Bich Minh Nguyen

by Short Girls (v5)

  Van, who had dutifully joined student Asian American Associations in college, had theorized that most midwestern Asians in her generation fell into one of two groups: politically aware and vaguely uncomfortable yet always claiming pride in their skin, or blissfully ignorant and unworried about the whole race thing. But Miles, who had grown up on the West Coast, whose great-grandfather had landed at Angel Island, had the confidence that came with growing up fourth-generation, surrounded by other Asians. He was politically aware and cheerful. He didn’t get riled up about racism or affirmative action, and if Van did she felt strident next to him, out of date. She had almost felt sheepish admitting that her interest in law had begun in college, when she first learned about Vincent Chin, the Chinese American who had been beaten to death in 1982, in Detroit, by an autoworker and his son who ended up serving no jail time. But Miles had been impressed by her motivation, called her studies noble.

  It was a day in September, their third year of law school, when he sat down next to her on a limestone bench outside the library. Van, who had been waiting for her friend Jen Ye, felt suddenly jittery. She hadn’t talked to Miles since the semester started, had heard that he’d summered at a firm in San Francisco.

  “Aren’t you going to miss this?” he said.

  Van took just a moment too long to formulate a response, so that Miles laughed and said, “Yes, I’m talking to you.”

  Van turned red, tried to laugh too.

  “I mean this suspended time,” Miles elaborated. He looked out at the quad that lay before them. The sections of cropped grass looked crisp in the fall sunshine, and the stone pathways cutting through them matched the graceful gothic arches of the buildings they decorated and held. It was all very East Coast- looking to Van, sort of Dead Poets Society, though she wouldn’t say that to Miles.

  “Yes,” Van said finally. “I already miss it.”

  Before she could say anything else, Miles stood up and began walking away from her. Van started; she wanted to call him back.

  He went five steps, maybe ten. Then he turned around, his shoulders casual, hands in his pockets. He was smiling. “Well?”

  Van missed lunch with Jen that day, forgetting all about it until that night when she had to call to apologize and explain. She was not an absentminded type, but she found it difficult, when in such close proximity to Miles, to think about other people. It was a feeling that would lessen only a little over the years, and she never lost the riveted, almost dizzying sensation he could inspire in her just by stepping into her line of vision.

  And just like that their relationship happened. He showed up at her place at unexpected hours, so that Van learned always to be dressed, her studio apartment clean, just in case. He called her to say, Let’s get dinner in twenty minutes. On Saturday mornings they would join the breakfast crowd at Zingerman’s, where Miles, wearing the thin glasses he donned at such times, would read The New York Times and buy cheeses and stuffed olives for later in the day. For the first time in her life Van prepared for each date. She took to daily moisturizing her hands and feet. She kept her clothes ironed and hangered. She fussed with her hair, wishing she had paid attention to Linny’s lengthy experiments with hair spray and hot rollers, her constant search for something called volume.

  Within weeks Van’s friends began declaring them a couple, although one did remark, “I had no idea you even knew each other.” Van understood that to strangers they seemed a fine pairing: two Asian people, simple as that. But the people who knew them probably paused to figure out how easygoing Miles and shy, serious Van had ended up together.

  Gracefully tall Jen Ye, who seemed a closer match for Miles save for her first-generation Ohio upbringing, said, “Looks like he’s over that big heartbreak.” When Van said she didn’t know what that meant, Jen apologized. She knew all the gossip about their classmates and told Van, “Some long-distance girlfriend left him. Apparently she was very moody and dramatic. I thought you knew. But it doesn’t matter. The important thing is how much he adores you.”

  And he did adore her, had said so from nearly their first day together, even if Van sometimes wondered at that. She felt—couldn’t help it, in spite of what her women’s studies professors would have said—chosen.

  A couple of months after they started dating, Van discovered the pictures. Three of them, framed, perched on a windowsill in Miles’s bedroom, revealed when Van lifted the blinds to let in the light.

  He lived in a small apartment off Packard Street. All of the furniture belonged to a property management company, which favored cast-offs from the university building and maintenance department. Miles liked to play being a bachelor, wearing boxer shorts while eating Bell’s pizza, splayed on the mustard-colored sofa. But his bedroom hinted at his real self: pale blue sheets freshly laundered; desk cleared of all but his computer; dusted bookshelves; walls decorated with framed black and white photographs of a lone silo, a car with a flat tire on the side of some derelict road, a tree split in half by lightning. Van had assumed that Miles had taken the photos, since he often talked about his interest in photography, architecture, and design. He had taken a number of art classes in college and kept an ornate-looking camera in his closet.

  On the windowsill, the pictures of three women looked out at Van. A brunette of uncertain ethnicity—Armenian, Van guessed. An Asian girl with ungodly cheekbones and a smile-less, burning stare. And a freckled girl with clear hazel eyes and a pile of blond wavy hair.

  Miles was taking a shower, so Van pulled out the biggest photo album from his bookshelf. The pictures, organized chronologically, interspersed Miles and his family with images of the three women. Here was Miles at a beach, his arm around the blonde. Here Miles and the Asian girl were dressed up, holding glasses of champagne. The women looked happy, taller than Van, well dressed. These were pictures they could look at without shame for the rest of their lives. Van flipped through the pages quickly and put the album back. She sat on the bed, overcome with a searing sense of bitterness she had never before experienced. It felt like a puncture, an invasion.

  When Miles emerged, Van was making the bed. She had left the window blind up so he would know that she had seen the photographs of the women. When he didn’t acknowledge them, Van nodded toward the black and whites on the wall and said, “Did you take those?”

  “A friend who’s a photographer,” he replied, opening his laptop to check his e-mail.

  “What about the ones in the window?”

  Miles looked up, amused. “Are you jealous?”

  “I just wondered who they were.”

  He went to the window and introduced them. “This is Maya, Diana, and Julie. Ladies, meet Van.”

  She knew she was supposed to play along. “And where do they live?”

  “All over. San Francisco, New York.” He still had a curious smile on his face, as though he had just uncovered a secret dirty habit of Van’s. “They’re just friends now, Van. I’ve known them for a long time. You can’t be jealous of my having friends. I never understood people who aren’t mature enough to be friends after a relationship ends.”

  “Did one of them take those photos on the wall?” Van tried to keep her voice light.

  “That’s Julie.”

  Miles came over to Van and put his arms around her. He smelled of citrus soap and shaving cream. “So jealous,” he said teasingly into her hair.

  The rest of that year, whenever Julie’s name popped up—Julie had done volunteer work in Cambodia; Julie had e-mailed him to say she was spending six months in Italy—Van felt that same puncture, a tightness that stayed with her for hours. Julie was the heartbreak girl, and Van imagined her arriving in Ann Arbor to reclaim Miles with her effortless good looks and artistic photography. Whenever Van was alone in Miles’s room she would stare at the photo of Julie on the windowsill, half hating her, half in awe of her. These women were a part of his past, Miles said. He believed in respecting that. Don’t you? he would add, and Van would agree. All that school ye
ar, she worked hard to contain the jealousy, which Miles had called the least attractive emotion. There was no way to express her discomfort with the photographs without acquiescing to the label of insecure girlfriend. So Van continued to wake up beneath the gaze of Julie’s art, convincing herself that Miles was right: What was so wrong, after all, with staying friends with one’s exes? She knew, by then, that in order to keep him she would have to sweep away what bothered her. And she did want to keep him. She wanted, with a fierceness that daily rebloomed, to have what the other women could only eye, or remember, from afar.

  Several times, Van almost told Jen about the photographs, but she could imagine her friend’s response. Jen was the one person who seemed unwilling to be fully charmed by Miles. “If he tries any harder not to be interested in law school he’s going to have to drop out,” she had remarked once in her dead-pan way.

  “Half the people here don’t want to be lawyers,” Van had defended him. “I think Miles is looking at law as an option rather than the rest of his life. He didn’t even go out for any of the journals.”

  That’s when Jen dropped the news that actually Miles’s bid to join the Law Review had been rejected; Jen knew because she had dated the editor. Van, who had aimed for the journal on race and law, only shrugged and said, “Happens to a lot of people.”

  She chose to admire Miles for not throwing himself into the intensity of school, for not competing the way everyone else did. It was spring then, they were the class of 1999, and their classmates talked endlessly about where they were headed next, where they might be ensconced in time for a new century. Van could see the curtain of their three years slipping down, and a new one lifting behind it, and she was glad when, in the impatient shuffle toward graduation, Miles responded by drawing them away. They spent a weekend in Saugatuck, near Lake Michigan; skipped class to spend four days in Chicago, where Van did not bother to call her sister. For spring break Miles took her to San Francisco so Van could meet his parents in the Italianate foyer of their house in Pacific Heights.

  When Miles proposed, sitting on the bench outside the law library, one month before graduation, Van cried out of surprise and relief. He said he loved everything about her, from the confidence of her arguments in mock trial to the static in her hair. He loved her devotion to immigration law and her funny, frog-like laugh. She was smart and clear-headed and she knew just where she wanted to go in life, he said, so why waste any time?

  But where will we live? was the first thing Van asked after saying yes. She had accepted a position at the International Center in Detroit, where she had worked the previous two summers. For months she had expected Miles to move back to California. She had wondered if he would ask her to go with him; she had wondered when and how their relationship would have to end.

  Looking at the ring Miles pushed onto her finger, Van imagined herself in the early morning chill and fog of the Bay Area, applying for jobs at immigration firms. In an instant she resolved to do it. But Miles surprised her again. “You’ve got a great opportunity at the IC,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.” He went on to say he had taken a position at the in-town office of Volker, Voss, and Williams, which Van knew well as the corporate-law giant of the Midwest. The Midwest, she thought, the word itself sounding so humble. She couldn’t picture Miles staying here, not joining their classmates who had been hired at multinationals.

  He wouldn’t hear her objections. “You’ve focused so much of your work on immigrant law in this state, Van. You should stay a while. Maybe not forever, but for now.”

  It was the right thing to do, he insisted, and everyone who heard about it told Van she was lucky, and did she realize that men never put their wives’ careers first? Even Jen was impressed. Van’s father, over the phone, told her she was lucky to be marrying a lawyer, seeming to forget that Van was one too.

  Only Linny expressed disapproval. “Hold on,” she said when Van called with the news. “You’re getting married to a guy you haven’t even dated a year? Are you sure about this?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Van snapped, irritated at how typical her sister was, always looking for flaws.

  “Okay,” Linny said, full of reluctance. “But I’ve seen women get married just because they want to be married.”

  Van flushed, remembering how her sister had bragged about her dates in high school. I don’t think a guy has ever called you, Linny had once said with a laugh. She probably resented Van’s having found anyone at all. “You’re hardly one to be doling out advice. When was the last time you had a serious relationship? You don’t even know Miles.”

  “Yeah, but I know you.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.” Silence. “Forget it.”

  “I’ve already forgotten it,” Van said, hanging up.

  By fall she and Miles had moved into an apartment together, taken the Michigan bar exam, planned the wedding, and started looking at houses in Ann Arbor. With a down payment drawn from his trust fund (“Trust fund!” Jen had exclaimed. “That’s so nonimmigrant.”), he had started looking at older neighborhoods, with homes that had “character” and original leaded windows, near the arboretum. But these tended to be smaller than the houses going up in the new subdivisions north of Ann Arbor, and it didn’t take long before Miles warmed up to the prospect of everything new, everything theirs. Like the wedding, plotting out the house became one of his projects, and he could spend weeks discussing maple versus cherry wood, one lighting fixture versus another. It had all seemed daunting to Van. To her, words like escrow sounded like a threat, in spite of the course she had taken in real estate law. As Miles had once dryly pointed out, Van was as certain in the classroom as she was uncertain in real life. He scheduled meetings with architects who weren’t, as he told her, cookie-cutter types at all but the kind who happened to create beautiful new construction.

  Van had never lived in such a place, surrounded by hygienic gleam and newness. The prospect was as alluring as it was guilt-making, especially in contrast to the cases she dealt with at the International Center. But it was too late to think about guilt. By December she and Miles had married in San Francisco and gone to St. Barts for their honeymoon; by the following summer they had moved into the new two-story colonial home, so much larger than Van had initially expected, with its rosy bricks and black shutters, the double garage carefully hidden from the street front, in a subdivision named Birch Crest Hills.

  Of course, Miles had invited the three framed women to the wedding. To Van’s relief only Diana had come, and Van had been so busy talking to other guests that she didn’t have time to scrutinize her smiles. Maya and Julie had sent regrets—Julie probably wandering around India or Tibet, no doubt taking pictures. When Van and Miles moved into their house, the framed women disappeared along with Julie’s black and whites. Grateful for his silent tact, Van took it as a sign of how well Miles understood her. How much he truly did love her. She was glad she had suppressed the urge to throw away the photos or say something about them. Now that she and Miles were married it was all worth it. Like a strange hazing she had survived.

  Van couldn’t help feeling that in the space of two years, from the day Miles sat down next her on that stone bench, her entire life, her future, had been formed. There were moments when it didn’t seem real—this house, this husband. Then she would look at Miles’s left hand and feel a profound sense of victory, her boat glided into its correct, sheltered slip.

  Even her job seemed to cooperate. At the International Center, a hub of immigrant law in downtown Detroit that brought Latino, Asian, and Middle Eastern communities into its fold, Van worked with asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants looking to sponsor relatives. Each weekday, and most Saturdays, Van listened to Spanish-language CDs while driving the hour commute to the Center. She had started taking Arabic language classes too, because the Detroit area had become the Arab immigrant capital of America. Jen Ye worked in the district attorney’s office nearby, so the tw
o of them often went out for lunch together. Driving back home in the evenings, Van would plan all the conversation pieces she could set forth over dinner: what one coworker had said to another; someone’s extraordinary story of escape and refuge; the morass that was U.S. immigration policy.

  Yet Ann Arbor, and their house of soft lighting and speakers that emitted carefully chosen jazz music, often seemed an unbridgeable world away from the IC. Miles, who had gotten interested in gourmet cooking, would spearhead most of their dinner plans and Van would play the role of sous-chef. Secretly, she found their kitchen a little intimidating: the stainless steel hood that hovered over the range; the island that housed a built-in wine refrigerator. The drawers had a special track that slowed their progress, like antilock brakes. It was a beyond-bourgeois kitchen, Van sometimes thought, calling back the dulled laminate counters in her parents’ house, the cupboards that rained sawdust in the cooking pans.

  Like everything else in the kitchen, the cabinets had been a product of Miles’s many magazines and home decorating web-sites, all of them jammed with pictures of gleaming stone counters and streamlined appliances. He had spent hours weighing one cabinet pull against another, lining them up to ask Van’s opinion. She never got over feeling that she was being tested whenever he asked her to make a choice. She was a suburban girl who had married a city guy, and that truth never left her for long. When at last Van touched the slim cabinet pulls done in satin stainless steel, Miles beamed. “Exactly what I was thinking,” he approved.

  Birch Crest Hills, with its curving roads and wide lawns, brought to mind Van’s father’s best friend, Truc Bao, who had predicted his own fate by changing his first name to Rich and then amassing a fortune from dry-cleaning franchises in the west Michigan area. Rich Bao had a huge house—a McMansion before anyone knew the term—but Vietnamese American taste. That meant puffy white leather sofas, too much brass and gold, heavy mahogany tables, and floors of green marble tile. As kids Van and Linny had been in awe of such clear wealth, admiring it like a house out of a soap opera. It wasn’t until she got to college that Van understood the guttural depth of the word tacky. Van and Miles’s house might be all new, but it would be nothing like Rich Bao’s.