by Sandi Tan
“This is fuckin’ ridiculous!” Jules laughed, almost enjoying it. “Help!”
They looked around to see if people were staring at them but the locals were minding their own business. Perhaps in Saigon, this was bookselling.
“Maybe you should try to walk home like this,” said Kate. “It’s all your fault, you know. Just watch your wallet.” She turned to the little Vietnamese boy, “Hey, can’t you tell you’re not wanted? He already gave you a dollar! Why do you keep bothering us? Why do you have to be such a fucking little creep?”
She charged ahead and made it to the steps of the Notre Dame cathedral, which resembled an Etch A Sketch version of the Parisian original. The little boy suddenly released himself from Jules and sprinted after her, shrieking: “You Vietnam whore?”
His words hit her in the gut. “What did you say to me?” She faced the boy squarely. He reached barely higher than her waist but could have been anything from six to thirty years old.
“You Vietnam whore?” the boy repeated, defiant.
Before she could stop herself, she’d slapped the boy’s face. He appeared to be a veteran of hard knocks and didn’t even flinch.
“Kate! What are you doing?” Jules ran to her, glancing around nervously. “We could be arrested for this! He probably doesn’t even know what he’s saying!”
The boy snickered. “Whore!”
Kate shoved the kid and kicked him hard in the shins. He buckled to the ground, by the cathedral steps. As Jules ran over, she kicked him again.
“Kate!”
“I’m American, okay, you little piece of shit!” she screamed at the kid. “Fuck you to hell, you fucking rat!”
Jules held her back while she struggled. The boy curled up into a protective ball like an aardvark. His vertebrae showed through his T-shirt, a notched serpent.
As Jules led Kate away, the little boy picked himself up and brushed the street dust off his legs.
“Don’t look back,” Jules told Kate. “Keep your eyes on the road ahead.”
She tried—for a minute. Then she turned around and saw the little boy sticking out his tongue at her. He lowered his shorts and mimed taking a dump, even squeezing out a real fart.
“Vietnam whore!” he yelled, wriggling his bare ass.
She broke free of Jules’s arms and tore after the boy. He zooted across the street, dodging speeding bikes, squealing, gleeful, impossible to catch. When he got to the other side of the street, he yelled back at Kate till his demonic voice cracked: “VIETNAM WHORE!”
“I’ll kill you, motherfucker! I swear I will!” she screamed. People stared now. Jules wrapped his long arms around her, and she realized she was shaking. He held her so close to his chest that she smelled the Old Spice under his arms. He put his lips against her hair and shushed her.
“Let it pass. Let it pass.”
The rest of the trip was a blur. She remembered the others teaming up against her, saying she was wrong to attack the Vietnamese boy. Gullible guilty liberals, always on the side of the supposedly oppressed! Yet they’ll brag about haggling down old ladies trying to sell them Tintin T-shirts for two dollars. After a series of quarrels, they left her alone in the hostel so she could sleep every day till noon. She remembered going over to the coffee bar next door where she ate croissants, drank coffee and listened to mid-eighties pop on the jukebox, ten years out of date. Wham!, Sheena Easton, Pet Shop Boys, Chaka Khan—Chaka Khan, for hours on end. She remembered crawling back into bed as the afternoon monsoon rains fell. One of those afternoons she bumped into Jules, who had returned to switch shirts after a sweaty excursion to the Cu Chi tunnels where the Vietcong once hid. They had comforting sex in the shower—she came, he didn’t—before he once again brought up the incident with that little rat.
“Maybe you overreacted a little?”
Her mother had been right. She should have gone to London or Paris.
She tried to forget about Vietnam after that and stopped seeing those “friends” of hers. She took on a second job and within two months, paid her mother back for the trip and never talked about it.
Vietnam, however, refused to release her. The flashbacks returned, every bit as vivid and ferocious as they’d been when she was eleven. And as then, they tormented her whenever she was menstruating, keeping her awake all night, rendering her worthless the following day. She tried her mental exercises but this time they did nothing. She got a prescription for Xanax at the psychological health center but the drugs made her dopey during class. Besides, she liked having an edge.
The only thing that seemed to be able to quell those nightmares was driving home from Pomona in the dead of night and crawling into Mary-Sue’s bed. The one place in the entire world where she had always felt completely safe was at her mother’s side; how better to steal an extended closeness with her than while she slept? Kate would fall into dreamless sleep next to the snoring, oblivious Mary-Sue and the steady, reassuring clips made by the plastic alarm clock on her nightstand. At first light, she slipped out of bed and took off for school without waking Mary-Sue. Until graduation, this would be the only way she could get any rest on those nights of the flashbacks.
Mary-Sue noticed everything, of course. She’d wake up in the middle of the night to pee and there they were—the warm body in her bed, the car in the driveway, the tampons in the trash. She didn’t say anything because she knew Kate would be on the defensive about it. If she woke in the morning before Kate did, she lay completely still and kept her eyes closed until Kate rose and tiptoed out of the room. Sometimes this tactic made her late for work but she didn’t care. She had to resist the temptation to leave packs of cookies on the breakfast table for Kate to take on her way out. That would break the charade; kindness went against the rules of this game.
As soon as Kate graduated, she moved back home, and Mary-Sue didn’t try to stop her. She didn’t want her to feel unwelcome. Far from being a freeloader, Kate got a job and bought all the groceries and paid all the bills. But Mary-Sue was perplexed when her grown daughter began again to creep into her bed on stormy nights. Perhaps Katie was a late bloomer, too. After all, she’d been in her mid-thirties herself before she did the one right thing in her life: import Kate. Nevertheless, Mary-Sue hoped it would be a matter of months before her daughter got up on her own two feet and moved away. She longed for the sweet sorrow of missing her.
The mid-1990s were an interesting time on Santa Claus Lane. Nervous Alta Vista families fearing the aftershocks of the LA riots moved out to new exurbs built around shopping malls beyond the county line. New people moved in—Latinos, Armenians and Koreatown transplants who wanted nothing to do with the free-floating anger that had permeated many parts of the city. Mary-Sue suddenly became one of the longest-standing residents of the neighborhood, a grande dame. She realized how easy it was to gain currency as an old hand in California; she’d been in her house 15 years but it might as well have been 150. The new people came to her for advice on everything from how to take care of camellias to where to get their cat spayed. With her salt-and-pepper hair and accentless speech, she must have seemed to them positively patrician, and this amused her no end. Kate, however, had no interest in these strangers who kept coming to their door with stupid questions, least of all the Korean pastor who once stared at her funny because she hadn’t worn a bra.
Mary-Sue felt an instant empathy for Mr. Park, the Korean pastor, and his young family. They seemed completely overwhelmed from the moment they moved in across the street. Soda bottles, toilet rolls and tins of baby formula would fall out of their overstuffed shopping bags and tumble down the driveway. Rosebushes would go unwatered and burn. The lawn would remain unmowed until Vector Control monitors came by to warn them that their tall grasses were harboring mosquito larvae.
Once, Mary-Sue entered their home while helping them with some shopping and saw that the inside of their house was mostly bare. The
Parks had sunk all their money into acquiring the property; there was none left for furniture, not even a crib for the second little girl that the pretty young wife was about to have.
“We really have to help them,” Mary-Sue told Kate.
With Kate’s help, Mary-Sue placed her blue pull-out couch on a set of wheels and rolled it across the street to the Park’s. No one would mourn its absence from their den but in the Korean family’s house, maybe it’d make an extra bed.
Mr. Park received the kind gesture with a lot of nodding and a minimum of words. He was too proud to accept their charity, and too proud at the same time to say no. Little would Mary-Sue have guessed that as soon as she left his door, the blue sofa would be moved from Mr. Park’s living room to the edge of his overgrown, disheveled backyard.
By 2000, it was clear to Mary-Sue that Kate had no intention of ever leaving home. She knew the limited allure of Alta Vista—most young people would be raring to flee. Not her Kate. Like only Mary-Sue could, she blamed herself. Kate’s dysfunction was the direct result, she felt, of lousy parenting. Rather than expel her beloved daughter, Mary-Sue decided to withdraw more of her father’s money and, in a word, flee. Even weighing her snobbery, she settled on South Florida.
The widow of an eccentric fern collector sold Mary-Sue their estate in Homestead, just outside Miami, well below its market worth; evidently, the old woman was eager to move on. The house was built on the highest point in South Florida—a grand elevation of three feet. One couldn’t see the street from it, let alone the coast, but that was fine by Mary-Sue. The antebellum-style villa, complete with ornamental shutters, came cocooned in five wooded acres, hidden like a militiaman’s lair deep in the agricultural heartland of Dade County. She could be a hermit all over again if she so chose, pursue any life philosophy she damn well pleased. She felt the same giddy freedom she experienced when she first arrived in California in the ’60s, before Katie, before Santa Claus Lane, before she managed to botch up her one attempt in her entire life to become a normal human being.
South Florida was filled with old people—Jews, in many cases—and they read. That meant that Mary-Sue could, for culture, dip into nearby Coral Gables for its bookstores. On top of that, the local campus of the Miami-Dade community college held interesting lectures from time to time, ranging in topic from the sexual imagery in pre-Columbian pottery to the reproductive lives of microscopic plants, and through those occasions, she met new people, some of them bearable enough to be considered friends. For food, she had mango, orange, key lime, loquat and guava trees in her yard, and the Publix markets sold cheap avocados and everything else she could possibly need, aside from the company of her Katie. But distance was good for them—they both needed to grow up, independently. Yes, she reminded herself, even she, a woman in her sixties.
Kate came out to visit twice a year, speeding in from the Miami airport until she reached the big, Spanish moss-draped cypress that concealed Mary-Sue’s driveway. Why her mother chose to live in a place like this confounded her.
On balmy evenings, they sat in the covered porch swatting mosquitoes and listening to monkey calls. Raccoons left poop valentines on the doorstep every night. At no time did they ever talk about unhappy things. Instead, they ate fruit from Mary-Sue’s trees, drove down to the Keys and, on Kate’s most recent visit, popped over to peek at the giant sinkhole that had appeared in the yard of Mary-Sue’s neighbor, Larry, a short, ruddy man who did some kind of building-contractor work.
“The Lord won’t never let us forget the whole of Florida’s one big swamp.” Larry hawked a loogie past his potbelly and into the void. Simple man, Kate thought.
No longer roommates who took each other for granted, mother and daughter opened up more. They discussed terrorism in big cities, picked hurricane shutters out of a catalog, debated the morality of local restaurants that served turtle fresh from the Everglades. It surprised Kate that Mary-Sue had evolved over the years into a perfectly plausible Southerner. She belonged in Florida. She wore sandals to restaurants whether appropriate or not, stacked unwanted items in the yard, and developed a sweet tooth for any kind of nut roasted in brown sugar. As each visit drew to a close, it always became clear that all Mary-Sue wanted was to assure Kate that she was doing fine on her own, and that her self-transformation was complete. Kate envied—and slightly resented—Mary-Sue’s confidence and adaptability. Most of all, she missed her bustling energy around the house. The German shepherd she’d rescued from the pound was a very poor substitute. She knew it was unreasonable to hope that a pet could replace her mother; still, she never expected to be stuck with such a timid, sickly lump of a dog.
At the end of her last visit to Homestead, after their usual unsappy, pat-on-the-arm goodbyes, Kate felt sorrier than usual when she had to leave—a huge part of her wanted to move into her mother’s tropical paradise and forget all about Alta Vista. As Kate backed down the driveway in her rental Saturn, feeling the queasy separation anxiety she always felt, Mary-Sue ran over and rapped on her window: “Oh, I almost forgot! You wouldn’t guess who I ran into at the Borders on Dixie. I wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t called out to me first.”
“Who was it?”
“Oh, I better not say.” Mary-Sue was coy as a schoolgirl. “He asked me to keep it a secret. I think he’s going to surprise you in California one of these days.”
– 6 –
DOUBLE-DIP
Kate and Bluto hadn’t spoken in years. Centuries, it seemed like. Then out of the blue, he’d breezed into town and given her a call that spring morning, asking if she had time for a “sundae on Sunday.” This was the kind of shtick that passed for wit when they were kids, Bluto having also been, as he liked to say, a cunning linguist. The arrival of the call that particular Friday seemed inevitable to Kate somehow. She was at an impasse, having gone nowhere professionally or romantically, and she’d been waiting for some kind of spiritual release, some fast-moving freight train out of nowhere to ram her out of limbo. She left her sick dog by a bowl of water, and drove out to her local Classic Shakes.
When Kate arrived, it took a while before she spotted him in a Naugahyde booth with a girl—Eurasian, she instantly knew—who looked about fourteen. The child was wearing a pink T-shirt with “Kiss Me I’m Irish” in green glitter. That, and jeans that frayed midthigh. Cutoffs, Kate supposed they were still called. She never wore those anymore. They were sitting at the far end of the diner though the place was practically empty. The girl’s dark, shoulder-length hair was wet and glossy from the shower or the pool.
Kate felt it was low of Bluto to spring his daughter on her like this, having said nothing about her—or his marital status—on the phone. She studied them as she made her approach, passing the chrome soda fountain, the glass dome with its leaning tower of pink donuts. If this kid was fourteen, that would have made Bluto her father at eighteen—the first year of college. That might explain, even excuse, his radio silence. Perhaps there was a wife sitting at home or working two jobs in New York. Or maybe he was now divorced, or widowered . . . was that even a word?
Bluto stood up and gave her a hug that felt both intimate and by-the-book. They’d never even hugged before, she realized, such gawky teenagers were they. His torso felt ribby against her, but his arms were bulky, like he lived half his life in a gym. She tried to recall if he’d always been built like this, a plastic action figure. As they disengaged, his cheek grazed hers. It felt rough. Grown up. She saw the creases on the sides of his eyes when he smiled. Crow’s feet. He looked weathered, and that made him manlier, sexier. How unfair.
She sat down and ordered a decaf. Bluto and his daughter were sharing a plate of fries, which the girl dipped in both ketchup and mayonnaise. Kate froze. She didn’t know anybody else who did that apart from herself.
“See that?” said Bluto, proudly pointing out his girl’s ritual. It seemed likely that he’d trained her. “Uncanny, wouldn’t you
say? Plus, your hair, your eyes.”
They ordered burgers, and then Bluto really got to talking. He spoke of all the years they’d been out of touch, of graduating and falling flat on his face, of the three long years he spent “couch-surfing” in Brooklyn, of making a poor living as a landscaper, of car trouble on the Tappan Zee, of antiquing in historic Rhinebeck with rich widows, of falling serially for essentially the same, interchangeable person—the unappeasable blonde who didn’t care for books or music. He threw around a lot of New York place names, but there was no mention of the girl’s mother. Maybe she was some kind of Thai hooker he was embarrassed about.
The girl kept her eyes fixed on Kate, as if studying the way she bit into her cheeseburger and how she chewed. Kate was careful to deny the girl the pleasure of seeing her double-dip her fries. Every time Kate tried to include her in the conversation, the girl’s eyes flitted down to her food or to Bluto, and her fingers rushed to fiddle with the monogrammed gold necklace around her neck.
Finally Bluto brought her into the conversation. He said her name was Brittany, like the province in France, not the singer. She was fifteen. He said that until he met her, he’d wasted too much time deceiving himself into thinking he’d be happy with a woman when all along what he’d wanted was a girl. He leaned across the table to Kate and whispered—“fire of my loins, a relentless cum machine”—about Brittany, the surly child who, until ten seconds prior, Kate had assumed was his daughter.
Kate stared at Brittany, who was twirling her hair as if nothing unusual had been said, her nonchalant affect gaining a new level of noxiousness. “This is a joke, right?”
Bluto laughed, and swatted the air with his hand. He had met the girl on the Internet, where he’d posed as a college freshman named Paul. At their first rendezvous, he said, she hadn’t been shocked to find a thirty-two-year-old man waiting for her at the Starbucks; she told him she just knew he’d be “middle-aged.” He took her on a plane and brought her out West to celebrate their one-month anniversary.