What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “You could be anything you like if you work hard enough,” said Madame. “Even a dentist or doctor. That would take lots of school.” Looking down at the report card. “And you’d have to improve your reading.”

  Noi didn’t want to be a dentist or doctor. Not because of an aversion to hard work or the need to master English. The thought of people’s mouths, their hot moist innards, made her recoil. Also, while she enjoyed school, it didn’t seem like real work to her. Real work brought in money, it was how you made a life for yourself.

  “I know what I want,” said Noi. Hesitant, although she felt sure. Madame, who was still talking about being a doctor, fell silent. “I don’t want to work for anyone anymore.” Noi blushed painfully, for it sounded impolite. “I like to sew. I want to own a shop.”

  In the ensuing silence, Noi sneaked a glance up at Madame’s face. She looked thoughtful, not upset.

  “All right,” Madame said. “I’ll get some fabric for you to make some samples, and we can see where you are.”

  It had been difficult to say I want. Noi had done it though, and she felt the world pivot beneath her. Now things would stop happening to her. She would make all of the choices for herself from here.

  * * *

  Madame had already seen an example of Noi’s sewing, although she didn’t realize it. Noi had designed and sewn the water-bottle bag for Philip, making the two compartments just the right size, layering the fabric to create an extra-thick cushion; Noi had seen how carelessly the Preston children dropped things they were finished with, just opened their hands and let them go. Madame kept that bag, filthy and wrapped in plastic, in her bureau drawer. Noi didn’t mention it. She made an array of samples and Madame examined them, exclaiming Where in the world did you learn to do this, and that same week a sewing machine was delivered and carried to the basement, into the large playroom the children rarely used.

  The playroom was lined with cherrywood shelves of a perfect depth to hold pattern forms; it had closets where Noi could hang projects in progress and finished items. She cleaned the big windows at the end of the room so the light there would be good for fittings. Madame spoke to some friends, and soon Noi had as much work as she wanted. Within a year, she had paid back the money for the sewing machine and the materials, and two years after that, she climbed into a stuffy rental space above a drugstore and pulled down brown paper from the windows to let the light pour in. She had the money for the lease, but Madame had to cosign. It’s because you’re young, Madame said, but Noi knew that was not the only reason.

  Noi still went to school two days a week, taking an accounting course. One morning when she was late, running up the steps, a man coming down caught her by the elbow. She wheeled around, too surprised at first to summon the weapon words.

  “You dropped this,” he said. He proffered a paper, a test that must have fluttered out of the notebook under her arm. “One hundred percent,” he said with a low whistle as she took it from him and tucked it away. “You must be very smart.”

  He was taller than she was but not too tall, and older than she was, maybe twenty-five. She did not say Far cough to him. He walked up the steps with her, talking; she learned he was an instructor in one of the classes she did not take. She agreed to have lunch with him after her class. “You correct me,” she ordered him during the meal. “When I say something wrong, you correct me.” He nodded, his face serious, as though he understood how personal was the request.

  More lunches, then some dinners. His name was Tom. He was patient and calm, none of the American hurry-up energy that could sometimes tie Noi’s tongue. He made room for the words to come from her; he didn’t guess what she was trying to say, or jump in to finish her sentences. He asked Noi to tell him about Thailand. She began to think, again, of a basket in the corner of her shop.

  One day she showed him Daeng’s note, which she had never been able to make sense of.

  “I’m not surprised you had trouble with this,” Tom said. “The spelling is—not good.” He studied it for a moment. “I think it’s trying to say, ‘If you can read this I was wrong and I hope you are happy.’ ”

  Noi laughed. So like Daeng to wish Noi well only if she didn’t need those wishes.

  * * *

  She sent letters home and wired money, and she heard back sometimes from one of her brothers or Moo, a polite thank-you with family news. Noi had not been surprised that Sao’s spirit did not visit her in Washington. It was such a long way, across so much water. Still, sometimes when she lay in the little room with the window raised and the sounds of the American night breathing through the screen—rustling in the high branches of the trees, an occasional animal call whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo—she would turn onto her side and close her eyes, and wait for the sound of amulets.

  * * *

  Then the master died, and Noi told Tom that marriage was not possible.

  “The family can’t expect you to live with them forever,” he said. They were in her shop; he’d brought her lunch and they were having what he called a “windowsill picnic,” the food spread between them on the wide wooden sill that ran under the big windows.

  No, they didn’t expect it, Noi tried to explain.

  Her tongue was baffled, her mind filled with jostling thoughts. Madame was always gone now. Birgita had been replaced by a series of worthless au pairs who were always wanting to go sightseeing and to meet American boys. Beatrice was at college many hours away. Noi could not leave Laura alone in the house in all of that stunned, empty silence. The choices I’ve made have consequences, Noi wanted to say. We’re connected by a tough net of karma, it’s more complicated than you see.

  “Don’t you want your own children?” he said, for the first time interrupting her while she was groping for words.

  “I’m doing what I am doing,” she said, her voice emphatic, her English rushed and nonsensical. She slapped her hand on the wooden sill, angry.

  He left, and didn’t come again.

  After two months apart she went to wait outside the building where Tom taught a morning class. He came out in a chattering clump of students that filtered away, leaving him standing with one girl, a laughing chubby American with a bushy side ponytail of hair. She held her books in one arm and kept touching him with her free hand: now his forearm, now his shoulder. He was listening to her, smiling, before he spotted Noi walking toward them.

  “Far cough,” Noi told the fat girl.

  “Sorry,” called Tom, laughing in surprise, as the girl walked away. “What?” he said to Noi. He couldn’t stop laughing.

  “I will marry you when Laura is older,” said Noi.

  “She’s fifteen now,” said Tom. He knew all about the girls, although he’d never met them. “As old as you were when you came to this country.”

  That was true, but although Noi was not much older than the Preston daughters, she had always felt the gap keenly. At each stage, they seemed to her much younger than she had been.

  “I’ll wait,” Tom said, putting his arm around her. “But not forever.”

  * * *

  He waited until Laura was off to college. Noi was twenty-six then. By that time, her business was solidly established, the lease in her own name. The sign outside said EXPERT CUSTOM TAILORING and inside there was a counter and a telephone. No basket in the corner, though, no fan on the ceiling, no Choy sweeping the floor. It was the American version of her dream—not quite as good as Noi had wanted, but better than she’d hoped.

  She became pregnant right away, as if her body had been waiting. When Tom insisted she close the shop, she smiled and kissed him, and did not argue. She went down to the public library and put a notice up in Thai and English: SEAMSTRESS WANTED. At six the next morning she arrived at the store to find three Vietnamese women already waiting outside. She made them sew some samples and chose the best one and trained her, until Noi was so big she couldn’t stand for more than half an hour without her ankles swelling unbearably. She hired a second girl then, and spent
half a day at home with her feet up before realizing she could lie around at work exactly the same way, so she did that, supervising the two women from a recumbent position, until the minute her pains began.

  It was nothing like that terrible night alone in the Quarters; the hospital room was bright and her husband was there. There was that same bigness to it, though, the feeling of being in a place outside of time. She gave birth to a healthy girl and looked hard into her squalling face—was this the baby she’d sent away? She couldn’t tell.

  When Noi returned to the shop she was pleased to see that not only had the women not stolen from her, but they’d beautifully completed all of the work that had been waiting. They had made her a welcome lunch, a variety of Vietnamese dishes of which she ate a little to be polite, and an American cake from a supermarket box, with grainy frosting and writing on the top, Happy Baby.

  Noi kept Vanessa with her every minute; in the small brick colonial in Alexandria or kicking her legs in the bouncy seat in the shop, the baby made a tight bubble of home. Noi resolved not to speak Thai to her, so she wouldn’t grow up with an accent. Noi had been called all kinds of things in this country—Ching Chong Chinaman and Mama-san and Goddamned Boat Person—and she didn’t want any of that for her daughter. She hoped Vanessa would have only the good traits of being American—the big-heartedness and optimism and self-confidence—and none of the bad ones: the laziness, the selfishness, the entitlement. But as Vanessa grew, it was obvious that the balance in her was wrong. She was an argumentative child, an insolent teenager.

  “It’s normal,” said Tom, after another door-slamming tantrum.

  “Unacceptable,” said Noi.

  She increased her strictness, hoping to fatten the Thai flame within the girl. Vanessa, however, seemed impervious to Noi’s biggest weapon, maternal disapproval. Instead of shamed acquiescence, Vanessa responded with defiance. In defeat, Noi left her more and more to Tom’s management and focused on the two younger girls. With them she had spoken in Thai from the first minute—she had felt lonely with Tom and toddler Vanessa speaking together so quickly that Noi could not always follow. The younger girls spoke perfect American English and also very good Thai, switching easily from one to the other. They looked more like Noi than Vanessa did, although they would never pass as pure Thai at home.

  In a vulnerable moment before they were married, Noi had told Tom about the first daughter, the one she had sent back. He had said, “Did you ever have a test?” and she’d looked at him, unsure what he meant. “To confirm the pregnancy,” he clarified. She shook her head. “So maybe you were never actually pregnant,” he said. She clucked her tongue—she shouldn’t have expected a man to understand, how a woman knows when there is life in her, and then when there is no life.

  * * *

  In the winter of 2004, a tsunami killed the twenty-one-year-old grandson of King Bhumibol, and Noi was inconsolable. She wept and wept. For the prince who had been half-American like her children, who had broken the heart of his grandfather the beloved king and his mother the rebel princess; she wept for the sorrow of his grandmother Sirikit and his sisters. She wept more than she ever had for losses in her own family, her sister Pla and her grandparents. Tom was baffled; the two daughters still at home, their own eyes swollen with crying, pleaded with their mother to get up, have a little bit to eat.

  Vanessa came home from the faraway college she attended. Noi’s eldest girl, her loud, tall, big-nosed American, crawled into bed with Noi and held her, fed her, bathed her. The child who looked so much like her father sang to Noi the only Thai words she knew, the lullabies Noi had sung to the other two when they were babies, and at last, Noi recognized her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in Thai. “I’m sorry I sent you away.”

  Vanessa answered in English, “It’s all right, Mom, it’s all right.”

  And finally Noi fell into a dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  When Madame was brought home from the hospital after her diagnosis, Noi paid a visit to the Tudor and was distressed when she comprehended the situation: although Bea and Laura visited often, grocery shopping and fixing meals and ferrying their mother back and forth to medical appointments, neither of them slept in the house, and they didn’t manage any of her physical care. For that, they hired nurses. Beatrice went back to her family each evening, and Laura went to the empty house she called home, leaving Madame alone with strangers.

  Noi hadn’t had the privilege of caring for her own elderly parents. She had seen them twice before they died—she and Tom had taken the children to visit once, and she had gone once by herself after that—and the money she sent every month had made their lives easier, but it wasn’t the same as daily care. It was obvious to Noi that Laura, who had no children and no husband, should move into the big house and take care of her mother. Noi hinted at this strongly, but when nothing changed, she moved in herself, taking her old room on the top floor.

  Vanessa FaceTimed her disapproval from Boston, where she was now a doctor. “They have all the money in the world, Mom,” she said, frowning from the iPad. “They can hire help. She has two daughters of her own.”

  “That’s right,” said Noi. She meant, See what it is to have weak daughters. See how daughters can disappoint you. See how lucky I am.

  “Are they even paying you?” said Vanessa. “Dad. Why are you allowing this?”

  “Your mom is loyal,” said Tom. “One of the things I love about her.”

  “Your sister takes good care of your father,” said Noi. The middle girl was unmarried and living with them in the colonial, working as a pharmacist.

  “Hey,” said Tom. “Your father takes good care of himself.”

  “You’re not an old retainer, Mom,” said Vanessa. “This is not Downton Abbey.”

  “You worry about yourself,” Noi told Vanessa. “You are getting too old for babies.”

  Beatrice and Laura also argued with Noi when she arrived with a suitcase. Noi ignored them, taking charge, inspecting the house cleaner’s work, supervising the nurses. Eventually, Laura and Bea stopped arguing and arranged to pay her. She managed her shop from her mobile phone. It had been years since she had done the sewing herself. She’d captured the costuming contracts for two area theaters in the nineties, and had hired more seamstresses then; when the real estate market dipped, she’d bought the building and expanded her business to fill all of the space. The store had a manager now, but Noi phoned many times a day and examined the work by FaceTime. She visited the store two or three days a week and spent most of each Sunday at home.

  Over time, Noi assembled a corps of reliable day nurses for Madame, but night nurses were less satisfactory. After a week in which she found one asleep for the second time and another inspecting the contents of the drinks cabinet in the butler’s pantry, Noi dismissed the lot and kept watch herself, sleeping in snatches. She descended the stairs from the attic for regular checks, or whenever the pressure-detecting mat beside Madame’s bed shrieked to announce that she had gotten up.

  Once, the sleep mat alarmed and Noi came down the steep stairs to find Madame already on the landing, standing erect and slim at the leaded windows, amber moonlight falling on her through the diamond panes. She turned, her still-beautiful face tormented. I’ve lost something, she said. Noi took her hand and walked her back up the stairs to the bedroom, got onto the bed with her, made shhhh into her ear. What have I done, said Madame. Where is everyone? I’m here, said Noi. She said it in English and in Thai and in English again. I don’t want to forget, said Madame, and Noi said I won’t let you forget, and Madame said, I’ve done something terrible, and Noi breathed Kha kha kha, and Madame closed her eyes and Noi’s two amulets slid together on her neck chain with a little noise, and she held the abandoned woman as her sister’s spirit had held her long ago.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  GENEVIEVE KNOWS she is losing her mind well before anyone else does. It began with little things, lapses any senior citizen might
expect: the house keys in the vegetable crisper, the electric kettle put onto the stove. She told herself it was simple absentmindedness; after all, she hadn’t tried to lock the door with an asparagus stalk, she hadn’t gone so far as to ignite the flame under the kettle. When her memory began to unravel, she hid that from everyone until it was nearly bare, like an unpicked embroidery, what had been a complicated scrollwork dwindled to a scattering of fuzzy knots.

  It is not wholly unpleasant to be free of the framework of overbearing facts, who and when and where. Genevieve particularly enjoys how her timeline pleats occasionally, the past touching the present, allowing her to cherish the details of lost ordinary days. Magically, her girls are grown and at the same time also children; she can be talking to adult Bea about her twins’ tenth birthday party while also reminding herself to get new ballet tights for eleven-year-old Bea, Laura having cut the feet off with scissors “to see if they’d grow back.” Genevieve knows that Beatrice is past fifty and yet there are the tights, pink size small, on Genevieve’s shopping list. No one sees that list, not even Genevieve’s snappingly efficient assistant, with whom iCloud shares information with a blithe openhandedness. There is still the secrecy of paper in the pocket.

  But then she gets lost in Bangkok, a city that she knows as well as the back of her hand. Walking from somewhere to somewhere, within an eyeblink nothing familiar, the buildings glassy and looming just like tall buildings anywhere, the sun reflecting into her eyes. She felt terrified and yet lightened, as though she’d shucked heavy layers of clothing underwater while drowning. Then a man walking beside her spoke, and she realized that he knew her. And that she knew him: her assistant, André. The rest cascaded after: she knew where she was and where they were both headed, and why.