Bich Minh Nguyen

by Short Girls (v5)

  Just inside the living room, Van was bidding good night to Co Ngoc.

  “When you’re going to come to my store?” Co Ngoc stretched out an arm to include Linny in the question. “Why I do not see you two in so long? You two girls need to come over. I’ll take care of you, no charge.” She caught Linny’s hands to inspect them, then grabbed at Van’s. “Better than this one here—no nail polish!”

  “She’s never worn nail polish,” Linny said. It seemed almost a source of pride for Van, who steadfastly avoided all Vietnamese nail shops. Linny hadn’t been in Co Ngoc’s salon in years, since the time she had stopped by to collect her mother’s acrylic-blend cardigan and favorite teapot. After that it had been easy to avoid the place, tucked into one of the many strip malls off South Division Street, and Linny could imagine that the puce-pink walls and diagonal squares of white linoleum, limned with dark grout, had remained exactly the same. Only the calendars, free from the Vietnamese grocery stores, would change.

  “Come over to my store,” Co Ngoc said again to Van. Co Ngoc was about the age Mrs. Luong would have been, which was fifty-one that year. Her face bore that contradiction of soft-cheeked youthfulness and elderly stateliness that so many Vietnamese women had. “Bring your husband too. He work so hard for you. He a good husband. Your ma would be so proud.”

  Van kept a smile going but pulled her hands away. Linny, feeling an unexpected rush of protectiveness toward her sister, ushered Co Ngoc to the front door. Out on the sidewalk Mr. Luong stood around laughing with a group of friends, his voice ringing out above the others. The only times Linny heard him sound so confident were when he was drunk or when he was excited by an invention breakthrough—even if the latter was followed by disappointment, like the time his declaration of developing shoes with adjustable heels resulted in a row of mangled pumps in his studio. Opening the front screen door for Co Ngoc, Linny glanced back at Van with an impulse to say, Remember how mad Mom was when Dad ruined two pairs of her shoes trying to figure out that invention? He never did make progress with it. But Van just stood in the middle of the living room, staring straight ahead of her at the picture window, which must have been throwing back her own reflection. Framed there, with the credenza and all it held stilled behind her, she looked like someone who was merely waiting to see who else would come and who else would go.

  11

  Van

  At one o’clock in the morning Van and Linny cleaned the house. Their father and his friends had sped off an hour before, leaving the living room looking like a bunch of frat boys had blown through. Van found balled-up napkins behind the couch, plastic cups of flattened beer balanced on the television set. She was annoyed, though not surprised, that her father had left without saying good-bye or acknowledging the work she and Linny had done for the party. It reminded Van of how often she had felt uninvited around him, cast out from his thoughts. Why else had she worked so hard to capture his attention? She was the one who had organized his notes, had tried (and failed) to help him get a patent for the Luong Arm. It shamed Van to admit that she’d had years of lawyering to help him get that patent, and hadn’t yet done a thing.

  Linny, on the other hand, seemed untroubled, skimming around the edges of the house, sipping whiskey, picking at the platters of food while wrapping them in foil. The remainders of the sheet cake she simply tossed in the trash.

  “It’s so weird seeing everyone after all these years,” she said. She got chatty when she drank. “They all look so old but exactly the same too. Sometimes I forget that time doesn’t stop just because we’re not at home anymore. I don’t know why so many of them stayed.”

  “Where else are they supposed to go? They’ve made this place their home. You make it sound like we’ve just landed here from London or Paris.” Van got what Linny meant, though. In high school they had shared an unspoken solidarity in declining to attend any more Vietnamese parties. And they had both fled after graduating.

  When Van and Miles got engaged, they decided against inviting all of the Luongs’ old friends and acquaintances to the wedding, a move that would have wounded her mother deeply but only vaguely bothered her father, who, as the man in the family, didn’t have to worry so much about keeping up appearances. Visiting at holidays, Van and Miles rarely stayed longer than forty-eight hours. To Miles, the monthly checks Van sent her father balanced out all the extra time they spent with the Ohs in San Francisco.

  For all of her supposed involvement in the immigrant community of Detroit, Van had practically opted out of the Vietnamese one in west Michigan. Linny had too, but she didn’t seem to feel bad about it. She wasn’t bothered by the sense of being on the sidelines, of having let membership dues lapse. Van was the one who felt out of bounds. She was looking in, not knowing how to get back, or if she even wanted to get back, to where she thought she was supposed to be.

  But all she said was, “I think Mom would have been happy that Dad finally got his citizenship.”

  “Sure. Not that it changes anything.”

  “It’s an added layer of security that we take for granted.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Mom always said.”

  “She did?” Van didn’t recall this.

  “She was anxious about it. Remember when she gave us photocopies of her naturalization certificate in case hers got lost or ruined? I still have mine, even.”

  And suddenly the memory floated back: Mrs. Luong handing Van a black and white sheet of paper that said United States Certificate of Naturalization. Van had humored her mother by sticking the copy on a pile of school papers that, somewhere along the line, had gotten thrown out.

  “What do you think about the TV show?” Linny asked suddenly.

  “It’s just an audition.”

  “Dad seems to think it’s a done deal.”

  “Well, that’s a problem. We’re both going to have to go, you know.” At Linny’s look of incredulity Van added, “Can you imagine him trying to navigate a TV show audition by himself?”

  “You act like he’s helpless.”

  “He doesn’t even know how to use a computer. He spends his time exactly the same way he did twenty years ago. A little tiling and carpentry work, fussing around in the basement, hanging out with his friends. Do you know what I saw on TV, almost two months ago? This infomercial where one of the featured products was basically a Luong Arm.”

  “You’re kidding.” Linny started laughing.

  “It wasn’t even as sophisticated as Dad’s version. And it was being pitched as an accessory—the rest of the infomercial was for products for people who are housebound. Don’t tell Dad.”

  “Like I would. Why are you watching infomercials?”

  “It was late at night,” Van answered, self-conscious. In fact it had been nearly dawn, sometime in that first week after Miles had left. Van had been mortified to see a primitive version of the Luong Arm on the screen, modeled by a feeble-looking old lady in a recliner, trying to reach a pair of slippers. The only consolation was how much better-looking, even more useful, the Luong Arm seemed by comparison. “Anyway,” she said, “I think we should go to the audition.”

  “I don’t want to drive all the way from Chicago just to take care of him. You do it, if you want to.”

  Van brought a heap of oil-stained paper plates to the kitchen. She felt the old arguments rising again between her and Linny and she wanted to say something to keep them at bay.

  Linny had the refrigerator open, trying to make the leftovers fit. She shifted the subject by saying, “I wonder what Dad’s friends really think of him. Do they think he’s weird or pitiful?”

  Van had thought this herself, at times hating to see the comparison between her father and Rich Bao, whose Polo clothes and sweeping McMansion made Mr. Luong look—she hated to admit it—fobby.

  “That stupid bitch Lisa Bao was making fun of the TV show right to my face. Did you see her? Carrying a Louis Vuitton logo bag, of course. And she’s giving her kids growth hormones. Did you know that?”


  “She told me, but those kids didn’t look that small.” Van brought a bag of pop cans to the back door of the kitchen, wondering how long they would sit in the garage. When she and Linny were kids they would collect as many cans as possible and take them to Meijer for the ten-cent deposits. The numbers would add up fast, until soon the girls had ten dollars to split between them.

  “They’re normal. She just wants them to look like big white-bread American guys.”

  “Good god. Does Dad know?” Van had thrown him into near hysterics the time she’d showed him a New York Times article about a gruesome height surgery that was gaining popularity in some parts of China. The article had described how patients elected to have their leg bones broken and stretched in order to become a couple of inches taller, though many of them ended up never walking again.

  “He already knows. She told me he tries to lecture her about it. She thinks it’s hilarious.”

  Van could picture her father trying to persuade Lisa not to do such a thing to her sons. She knew just what his reaction would be. Her father had always believed in the ingenuity and triumph of short people—he believed in inventiveness, his own inventions. He said it wasn’t about being tall; it was about being smart. And he, Dinh Luong of Luong Inventions, would offer the gift of cleverness to all the short ones out there. He would equal the playing field.

  Dawdling in the kitchen, Van was relieved to have averted an argument with Linny. They almost never sustained this kind of gossip without bickering. So Van went along as her sister assessed Nancy Bao’s hair, Co Ngoc’s pestering, and Na Dau’s drunken antics. Gathering stray bean sprouts from the floor, Van realized that she hadn’t thought about Miles in at least half an hour. That was a record, so far.

  You’re kind of a different person around him, Linny had said once in that half-pensive, half-blunt way she had. No doubt she meant that Van was even more reserved, which was true. Van’s family had seemed a lonely crew compared to the dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles Miles claimed and visited along the West Coast. Not that he had ever been less than polite and kind to her father. Still, Van had always been fearful of possible judgment and ridicule. Miles had come close, several times, to witnessing what she often felt to be her fraudulent Vietnamese identity. Like the time they had flown to California to attend one of his cousin’s weddings in Irvine. Miles had wanted to drive to Little Saigon and eat some really great pho. Van, who had never before been to Little Saigon, had felt lost in the onslaught of strip malls and Vietnamese signs; she had no idea where to eat. The sidewalks teemed with the most confident-looking Vietnamese kids she’d ever seen. Girls had big gold hoops swinging from their earlobes, their shirts revealing tawny midriffs and surprisingly curvy figures. They carried patent leather bags and clopped along on wedge heels higher than Linny’s. And so many of the guys were downright gangster-looking, with slick-backed hair, neck tattoos, and the white sleeveless tees that she had heard people refer to, odiously, as “wifebeaters.” These were Vietnamese who had the look of ownership and swagger, far removed from the pale population Van had grown up with in small-town Michigan. Eventually Van and Miles found themselves in a café where the waitress seemed amused by Van’s halting Vietnamese. You use words kind of like my grandma, she had said in English, meaning that Van’s language was too formal. She had missed the years of updates and slang, the immersion she never knew in a Little Saigon.

  In her father’s house without Miles, Van’s family seemed like an old habit she had secretly returned to. Sometimes when Van conjured an image of her father she saw him standing in the cold at the bus stop, waiting to get to the grocery store. They had all done that together, before they had a car. Back then, the winters seemed especially unrelenting with their stone-colored cap of sky, the empty trees that could hide nothing. Van would draw a knit hat over her ears while Linny had a fake fur muff that she stuck out in front of her. Their mother, holding tight to her purse, made sure the girls stood far enough from the curb to avoid being splashed with slush. Their father had always stood a little to the side, anxious, staring down the street as if willing the bus to arrive more quickly. He said so little to them that, once they were on the bus, Van would wonder if other people could tell he was her father. Sometimes the only thing that seemed to bind him to the family was his very face, his hair, his Vietnameseness a mark of identity that all of them had to bear.

  That night when Van and Linny climbed into their opposite twin beds Linny said, “I saw Dad with Nancy Bao once. When I was fifteen. It was at a party. I saw them—in the car.”

  “How drunk are you?”

  “A little. Not too much.” Linny stretched out her arms. She’d thrown on an old T-shirt printed with the state of Michigan motto—If You Seek a Pleasant Peninsula Look About You—and the near-fluorescent print shone faintly in the dark. “She used to call sometimes after that. You probably didn’t notice. Then it all stopped, sometime before my senior year. I remember one day thinking about her and realizing the phone hadn’t rung and Dad hadn’t answered in his weird way in a while. I bet you didn’t know, huh?”

  “I’m not sure.” The scenario was unsettling but not completely surprising. “What about Mom?”

  “I don’t know. Tom says he’s never had anyone gossip to him about it, but that could be a generational thing.”

  “Who’s Tom?”

  “Tom Hanh. He’s a dentist now? He said whenever the patients are Vietnamese they like to talk and talk. But then again, he’s splitting the community’s business with a bunch of other guys. So maybe the big gossips are getting their teeth fixed somewhere else.”

  “I have no idea who Tom Hanh is.”

  “Van, you even talked with him tonight. He’s from the old school parties.”

  Van had not tried to retain the faces she’d spoken to, or who’d spoken to her, over the course of the party. She’d spent most of her time trying to dodge questions about Miles and when she was going to have a baby. That took enough of her attention. Her parents’ friends were tenacious in their demands to know why she wasn’t pregnant yet. They had no compunction about asking after her fertility, or squeezing her arm to help them decide if she’d gained weight. She got only a few minutes of respite when her father gave his speech in his studio. There she had been able to stand by herself, pretending to listen, letting her father’s voice fade into the dimness of the basement. It was a way to gain a little peace: zone out, drift off, put her mind anywhere else but where she was.

  It figured that Linny had been off having a great time, reigning over the kitchen so as not to have to chat with the elders. Tom Hanh—of course. He must have been that cute guy she’d noticed Lisa talking to. Linny wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. Of course they had spent the evening together. No matter where Linny went, even at home, she could find a guy.

  “What about Mom?” Van repeated.

  “I think she must have known.”

  “It doesn’t really make sense, though. Dad’s never seemed interested in anything besides his inventions and parties. And watching action movies.”

  “Well, what do we know? It’s not like we know him.” As if sensing Van being taken aback, Linny went on, “Have you ever even had a real conversation with him? I haven’t. He’s an Asian father. No real talk. That’s how it is. Anyway, I thought this whole Nancy Bao thing was ancient history until she showed up at the citizenship thing yesterday.”

  “What about Rich Bao?”

  “God, who knows? Maybe they had some sort of arrangement, which is gross to think about.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you didn’t see what you thought.”

  “No way. It was very clear.”

  “You were fifteen.”

  “I know what I saw. I know Dad and Nancy Bao talked to each other on the phone. And then it all just stopped.”

  Van still wasn’t convinced. She didn’t say any more but Linny noisily turned over on her mattress and said, “You can think whatever you want. You weren’t
there.”

  That night Van listened to her sister breathe for a long time before falling asleep herself. Linny never seemed to have a problem with insomnia. Same with Miles. Van could fall into naps just fine during the day but nights gave her anxiety. She could stare at the ceiling for hours, flipping the pillow over and over. How many times had she watched Miles sleep, the wall of his back silhouetted by the glow from the streetlights? She would slip out of bed to walk the house and check the window locks, finally collapsing on the sofa with the television volume on low.

  In her old bedroom with Linny, Van thought about how fast it all seemed to go, those growing-up years. You weren’t there. She had missed a lot, she knew, buried so deliberately in her books, lost in the library or school projects. Tuning everything out with the noise of television shows. Which was what she’d wanted at the time, constantly pushing toward college. She had wanted to be on her own, and she thought Linny had too. Hadn’t they shared that feeling more than anything, that wish to be free? But free from what exactly? Van had a sense that she herself had reached back somehow as if with a blurring tool to swirl all of those years together, leaving a final impression of something like guilt, forgetfulness. And every return to this house, to this room, left her awake in the dark by herself.

  Yet in the morning she knew she would get up, unsure of how she had ever fallen asleep; she would dress and brush her hair while looking in that same full-length mirror tacked onto the back of the door. In middle school and high school Van used to approach the mirror thinking she might suddenly be pleased with what she saw. It took years for the lesson to be learned, for such optimism to be tempered. The mirror, unlike the teachers who favored her for her discipline and grades, would never give her an easy pass. No grade inflation there. The reflection was accurate, telling her she was the same plain, short girl she had always been.