Bich Minh Nguyen

by Short Girls (v5)

  His studio, shielded by a curtain, revealed the side of her father Van knew better: disorganized, unfinished. A dismantled Luong Arm lay on a table near the old binder that Van had given her father, back in grade school, to help him organize his notes. She had also included a compilation of “Famous Short People” and added on to it over the years, her print steadying and maturing with each notation.

  Queen Elizabeth I (about 5′3”)

  Elizabeth Taylor (5′3”, probably shorter)

  Alexander Pope (4′6”)

  Danny DeVito (5′)

  Charlie Chaplin (5’4½“)

  Edith Piaf (4′8”)

  Honoré de Balzac (5′3”)

  Dolly Parton (5′)

  Sammy Davis, Jr. (5′3”)

  Pablo Picasso (5′4”)

  Tom Cruise (5′6”?? probably shorter)

  Van had actually searched the local library for these facts, pinned them down with an earnestness she almost couldn’t believe, looking back now. How plainly she had tried to gain her father’s favor, like someone trying to keep an insider joke going for years as a way to force a friendship. The binder was just another layer in her father’s piles of paperwork, sketches, blueprints, and general plans. He had, at least, created a new sign, Luong Inventions announced in inkjet calligraphy along one wall, replacing the handwritten banner he’d had for years. Van spied another curtain, narrow and black like a magician’s cape, hanging over the back wall. She lifted it to see three simple shelves, nothing on them.

  “Hey,” Linny said from the foot of the stairs. “What’s behind that curtain?”

  “Just some shelves.” Van showed her, then let the fabric fall.

  Linny walked toward the desk, hugging her elbows. “It’s too cold down here.”

  “He’s improved some things.”

  “When did you start wearing that?” She looked at the jade bracelet on Van’s left wrist.

  “Just now.”

  “Where are your rings?”

  Van panicked for half a second until she remembered. “I took them off to get the bracelet on.”

  The light in their father’s basement was part fluorescent, part halogen, part Christmas twinkle, and the combination made Van uncertain of what she saw on her sister’s face. Was it caution? Once upon a time, long ago, she could read every expression of Linny’s, from the look she had right before she burst into tears, to the bravado she used to mask fear. Once, for a brief time, Linny had been the little sister who merely wanted to hold Van’s hand and go along with any game Van wanted to play. How had she gone from mimicking and adoring Van’s every gesture and liking, to this—watching and judging, as if waiting for her to make mistakes? Linny had always wanted to stride ahead, Van supposed. She had always wanted to be the one looking down, looking back, gathering together all the recipes that Van had never bothered to learn.

  Still, Van wished she could talk to her sister. Tell her. Tell someone.

  “Van,” Linny started to say.

  “What?”

  A pause. “Are you going to help me with the party?”

  “I said I would.” Clasping her hands together, her right covering her left, Van headed back up the stairs.

  10

  Linny

  Rich and Nancy Bao were drinking whiskey and soda in the living room. Nancy had a weird way of laughing—instead of throwing her head back she dipped it toward her neck, creating a momentary double chin. Rich Bao looked bigger than ever; his belly seemed to begin at his shoulders and bow outward. Linny remembered him as casual, always in flip-flops and loose-fitting short-sleeve button-downs. Tonight he was oddly preppy, the collars of a red polo shirt peeking out from under a butter-colored cable-knit sweater. He held his drink with three bulbous fingers. When he took a sip his mouth opened wide and flat.

  Linny didn’t know how to think of him outside the context in which she grew up: Rich as his own first name. When Mrs. Luong first learned the phrase got taken to the cleaners it became her enduring wisecrack about the Baos. For years, Linny had wondered if her mother had known about Nancy; she would probably always wonder.

  Linny had friends whose families laid out every particle of their past for inspection. These friends, always white, with politically progressive, hip parents, weren’t afraid to talk about former relationships and flings, joke about all the feuds and mistakes that made up a family history. It made Linny a little awed to witness such open conversations. It embarrassed her to admit the mystery of her own family, the Asian stereotypes they kept reinforcing by saying so little to each other, and the secrets they locked inside those silences. Us Vietnamese, Linny’s mother had once said. If we tell you a story, it’ll never be the same way twice.

  The Baos had brought bottles of cognac and champagne, a giant sheet cake, and Na Dau (Linny and Van used to make fun of how so many Vietnamese names rhymed: Bao and Dau, Huong and Cuong, Lam and Nam). Na was not the stoop-shouldered guy he’d been at the citizenship ceremony. Now one of his hands held a drink while his other tried to slide broadly over Linny’s shoulder. Nancy, who usually maintained a chilly demeanor, playing the role of doyenne, had to tell Na to act nice. “He’s drunk,” she said apologetically.

  Linny guessed that Na was drunk a lot. No doubt he was the indulged boy who didn’t have to worry about finding a job since his sister would always support him. Linny had avoided the Vietnamese get-togethers for years but she knew the central covenant hadn’t changed: family as community, community as family. Even if Nancy couldn’t stand her brother she would never stop giving him money.

  “Where you live?” Na asked after Linny drew away from him. When she answered he pretended to stagger back, impressed. “Big-city girlie, huh? Maybe I visit you in Chicago.” He inflected it the way recent Vietnamese immigrants always did: shee-cah-GO. It reminded Linny of how distant the city felt whenever she visited her father, as if she’d never established her own life in Chicago at all. Barbara and You Did It, Gary and Pren, Sasha and the salon—in her father’s house, they could seem not quite real. The feeling was both comforting and suffocating.

  “You like me visiting you?” Na persisted. “You and me have fun.”

  Nancy snapped at him in Vietnamese to go away. Na complied, giggling to himself, aiming toward Rich and his friends while casting a backward wink at Linny.

  “Don’t pay attention,” Nancy said. Her dark lipstick had half rubbed off onto her plastic cup. Linny thought of how strange it was to have known her from a distance these nearly thirty years since 1975. In this living room, standing only a few feet away from Mrs. Luong’s ashes, Linny reminded herself that her mother had been dead for nine of those years. If after all this time there was still something between her father and Nancy Bao, then maybe Linny would have to accept that.

  “Na told me he’s only been here a few years,” Linny said. She meant it to be polite conversation but it ended up sounding like an accusation.

  “He’s still learning and adjusting.” Nancy sounded defensive. “I guess you don’t remember when he arrived. You and your sister do not come home very much.”

  Linny almost snapped at her, I check on my dad every couple of months. Or, What do you know? But instead she just excused herself to check on the food.

  The Baos’ cake—the kind Linny couldn’t stand, with Criscoed buttercream frosting, too sweet, institutional-tasting, decorated with balloons floating around the word Congratulations—occupied one corner of the dining table. The rest was covered with all of the food Linny had spent the day cooking: cha gio; summer rolls stuffed with shrimp, herbs, and vermicelli; beef and chicken satay; shrimp chips; pickled vegetable salad; asparagus with oyster mushrooms; snapper steamed with ginger and soy sauce. Linny had enlisted her sister’s help but Van was slow at mincing and chopping and had too many questions, seeming not to know basic things like how to mix nuoc mam sauce or how long to cook the vermicelli. She was skittish of the wok of roiling oil that fried the cha gio.

  The house filled up w
ith people Linny hadn’t seen since her mother’s funeral, when her parents’ friends had drifted through for two days, lighting incense and bowing, offering trays of food. A few die-hard women still wore ao dais, but most had switched to bright pant suits and dresses, their husbands in olive sport coats. They all paused in the living room to pay their respects to Mrs. Luong. The photograph of her was an Olan Mills portrait, her face set against a heathered blue background, smiling at something slightly off to the side of the camera. Linny remembered exactly when that photo was taken: it had been her last year of high school, when her mother had insisted on tagging along when Linny went to get her senior pictures taken. Even then Linny had thought it an odd ritual: all the seniors had professional photos done, trading them with friends and choosing the best one for the yearbook. Some of the girls in her class had multiple photo shoots in outdoor locations. They perched on fallen trees in an apple orchard and leaned against a stone fence in a pasture. A lot of the guy jocks posed with their varsity jackets, holding footballs or baseball bats like trophies. The Luongs couldn’t afford more than the basic head shot at Olan Mills, so Linny compensated by wearing low-cut shirts and extra makeup. Her mother, glancing at the studio’s advertisement for Glamour Shots, had made that little throaty noise of reproach.

  “In a few years you will laugh at this,” she had warned Linny, and of course she was right.

  When the proofs came back Linny found pictures of her mother among her own poses. The photographer had taken them while Linny had changed outfits. When her mother ordered an eight-by-ten photo of herself, Linny had laughed. She had no way of knowing, at age seventeen, that that same photo would accompany her mother’s ashes forever.

  At Mr. Luong’s citizenship party the old Vietnamese friends were careful not to set plates or cups on the credenza. Linny replenished the cha gio while Van did the dutiful daughter thing, bringing drinks and napkins around and hanging up coats. Van greeted people—Chao Ba, Chao Co, Chao Ong—with a deferential manner. Once again, Linny thought, the good Asian daughter. Her parents’ friends had always nodded with approval at Van’s modesty while their sharp voices targeted the girls who showed too much skin.

  Earlier, getting ready for the party, Van had spurned Linny’s suggestions on what to wear. “What difference does it make?” she had said, seemingly determined to preserve her khaki pants and plain crewneck sweater.

  They were in Van’s old bedroom, the one their father had made into Linny’s as well, looking into the same floor-length mirror that still hung on the back of the door. “Maybe you could just not hem your pants so much,” Linny said.

  “I didn’t get these hemmed. They came in exactly my size. They’re ankle-length.”

  “You should learn how to hem things yourself. It’s so easy, and a lot cheaper.” Van had resisted learning it, had even gotten special permission to skip the required home ec class in middle school so she could take Latin instead.

  “I don’t have time for that.”

  “The pants are also too big,” Linny said. Couldn’t Van see how easy it was, really, to look a little taller, better, more at ease in the world? “I’m not trying to be mean. They’re weirdly baggy around the thighs. And when your pants are too short you end up looking too short. You need a nice long pant and a nice heel. The hem of the pants should come down almost to the floor without touching it. This would make you look taller.” She refrained from commenting on Van’s shoes, which were probably made by some comfort brand. Linny depended on high heels. Without them she felt diminutive—a step away from being a little girl or a doddering old Asian woman.

  Van hesitated; Linny could see that. Looking too short was her one sartorial sore spot. But finally she said, “Everyone’s short here, tonight.”

  Now Linny noticed again the sad bagginess of Van’s pants and how they seemed to weigh her down. Stand up straight, she wished she could say, the way their mother used to command them. Walking past the girls as they watched television, Mrs. Luong would shout out, “Posture!” Linny noticed, too, that Van was wearing her wedding rings again, gleaming above that jade bracelet. The jade bothered Linny, as if Van were somehow trying to arm herself with jewelry. Did she know about that woman in Chicago, that Grace? How could Linny ever bring it up? They didn’t talk the way true sisters did; their conversations barely ventured beyond the mundane, the argumentative. They had gone from sharing a sofa bed, clothes, toys, a whole imagined universe, to where they were now, with such swiftness that Linny couldn’t track how they had changed.

  Yet she remembered pretending to be the Trung sisters, fashioning swords out of wrapping-paper tubes. She remembered running the length of the Baos’ basement, holding their arms up to stop their jade bracelets from sliding off. Linny’s was a mottled red, Van’s a bright sea green. In middle school Linny had coaxed hers off for good in the school bathroom during lunch. She didn’t know why, exactly, except that the weight of it, the insistent feel of the cool stone knocking against her wrist, felt almost like a trap.

  Linny discovered that her father had invited the Oortsemas to the party when Dirk and Paula stepped into the kitchen just as Linny was filling a bowl with pickled vegetables.

  “Linny!” they exclaimed, folding her into hugs. They handed her a blue tin of Danish butter cookies that she and Van used to love. “It’s just been too long,” Paula sighed. She was round and soft, her eyes crinkling up as she reached out to touch Linny’s hair. “Look at you—so pretty.”

  “Did you make all this food?” Dirk asked. Even hunched as he was, his body was huge in the small house. “I heard you were a good cook.”

  Linny wondered where he’d heard this. “It’s nice of you to stop by. Can I get you something to eat?”

  “We just wanted to congratulate your dad again. Such an accomplishment.” Paula gazed around the kitchen—maybe thinking, as Linny often did, that it was so preserved in its late seventies style as to be borderline fashionable again. “Tell me, Linny. When can we get together and talk? I’ve always thought we should be in better touch, especially ever since your mother died. You know I’m always here for you girls. Dirk too. We like to stay close with the people we’ve sponsored.”

  You didn’t sponsor me, Linny wanted to say. Before she could come up with a suitable response, Van appeared in view long enough for Paula to snatch her up. “You two just get more and more adorable,” she declared. “Where is that charming husband of yours?”

  Van sounded neutral when she replied, “He couldn’t get away from work.”

  “Well, I want to see both of you again soon. Now, what’s this I hear”—Paula lowered her voice—“about some good news you might have?” She winked.

  Linny was stunned for a moment, but the quick grimace crossing Van’s face revealed the truth. “There’s no news,” she said. “I hope my dad didn’t tell you there was.”

  “It’s my fault,” Dirk apologized. “I thought I heard someone say that just now. I’ve been trying to learn the Vietnamese language all these years and I guess I haven’t improved much.”

  Linny could see her sister forcing a smile. “Don’t worry—I’ll be sure to keep you updated.” She excused herself by saying she needed to get a few drinks for people in the living room.

  Before Paula left she grabbed Linny’s hands and said, “You’re going to call me, okay?” Linny nodded, but she had no intention of calling. Her mother had always emphasized the Oortsemas’ generosity, using sponsor as if it were a synonym for friend. “But I was born here,” Linny always countered. “She didn’t sponsor me.” “It’s the same,” her mother had insisted. Because of this, Linny had never gotten past the uncomfortable feeling that she owed the Oortsemas something.

  It was strange to think that when her parents left Vietnam they had been younger than Linny was now. They couldn’t have known they would end up seeking a community in the cold isolation of Michigan, living in this ranch house with the three little rectangular windows in the front door that always struck Linny as
undefinably sad. They couldn’t have guessed how many years Thuy Luong had left. The difference between them and Linny, their lives and choices, seemed vaster than any years could explain. She never could imagine, really, what it must have been like for her parents to start over in a new country, with a new language and new children to balance. What had they known about America then, beyond the well-worn promise of opportunity? And why had her mother seemed to figure out how to manage, but her father could not? For as long as Linny knew her, Mrs. Luong had had the same routine of working at Roger’s, doing some extra sewing at home and on the side, visiting with friends on the weekends. She had memorized the bus schedule right away and always had the fare ready in her pocket. When they finally got a car, she was the one who remembered to check the gas gauge and get the oil changed. She was the one who insisted on keeping the car in the garage in the winter, to avoid all that shoveling and scraping of snow. By comparison Mr. Luong always seemed a step behind, not knowing what time it was, never able to say a quick no to telemarketers. Because he skipped so many of the language classes that his wife took, he never learned to speak English the way she did. No wonder he often seemed irrationally angry, unable to make the world, the town, the very household, bend exactly to his wishes. Linny had always guessed that her father invented products as a way to invent himself in a new land. But why did it seem he was doomed to stay in that dark studio, working away mainly for himself? When he emerged it was to be heard, finally, by the only people who would listen to him—his wife and daughters—who, too, turned away. Maybe it was inevitable that he had to seek out his friends’ parties and gambling, living out whatever recklessness of his youth that war and escape had truncated.