by Jamie Gilson
So I laughed. Tuan, too. Probably he thought he had to. And then we all headed for home.
As soon as we got there, Mom hurried the adults up to their rooms and told me to settle Tuan in his. It was just four o’clock, but the Nguyens were really jet-lagged.
The kid and I stopped on the second floor. “You can use my shower,” I told him, grinning about two sizes too big. I wanted him to be sure I really was a good guy. “See, there’s only one bathroom upstairs where you sleep, and it’ll be pretty busy with both your dad and grandmother.” I was flinging out too many words. He didn’t show a flicker of understanding.
“Shower,” I said, and did a wild charade of it, jumping around and scrubbing under my arms like a monkey. Then I took him into the bathroom off the hall, turned the water on to a good warm, and gave him a brand-new bar of soap. I folded a pair of my last year’s Cubs’ pajamas on the edge of the sink and pointed to them. “For you.”
Outside, I waited to hear the shower door close to make sure he’d understood. It clicked shut, but I didn’t hear singing. He’d stood in the shower, though, because when he opened the door to the hall, his head was soaked and water was dripping off the tips of his bangs. My pajamas were too big for him. The red neckband drooped, soaking up the rivers running out of his hair.
“Rub it dry.” As I handed him a fresh towel, it occurred to me that I could do better than that. So I led him back into the bathroom, slid open the cabinet, and got out my little red hair dryer. Actually, Pete had left it behind, so it was mine by accident. I plugged it in and handed it to the kid. He didn’t take it. Probably, I thought, he’s not used to a hair dryer like this. Maybe he’s not used to a hair dryer at all. So I grabbed it by the handle and pointed the tube-shaped blower at my head. “Like that,” I said. “See?”
I lowered it and showed him the switches, flipping the HEAT to the light orange circle for LOW and the AIR switch to where it says HIGH. The dryer hummed and vibrated warm. Information In? I smiled, user-friendly.
This time Tuan took the dryer when I offered it, letting it rest lightly in his palm the way he’d held the marble before it disappeared. Giving me a weird look I didn’t understand, he raised the dryer to see it better. But the sudden high blast on his wet hair splattered water in his eyes and onto the bathroom mirror.
He took a quick, deep breath, pressed himself flat against the tile wall and stared down at the humming dryer. “Gun?” he asked me, aiming it at the floor. “Bang-bang?”
It did look like a gun. It really did. Handle, barrel, and all. It looked like a red space-age shooter that plugs in and has its triggers on the side. A fancy American laser, maybe. I’d never thought of it as looking like anything but a hair dryer before. Grabbing the cord, I yanked the plug out of the wall. The humming wound down. The kid looked at me like he didn’t understand anything at all.
OK, I thought, so a few things had gotten messed up. I was going to have to press the CLEAR button and start over. Maybe we could just forget day one. After I’d turned his name around, I’d headed him down a metal dragon’s tongue, called him like he was a mongrel pup, fed him dog-meat sausages, handed him a spear to eat with instead of two sticks, choked him with a gob of ice, stolen his blue-eye marble, and, to top it off, tried to get him to spray his head with laser beams, bang-bang. There must be an easier way to turn American.
Julia stepped in front of the open bathroom door. The kid had the dryer still in his hand. I was holding the cord. Over her head she was waving the sign I had carried at the airport, WELCOME TO PITTSFIELD NGUYEN FAMILY. She had it upside down.
5
OK? OK.
“HARVEY, COME LOOK!” Julia called from the top of the third-floor steps. “They sleep funny.”
“Quiet,” I whispered and leaped the stairs two at a time to shush her. “Quiet, or they won’t sleep at all.” Still, it was the middle of Sunday afternoon, and they’d been up there almost twenty-four hours. The trip must really have zonked them out.
“Look at that,” she whispered back and pointed into Pete’s room.
The door was open and I could see inside. It wasn’t true they slept funny. They were sleeping like people do, all curled up. It was where they were sleeping that was funny. They were all in Pete’s bedroom, but they weren’t in bed. They’d taken the bedspreads off and put them on the floor, and that’s where they were sleeping. I’d only slept on the floor at sleepovers, but it never worked out too good. When I woke up in the morning, I always had a crick in my neck.
“Julia!” I pulled her away from the door. “Don’t be nosy.” And I headed her back down the steps. On the way, though, I coughed a little, hoping to wake the kid up. We had work to do.
When Tuan came downstairs about an hour later, he was a lot hungrier for food than for facts. He ate two apples from the bushel in the kitchen, some of the big bowl of rice Mom had made special, and a whole lot of beef stew. I would never have thought that using a fork could be so hard. Just watching him made me nervous. And I wondered how anybody could possibly eat all those slippery little grains of rice with sticks.
Right after he ate, I steered him down to the basement to meet Felix, trusty computer. I figured that since I’d pretty much blown the first day, Felix and I could program him with some basic stuff on the second. We sat on the tall red stools in front of the workbench Dad had built, and I slipped in the Dancing Demon disc to get the kid used to the keyboard. You don’t have to do much. The demon on the screen just dances fast or slow, doing whatever steps you tell him to. Then I shot at a few of Pete’s personal Zagnabs and, after that, we both played this great game where you’ve got an aerial view of a fat robot that blips in with an ax and a shield in one corner and a skinny robot with an ax and a shield in the other and they go at each other. Tuan was the fat and I was the skinny. I creamed him. He’d seen TV, he said, so the computer didn’t really knock him out. I mean, it wasn’t like the escalator or the hair dryer. He didn’t think I was trying to execute him with my joystick.
I’d decided it was time for Felix to teach him some new words. The first one would be marble. My dad had dug out a wrinkled leather pouch of his old marbles and given them to me so I’d have something in common with the kid. I mean, it wasn’t as though I could shoot marbles or anything like that. My dad said it was an old American sport, but since I wasn’t an old American, I didn’t play it. Anyway, I opened the bag and dug out a big yellow one with tiny bubbles in it and gave it to the kid, feeling as guilty as if I really had tried to steal his blue cat’s eye. He looked it over but didn’t remember what it was called.
“Marble,” I said, and typed it out on Felix. “What is it called in Vietnamese?”
He typed DANH-BI. “Need mark through d and over n,” he told me, but the computer couldn’t handle that. “Say, ‘đańh-bi.’”
It was hard to say. It didn’t fit my mouth, and so I only tried once. He started to hand the marble back. “Keep it,” I said, holding my hands behind my back. “Keep it.” He put it on the workbench.
Pete’s bike was leaning up against the wall, in storage till he came home.
BICYCLE, I typed out on Felix and, giving the handlebars a pat, said it out loud.
So did the kid. “Bi-cyc-le.”
“Close,” I told him.
XE-DAP, he typed. “And mark through …” He pointed at the d. “Bicycle is xe-đap.”
“Shut up?” I asked. That’s sure what it sounded like.
“Close,” he said.
“Do you know what shut up means?”
“Shut up? No. What means shut up?”
“It means ‘be quiet.’” I put my finger in front of my lips and said, “Shhhhhhhhhh.” He nodded. “Shut up!” I yelled.
“You talk loud to ask be quiet?”
“Right. Shut up! That’s the way to say it,” I shouted.
“Shut up!” he yelled back, laughing.
“You boys all right down there?” Mom called down the steps.
“Fine
,” I told her. “We’re OK.”
“What means OK?” he asked.
“OK means ‘good,’ ‘terrific.’ Didn’t that guy in camp teach you anything? OK is basic. OK is the best. We’ll have Felix tell you ‘OK’ every time you get a word right, OK?”
“OK.”
We sat there for a long time with me teaching him words like follow. First I marched around behind him. “I follow you.” Then I got in front of him and made him say, “I follow you.” I was the leader. He was my follower. We did verbs like throw and hide and laugh and vomit. After we’d both acted them out, I’d write them into the computer. And Tuan would write in the Vietnamese word so he’d remember what the English one meant. Input, output. Input, output. It was terrific. We were working on hiccup when Mom called down the steps again.
“Harvey, you’ve got company. It’s almost ten o’clock, though, just about time for bed.”
“Tuan just barely got up,” I told her, “and he’s got lots of work to do. Who’s there?”
“Quint the Quintessential,” he called down grandly.
Big deal, I thought. “Enter,” I said, though, since nothing was likely to stop him. He took the steps slow and heavy, waving and grinning like the Jolly Green Giant. I turned back to the computer.
“Hi, there, Zilch,” he said. “Having a good time with your new toy?”
“The computer’s not all that new,” I told him, punching a few keys casually.
“I wasn’t talking about the computer.” He grinned, and leaning with his mouth close to my ear, he whispered, “Uncovering the mysteries of the Orient?”
“No!” I pushed him away with my shoulder. “I’m teaching Tuan English.”
He gave the kid a big hello like he was his biggest admirer and then circled around behind him and rolled his eyes at me. “So, why bother?” he asked.
“He’s got to learn it. He starts school Friday, the end of this week. With us.”
“You’re kidding. Our class?”
“Why not? He’s twelve. Mom says it’s fixed so he can be with me.”
Quint laughed through his nose. “He doesn’t know his elbow from an escalator and he’s going to be in the same class with me? Gifted old me? He ought to be in Julia’s room.”
Tuan was working on the words we’d programmed. OK, Felix printed, turning on his computer charm. OK, TUAN. The kid glanced at Quint, who clapped his hands, yelled, “OK!” and nodded as if the kid had just won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tuan turned back to the computer, smiling. Quint rolled his eyes again.
“That foreign guy upstairs,” he said, “I suppose he’s going to our school too?”
“That’s Tuan’s father, and he’s going to work,” I told him. “He’s thirty-some years old, too old even for high school. Jeff Zito’s going to teach him English.” I looked over at the kid, but he was concentrating on the word laugh which I guess isn’t all that easy to sound out. “Tuan’s dad has a job as custodian at the Starlight Motel.”
“You are kidding. Is that fixed too? My uncle looked for work at the Starlight, and they said they didn’t have anything. You mean they lied to Wayne so they could give a job to some foreign guy? Boy, I’m gonna tell him, and he’ll explode.”
“Come on, Quint. We brought them here to help. That’s the whole idea.”
“My uncle was in that war in Vietnam, too, you know.”
“Listen, Quint, it’s getting late.”
“Right. I came to talk to the Hot Dog.”
“Why?”
Quint ignored me.
“Listen,” I said, “his name is Tuan.” I didn’t want him calling my kid Hot Dog.
“You are good,” he said to Tuan, as Felix went OK once again.
The kid beamed back.
“Will you teach me marbles?” Quint asked him.
“Teach?” He turned away from the computer. “Teach you?”
“Right.” Quint picked up my yellow marble from the counter. “Will you teach me how?”
“Yes.” Tuan grinned at him. “OK.”
“Tomorrow?” Quint was trying to take my kid away from me. That’s what he was trying to do. He handed Tuan the marble I’d given him just ten minutes before. “My uncle wants to ask the kid some questions,” he whispered to me, like we were both in on some big joke. “Wayne knows a lot of words in Vietnamese. He wants to look him over.”
“Sorry. Tuan’s busy with important stuff tomorrow and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, and he starts school Friday.”
“After school Friday it is, then. You come to my house Friday,” Quint told the kid. “OK?”
“I’ve got to work after school Friday,” I told him.
“I didn’t ask you,” Quint explained like I was a little kid who’d begged to tag along to a party. “OK?” he said to Tuan again.
“OK! Marbles.” You’d have thought the president had invited him to breakfast at the White House, he was so pleased.
“See you around.” Quint took the stairs two at a time, slamming the basement door so we’d have something to remember him by.
When the place had stopped shaking, I said to the kid, patiently and slowly, “You don’t want to go to Quint’s.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling broadly, “I go to him house.”
“His house.”
“His house. He is … Quint?”
“Yes, he’s Quint, all right.”
“Quint is OK. Right way to use OK?”
“Right,” I said. But I sure didn’t mean it.
6
Follow the Directions
“HELLO, MY NAME IS JELLY,” Julia said, staring at the name tag stuck to a jar on the kitchen table. She’d guessed wrong. It said, HELLO, MY NAME IS JAM. Tossing Zachary onto her chair, Julia climbed on top of him, leaned back, and stared up.
“Hello, my name is Ceiling. Is that right?” I nodded. “I can read ceiling! Maybe they’ll let me skip first grade.” She craned her neck to look at the sign again. “Are you sure that says ceiling? Mrs. Broderick says the snake sound, Ssssssssssssssssss, is S. Silly Sally Ceiling. See, it’s got to be wrong.”
“Ceiling,” Tuan said automatically, copying it into a small notebook I’d given him. NEW WORDS, I’d printed on the cover. He was eating breakfast and hadn’t noticed that one yet.
“Remember ‘I before E except after C,’” I told him as he wrote. He blinked at me.
I’d got the name tags from this huge stack left over from a party of Mom’s where nobody wore them. The tags had little red wavy borders with HELLO, MY NAME is printed on the front and sticky stuff on the back. I’d written about a hundred names of things on them in wide black Magic Marker. Then I’d matched them up, sticking them on the sugar bowl, the doors, floors, apples, toilet, computer, boot box. Every day after I came home from school, I’d take the kid around naming things for him. The house was beginning to look like a first-grade workbook.
“Hello, my name is Butter Dish,” Julia said. “Harvey, make one for Zachary. He’s jealous.”
“That tag better not leave a mark on the ceiling,” Dad told me, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “And the day you lay one on my scrambled eggs, you’ve had it.”
Actually, I had made a Scrambled Eggs label, but I’d decided it would slide off, and so I’d just stuck it in my back pocket.
“Your father is absolutely right,” Mom said. “If there’s anything that flusters me, it’s eggs that try to get too friendly. More toast, Tuan?”
He shook his head and leaned over his scrambled eggs with a fork, watching me closely as I ate. He waited a long time before picking up the bacon with his fingers as I did, making sure that’s how Dad ate his, too. His grandmother sat by herself at the end of the table. He called her Ba Noi, which means, he said, “your father’s mother.” A white wool shawl Mom had found for her was tucked tightly around her like a cocoon. She was not having scrambled eggs for breakfast, but broth with noodles in it, first drinking the broth and then eating the noodles with
chopsticks she’d brought with her.
“Get Tuan to school on time, now,” Dad called, barreling out the back door. Then Ba Noi spoke. It was the first time I’d heard her talk since the escalator. She said something to Tuan—low, fast, and kind of sharp. Tuan answered her quietly, glancing around at us and then down at his feet.
“Is something wrong?” Mom asked him. “May we help?”
The kid shook his head and took a deep breath. I wondered if he was trying to think what to say or how to say it. “Ba Noi say I not … look good for school,” he whispered.
He looked good to me. I’d told him what to wear—faded jeans, a striped T-shirt, and the red, white, and blue tennis shoes Mom had bought him the day before. Perfect.
“Tell her I say it’s very American.”
“She want me very Vietnamese … blue pants….”
He sliced across his leg with his hand to show he meant the short ones he’d worn when he arrived.
I laughed. “You dress like that and everybody’ll think you’re weird. Besides, in this weather you’d die of terminal goose bumps.” I knew he hadn’t understood that. “Cold,” I said, shaking myself with a shiver. “Short pants are for summer.”
“Hello, my name is Clock,” Julia announced. “We’re going to be late.”
Tuan spoke again to his grandmother. She still did not look pleased. But we waved good-bye to her and to Mom and hurried off. Tuan was smiling as if he liked looking very American.
On the way, we worked on tree names and street names. I named. He repeated. Once we got to school, I showed him the water fountain, the john, and the trophy case. People kept saying, “Hi,” and so I taught him a few of the kids’ names, too. It was an educational experience.
Finally, I got him to the principal’s office. Mr. Saine was on the phone when I poked my head in. “… will deal with that matter immediately,” he told the phone, motioning us to come on in.
Mr. Saine stood up, way up. I mean, he must be six-five. Tuan came about to his belt.