Such a Pretty Face

by Ann Angel

  Nikki shakes her head. “You can’t. The custom taxes are more than what you pay for the clothes.” She looks pleased to be delivering bad news.

  “So where do you buy clothes?” I ask.

  “In the States. On furlough.” Nikki flickers her fingers as if to say, “Duh, of course.”

  We won’t get furlough until Christmas. I shrink a little more into my “wrong” clothes.

  A bell shrills. Nikki and I plunge into a swirling mass of kids shoving their way into the building at the first bell.

  I am invisible.

  There are invisible kids in every school. Not nerds or misfits or obvious freaks. Just anonymous. The ones in the yearbook I swear I’ve never seen before. Kids who fade into the walls.

  Gap-dressed kids stream by me, pressing me against the wall. My pale, pinky-white skin matches the wall color perfectly. Lauren, the Amazing Wall-Colored Girl!

  Nikki dumps me off at World Lit.

  “I’ll find you for lunch,” she says. It sounds like a threat.

  At lunchtime, Nikki and I wedge into the food line. I scan the cafeteria. I am the only person my color.

  Oh, there are plenty of Caucasians. The ones with permanent perfect tans. The ones Mom predicts will “look like shoe leather when they’re forty.” Well, maybe, but right now they look hot. Who cares about forty?

  They have perfect tans and teeth and everything else. It’s like being in the middle of a TV movie about high school, where everybody is supposed to be sixteen, but you know the actors are really thirty. Perfect hair, perfect teeth. Perfect outfits.

  The Thai girls especially. Like they’re trying to blend in. Look American. Which is weird because all the Thai girls are incredibly gorgeous with honey-colored skin and silky waterfalls of hair.

  We move up to the steam tables. “You can get Thai, American, or vegetarian,” Nikki yells over clattering trays and four hundred kids talking. I look at the glistening piles of unfamiliar foods. At home, Kuhn Noi makes familiar American food.

  “Hurry up,” Nikki snaps. “We only have twenty minutes.”

  I quickly point to the only familiar items in the line, a burger and fries. Nikki and I elbow our way to a table of Perfect American Teens, all named Megan or Christopher.

  “So where are you from?” a blond Megan asks me.

  “Atlanta.” My fries taste weird.

  “I mean overseas.” The Megan pokes at a plate of Thai noodles. She looks more interested in rearranging her lunch.

  “I’ve never lived overseas before.” Peanut oil. The fries were cooked in peanut oil. And the burger is seasoned with lemongrass. The “American” lunch is a big mistake.

  “Oh.” The Megan divides her noodles into little piles. End of conversation.

  The Megans and Christophers are more than happy to tell me where they’ve lived. Seoul. Sydney. Singapore. None of them has spent much time in the States. They all call it “home,” but they’ve never lived there.

  They don’t really have a home.

  It’s a scary thought.

  Almost as scary as the rest of the conversation. Lunch reminds me of a TV show I saw back in Atlanta. It was about something called “speed dating.” These single people would get together and talk one-on-one for five minutes. Then a timer would go off. Everybody would change partners and talk to somebody else for five minutes. At the end of the evening, they would ask out the people who had been interesting for five minutes.

  The Megans and Christophers ask all these questions. A wrong answer, and I’m history.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” I want to yell. “Give me a chance.” But the questions keep coming. This is the chance.

  I see them taking me in. All of me. No-color hair, nothing sort of face, the wrong clothes. Not fat, not thin. Not short, not tall.

  Just not.

  Suddenly, like someone has turned off a switch, the questions stop.

  And the ignoring starts. Conversation shoots over and around me.

  I’m out.

  “Did you hear what happened to Jordan?” asks a Christopher with spiky blond hair. “Moved to Beijing over the weekend. Didn’t even get to say bye.”

  “Bummer,” says another Christopher through a mouthful of fries.

  Then I get it. In this world, transfers can happen over the weekend. People decide who you are in a twenty-minute lunch.

  I am doomed.

  When I come home from school, Kuhn Noi is in the kitchen, chopping mangoes for a fruit salad.

  “Sawasdee ka, Kuhn Lauren,” she says. “Sawasdee” is an all-purpose greeting, just as “Kuhn” is a title of respect tacked on before names.

  Kuhn Noi hands me a piece of mango.

  “Kop juhn ka,” I say. “Thank you,” “hello,” and “foreigner” are my entire Thai vocabulary.

  I suck the juice from the mango as I watch Kuhn Noi’s knife flash in the afternoon sunlight.

  I think about how Mom freaked when she learned that not only were we getting a housekeeper, but that she would live in the maid’s room behind the kitchen.

  “I can do my own housekeeping, thank you,” Mom insisted. “I don’t want some strange woman living in my apartment.”

  “Most Thais don’t speak English,” said Dad. “And Thai is almost impossible for an adult to learn. You will need someone to grocery shop for you.”

  “I can’t buy my own food?” Mom looked at Dad like he’d lost his mind.

  “Produce is bought from the street market. And even if you could speak Thai well enough to haggle, the vendors tend to have two prices. One for Thais and one for foreigners.”

  So Kuhn Noi, a little walnut of a woman, who could be any age between twenty and death, came to live in the closet behind the kitchen. Only her eyes tell me that she is far older than she looks. Her eyes glow like the burnished mahogany walls of the apartment. Wise, ancient eyes.

  Kuhn Noi is my best friend.

  “More mango?” asks Kuhn Noi. I take another sliver from her elegant brown fingers.

  According to other farangs, you should not be friendly with “the servants.”

  “They won’t respect you,” the farangs say. “They will take advantage.”

  But Kuhn Noi isn’t like that. For one thing, she is much older than the hill country nannies I see at the pool or park. They are sturdy and round faced, with long braids and gap-toothed smiles, and they don’t speak English.

  Kuhn Noi is small, birdlike, and hides her hair under a silk scarf wound around her head. She also speaks excellent English.

  “I work for many American,” she tells me. “They teach me English. Americans have good heart.”

  For Kuhn Noi, everyone has either a bad heart or a good heart.

  The kitchen is the center of Kuhn Noi’s world. After homework and supper, I go there to talk to her. When the dishes are done and the countertops clean, this is the maid’s living room. Sometimes, late at night, I hear the high-pitched chatter of other maids.

  “We talk about our madams,” says Kuhn Noi when I ask. The maids call their female employers “madam.”

  Kuhn Noi files her tiny almond-shaped nails. Her hands are wrinkled and rough from endless hot-water scrubbings of floors and windows and dishes. But that doesn’t stop her nightly manicure.

  “Prani, from fourth floor, she quit her madam. She go home to vote and not come back.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Her madam fat. She lose face working for a fat woman.”

  For a minute, I think Kuhn Noi is kidding. But Thais do not make that kind of joke. I know Prani’s madam. She’s a little big in the butt, but she sure isn’t fat.

  “The maids, they say, ‘Noi, you work for fat woman.’ ” Kuhn Noi carefully brushes on clear nail polish.

  I listen, fascinated. Horrified. Is this how the Thais see us? Mom is no hot babe, but she’s not supposed to be. She’s a mom!

  “But I say, ‘Yes, madam fat. But she has whitest skin in whole building.’ ” Kuhn Noi splays her newl
y polished fingers on a worn-out towel to dry. “ ‘And a good heart, too.’ ”

  I look down at my own not-so-skinny white arms. Kuhn Noi catches me.

  “You have pretty white skin, like madam. You take care. No go out in sun without sunblock. You no want to be like Kuhn Noi.” She reaches into her flowered silk makeup bag and pulls out a blue plastic jar with fancy gold Thai script on the label. A very white-skinned Thai woman in a slinky dress lounges across the lettering.

  “What’s that?” I ask as Kuhn Noi dips the ends of her fingers into the pink stuff and rubs it into the backs of her hands.

  “Bleach cream.” She slathers it from wrist to elbow and massages it in. “White skin, very beautiful.” She starts on her face.

  Back in Atlanta, the drugstores sold bleach creams, too. Only the women on those jars were light-skinned black women. I always thought it was pathetic that someone would want to change their skin color.

  I decide that Kuhn Noi only wants to turn her skin to the buttercream color of my Thai classmates. I can understand that. I’d like to be a slightly different color myself. Only darker.

  Still, it’s sad. After all, Kuhn Noi has a “good heart.” But good hearts don’t show the way that light skin and long shiny hair do.

  Another day, another lunch with the Megans. No one speaks to me. I am invisible. The Megans talk about plastic surgery.

  “It is sooo cheap here,” says a long-haired Megan. “Mama absolutely promised I could have my nose done during winter break.”

  Why? Her nose looks fine to me.

  “Well, don’t go to that doctor Ashley went to,” says Nikki. “She looks totally worse.”

  “What Ashley needs is a head transplant,” says the Megan.

  They all laugh. I take my tray to the garbage chute. Another burst of laughter as I pass the table. What are the Megans saying about me?

  I have ten minutes before class. In the restroom, I hear the same sounds I heard in the bathroom of my old school after lunch. Girls throwing up. Cough. Gag. Spit. Flush. It sounds like every stall has a girl with a finger down her throat.

  I am scared in this country. Not of the country. But of the farangs.

  I try to find a place at the mirror, but I have to wait. Girls lip-glossing, hair-brushing, or just looking. Looking for what? What do they see?

  Finally, it’s my turn at the mirror.

  Next to me, a Thai girl tosses a pouch purse the size of a laundry bag onto the narrow shelf beneath the mirror. Someone calls to her in Thai. She turns quickly, knocking her purse to the floor with a crunchy whack. Pens and combs and lip gloss roll from the purse’s mouth.

  And a jar. A blue plastic jar with a whiteskinned Thai babe on the label. The jar lands at my feet.

  Kuhn Noi’s jar.

  The slide show runs in my head. A foreign land. Click. American girls, throwing up. Click. Thai girls, dressed like American girls. Click. A woman with a good heart. Click. A jar of bleach cream.

  I hand the girl the jar.

  “Kop juhn ka,” she mumbles, but her eyes are sad and envious. Of me.

  The girl with the wall-colored skin.

  I am sad too, for this girl—this girl with honey skin and silky hair and graceful hands.

  Here in the land of beauty, we are all farangs.

  Chris Lynch

  I never loved anybody, before a Saturday in June. Actually it would have been Sunday, since all the stuff that happened happened mostly after the dateline, after midnight, which I figure is when most of the real things in life happen. I usually sleep through them.

  Love, though. Never really, anyway, love. As far as I know. As far as I can tell, I never loved anybody, except for possibly my mother, before Saturday. Or Sunday. It wasn’t by choice. Not a decision I made, or something I controlled. It was just not what I did with people. With people? To people? At them, around them? What is it you do with love, anyway? Not important. The thing is, it was just not my thing, and it was not my fault. It just was.

  “Well, certainly, it’s hot. Sure, it’s hot. We all feel the heat, and we’re free to move around. We are free to go outside, and to have a smoke, and to drink a couple of icy-cold Diet Cokes, if we so desire. For you, in this . . . thing, god, it has to be ten times worse with the heat.”

  It, this thing, would be my bed.

  The Stryker bed. Sounds dynamic, no?

  No.

  Here’s what the Stryker bed does. It makes a sandwich out of you, and then it makes a rotisserie chicken out of you, and if I’m leaning a little heavy on the food comparisons, then that’s fair enough because the other thing the Stryker bed does to me is it makes me want to tell everybody to just eat me.

  Sorry. But what it is, it’s like a cot type of bed and every two hours when I’ll be just lying on my back—you know my back, the broken one—being a brave young soldier indeed, the team comes in and clamps a whole other cot right down on top of me. There’s a little hole cut for my face so I can do things like see and breathe and probably I look like the carnival attraction where you try to bop the clown with a baseball. Maybe we’ll play it, eventually.

  There’s no need for more entertainment yet, though, because the best part is next. That’s when my handlers all get together and heave-ho, here we go. They crank a handle and shove me over until the world does a quick gainer with a half twist and I come to a stop with a thump that leaves my spine feeling like it’s tearing off in two directions. I’m staring at the speckled, screaming-white tiled floor through my Stryker cot face-hole, adding more screaming and speckling to the floor because I am crying my guts out all over it.

  Every two hours, pretty much the same scene.

  I am very sorry about that. Because I know what I look like when I cry. That is why I stopped crying when I was five. Caught a glimpse of my yogurt cheeks, my brown-spotted forehead, my copperwiring hair matting down along throbbing, veiny temples, and I scared myself completely and permanently straight. I looked like Raggedy Ann, if she were sitting on the tip of a flaming spear. So the crying thing just couldn’t happen.

  And didn’t. For twelve tight-ass years. Until a Saturday in June. Sunday.

  Here’s what I did, on Saturday night. It is a thing I do. Not the breaking-my-back thing, which was kind of a special-occasion deal, but the rest of it. I drive out almost every Saturday night unless I have another engagement—which is another way of saying I drive out every Saturday night—to the airport.

  I don’t have any business there, I just go. I do like other people; I watch planes take off and land, I have something to eat. I try to get around to all the different restaurants in all the different terminals, for variety, and have a little meal there. I’m compiling a little book of reviews that I’m clipping together for I’m not sure what. Maybe somebody will like it. Maybe it will be useful sometime even though the restaurants all look and taste the same.

  After I eat, I walk, because that is good for digestion. It is also good for looking at people. I stare at people. I try not to stare, but I know I am doing it because of the bug-eyed, mind-your-business look I get when I am caught. I don’t stop, though. I watch all the couples and the families and the rowdy-guys groups. I like to watch especially at the big airport moments, when lots of people are just slamming back together after somebody’s trip, and lots more are yanking apart because the airline is making them say good-bye right this minute. Airports are all about tears and giggles, and you really can’t help but feel somehow like you are part of it, especially if you go regularly like I do and so are a natural part of the scenery.

  Sometimes I go to a greeting area, like outside of customs at the international terminal, and I wait there for a long time, just as if I were there to pick somebody up. But toward the end, when most people have been picked up, the only ones left are the raggedy stragglers who look half dead and wholly alone because nobody is there for them. When they come, I go, because they kind of spoil it.

  But none of all this broke my back, did it? No,
what broke my back was that I was driving way too fast, far too fast, late Saturday night to get away from that airport. I don’t drive fast; I know better. I stopped driving fast when earlier in the year, at the start of my senior year, our headmaster addressed us all in the auditorium, pointed his finger out over the crowd, and insisted, “Two to four of you people will not be here for graduation. That is what happens every year. And we will probably lose you in an automobile. Try and make it to graduation, kids.” And that was it; he left the stage.

  Pretty effective speech, as far as these things go. It worked on me, anyway. I wanted to live, and I wanted to graduate. Not entirely sure why, but there I was.

  And I was a safe driver before a Saturday night in June. Before I felt a need to speed away from the airport and flew through the airport tunnel probably faster than the planes above it, and flew out of the tunnel far too fast for anybody who seriously wanted to make the sharp right turn up the upramp to the expressway.

  And so, violence. I have millions of flaws, more flaws than almost anybody, more flaws on my anemic face alone than you probably have in your whole soul. Except that the main flaw I always did not have was violence. I was never in any way a violent guy, and never once did I deliberately hurt another body’s outsides.

  But now it comes in bunches. Day and night, but especially night, the violence, the visions, the scenes come in monster waves. Me fighting. Me driving fast, faster, aiming for a crash. Blood, and speed, and shattering bones, and stuff that before a Saturday night in June was never, ever a part of my life is suddenly very central to my nightly life. In nearly every scene, my skull winds up mashed like rotten fruit.

  Morphine, I think, has something to do with it. They give me, apparently, as much as they are allowed, because I am broken pretty good, and my genius surgeon who is busy but worth the wait is keeping me waiting, keeping me broken, for a week before operating. It kind of hurts a lot when we are nearing time for my next morphine. But then, right after, other things take over.

  “You know, Nursey-Nurse, I’m one of those guys who lives life too close to the edge. That’s what got me in this situation.”