by Sonya Chung
Hannah pinched her face as she left the bus. For the first time she felt how gravely the wrongnesses were muddled. She’d do her time, but she should keep her head straight about it. Hannah kept on and descended the steps—one, two, then down onto the icy black pavement that looked swampy under the street lamp. She stood there a moment before following the girls to the common room. She breathed white winter breath into the yellow light. Hannah felt Omar watching her, but she did not look back.
In the late spring of that first semester, there was an especially lonely time when Hannah called Monique Glissant. She had a small card on which her teacher had written her phone number. On Hannah’s last day, Madame had handed Hannah the card, saying, Tu peux m’appeller, quand tu veux—when you are in need. She’d looked at Hannah inquiringly. Her look said, What has happened to you, what is happening? Hannah took the little card and said, Merci, Madame. Je vous remercie. She was not avoiding the inquiry. She simply did not know what to answer.
When she finally called, Hannah did not know if, or of what, exactly, she was in need, but Madame seemed to understand. They spoke regularly from then on, always in French, and thus in the way of communication that lacks adequate vocabulary, both vague and intimate. Oui, je suis contente, mais je pense beaucoup. Rien ne me manque mais il manque quelque chose. The school’s advanced classes were too easy, so Hannah made up an independent study, reading through Colette’s works and translating short chapters and stories. On her dorm-room wall, by her bed, where other girls had pictures of Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe, she had a 5×7 postcard that Madame Glissant had sent her—the actress Polaire as Claudine, sailor-suited with cropped hair and smoky eyes.
There was summer school, but it cost an additional tuition. Instead Hannah worked in the language library and saved up. They let her stay in the dorm with paying students in exchange for collecting the garbage and cleaning the bathrooms, and she could use the pool in the early mornings. After work hours and on weekends, Hannah sometimes took the bus into town, especially when she craved a juicy cheeseburger or a Reuben sandwich. At the diner, she sat at the counter, sometimes with a book, sometimes with a few postcards and a pen. She wrote to James, and twice each to Teresa and Raj. It was interesting to try to say something in the small space of a postcard.
By summer’s end, the waitress at the diner knew to bring Hannah coffee with lots of milk and two sugars, and she came around to warm her mug, pursing a smile and eyeing her. The girl sat there, drinking her coffee and staring into space, just like some of the old geezers she’d served for decades. One day she saw Hannah opening an envelope and unfolding a letter. Hannah sipped her coffee with extra care, as if tasting for either flaws or flavors, and she ordered a slice of cherry pie instead of her usual chocolate milkshake. The waitress left Hannah alone until the third refill, then asked, “You got a sweetheart in the service or something?” Hannah looked up, as if considering the question seriously—as if it were not a yes-or-no question. Hannah then folded her letter and asked for the check, very politely, and the waitress raised an eyebrow before turning away.
Hannah went home only during the Christmas break after the fall semester, for two weeks. In her parents’ house, there was a feeling that nothing at all, and everything, had changed. During the days, Hannah went out by bus and Metro, to see foreign movies at The West End or to the botanical gardens looking for rose mallow. By silent agreement, the three of them ate dinner together every night. Soon-mi cooked multi-course Korean meals, and Hannah ate gratefully, like a guest. The familiar smell of barley tea filled the kitchen, and there was a poinsettia on the counter as always; still, there was something mysterious in their midst upon which Hannah felt she was intruding. Chong-ho and Soon-mi were to Hannah more contained than ever—like bottles of black ink, opaque and impenetrable.
Just before New Year’s, Hannah went to Madame Glissant’s in Friendship Heights. It was her first time visiting, but she felt at home. They looked at photo albums of a Parisian childhood, and more recent pictures of summers in Paris. They cooked buckwheat crěpes, and Monique made Hannah a Kir, which she sipped slowly and savored. Monique herself drank nearly an entire bottle of red wine. The alcohol made Hannah sleepy, her head pleasantly blurred. There was something she wanted to tell Madame. Or, was it something she needed to ask? The warm buzz from the Kir insisted both that the difference mattered and made it difficult to distinguish. Was it something about Claudine, maybe? If my face looks younger than my age, my figure looks eighteen at least. Or about Renée the dance hall performer, La vagabonde? From the open lawns rises a quivering silvery incense. On such a winter morning as this, surely even in the full flower of adolescence I was neither more firm nor more supple nor more sensually happy … It was on the tip of Hannah’s tongue, whatever it was.
She’d felt this same thing that previous spring, the lonely time, when she first called Madame. Hannah had received a letter. At first she’d thought she wanted to tell about it, but then immediately she knew she didn’t. In the end, she thought maybe what she’d wanted to express was simply her desire to keep talking to Madame, no matter where she was.
There had been more letters, over the summer and fall—the one she’d read at the diner was number three—and there would be many more to come. Neither their arrival nor their contents surprised Hannah. They were familiar somehow, and steady; reading them was like swim practice, the smooth middle laps before she had to push through fatigue. Hannah heard their warm woodwind tones in her ear more than she analyzed the words in her mind.
And yet, something was stirring in Hannah. She thought of bread-baking in home ec class—the dough rising, soft and yeasty and slow. Maybe she was being impatient, punching down the dough during the first rise with her urge to quiet the stirring. Hannah recalled the tangy aroma of the ballooning, fermenting bread; she inhaled deeply as if it were now filling Monique’s living room.
Monique’s eyes were drooping. She had a contented smile on her face, a flush in her cheeks; her feet were curled up under her, feathery black tresses brushed her shoulders. Hannah finished the last of her Kir in a gulp. White heat ballooned in her chest and warmed her cheeks. She did not want to lose Monique to sleep, because she was not ready for the evening to end. She blurted, “Are all French girls like Claudine?” She could see the words in the air, like a spy code on a ribbon.
Monique became thoughtful. She sighed, hugged an embroidered pillow, a gift from her Lebanese grandmother, and laid her head in the crook of the sofa’s arm. “Well,” she said dreamily, “you wouldn’t ever call Claudine typical; or Colette for that matter. But the French recognize themselves in both of them. Colette is the kind of romantic we understand. For us, love is more … aesthetic, you could say, than moral. There is this great difference we feel with the Americans: you have so many wrong kinds of love.” Monique closed her eyes. She searched for the simplest words, for the girl’s sake. “I think Colette would put it this way: if love is truthful, it is beautiful. If it is beautiful, it is right. That is all there is to it.” The wine had loosened Monique’s tongue, and her heart was warm and full. Without the wine, she might not have continued: “Et bien, le vrai amour peut sembler tout tort.” True love can appear all wrong.
These last words were half-slurred; Monique drifted into sleep. Hannah was wide awake, her thoughts glowing and buzzing like June bugs. There was some wine left in the bottle, two swigs worth, and Hannah took them. The fruity acid taste made her think of wetlands and garden snakes. In her mind Hannah began mapping the Metro route to Kenyon Street. It was not at all a direct route. It was almost midnight. The letters came again into her mind. Not the words, but the bright white paper—always just one sheet, folded into perfect thirds, written on one side. The handwriting was small and neat with wide spaces between the lines. Warm and steady in her ears—a gentle harmonic line threading through her own internal music.
Monique snored softly; her eyes opened then drooped. Hannah spoke again, in a forthright voice, as if per
forming a monologue. “My teacher at school didn’t like me reading La Vagabonde,” she said. “She said it was not appropriate for a freshman independent project. So I read it during the summer. It’s funny to wonder what she meant.” Was it that Renée, once a promising authoress, was now, after her divorce, une dame seule qui a mal tourné? Or was it something about being “sensually happy”? Shy senses, normal senses … slow to rouse but slow to quench—in short, healthy senses. Hannah wondered if the teacher meant they were the same thing—a lone woman who made a “bad turn” and one who had healthy senses.
The following spring, when she had to write an essay to go along with her translations, Hannah wrote: “Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was a woman who loved everybody she was meant to love—men, women, boys, girls, dogs and cats. She had many, many loved ones.” Hannah did not write des proches—meaning kin, the people who are close by—but instead des bien-aimés: literally, the loved ones, the ones she well-loved. Hannah wrote: “Colette died alone, an old woman with her butterflies and baubles. She lived truthfully and beautifully.” It sounded right to Hannah. The loved ones. Les bien-aimés.
4.
She had been gone three months when Charles began to dream of Frank. By then he felt how Hannah was disappearing from him. The loss was severe; it was too much to sort out with thinking alone. He bore it like a maiming, an amputation—the twitching of something you feel is there that isn’t.
Charles believed that if Hannah came back, if he could just see her, watch over her, he could preserve it. Dig into it. Make it real. Whatever it was. All Charles knew was that it was something, and now it was gone. Going. Gone.
He heard nothing from Hannah, or about her. How could he, why would he? Once, he thought about how Veda might again surprise him and say that Hannah had come to see her. But that didn’t happen.
In his dream, Charles saw Frank’s face: thick eyebrows, bottom teeth that showed big and crooked when he smiled; nose wide and flat with a point at the end like … just like the boy’s. Benny’s. The face came with a voice, deep and smooth like molasses, but in that dreaming state Charles was never able to make out words. Frank did not exist in Charles’s memory, he’d disappeared from their lives right after Charles was born. Charles had never even seen pictures—Nona did not allow it, destroyed every one—and yet he knew, without a doubt, that the dream image was true. The face, the voice. When he woke, Charles knew he’d dreamt of his father.
The knowing was always followed by thoughts of Hannah. It was an eerie layering of unrelated pictures and sensations. What did it all mean? It was too much to sort out with thinking alone.
Charles and Alice went on—days piling on top of days, then weeks, months. He thought of Benny sometimes, but there was no sadness. His thoughts were infrequent and uncomplicated—shrugging sentiments, echoes of his grandmother and the church folk, who’d drop their chins and say, Weeehhhl in the face of all things unspeakable. Nona would never shrug, though. She’d shake her head and squint her eyes at the needle she was threading or the newspaper she was reading. What was she really thinking—when they lost Uncle Ernie. When the Lang girl next door was found dead—violated, her face kicked in—in back of the Greyhound station. Nona never wept. Not that Charles ever saw, anyway. Was she sad? No, not sad. Something, but not sad.
Weeehhhl, Charles thought. The boy came, and then he went. No guarantees on him. If Alice could hear the thoughts underneath these … Wasn’t heading no place good, anyways. Thankfully, she could not.
What Charles hated to think of—he did once, and then never again—was the drowning itself. It took three minutes, they said. Three minutes. Your mind crazy with panic, water devouring your air. Three minutes was too long. Thirty seconds was too long. It was no way for anyone’s child to die.
Charles didn’t know exactly what Alice felt when she thought of Benny. He had an idea that when you thought and felt something all the time, you really didn’t think or feel it at all.
One day Alice said she would begin caring regularly for an elderly woman with diabetes near Great Falls. Soon after that, she took an apartment; said she wanted to “try it out.” She would come home for Veda in the afternoons and evenings. They would barely know the difference. Charles couldn’t argue that.
The dreams came on, and Charles began thinking of Hannah Lee every day. The twitching, her absent presence. Then one day he decided Enough with the thinking; he wrote a letter. As soon as he finished writing it, he didn’t think of her for a week. Then Charles wrote another letter, and it went on like that. He found that he could put Hannah out of his mind by writing to her. The letters were short, and there wasn’t much to them: he wrote about the day-to-day, his passing thoughts. Somehow the agitation quieted. He sat at his desk when he wrote, always around 2:45, when she’d be coming out of school. The writing absorbed Charles—the short, simple letters still took concentration—so much that he didn’t notice Bart Sheridan watching him.
Charles didn’t dare send the letters. He’d file them away, and then a few days later tear them up. The ritual just evolved: write, wait, trash.
Spring came, and with it something lazy and sour in the air. Charles realized that he was forgetting Hannah. Forgetting the it. The writing hastened the forgetting, as if each word turned substance into fog. He’d long forgotten how she felt in his arms, her slender, solid body opening up to his. When he tried to remember, Charles couldn’t keep the images and sensations from melding with the magazines that lay around in the men’s room stalls at work (sometimes hidden beneath a newspaper, just as often out in the open); and this sickened him profoundly.
The days grew longer and hotter. Charles brooded. Then he became frightened. Bart Sheridan watched Charles flick his pen at his desk, clench his jaw. One day, at 2:45, Charles went to the high school. He hadn’t thought too hard about what lie he’d tell, but it came easy: she was their babysitter, he owed her last wages, he said. He really shouldn’t have let it go this long. The secretary was young, and new, that was lucky; maybe she’d been a babysitter herself not so long ago. She smiled, looked in her file and gave him the name and address of the other school, where they had sent Hannah’s transcripts. Charles went straight to the post office, addressed and stamped his most recent letter, and mailed it.
May 1985
I’ve only ever written letters to my sister, back when I was stationed in Korea. She wrote long letters with news of the family and the neighborhood. I wrote back short bits, usually half-truths, to spare her what it was really like. I remember sitting down to write as if it were a class assignment. “Write 250 words in which you put the recipient’s mind at ease.” I was pretty good at it.
Time passes slowly these days. It’s always the same amount of time—a day is twenty-four hours, a week is seven days. It’s one of those mysteries. There’s time, which never changes; and there’s the experience of time, which is always changing. But without both, what would be the point. We’re serving some purpose, by making something out of those ticks on the clock. When you’re waiting, you can think about the fast-moving experiences and try to savor the slow ones.
At work time passes a little more quickly. The key is to give yourself just a little more to do than can easily be done. Or make it harder, create a problem to solve. That race against the ticking is what makes the time go faster; you’ve made the ticks scarce, more valuable. Maybe, if you’re trying to make time pass a little more quickly where you are, you can give it a try.
When I have trouble sleeping, time goes more slowly. The nights are hard lately. It’s these dreams I’m having. I see and hear my father as a man about my age. My father had a deep voice and thick eyebrows and a wide, pointed nose. I didn’t know him, but that’s what I feel sure I know about him.
And writing to you, I should say, is about trying to say things that are true. The assignment is, “Write a page in which you do your very best to tell the truth.”
He drove away from the post office and felt instantly better. Then
worse. He shouldn’t have sent it. But why not? What had he written? Charles tried to remember his words. Time passes slowly these days and At work time passes a little more quickly and My father had a deep voice and thick eyebrows and a wide, pointed nose. The words were true. They expressed something simple and definite.
Expressed. Not communicated. It troubled Charles that he had no way of knowing whether his expression would be received, or how. The next few weeks Charles waited. For what? A response?
Then he began imagining Hannah reading the letter—just opening the envelope, unfolding the single page, and reading—and he felt better again. He held to that image and no longer waited for anything. He sent two letters during the summer, another in the fall. He sent one just before Christmas, too.
Frank disappeared from Charles’s dreams. As mysteriously as he had appeared.
Time passed. Charles applied himself at work. It was true that by setting challenges, solving problems, day after day, you could pass the time quickly—months, a year, then another. He remembered what a good soldier he could be. The boss was pleased that he was improving things, tightening up. He got two title bumps in two years; Bart Sheridan chuckled when he heard. “I’ve had my share of those,” Bart said. “You can be sure the paychecks haven’t changed as many times.” Charles couldn’t help wondering how Bart managed the brand-new Coupe de Ville he’d driven up in a few months before, but he didn’t care near enough to ask.
Alice lived in her own world now, and Charles asked himself if it had ever really been otherwise. By the time they’d lived apart nearly three years, certain things started to come clear—that he’d married Alice because of what it would have meant not to marry her, for one. Back then, he’d wanted out of the way of things—the way of the triflers he came up with, who ended up in the back room at Brother Dee’s, or in the pews, or prison, or dead. The way of so many GIs who took up with local women then left them to take care of “accidents.” The way of his father. Charles had married Alice and thought, This is a way out. A better way.