Bich Minh Nguyen

by Short Girls (v5)

  Mrs. Luong didn’t talk about the one thing Linny wondered about the most: What kind of love existed between her parents? Why did nothing ever seem quite clicked into place for their family—nothing like the laughter-filled get-togethers they all watched on evening sitcoms? Had the love between her parents dissipated like so much steam as they crossed the ocean, and so many hundreds of miles of land, only to end up in this cold climate, with no context to shape how they had begun? Or did their squabbles and resentments spring from realizing how leaving their country further cemented them to each other? For years they’d had to rely on each other for even the smallest errands, even just figuring out how to order a hamburger from a drive-through window. But while Mrs. Luong thought in terms of weeks and months, measuring the seasons, her husband couldn’t stop his mind from wandering to the next big possibility. He looked to the distant future, when grand things would surely happen. Money would come, adulation would follow. It had been the only way, Linny guessed, to keep his inventions alive. She remembered, in fact, her father sometimes saying, “Tomorrow is another day,” and not realizing until she saw Gone with the Wind in college that he’d probably lifted the line from the movie. It seemed an odd pairing, but perhaps Vivien Leigh had been short. Who knew? You could try to peer into his mind but he would never give a full answer.

  Linny was glad that her last conversation with her mother had been meaningful, that she hadn’t just fought with her over her clothes or boyfriends or said something sarcastic and teenagey. But it bothered her too to think of that evening as a premonition, her mother somehow needing to sit Linny down and talk.

  At the funeral, Linny told Van that their mother had planned to go to Vietnam again. “I didn’t say I’d go,” she admitted.

  Upset, Van said, “She should have gone back one more time. I wish she had. Now it will always be too late.”

  “Would you have gone with her?”

  At that Van looked away. “I don’t know,” she said, just as Linny had in response to the idea. “Maybe. One day.”

  In Chicago, one week after the party and back into the routine of You Did It Dinners, Linny stepped onto Milwaukee Avenue, squinted against the spring sunshine, and saw Gary. That was how she must have looked to him, halting as the door to her building clanged shut behind her. Gary leaned against his car—how had he even gotten a spot right in front?—keys in hand as if he’d just arrived. But Linny wondered how long he’d really been waiting, listening to NPR, keeping his eyes fixed on the door.

  “You haven’t returned my calls or e-mails.” Gary was in a dark gray suit, his tie a long pattern of dizzying stripes.

  Linny said, “You look like a gangster in a movie.”

  “Are you going to come over here or what? Or do you want the whole world to see?”

  He walked up to her then, and even though Linny knew he was going to kiss her—like something out of a bad drama, she thought—her back was up. She felt like a camera was on her, affixing to digital permanence the image of Gary leaning his mouth toward hers. Anyone could drive up and see them.

  It was with this feeling of exposure that Linny let Gary back in her apartment. They went straight to her bedroom this time, and even though she understood it to be a mistake—so much a mistake that she almost, perversely, wanted to lose herself in it—she didn’t stop. She kept her eyes closed the whole time.

  She didn’t begin to feel clear-headed until Gary was half falling asleep and she got up to put her clothes back on. It was then that she felt, at last, what she’d been waiting to feel: the inward self-disgust; the wince. The embarrassment flooded her—the horrible humiliation of being here all over again with this guy. The room, the apartment, the day all seemed like glass. Clarity. For a long while a rueful feeling had been forming in her. It was not quite remorse, but close, jarred into place by her visit back home; by Van; by Tom Hanh; by what Linny knew now about Miles. And it crystallized in the space she recognized as that moment between now and the last time Gary had been in her apartment.

  “You have to go. I’m supposed to be at Barbara’s.”

  “Who’s Barbara?”

  “Barbara. At work.”

  “She can wait.”

  “Well, I can’t. Don’t you have to get going too?”

  “I don’t work on Saturdays.”

  “Then why are you wearing a suit?”

  “Because sometimes I do work on Saturdays. Money can move anytime, you know.” Gary grinned at her and his face seemed to her almost sickening. “Especially now that things are back to normal.”

  Linny put on the rest of her clothes. “Nothing is normal.”

  Gary sat up in the bed, stuffed a pillow behind his back. Linny used to reassure him that he looked younger than thirty-eight, but the truth was that the more she knew him, the older he looked to her. She had seen him too up close too often. “Are you really still upset?” he asked.

  She went into the bathroom to retouch her makeup. She wished she could flee now without an explanation—a replay of that night in the sushi restaurant—but she was stuck until Gary left. That was another reason why she’d never liked guys staying over at her place.

  “You need to go,” she said again.

  “We just kissed and made up.” She knew he was trying to angle their situation to his point of view, defuse where necessary, then ratchet and demand. When they first met, shaking hands over one of the granite counters in his kitchen, he had seemed so agreeable, easygoing; nothing could shatter his feeling of being accomplished in the world. Linny had had moments of being intimidated by him, by the sneaking-up thought of wanting more than just Sundays and evenings in hotel rooms. How she had glanced around his kitchen and pictured, just once or twice, her own self there.

  But that too seemed an impossibly long time ago from where she was now, standing in the doorway of her bedroom while Gary refused to budge from her bed. The old feeling of encroachment came over her again—she wanted to get him out of here, to negate the last half hour. For that was how things always ended for her: with a wince. That inward shiver, the desire to erase all evidence of where she’d been and with whom. Linny had always relied on that wince to keep her moving on, make sure she didn’t become the needy, guy-directed girl that she had sometimes suspected her sister of being. Linny left guys before they could leave her, letting that pride her mother had said she had too much of propel her forward.

  Gary, lying there in her bed, had no idea.

  “I have to go work,” was all Linny told him.

  “Come here and let’s talk.” He patted the mattress, trying to use a winning voice that left Linny cold. Then, “I thought you were done playing hard to get. Didn’t you say you liked having your freedom and independence? We agreed on this. These were the terms.”

  “This isn’t a contract.”

  “I’m not ready for this to be done.”

  “I don’t think you get to say.”

  All at once Gary threw back the covers and got out of bed. Linny stepped back, waiting to see what he was going to do. He paused a moment, as if considering possibilities, but simply reached for his shirt and got dressed. They ended up leaving the apartment together, walking down to the ground floor and out to Milwaukee.

  “I’ll see you again,” Gary said just as Linny thought she would make it out of earshot, toward her car parked three blocks away. She couldn’t tell if his statement was a wish or a warning. When she finally reached her Toyota and got in, she auto-locked the doors. Glancing in the mirrors, she drove toward Oak Park and the company kitchen she was supposed to be looking ahead to managing.

  The parking lot behind You Did It Dinners was empty save for Barbara’s car, and Linny had a sudden sense of dread, the kind she associated with job interviews or the ominous note of See me her teachers had sometimes scrawled at the top of her assignments. “Linny, I’m concerned,” they would say, earnestly shaking their heads. “Your performance isn’t up to par.” Linny knew they were comparing her to Van, in whose sta
r-student afterglow Linny had trailed. She could use it to her advantage only for so long. Teachers wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, as if expecting her to wake up one morning and be the good model minority her sister was, but Linny refused to follow through.

  Inside the You Did It building, she heard Barbara calling out her name. The tone confirmed Linny’s worries: trouble. “Linny, come here for a minute,” Barbara said. “Before you wash up, I want to talk to you.”

  Linny tightened her grip on her handbag as she approached Barbara, who wore a clean white You Did It apron. Her hair was tucked back in a bob-like net. The kitchen was quiet; stacks of disposable tinfoil pans and zippered plastic bags sat on the counter, soon to be filled, sealed, and labeled as chicken fiesta burritos, Hungarian goulash, zucchini lasagna. Later in the day, the weekend groups of moms—the work-out-of-the-home moms—would stream into the kitchen to make their two weeks of family meals.

  Ordinarily Linny and Barbara would start the cooking together before the moms arrived, working across the counter from each other. They would discuss recipes, restaurants they’d tried, Barbara’s kids, celebrity gossip, wending their way toward a few new dinner ideas. Whenever Linny threw out a suggestion that Barbara thought too upscale, Barbara reminded her, “We don’t want people to think this is complicated. Keep your eye on our demographic.”

  But now she said, “Prentice Millen called me.”

  Linny felt herself blushing. No way to hide it. She looked down at the tiled floor, whose diagonal pattern always, immediately, brought to mind her father. He had opinions about flooring wherever they went, and in these past years had come to disdain the diagonal setting of square tiles. The brick pattern was the nicest, he had said.

  “Do you not want to work here? Are you trying to get me to fire you?”

  “I do want to work here.”

  “I thought I could trust you to have better judgment. I thought you were better than this, Linny. You were supposed to be my ideal employee.”

  “It was a huge mistake,” Linny tried to explain, but she was thinking, Was I an ideal employee? Had Barbara viewed Linny the way people usually viewed Van? Her mind raced past to Gary, standing half clothed in her apartment, trying to get her to stay. Did he himself go to Pren, fling this secret into the air of some argument between them? Or could he not deny, finally, the suspicions that Pren had intuited? Linny could see them fighting in their bedroom, under the soft light cupped by a domed ceiling fixture. They would be on opposite sides of their big framed bed, speaking tensely, trying not to shout so the children wouldn’t overhear, until Linny’s own name spilled out. Then Gary would be running away, driving to Wicker Park, looking for absence and solace in Linny herself.

  “You know,” Barbara continued, “how much this kind of business depends on word-of-mouth.” Her body seemed rooted to the floor, solid and white-clad, giving Linny nowhere else to face. There were times, like that one, when Barbara looked relentlessly American, that mix of European ancestry that conferred on her a kind of everyday comfort Linny could not access.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “It was incredibly awkward and embarrassing to get a phone call like that. Not to mention the business I could lose. I always thought my husband cheated on me,” she said suddenly. “He said he didn’t—even after the divorce he insisted that was the truth, but I always wondered. It’s a terrible feeling all around, that kind of suspicion.”

  Linny simply stood there, exposed, small and punishable in a way that called back high school, after she’d skipped too many days of class and the principal threatened her with expulsion. You’ve had too many chances, he had said, and Linny wondered if Barbara was deciding the same thing.

  “I’m just going to go,” she offered.

  Barbara picked up a pan filled with chopped peppers and gave them an unnecessary stir. She said, “One of my sons is in town, so he can help me out this weekend. You and I can talk next week.”

  Linny didn’t ask when she should come back, or if she should at all. She didn’t wait to find out more. She backed out of the kitchen and left, quickly, the way she had come in.

  Out in the parking lot she sat in her car a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do. The leafy village of Oak Park was filled with strollers and bicycles, families going out for the first ice cream cones of the season. Linny thought of Gary, possibly lying in wait near her apartment building, wearing his aviator sunglasses. She wanted to be someplace where he couldn’t find her. She thought of going to Sasha, but Saturday was Paolo Francesca’s busiest day. She had a momentary urge to call Tom, but she knew better than to talk to him about this.

  Linny’s old impulse to escape surged back. Throw some clothes in a bag; leave a job without calling in to quit. The feeling kept her from being a pack rat, for she liked the idea of being able to leave a place at a moment’s notice. But she’d never really traveled alone. She’d always ended up calling up an old friend or boyfriend in another city, sleeping on someone’s sofa until she finally had to go back home. Still, traveling seemed to promise, no matter how falsely, disguise. When she visited New York she pretended to live there, let her imagination and clothes become her costume. She thought of the way she and her sister, as little girls in that first apartment, had pretended to be the Trung sisters, so-called brave, building a fort in the living room that served as the cave where they would plan a mission to overthrow someone else’s rule. Van too had a terrible secret. She knew what it was to be concealed. And that was how Linny decided where to go. She didn’t even call first, just took the roads she knew to get to Ann Arbor.

  13

  Van

  Over the past two months Van had spent her weekend mornings lying in bed for as long as possible until hunger or the need to use the bathroom forced her to get up. The weekdays she could fill with work, seeing Gertz & Zarou through the transition from INS to DHS. Her other hours needed escapism. She felt like her father when she searched for action movies in the video store, but they were a reason to avoid the present-day of her house. The world of a movie, the world of her clients: Van would rather live there.

  But this Sunday Van remembered: Linny was in her house. The knowledge gave Van a feeling of safety, broadening as the daylight seeped through the wooden shutters in the bedroom. The previous night when Linny had shown up unannounced Van had surprised herself by not being bothered. She didn’t mind the company, and was glad to find that Linny’s motivations for being there didn’t seem to come out of some misguided sense of pity. “I just wanted to get away,” was all Linny said. “Can I stay the weekend here?” None of this could have happened a year ago, or even a few months ago, not with Miles in the house.

  Van put on her old fleece robe, the one Miles disliked, especially when she wore it past noon, and went downstairs to the kitchen. Guessing that Linny was still asleep, Van did a quick tour around the first floor, glancing out windows in each direction, trying to see the place from her sister’s point of view. She noticed the brown, brittle houseplants in the corners of the front hall, touched the fine layer of dust that had settled on the living room table. The house cleaner hadn’t been there in a long time, not since Miles left, and Van finally realized that he must have canceled the service. She thought about calling them, but something inside her said, why bother?

  In the TV room Van picked up the notepad she had written in after her one stilted phone conversation with Na Dau. He had been difficult to reach, and Van had left several voice mails, uncertain if she even had the right number, before he called back. He had laughed at her when she said that she’d rather talk in English. There wasn’t enough left in the reserve of her knowledge of Vietnamese.

  “You the fancy lawyer lady,” Na had declared, his words thick enough for Van to wonder if he was drunk. “Now you help keep me out of jail.”

  Van had gathered enough information to conclude that Na’s situation, a first-time OWI, would probably result in no more than a $500 fine and probation.
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br />   “It’s very unlikely that you’d go to jail,” she assured him.

  “So my green card is good.”

  “Yes. Just don’t get into any more trouble. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t do anything wrong. It could affect your status or your future application for citizenship.”

  “What you mean, ‘status’?”

  Van tried to explain that his status as permanent resident could be in jeopardy if he got picked up for further offenses. “Your OWI is just a first-time misdemeanor, so you’re going to be fine. But you do have to be careful.”

  “I’m not worry. I can’t get deport. I heard the government can’t deport to Vietnam, so it’s all good.”

  Van envisioned Na drinking and driving again, ignoring her, believing he was untouchable. Just like her father, in his way. So many of these Vietnamese men she knew in her father’s generation seemed purposely reckless, as if daring some other upheaval to happen to them. She could guess why Na drank so much: it was a way to forget himself, the daily struggles in a bewildering, English-demanding nation.

  She tried to explain to him that even though Vietnam still refused to accept deportees from the U.S., such immigrants could be held in detention centers.

  “What, you mean like jail?” His voice still sounded lazy, laughing. “Then you bail me out.”