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Grass Roof, Tin Roof

Page 12

by Dao Strom


  Outside it had been cool and dark as I got into the patrol car, and the lights from nearby neighborhoods and shopping centers had seemed mute and pretty. Inside the hospital it was like geometry, the lines and planes and comers absolute, stifling. The waiting room was full of old home furnishings, to make it cozier, I supposed. My sister and father were seated on the most uncomfortable chairs anyway, the ones most resembling classroom chairs. On the walls were posters of Snoopy or ordinary-looking people smiling, urging you to ask your doctor about rubella vaccinations, cholesterol, birth control, incontinence—all these issues were hinted at tactfully, however. A grinning overweight man held a spatula over the caption: “Are you watching what you eat?” The hazards and statistics of each condition were listed in small print; you had to walk closer to read these. On an end table in the corner was a cardboard display of religious brochures, with a photo of a child’s praying profile and a caption reading: “Prayer does help.” The “does” was underlined.

  And suddenly I was recalling a story about a boy—was it someone I knew or had I read about him?—who had a terminal illness and was told that if he went to sleep with his forearm propped up by pillows, his hand raised, then the angels would know he was ready to be taken and would come get him. Eventually the boy knew he was too sick to go on living, and so his grandfather or mother or friend helped him arrange his pillows, and that night the boy died peacefully. I must have believed this story at least slightly: I could remember being afraid to fall asleep unless my hands were firmly at my sides and beneath the blankets. Had my parents told me the story of the raised hand as part of a ploy to keep me from sucking my thumb at night? I had also been intrigued by the potential power of making death a willed decision. What a relief to a young child’s mind.

  But I was not so young anymore, and as I floated into this waiting room I was still slightly high on other things—the music, the perfumed smoke, the colored lights, the alcohol, that night’s social games. My body was still warm from dancing.

  My mother had had what we thought was a protracted flu for weeks—she suffered often enough from colds or allergies. None of us had thought to pay much attention.

  Beth was sitting on her chair, not talking or even looking at me. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt, her hair a little messy from sleep. She clutched a plastic fish necklace, the most recent thing our mother had bought for her. Beth made her decisions according to a mystical logic sometimes. I never would’ve thought to bring something like that along.

  Our father was sitting impassively, too, his hand on his stomach. His eyes flickered toward me. “Your little old mom,” he said with stern cheerfulness, “was sicker than we thought. It was imperative we get her to the hospital when we did. She’ll pull through, though, she will.” I noticed he didn’t stand to greet the two police officers who had escorted me there. And the police officers were men, exactly the type my father usually stood to talk to, in the way men do.

  “We learned her whereabouts after talking to four different sets of parents who also did not know where their kids really were tonight,” said one officer. “Only one parent out of the whole group of them knew, if you can believe it. A divorced single mother. They’re always the liberal ones, of course.”

  My father nodded. They exchanged more words and my father thanked them for responding to his call. Once they’d left, he turned on me. “You are a disgustingly selfish creature.”

  I didn’t try to respond and he asked no questions.

  “Can I see her?” It was the most straightforward—the most pressing—question I thought I would ever ask.

  It looked as if violence was being done to her chest. Thick clear tubes protruded like viscous ropes from her torso. Her breasts were bared, soft whitish bags of flesh sloping toward her ribs, the nipples like dark eyes. Her eyeglasses had been removed. Her face was half covered by the hands of the doctors and nurses surrounding her bed, and more tubes stuck out of her mouth. I recalled more fears I’d had in plush-carpeted waiting rooms with magazine-coated tables, alone, listening to soft music tinkling from speakers I could never spot, while my mother went down a quiet hallway to her dentist appointment. Already I knew she was no longer my mother; she had abandoned this role. She hacked horribly from somewhere deep inside herself, some garbled esoteric message, as the nurses closed the door. Her hands —were they at her sides or raised? I had not seen them at all, I realized.

  A nurse put her hand on my arm, her fingers firm. “You need to go back to the waiting area now, get some rest.”

  “What are they doing? Is she going to be okay?”

  She smiled a nurse’s smile at me. “She is in good hands,” she said. It sounded ludicrous to me, all those references to hands so close to the fact of death. Like an ad for insurance, I thought.

  I went back out to the waiting room, where another family now sat on a couch across from my father and sister—a big lady with curly hair, wearing a jacket over her nightgown, a heavy-set man with a moustache, a little boy in Spiderman pajamas holding his stomach, and an older boy looking sullen at the far end of the couch. A door opened and a nurse called, “Travis Frailey?” The little boy and the mother got up to follow the nurse, leaving the other two in the waiting room. These two turned on the TV. I could tell this annoyed my father; he frowned and placed his hand higher on his stomach.

  Beth and I turned our heads to watch the TV, and our father glared at us. One of those late-night talk show hosts was telling jokes, the fake cityscape behind his desk glittering and tinny. I thought I would never feel the same about these shows again; they would always seem to me cruelly comforting.

  At one point our father went to telephone our brother. The nurses allowed him to make a long-distance call from the phone behind the front desk. Thien now lived with our cousins in southern California and had since my father kicked him out of the house four years ago because he’d discovered my brother was cutting school to work at a garage in Sacramento. My father had said that if Thien thought he was smart enough to make this kind of decision about school, then he should be smart enough to live on his own, too. My brother was eighteen with one more year of high school to go; I was eleven.

  We waited I don’t know how long.

  Later, I went to the bathroom. In the stall, the water in the toilet had risen and was swirling and someone’s slightly bloody tampon floated on top, a smear of red on a string, like some version of a tadpole in the bowl. This struck me as something I would remember; it jolted me. From now on, I told myself, I would be the kind of person who always checked to make sure the toilet had flushed completely behind me. I used a different stall. Then I ran the water to wash my hands and looked at my eyeliner-smudged face in the mirror. I look okay, I thought. My thoughts were like this, jumpy and cold, one at a time.

  In the hallway, Beth was talking to the sullen-looking older boy. He was her age, a spiky-haired blond with a faceful of pale brown freckles. The two stood by the drinking fountain.

  “They said she may have an advanced case of secondary tuberculosis,” Beth was telling him, very seriously and quietly. (Beth was often willing to talk about our family issues to anyone, anyone who would listen.)

  The boy furrowed his brow. “Does your family have AIDS?”

  “What? You asshole,” said Beth quickly.

  “No, man, no. I just thought people only got tuberculosis if they had AIDS.”

  “Whatever,” said Beth, and then she caught my eye.

  We had to face the drive home with one person less. It was the reverse of going there to have a baby, likely the only other time my father had to drive her to the hospital in the middle of the night.

  The world outside the hospital, after our long wait inside, seemed suddenly bright with morning and insane and extremely dangerous—it was no wonder she hadn’t survived, I thought. I sat in the front seat by my father, Beth in the back. As we pulled out of the parking lot, Beth said softly, “Bye, Mom,” as she looked out the window, as if that place was where
we had left her; we had only to go back and pick her up later. Beth was also the one to make the suggestion about the library lawn. “Mom always liked it there. Let’s drive past.” The Honda, which we were so used to riding in with our mother in the driver’s seat, idled like an obedient kitten as my father steered it slowly by these familiar, soon-to-be-so-different places. We were meandering. We were on our own time now, in our own sphere of the newly unknown. Still, we stopped for the traffic lights.

  “Well, then,” said our father after the library lawn, “how about a hamburger?” And he pulled into a Jack in the Box, but it was closed.

  We hadn’t realized it was only seven thirty in the morning.

  We ate at a twenty-four-hour diner. My father told us about some antibiotics we would have to take, a preventive measure; he worried aloud about our brother, living around our cousins and other recent immigrants who might be carriers of tuberculosis. My father talked about how people who’d died from diseases such as these had to be buried under slabs of concrete because their bodies might still have been infectious; he said this was costly and cremation was a better idea all around (though the smoke probably had to be monitored somehow, he added). “One must be extremely cautious,” he said. “One should have a dignified exit from the world.” I wasn’t sure if what he was saying about the slabs of concrete was true, but it filled me with a familiar dread. He had said similar things when my mother’s father died. My grandfather had been sponsored to come to the States from Vietnam some years ago by my mother and her sisters in Los Angeles (he hadn’t wanted to emigrate but his children had insisted), and he had died of cancer or tuberculosis or pneumonia, or a combination of all these ailments—they eventually decided—not two months after his emigration. My sister and brother and I visited Los Angeles with my mother around that time, and while all the adults were at the hospital, we played “Bloody Mary” in front of the bathroom mirror, all of us crowded together in front of the bathroom sink with a lighted candle. We’d say her name three times out loud, then one of the older cousins would claim he’d seen a face appear in the mirror, and we would run screaming out of the bathroom, delighted by our fear. The one time our mother took us to see her father, he was an ancient silent man in the hospital bed, breathing laboriously, with a deeply lined brown face like National Geographic photos I’d seen of people from other—lesser, I’d thought then—parts of the world. His collarbones stuck skeletally up beneath his old skin. In the flower-dotted white hospital gown, he looked like a withered and hapless, overly sentient child. My mother ordered my sister and me to give him a kiss on his cheek. He touched our faces with his long, bony hands.

  Later, over the phone, our father had questioned us intently and told us to wash our hands and faces thoroughly if we had been near our grandfather. My father’s fear of disease was not so uncommon then; this was the mid-1980s. A time in which all types of contact were purported to have resounding consequences. When it was our mother’s turn to speak to him, she had cried and talked angrily into the phone.

  Our father was being irritable with the waitress. “What’re you doing back there, hey, taking a shower?” he said when she was slow bringing him an ashtray.

  She half laughed, trying to show a good face. Our father raised his eyebrow, took out his cigarettes and lighter. The waitress cleared our plates, asked if we needed anything else. Our father gave her a brutal no. He stared out the window as he blew smoke over our heads. Beth coughed, just a little. He turned on her suddenly with wide-open eyes, grabbed her by the arm.

  “Do not, do you hear? Do not play with me like that.”

  Beth cringed, hunching up her shoulders. I watched as her face sank into itself. She was the only one of the three of us, finally, then, to cry.

  Once home, the first thing my father did was call our neighbors the Walkers. Our brother was to fly in that afternoon, and the Walkers offered to pick him up at the airport. My father called our other neighbors, the Johnsons, whom we actually hadn’t spoken to in years, not since Rebel Johnson stole our horse, Chip, and rode him lame on the asphalt roads and Animal Control had to take him away. My father told Mrs. Johnson he thought they should know. There were no other local friends of my mother’s to call. He opened her address book but the names inside, of all her Vietnamese friends, were indecipherable to him; he passed the book to me, but I was not much help, as I’d never bothered to keep track of the names or faces of my mother’s friends, and I couldn’t read or speak Vietnamese, either. Except for one or two visits years ago, when they first married and when we first moved up here, my father hadn’t had to interact very much with any relatives on my mother’s side of the family. (For that matter he’d hardly interacted with his relatives, either, the ones still back in Denmark.)

  I didn’t know what to do with my mother’s address book. It was not long before the phone rang anyway. It was one of my aunts. She had been with my brother when my father had to tell him the news over the phone the night before.

  She spoke half in Vietnamese to me, half in broken English. She must’ve forgotten my sister and I couldn’t understand Vietnamese; Vietnamese people we knew generally took it for granted. “You must to come live with me now, you and your sister, two of you. I take good care of you. I your mother’s oldest sister. Tell your father I say so. I your mother’s sister.”

  “Dad,” I said, unsure how to handle the situation, “Aunt Mary says she wants me and Beth to come live with her now.”

  My father was leaning on the kitchen sink, smoking another cigarette. He looked exhausted. “Absolutely not. Tell her I said no.”

  “He says no,” I said into the phone.

  “Can’t we talk about this later?” I heard Beth ask no one directly. She was sitting at the end of the couch, still holding her fish necklace.

  “You let me talk to your father,” said my aunt. “I tell him, I make him to understand, I do this for your mom. She my little sister.”

  I relayed this to my father. “You tell her to call back later. I can’t talk to her right now.” He made a face and shook his head. Then he turned and walked out of the room.

  The minute I was off the phone, my sister grabbed it to call the Newmans. Lisa Newman was her best friend and Beth spent a lot of time after school over at the Newmans’ house. Lisa’s mom, Katie Newman, was a pretty, red-headed, but slightly ditzy woman who our parents had said was like a child herself, simple-minded. She dressed her daughters in girlish clothes and often instructed them to pretend their house was a castle, their property a fenced-in kingdom. Katie Newman liked to claim that she was Beth’s “second mom” and sometimes announced when Beth arrived at their gate, “Oh, my long-lost daughter escaped from her evil stepparents at last!” My father had warned Beth not to take Katie’s games too seriously; he thought them harmless but foolish.

  “Dad, I’m going over to the Newmans,” my sister called out once she was off the phone. She was crying again.

  We heard the bathroom door open, our father come back down the hall into the kitchen. “You are not going anywhere,” he said. “No, no, and no.” He pointed his finger. “You call back and tell them your father says you are not going anywhere. No, I’ll call and tell them that.” He walked over to the phone, looked for the Newmans’ number on our phone board, dialed it. “Listen, Katie,” he said, “the girls need to stay here right now, do you understand me? If I find that Beth is sneaking over to your house without my permission, let me tell you she is going to be in a whole lot of trouble.”

  Beth and I sat down on the couch. There were people I would have liked to call, too, but my nerve was gone. For some reason I was thinking about other things, normal things, the people I knew at school, the fun I’d been having dancing, the satisfying, curious way I was looked at by other kids last night in the club as the police officers took me away.

  It kept feeling as if we were just waiting for our mother to return. There was still, of course, evidence of her daily activities everywhere: a folded-open magazine on
the end table by the couch; her toothbrush and floss-holder in a cup in the bathroom; her cluttered desk in the corner of the living room; her closet full of newspapers and stacked milk cartons of more papers and her books, shelves of them, all paperback with extra thin pages, the Vietnamese words printed small and too close together, three- and four-letter words most of them, and consisting often of consonants in a row: nghi was a word, for example. They seemed confounding and unbeautiful to me, these crude things she had left behind. And then there were her shoes—this was what got me—by the back door. Cheap, beige, high-heeled, open-toed slip-ons she used for walking out onto the deck, resting now at slight angles to each other where she must have casually kicked them off.

  The Walkers arrived, all except Mr. Walker, who was on his way to the airport to pick up Thien. Mrs. Walker was effusive, red-eyed, and sobbing enough for all of us. She was an expressive and outgoing woman whom my mother, out of her own shyness, truthfully, had tended to avoid.

  “Anything you need, anything they need,” Mrs. Walker told my father over and over. She sat between Beth and me, clutching our hands in our laps, and we sat rigid in a row on the couch as if it were a seat on a roller-coaster and we had to hold on to each other tightly.

  Cody and Danny sat down at the dining table and looked at their feet. Cody had grown to be tall, athletic-bodied, and begrudgingly blond and beautiful, the type of good-looking fifteen-year-old boy who gave you a quick, disdainful glance if he caught you looking at him admiringly—something I’d seen happen frequently between him and girls at school. Danny was a younger, lesser version of his brother. I knew better than to want from Cody Walker what other girls wanted. Our social personas were antithetical: he was everything I hated about the status quo; I was everything he could not understand about the aberrant.

 

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