by Eric Nguyen
“What’s that supposed to mean? Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m saying we can always choose to do good, even if we’ve done bad,” Vinh said. “It’s why I look after you all. It’s maybe the one good thing I can do in the world. I’m here to stay, kid. I’m here to look after you and your brother and your mother. That’s what families do, you know?”
“What does this have to do with anything? I’m gonna be late.”
“You have a choice,” Vinh said as Tuấn walked away, not yelling but keeping his voice steady. “You always have a choice.”
“I don’t need a guardian angel,” Tuấn yelled at the bottom of the steps and ran off.
When he got to Quang’s laundry shed, Thảo was flipping through a magazine on the couch. The radio played “Motownphilly.” Outside, the sun was setting, marking the sky purple and blue and orange.
Thảo pulled the blinds closed and they sat down on the couch. He spread out lengthwise, laying his body down, and Thảo spread herself on top of him. She placed her head on his chest and held his hands. Her own hands, somehow, were always cold.
“What you’re doing,” she said. “It’s very brave.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really. None of the other guys would do it. But you, you stepped right up. That’s why I like you, Tuấn. You’re a doer. You do things. The other guys just like to talk. They’re talkers. They’re more like…I don’t know, managers!” She laughed and massaged his hands. Her hands were freezing, and he wanted to pull his away. Tuấn moved his eyes to the door, then the blinds. Thảo tugged his chin and her lips met his. When she let go, she massaged his chest and moved down his torso.
The first time they had sex, all he remembered were hands. Her hands were everywhere. Freezing. He imagined it was what snow felt like. Not knowing what to do, he moved his hands, too, but they fumbled and shook because he was so nervous. She wasn’t. Thảo was experienced, and she did not approve of his slowness and clumsiness. After he came, she got off him and he closed his eyes. When he opened them she was gone. He called her at home. She said he looked so peaceful she didn’t want to disturb him, so she left. He didn’t tell her, but he felt used. Though he enjoyed it, the feeling of her body against his, the speed of it all, he couldn’t shake that feeling. He wanted more of her.
When he first met her, he had never met a Vietnamese girl so proud of being Vietnamese. All the other girls acted, somehow, more American. They had their Vietnamese names—beautiful names, he thought—but they told everyone to call them by their American names—Samantha, Becky, or some other bland name. But Thảo was Thảo. She spoke Vietnamese fluently and, though he had forgotten most of it, it still sounded beautiful to him. It gave him butterflies, still, when she said người yêu or cưng ơi, less because they were terms of love but because they were Vietnamese. That she hung out with the Southern Boyz made sense.
“The Việt girls here with their white names and straight As think if they do everything right they’ll be fine, they’ll have a happy life,” she once told him. “But they forget they’re người Việt. We’ll never be American enough for the people here. People look at us a certain way and they always will.”
There’s truth in that, Tuấn thought. He’d lived most of his life in New Orleans, yet there was always a feeling that he didn’t belong.
“That’s why I like SBZ,” she went on. “They have Việt pride.”
When they finished this time, he didn’t fall asleep. He looked at his watch. Nearly seven. He had time to kill.
“Do you want to grab a burger or something?” he asked as she got dressed. She looked up as if surprised he was there.
“I’m not hungry,” she said after a long silence.
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you later, Tuấn.”
“When?”
“Later,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
She picked up her purse and left.
* * *
—
At 9:50, Tuấn sat beside a trash can on the corner of Bourbon and St. Louis. The sidewalk was moist because it had rained on and off during the day. Clouds hung in the sky under the moonlight. Tuan took in a breath of air and held it there until he couldn’t take it anymore, letting it out furiously. His hands shook and the bat shook, too, making a soft, tinny, irregular rhythm on the concrete.
At the laundry shed, Quang had told Tuấn he was proud of him. He had patted Tuấn on the back, and it made Tuấn smile. As he had walked down Bourbon, passing all the tourist bars, he was confident. Yet now on the corner of St. Louis, he couldn’t even walk anymore. He collapsed and leaned on the trash can. Then an idea occurred to him: they didn’t want to scare an old lady themselves, so they’d handed it off to him.
“Motherfucker,” Tuấn said. He looked at his watch. 9:54. He took in another breath and let it out. His lungs burned.
It was cold. It was October, and nights would be in the fifties, maybe the forties. He bet it was warm in Wei Huang. He began walking. Wei Huang was the third store on the block. At the door, he paused.
Inside, Madame Wei counted money and wrote down her calculations on a piece of paper. Tuấn touched the door handle and pulled and, as in their plan, a bell rang.
Madame Wei looked up from her money.
“Oh, allo!” she said. “We about to close. Can I help?” She smiled and put down her pen and crossed her hands in front of her.
Tuấn licked his lips and tapped the bat against the floor. The steel made a hollow sound.
“I’m just getting back from baseball practice,” he said and pointed to the bat. “I was walking,” he continued, “and I’m hungry.” He rubbed his stomach to let her know. “Can I look around?” He was speaking slowly and loudly like people sometimes did when they assumed he didn’t know any English, and he felt ashamed.
“Of course,” she exclaimed. “Take time!”
He began walking down the aisle. As he inspected the shelves, a pang of nostalgia came to him as he saw the foods of his childhood: haw flakes in red tubes, salted dried plums in small plastic boxes, White Rabbit candy. When he was out of Madame Wei’s sight, in the back near the refrigerator, he took one of the bags of White Rabbit candies and stuffed it into his pocket. He slowed his pace.
He knew what lay in the end. He bit down on his lips. The store looked smaller. It seemed, almost, to collapse onto him, all of it—the walls, the shelves, the packages of food with gold Chinese characters.
Soon he was back to the front counter again, but this time Madame Wei was gone.
For a second, Tuấn was relieved. He imagined what he would say. “She just up and disappeared,” he would tell Quang, and everything would happen according to plans. The store would disappear and he would join the Southern Boyz. Easy! Tuấn told himself. Piece of cake!
A microwave signaled, a steady beeping sound.
Madame Wei came out of the back room. She held up a Tupperware container. The sides were fogged up and he couldn’t tell what was in it.
As she walked to the counter, Tuấn saw that she had left the money there, next to the cash register, out in the open. She uncovered the container and steam rose out. “For you,” she said. “Here, here.”
At first Tuấn didn’t understand. “No,” he said. “No.”
“But you hungry,” she said. “Here, here.” She pushed the container toward him until he was forced to hold it. He looked down and saw noodles and pieces of vegetables and thick cuts of meat, all in a brown soup. “Here, here,” Madame Wei said again. She handed him a plastic fork. “Eat, eat,” she said.
“But,” Tuấn said. He smelled the broth. Beef. Like phở but not.
“Eat, eat,” she repeated.
Finally, he dug down the fork, lifted it to his mouth, and chewed. It was nothing special. It was no
t salty enough and needed more pepper. But it was warm and he drank all of the broth before slurping up the rest of the noodles. Madame Wei smiled the whole time.
When Tuấn was done, he didn’t know what to do, so he gave her a five-dollar bill and left, dragging the steel bat behind him.
Outside, Tuấn felt the chill of the air. The temperature must’ve dropped five or ten degrees, somehow, in minutes. He pulled his hood over his head, held the bat under his arm, and placed his hands in his pockets. Not wanting to go home, he sat on a bench in Jackson Square.
He woke up near midnight and opened his eyes to a woman and her kid in the distance. He saw only their silhouettes, but they were the same size as his mother and brother. For a second, his heart stopped. He was thinking it was them, that they had found him out. She would grab him and drag him home, screaming and yelling and embarrassing him. (She did that once to his brother in a church. For a month, all of Versailles gave them mean stares, and she told Tuấn and Bình what they thought didn’t matter because they weren’t family.) He stood up, prepared to run, and as they came closer, he saw he was wrong. He ran away anyway, and the mother pulled her son closer to her, out of the way, away from danger. Running down the streets of the Quarter, he realized he was nearly disappointed it wasn’t them. He took a bus home.
Tuấn would avoid Quang and the others that night and the next night and the entire week.
Later, he would go to Quang to confess. The woman was old and fragile, he would say. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. They shouldn’t do it. He had good reasoning, too, he would say. The old woman would die very soon. She had no family. The business would die. There would be no more Chinese in the Quarter, perhaps in all of New Orleans. The Quarter could be Vietnamese territory.
But Quang would have found out about it already. He would have taken care of it by then, too. Quang, with a smirk on his face and beer bottle in hand, would stand over a bonfire and tell his story: how he made that old hag cry, how he drove her out of her own store, and how, to make sure she would never come back, he smashed everything—the display case, the shelves of food, the neon sign, the window. And he took the money and he walked out.
“The old lady just left it there on the counter. That stupid cunt,” he would say. “Here’s the thing…” And he would see Tuấn from the corner of his eyes and he would shake his head and stop talking. Everyone else would quiet down, too. He shared secrets only with family, Quang would say then, and Tuấn wasn’t family.
Ben
1992
That summer, Addy wanted to join the swim team. In her front yard, she’d stretched like a swimmer, straightening her legs and touching her toes before racing across the grass as Ben watched from the porch.
“Imagine that’s me in the water,” she would tell him.
By July, she was ready for the pool, all the way out in Gentilly, and Ben followed along despite not knowing how to swim.
He sat on a vinyl lounge chair off to the side with a book and watched boys jump off the diving board, each yelling playfully before hitting the water.
“I get seasick just looking at it,” he told Addy.
“Don’t, then,” she said.
“I can’t help it.”
Another boy hit the water and Ben imagined himself doing the same, but instead of popping up on the other side, he’d drown and die. He shook his head and returned to his book. There was summer reading to do, and he was already ahead, with two of the three books done. He read a chapter before deciding it was a good time to stop. He let the book lie open facedown on the chair and left for the concessions stand.
By the time he got back, a skinny, older white boy and what must have been his father sat in their chairs. The father had a bad, uneven tan that made him look like he was wearing a pale shirt. The boy was just pale all over. Ben’s book sat on the concrete, closed.
He ran over. “Hey, hey, hey!” he yelled. He waved his arms in the air to get their attention. “Don’t you see our stuff?”
“What stuff?” said the boy. His voice was sharp and it sounded like he was chewing gum or had something in his mouth.
“Our stuff,” Ben said, then to clarify, “our bags, our towels, my book!”
“Where?” The boy held his arms in the air and shrugged his shoulders, cool—Ben would remember later—as a glass of lemonade. “Where? Where? Where?” The boy was mocking him now. And his father, having set down his glasses, walked away.
“There,” Ben said.
The boy looked under the chair and picked up the book. Water had splashed on the cover; a dark patch stained the front. “Oh,” he said. “These?”
“Duh, those!” Ben reached over and grabbed his stuff with such force that everything fell out of his hands and scattered on the ground. He picked it all up and began to leave.
“Hey, you! Hey, kid!” the boy called after. His voice was loud, tightly coiled, controlled. “You forgot something.”
Ben looked around and saw the boy waving Addy’s shirt and shorts, both hot pink. He turned his head toward the pool. Addy was still doing laps, oblivious to what was happening. He imagined what he’d tell her. “This white boy…” he would begin with a smack of his lips, the way they always began when they told stories about the crazy white people they met—This white man thought I stole something from his store; this white lady thought I was someone else because apparently all of our kind look the same….
Ben walked back and grabbed them. “My friend’s,” he huffed.
“This white boy…” he said to himself. Addy would enjoy his story.
* * *
—
Addy came up and, without drying, took a seat next to Ben. Her body squeaked against the vinyl.
“What happened?” she asked. “Why you change seats? Took me a good minute to find you.”
“So this white boy took them,” Ben started, putting his book down, “when I was getting snacks.”
“You shouldn’t leave our stuff alone, Ben,” she interrupted. “You know how folks around here are.”
“But our stuff was there.”
“But nothing. You know how people are.”
Addy was raising her voice; he was raising his. He imagined people looking at them, assuming they were a couple. He felt embarrassed and looked down at his hands.
Addy smacked her lips. “Just be careful. That’s all I’m telling you. That’s all I’m saying.”
She dried herself and he returned to his book, though he couldn’t concentrate. He read and reread the same sentence over and over a dozen times before Addy started talking again.
“Can you help me with this?” she asked. He looked over and Addy held out a bottle of waterproof Hawaiian Tropic. “I’m supposed to reapply every hour. It says right here on the bottle.”
He grabbed it and Addy turned away. He squeezed the lotion onto his hands and spread it across Addy’s back, first with only a finger, then, hesitantly, he used both hands until her entire back was all white and pasty. Under the sun, the chemical scent of the Hawaiian Tropic intensified. It reminded him of cleaning supplies and made him gag. He tried to think of something else, anything but Addy’s skin and the smell and texture of the lotion until he spotted the boy sitting where they’d sat. Shirtless, the boy stretched out on his chair, faceup, his sunglasses reflecting the sun. Even from this distance, Ben saw his breathing.
“Make sure you don’t miss a spot,” Addy interrupted. “I don’t wanna get cancer.”
“You’re not going to get cancer. Who gets cancer?” he said. “Done. I’m gonna wash my hands in the bathroom.”
“Just use the pool,” Addy said.
He looked at the water, then back at Addy, and nodded and walked to the edge of the water, where he bent his knees into a squat. As his hand broke the cool surface, Addy dove in. The drops of the splash scattered in the air, an
d for a second Ben saw a rainbow. He let his hand sit as she became smaller and smaller the farther away she swam. Soon the pink cap was out of sight. His eyes wandered back to the boy, but his seat was empty. He let out a quiet sigh—of relief or disappointment, he wasn’t sure—and, when the lotion was gone, headed back to the chairs. To his surprise, the boy was there.
Ben couldn’t help but smirk as he ran. “You again,” he called out, trying to sound serious and angry, but all he wanted to do was giggle. “Do you take everyone’s seat? Is that your thing? Is that what you always do?”
“Are you new here?” the boy asked.
“What?”
“I’m here every summer,” the boy continued. “Been coming here every summer, and it’s just—I’ve never seen you before.” He took off his sunglasses to reveal serious blue eyes.
“It’s ’cause I live in New Orleans East,” Ben said. He felt himself blushing.
“Don’t you have your own pools there?”
Hearing that, Ben felt offended. He looked around. He and Addy were the only nonwhites here. He straightened his posture. His chest tightened and the hair on his skin stood up.
“It’s a free country, you know. Anyone can go anywhere if they want to. It’s written in the Constitution. It’s, it’s…”
“Relax,” said the boy. “Relax. I’m from Metairie. There’s no pool there, either. No good-quality pools anyway. There’s no pools in New Orleans East, either?” The boy barely moved his lips when he talked. It must be the reason for his accent—part mutter, part muddled melody.
“Yeah,” Ben said, calming down. “There’s nothing in New Orleans East. There’s one stretch of highway, strip malls, then there’s the apartments and homes. Not the most fun place.”
“Metairie isn’t, either.”
They agreed that neither New Orleans East nor Metairie had much going for it. The boy stretched out on Addy’s chair and Ben found himself watching the boy, examining him. Ben took a seat himself, and his muscles relaxed.