Grass Roof, Tin Roof

by Dao Strom

  So at last I told Donny that I had intended to have sex with him because a war had broken out. I told him I didn’t feel that way anymore (the idea had lost its significance; the war was already over), but had he tried in the past few weeks, I might’ve been willing. I knew this was the last intimate conversation we would have, Donny Silver and I. We were sitting on a park bench by the city pool, which was closed for winter. He scooted away from me in disgust. I was looking at his hands, brown and dirty against his dirty black jeans.

  He said, “You are one sick tease.”

  What he was missing, though: it was all theoretical for me. The fact is, I never let or made anything happen. I never stopped thinking about it long enough to actually allow my body to act, and I probably never intended to.

  ***

  The path was marked by tiny ribbons of torn yellow cotton tied to the lowest branches of bushes, roots, some trees. We followed the yellow. The hill was covered by hard, chunky red dirt. The bushes were dry and crackly-looking. The pine trees were sparse because this area had been logged frequently.

  We were in camouflage again. Sensei had bought a whole box of surplus army gear from the thrift store on Main Street. I had borrowed my brother’s old Civil Air Patrol jacket. I was partners with Heidi. The other team hid in the trees along the path at various ambush points. Heidi and I traveled back to back. We had already decided that she would take care of head and stomach, I the legs. I would take them out at the knees, if need be.

  “It’s Kenny!” she shrieked suddenly and crashed into my back.

  Kenny Davis had dropped out of a tree and landed behind us. He wore twigs in his hair and looked more like a youthful Greek forest god, I thought, than a camouflaged fighter. “I got you! I got you!” he was exclaiming. We were supposed to determine if someone was out of the game by judging our own skills fairly. We weren’t supposed to make actual contact: we pulled our kicks and punches, went through our fake reactions. But if you didn’t react in time or block adequately and you knew it, you had to be honest enough to admit you were dead. These were Sensei’s rules.

  I didn’t care, though. I was just waiting to die today. We had been doing training exercises all weekend and I was tired of them.

  “Beth, you’re not even trying!” said Kenny.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “Kill me, kill me.”

  “Legs, his legs!” Heidi reminded me from the ground where she was doubled over. “I’m still alive, I’m just injured. You can still save me,” she mock-groaned.

  Kenny scowled. “You can’t do that.” He came at me with another punch. I did Defensive Art Number 2, the only one I could do spontaneously because the first move it required—the first action—was to step back. Was to go where the strike had wanted you to go in the first place but before it put you there itself. It was an entirely subversive Defensive Art. Because what followed was low kicks. To the groin, the knee—they buckled—then you swept out the leg. It was all about undermining your opponent’s tactics.

  But it was my ground, my ground always, that was the real problem, it felt like it was forever slipping away. I was the one shaking here.

  We were into the next exercise now, and I had been finding it increasingly hard to stay alert. I had already been kicked in the gut once during this new exercise but was trying not to show it. Sensei had us performing long sparring sessions with no gloves, in a dirt clearing with piles of branches prickly with needles and huge, stacked pine trunks, a logging site at the base of a mountainside. Turkey vultures reeled high above us, and our voices resounded crisply in the dusky pink air. Every now and then Sensei would replace one of the fighters who’d been going awhile with a new one, pitting the former against a fresh opponent. To test our endurance, he told us. “It’s important to know what we’re capable of when it comes down to— the wire” said Sensei, melodramatically.

  He had kept me in the “bullring” for three rounds. Now he stepped between Kenny and me, took the prop weapon out of Kenny’s hands, and unbuckled the leather case on his own belt. I shook the sweat out of my eyes.

  He said to Kenny, “That’s real American steel in your hands now, son,” and grinned at me. “Beth. My tough girl.” Sensei stepped aside—taking with him the rubber knife we usually used in practice—and Kenny and I were facing off again. He nodded at us to resume sparring. From the sidelines the others were watching. I think pain sometimes registers like a noise you’re not sure you’ve heard—faint then suddenly so apparent you can’t fathom how you had missed it. I had failed to block. When I realized this, then I heard the music in the trees: the chattering birds and swishing needles drawing my attention almost completely away. I saw a preternatural light I’d never seen before flash in Kenny’s baby-blue eyes.

  On top of a stack of logs the boys were ducking and running and pretending to shoot each other and jumping off. From where I lay, a few yards away at the edge of the clearing, I heard them scrambling up the logs, and the thud of their feet and bodies as they hit the ground, and for a moment I imagined it, gray fallen rubble, broken stone-and-straw villages, blackened walls, streets full of wailing. A sea on fire. A river aflame. The desert awash in mercury-gray fluid. The flat brown flood coming at me was a flood of faces. Bobbing, jagged, brown faces: they were running. The placid, permissive heat—tropical—I had never actually felt, only been told of through TV coverage of places where these unending battles occurred: places of frequent catastrophes. Monsoons, bombs, unnamed deadly winds.

  But really—it was only this: the boys had caught a snake. The Sandusky brothers were beating it with sticks. When I sat up, I saw what they were doing. The snake was supple and black and thick like a beautiful piece of steel cable. It thrashed and thrashed with an insane will to live. I felt pity not for its death but for the earnestness of its fight.

  The Whalen twins’ mother doctored me with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol and small beige strips of adhesive.

  “Hold still, Beth,” she told me. Her presence was soft and pleasing. Her fingers were cool. “I’m just making a little butterfly now.”

  My sister picked me up, and on the drive home she told me that while we were gone this weekend, Dad did something I would not believe. He bought two hundred dollars’ worth of groceries—it hadn’t been his idea alone, other parents had pitched in, too—then he and a couple of other fathers drove to the dojo to sneak the groceries into Sensei’s family’s cupboards and shelves and refrigerator. They sent Jacob, the youngest Sandusky, in through the bathroom window. Then he went around to open the front door. He let in our father, the other fathers, the bags of groceries, all, into Sensei’s home. They filled his kitchen with food, Beth. So that he and his daughters would come home and find their shelves stocked and they would feel grateful, relieved. I listened to this, confused. It had never occurred to me there was a shortage of food in Sensei’s home.

  “That man,” our father had said bitterly afterward, “that man can’t even feed his own family.”

  “And what he really means,” said April, “is ‘see how well I’ve done? See?’” She told me how she had refused to help. It was too weird for her. “‘Feed us,’ I told him, ‘Feed us, why don’t you?’ Something more than TV dinners, frozen beans, you know? He’s no different than Sensei when you really think about it. They are both force-feeding someone else’s kids. I was telling Gunner about it. I finished that book he lent me. There’s this part about love, it’s really beautiful and true, we were talking about it. ‘Love is the upward glance,’ it goes—” She looked over at me. Only then did she notice.

  “What happened to your eye?” she asked.

  Our father asked, too, once we were home. “Hi, hi Beth.” He appeared to be in good spirits. He was knocking his pipe out on the deck railing. He frowned at the sight of me. “What happened to your eye, skunk?”

  “Forget it, Dad,” said April. “She won’t even tell me.” Butterfly, I was thinking, is a beautiful way of saying “bandaged.”

  “She go
t hit or something,” said April.

  “I got hurt,” I said.

  7. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED UPON MY RETURN

  My cousin and I were sitting on a bench facing the Saigon River when she told me that sadness is actually the main current of life. To feel sadness is evidence of the true texture of experience. Sadness, it seemed she was telling me, is also an inherent characteristic of the Vietnamese culture. They have staked their claim to it. They are certain they are among those in the world who have had the most of it—and how can you say they are wrong? They use the word “sentiment” to describe it, though. “We are people very sentiment,” or “This is a nation of heavy sentiment, life always hard here,” they will say, and having no grammatical structure for the past tense in their language seems to confirm that this must be an ongoing situation. I, meanwhile, was thinking about the negative connotations of the word—in America many of us would define “sentimentality” as a sinister thing, a thing not to be trusted—or, at the least, an embarrassing thing. A weakness of character, an indication of insincerity buried beneath the overt show of emotion. And where does this idea stem from? Does it have to do with the northern Europeans (I want to blame them), the stoicism of those emigrants from colder climates? My father has his theories about hot and cold climates. Why is it, he says, that colder climates for the most part have produced the more socially progressive, more technologically advanced societies of the world? The cold requires people to think more sharply because a lack of proper awareness in the cold might mean death, is his theory, and thus these people have been conditioned to exercise their mental faculties. While in hotter climates barbaric conflicts have prevailed for thousands of years without change, as well as an indulgence in life’s baser elements (they came up with the “siesta” after all). It must be that the heat dissolves the brain’s capacity for rational thought, he will actually say, or for an understanding of systems. By systems he means things like Time and Government and Mathematics and Science. I don’t argue against such views. Arguing is another thing that requires systematic thinking.

  I went back to Vietnam for the first time in 1996, expecting as I always do to feel underwhelmed, and instead I felt everything. My body felt awake—abler, thinner. My skin felt at home for the first time anywhere, unfettered, natural. I recognized things I shared, like my relatives’ gestures, the shapes of people’s faces, their body types, their smiles and tired expressions. I cried freely there, felt—equally—purged and chaotic. I had dreams of myself drawing objects up from underwater, or of standing over an unconscious girl in a dark cave—I had to fight to wake from these dreams. Occasionally I felt a deep sense of retrieval. But I never felt as if I belonged there, no.

  There is nothing insincere about true, honest-to-God sufferers. There is nothing sinister in the sharing of one’s own sorrows. I, too, am willing to admit I don’t always know what I’m talking about and that often I feel defeated, but I’ve not mastered the tact of Third World candor. You will see it in the way they are so good-natured, able to laugh at their own heartfelt dramatics; they will, in irony, make sweeping gestures with their arms in the middle of a love song that in private they might usually take very seriously. They will admit, charmingly, that in private they usually take this song very seriously. They will dance with true abandon. You must know how to laugh among these people. Or their laughter will seem to you almost annoying, quite mysterious, and perhaps that is why I was to find myself weeping on the sidelines of their dance floor, on my second night there, and my cousin had to take me outside to the bench beside the black water of the river, where I probably more appropriately belonged.

  Conversely (to the remarks above about embracing sadness), for I was reading Joseph Campbell on the plane, there is also the rule of mythology that says all extremes — evil and good, birth and death, suffering and wealth—are born of the same primordial matter. And that is why we must also be joyful in life. I am sure. I am not so sure.

  PASSENGER

  When you are flying west, the sun rises for seven hours: a perpetual morning. There is no such thing as rest.

  June 19:

  They come at you from all sides here. Humans, dogs, cyclos, bicycles, motorcycles, produce trucks, squawking chicken-trucks. All these wheels. Bent old ladies carrying baskets of rice on bamboo sticks across their shoulders. Pretty girls herding piglets. To cross the traffic these people must engender absolute trust in the mad drivers; arms close to their sides, they inch forward, keeping their gazes fixed and blank on the oncoming traffic—and the traffic swerves easily, indifferently, round them. The noise of all the scooter engines is like a sick cat purring, punctuated by growls and grunts and choke-ups, an inconsistent but continuous grinding. Men squat barefoot in dim doorways, arms resting on knees to smoke cigarettes. Women glare out from metal-latticed windows. Half-naked children run up and down the sidewalks.

  I was born here. I have never quite grasped this.

  I show the address to the taxi driver and he takes me to Aunt Long’s house. The widow of Mom’s older brother, who died in the war. Her house has two rooms with a single faucet in the side alley outside, on a narrow rutted street where all the houses are low and small and built very close together. Father, I am loath to tell you this because I suspect you will interpret it as their failure to develop intelligence, or something. They store water in large plastic tubs and hang their clothes to dry on a line at the back of the alley; there are two cots in the second room, where everyone sleeps together, a few of them on the floor. The bathroom has no plumbing and no roof; it is open to the sky.

  I am stared at and told over and over how much I look like Mom. Each one has to hug me, and do you know how many cousins that is? I was surprised you suggested I come here, to be honest, and I’m still confused as to what you expect I’ll discover here. Maybe you thought I needed the culture shock? It’s 1996. I’m twenty-three years old, twenty-one years past the last time some of these people leaned down and spoke to me in a language I can’t remember I ever knew. It just doesn’t seem like you to say these connections still matter.

  Sorry. I will try to start again more gently.

  I sat on the wooden bench just inside their door for a while after I first arrived, and they asked at least ten times if I was hungry. I said no, thank you, again and again. Then there was confusion over the water. I was afraid of getting sick, so I took the glass but didn’t drink from it, and they kept asking about it and finally gave me a Pepsi instead. Though I didn’t mean for them to do that, either.

  Ha, the one cousin who speaks English (her daughter speaks a little, too), knelt on the floor in front of me. She had a very happy, affectionate expression on her face, and said, “It is very good to see you, you do not know.” And put her hand on my leg.

  You do not know. Well, I guess I don’t. But I have to take a break now because they’re telling me it’s time for bed.

  June 20:

  Morning. They wake early (six A.M.) and it’s hot by eight-thirty. They dress in shorts or loose, thin pants and sleeveless tops, like the outfits Mom used to sew that I always said looked like pajamas. All the women wear them here. It’s too hot to wear much else. It’s too hot to even bare your skin, and tans are unfashionable. Women here want rather to look delicate and fair.

  Seven cousins (all much older than I am) live in this house with their mother. Three have kids of their own. Ha’s daughter, Thi, is the closest to my age. She’s eighteen, and beautiful. Round, high cheekbones. Elegant and childlike both. She and the boys—who are all ten or twelve years old—are taking English language classes at school. English is the language to learn here now.

  I know it’s rude, but I can’t remember everybody’s names.

  I want to finish telling you what happened yesterday. I was sitting with the cousins when they heard Aunt Long’s footsteps on the stoop outside and they all jumped up, exclaiming. I heard my name—my other one. Thuy. The way I can’t pronounce it myself, a noise rising up from the bottoms of the
ir throats (though I tried to tell them I’m more an April now than a Thuy). It is what they at least have never forgotten or questioned about me, though, I realized—so I didn’t insist. Aunt Long stepped down into the house. She has gray hair and looks a lot older than Mom ever did. She saw me and grabbed my hands tightly and her face crumpled and she started to cry. She said a bunch of words I couldn’t understand. I didn’t know what to do but stand there.

  “She say it very long time since she see you,” said Ha. “When she see you before, you only very little baby.” My aunt spoke and patted my face. “She say you very pretty,” said Ha, “like your mom. We all love your mom so much. When she here, she give advice to all the girls and we listen. She say, be strong, you be smart, no let man think he so important. She like big sister to me.”

  The boys were crouched against the far wall with their knees in their armpits, poking at the concrete floor with their fingers and glancing up at me only every now and then. The women kept speaking on top of one another, nodding and nodding at me. I didn’t know where to look. They asked a lot of questions: “How old you are now? Do you like the Vietnamese food? Do you still love the tomato?” This one they laughed about a lot. “You love to eat the tomato when you little baby,” Ha explained, “and then you want to hold her hand”—she pointed to one of the cousins—“but she no want to hold your hand no more because they are sticky!”

  Another asked, “Why your father no here too?”

  I answered, “He thought I should go alone.” (Which is better than the other answer I give about you sometimes, which is “He’s a hermit. He won’t go anywhere.”)