by Dao Strom
“God has taken her. It is so sad but we must believe He has His reasons,” Mrs. Walker said urgently to us. “You girls are so strong. So strong.”
“It’s nice of you to try to make us feel better,” I said, “but that honestly doesn’t help me a lot.”
“April,” said my father curtly, though I knew he felt much the same as I did on the matter of religion; he just wasn’t saying so to the Walkers’ faces.
“God will forgive you,” said Mrs. Walker. “You are, of course, angry with Him.”
Beth said, “I believe in Him, sometimes.”
Mrs. Walker released my hand to use both of hers to squeeze Beth’s shoulders. She said, “Good girl, good girl,” almost as if she were praising a dog.
I caught Cody glowering in his mother’s direction from across the room, and I gave him a cold stare. I was not sure whom I wanted to criticize more.
Beth went on, “I mean, of course I want to believe she’s somewhere happier now. Like maybe she’s sitting in a beautiful meadow with a blue sky and birds singing and she’s eating anything she wants to.”
“And what do you think that would be?” asked Mrs. Walker.
“Probably some cream cheese toast,” replied Beth, with a gratuitous, sad little laugh. One of our mother’s staple snacks, cream cheese toast was toasted sourdough bread topped with cream cheese and soy sauce. “Maybe if we made some it could be like something to help her rest in peace. Like fruit before bed.”
I felt appalled by this whole exchange, as if Beth had betrayed me somehow. I tried to catch her eye, but she didn’t notice.
“Well, any time you want, you can come over to my house and we’ll make a peace offering to your mother, all right? We can even do it now if your dad says it’s all right and it’ll make you feel better,” said Mrs. Walker judiciously.
“Sure, sure,” said our father. He was standing by the kitchen counter with his hands in his pockets, looking agitated and vulnerable.
“But maybe we’d better wait,” Mrs. Walker continued. “I think your father needs you girls here with him right now.” Her tone was gende and watchful and diplomatic.
Our father made a sound like a balloon letting out a spurt of air. It was unconvincingly dismissive. “We need to all be here when your brother arrives,” he said finally.
We sat on the couch a while longer with Mrs. Walker, trying to make conversation in the strained silence. Cody and Danny stubbed their sneakers against the floor, swung their legs, rubbed their noses in awkward boredom. Mrs. Walker decided coffee would be nice, and food shouldn’t be forgotten, either; it was about lunchtime after all, if our father wouldn’t mind her nosing around the kitchen some.
He said, “No, Kathlyn. No, please,” with a firm frown.
Mrs. Walker insisted. “You go sit down, Hus, you’ve had a long night. Or go outside and get some fresh air. I’ll take care of the girls.” She stood up and walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder.
My sister’s and my eyes went to his shoulder, her hand. Was this the proper way to offer comfort?
We watched our father acquiesce. His shoulders looked soft and big for the first time. His hair had drifted out of place onto his forehead. The lines in his face were long and beginning, elegantly, to droop. “I don’t know what you’ll find in here,” he said. “God knows where Tran kept anything.”
“I have a way with kitchens,” said Mrs. Walker gaily. “I can find anything in anybody’s kitchen. I can.”
My father took his cigarettes and lighter and went outside on the deck to smoke.
“So are you guys still gonna go to school on Monday?” asked Cody, from the table. Beth and I hadn’t moved from the couch; there was a gap between us where Mrs. Walker had been just a moment ago. “You don’t have to, you know,” added Cody. “People don’t usually, when someone in the family dies.” He didn’t look Beth or me in the eye as he said this; his gaze drifted around the space between us. He scratched the wood of the table with his thumbnail.
Danny pushed back his chair, got up, and leaned over the kitchen counter. “Hey, Mom, I’m thirsty,” he said in a low voice. We heard the refrigerator open a few seconds later.
“It helps to believe in God,” said Cody, in the same drifting, almost sullen manner as he’d made his last comment, as if he was trying to be sincere but would quickly turn angry if anyone we knew were to catch him talking like this. “April, I could lend you my Bible or something. If you want.” He shrugged one shoulder.
“I don’t think so.” There was a small feeling of triumph in saying this, the triumph of being able to refuse someone who would normally never offer you anything.
“Well, I’m just saying,” said Cody, shrugging again.
I narrowed my eyes at him. I was sitting with my legs crossed, my arms folded. Then it occurred to me what I wanted to say. “You’re only being nice, Cody, because this is exactly what people do when something bad happens. They think they’re supposed to act all sad because it’s the nice thing to do, when really it’s the totally fake thing to do. The honest thing would be to just act normal. I’m not sad, okay? I’m not really that sad right now. I feel fine, in fact. I feel the same way I did yesterday.”
Mrs. Walker said from the kitchen, “Let’s give April some time, Cody.”
“Whatever,” said Cody, back to his old self. “I think she’s a bitch, though.”
“Cody Michael,” warned Mrs. Walker.
Beth got up suddenly and headed for the stairs, walked up them loudly.
I sat very still, looking straight ahead. On the bookshelf opposite me was my mother’s picture in a frame, staring back at me. It was unnerving, and a feeling like nothing I had ever felt before imploded in me. But I still wouldn’t say I was sad. It was not that.
I had not always been an unbeliever. Around the time I’d started to fear almost everything, when I was about eleven, I turned to God for a while, secretly. I made up a prayer that I wrote in my diary; it was seven pages long, and I would read it every night before bed, though never aloud. I praised and prayed for all the usual things—thanks for the safe passing of the day; protection from all the dire possibilities of tomorrow—but I prayed for it in the utmost detail, each night adding to my list of concerns. I racked my brain to imagine every ill I could (the mentioning of it was key in warding it off), and I prayed that I and those I knew be spared from earthquakes, falling trees, landslides, lightning, floods, rabid or wild animals, rape, murder, kidnapping, sudden disappearance, assault, car accidents, brain damage, contagious diseases—my list went on and on. And I would ask God for these graces in exchange for certain sacrifices.
I promised to forgo stealing candy from the Lotus General Store for one day; I would walk, not gallop, my horse over a stretch of field where I usually loved to gallop; I would make a one-week pact not to cry even if I felt like it during an argument with my parents—I would vow absolutely not to cry whenever being spanked by my father with his belt (I would tell myself it hurt just the same as falling off a horse, and I’d done that plenty of times and even laughed). It was not so much that I saw these actions—crying or enjoying candy or galloping across a field—as sinful. It was simply that I associated piety with restraint. My understanding of God was that you bargained against whatever was your most basic nature or impulse in a given moment in order to remain on the “good” side of life; the safe, blessed, loftier side. And whether or not this proved the existence of God, the fact was no grave ills befell our family in that period of time.
Then something happened, between twelve and thirteen. I woke up. Boys had begun trying to put their hands on me underwater at the city pool; I was finally permitted to wear makeup. I outgrew my fears, lost interest in praying. I even went back to my diary and erased all the pages of “I HATE ME” I had written (self-loathing was another deal I’d thought to make with God—this was how I had interpreted penance) because now I needed the extra room to write down new lists—records of boys’ names and memorable glances and ges
tures and other tiny but significant instances I didn’t want to forget.
I guessed if it were still in me now, that brief allegiance I’d had to Him then, I might’ve felt it was my fault somehow, my mother’s end. But I had no doubts about my disbelief—not that, at least—though I did still believe in some rhythm of sacrifice. Which is why at the back of my mind there was the thought, almost guilty, that my mother might have been the biggest sacrifice of all. I may have been meant, then, to have other things: stranger, more remarkable, unlikelier things. Fame. A gorgeous boyfriend. ESP or great beauty or an adventure.
Kathlyn Walker was making us sandwiches. She was brewing coffee. My father was out on the deck smoking a cigarette.
In the end, we did not take up Kathlyn Walker’s invitation to come over and make toast. Ted Walker returned with Thien and the Walkers left us, and in the days to come it was just the four of us, dealing, retreating, speculating, bickering. We watched our father hang up the phone with his other hand on his stomach a number of times. We watched helplessly, not offering much and knowing he wouldn’t allow us to help anyhow. After some deliberation, he decided against having a funeral service. Maybe a small, private ritual, but my father would not stand for any priests or ceremony (technically, my mother had been a Catholic) because he scoffed at all organized religion. In fact, he was opposed to it. Church-centered gatherings such as funerals and weddings had always made him uncomfortable and compromised his sense of emotional integrity; he felt that mourning or celebrating as a group tainted the experience—which was private, or should be. This was just how Danish people were, my father explained. In Denmark you left a family alone after they’d had a tragedy; you did not come knocking on their door with a basket of fruit. You could offer assistance, certainly, but only if it was appropriate and necessary. Americans, on the other hand, seemed to want to make everything public, and our Vietnamese relatives were proving to be not much different. They had been calling, trying to intervene. They wanted to hold a Vietnamese Catholic service in Los Angeles because there were too many of them to make the trip north, they said. My father insisted she would be cremated.
That first night, my brother and sister and I curled up on one bed upstairs and talked about our mother. My sister and I expressed our dread at living alone with our father; our brother expressed his worry about us; we expounded on these fears. We agreed our father had always been the more difficult parent, our mother the soother. Without her to allay his moods, we imagined he would become a tyrant, a demanding and unyielding person. We couldn’t conjure many specifics of this future, though; our fears were, it seemed, based more on a general sense of void. My brother repeated what our Aunt Mary had said over the phone, that we should go to live down south. He said he loved it down there. The weather was nicer, and our cousins’ house had consistently running hot water, a big-screen TV and stereo system, was in walking distance of malls and beaches. Aunt Mary even had him going to church (though this part, I argued, would never happen to me). I was almost excited, being able to blind myself to the fact of her absence, turning everything, our lives, into the idea of a vacation of sorts. Beth was more sensible, remorseful, attached. “But Dad’ll get lonely, too, you know,” she said. We could hear him downstairs coughing and moving around and talking to the dogs. We heard the squeak of the sliding glass door as he opened it to let them in and out, the clack of their claws on the tile floor, the rush of their happy panting. It was March, still cold in the house at night and freezing in the mornings.
A couple of times in the following days, Kathlyn Walker sent Cody and Danny over with a pan of baked lasagna, a large glass bowl of spaghetti, boxes or bags of various sundries she and a few other neighborhood mothers thought we might need. She was discreet, tactful—right, actually—and in the bottom of one bag was a supply of feminine items for Beth and me. These items were placed at the foot of the stairs (we knew they came from Mrs. Walker because we had seen the bags earlier), uncommented upon by our father, but we took them to mean he understood what we would have to deal with as girls, alone now; or he was trying to, at least.
And it would be weeks before we started to put away anything our mother had left out, the folded-open magazine, her deck shoes, the washcloth in the bathroom we each suspected the other was using until at last it occurred to us it had been dry for weeks. Objects would just go on waiting, we realized.
***
There was no official service for my mother. We would dress nicely and drive to the funeral home to pick up the ashes; we would accept some visitors; we would mourn in private. Once, the Walkers invited us over for coffee and tea and passed on to us condolences from other neighbors and friends’ parents and teachers at school. Beth and I sat on our chairs, sipping hot chocolate and looking across at Cody and Danny, dressed in slacks with their shirts tucked in, slouching on the couch. Thien sat in an armchair and drank coffee and answered Mrs. Walker’s occasional questions about San Diego. Ted Walker and my father stood the whole time, and at one point Ted took my father into the kitchen to show him their new cabinets. Uncle Michael called for Kathlyn from the other room, and she took him some cookies.
Aunt Mary and Uncle John had expressed their wish to fly our mother’s ashes back to Vietnam. This was a traditional idea: where one’s ashes lay, one’s soul may rest. Our father thought this appropriate and agreed to pay half the airfare. He was “absolutely not sentimental” about such things as adjacent burial plots, and when asked was appalled anyway at the thought of being buried himself. (“Is not marriage a morbid enough union as it is?” he said at one point, his usually wry jokes like lumps of lead at this time.) He couldn’t comprehend the benefit for anyone involved of all these proceedings—not even death could bring him to admit a God or the good of spiritual measures. He would talk only about the disease, and in general about her. He arranged for the ashes to be transported to L.A. on the same flight as my brother’s and allowed Beth and me to go, too, for the memorial service our relatives were arranging down there, though he declined to go himself.
“Your mother, her largest concern was always for Vietnam,” said our father on our drive home from retrieving the ashes, “and the Communists. She wanted nothing more than to see Communism defeated, you know.” This was something I did know about my mother, but I’d never considered it her largest concern; to me it had seemed she, like all adults, had many concerns, many ongoing projects of vague nature that she easily picked up or set aside whenever we came in or out of the house. “She was obsessed by it, in fact,” my father went on. “It was a vital, crucial part of her being and without it, without that sense of struggle, she was not a whole person. She was always feeling embittered about her homeland and what the injustice of Communism had done to it. She used to lash out at me sometimes in incomprehensible bouts of anger.” He fell silent, as if he had just caught wind of some other news beneath his own words.
The ashes were confounding to me. The funeral home director handed them to my father in two separate vessels—a large, Egyptian-looking vase, and a second box that was heavy though small enough to be held under one arm, small but dense as a chunk of metal. The ashes themselves were as fine as the finest, driest mud. So easily could the pieces of my mother slip away now—a puff of them escaped as we lowered the lid back down: what did that mean? What part of her was that and where had it gone? That a person could be so dissolved was no comfort to me. I tried to imagine the essence of my mother floating around, pleasantly uniting with others who had passed on beyond the physical, but all I could imagine her soul to be—if it existed—was simply the outline of her body and features as they had appeared in life. This seemed no better—just a continuation, not a passage.
But at least this box and vase were tidy, were right. It was done.
I remembered something in the car. “Mom had a story she was telling me that she wanted to write someday,” I said. “It was about a character who drives past a beautiful field of sunflowers on the side of the freeway. All the sunf
lowers are open and facing the road, and she is so in awe of the sight that she wants to stop her car and pull over and take a picture of the field. But she tells herself she’ll stop next time. Each day she tells herself this. Until one day the flowers have turned away from the road, they’re following the sun, and she can see only the curved backs of their stems now, which is not as picturesque, and she realizes, in a poignant and self-reflective way”—I used the exact words my mother had used to convey this moment in her story; it was imperative to me to be acutely honest—“that she has missed an important opportunity in her life.”
My father made a “hmph” sound. “Told so cryptically, April,” he remarked, almost thoughtfully.
My brother sat in the passenger seat next to my father. “The flowers died?” he said, sympathetically.
“They weren’t dead, they just turned in the direction of the sun,” I explained, leaning forward in the backseat.
Beth leaned forward with me. “I have a story about something Mom told me, too,” she said. “A couple of days before she had to go into the hospital, we were sitting upstairs in my bedroom talking, and she asked if I would miss her if she had to go away. I said, no, I wouldn’t, because I don’t believe in missing people. If where they went would make them happier than where they were before, I mean. And you know what she said then?” We were quieted by Beth’s words, humbled and envious and skeptical altogether. Without a note of incredulity, Beth finished, “She looked at me really softly and said, ‘I knew you would understand, Beth.’ And I looked at her and I didn’t understand totally then, but I do now. She knew she was going to die, see.”
The service took place in a large banquet room above a Vietnamese lawyers’ office and an Asian grocery in a shopping plaza in Santa Ana, otherwise known as Little Saigon. The room was rectangular with one bank of windows overlooking the parking lot. We sat on metal-framed, red-cushioned conference chairs set in rows facing the front of the room, where there was a carpeted stage and large black speakers aimed outward. The service would’ve been held at a local Vietnamese Catholic church, but our relatives were afraid the church wouldn’t be large enough; there were nearly a hundred people attending. The Vietnamese Catholic priest wore a long white robe; he wore thick eyeglasses and his skin was pockmarked. Beside him on an easel was displayed an 8 by 10 photograph of our mother’s face, smiling and made up (as she never was in daily life), taken by a photographer friend of hers. In it, rouge had been applied in circles over her cheeks; her lips were glossy; her hair up in hairpins. Her face looked masklike and tranquil, and older than it had usually appeared. The frame was ringed with flowers, and on metal TV trays beside it were candles, red-tipped incense sticks, red envelopes, rice, fruit, flower petals, and a hand-bound book of uneven, coarsely textured paper, inside of which were pasted clippings and photographs. All our mother’s brothers and sisters and some of our older cousins wore white head sashes. Their clothing was formal, rustling, perfumed, white, or floral. The aunts were so thickly made up you could read the boundary, clearly marked along their jawlines, between the orangey brown of their facial foundation and the natural brown of their necks. All this adornment, all these mourning accoutrements—to me, it was as if our relatives had put on what they thought were the adequate masks of grief. They dabbed at their eyes; their husbands next to them looked heavy-lidded and piggish and irate and stared straight ahead.