From down the street Linny could hear the crescendos of laughter and music. The faint strains of a Vietnamese cha-cha song switched suddenly to Depeche Mode, turned up. This was accompanied by a screeching wail and a succession of popping sounds—someone had brought fireworks to the party again.
“Gosh damn it,” came a voice. Clear and male, and so close that Linny started.
Tom nudged her, nodding his head toward a tall, pale-haired man standing on the front steps of his dormered colonial. The lamps on either side of the front door illuminated the frown on his face. He was glaring at the Baos’ house, hard, as though willing it to disappear. He muttered, “Damn noisy gooks.”
Neither Linny nor Tom said a word, but as they crossed the street she realized that they were holding hands.
As they walked alongside the line of parked cars, Linny’s mind skipped ahead to future phone calls with Tom, Saturday meet-ups at the mall. She wanted to suggest that they get some food and bring it outside, but she was distracted by the sight of her parents sitting in their tan-colored Cutlass, arguing. At least that’s what it looked like. Only when Linny got closer did she realize that it wasn’t her mother—it was Nancy Bao.
Linny didn’t dare face Tom, to see what he was seeing. She hurried ahead to the Baos’ front door and went straight to the dining room, where she pretended to be hungry for shrimp and vermicelli. She didn’t even know Tom. What if he gossiped to everyone? Linny could just imagine Lisa in hysterics, the whole community in an uproar.
“Where should we eat?” Tom asked.
“I’m going downstairs,” Linny said, turning away, already planning to ditch him for one of her friends.
She poured a cup of Dr Pepper and grabbed a napkin, ready to flee, when Nancy Bao appeared, the image of cheerfulness with her freshly permed hair and flowered halter sundress. She set a bucket of ice near the two-liter bottles of pop. “Enjoying the food, children?”
Her Vietnamese was silky and languid. Linny looked straight at her and said, “The shrimp and vermicelli dish is no good.”
Linny could feel Tom staring at her but kept focused on Nancy Bao, who didn’t stop smiling. She simply took up the platter of shrimp and walked to the kitchen, the back hem of her skirt swinging out.
After that Linny stopped going to the Vietnamese parties. She didn’t want to face Tom again or Lisa Bao. It was easier to stay away, enmesh herself in her own group of friends from school. She wondered when she would hear word of a fight—her mother getting the news from one of her friends, waking up the neighborhood with her shouts. But nothing happened. Van, oblivious, seemed to spend all of her weekends reading or working on projects to beef up her future college applications, while Linny cruised the mall with Missy and Becca and Caitlin, popular girls from school. She started dating boys who had their own cars, who took her to Pietro’s for pizza and then, in the darkness of the Studio 28 Theater, slipped their hands up her shirt.
She never said anything to Van about Nancy Bao, though she wanted to, sometimes, in the quiet minutes at the end of dusk, twilight descending, the time when Mrs. Luong liked to sit outside and “not think.” Then, Linny might glance at her sister bent over a notebook and long to say, I know something you don’t know. Or maybe, I want you to think about this too. When she studied, Van kept her hair in careless ponytails that seemed to accentuate the flat plane of her face. Her expression was serious, lost in some textbook history, stories of other people’s lives. Linny often had the urge to snap her fingers under her sister’s nose or yank her hair as she did when they were little and had fights. But she always let the chance to speak fall away. If Van preferred to stay in her own solitude, so be it.
For Linny, knowing about Nancy Bao meant seeing her everywhere. Picking up the phone and hearing her breathy English: “Is your da-ddy home?” She envisioned clouds of Dior perfume, eyelids painted royal blue. Nancy would cover her face with foundation, crab to her mother, sulk to her husband, spend long afternoons perfecting her fingernails.
If Van was too preoccupied, too focused on the debate team to notice, surely Linny’s mother was not. Linny wouldn’t have dared to say anything to her, make the subject a soft fruit smashed open. But she believed that her mother must have known, and somehow this thought became almost more unbearable than the affair itself. If her mother spilled a glass of water on the table or forgot her purse at home, if she broke a teacup or left the milk out on the counter all night—Linny saw these as signals, a communication no one would answer.
In the middle of her tenth-grade year, Linny acquired her first real boyfriend, an eighteen-year-old senior whose parents had bought him a red Jeep. They spent hours after school driving around town and finding secluded places to make out, testing how far they dared to go. One day, stopped at a light on 28th Street, Linny saw her father and Nancy stepping out of a Chinese restaurant. The day was bright and cloudless and Nancy shaded her eyes. She wore yellow pumps and a dress patterned with overlapping squares of primary colors. Linny could see her magenta lipstick and thick black eyeliner, no doubt meant to widen her eyes. Nancy Bao tucked her fingers into Dinh Luong’s arm as they walked to the Cutlass Supreme. As the light changed and Linny’s boyfriend drove on, the last thing Linny thought she saw was her father unlocking the door for Nancy. He lifted the handle, opening the door just slightly before walking around to the driver’s side, as if he were unwilling to open the door fully and wait for her to settle in. Linny craned her neck to see more, but only glimpsed the colors of Nancy’s dress, disappearing.
Linny’s father called as she was driving past the exit to South Haven, where she and her friends had spent so many warm days, lounging at the Lake Michigan beach, skipping school. Linny would spread out her towel, look out at that seemingly endless expanse of water, and pretend she was at the ocean.
“Where are you?”
“About an hour away.”
“The ceremony starts at three o’clock,” he said reproachfully.
“Plenty of time.”
“Did you talk to Van?”
Linny felt that sick sensation again. “No. Why?”
“She isn’t calling back. You should’ve drive here together.”
“We don’t live in the same place, Dad.” Sometimes she wondered if he was actually aware of that. “I’m sure she’s on her way.”
“She didn’t call back all this week.” A loud crashing sound. “Chet cha!”
“Dad?”
“I dropped the Arm. I’m setting up the studio for the party so people see my work. A lot of old friends haven’t seen me in so many years. Now they’ll get to see my big announcement. You and Van will see it also. It’s my new invention. So everyone has to be here.”
Suddenly Linny asked, “The Baos?”
“Of course the Bao family. Listen, Linh, you call your sister. Tell her to not be late. I have to fix this,” he muttered. He hung up and Linny kept her cell phone in her hand. Without letting herself think about it, she dialed Van’s number.
To her surprise, Van answered.
“Dad told you to call, right?”
“He said you haven’t been calling him back.”
“I’m tired of seeing his number.” She sounded more annoyed than she usually got with their father. It was Linny who typically had less patience. “Tell him I already left.”
Linny took a breath before asking, “Is Miles coming with you?”
“No, he’s out of town.”
“Where?”
“What do you care? I have to go.”
“I just thought—” Linny stopped. She had no idea how to complete the sentence. She drove past a giant homemade billboard shaped like a cross that said If you don’t get right yer gonna get left.
“I’ll see you at the ceremony,” Van said.
Linny tossed her phone on the passenger seat and paused the mix CD. It was a box set, the kind of thing she’d wanted to order for years, ever since the “Freedom Rock” commercials from the eighties. Remember? she ima
gined saying to Van. Back then, they both knew the commercial by heart, down to the succession of featured song snippets. They sat close to the screen and sang along: “I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name . . . I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain . . . Sunshine go away today . . . We may never pass this way again . . .”
At such times, Linny could forget that she was the bad Asian daughter and Van was the good one. Van, who had kept up her Vietnamese, attended to her parents, and hardly ever talked back. She had taken Asian American Studies classes in college and sometimes talked about various immigration acts, which Linny pretended to ignore. Words like awareness and heritage nestled right into Van’s vocabulary. Then she had gone on to law school, something their father deemed just as worthy as engineering or dentistry school. And she even married an Asian guy.
Linny’s boyfriends had mostly been white or black, and she hadn’t even finished college. Even in high school she had done everything half-assed, which she saw confirmed in the glances her mother’s friends used to give her. The ones that said, When is that girl going to shape up? Linny hadn’t even had the decency to consider working in a nail salon. That kind of Vietnamese girl, at least, did her part in keeping the community intact.
Linny had always imagined that Van’s life was an exercise in discipline, a how-to kit in which all the directions were followed exactly. But now, having seen Miles in Chicago, having guessed at how much her sister might be concealing, Linny reconsidered.
Floating on that highway toward home, Linny felt barely rooted to her seat. She thought of ghosts, spirits, or whatever form her mother was supposed to be now, conjured whenever Linny wrote another recipe or wondered what her mother had thought, their first months in Michigan, when she couldn’t find any decent rice in the stores. Linny had often tried to find comfort or guidance in the memory of her mother but she usually ended up answerless. She searched for threads in the sky in front of her, invisible webbing reaching to Chicago, Ann Arbor, Wrightville. She didn’t know which line to tug first.
7
Van
The day after Miles left, after Van had driven around Ann Arbor looking for him, after her father had called with the news of his citizenship, Van sat on the carpet-covered staircase in her house for five hours. The pile was thick and plush, just as in an advertisement, and she had a notion that if she did not stir from her spot, then she would be okay, like riding out a storm. Eventually she fell asleep, spread across three steps, rolling in and out of consciousness so that the waking world seemed a half-lucid dream. When she finally got up, aiming for the sofa in the TV room, she was almost glad to feel an ache in her body, distracting her from the absence in the house. It didn’t last long enough.
She called in sick to Gertz & Zarou that week, something she never would have dared before. She slept in a position of waiting, preparing to spring up at any moment if the garage door should rise. At the very least, she didn’t want to leave the house in case he returned. She tried to think of the days as a countdown, even if she didn’t know when the count would be over.
But by the end of the week, Van became restless. She turned off the incessant television that had seeped into her nightmares, mixing laugh-track sitcoms with visions of Miles and Sunil, elephants and motorcycles, a swirl of gold and jade bracelets. She awoke thinking that Miles was testing her. Perhaps he wanted her to come after him. Didn’t he say she should have more initiative, more assertiveness? Perhaps he was waiting for her.
The thought compelled her to get up and shower, shave her legs, and wash her hair with the botanical shampoo Miles favored. Afterward, wrapped in a towel, she tiptoed to the top of the stairs, listening in case he had come home. Then she went to her closet to find something to wear. Miles always liked her in fitted suits and solid-color dresses. His praise words were elegant and stylish. Van pulled out the burgundy cashmere turtleneck he had bought her last year. Moving quickly through the racks at Neiman Marcus, he’d plucked the sweater as if from the air, resolving it out of nothing but his will. The neck of the sweater was slightly cowled, and the fabric fit smoothly over Van’s narrow shoulders. She paired it with gabardine dress pants Miles had also chosen for her that day. They’d had them hemmed in the store, and Van remembered the way Miles watched her as she looked at herself, standing almost tall on the dais, facing the three-way mirror. He had leaned against an opposite wall as if he liked what he was seeing. The seamstress, taking pins out of her mouth, had spoken not to Van but to Miles about when the pants would be ready.
Van realized that she must have dropped off the pants at the cleaners last week. Some of Miles’s clothes had gone too. A feeling of dread washed over her to think of him reclaiming his shirts and leaving her pants behind. What would the woman at the cleaners think? Van made a note to pick up all of the clothes herself first, make Miles return to her in order to get them.
She put on black wool pants instead and grabbed a pair of trouser socks from a drawer. She would wear the black pumps Miles had also bought for her, from the intimidating shoe department at Saks, where Van never went herself. She had been so shocked by the price that she hung on to the years-old Naturalizers he had wanted to toss out, keeping them in her car to change into before work.
Like her sister and mother, Van was slim, small, and short. Mostly short. That was the primary adjective people used to describe her. In a crowd of white students, white lawyers, it was easy to identify her as the short Asian girl. Linny had said it was possible to slip past that; she had a way of dressing to perfect advantage, knowing exactly what worked for her figure. She spoke of how certain prints “overwhelmed” a short girl, and how certain styles had a lengthening effect. Van saw how clothes could transform her sister but didn’t believe they could have as much of an effect on her. Miles preferred suits because they lent her the strongest guise of authority. Of course, he had laughed, someone could also think you’re a little girl playing dress-up. The words stung Van, got to the core of her fear of being unseen, interrupted, dismissed. She couldn’t shake the way Miles said, Come on, Van. It’s a joke. Learn to laugh at yourself. It was a phrase he had invoked repeatedly in recent months. Don’t you know how to take a joke? He didn’t know he was echoing Linny in her teenage years, part of the barbs she and Van had traded.
In the bathroom Van applied a light coating of lipstick, blush, and powder. That was all the makeup she ever wore. All of Linny’s complicated accoutrements—the weapon-shaped eyelash curler, pots of shimmer, a box full of different-sized brushes—seemed foreign to Van. She didn’t know how Linny could paint herself up so unselfconsciously. Wasn’t she afraid of appearing effortful? Even on her wedding day, Van had worn minimal makeup. Besides, Miles had always said he liked the natural look; women who wore too much makeup were probably hiding insecurities.
There wasn’t much to be done about her hair either. It hung limply at her shoulders, plain and unmistakably Vietnamese. It had been this way since high school and, except for the occasional ponytail or bun, she’d never seen a reason to do anything different. This was the body Miles had fallen in love with, after all. Linny, who never failed to offer unasked-for advice on Van’s hair and wardrobe, could know nothing about that. As Van hurried down to the garage, she thought of what Linny had said after she’d met Miles. “He’s nice. Maybe a little too nice. You can tell he really wants to be cool. He’s friendly but calculating, just like a lawyer.” When Van got mad, Linny said, “Hey, I’m just being honest.”
That was Linny’s typical defense, and she got away with it too, because she happened to be beautiful. It was an all-encompassing answer. An acceptance and definition. Matt Staven, Van’s prom date and Model UN partner, had said, Your sister is really something. Her first boyfriend in college saw a picture of Linny and exclaimed, That’s your sister? Beauty was Linny’s distinguishing characteristic and it satisfied people. They needed to know nothing more. Van was the one who had to prove herself, raise her hand to deliver answers, get the grades.
> As a teenager she would sometimes confront herself in the mirror, asking: Am I jealous? Sometimes it was yes, sometimes no. She could see how she was the imperfect amateur portrait of Linny. The resemblance was clear, the effort commendable, but the lines just didn’t match. There was a faltering, a fundamental lack. It wasn’t unfair so much as an unchangeable fact. Van even had moments of pride when she considered what her sister possessed. She imagined it was what mothers felt while shooing their daughters onto a beauty pageant stage. Linny smiled and it seemed a bestowal. Surely the world opened up for women like her.
Van remembered a song blaring out of Linny’s high school boom box: I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money. Linny sunning herself in the yard, listening to WKLQ. It was mid-June, the end of Van’s junior year, and she was studying for the SAT while Mrs. Luong rolled out cha gio for a party that night.
“That’s a funny song,” their mother said. She tilted her head a little, listening to the chorus coming in through the window. “You and Linny are like that. That’s why you have to stick together. Make money and save money. Together.”
Van glanced up, irritated, from the vocabulary words she was memorizing. “It’s just a stupid song.”
“You go to the same college,” Mrs. Luong said, a grim order.
“No way. I’m not going to end up at some fourth-tier school.”
“Same college,” she insisted. “Stick together!”
Linny came into the kitchen for a can of Sprite. She was barefoot, almost naked but for a pink string bikini, another item “borrowed from a friend” so Mrs. Luong couldn’t throw it out.
Mrs. Luong still glared at the bikini but Linny appeased her with, “I’ll help you with the rest in a minute. The bean cakes too.”
Van concentrated on the vocabulary words, pausing to repeat concatenate to herself. She thought, There is no way in the world we will go to the same college. Her mother arranged a cha gio roll on a platter.
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 10