Bich Minh Nguyen

by Short Girls (v5)

  No, the Ohs were not at all midwesterners, and Miles meant for the house in Ann Arbor to prove it, from the Spanish tiles in the downstairs powder room to the antique French sideboard that was a nod to the semester he spent in Aix as an undergrad. To Van the furnishings never felt even, the centuries and countries pushing up against each other. But she praised whatever her husband praised. He talked of bathroom faucets and patio furniture. He circled furniture in catalogs and tabbed magazines with Post-it notes, seeming to know just how to go about attaining beautiful order in every room.

  A Design Within Reach catalog still lay open on his office desk. The pale slate-blue walls complemented the clean lines of glass and stainless steel bookcases. Van surveyed all of it from the doorway where she stood, procrastinating instead of preparing to go to Wrightville for her father’s citizenship party. For a while she had been avoiding this part of the house, for Miles’s office was next to the guest room they were going to turn into a nursery. Van had already painted it the color of an opened avocado, a shade that she thought of as childhood green. She realized that Miles had probably told his parents everything by now. They were probably calling all the aunts and cousins, heating up the phone lines with speculation. She could imagine Miles’s mother saying to her, If only you’d had a baby. She had never let up pestering them about it, even after Miles had told her about the almost-pregnancy. At their last Christmas gathering Mrs. Oh had scolded Van, saying, “As soon as you hit thirty, you’re pretty much going to be asking for complications. What are you waiting for?”

  Van had started wondering if Miles had insinuated that their lack of a child was somehow Van’s fault. “You have to do things you don’t always feel in the mood to do,” Mrs. Oh went on, making Van squirm. “You have to make sacrifices to be a mother.” Miles’s birth had been difficult and Mrs. Oh had nearly died; the doctor had said she could not risk having more children, though she had wanted three or four. She planned to make it up, she told Van, with grandchildren.

  Nearly every time Van drove to meet a client at the battered old INS building—in her mind she still called it that, not the Citizenship and Immigration Services building or Department of Homeland Security building—in downtown Detroit, just at the edge of the city between the bridge to Belle Isle and the Ambassador Bridge to Ontario, Van couldn’t help thinking of her own family, half first-generation, half second. She felt the most lonely then, unsheltered, far removed from her father and sister, the loss of her mother seeming to pour in through the car windows. Van had never yet visited Linny in Chicago, and Linny had only been to Ann Arbor twice. As with their father, both times were occasioned by a visit to someone else in the Detroit suburbs. From the way Linny had gazed around the living room, looking up at all the recessed lights, it was clear she didn’t understand the way Van and Miles lived.

  There was no way, Van thought, that her sister would understand what it meant to almost have a child. To stand in Miles’s office and look at his desk, his books, his Aeron chair. There was no way her sister would understand these kinds of emptiness.

  Van hovered over Miles’s desk, wondering why he had left the catalog open to this page: a dining room table laid with square plates. Had he wanted a new table? Had he been dissatisfied with the way she set it for guests? What message had he wanted to convey to Van? She remembered how, in recent months, he sometimes came home from work with increasing impatience. “Do you ever wonder why we bothered with law school?” he asked. He spent his weekends surfing the Web, typing long posts on home and garden message boards. He sometimes went antiquing by himself, coming back empty-handed save for the time he had scored an overpriced Saarinen table that ended up in the basement.

  When Van finally opened the door to his office closet, she couldn’t recall why she had waited so long to look through his things. Politeness? Fear of getting caught? It was still a transgression she knew he’d never forgive, but she barreled past that now.

  The boxes and plastic containers stacked in the back of the closet were labeled: Graduate School, Undergraduate, Art, Misc. Files. She dragged out the one cardboard box that said Stuff. The old packing tape peeled back easily, and Van drew out envelopes full of photographs, their negatives spilling out. She found a pile of cards bound with a rubber band, and three spiral-bound journals, empty of writing. At the bottom of the box Van saw what she had been waiting for: the three framed women and Julie’s black and white photographs. They looked more plaintive here, almost pretentious. They wouldn’t even work in this house, Van decided with a surge of bitter pleasure. But the women were just how Van remembered them, their faces stilled and taunting, seeming to know something about Miles that Van could never grasp.

  She had guessed, early on, what Julie had meant. The one who got away. She knew it in the way Miles had spoken of her—with a certain admiration and respect, wistfulness. They had known each other in high school and had both gone to Pomona. They had a shared history, as Miles said. Van had overlooked it, reminding herself that she was the one he married. Over the years the jealousy had faded somewhat, pushed into a closed-off compartment called The Past. She knew that Miles heard updates on Julie once or twice a year, probably by e-mail, but she was careful not to appear bothered by this. She refused to let Julie become a lingering specter in her marriage.

  Van skimmed the old birthday greetings and postcards, looking for the names. There was an amiable note from Maya, dated four years ago from London. Diana had sent a birthday card with a big loopy heart drawn on it, and the scrawled words, Love ya always!

  When Van touched a square envelope of tan recycled fibers she knew whose it was. Julie’s handwriting was artsy-looking, of course, at once jaunty and studied—a lot, Van realized, like Miles’s. It was addressed to his apartment on Packard Street, with a return address of San Francisco.

  Miles had slit the envelope open cleanly with a letter opener. Van pulled out the card made of heavy card stock, letterpressed with a pattern of golden birds. But there was nothing inside it. No handwriting, no words. Van was certain—she felt it like a weight pushing her to the floor of the closet—that there had been a note in here once. A letter—a love letter? A farewell? Whatever it was, Miles had kept it to, for, himself. It was that private, that important. Van knew her husband well enough to know that.

  From the moment they had married, Van had carried a secret pride. She had felt safe from the rest of the world, privately pitying single women like her sister, who tended to complain about the lack of decent and available men. For Van, marriage had fulfilled its ancient promise. I am claimed, she sometimes whispered to herself. She never thought that Miles, who had spoken so firmly about the importance of commitment, would break his end of the bargain. Wasn’t marriage a guarantee against the easy shifting of one’s mind? They all think that, Van remembered a friend remarking about her family law practice. They say, I never thought this would happen to me.

  Now Van saw evidence of Julie everywhere. The specter she had avoided had been there all along, seeping uncertainty into their days, slipping into that space created whenever Van and Miles turned away from each other in their sleep. The specter was there in all of the silences, the ones Van had wrongly regarded as the quietude of marriage. “Julie.” Van spoke the name out loud, because no one was there to hear it. What she really meant was Miles.

  The postmark on the envelope said August 1998, right before the start of their last year of law school. A few weeks later, Miles sat down next to Van on that bench near the library and began everything between them.

  6

  Linny

  Driving the teal-colored Corolla an ex-boyfriend had let her have for five hundred bucks, Linny listened to a retro hits CD she had bought at a gas station. The songs were by Taylor Dayne, En Vogue, Color Me Badd, all reminding her of high school, and the lazy summer days in between when she roamed Woodland Mall and sneaked away with boyfriends to make out anywhere they could—someone’s basement, or the woods behind Egypt Lake Golf Club north of
town. Often when Linny went back to Wrightville to check on her father she ended up running into people from high school. It flustered her to see them increasingly overweight, saddled with toddlers. They walked the aisles of Meijer, their shopping carts heaped with Stouffer’s and cases of Diet Coke.

  Many of her classmates had gotten married right after college and stayed in west Michigan. By now, edging toward age thirty, they had two or three kids. They knew mortgages and parent-teacher conferences and, like their parents before them, clipped coupons from the Sunday Press and watched Suzanne Geha report the Channel 8 news. Linny didn’t want any of that, exactly, but she couldn’t help feeling somewhat exposed in lacking such markers of a grown-up life. At such moments Linny clung to Chicago as her prize, the gloss of sophistication that would cover her undistinguished career, lack of college degree, and nonexistent photo of husband and kids. She took comfort in not having gained weight or wrinkles; she was the same size she’d been at age eighteen. Still, she allowed herself to wonder: If she could trade places and be Pren, would she? Would she drive to Michigan with a greater sense of ease?

  The day before, at You Did It Dinners, preparing pans of cheesy stuffed chicken, Barbara had introduced a new possibility.

  Linny had been chatting away about the two dads who frequented You Did It and were well known among the regular crowd of stay-at-home moms.

  “It’s a new micro-trend,” Barbara declared. “We’ll be seeing more of them. We should start stocking beer.”

  “Well, these guys aren’t one hundred percent stay-at-home dads. They have freelance consulting businesses or something.”

  “Oh, I know. There are few men who truly stay at home. They all seem to have their own businesses on the side. Or they’re trustafarians.”

  Linny laughed at this unexpected word from Barbara.

  “My kids taught me that.” Barbara smiled.

  Deftly she slit a pocket into a chicken breast and stuffed it with spinach and goat cheese, tucking in a quivering slice of ham. “What would you say, Linny, if I told you I wanted you to handle just about everything here?” Barbara went on to propose bringing in another assistant, shifting Linny into Barbara’s place while she herself opened a second branch of You Did It Dinners, in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood.

  The offer was so unexpected that Linny hardly knew where to look. “Thank you,” she said finally. She meant the words. She had never been offered a promotion in anything. Had never stuck out a job this long.

  But as Barbara continued describing her plan, Linny realized what it truly meant: she could no longer think of You Did It as a temporary job, a lark, which was how she still viewed it even though she’d been there for three years. The realization lifted her spirits and then sank her: these meals, the meals of so many families, would become her complete responsibility. She had never thought of herself doing this forever, literally catering to moms. People would ask her what she did for a living and she would have to say she managed You Did It Dinners, specializing in convenience for families on the go. It would no longer be a holding place for the next whatever-may-be.

  In the last class Linny took in college, the day before she just stopped going back to campus, her merchandising professor had given a lecture on branding. All of the other students seemed eager to own their own businesses—or so they all said when they introduced themselves on the first day—and the professor often cited successful or unsuccessful brands. On that day she stressed the importance of a name. “Your business can rise and fall on the basis of its name,” she said.

  You Did It Dinners, the name, had always bothered Linny. It was an awkward phrase, a tripped-up string of words. Out loud, You Did It could be an accusation, a backing into a corner of guilt. It sounded like culpability. The many women and few men who paid to “do dinners,” as Barbara called it, were paying partly for a feeling of accomplishment.

  As she drove to west Michigan, Linny tried to reconcile herself to managing the You Did It kitchen. She saw herself in the same apron whites, monitoring moms with their pans of vegetables and cheese and their glasses of pinot grigio. She saw herself promoting new recipes and updating the website. A lot of people, like Van, would surely say that was progress. That was what work meant. But in the moment all Linny could feel was something closer to claustrophobia. Closer to fear.

  Added to that was the worrying she’d nursed all week, after seeing Miles and that woman, Grace. Of course her name was Grace. Such a standard later-generation name. Girls named Grace were bright and ambitious, bought makeup at Clinique and suits at J. Crew. They were the kind of girls Van probably always wanted to be.

  Linny had debated calling her sister but what would she say? They hardly knew how to talk to each other without nitpicking, falling back on insults; Van might think she was rubbing the sighting in her face. Your husband is having an affair. Could Linny say those words? Were they true? And—did Van know? A sick feeling roiled Linny’s stomach when she realized that either yes or no seemed plausible. She was used to feeling sorry for her sister the wallflower. This new mixture of defensiveness and worry, a kind of tenderness, carried Linny back to her earliest memories, when Van was the treasured older sister to look up to. Van had always been the one who could be counted on to take care of business, make sure all of her bills got paid on time, in full. Or as their mother had said, “She keeps all her chickens in a row.”

  So it seemed especially awful that Linny couldn’t stop picturing Grace and Miles together, fresh from their hotel room, arms entwining as they merged into a bright day of walking on Michigan Avenue. She allowed herself to push the scene, let Gary and Pren enter into view. The four of them could go to a museum together, or draw up chairs at a café where Linny would be fixing cappuccinos behind the counter.

  Of course, she knew that her own deal with Gary had never been about permanence. Gary saw her as an opportunity, a break from his daily life. To Sasha, Linny had claimed the same for herself. Yet it had become nearly impossible not to wonder what it would be to live not in Gary’s world but in Pren’s.

  Maybe Van and their mother, in their own ways, had known this kind of question too.

  When Linny turned fifteen she moved beyond her Belinda Car-lisle phase and her popped-collar shirts in favor of acid-washed denim jackets. Back then, Rich and Nancy Bao were still throwing parties nearly every Saturday at their almost-mansion in Wyandotte, a suburb that became home to a burgeoning Vietnamese community just south of Grand Rapids and twenty minutes west of where the Luongs had settled in Wrightville. Growing up, it had seemed improbable to Linny and Van that so many white people in Michigan had sponsored Vietnamese refugees, and that the Vietnamese had not only stayed but increased their numbers. Every winter their parents complained about the cold but they never thought about leaving; they were going to stay where they had landed.

  When Linny looked back at that time she saw so much in relative aspect to the Baos. Van was always old enough to stay at home alone, something she apparently cherished, though she never did anything more exciting than read, watch television, and eat microwaved popcorn. Linny preferred the parties, where she could hang out with kids her age and pretend, for a while, that the puffed-leather luxury of the Baos’ house belonged to her.

  From the moment Mr. Luong parked on the Baos’ street, joining a line of cars that would stay there for many hours, a divide fell between her and her parents, children and adults, English and Vietnamese. While the parents played cards and drank and danced in the great room to Vietnamese music turned up so loud that neighbors complained, the children claimed the basement. The Baos had a ping-pong table, an air hockey table, two TVs with separate Nintendo systems, one for each of the Bao children, and dozens of board games. Some of the older kids staked out the laundry room, where they smuggled in nearly empty bottles of whiskey and vodka swiped from the tables upstairs. It was there that Linny had her first kiss and her first make-out sessions, under a blanket in a corner of the laundry room, with boys Ameri
canized into Jimmy, Bobby, and Matthew. There, Linny first understood the wondrous, addictive rush of having power over a boy. She remembered looking down at—was it Alex Phan?—her shirt half unbuttoned, and feeling certain that he would agree to do almost anything if she let him undo the rest.

  In the warm months the Baos set up two big grills on their backyard patio. The men would lounge out there, drinking beer and Courvoisier while they cooked beef and shrimp satay. In the kitchen the women fried cha gio and shrimp chips. Somehow all at once the food was brought to the dining room table, and everyone fell upon it. Eating was a confusion of paper plates and chopsticks, nuoc mam and Open Pit barbecue sauce, hoisin and sweet pickle relish.

  It was during one of these summer evening parties that Linny began to believe that her father and Nancy Bao were having an affair. That night, Linny and a new kid, Tom Hanh, had been talking about the imminent start of tenth grade. Tom was by far the cutest boy at the party and even Lisa Bao, the princess of her parents’ domain and the self-appointed fashion arbiter of the younger set, had praised his restraint in not going overboard with the New Wave look—spiky hair, white shirt, and baggy black pants—that all the Vietnamese boys were still sporting. Normally Linny viewed Lisa as her competition, but that summer Lisa had a steady boyfriend, and Linny threw her a smile from her seat on the sofa next to Tom Hanh. His family had been living in Wisconsin and he was shyer, more unassuming than the boys Linny usually favored. He didn’t make one move, later, as they walked around the neighborhood.

  Already the crickets of late summer were out, signaling to Linny an awareness of time: months gone. School ahead. The night wearing down. The Baos’ subdivision of cavernous brick homes seemed far away from the Luongs’ ranch house. Here, the creamy sidewalks seemed to be lit from underneath, reminding Linny of the video for “Billie Jean.”