Miles had grown up with parents and grandparents who had done well enough to afford private schools, resort vacations, and Qing porcelain without a second glance at the bank accounts. Miles had learned to drive with his mother’s Lexus; he had backpacked in Europe twice; had even, in high school, been named homecoming king. In so many ways he embodied an immigrant dream of immersion and status, and Van felt the burden of having married up and into it.
Where their house was concerned, Miles knew how to speak of art and architecture. He might point out a curve of wall that looked very Bertrand Goldberg, or a lamp in a store window that was an obvious Nelson rip-off. Van tried to pay attention, though it was many months before she realized that the designers Charles and Ray Eames were not brothers but a husband-and-wife team. Van noticed, though, that Miles’s tastes kept shifting. Even as their brick colonial had risen from its cement foundation pushed into the frozen Michigan earth, every other sentence Miles spoke seemed to carry the phrase mid-century modern. He hesitated just once, when Van asked if it was all right to pair modern furniture with the traditional-looking colonial. He answered, finally, that the contrast itself was modern.
Before the kitchen plans got under way Van had asked for customized counter and cabinet heights. It had been her father’s idea, the first thing he suggested when Van mentioned the new construction. He calculated that counters two inches lower than standard would be optimal, but even one would make a difference. “Think of the comforts,” he urged, and Van had to admit that it sounded pretty good. She’d never been in a kitchen that didn’t seem designed for a tall person.
Miles had laughed. “I love your dad. He’s hilarious.”
“But it does make sense,” Van said. “Actually, it would be kind of a dream come true.”
“Well, what about me? I’m not short.”
Except for their ongoing debate about pets—Van wanted a cat but Miles thought only a dog would be suitable when they had a kid old enough to want one—they rarely argued. When they did, though, it could become epic, Miles’s mood darkening for days even after Van, the first to give in, apologized. She knew she was going to lose this argument too, when Miles insisted that custom counters would affect the resale value of the house. “People will say, that’s the house for short people. You can’t expect someone as short as you is going to want to buy this place.”
“We might not sell,” Van found herself saying. A four-bedroom house in a top school district—that was enough for her.
“Van, come on.” The case was closed.
She never told her father that she gave up on the idea of a kitchen customized for short people. He had only visited them once, anyway, while driving back from a friend’s in Detroit. He had barely glanced at the kitchen; the mere fact of the house sealed his affection for Miles. “You see how he’ll always take care?” he said to Van, disapproval built into his voice as if she were already neglecting her husband. So the only consequence was that whenever Van dragged out the Luong Arm or used the step stool that she kept stored in a corner cabinet she felt a slight flare of irritation toward Miles. Sometimes she planted it on the floor louder than necessary. But Miles, if he noticed, didn’t say. He was on to another project—his office upstairs, or built-in bookshelves for the family room, which he refused to call the TV room.
Van came to realize that Miles needed these projects, that without them he could grow alarmingly restless. That was when he would take jabs at Ann Arbor or the state of Michigan, calling it provincial or down and out, depressed, flyover country. Then Van would redouble her acknowledgment of the sacrifice he had made in settling there. She would steer the conversation toward decorating the guest bedrooms, or landscaping the backyard. She told him, finally, that she would be willing to move anywhere he wanted, whenever he wanted. It felt suspenseful, waiting for him to make up his mind about leaving this place for good, heading out to one of the coasts where, surely, people felt more tied to the national conversation. But no new jobs materialized, and as long as Miles didn’t bring up the subject, neither did Van. After a while, she started hoping that in spite of his complaints, maybe he preferred their life in Ann Arbor after all. At any rate, it was easier to let the lid on the topic fall shut.
Mostly, life seemed more or less tranquil, orderly, the way Van had always pictured marriage should be. While she brought home sweets and baked goods from her clients, Miles brought ideas for the ongoing decoration of their house. He didn’t talk much about his work at Volker, Voss, but he didn’t seem unhappy there either. In her mind Van plotted out the years ahead: a child, maybe two; a couple weeks of every summer in San Francisco and at his parents’ beach house.
But all of that was before Vijay Sastri.
He had been a client like many others, in the States as a student, hoping to secure an H-1B temporary worker visa through an engineering firm that wanted to hire him. Van had filed his paperwork, chatted with him about his wife, about which restaurants they liked best in the area. Vijay was going to settle in, work his way up the salary rung, eventually buy a house in one of the suburbs; his children would grow up completely American, shun Vijay’s customs for those of their white friends at school. It was going to be the typical immigrant story.
But then Vijay got arrested, called Van from a holding cell. It was November 2001 and blustery, the roads thick with blackened slush. And Van had known even then, long before she presented his case, that she couldn’t save him, couldn’t keep him from the fate of deportation. Still, the loss—her first and only—hit her hard. It hit Miles too, seemed to shake him into a state of mind, of intensity, she’d never seen before. Then Van’s whole life seemed to become a tumble, a spillage, Miles arguing again with her about what they were doing here in this blank Michigan landscape. It was in the haze of those days Van learned she was pregnant, and the news became the one thing she wanted to pin down, a thumbtack on a map of her world. She wanted to keep Miles there with her. Until that too, like the well of certainty she had started to think her life could be, became the thing that never was. Uncontainable. And, in retrospect, the beginning of that moment when Miles walked into the house and told her he didn’t want to live with her anymore.
At home after her phantom car chase around Ann Arbor, Van checked the phone for voice mails. None. In the kitchen she buried the McDonald’s bag in the trash. The garbage bin, built into the cabinetry, smelled of the shrimp shells she and Miles had peeled two nights before. He had sautéed them with garlic and scallions and chili oil, making jasmine rice in the fuzzy-logic rice cooker.
As if to test how alone she was, Van opened one of the cutlery drawers and tried to slam it shut, but the drawer returned primly to its place. She moved on to the cabinet doors, which had little felt-like stubs that prevented the doors from banging shut. She pulled back the door to the baking pans and kicked it as violently as she could. She did it again and again to hear the muted slams.
Van had always hated how mournful and slow Sundays felt, full of regrets, full of errands that didn’t get done. The work week loomed the way the school week had when she was a kid. She had nothing to do this Sunday, especially, but wait for her husband to call or come back. It was her only motivation to shower and dress. If Miles came back, he would find her checking case files at the kitchen counter, not drowsing in front of the TV. He would find her a natural part of the house and the message would be clear: they belonged in the same space, where each room blended into the next, leading toward the soaring ceilings and windows. Walls and walls of a taupe-colored paint, a shade called Evening Fawn that Miles had chosen.
When the phone rang Van’s heart dropped. She was so certain of Miles that she didn’t check the caller ID before answering.
“I’m having a party,” her father’s voice announced.
Van tried to hide her sigh of disappointment. “What for?”
“Citizenship. I’m a hundred percent American. The letter come in the mail yesterday.”
“Congratulations, Dad.” She
was actually relieved to hear the news. She had been the one to fill out the forms, inspecting every detail. Immigration was known for rejecting applications that had even one error, making the wait of two years or more even longer. Van had also paid the hundreds of dollars in fees, knowing they were a main part of her father’s refusal to apply in the first place. She had brought each round of her father’s documents, fingerprints, and photos to the Detroit immigration office in person. All of this her father had taken for granted, as he did whenever he asked her to help one of his friends with some paperwork. “Just in time too,” she added. “It’s really a good thing we sent your application when we did.”
“What you mean?”
“INS is being taken over by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s going to be a huge mess.”
“It’s no difference to me.”
“Well, it will be to a lot of people,” Van said irritably.
“The ceremony is in April,” her father went on. “Two months from now, on the last Friday. I’m having a big party on the Saturday. Everyone’s coming. Vien’s family is coming from California, everyone in town—everyone. So you and Linh and Miles have to be there. Friday and Saturday.”
“The ceremony’s at the Gerald Ford Museum, right?”
“Yes.” He always said the word with an inflection that indicated obviously. “You be there, Van. You and Linh and Miles.”
Only her parents and other Vietnamese people called Van and her sister by their real names: Van pronounced Vun, Linh instead of Linny. Van had become so used to the Americanized versions of their names that Vun sounded strange to her. It belonged to another person.
“I’ll tell you what else. Someone told me about a chance for a television show, so I’m working on something new.” For years he had been fantasizing about QVC or the Home Shopping Network, envisioning himself a Vietnamese version of the gadget-master Ron Popeil. That description, in fact, was one Van had used, laughing about him with Miles. My dad thinks he’s the next Ron Popeil. Miles had gone along, always calling Van’s father an “eccentric character.”
“I thought you were still perfecting the Luong Arm.”
“I’ve been doing that already,” her father said. “And you remember the invention that comes up out of the water, from the submarines?”
“The periscope thing. I know.” He’d been working on that for years now, a viewfinder device to allow short people to see over people’s heads in a crowd.
“The Luong Eye. It’s a good one, but I’ve got a better one now. I realized on the TV, it’s smart to have a series. The Luong Arm and the Luong Eye. Then people remember. Wait to see my other idea too.”
“It sounds great.” Out of habit she was careful not to break his chatty mood. He got like this once in a while, usually spurred by drinking, and at such times could keep Van on the phone for twenty minutes. Their more typical conversations went no longer than a commercial break.
Van wandered into the TV room and lay down on the sofa. Her father was still talking but she only half listened. Looking up at the vaulted ceiling, she remembered how anxious he had been on the day of his citizenship exam. She had jumped up from her chair in the waiting room as soon as he was done. “They ask me, ‘Who is Betsy Ross?’ I don’t remember that in the book you gave me,” he said, referring to the exam guidebook she had sent him. “So I say she was married to a big president. The lady laughed. But I passed the test.” He didn’t seem that happy about it, so Van took him to lunch at a Chinese buffet. They ate mostly in silence, her father repeatedly getting up for more king crab and fried shrimp. Several times he seemed to forget where they were sitting, and Van had to wave at him to call him back.
Now she interrupted whatever he was saying about the party. “Dad, I have to go.”
“Don’t forget the party.”
“I know.”
“Tell Miles I say hello.” He always said this.
“I will.”
Van kept the phone nearby as she slumped on the sofa. She told herself to get up, maybe clean the tortilla chip crumbs from the kitchen counter. She told herself to do some work. Instead she covered herself with a throw blanket, curling into the warmth. She lay there for a long time, unable to fall asleep, realizing slowly that she did not expect to hear the sound of the garage door lifting.
During their first winter in this house they had spent so much money on heating bills that she started to turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees and wear a zip-up sweatshirt in the house. Miles laughed at that, asked where her Jimmy Carter cardigan was, and said it reminded him of something her father would do. In fact, it was something he did do. So Van took the layers of sweatshirt off, let the heat run high. They simply paid the bills. And the novelty and freshness of such open space faded into footfalls and whispers and the eeriness of late night when it seemed anything at all could come crashing through one of the high windows. Van sometimes thought that if she were a bat, or a crow, or a pigeon, she would have tried it. She would have set the glass to shattering, sailed through someone else’s house, used up all the space that humans never reached.
4
Linny
Linny had lived in Chicago for five years, enough time to inure her to the touristy crowds on Michigan Avenue where suburbanites traveled great distances to shop at Nike and Banana Republic. Still, whenever she approached the city from her Wicker Park neighborhood she couldn’t suppress a little catch of joy at seeing all those skyscrapers coming into view. They created a chart on a graph that she could follow. Even on a day like this one, the second week of April, cold and gray, the buildings seemed to collect the gathered gleam from Lake Michigan and throw the light back into the air.
Sometimes Linny imagined running into Pren here, on the northern side of Michigan Avenue, between Barney’s and the Drake Hotel, where Linny’s friend Sasha ran the Paolo Francesca Salon. It was easy enough to get there from Lincoln Park. Linny had walked the reverse route, heading north past all of the doormen buildings in the Gold Coast to get to Lincoln Park itself, then down a side street lined with oaks, toward Gary’s limestone house with its wide front stoop and bay windows. Most of the families Linny cooked for lived in homes that carried a similar sense of tidy well-being, a scent of children with freshly shampooed hair. How many of them ate her dinners night after night, the parents checking the large-font instructions to know which temperature their ovens should bear?
Before answering the ad for You Did It Dinners, Linny had lasted eight months as Paolo Francesca’s receptionist. She sometimes returned to get a free haircut or manicure, but mostly just to get after-work drinks with Sasha. They used to wait tables together, back when Linny first arrived in Chicago, and over the years had shared countless stories about dates and jobs gone wrong. Sasha had grown up in a working-class neighborhood just outside the city and made no secret of her desire to get ahead. She always knew what to do on weekend nights, bringing Linny to parties and lounge openings, places that tried to lend out a sense of being somewhere significant.
When Linny arrived at the salon, Sasha was neatening a stack of fashion magazines in the waiting area. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said. “Are you wearing a new jacket?” It was a habit they had, appraising the ebb and flow of each other’s wardrobes.
“Sale,” Linny began to reply, but was interrupted by a client swathed in a plastic Paolo Francesca cape. Blond highlighting foils twisted the woman’s hair into an alien look.
“Excuse me,” she said, drawing her arms out from under the plastic. She touched the edges of her forehead gingerly, as if afraid to know what was there. A bride-to-be, Linny decided—diamond ring flashing, getting ready for the big day. “I thought someone was going to give me a pedicure while I’m waiting for this color to take?”
“We’ll be right there,” Sasha said, putting on a customer-service smile that Linny knew well, and used herself, when the mothers gathered in the assembly-line kitchen.
“Well, I’ve been waiting.” T
he woman turned to go back, but paused to point at Linny. “Are you doing the pedicure?”
“What?” Linny’s word came out like a bark.
The woman, realizing her error, began to laugh. “Oh, sorry, I just thought—”
“Someone will be right with you,” Sasha rushed in. She escorted the woman back to the inner rooms of the salon, glancing back at Linny to mouth the words, Fucking bitch.
Linny waved a hand to indicate, Don’t worry. It was not the first time she’d been mistaken for the manicure girl.
During her time at Paolo Francesca, Linny had quickly tired of the brides that clouded up every weekend. They arrived doughy-faced in button-down shirts and left shimmering, haloed in veils, their updos anchored with bobby pins and a shellac of styling cream. Eventually they all looked the same, or wanted to, with heavy “natural” makeup and an inevitable strapless dress. Salons like Paolo Francesca promised, and often delivered, the magic of metamorphosis. But Linny had seen the process too up-close.
She had spent much of her adolescence perfecting her own hair, makeup, and nails, but realized that doing so for other women was worse than a chore. Besides, she had always vowed never to become just another Vietnamese girl running a nail shop. Even though Paolo Francesca, with its steel counters and relentless techno music, was far removed from the strip-mall joints where some of Mrs. Luong’s friends worked, the very space of white on a woman’s French-tip manicure never failed to remind Linny of those striving, Lancôme-wearing Vietnamese women in Wrightville. Linny would shudder just driving past all those nail salons with orange adhesive letters spelling out signs on the window. Nails by Kim. Nails by Hoang. Or the worst, Oriental Manicure. Where bargain-conscious white women who stopped in to get their nails done always believed they were being gossiped about in Vietnamese. Where the same whiny soap opera music would blare from a boom box, the same Vietnamese magazines would cover the tables, and the same odor of nail polish remover and incense would linger in the air. Linny had promised herself that she wouldn’t end up filing other women’s nails for a living.
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 5