The village guy looks down at the two white tablets I’ve placed in his palm. He looks up at me. He’s not sure what to do with the aspirin.
“Swallow them. Eat them,” I say. I point to my mouth.
He smiles and nods; he throws the aspirin into his mouth. He chews them; instead of swallowing, though, he spits the aspirin into his hand. Then he rubs the chalky paste he’s made into the skin of his forehead. The man thanks me by giving a wave of his hand and walks away with a white smear on his forehead. I see him meet his wife, who is waiting for him near the tent entrance; he points to his forehead. She smiles and touches his face, then brings her hand down to his shoulder and says something to him. They both smile, and as they leave the tent together I think of Donna. At that point I haven’t seen Donna for eight months. Jason is a year and a half old, changing every day and I couldn’t see any of it. They are living in Chicago. Donna sent me a recording of Jason’s sounds and words, his remarkable voice; for days after I received the tape, I listened and rewound and listened again. My body was filled by that music.
One evening, Donna got home from our new local library and found me sitting at my desk, half-soused on three whiskey sours and most of a can of beer. She came into the room to say hello. She bent and kissed me on the cheek, but she didn’t mention the smell of whiskey. She looked at the computer screen. I was researching lizards. I said, “I like to know what I’m up against.”
“Harold, they’re not hurting anything,” said Donna. “You should leave them alone.”
“Right,” I said, “but they’re in our house.”
“What’s that?” she said, pointing to the screen. “Is that the kind we have here?”
The lizards we get are small, pale-skinned except for the reddish pigment along their spines. I started clicking through the different images I’d found. It was beginning to feel like a ridiculous exercise: How was this going to help? Was I going to type the lizards away? Was I going to search them out of existence? It was pathetic—I was sitting there drinking, showing Donna my pastiche of little lizard pictures, as though it were a garden I’d made for her.
“Oh, look,” she said. She liked a delicate yellow one with a loose sack of scaly flesh under its chin.
“You smell good,” I told Donna. She smelled like salt from the beach, and like herself, a scent that’s vaguely floral. Sort of like an orchid, if you’ve ever smelled one of those.
After I finished on the Web, I went out to the back to fire up the grill. Donna had brought home some fresh snapper, and it was almost dinnertime (I thought it was, anyway: when you stop working, dinnertime can become the focus of your day, and somehow your preparations for dinner stretch on hours longer than they ever did when you worked, when you were a doctor with a small practice in a little town way up north, the thought of it can make you shiver). Our grill was on the little patio by the side of the kidney-shaped pool. As I stumbled through the sliding glass doors, hauling the bag of coals, I began to hear a splashing. Donna was behind me in the kitchen, and we didn’t have any guests, but at first I didn’t think to worry about what might be swimming around in our pool. My mind was fixed on the grill, and, curiously enough, it remained fixed on the grill for a second after I slid the doors open, stepped out back, and saw the large black turtle paddling in our bright clean poolwater. These damn creatures were every-fucking-where: reptiles, amphibians, what have you. I walked around the edge of the pool, watching the turtle, until I reached the grill and opened its top. But then I set down the charcoal and went back into the house.
“Donna, look at this,” I called. She came and stood by me at the sliding glass doors.
“Oh,” she said.
“Can you believe that?”
“Harold,” she said, “let it find its way out.”
But the black shell went around and around. The turtle had a strange snout; it seemed to have a little black funnel instead of a mouth, some little suction device to breathe in its food, its air. I couldn’t figure it out—another little alien species in Florida. How do you live a life like that, swimming around in someone’s pool without a mouth? And how the hell do you grow into a twenty-five pound turtle if you can’t eat solids? (Because this turtle looked to weigh about twenty-five pounds.) So the wide dark shell continued its kidney-shaped circuit around our pool, that liquid emerald bean, giant and sunken, where all my grandchildren will learn to swim. That was a decision I made when Donna and I moved down here: the pool would be for the grandkids. They would be swimmers, and their comfort in water would make them more confident and able on land. I would contribute to their lives with the shape of my home, and with the weather my new home state could provide.
And now here was this turtle in my pool.
“It looks trapped,” Donna said.
It was her pool too; couldn’t I keep my wife happy and secure in our home?
“But just leave it alone,” Donna said.
I went into the garage for the shovel.
The shovel is an heirloom, a relic, an old, banged-up garden shovel, heavy and brown, and we’ve had it since our first house in upstate New York. Why we brought it down to Florida, I have no idea. There was always something to shovel in New York; the snow or the soil of the zucchini patch or the rocks that stuck up out of the grass. But in Florida, there is no snow, and everything else has been dug for you before you arrive. I went out back holding the shovel tight, my right hand wrapped like an unlucky starfish around the wood handle, my left hand stabilizing the shaft.
“Harold,” Donna said, “no. Leave it alone.”
“I just want to help it,” I told her.
I looked into the pool, and there came the circling turtle, like some monster aquatic version of a toy train, making quiet splashes with its rubbery black feet. The shallow lines in its shell looked as though they were drawn by children. The turtle eyed me, I swear it did, slightly twisting its strange snout to get a better look. In its eye I saw a kind of understanding—it was a martyr for wilderness. It knew it.
“You’re going to hurt it!” Donna said. Her voice was raised and the skin of her face was flushed and angry.
“Donna,” I said, “this is our pool.” When it passed under me, I dug into the water with the shovel and trapped the turtle against the side of the pool. Adrenaline surged through me; I lifted and the thing came out of the water with the shovel. I was trembling, my whole body shaking, lifting just that modest living weight. Donna circled around the pool towards me. She was not calm. She was agitated, making little movements with her head, and reprimanding me loudly: “Let it go! What are you doing, Harold? Drop the turtle!”
I could feel the grip loosening in my right fingers and thumb. “Donna, open the gate that leads out by the garage. Hurry, babe. The gate.”
“Is this what our retirement’s going to be?” she cried out in anguish and wonder. “Just a bunch of baggage about whether you’re still strong enough to keep everything in order? To protect your little piece of the world?”
“Will you help me?” I said back. My arms were shaking; the turtle was still at the end of the shovel. Donna’s neck was flushed and her lips were wet. If I was old, she was old. But Donna didn’t seem old to me. Donna opened her mouth to speak, but then I let go, and there was a great splash. I heard her say something about love. The shovel dropped in after the turtle. My wife walked into our perfectly new Florida townhouse, still flushed, all that blood up close to the skin of her face. When the animal control worker arrived, I gave him an idea of what had happened—why there was a shovel at the bottom of the pool in addition to a turtle, now barely staying afloat in its slow circle. “It’s almost always better to call us,” he said. He produced a blue net from the back of his truck, scooped up the exhausted swimmer, and hauled it away. It left a trail of water.
In Nam we had green military-issue shovels, lightweight and collapsible; because I was a doctor, I only used my shovel near the base. We had to set up what were called piss tubes to urinate in, which
were very long artillery shell casings placed a few feet into the ground into a bed of stone. I helped dig in one set of piss tubes: they were placed at a 15–20 degree angle so that you weren’t urinating straight down at a 90 degree angle to the ground, but rather at an angle compatible with the natural urinary stream of the average man. The height of these tubes was about 3.5 feet and the diameter of the opening was 4–5 inches. The area was enclosed by a brown canvas material to shield you from view during the act of micturation.
Besides the piss tubes, we had to build shitters, wooden sheds with a slab of wood inside under which were 55-gallon drums cut in half, holding a few inches of kerosene. We shared latrine duty on a rotating basis, burning the old drums and replacing them with new ones. There was a lot of gagging and fleeing upwind.
Right after the incident with the turtle, I went shopping for a new bottle of whiskey, to get away from Donna and give myself time to think. I didn’t even feel like a drink, really. I bought an expensive bottle so I could worry about the price of it, worry about my retirement funds and investments, instead of worrying about what had passed between me and my wife. I put the bottle on the kitchen counter when I got home and stood looking at it. I didn’t want any whiskey, but the bottle caught my attention. When I heard Donna’s footsteps behind me I didn’t turn around. I kept my eyes on the smooth red wax that had been poured over the top of the whiskey bottle by the manufacturer, over the cap and neck of the bottle, a regal, shining seal. My temptation to break that seal was like a kid’s need to jump in a puddle.
“Harold,” Donna said.
I turned to face her. Her hair was wet from the shower, and she was wearing a bra and a pair of shorts. “New whiskey,” I said, and I tapped the bottle.
Donna was quiet for a second.
“You know, when I was walking on the beach earlier today,” she finally said, “it got me thinking. The beaches down here are so pristine, and they’re never crowded—they’re elitist beaches. They’re almost perfect. But I was walking along the water, and then I didn’t want to be there anymore. All these leather-skinned, sun-darkened, gold-wearing . . . ”
“Don’t say ‘old,’ ” I warned her.
“That’s not the point,” Donna said. “It was their bodies. They were all baking their almost-naked bodies, stretched out on chaise lounges. It wasn’t pleasant; I didn’t like it.”
“What does this have to do with us, Donna?” I dreaded her answer; I’m a bit of a sunbather myself.
“It has to do with the place we live in, Harold,” she said. “I don’t feel the same down here. I don’t feel like myself, and I don’t feel similar to other people who live here. Let’s be honest: How many of the women down here don’t have plastic surgery? I want to move.”
“You want to move? Where would we move?”
“Away,” she said. “Or—just to a different place.”
“Move out?” I said. “You’re going to leave me,” I said. “Are you going to leave me?” I hadn’t been away from her, not really, since my year in Vietnam. The worst year of my life.
“I don’t want to leave you,” she said. “But I want to move.”
“But this place,” I said. “It’s for us, for the grandkids, the family.”
“It might be for them,” Donna said, “but it’s not for us. It’s not for me, at least.”
“We’ve been married 39 years,” I said. That’s all I could say. We’d never disagreed about a home.
Donna told me she was moving back up north, and I could go with her or stay in Florida, it was my decision. “I’m thinking Boston, maybe Chicago,” she said. “You’re welcome anytime.”
“This feels like a divorce,” I said.
“Please: I have no interest in divorcing you,” she said.
That night, we had excellent lovemaking. Then I had a dream.
I dreamt of another invader in the swimming pool. But this time instead of a turtle in our pool, it was something larger. For a while Donna and I watched it through our sliding glass doors, until, despite a chorus of protests, I went out to the pool with the shovel. Except it wasn’t our old garden shovel; somehow I held in my hands my collapsible Army shovel from Vietnam. The intruder in our pool—some primordial reptile—was gliding like a giant scaly squid stained in its own ink. A scaly squatter, a living tree limb, a floating dark exclamation mark in our emerald green pool. With eyes like bubbles that wouldn’t pop. I dug into the water; I lifted the beast—gigantic, five times my size, with teeth springing from a sweet muddy mouth, plus a tail like a wrecking ball, or a whip—and I stared right at the maw. The long reptile began to creep to me along the shaft of the shovel, moving on its sharp claws like a cat.
I woke up, and Donna was holding me, at least, curled into me with a knee up near my groin and an arm over me. She was sleeping with her mouth open, breathing loudly, which was just like her. I stared into the darkness of her mouth for a moment, and, assured that she was near me, I got myself to sleep.
MONICA SOK is a Cambodian American poet from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of the 2016–2018 Stadler Fellowship and is the author of Year Zero, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Sok received honors from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, MacDowell Colony, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and elsewhere. Her parents lived through the Khmer Rouge regime and in 1979, when Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia, fled to Khao-I-Dang. Sok’s poems discuss intergenerational trauma, familial silence, and growing up Cambodian American in Lancaster.
KAMPUCHEAN SKIN
i used to be her daughter
skin once caught in war
grew back ruggedas the land she was
a crushed nose dripping
watercolor on pictures
worth 4000 riel each
one dollar for smooth
stone faces of Angkor
i walked to her first
left my american friends behind
ignored the affordable glamoursequined
scarvescheckered kramaelephant blankets
fringed in goldall that bloomed there
to be boughtwoman with no face
wandering around with her pictures
in the marketplacei dug
into my pocket
waved a Washingtonfor all the watercolors
of Angkor
inside each illustrationred blurry figures bicycling
tuk tukking in circlesaround
a single stone face observing east
west after failingwhere are you from
where do you livein my mother’s tongue
she nodded to my friend
whose baby skin sprouted up like daisy
flowerbeds in thick silkyes she was beautiful
but when she called her skinsah att
before she called my skinsah att
which she didn’t
i can’t tell you how much my face hurt
kmao pockmarkedcolonized and mined like hers
LEFT-BEHIND LOOKS FOR THE APSARAS
Left-Behind saw apsara crowns floating in milk,
churning underneath a poached sun.
She watched the red-and-white-checkered Krama Man
smash skulls sometimes. He couldn’t see her
—small inside a tree trunk above the courtyard.
Soon, it would turn red over the kingdom.
Nobody liked that color, not since the evacuation,
especially the jungle. Strong smells of smoke prayers
rising above Ta Prohm temple’s roof. Left-Behind
scuttled back to her nest, climbed the neck
of the Octopus Tree to find the source of fire.
Where are the apsaras? she asked the trees.
But the trees pretended not to know anything.
Below, stone heads nodded to her, watching over
Angkor Thom. Smoke clouds sealed their mouths, shut
their eyes. Left-Behind squinted through the haze
to make clear the shrieks sh
e heard. To tell you what she saw,
she would have to whisper through this flute she found
in a branch. She couldn’t go near the circle of dancing women
or where the soldiers took them—near the palm trees
whose leaves blushed again and again, again and again.
WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER
He was cornered by the men in blue
at the bottom of the stairs outside.
One pointed a gun at him
made his hands flail
upward in alarm. He cowered behind
Pol Pot—ten times his stature, hands
on his hips as if he were the hero
protecting the victim.
Around the building he ran for it,
found me and told me the war was over,
kissed me, thrust me against the table—
I take his hand, climb the stairs
of my school, twist
the doorknob of a locked classroom
and round our way to the EXIT
where we climb the steps
of an ancient world wonder
from a pre-Angkorian time.
Inheriting the War Page 36