“I’m not keeping it.”
“You don’t want this house?”
“It’s too big. Miles did all the specs. But he doesn’t want it either.” She didn’t elaborate on how Miles had kept looking for ways to improve it, and how Van had never quite gotten over the feeling of being a guest in someone else’s domain. The house was like nowhere she’d lived before, full of unused areas, audacious proportions. And it was too big; it had put too much space between them.
“It is kind of a family house.”
“We tried,” Van said, answering Linny’s unasked question. “It didn’t work out.”
Linny set her wine glass on the slate tile and Van was grateful when she shifted the subject, saying, “You missed a crazy show today in Detroit.” She gave a rundown of the tryout and how she’d had to step in. “I wish Dad weren’t so determined not to go to Las Vegas. He’s really improved the Luong Arm. You wouldn’t believe how easily it carried that dictionary. I could actually see people finding it useful.”
“I bet that show never even makes it to TV.”
“So if you don’t like this house,” Linny asked suddenly, “where are you going to go?”
“I’m not sure yet.” But as Van said this she realized it wasn’t exactly true.
When their father and Tom came back with Thai food they all decided to eat on the patio. Van could feel the summer approaching with its deceptive peak of days, and she thought about how all that long light made people forget that the sun had started its slow recession.
As they passed around containers of green curry, shrimp, and noodles, Van decided to wait until morning to tell her father about Miles. She wondered if he would blame her, ask if she’d taken care to be a good wife. She pictured Linny stepping in, saying, Jeez Dad, don’t be so mean, her voice commanding in a way that Van’s, somehow, never could be with her father. Or maybe he would surprise her. After all, he had never nagged her about having a baby. And it would only be a matter of hours before he realized that her kitchen had not been customized for a shorter person. Her father could just as easily be on her side, Van reasoned. She knew if she asked Linny right now to predict his reaction that both of them would only have guesses. They might never know a thousand things about his life, like whether anything had happened between him and Nancy Bao, or if he would ever travel back to Vietnam, or if he would ever admit why he refused to go.
Linny had sounded serious when she’d insisted that their father’s inventions worked well, that they weren’t as laughable as they’d thought them to be. Van, thinking of the seldom-used Luong Arm in her kitchen, wanted to believe that. She wanted something to replace the prevailing images she had of her father:
lecturing to them at dinner; struggling to explain what he needed at a hardware store; cooped up in his darkened basement. He had made sure Van and Linny knew they would never be tall enough, that they would have to work to get things that seemed out of reach. In response, Van had braced herself. She knew short people were supposed to be able to laugh at themselves, take a joke, brush off the comments, the people who kiddingly used their heads as armrests. We live in a tall American world, her father had often said, forever minding the shadows. Perhaps feeling inadequate went with the territory—had become their territory—when her parents crossed from Vietnam to America.
After dinner everyone but Van retreated inside to the TV room. She decided to wait, as she hadn’t done in years, for the blue hour that had been her mother’s favorite, deepening as the earth moved toward the solstice. Mrs. Luong would bring a lawn chair to the middle of the yard or, later, perch on the teak bench she’d set under the maple tree, ready to stare at the sky. Gloaming; l’heure bleue—Van had taught her these words. Her mother had loved learning them, even when she forgot their correct usage. For her, the words had been proof of Van’s excelling in the American school system. “Everything seems to slow down when we’re gloaming,” she said once, maybe two years before Van left for college. “Stay out here with me.” She always wanted company when she sat outside but rarely got it. Mr. Luong would be out with friends or in his studio; Linny would be out or on the phone with her friends; Van would be studying while watching TV. All excuses, a life of them, until it was too late. Only a few times did Van agree to sit in the darkening air with her, listen to her wander the subjects of work at Roger’s, gossip about her friends, and how she had known all of her neighbors in Saigon. Van had been too selfish to pay attention. She hadn’t known she would have such a small amount of time. The evening hour seemed long. Yet it disappeared in a moment, didn’t it? Outside on her own patio, Van shivered in the dark. Her jade bracelet was cold around her wrist. The stars were becoming discernible, patterning the sky. At such times, her mother’s shadowy profile would linger only a moment longer before retreating back to the house. It wasn’t night her mother craved; it was the slow countdown, the space of half-light no one could ever keep.
For the first time in longer than she could recall, Van had several guests sleeping in her house. She liked the extra weight anchoring the floors, the fullness in the rooms. Past midnight, she slipped downstairs to check on her father, who’d insisted on sleeping on the TV room sofa. The flicker of lights as she reached the bottom step told Van that he’d fallen asleep while watching The Bourne Identity. She turned the television off; her father didn’t stir. Van peeked into the backyard, the side yard, the front.
She would not mourn leaving this house, which had tried to contain, and couldn’t, the marriage she herself had hidden from understanding. The house was all past tense. A former Miles. Even the walls couldn’t commit, sometimes seeming beige, or latte, at times a mythical taupe. Evening Fawn. As if something rare or rarefied. The magical holding-of-breath feeling Van got whenever she did see a fawn, its stillness and quick movements equally stunning. To think that a wall, its role as barrier or blockade, could make or deliver such a promise.
No, she would not be sorry to leave. She would press the numbers of the alarm system one last time, disabling it. She and Miles had danced only once on their wooden floors, on their first anniversary, sharing a bottle of champagne. Even then Van had had a faint sense of enacting what she knew was supposed to be marriage. She’d carried a secret feeling of having somehow tricked him into all of it.
Then a blur of months, years. At the front window Van remembered she’d done this very thing—checking the window locks, seeing if any cars murmured by—the night after she lost Vijay’s deportation case, after the screaming fight she and Miles had had. Her colleagues had said no one would have won the case, not when it involved a conviction for illegal possession of a firearm. The judges who ruled those cases were notoriously tough, Van had pointed out to Miles. But in defending herself she had given him more reason to highlight her guilt. Excuses, he said. They accomplish nothing.
And now Na Dau. Would he, like Vijay, waver into her dreams? What if he appeared at this window, this night? Would she be able to save him from running?
At the thought of this, something rose in Van—the same feeling that came over her when she read articles about racial profiling, or an op-ed in the Free Press about illegal immigrants “infiltrating” the state, or a piece in The New York Times on So-malian refugee boys struggling to get by in small-town Georgia. She remembered how swiftly anti-Japanese sentiment had swept through Michigan in the 1980s; people said then that any Japanese car in Detroit risked getting vandalized. In college, the Vincent Chin case had steered her to law school, to immigration studies in the first place. And the same kind of xenophobia could all be happening again, she knew, with the focus shifted toward the Middle East and toward Mexico and Central America. She thought of all the laws, past and present, stacked against brown-skinned immigrants, meant to keep them, at the very least, out of bounds and out of view. Laws made to exclude, keep out, guarantee fear. It was only in 1967 that the Supreme Court, in the fittingly named Loving v. Virginia case, had at last overruled state antimiscegenation laws. Van had felt at hom
e among the immigrants at the International Center, the newly arrived, the first and first-and-a-half generation looking for that compromise between understanding and assimilation. East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Indian, Latino, Middle Eastern; short, dark-haired people, perpetually foreign in a foreign world—they were all in these States together.
Van stood in her house with her sleeping family for as long as it took to try to memorize the moment. It was something she wanted to keep of this place when she left it, when the rooms were all cleared out and the only thing she had to do was get in her car—a different one, she decided; she would trade in that handed-down Infiniti as soon as she could—and drive on, eastward, toward the spired shadow of the Ambassador Bridge that linked one country to another.
16
Linny
On the first Saturday in August Linny and Tom arrived in Ann Arbor with bags of groceries and champagne. Van’s house was nearly empty, almost all of the furniture carted away to a storage unit that Miles had rented. “I told him to take everything,” Van reported, “except the big TV and the big sofa that goes with it.” Those were going to her new condo in Dearborn, and whatever Miles didn’t want would be sold, donated, or hauled back to Wrightville, for Mr. Luong wouldn’t stand for anything to be thrown out.
“The buyers asked me if they could start moving in this week,” Van said, lingering at the kitchen counter while Linny and Tom put together a plate of cheeses and prosciutto. “My place is all set, so I guess I’m moving early.”
“It’s a good thing we’re celebrating today, then,” Linny said. “Happy birthday.”
Tom added, “We brought you a strawberry cream cake. Linny said it’s your favorite.”
Van peered into the cardboard box, taking a swipe of frosting. “You’re going to have to learn how to make this,” she said to Linny.
“I’m definitely taking pastry courses.”
It was strange to think that Van would be moving so soon and that Linny would be starting culinary school in the fall. She’d already warned Tom that even if she failed miserably at it there was no chance of her returning to live in Michigan.
“It’s not like I’m stuck there forever,” he had replied.
“You have a whole practice there. And your parents.”
“I’ll take care of them wherever I am. Why do you think so many Vietnamese become dentists? People need them everywhere. We’re a people who choose mobile professions. We never know when we’ll have to make a fast getaway.”
For now they were going to keep it safe, arranging his visits to Chicago and the restaurants Linny wanted to try with him. From where Linny stood in Van’s kitchen, the idea of the future seemed almost suspenseful. Even Barbara had said something like that when Linny had told her about going to culinary school. By then Barbara had nearly softened back to her old self and tried to convince Linny to take on the management, after all, of the original You Did It Dinners. When Linny insisted she couldn’t, Barbara finally agreed that they could try keeping Linny on as a consultant, see if they could work around her class schedule. “You have to do what you do when you’re young,” Barbara sighed. “Someone like you is probably made to go out on her own and achieve all sorts of things.”
While it made Linny laugh to think of being viewed as an achiever, she did take the words as encouragement. Cooking school was one of the few things that didn’t make her feel like she was simply settling or avoiding.
Van had joined a new immigration law firm that had support from a foundation, allowing the lawyers to handle probono and test cases in addition to the worker visas and permanent resident applications Van knew so well. Both her new office and her condo were close enough to the International Center for Van to restart her classes in Arabic and Spanish. Her friend Jen Ye lived nearby and was going to help her move in.
The only problem was money. With the pay cut she’d be taking and without Miles to provide most of the income, she could no longer afford to send her father a check every month. Linny could contribute nothing—though she would still be making a salary at You Did It, she was taking out a major loan to go to school.
“Dad is the only reason I’m asking for alimony,” Van said. “The house will be paid off in a few years, but he still needs to live on something.”
“You should ask for alimony no matter what,” Linny insisted.
But the divorce was far from being settled, and in the meantime they both worried. What would their father do? The occasional tile and flooring work he did for friends—“freelance,” he called it—would have to be increased, though they couldn’t imagine him doing that. Most likely he had, in spite of himself, come to rely on those checks from Van.
That was why Van had gone back to Wrightville, a month after the tryout for Tomorrow’s Great Inventor, to find out once and for all what his finances were. He had hedged, unwilling to reveal any actual numbers. It was only when Van had told him she couldn’t send as much money anymore—he hadn’t realized that would be a consequence of the divorce—that he admitted he needed it for his business.
“That’s how he puts it, of course,” Van had told Linny. “Money for his business. Not for him.”
In his late fifties, with no signs of ill health, he should be working, Linny asserted.
Van pointed out that he probably believed he was. “He’s got his own version of events, and the trick is to gain control of the narrative. It’s what he’s always done: use silence as a weapon of control. We can use it right back.”
Which was just what Van had done, Linny realized, the day after the reality TV show audition, when she announced at breakfast that she was getting divorced. Their father had demanded to know when that had been decided. “I like Miles,” he said. “He’s a nice guy. What did you do?”
“Not helpful,” Linny had interjected.
But Van seemed calm, much more than Linny would have imagined. “It’s for the best, Dad. You’re going to have to trust me on this one.”
A troubled look spread over Mr. Luong’s face and stayed there. He didn’t offer anything more—not an I’m sorry or what happened or what can I do, the normal American things people were supposed to say.
“He’ll probably just pretend I was never married at all,” Van said to Linny later.
“Your dad and I have a plan,” Tom had announced to Linny over the phone one day in June, not long after Van had come back from seeing Mr. Luong in Wrightville. “Why didn’t we think of this before? LuongInventions.com.”
Linny, sitting in a coffee shop while working on a few recipes for Barbara, had laughed. “Van and I have both thought of that before, but my dad doesn’t know how to use the Internet. I tried to explain it to him once and he got confused and then mad and didn’t want to hear about it again.”
“I think he’s open to it now. A lot of his friends are starting to e-mail each other and he’s feeling left out. So I talked to him and he said yes. He could even sell his stuff on eBay or any number of sites. I had him come over to my building so I could show him how it works.”
“Are you having meetings with my dad?” Her father, as far as she knew, had never even used a computer. Linny couldn’t picture him suddenly running a Web business out of his basement.
“Apparently when Van was back in Wrightville she showed him how he can apply for a patent. Did you know the entire database is online, pictures and all? I think he’s excited.”
“Pretty soon we’ll all be running his e-business.” But it amazed Linny to consider that her father might, after all, be able to step out of the cast of too old, too first-generation immigrant.
“You and your sister might not have to look out for him as much as you think,” Tom said.
There was something hope-giving about the idea of her father having his own website, a place where anyone in the world could see what he was working on. Even if it didn’t yield any sales, it would open up his basement studio. Plus, her father still believed in the possibility of striking it rich and winning the lo
ttery. And he had heard that the Google guys had made billions.
“You do realize you’re becoming one of the many people who help my father and get nothing in return,” Linny said. “Some people would call that enabling. That’s what my mother always did.”
“I like your dad,” Tom replied simply. “Plus, his inventions make sense. Using the Luong Arm is like channeling Plastic Man.”
Linny thought back to how Van, the day after the TV show audition, said she had to admit Tom was a decent guy.
To Tom Linny said, “All this and nice teeth too.”
“See you soon?” He had driven to Chicago nearly every weekend since the TV show tryout.
“Oh, yes.”
That week, waiting for Sasha outside Paolo Francesca, Linny spotted Gary and Pren crossing the street with their children, eating bags of Garrett’s popcorn like any group of tourists. It was the first time Linny had ever seen them all together outside of their house, and she guessed they were even then heading back to its comfort and gloss, all that high-ceilinged space Linny had admired. She was strangely relieved to see them, to know that her brief appearance in Gary’s life had not left a darker mark.
She turned, heading for the entrance to the salon, but before she could get away with it Pren spied her. She froze for just a second. Then she looked beyond Linny, pretending to focus on something else. She pulled a pair of sunglasses from her bag and put them on. And Gary—he actually stepped in front of the children and glared right at her. At least, she thought it was a glare. Did he think she was looking for him? Sasha emerged from the salon as the family walked beyond them, toward the brightness of Michigan Avenue, Pren and Gary keeping protective hands at the backs of their children.
After Linny’s run-in with Pren she had deleted Gary’s every e-mail. She would never know for sure if Pren had thrown her a disturbing truth or a brilliant lie but she decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of finding out. After a while, Gary’s messages stopped. He didn’t show up at her apartment again. He simply receded. In the end, Linny knew that when she thought of this time in her life she would think more about Pren than Gary. How many times had Pren endured this—how many more times would she?
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