Hello, My Name Is Scrambled Eggs

by Jamie Gilson

  “Why, hi, there,” I yelled. “My name is Attila the Hun, and you get to stay at my house, you lucky kid, you. Just stick with me.”

  “Attila,” she told me, “the ‘stick with me’ stuff was wrong. Jeff said you’re not supposed to use slang like that or like ‘I’ve got to hit the books.’ But I think you’re not big on book-hitting, anyway.” She giggled. At least she didn’t call me Zilch.

  “I’m late for work.” I backed up, but she was sticking with me like Velcro.

  “Try not to shout because they’re not deaf, they just don’t speak the language. I wish I had my notes. They don’t call people over by motioning with their index finger,” she went on, “because that’s the way they call dogs.” I could tell she’d said she was scared she’d forget just so she could tell me how much she remembered.

  “If you need any help …” Caroline said.

  I dashed out the front door, free. Actually, I did need help. On Thursdays, Fridays, and half-day Saturdays I worked at Mom and Dad’s drugstore. We were starting a big twenty-percent-off sale on Friday, and so I had to finish out the afternoon zapping hundreds, maybe thousands of red New-Low-Price stickers onto toothpaste boxes, Odor Eaters, patterned panty hose, bunny-rabbit barrettes, and like that. Pete and I used to fool around a lot in the stockroom, pricing each other’s noses and stuff as we worked. It was fun. When I was there by myself, though, the stockroom was a dungeon with prisoner me hemmed in by hissing drugstore serpents, rare and deadly.

  I sprinted down the sidewalk toward the town square, parting a tide of yellow leaves, slowing down through the oatmeal-cookie smell that drifted out of Miles’ Bakery, and stopping, finally, at the big metal “Pork-Capital-of-the-World” pig statue on the courthouse lawn. It’s made out of old car parts welded together. Sort of modern. Pittsfield doesn’t need George Washington on a horse. Pitt Pig has class. I pushed its fat spring snout. I always push it for luck, expecting a whole-hog genie to shoot back out, shazam. There has to be one in there somewhere, grunting wishes.

  But this time I didn’t need it. I already had my wish. I was getting a kid of my own to take Eric’s and Pete’s places, a kid I could teach whatever I wanted to. He was coming from rice paddies, and I was going to program him so he’d understand People magazine. There was this Vietnamese girl I’d either read about there or seen on TV who was in the finals of the Great American Spelling Bee. She’d been in this country no time at all, maybe less, when she’d won. Some kid had probably taught her I before E except after C and, so they say, in weird neighbor, and weigh. Then, of course, the teacher kid had clapped like crazy whenever she won a round. I could hear the wild applause as I opened the door to our drugstore.

  “Harvey,” Dad called from behind the prescription counter, “fill the Coke machine before you start pricing. Where’ve you been? Your mother marked all the deodorants this morning, so just start with the toothpaste. I’ve already unpacked it.”

  I chucked cans into the Coke machine. Then I flattened the cardboard boxes Dad had emptied during the day and stuffed them into the garbage bin.

  A big batch of lemon-flavored PURE toothpaste was stacked on the stockroom counter. I didn’t know how we’d sell that much unless everybody in town really did squeeze it out snake-thick, like they do on TV. With a little curl on top. The PURE had been $2.49, so I figured out the big fat discount and set the pricing gun. The stuff tastes the way furniture polish smells. Yucky. So I covered the RE with a red sticker. PURE. Zap, $1.79. PU. After pricing a few, I made a square of boxes to build on and started adding layers up. Zap. And up. Zap, $1.79. PU. Winner and still champion in the price-gun category is …

  “Harvey,” Julia called. “Hi.” Lowering her head, she ducked under the swinging door that leads from the drugstore into the stockroom. “Mom had to go to a meeting. She said you should baby-sit me. Dad said not to bother you, OK?”

  I put $1.79 on her nose.

  She emptied out the brown-paper sack of Hot Wheels she was carrying and sat down on the floor next to a carton of pH-Perfect Strawberry Shrub Shampoo for Oily Hair. “Rnnnnnnnnn, rnnnnnnnn,” she purred and raced two trucks up my leg.

  “How was the field trip?” I asked her, zapping and stacking like a robot. “Learn anything you didn’t know?”

  She let the trucks crash on my shoes. “Mrs. Broderick’s bedspread doesn’t have Big Bird on it, or Kermit, either. It’s got pink roses. Her bathroom has pink towels and pink toilet paper and pink soap. And she’s got a dog named Maudie.”

  “Who is, naturally, pink.” My stack was getting to be Mt. Everest with only a half-carton of toothpaste left to go.

  “She sings,” Julia went on. “I mean, she barks ‘Jingle Bells,’ and you can really tell.”

  “Mrs. Broderick?” I asked.

  Julia laughed. “No! Maudie.” She climbed onto a stool next to me and handed over a box of the revolting toothpaste. I zapped it.

  “Mom’s getting me a dog just like Maudie.” Julia’s Jeep popped a wheelie on the counter. “I’m going to teach it to bark ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.’”

  “Who says?”

  “Me.” She narrowed her eyes at my toothpaste mountain.

  “You knock that over, kid,” I warned her, “and I’ll wind you up and aim you at the moon. Look, our last dog chewed up Dad’s sunglasses, dug out Mom’s parrot tulips, and ate Pete’s sneakers, so don’t get your hopes up. Said dog now lives on a farm, where he bites strangers.”

  “My Maudie will be good.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Can you add one more box on top?”

  “Maybe.” I raised my arm high and carefully placed a toothpaste box upright, like a flag, on the summit. It looked terrific.

  The pricing gun clicked empty, and so I filled it with a new roll of red stickers. Julia drove the Jeep around the base of PU mountain.

  “Look, I thought Dad said you weren’t supposed to bother me.”

  She grabbed the box I’d just marked and wandered out toward the store. “I wanted a candy bar, anyway.”

  Zap, $1.79. Zap. OK—so, like Suzanna says, I thought, I don’t shake this new kid’s hand or point at him. Big deal. But I kind of push ENTER and start feeding him Useful Information. Before long he’ll dress like me, talk like me, and act like me. Caroline, and even Suzanna and Quint, will say, “See that Vietnamese kid over there? After one month he could count to a hundred and knew about I before E. He scores eighty thousand when he plays Donkey Kong, knows all the verses to ‘America the Beautiful.’ And everything, everything he knows he learned from Harvey Trumble.” Zap, $1.79. I’ll just shrug, I decided, and tell them, “It’s nothing, folks. No kidding, it’s nothing.” Zap, $1.79.

  “Finished,” I yelled. “On to the panty hose.”

  “Harvey,” Dad called from out front. “You know, don’t you, that twenty percent off $2.49 is $1.99. Did you do many of those boxes wrong?”

  Not many. Just all. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Julia!” I called.

  She swung through the door and gave me a bite of her frozen Snickers. Then she drove the Jeep from one side, and I aimed a Thunderbird from the other, and we crashed the whole mountain down to the counter, making heaps of yellow PU toothpaste foothills.

  Julia started handing them to me one by one. We were an assembly line. Grab, $1.99. Grab, $1.99, faster and faster.

  “And he beat his old record, folks,” I could hear the TV anchor announce breathless. “After the toothpaste market collapsed, Harvey Trumble boldly raised the price and saved the world from unsightly decay.” Grab, $1.99.

  Well, I decided, that new kid’s going to have to do something for himself. Maybe percents.

  3

  The Steps Move

  FRIDAY AFTER SUPPER I scoured the John, scrubbed the mold out of the cracks in Pete’s shower, and dragged my beer can collection down to the basement, hoping the good ones wouldn’t rust. I didn’t even have time to stick around down there with Felix A. Compu
ter, who was probably glowing a chip from pure loneliness.

  Five people were supposed to be moving in—Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen, the baby, the kid, and their grandmother. So Mom and I set up Pete’s room for the parents, the little sewing room for the grandmother, and the spare room for the kids. As I worked, I began to make plans. I’d show the kid once around town—the school, the courthouse with its fancy old stained glass, the drugstore, the cream puffs at Miles’, the park where the swimming pool is, and Suicide Hill where you can skateboard when you get good. Probably we wouldn’t look at the roses on Mrs. Broderick’s bedspread, though her singing dog was a possibility.

  What’s more, they were even letting me go to Chicago with Jeff to pick up my kid. Dad should have gone in place of the man who was all puffy with chicken pox, but even though he has extra help on Saturdays, he couldn’t take this one off what with the sale and all.

  It was kind of bizarre, actually, because Jeff and I finally tooled away in the church’s blue van at three-fifteen in the morning. The plane was supposed to arrive at eight-ten, and it’s roughly a four-hour drive when there aren’t flat tires or wrong turns. Mom made me go to bed, of course, but I didn’t have much time to sleep before the alarm went off.

  As Jeff and I headed out, nobody was on the streets, and the traffic lights on the square were just set to flash caution. The drive up to Chicago is over flat Illinois farmland, dull in the day, and nothing much at night but truck headlights barreling past. I dozed. Off and on.

  The sun was hardly up when Jeff shook me awake. It was almost seven-thirty, and he was starting up a spiral of curves on the airport garage ramp. As he pulled into a place near the elevator, I rubbed my eyes and shook the sleep away so we could head off to the waiting room.

  One of those moving-belt sidewalks that lets you stand still carried us a block or so underground. Then we got on an escalator up to this huge hall where people were waiting in line with their suitcases and backpacks. After Jeff stopped to ask directions, we headed off again to file through a little arch where they discovered we weren’t carrying any dangerous weapons.

  I still can’t imagine where so many people were going so early in the morning. Jeff said several refugees were supposed to be coming in on the same flight, and so a translator was at the gate to help out. A woman from Travelers Aid was there, too. Other sponsors waited around in clusters, talking to each other about families they’d had before and how they were doing. It was like a party.

  “Flight 231 from San Francisco now arriving at Gate H-12,” a voice on the loudspeaker announced. The party broke up as the greeters pushed closer to the door. I unrolled a kind of banner the fourth-grade Sunday school class had made out of white shelf-lining paper, WELCOME TO PITTSFIELD NGUYEN FAMILY, it said. The edges were red, white, and blue stripes. All we needed was a brass band.

  A lady in a wheelchair was first off. She didn’t look Vietnamese. Then came a few families and some men and women wearing ties and carrying briefcases. This really cute girl in pink jeans and a fuzzy jacket flung her arms around a sailor as soon as he stepped into the waiting room. Traffic stopped while she gave him this massive kiss. But pretty soon the first Vietnamese appeared behind them. Twenty or so followed after him, edging around the smoochers, who were very glad to see each other. Once they stopped kissing, they rubbed noses and giggled. I couldn’t help but notice.

  Forget handshakes, I thought. I bet those Vietnamese are wondering what they’ll do when we rush up with hugs, kisses, and public nose rubs.

  The woman from Travelers Aid and the translator stepped forward to greet the cluster of anxious-looking Vietnamese who were hugging shopping bags, packages tied with twine, and tote bags that said C.A.R.E. on them. When the people looked up, they saw us all standing there with signs and things, beaming. They smiled back.

  This is going pretty good, I thought. I raised my arms high over my head and waved the sign. It still felt like a party, WELCOME TO PITTSFIELD NGUYEN FAMILY, I waved back and forth. Several of the group glanced at the banner and blinked a few times, but no one came running up, hands behind backs, to say, “That’s us!” There were quite a few kids, but I didn’t see any groups that looked like ours. What, I thought, lowering my sign, what if they’d missed the plane?

  The Vietnamese translator, though, hurried over. “Perhaps I can help you,” he said quietly. “Your sign may not be enough. Most of the families just arriving are called Nguyen. Are you the only sponsors from …?”

  “Pittsfield. Yes!” Jeff filled him in with the details we had and showed him the papers he was carrying with him. “Are all of these people, then, from one big family?”

  “Oh, no.” He smiled. “It is just that more than half the people in Vietnam are named Nguyen. It’s a name like Smith—only more common. If I visit Pittsfield, I know from your sign that I will be welcome. My name, too, is Nguyen.” He bowed slightly.

  We said, “How do you do,” and watched him go off in search of our family.

  That was actually the first time we’d heard it pronounced “N-gwyn.” All of us—even Jeff and the committee—had only just seen it printed. We’d been saying “N-guy-en.” Jeff and I were practicing the name out loud when the translator came up with three people, none of them wearing fancy samurai costumes. There were a short man and a small, thin boy with no long pigtail but black hair cut in bangs. He looked younger than me, shorter, too—which is really something, since I’m the kid in class they call Shrimp. An old woman dressed in gray stood back a step from them. Her face was wrinkled with lines deeper than any I’d ever seen, even on old farm women. Her eyes were black and damp-shiny, so small they seemed like part of the furrows. She looked as though she had never smiled.

  The translator said their names, but they sounded so strange to me, I couldn’t have said them back. Suzanna would have been proud of me, though. I clenched my hands in my pockets. “Hi,” I said, long and slow.

  Jeff stood, legs apart, hands crossed behind his back, nodding his head like a handshake. The boy and his father smiled really big. They reached their arms toward us.

  “Hello,” they said together, hands out. I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Jeff and I both shot our hands back at them so fast that when we finally shook, our arms crossed like an X. I kept laughing like I had hiccups. My kid and his dad were staring down at the floor as if they wished they were back in a combat zone, anywhere but there.

  “Excuse me,” Jeff said to the translator, and he explained what we’d learned about handshakes.

  The translator nodded. “It’s generally true what you say.” He spoke to the man and my kid, and they grinned at each other, said something to the translator, and then they all looked at us and started to laugh. People around us were staring like I was wearing a KICK ME sign.

  “Before your guests left the refugee camp in Galang,” the translator explained, grinning, “they went to a meeting. Among the many things they learned was that Americans have customs new to some of them. They were told that when they met you they should shake your hands so you would like them.”

  So we shook hands again. And laughed. And even bowed a little. It was crazy.

  The kid was still smiling. “Harvey,” I yelled, pointing at myself. “Harvey Trumble,” I repeated, trying to break the language barrier.

  Then I remembered not to shout and that pointing is supposed to be gross. Or did somebody tell them we do that here too? Just in case they didn’t, I lifted my hand to the top of my head to find someplace else to put it.

  “Nguyen Tuan,” he said, reaching out his hand. So that was the name of my kid. We shook hands again.

  The translator stopped his explanations to Jeff to tell me, “You should call him Tuan. In Vietnam, we say our family name first. Here, of course, he’ll be Tuan Nguyen.”

  “Tuan,” I repeated, wondering how we were going to get along without this translator guy. Was it because they lived on the other side of the world that they did things backward?

  “It-
is-pret-ty-cold-out.” I-sound-ed-like-a-ro-bot. “You’re going to freeze, no kidding.” He was wearing blue shorts, a short-sleeved brown shirt, and blue rubber thongs like the ones kids wear at the beach in the summer. Not exactly forty-five-degrees clothes.

  He smiled at me blankly. “Eeze no kidding?” he asked.

  The translator was telling Jeff that Tuan’s mother was sick and had to stay behind in the camp with his baby sister. They would come later. I didn’t know what to say, and so I just grabbed a heavy green tote bag from the grandmother, smiled too big, and started backing up down the long hall. We had a long way to go to get to the lower level where the rest of their luggage was being unloaded from the plane.

  As we walked, the kid kept glancing from side to side at the ads on the walls of, like, girls in bikinis riding bareback in Jamaica and giant chickens pecking at twenty-four flavors of popcorn. The hall narrowed as we skirted a tall wooden fence. The sign on it said, PARDON OUR DUST, A SHORT-TERM BOTHER, A LONG-TERM GAIN.

  Shuffling around barriers, it took us a while to reach the down escalator. Jeff was the first one on. He held out his hand to Mrs. Nguyen, who was walking just behind him. She had reached the top of the steps when suddenly she stopped and gave a weak, small cry. Looking back at us, her eyes wide, she said something low and fast, and backing up, grabbed at her son. We all stared at Jeff, who was trying to run back up the steps that carried him steadily down to the floor below.

  Tuan peered down the escalator and then tilted his head at me, blinking like he had just watched a cow cruise up to the moon. “Move,” he said, amazed. “Steps move.”

  I nodded. And though Jeff called and waved from below, and people kept stepping onto the stairs that moved down and down, the four of us at the top just watched. We didn’t move with them.

  4

  What Means?

  “BUT WHY?” Julia asked. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because, moppet, they’re chicken,” Quint explained. “My uncle says. You’ll see.” Quint was talking about the escalator story. I mean, it was too good not to tell. So I explained to all the kids in line at the potluck lunch how the three Nguyens had dug in their heels at the top and stared down. Two fourth-grade kids, Billy and Simon, thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.