Bich Minh Nguyen

by Short Girls (v5)

  Had she and Miles ever dreamed of this kind of companionship? Had they spoken of the long years ahead? Van wished their house in Ann Arbor had been built with a porch. Why hadn’t they thought of a porch?

  “Come here,” Linny said. “Look inside.”

  Van had to stand on her toes to see over the plantation shutters. A stone fireplace anchored the square living room, and beyond that a gleaming dining table held a glass vase filled with huge pale blooms. Everything was taupe and beige and cream, accented with dark jewel tones. When Van put her hand on the window to steady herself her jade bracelet clanged against the glass.

  “It’s totally Pottery Barn,” Linny said. She noted the high ceilings, white crown molding, magazines spread just so on the coffee table. These rooms looked clean, sanctioned. Some people had the effortless ability to beautify everything around them, to make all design bend for them. Van had known even as a child that she was not one of those people. No one had ever called her chic or admired her placement of a pillow in the corner of a sofa.

  Van supposed that this house was a clear portrait of what Miles had always desired. Van could only be a ghost here. She was a tiptoe visitor, the Peeping Tom, the freak with nowhere else to go. Perhaps in these two months without him she had become invisible. She had disappeared from his mind. He had already started a whole new life, and he would never come back to Van’s. He would never even think to call.

  Van was so lost in this idea that she almost thought she’d conjured a vision when she turned from the window and saw Miles standing on the sidewalk with Grace.

  It seemed a long minute before he finally spoke. “Is this a breaking-and-entering thing, or a stalking thing?” His voice so thick with derision that the woman, Grace, actually murmured something to him. It appeared to be one word of restraint, one stretched-out syllable: Miles.

  Van felt her face getting hot, actually felt the red rising like liquid filling a container. She glanced at Linny and for a wild moment she considered running. They could jump the porch railing and get out of there, the way they had a few times, growing up, playing ding-dong-doorbell. They’d never gotten caught. But Van found herself frozen to the porch as Miles started up the steps. She was both scared and fascinated by this man, her husband. He did not bear the stony, impassive look from his office, the last time she’d seen him. Now there was anger. It took Van’s conscious will to meet it. In so many ways his gaze was the very same one that had captivated her in law school. She could remember that feeling all over again. Sitting on that bench near the library. Being chosen, the spotlight on his stage. For years looking him in the eye—allowing him to look her in the eye—felt like nothing less than raw exposure.

  His face made Van hold her breath. She had no idea what he was going to do. But he dismissed her entirely. He walked around her, aiming for the front door. It was a gesture that showed his awareness of what would wound her most.

  Perhaps Van would have let it all play out like that. She would have just stayed rooted there while Grace trailed Miles into the house, the two of them shutting her out, emphasizing her pointless stand. It was Linny who reached forward and grabbed the woman by the elbow, saying, “Why don’t you look at my sister?”

  Grace gasped. And in that second she did, as if by accident, look. Van had dreaded this face-to-face, expecting to feel miserable hatred and jealousy. The very thought of Grace—perfectly Asian American in a poised, smooth-skinned way that Van had never been—had filled her with a desperate rage. And she wasn’t wrong. Grace was her very name and Van, standing near her, felt every ounce of her own smallness. She was a clunky utilitarian van. The only thing left for her was complete humiliation. Abjection. It took her a moment to place, to name, the feeling. It flattened her, rendered her speechless.

  Then Grace slipped away into the house, and Miles said, “You need to leave.”

  Linny was quick to reply. “What are you going to do, call the police? That’ll be a great show for all the neighbors.”

  Miles ignored her. “I guess I should have expected that you would start stalking me, Van, but this is pretty psycho, don’t you think?”

  “I wanted to see where you were.” Somehow Van managed to say this without sounding shaky.

  “It’s not your business. I’m not your business anymore. I’ve tried to spare your feelings, Van, so don’t play the victim here.”

  “We’ve never had one real conversation about any of this. We said we were going to talk.”

  Miles sighed. His voice softened as he said, “I just said that to get you out of my office. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I appreciate your giving me some space and not harassing me and calling me. You’ve been great about that. But I can’t believe you’ve been hanging on to any hope. You have to have known it’s over.”

  Van was keenly aware that Linny stood nearby, observing and listening. Now nothing could be disguised. Linny must know everything.

  “And that woman?”

  “Van. Are you really going to focus on this? You followed me here. Don’t forget that. You brought this on yourself.” Van shook her head but Miles didn’t stop. “You’re only hurting yourself. You’re always focusing on the wrong thing. Grace is not the issue and I’ll say that over and over again. So please leave.”

  With Miles it had always been better to go along, get along. Avoid courting the future apology. But in that moment Van realized: What did she have left to lose? In that long week since the citizenship party, she had been convincing herself that Linny’s claim of seeing Miles with another woman had been a mistake, a misunderstanding. She had dug deep for that denial but there was no keeping it now. “I want to know how long you’ve been with her.”

  “Don’t be childish,” Miles snapped. “Don’t make this ugly, don’t make this a goddamn soap opera. I don’t want to have to close the door in your face. It’s pathetic.”

  Van ran through all the things she could say, but nothing seemed right. All she could think of were lines from television shows, movies, and yes, soap operas. Those were her examples, the only models of relationship behavior she knew.

  “Why don’t you answer her?” Linny spoke up.

  “Stay out of this,” Miles ordered. He looked furious, and Van suddenly understood: Miles could say nothing to Linny that mattered. There was something almost wildly gleeful about the thought.

  Miles opened the front door. Not even facing Van, he said, “You can show up here all you like but you can’t force me to talk.”

  She wanted to leap out at him, physically prevent him from disappearing from her sight. The only thing stopping her was the awareness of Linny. So Van didn’t move; Miles did. He went in the house.

  Van forced her body to pull away, to hurry back down the porch steps so as not to see Miles slamming the door behind him. When she stopped on the sidewalk, Linny, close behind, ran into her.

  The house looked calm again. No signs of argument within, no signs of drama. Van imagined Grace sitting on the edge of her bed, tense, waiting. She was running hot water into a bath. She was perched at the bedroom window, surveying, taking in the lay of the land that was Miles’s past.

  “Are you okay?” Linny asked.

  Van nodded. She had never been in this neighborhood before, never stood on this leafy street, surrounded by all the houses of families she would never know. She thought how she could have gone her whole life happily never knowing this place existed.

  For nothing, now, bound her to Miles. Not a child. Not even a contract, really. Nothing that couldn’t be broken.

  14

  Linny

  While Linny was in Ann Arbor, Gary called six times. She refused to answer when his number came up and erased his voice-mails as soon as she heard them. I’m smoothing things over, he insisted. I’m talking Pren down. By the time I’m done she’ll be calling your work to apologize. Linny had hidden in Van’s bathroom to listen to the messages, as if her sister would be able to discern the whole situation otherwise. Instead of calling
Gary back, she called Tom.

  Two days after Linny and Van followed Miles, Linny returned to the kitchen of You Did It Dinners. Barbara, looking up from supervising a gaggle of moms, had nodded her assent. Later on, neither of them brought up the subject of Gary and Pren. Instead, Barbara talked about the future, looking ahead to the targeted opening of her new branch in Lincoln Square. Linny unofficially agreed to stay in the Oak Park location, and Barbara unofficially agreed to allow her. So for now Linny returned to her search for new dinner ideas, calling up recipe sites and reading through back issues of food magazines. She spent most of her evenings like that, taking notes and e-mailing Tom.

  It’s not thrilling work, she admitted to him. They’d been exchanging more and more messages since her father’s party, talking on the phone at night.

  What would be?

  She sent him links to sites she’d bookmarked more than a year ago. The Cordon Bleu Institute in Chicago. The French Culinary Institute. The Culinary Institute of America.

  The CIA, Tom typed back. Serious stuff. New York?

  But Linny wanted to stay in Chicago. All of her years in Michigan, the city had seemed a beacon, a promise that she still wanted to have fulfilled. Here, in the middle of the country, an unlikely avant-garde spirit had risen, taking shape in neighborhoods edged by skylines, flatness interrupted by heights, midwesternness mixed with modernity. Linny had almost begun to take it for granted. It had taken Wrightville and Ann Arbor, seeing her father and sister, to make Linny long to stop wasting so much time.

  More than once, Linny had almost told Tom about Gary. She just didn’t know how to explain it. Nor could she say why she had the compulsion to confess, except that it had something to do with sensing that the pattern of her days in Chicago was shifting. If she told Tom the truth, as she might have back when they were fifteen, what else might change for her?

  Look at how Van had already changed. That evening of the confrontation with Miles and Grace, Linny had driven Van back to Ann Arbor in silence, thinking her sister was in full retreat mode. The quiet between them dominated as it always had, seemed to expand like a bubble until it became a fearsome thing to break. When they got back to the house Van started to march up to her bedroom but got no farther than the stairs, where she suddenly sank down. For a moment she drew her legs up to her chin.

  She surprised Linny by saying, “I would absolutely destroy his things if it weren’t such a fucking obvious thing to do.”

  Linny, relieved that Van hadn’t burst into sobs and relieved to hear her cursing, said, “It doesn’t mean you can’t do it anyway.”

  “Yes, it does. Because then Miles would say that’s such a fucking obvious thing to do. And then I would be the immature one.”

  “It’s funny to hear you swear.”

  “Miles said swearing was crass and the sign of an uneducated mind.”

  “Then he must be a hypocrite.” Linny took a seat on a lower step, leaning against the banister.

  “I should never have learned about the Trung sisters.”

  At this unexpected mention, Linny recalled the way they used to run around the living room of that old apartment, mixing up the Trung sisters with Charlie’s Angels. Neither the Trungs nor the Angels would have walked away in defeat from Miles. “Just remember that they threw themselves off a cliff and drowned in a river.”

  But perhaps Van was not fully ready to sustain the anger she should have had. She pulled herself up like an old lady from a park bench and said, “I’m going to go to bed. I guess you’re heading back to Chicago?”

  “I don’t know.” She meant, Do you want me to?

  “You should go.” Van sounded weary, threatening to recede into some cold depth and take the whole evening with her.

  “I can leave early in the morning,” Linny suggested, wanting to say something else to bring back that momentary glimmer of fierceness. Van nodded, then moved up the stairs. At the very top she turned back for a moment.

  “Will you do something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Go to Dad’s TV show audition.”

  There was no way Linny could say anything but yes.

  On the day before the audition, Linny demonstrated a new chicken, roasted vegetable, and couscous dinner while Barbara took notes. They used to talk over every aspect of building a new dish, brainstorming—one of Barbara’s favorite words—to reach the compound of ingredients that she judged would most satisfy the demographic. Now Barbara typed on her laptop, made a few noncommittal noises meaning nice and possibly, and let Linny go home early.

  Walking her neighborhood to clear her mind, Linny told herself to expect the chilliness from Barbara. All she had to do was push through it. She would shop for Tom’s upcoming birthday instead, focus on how bright the days had gotten: a glorious spring had arrived at last, bringing pansies from window boxes, kids selling silk-screened T-shirts at every corner. Near the five-point intersection where the El stopped, a restaurant owner, dressed all in white, stepped onto Milwaukee just as Linny walked past. They nodded at each other, a simple exchange that made Linny feel the satisfaction of being acknowledged. She headed down Damen to the row of new clothing boutiques that had completed the street’s gentrification.

  Linny was browsing a shop filled with sale sweaters and the gleam of fresh summer dresses when the entrance of a woman with honey-red hair generated a call of hello from the hipster girl refolding clothes at the center table. Before she even looked, Linny knew it was Pren.

  She had been expecting to see Gary in the neighborhood. Sometimes at night when the door buzzer sounded in the apartment next to hers she started, certain of Gary. In his most recent voice mail, left earlier that day, he had said, How much longer do you think I’m going to wait for you to call me back?

  The scene with Miles and Van, all of it too close to Gary and Pren, had more than unnerved Linny. She couldn’t talk about it to anyone but Sasha, who could only say, “Oh, lord, that poor girl. Poor sweet sad used-up girl.” Well, there wasn’t much else to say, was there? There was no resolution. Linny had never seen Van look so timid, so small. A violent feeling had surged up in Linny on that porch. If she’d been in Van’s place she would have lashed out. Forget the semblance of control. She would have made Miles fear her.

  But as soon as Linny imagined this she was chastened by her own role: as Grace. No getting away from that comparison. If Gary and Pren showed up outside her apartment, both of them screaming, their tall figures blocking out the store awnings across the street, what would Linny do? Gary would be Miles, trying to keep everyone quiet. Linny could no longer hold onto her excuses. I wasn’t looking for someone else’s man, she had defended herself to Sasha. He approached me. What do I owe Pren? And so what did Grace owe her sister? The question made Linny uncomfortable, spurred her to duck away, as much as she could, from Pren, who stood in the same shop, reaching forward to touch a chiffon dress.

  Linny slid behind a mannequin dressed in a trapeze shift. Hiding was one of the few advantages to being small. But she couldn’t avoid Pren’s eye for long.

  In the past, whenever Linny had run into her while dropping off a supply of dinners, Pren had been adept at making small talk. She never failed to compliment Linny’s clothes or ask where she’d gotten her necklace. They had talked about Bucktown and Wicker Park too, how Pren adored the neighborhoods’ shops and restaurants.

  Now Pren’s face drew down into a hard stare. She moved closer, fairly towering, smelling of honeysuckle perfume. This wasn’t a woman who ran away. Pren said, “I’m sure the owner of that company told you we won’t be needing those dinners anymore.”

  “I heard.” Linny glanced past Pren, at the girl in tight jeans trying not to eavesdrop too obviously.

  “I hope you don’t think you’re special. In fact, I’m glad I ran into you, because you should know that you’re just another notch on his fetish belt. He’s got a thing for you ethnic girls. Thai massage. All that stuff. Didn’t you know?”

  L
inny felt her face getting hot. She thought about saying, I’m sorry, but the words seemed pointless.

  “Thought you’d want to know.” Pren turned away, but Linny stopped her.

  “Wait,” she said.

  Pren glared. “Do you have something to say to me?”

  “To him,” Linny said. “Tell him not to contact me again.”

  Pren’s lips seemed to furrow together, but she said nothing more. She pivoted, her expensive handbag flaring out. Her heels thumped on the distressed hardwood floor of the shop.

  The girl folding clothes watched Pren go, heading north on Damen, and Linny knew she could never step in that store again. When she left she went directly back to the small space of her apartment where, at least, everything could be claimed as her own.

  It took four and a half hours to drive from Chicago to the center of Detroit, and on the Saturday morning of the reality show tryout Linny spent most of that time thinking about Gary and Pren. Another notch on his fetish belt, she had said. The words, the idea, made Linny feel sick, as Pren had surely known they would. While Linny assumed that most white guys who hit on her were possible fetishists, she had never sensed that in Gary. He didn’t fit the giveaway signs—didn’t use the word exotic as a compliment or say stupid things like Vietnamese girls were the prettiest, or generally give off that subtle but clear vibe of guys who collected Asian porn videos. Was Pren lying, knowing just how to deliver a punch? Or was Gary really the kind of guy who boasted about dating various Latina, Asian, and black girls?