Bich Minh Nguyen

by Short Girls (v5)

  Soon, college pamphlets and applications would fill up the mailbox. Fees waived. Honors programs touted. All for Van.

  Linny’s feet slapped on linoleum, the screen door slamming shut.

  Van closed her eyes. In one year I’ll be free. I’ll never come back.

  Driving toward Miles’s law office in Ann Arbor, those polished black pumps already pinching her toes, Van banished her family from her mind. If things worked out, if Miles returned, no one would have to know that he’d ever left. He had married Van for a reason. He had chosen her above all the prettier, flirtier, taller women surrounding him in law school. But as she headed downtown her heart seemed to grow heavy with worry. It was like the old days, dating Miles, when she never quite knew where she stood. Her sometimes breathless anxiety as she climbed the steps to his apartment. Would he smile? Would he be glad to see her? Or would he turn her away gently, saying I really need to work tonight.

  Volker, Voss, and Williams occupied a brick-and-mirrored-glass building surrounded by greenery and Japanese maples. Every aspect of the landscape seemed to anticipate the clients’ expectations of marble and mahogany, low voices commingled with the sense of importance that pervaded the office. It was nothing like Gertz & Zarou. At Volker, the clients were wealthy and white, and owned German luxury cars or gigantic SUVs. At Van’s office the clients were Indian and Chinese; they slipped into the waiting room with as little noise as possible, sat with their hands in their laps.

  Miles’s secretary, an early-twenty-something woman whose mother was also a secretary in the firm, tilted her head smilingly when Van walked in.

  “Hi, Mrs. Oh,” she called out. “I didn’t know you’d be stopping by.”

  “Nice to see you, Holly.” To Van’s relief her voice sounded normal. She was always startled to be called by Miles’s last name, because she had not changed hers when they married. He had claimed to approve, calling it independent, but asked for a compromise: she would keep her name legally, but be known socially as Mrs. Oh, and she would change it for real once they had a child. “Is my husband here?”

  “He’s in a meeting but it should be over in a little while. Want to wait?”

  “Yes. I think I will.” Van sank into a modernist silver-trimmed leather chair. As she crossed her legs her pants hiked up, revealing the trouser socks she had put on earlier. Van realized that they were dark brown, not black as she’d thought, and they looked silly against her black pants and shoes. Van uncrossed her legs and tried to draw them underneath the chair. At that moment two women walked by, obviously an associate and her client. The lawyer wore a pencil skirt, black hose, and stacked heels; the client swished by in wide-legged trousers. No matter what she wore or how good she might feel about herself, the sight of a pulled-together tall woman could always make Van feel like a short little stump.

  “So, how have you been?” Holly asked from her desk. “I haven’t seen you since the Christmas party.”

  Van had missed the first half of the party due to traffic coming back from the immigration office in Detroit, and she remembered the dread she had felt at an impending argument with Miles, who hated it when she was late for events. But he hadn’t seemed to register her timing. When she arrived at the restaurant, wearing a red dress and realizing that none of the other associates had dressed festively, Miles had simply waved at her from a conversation he was having in a far corner of the room. It was a gesture of hello, she thought at the time, rather than an invitation. But she’d joined them anyway, stepping into her role as the spouse.

  “I’m doing fine,” Van said. “How have you been?”

  “Well, great, actually.” Holly grinned, then lifted her left hand to smooth a lock of blond hair. The gesture was so deliberate that Van understood: the girl was wearing an engagement ring, a large one that gleamed flatly in the office light. “I don’t know if Miles told you,” she began.

  “You’re engaged!” Van blurted. “How fun! How great! Congratulations! Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “You know Kevin Anders?”

  “Of course.” Van smiled, but she was secretly shocked. Holly was barely twenty-five. Kevin was a partner at the firm, gym-fit to make up for his advancement beyond middle age. He had once declared he would never get married, sparking rumors that he was gay, and Miles had told Van that all the single women in the building were aiming to find out the truth.

  “It’s only been a couple of weeks,” Holly gushed. “But I still can’t believe it. When you and Miles got engaged, did you spend hours looking at your ring or what?”

  “Can I see it?”

  Holly’s left hand shot out and Van rose from her chair to get a better look. The diamond was thick and oval-shaped, with baguettes on either side.

  “I wanted gold,” Holly said, “but Kevin said platinum was better.”

  Van lifted her own left hand, where her plain diamond solitaire circled her finger above the channel-set wedding band Miles had selected. She was standing there, her hand almost close enough to Holly’s to bear a comparison, when she heard Miles saying her name.

  She blushed, Miles staring at her with an expression of uncertainty bordering on amusement. She could have been a comic moment at a zoo exhibition, or an audacious child. Still, his face, softened since that terrible Saturday night, gave Van hope. Holly piped up, “I was just telling your wife my news.”

  “It is very good news,” Miles said, starting toward his office.

  When he had shut the door behind them and sat down at his desk, Van remained standing. The room was clean and noncommittal, with recessed lights, stern Berber carpeting, and cherry-stained furniture. A bold white orchid, no doubt a client gift, perched on a filing cabinet, and on the desk one picture frame faced him. Back when he first took this job Van had framed some of his college art photographs so he could hang them in his new office, but he had never even moved them from their box.

  He gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk but Van would not be treated like one of his clients.

  “I knew you’d come here,” he said.

  This deflated her, and for a moment she felt like a stalker. A predictable one at that. “Then why didn’t you call?”

  “If I had wanted to talk I would have called.” Miles spoke evenly. He was no longer the sensitive man weeping into his coat sleeve. He was straight-faced, prepared. His tie glowed iridescently, changing from silver to blue and back again.

  “I think you owe me an explanation.” The words emerged from Van as though she knew what to say. She didn’t. It was only later that she realized that she’d taken her cue from movies and television shows, probably reaching all the way back to the evening soaps her mother had favored.

  He leaned back in his leather chair, looking altogether too relaxed. “I wish you’d sit down.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Van, all I know is what I’ve known for a long time. I just didn’t realize it until I did. So let’s face reality for once. Do you honestly think our marriage is okay?”

  She blushed again, feeling as though she’d been called out in a law school lecture. “I don’t think it’s not okay.”

  “Well, it’s obvious we’re not on the same track. Our minds aren’t aligned.”

  “Aligned,” Van repeated.

  “When we first got together, we were a real couple. You had ambition. Potential was everywhere. And now, as you well know, Van, it isn’t.”

  A wave of panic rose inside her, and she fought to keep her voice in control. “You didn’t even want me to work at the International Center. You persuaded me to quit.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t blame me for your mistakes and failures, Van.”

  “You did. You said—”

  “We’ve both said a lot and most of it is a lot of nothing. We go right past each other. This isn’t just about work. Van. Stop being so literal. It’s about character, personalities.”

  “In what way?”

  “Shh,” he said. “Please keep your vo
ice down. I have to work. This is my workplace. I’m meeting clients all day.”

  “You want me out of here.”

  “In a word, yes.”

  In the few days Miles had been gone Van had cried only once in the shower and only once while watching TV. It was a strange thing with crying: by herself she could contain it; in the presence of another person she lost control. As a girl, if she was yelled at she would burst into instant, hyperventilating sobs. Even bad customer service could make her throat swell. She’d always been careful to maintain composure around Miles, but she knew he could see that she was on the verge.

  “Don’t cry, Van.” It was a weary command. He stood up and said it again, more gently. “Van,” he repeated.

  He walked over to her and, hesitating, patted her on the shoulder. “I’ll tell you though—it’s nice to hear you actively disagreeing with me. Not just going along.”

  I thought you wanted me to go along, she almost said, but stopped herself. Was she supposed to agree or disagree with what he just said? Van found herself grabbing at Miles’s hands. His face, his eyes were inscrutable—had they always been? She had never understood how characters in books could discern entire ranges of emotion and understanding in someone else’s eyes. Miles’s steady gaze told her nothing more than what his words said. He let her hang on for a moment before drawing himself away. “Now’s not the time for this,” he said quietly. “Get yourself together.” And then, as if to reward her, he put his arms around her.

  “We’ll talk soon. I have to come by the house to get some more things.”

  She focused on the picture frame on his desk. “When?”

  “Whenever I can. I’ll call you.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Here.” He went back to his desk, opened a drawer, and set forth a box of Kleenex. “You have to go now.”

  She looked around helplessly. “This isn’t right.”

  “It’s okay. We’re going to be fine. Just go home now.” He spoke so tenderly that Van held on to the phrase we’re going to be fine. It was her lifeboat. “Don’t make a scene, okay?”

  When Van left the office she moved quickly, letting her hair hang in her face to avoid seeing young Holly’s diamond ring.

  It was only in the car, starting back home, that Van remembered something she had meant to do. Just keep going, she told herself, but the need to know was too strong: she did a U-turn and drove back to the maroon-and-glass building of Volker, Voss, and Williams. This time Van ignored Holly and headed straight to Miles’s office. He was standing at an open filing cabinet, briefcase on his desk. “What are you doing back here?” he demanded.

  At his tone of trespass, the slight emphasis on you, Van stopped. She realized that she should feel ashamed. Ordinarily, she would. She would have felt like the desperate, needy girl who didn’t know when to walk away, take no for an answer. Now Van felt angry. It came on suddenly, like a boost of adrenaline in the last minute of a timed debate. It was anger, finally, that made her reach out to Miles’s desk. Her hand grasped the one picture frame sitting there and flipped it around. Van let out a breath she’d been holding. All that time, she had been expecting to see Julie.

  8

  Linny

  Up until Linny was eight years old, the Luongs lived in an apartment complex near a freeway and a construction site that turned out to be a correctional facility. Linny remembered waiting at the school bus stop, which was right next to the city bus stop, and watching the prison go up in rounds, studded with tiny window slits. Often in the mornings she, Van, and their mother would wait at their stops together. Linny always hoped that her mother’s bus would carry her off to her sewing job at Roger’s Department Store before the pencil-yellow school bus loaded with their classmates rumbled up to the curb. Back in the apartment Mr. Luong would be dawdling, or sketching out some design idea, or convincing a friend to give him a ride to whatever tiling or construction job he might have lined up for the day. The work was too easy for him, he said; he had studied civil engineering in Vietnam (no degree, Mrs. Luong sniffed).

  Linny’s mother often said they would have been able to buy a house sooner if he hadn’t spent so much time “being the bum” with his inventions. Van was seven when their mother said she was old enough to be in charge, and accepted the full-time job at Roger’s. When Linny had recalled this, the night of Van and Miles’s rehearsal dinner, Miles had been shocked, exclaiming that he couldn’t imagine leaving a seven- and a six-year-old home alone. Van had laughed it off, but Linny had wondered then what else Van had never told him.

  Van had managed the two of them well, Linny thought. They would ride the school bus home together and Van would fish out the key to their apartment from the zippered inside pocket their mother had sewn into all of her jackets. Then they’d spend the rest of the day reading and watching television, snacking on crackers and apples and chocolate mints, whatever was in the kitchen, until Mrs. Luong returned. Those early evening hours between Linny and Van made up the closest years of their sisterhood, when they pretended to live in the apartment by themselves. Linny was Laverne and Van was Shirley, both of them sassy and in control, just back from shifts at the beer factory.

  Two years later, Mrs. Luong’s scrupulous savings allowed the family to move out of the apartment and into the little ranch house in Wrightville. That was when Mr. Luong started cutting back to part-time construction work, something his wife resented at every step. “Your father,” she would say to the girls, “he always prefers the fake work.”

  But he had invented the Luong Arm in that apartment by the freeway. Linny believed she could trace it back to the way she and Van used to climb on the kitchen counters to reach boxes of cookies or graham crackers. She recalled one day in particular—her father sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the Oriental Market wall calendar beside the refrigerator—when Linny slipped into the room to get some Halloween candy. She was seven then, and she boosted herself onto the counter with one hand while her other hand opened a cupboard and located the bag of sweets. When she turned around her father was looking at her with a shining interest he rarely had. A few months later, at dinner, he presented the prototype of the Luong Arm, demonstrating it by grasping a bag of chips from the top shelf of a cupboard.

  When he wasn’t around, Linny and Van practiced using the Luong Arm and Linny boasted that she had given him the idea. “No you didn’t,” Van said. “He got the idea from me.” When they finally worked up the nerve to ask him, he simply said, “It was my idea.”

  Linny’s mother never used the Luong Arm. She tolerated her husband’s talk about it, mostly meeting his enthusiasm with nods and silence. But she raised her voice when he spent money on infomercial items that he called research and she called a waste of money. She had been especially furious when, that Christmas, he gave her a Tidie Drier, a contraption that somehow promised to fast-dry her hair as well as her hand-washed underclothes. He said he was on the lookout for the next big thing in sewing machines too, but Mrs. Luong told him to leave her out of his plans. Long before they occupied two different floors of the same house, they had each retreated to their own work.

  Roger’s was going out of business now, done in at last by the shopping malls, and Linny sometimes wondered where all of the Vietnamese ladies who’d worked there would end up. Before Mrs. Luong died, she had considered leaving Roger’s to work at her friend’s nail salon. Don’t do it, Van had urged her. It’s just too stereotypical, even worse than sewing. Linny had to agree. But their mother had said, It’s a good job. Don’t be so stupid.

  After her death, Linny and Van both worried about what their father would do to get by. He received a minor life insurance sum, but they suspected, in one of their rare longer phone conversations, that he’d soon spent most of that on his inventions or drinking and playing cards. He had never been one to submit to steady work, even though, as he’d bragged, he was the best person around for setting complicated tile patterns ju
st right. He also refused to talk about money matters. When Van decided she was going to send him monthly checks, Linny said that was good since she couldn’t afford it herself. She made a joke about how it was the duty of the oldest to take care of the parents. What else am I here for? Van had thrown back sarcastically, sounding a lot like their mother.

  On the day of his citizenship ceremony, Dinh Luong sat alone in the ivory-paneled auditorium of the Gerald R. Ford Museum. He wasn’t truly alone—surrounded by families, other ethnic-looking people also about to take the oath—but to Linny he seemed to be set apart, nearly invisible. As though he were still hovering over his studio desk in the basement or laying out pieces of tile before grouting. When Linny was a girl she would feel nearly abandoned by that faraway look on his face, and would sometimes barrage her father with questions about his work just to make him come back to life.

  When he saw her he called out in Vietnamese, “Where’s your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” Linny said, instantly irritated. She hurried past a South Indian family to get to the seats her father had saved with an umbrella. The auditorium, its high ceiling rippled with lights trained on the wide wooden stage, reminded Linny of her high school’s production of Our Town.

  “But she’s never late.” He looked uneasy in a gold-buttoned navy blue sport jacket Linny recognized from years ago. He tapped his knee with the program, his eyes searching the auditorium. “A lot of people will be coming to the party tomorrow, so you have to cook a lot of food. Van has to help clean,” he added, which Linny knew meant, You and your sister need to clean the entire house. “You know, your ma never thought I’d be a citizen.”

  He invoked her so rarely that Linny felt cautious. “How do you know?”

  “Listen,” he said, changing the subject, “did you know there’s a song called ‘Short People Are No Reason to Live’? One of my friends play it for me.”