WHEN HE’D GONE, she slunk half-naked to her bedroom on the third floor, ducking below the windows, and locked herself in, ready to play dead at the first sign of his return. She let her crying become audible only after hearing a door slam downstairs. He’d thanked her warmly afterward, as if she’d given him a gift. But if it had really been a gift, why did it hurt so much? What she wanted now was her father, or her brother, but she was too ashamed to go find them, and scared he would come back first. Eventually, she crammed her things into her suitcase and limped down the back stairs, pausing at landings to listen. She hurried to the car without leaving a note. Her windshield wipers were useless against the squall that had blown up. It was to be a rough ride back on the ferry. She would spend it locked in the lavatory, kneeling before the toilet. Only on the mainland, in a restroom behind a Sinclair station, would she discover the small perfect circle of blood in her underwear.
THERE WAS A PAUSE on the phone when Daddy reached her in Poughkeepsie that Monday, a thick bolus of shame and anger and loathing that stopped her throat. “I was feeling sick to my stomach,” she lied. “So I decided to drive back a little early. Sorry I didn’t tell you; I didn’t want to rain on your parade.” He didn’t think to probe the logical gaps here—just said, in his abstracted way, that he hoped she was feeling better. Having spent the whole drive back rehearsing the part she would now be expected to play, she told him she was.
It would take her another month, spent mostly in bed, to decide to tell her father what had actually happened that weekend. And then a month after that, and another missed period, to screw her courage, et cetera. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get the words out over the sorority house’s communal telephone, and so, on a Friday in mid-November, she drove down to Sutton Place. What she found there, though, was odd: to the usually neat stoop clung hundreds of yellow leaves, their skeletons like darker tracery. She remembered for some reason how she and William used to collect them, and how Doonie would iron them between sheets of wax paper strewn with the shavings of crayons. Stained glass, they’d called it. The reason was that she was stalling.
The first floor was silent, save for the kitchen. There, she came upon Doonie bent over a shipping carton, a wisp of hair escaping from her bun, more white in it than there used to be. Part of her wanted to bury her face in the cook’s broad back, smell that old sturdy smell, let her tears soak the cotton. But Regan was older now, too.
“Miss Regan,” Doonie said, looking up. “I didn’t expect you back.”
“What are you doing?” Regan nodded at the newspaper-wrapped parcel in Doonie’s hand, hating the note of command that had entered her voice. Doonie looked equally surprised to find it there.
“Some of these pots and things I bought out of my own purse over the years. Kathryn and I always had an understanding I’d take them with me when I left.”
“But you’re not leaving us, are you?”
Doonie raised a finger to her lips and motioned toward the open door. “It’s not my choice, Regan, but in thirty-five years, I never cooked a haute cuisine, and I ain’t about to start. You’ll have to talk to your father about it.”
Regan stormed into the hall. They were getting rid of Doonie now, too? Indecent, was what it was. She’d nearly forgotten her purpose in coming here when she entered the unlit living room and saw the silhouette facing the bay window. Beyond it, in the courtyard, a Japanese maple had exploded into red, filling the squares between the mullions with fire. Amory Gould. The nervousness she’d always felt around him had now thrown off its mask. It was revulsion. Her instinct was to run, but at that moment something made him turn around, and a weightless smile replaced whatever had been on his face. “Ah, Regan! Let me pour you a drink.” Without any gesture toward turning on the lights—without, indeed, seeming to notice they were off—he moved toward the credenza.
“I’m …” She swallowed. “Thanks, but I’m not thirsty.”
“But surely you’ve come to celebrate the good news?” When she didn’t respond, he pressed a glass into her hands. The company’s largest competitor, he said, had just that morning agreed to a takeover. “This adds extensive interests in Central America to our holdings. And it stands to make you”—he clinked with his own glass the glass that hung between them—“a very wealthy young woman.”
“Who is it?”
“Who is who?”
“The competitor,” she said, though she already knew the answer. The wine was sickly sweet, cloying. She drank not for congeniality, but for courage.
“I introduced you at the engagement party. The son seemed to take a shine to you. I felt certain you would make a fine match.” His face swam up through the gloom, a lamprey from the shadows. “Or was there another misunderstanding? In any event, everything worked out fine, Regan, and you’ll learn that sometimes self-interest means putting long-term security ahead of affairs of the heart. Anyway, let’s drink to your father. Nothing, I’m sure, could spoil this moment for him. They’re in the office upstairs as we speak, blowing dry the ink.” And in case she didn’t get the point, which was to keep her big mouth shut, he clinked her glass again, hard enough that a bit of his own wine leaped in. Almost as if he’d meant to infect her, she would think.
60
ACTUALLY, HER NAME WAS NOT JENNY. This was a condition she shared with billions of other people living at that time, but most were oblivious to it, whereas Minh Thuy Nguyen thought about it at least once a day. Her father and mother had emigrated from Vietnam back before anyone knew to feel sorry for them. Not that there was any reason to feel sorry, Dad said—the country had been at war on and off for a thousand years, like most of the rest of the globe, and anyway the Nguyens weren’t living in some shell-shocked Indochinese village but in a wide white ranch house in an unincorporated canton of the San Fernando Valley where they didn’t pay city taxes and where in the early evening when the light homed in low over the mountains and the DDT truck rolled through to spray for mosquitoes, the yards’ synchronized sprinklers could have been the fountains of Versailles, wasting their bounty on the ridiculous desert grass. But white people turned out to be profligate with their pity, too; as early as middle school, other kids had started looking at her with that expression that said, Vietnam … Yikes! And so, on the first day of sixth grade, when Mr. Kearney called the roll, Minh Thuy had corrected him. “It’s Jenny.”
“Jen-yi?” he ventured.
“Jenny.” She was only twelve, but already she knew he couldn’t care less what she called herself. California was beautiful in exactly this way: so long as you kept your lawn green and your grades up, you could do any weird old thing you wanted. And Jenny was one hundred percent Californian.
The new name split her life in two. There was, on the one hand, home: the shady world where she continued to answer to Minh Thuy. Her mother, a migraine sufferer, kept semi-sheer drapes drawn through the bright hours of the day, so that the sunken living room stayed dim. Minh Thuy could barely make out the jade Buddha and the crucifix butted up like bookends on the mantel there, the photographs of overseas relatives, or the volumes of Victor Hugo on the desk where her father composed his weekly letter to the editor of the West Covina Times. She might hear him in the kitchen chopping vegetables, the chock of his knife on a cutting board of space-age polymer, while her mother lay on a straw mat by the coffeetable with a washcloth over her eyes, as if dead. (The softness of American beds overwhelmed her when she was having an attack, she claimed, though surely she could have found someplace less conspicuous to lie down.) The migraines provided a handy alibi for why Minh Thuy never invited friends over, for why every sleepover or Brownie troop meeting took place at Mandy’s house, or Trish’s, or Nell’s. Only later did she realize her parents had used the migraines as an excuse, too. She would think back on Dad’s wet bar, a hundred dollars’ worth of liquor bottles to which he took a dustcloth each Saturday, as though at any second the house might fill with his colleagues from Lockheed. She would think of the hi-fi boug
ht on installments from Sears, used only for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Sunday afternoons. Of Mom and Dad sitting stock-still on the davenport, listening to Samson et Dalila. She would recall the strange smells of her friends’ houses, one like fish food, one like cottage cheese; she couldn’t remember which was which, but if they smelled strange, how must her own house smell to them? The world of Minh Thuy was like an odor that, terrifyingly, she could not herself detect. But within those walls she’d remained an obedient child, saying her prayers, eating soup in the summertime, practicing her violin in the garage so as not to disturb her mother.
Her growing up, however, had been done in the other world, the world of Jenny, with its miles of highways, its drive-ins, beaches, and bougainvillea, chaparral, Tastee Freez, wildfires, stucco, cineplexes, bumper cars, in-ground pools, planned subdivisions up in the foothills with grids of paved streets and manholes and streetlights, as if someone had forgotten to build the houses, or as if some B-movie bomb had vaporized them. In high school, she would drive up here with Chip McGillicuddy after double features or beer blasts. Mouths sort of sore from kissing, they’d park in one of the deserted cul-de-sacs and look out over the corresponding cul-de-sacs below. She thought of this as the essential Californian activity, gazing upon your life from a great distance, trying to infer from trees and highways and restaurants shaped like the foods they served which house was your own. (This was before she moved to New York and discovered that recasting your life in cinematic terms was a national phenomenon, possibly a global one.) From this height, and with smog framing the sodium lights in soft focus, her house looked like everyone else’s. And when Chip worked his hand up under her shirt and handled a small breast clumsily, like an avocado he was testing for ripeness, she could have been anyone’s girlfriend, could have been anyone, which at the time seemed like what she wanted. She reclined in her seat and stared at the leatherette ceiling of the McGillicuddy family wagon and thanked God for the Golden West.
She stayed in-state for college, on a scholarship to Berkeley. Her father clucked about it and read aloud an editorial about recent misbehavior on campus, but he was attached as only an immigrant with a doctorate can be to the idea of public education, and he knew it was the best school in the system. She and Chip continued to go steady, though he was at U.C. Santa Barbara and she was concerned about where all this was headed. He was one of those people who, set walking toward a point on the horizon, would keep on in a straight line without ever noticing that the horizon never got any closer. He would have marched straight into marriage, though what he’d meant those times he’d said he loved her couldn’t possibly have been what she meant when she thought of being loved.
College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more. She wanted to cast her self-reinvention as Jenny from the Valley in theoretical terms, as a form of resistance, or a heroic negative capability—probably because somewhere underneath, she was ashamed. It had been painful, being two people. There was a civil war inside her. Phone calls grew strained.
Then, in December, Chip invited her family to his family’s Christmas party—an overture that felt like a sneak attack, in that the invitation, addressed to , came in the mail while she was still finishing exams upstate, and she didn’t have a chance to stop her father from opening it, from RSVPing enthusiastically and posthaste. Her mother was seeing a chiropractor now, the headaches seemed further apart and milder in intensity and duration, and as they drove together through the weird SoCal Yuletide, the fake snow on the roofs of bungalows, fir trees in the windows of service stations flanked by palms, the massive cognitive dissonance generated by consumer culture, the Cartesian fallacy, and so forth, Jenny saw Mom flinch a little when Dad reached across the seat to take her hand.
She watched them at the party, too, a bourgeois affair where men in hibiscus-colored shirts stood around drinking buttered rum while women circulated restlessly and kids reconnoitered out back behind the pool house to watch planes streak in over the Valley and get high. The desert moon stayed up for as many as eighteen hours a day. The desert could seem, itself, like the surface of the moon.
Having ignored Chip’s hints that they should go for a drive, she returned to find her mother surrounded by a little scrum of husbands. Mom’s English wasn’t stellar, on account of her years of isolation, encountering America through a tube, but you wouldn’t have known that to look at her. She laughed almost silently at the men’s jokes. There was condescension on Chip’s father’s face, as if he were saying to his friends, Look how easy it is to make these Celestials laugh. Also, the man was drunk. He was an alcoholic, according to his son, and this was the first time Jenny had seen him inter pocula, but the implications for Chip and for family life in general seemed to fall away beside the manifest injustice of being made to perform for these people like trained monkeys, of having to be Jenny, and of not quite being able to recall the country that was supposed to be hers, on whose benighted people the fascist Nixon was even now dumping his bombs. She squeezed her mother’s elbow. “We have to go.”
“But we have such a good time,” Mom enunciated, as if it were a phrase learned from a book.
“I’m not feeling good. We need to go.”
She lay on the backseat on the ride home, faking menstrual cramps and watching colored lights slide across the window. While Mom continued to practice her English—What a lovely home—and Dad pretended they would return the invitation, she kept seeing the way they’d bowed when they laughed, like spring-mounted toys. Kept hearing their tiny coughing fits of laughter.
Back at school, she started to go by Minh. Whereas her parents’ Viet-ness had once been something to conceal, it now provoked from people—when it had been established, through decorous indirection, that she wasn’t in fact Chinese, or Thai—a kind of awe. It was something she’d accomplished, rather than something she was. It didn’t seem worth mentioning that her dad, a Catholic, had supported the Diem regime. Her grades suffered, but only slightly, as a result of the rallies and parties and self-criticism circles and hybrids thereof she began attending, and of nights spent doing her own small part for the sexual revolution. (Even this, she later reflected, was not an unmixed good, in that it created an unrealistic picture of the world to come. But what didn’t, in those days?) As Mother Mountain, she appeared weekly on the 10-watt student radio station, punctuating excerpts from Minima Moralia and philippics about the aerospace industry and modern kitchen appliances with renditions of Stockhausen on her detuned violin. Relative to the rest of the student body, her drug intake was moderate-to-fair. She went home less. It was a heady time.
Then came the occupation of the deans’ building, and the arrest, and Dad showing up alone to bail her out. At the start of the long drive south, he told her her mother was leaving him—for the chiropractor.
Jenny turned her face to the window, feeling at last the full force of something she must have been concealing from herself for a very long time. As if the point of the blade were aimed not into her but out. She wanted it not to hurt, the institution of marriage being such a heteronormative cop-out and all. Or was it possible to love something and hate it at the same time? For liberty to be tyrannical, and tyranny liberating?
They arrived at home to find the house empty, and finally, after so long, she could smell it, like salt and paper. It didn’t smell any more or less weird than Trish’s house had probably smelled to Mandy, or Mandy’s to Nell, and she wanted to call them all up with a belated invitation to spend the night, so that she wouldn’t have to cry alone, but she hadn’t spoken to Nell or Mandy or Trish in a long time, and all she had now was her father, and later, in the chiropractor’s houseboat on the far side of the 405, her mom, and the two Valiums she’d smuggled home in her laundry bag.
Philosophy s
eemed to require that one take a position on the questions that reasserted themselves now. Tradition vs. Progress. Reason vs. Passion. Being vs. Time or vs. Nothingness. Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn’t decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you’d lived, and the places you’d come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.
61
SNOWING HELL OUT HERE. Through the windshield, Regan couldn’t see the road, or even trees beyond their skeletal trunks. She kept picturing herself and the car sliding off among them, into the nothing. With the dashboard lighter. With Kotex and peanut butter and a pack of chewing gum gone brittle from the cold. Over and over her little inventory she ran, like the girl with the prayer in the Salinger story. Or the kids who sang that song on the radio. How many times had it played in the hours she’d been driving? She’d listened till their dumb sweet voices hurt too much, and then turned it off until that hurt too much, and then back on, and there was the song again. She could count on hearing it several more times, drifted in at the forest’s edge, as she warmed herself with the lighter and sucked the last nutrients from the gum. Snow mounting over the ragtop. Air dimming as night fell. Blood slowing, mercury dropping. And finally miles of uninflected white. Nuclear oblivion had been a nightmare since childhood; now she knew it was what she deserved. For in these last few days, what was in her womb had seemed to stir. Probably that, too, was just her imagination, but it had forced her to examine her choices. Say she really had waited too long. She could never tell L., much less marry him, as Daddy, still in the dark, would want. And a child with no father would shackle her to the tainted fortune she planned to give up as soon as her acting would support her. True, she could change her name, go somewhere far from New York. But what if she hated the kid for forcing her into a grim life in the provinces, the way she’d hated having it inside her, this thing made not of love, but of pain?
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