for some reason, with a little triangle-skirted figure on its green door. Did zoning okay that? And how are they going to get a septic in, what with the ground so wet? The trailer is quiet except for the
shush-rat-tat
of a mop or towel being wrung out into a pail.
Shush-rat-tat. Shush-rat-tat
.

That roof seam must have leaked something terrible.

Shush-rat-tat
.

An interesting counterpoint to the woodpecker.

Shush-rat-tat
.

Is that the girl mopping?

The sorrows of the rich are not real sorrows
. Hattie does not hear her father’s voice too often, but she hears it now.
The sorrows of the rich are not real sorrows; the comforts of the poor are not real comforts
. Was that a Chinese saying or something her father just liked to say? She doesn’t even know.

And never will, now, probably.

Mud. The mud sucks so hard at her boots as she tromps uphill, she is just glad they are tied on. Then there she is again, returned to her own damp but springy grass. Down below the white lake glitters; the treetops toss. Some advanced clouds are already starting to move back in, and somewhere far off a car beeps in a way you don’t hear much around here.

H
attie’s no artist. Joe used to call her Miss Combustible, and probably in her day she was indeed lit more by the blindness of the world than its beauty. Vietnam! Staff firings! Library closings! She fought them all. But her chief job these days is to reconstitute herself.
(That you might rise and fight again
, Lee would say—one of her favorite quotes being from some old warrior who is said to have said, as he lay a-drip on a field,
I’ll but lie and bleed awhile. Then I will rise and fight again!)
And, well, the painting has been a help with that—especially on bad days it’s been a help. Maybe just because it’s something Hattie did growing up—her childhood associations tied to her muscle motions—who knows. Anyhow, it’s gotten her up out of the voracious depths of Joe’s reclin-o-matic—her official mourning chair—starting with the slow making of ink in her father’s old inkwell. That inkwell being a mini-doorstop of a thing, into which she pours a bit of water, and above which she circles her wrist, ink stick in hand. Circling and circling. The best ink being made
wú wéi
—by acquainting the stick with the water, never pressing. Dissolving the fine particles of lampblack one by one, practically. Who needs meditation? By the time she’s ready to dip her
máobĭ
in the dark ink, Hattie’s full, not so much of Western-style contentment as of detachment—what the old Chinese scholars used to seek.
Dá guān—
a feeling that one has risen above life, seen through it. Attained a monklike lightness by sitting the proper way—back straight—and by holding her goat-hair
máobĭ
, likewise, not at an angle like a pen, but straight up, like a lightning rod. She pauses, poised. And then—the judicious pressure, the traveling lightness, the slowing, pressing lift that produces a segment of bamboo. The segments narrow through the middle of the stalk, then grow wider and darker again; each stroke
shēng yì
, as her father used to say—a living idea.

Bamboo: the plant that, as every Chinese knows, bends but does not break.

It’s absorbing. Still she does listen, a little, for her neighbors as she paints. Finding, as she does, that if she opens a window in the right wind, she can sometimes hear chopping and washing. Frying, pounding—a lot of pounding. Meaning spices, probably. Who knows what Cambodians eat, or with what. Do they use their hands, like Indians? Hattie’s delighted to hear the noises in any case, if only because of what it says about her hearing. Studies say the hairs of a young inner ear can detect motion the breadth of a hydrogen atom. Well, hers are nothing like that. What with the loss of some of her higher frequencies, in fact, she’s finding even mouse squeaks sounding different these days—more sonorous, as if their little mouse chests have been getting bigger.

Thanks to the inevitable sad stiffening of your basilar membrane
, Lee would say.

Something she learned from Hattie, actually, who used to measure the highest frequencies her kids could hear and chart them, showing how they lowered every year.

But Hattie’s neighbors. She’s delighted to be able to hear them and delighted, too, that she can glimpse a portion of their doings, it turns out, from various windows as she crosses the room to wash out her brushes. Not spying, exactly.

Hattie nose full of beeswax
.

She does try not to spy. Trained in observation as she’s been, though, she can’t help but notice how in the mornings there’s only the outside of the trailer to see: that black plastic crate; that beat-up front paneling; those small metal windows with their oversized louvers; and that one good-sized picture window, mullioned tic-tac-toe style. In the afternoons, though, she can see both inside and out by the low west sun. Nothing too much through the ruffle-curtained bedroom windows, but the picture window affords a fine view, and by night the living room lights up clear enough that she’s begun keeping her spare distance glasses on the windowsill. She has, nota bene, stopped short of parking her binoculars there, too; she does have some pride.

And yet somehow she soon knows that right around four the girl is almost always out front, swatting flies. She sits sideways on the milk crate, keeping the light out of her eyes—which position puts her body half in shadow, half in light, as she works her glinting knife or gray mortar and pestle. There’s a colander beside her, usually, and a bunch of plastic bowls—green and yellow and fish-belly white. Assorted dish towels, too, for the heaps of peels. All of which helps perk up the otherwise bleak scene, like her shocking-pink jacket, which she generally leaves open.

Today, though, it’s zipped shut like Hattie’s fleece—Hattie having moved her painting table onto the back porch for fun, only to find some winter teeth left in the early-spring air. She’s had to warm up her red hands several times—tucking them into a spot under her breasts, right in the fold there, as she likes to do. It’s a private pleasure. For though she is mostly an old lady with an old lady’s epithelial cells, that part of her body, if she may boast, is still soft and new. Of course, if she had gone out running in her underwear the way the girls do these days, well, who knows. But never mind. The girl’s jacket is zipped up, is the thing, half on account of the cold, and half because the baby is with her, and zipped up in it. Hattie watches the bouncing going on in the girl’s lap—a live pink jiggling—the baby poking its head out every now and then so that its face is right in front of the girl’s. It pats her face and pulls her hair; that’s when it doesn’t look to be trying to eat her. And has she ducked into her jacket now, too? All Hattie can see is squirming—the hood flapping up and down and the two armless sleeves flying around like a scarecrow’s. How loud the girl and baby squeal! Hattie couldn’t block them out if she wanted to.