The museum lobby echoed with non-English chatter, jarring Van from her one memory of her visit here in grade school. Growing up near Gerald Ford’s hometown she’d learned a lot about him, recognizing him as a real-life symbol of their tall, conservative city. And she had been fascinated by the idea of seeing his White House china transplanted here. But there were only a few place settings, so the table was pushed against a mirror to make it seem twice its length and fullness. Van had disdained the trickery, and ever after when she drove past the triangular museum building, itself half covered in mirrors, she remembered the half-sized table and felt vaguely cheated.
“Hiya lawyer lady,” a voice boomed out. It was Na Dau, Nancy’s younger brother. Nancy had sponsored him a few years back and Van had helped her file the application. She had met Na only the previous Christmas when her father’s truck broke down at a friend’s party and Van had had to retrieve him. Na had been sitting on the front porch, drunk, singing nonsense words to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” Nancy, when she’d called Van about Na’s application, had admitted he was kind of a troublemaker. He was wild, Van’s father said. You wouldn’t know he was over forty, and none of the Baos knew how to handle him.
But now Na stood primly in a starched button-down, as though he’d just come from an office job.
“Remember me? It’s Na Dau. This a nice day for your ba,” he said, adding proudly, “I say to my sister, one day I be here too.”
Van introduced him to Linny, who asked him how long he’d been in the States.
“Almost four year. Nancy got me work sometimes at one of Rich’s stores.” He shrugged. “I got dreams that look bigger. That’s why I talk to your ba about his inventings.”
“You’re interested in inventing things?” Van asked.
“I have many, many interests,” Na answered earnestly. “I have many plans. Rich has the money but I have the bigger ideas.”
Mr. Luong and Nancy Bao came up to them and Linny beat Van to congratulating their father.
He still had the little American flag in his hands. “That was good, huh? I’m the normalized citizen now.” He spoke with the voice of someone who’d gotten away with something. “Now they say I’m legitimate. The proof is right here.” He held up his certificate of naturalization.
“This is a good thing, Dad,” Van said.
“It’s good for my business too.”
“We’ll celebrate at the party,” Nancy said. The fabric buttons of her pink jacket were limned with sequins that flashed when she tightened her grip on her handbag. She nodded at Van and Linny, then told Na in Vietnamese that it was time to go.
“Okay, big sister,” Na replied.
“See you tomorrow,” Nancy said. She led Na away, but he turned back to Van for a moment.
“I want to say thank you.”
She was unnerved by the intensity of his gaze. “For what?”
“For you helping bring me here.”
Nancy gave a patient smile but touched her brother’s arm.
“I go,” he agreed, shrugging.
As they left, the movement of Na’s back reminded Van of how her clients, from both the International Center and Gertz & Zarou, bore a similar uncertainty in their bodies. Their very way of walking seemed to reveal the commingling of hope and caution they held—a longing to belong and the fear that they never could. Van was, in fact, at that moment in the lobby, surrounded by people she could have helped.
She wondered if her father ever had these kinds of thoughts. But all he said then was, “Don’t forget to get extra beer for tomorrow.”
“I know,” Linny answered.
“Are you cooking enough food? We need a lot of fish and shrimp.”
Just like that the celebratory moment was over. The buoyancy he’d had onstage disappeared, and he was back to being the same Asian father, requiring his daughters to bend around his commands.
“Are you going home now?” Van asked.
“Not sure.” Which meant no. He fixed a sudden sharp eye on her. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Van replied. “I’m tired. I want to go home.”
“I’ll see you later then,” her father said, beginning to edge away. He had that familiar look of distraction on his face that meant he had already left the scene. He was at a friend’s house, playing cards; he was getting a bowl of pho at another friend’s restaurant; he was planning to settle back into the cave of his studio.
“Well, congratulations,” Linny called after him.
“Let’s go,” Van said. She was already walking away, trying to avoid Dirk and Paula Oortsema, who were chatting with the judge. “I want to get out of here.”
Before heading home Linny insisted on Van accompanying her to Meijer to pick up groceries for the next day’s party. In the fluorescent aisles Van followed along like a schoolkid while Linny scrutinized vegetables and tossed handfuls of shallots into the cart.
“I wonder how bad the house will be,” Linny said. “Maybe we should get some cleaning supplies just in case.”
After their mother died Van and Linny had taken responsibility for maintaining the house, which they were sure their father would have just let disintegrate. Often, when Van checked on him, she found the dining table covered with old newspapers and catalogs, the bathroom untouched from the last time she’d been there, the laundry chute clogged with towels. Sometimes when her father ran out of them he would use sheets to dry himself off. It was hard to compete with his chaos. But there were times, too, when the kitchen would look unexpectedly tidy. In the living room the credenza and the urn that held Thuy Luong’s ashes would be freshly dusted and polished.
At the checkout Van paid for the groceries, blinking at the conveyer belt full of things she never bought—mint and cilantro, peanuts to crush and sprinkle on hoisin, disposable chopsticks to supplement the well-worn plastic ones their mother had collected over the years. Van didn’t know how to make Vietnamese food, something that always surprised people. As if she had to know how to cook pho just because she was Vietnamese. Van’s mother had tried to teach her to prepare a few dishes, back when Van was in high school, but she’d always begged off, preferring to study or read or watch TV. In Ann Arbor, Miles had liked taking on the role of household chef. He had a penchant for fine cookware and authentic ethnic food; he liked to buy hardcover cookbooks and bring home expensive olive oils and balsamic vinegars from Zingerman’s.
“How do you know how to make all of this stuff?” Van asked Linny.
“Mom taught me. I brought a bunch of ingredients from an Asian store in Chicago.”
“Oh.” Why was it startling to think that, all those years ago, Linny really had paid attention to what their mother had been cooking?
Linny always drove too fast, so her car was already parked outside the house by the time Van arrived. At nine years old, seeing it for the first time, she had been enchanted by the squat ranch with its brown siding and picture window. It had looked beautiful, large, and most importantly, theirs alone. There would be no more of the crying baby in the apartment to the right of them, no more of the couple who shouted beneath their feet. Sometimes in that apartment Van could hear someone snoring and not know where it came from. This house, their house, on Garland Street in Wrightville, Michigan, had a maple tree in the back, a garage, a sunny yard to play in. But as Van grew up and went to school she understood what it meant to live in such a place. She learned working class, middle class, blue collar. The house seemed smaller every time she returned from college, and never more so than when she brought Miles here to meet her father. She would never forget that day because he had, without telling her, invited Dirk and Paula Oortsema, whom she hadn’t seen since her mother died.
“Our girl is getting married!” Paula had exclaimed, and Van had returned her hug stiffly. She had never felt comfortable around the Oortsemas, too aware that they were, in a sense, her parents’ benefactors. Plus, her parents had always had a habit of behaving in an overly deferential ma
nner toward them. With Miles there her father seemed to be especially, well, first-generation .
“We keep track of all our kids, all our families,” Dirk had said proudly to Miles. “They’ve done good, every last one.”
“Thanks to you,” Mr. Luong had said. “Or we still be in the camp! Miles, where you think Van would be? You get married in the refugee camp!”
By the time Van walked into the house Linny had already cleared the dining table free of their father’s papers and had started on the kitchen. The house was actually neater than Van had expected. The usual cobwebs hadn’t formed near the windows, and the living room television’s old remote control had a fresh application of packing tape to secure the battery cover. There were three TVs in the house, including the portable one in the kitchen and the mammoth set in the basement. There had been many times when all three played at once, her mother, sister, and father all tuning in to separate vistas.
Over the years Linny had tried to make some cosmetic improvements to the house with a new coat of paint here, a few throw pillows there. But it would have taken a drastic renovation to alter the basic elements of each room. None of the appliances had even been changed since the Luongs had moved in. Only after Van had lived in her house in Ann Arbor did she understand: a house required a daily battle against deterioration.
In the living room the credenza that Van’s mother had splurged on, carefully polishing its maple surface each month, displayed the family’s Buddha statue. He sat flanked by candles, incense, and a few pieces of fruit, while the cabinets held Van and Linny’s old board games and books. Van would never forget how her mother had said to her, My ashes and your ba’s will sit here too someday. Van had said, That’s creepy, Mom. But here her mother was after all, nine years now, her ashes in a ceramic urn, her photograph in a gold-tinted frame. Van bowed three times to her mother and Buddha, keeping her hands clasped together. Growing up, she had seen her mother pay such respect to Buddha but never did it herself until she had to, on the day of her mother’s funeral.
Bringing her overnight bag to her room, Van stopped in the hallway to look at the pencil marks on the wall that recorded their heights. It was something she did every time she went home. Her mother’s last mark, four-eleven-and-a-half, was dated a year before her death. Every time Van saw this she had an urge to darken the notations, to make them more permanent, but she was afraid of ruining her father’s small, fine script.
After she and Linny had both moved out of the house their father had consolidated their rooms so he could use Linny’s for storing shipping boxes and remnants of tile and carpet. Van, home for Christmas break her second year of college, had been shocked to see her room set up with two twin beds. All of Linny’s old posters, torn on every corner from years of tape, lay on the beds in such a way that the stars of Culture Club and Depeche Mode looked frozen in repose. Linny had been angry, but it couldn’t be changed. So Van and Linny ended up sharing a room whenever they visited their father at the same time.
The bedroom still had the same window blinds and the patterned green carpet that, Van realized, must have been nearly twenty years old. She and Linny had been thrilled to have their own rooms, even though that turned out to be the very thing, Van realized later, that drove them away from each other, dissolving the times in the apartment when they had pretended to be twins, secret agents, partners in crime like Charlie’s Angels. “You can be the famous Trung sisters,” their mother had told them, explaining how once, in ancient times, two sisters rebelled against Chinese rule in Vietnam and became queens of the land.
“How did they do it?” Van had asked.
“Through skill,” their mother had answered. “They had martial arts skill, and swords skills, and they had the support of the people. They rode on elephants into battles and they were the most famous queens in the world.”
Van and Linny had been enchanted by the story, and often pretended to brandish swords around the apartment. Later, in high school, Van accused her mother of lying to them. “You always said the Trung sisters were so great, but they only ruled for three years. I looked it up. There’s hardly anything about them.” They were nothing like the British queens whose dates and accomplishments she’d memorized in history classes.
“What difference is it? They’re Hai Ba Trung. They’re legends.” Her mother, working on some extra sewing at the machine she’d set on the kitchen table, spoke in a way that revealed her disgust at Van’s ignorance.
“But they committed suicide. They threw themselves into a river.”
“They had no choice. They lost power and the Chinese were going to kill them. The important thing is they controlled everything themselves, right until the end.”
Linny, eavesdropping from the living room where she was watching a game show, shouted out, “Who cares!”
Van’s father, walking into the kitchen from his studio, said, “Hai Ba Trung did something, at least. What you two do?”
Moving into that house had given them all more space, more doors to close between them. There, Van and Linny had drifted into their own separate identities. Van kept her bedroom walls blank except for the Van Gogh print of “Starry Night” she had bought in middle school because it had seemed so cultured to do so. Linny decorated her room with rock star posters and photos of her friends, tucked movie ticket stubs around the edge of the mirror she set on top of her dresser.
In the top drawer of her own dresser Van kept the jade bracelet she had worn in elementary and middle school. All the Vietnamese girls were supposed to start wearing them at a young age, so their wrists could keep growing to fit the bracelets, make the stones irremovable. Van had pried hers off in ninth grade, when it kept clanging against the desk in her key-boarding class. Linny had discarded hers too. Only Mrs. Luong had kept hers on. She’d been cremated with it, even, and Van had wondered what happened to the jade in such fire, if it too burned into ash indistinguishable from the matter of the body.
Van took up her bracelet now and tried to slide it over her left hand. When it would not go past her wedding set she removed her rings. She knew she shouldn’t be trying to do this; the bracelets had to be carefully forced, the hand and wrist soaking in warm soapy water. But still she pushed. The jade bore down on her knuckles until all at once it settled around her wrist, leaving red marks on her hand.
Van lay on her bed, rolling onto the sunken-in part of the mattress. The pillow smelled like stale sunshine on dust. She told herself not to wonder where Miles was but her mind rebelled, taking her back to that photo frame sitting on his office desk. She could see her hand reaching out, grasping the frame to see what it contained, expecting to find a picture of Julie. But the frame had held nothing. Maybe he had removed a photo of Van; maybe the frame was supposed to be some kind of self-conscious symbol for Miles, who had his moments of believing in ritual. Van didn’t ask—she was only relieved not to see someone else in her place. Miles shook his head to express his disappointment in her behavior. What are you doing? he said, volunteering no information about the missing picture. Then some gust of fear and blame, of deep chagrin, pushed her out of his office, sent her retreating back to her car.
It was dark when Van woke up, surprised that she’d fallen asleep. In the kitchen Linny was mixing cha gio filling with her hands; they were shiny with the shrimp and pork, fish sauce and mung bean threads. Near her the portable television was broadcasting Forrest Gump. The fluorescent light overhead gave everything a greenish tinge, making the yellow countertops glow.
“Is Dad home yet?”
Linny made a little laughing sound. “What do you think?” With her head down, her hands in the plastic bowl, she looked so much like their mother that Van had to look away.
She opened the refrigerator door. “I’m hungry.”
“I got some sushi rolls from the deli at Meijer. Kind of gross but I knew I wouldn’t have time to make anything.”
You mean I got the sushi, Van stopped herself from saying. With Linny she was always
the one who paid.
“Might be scary, but it’s probably better than frozen pizza,” Linny continued.
Van didn’t offer up that frozen pizza had become one of her mainstays. She pulled out the plastic trays of tuna and salmon rolls, bringing them to the table. How many times had she sat here, in the same chair? That same flowered plastic tablecloth—probably fused to the table by now. That same rooster-shaped napkin holder—empty. And that same knobby brass chandelier that Linny always said she wanted to replace. Years ago, their mother had enlisted Linny’s help to paint over the silver and orange wallpaper, and with every return home Van saw more and more glints of metallic peeking through. Miles had noticed too, of course; he hadn’t approved of painting over wallpaper but the vintage print interested him.
“Are you going to help me roll these?” Linny called out, referring to the cha gio.
“If you need me to.” The sushi rolls tasted flavorless to Van. She doused them with extra soy sauce and wasabi, watching Forrest Gump’s depressing New Year’s Eve with Lieutenant Dan. After a while she stored the rest of the rolls in the refrigerator and headed downstairs to her father’s studio.
The basement had been spruced up since she’d seen it last winter. Her father had added icicle Christmas lights around the ceiling to look like a lit-up wallpaper border. The TV area was home to a new standing lamp and potted plants, probably fresh for the party. The futon was made up into a sofa decorated with Linny’s dot-print throw pillows. A zebra-print rug covered the original shag carpet that was exactly the color of burnt sienna from Van and Linny’s shared Crayola box. Van knew she should feel glad for her father and these small signs of progress, but it pained her to see the buckets of new geraniums, the futon cover tucked in tight. The feeling wasn’t exactly new, but deepened, tinged with what haunted her: even more than the rest of the house, the basement belonged to someone who lived alone.
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 13