by Lan Cao
The ceremony is over and children now run up and down the apartment’s narrow hallway. Wine is served. Someone has opened the screen door leading to a small balcony. A man leans against the iron railing and lights up a cigarette. Perhaps he can sense that I am staring at him although his back is toward me. He turns around and gives me a cordial smile. I am frozen. I am fixed on the plain creaturely fact of his gesture. A moment ago, he had aimed a match across the matchbox’s rough surface and struck it. He had taken a long, pensive drag on his cigarette and slowly exhaled.
I run into the kitchen. Aunt An is at the sink, scrubbing a star fruit under a gush of water. She looks at me, mild-eyed, but she can tell from my expression that I am full of excitement. Yes, she says, making an experimental question mark with her voice.
I grab her sleeve as if to press her into urgency. I ask her over and over if the man with no legs smoked. She recalls the odor of cigarette at that house, yes. And next to her, where he sat, yes, she does recall someone smoking with deep, steady intakes. She remembers the glitter his hand produced. The cigarette was held in a gold holder. His fingers were stained with nicotine.
I can feel my heart skip. I press a palm against my chest as if to calm its quick, tremulous beat. I can feel it. Surely Mother is plotting to leave. Surely any of her Chinese friends, Younger Aunt Number Three the Rice Seller or Older Aunt Number Three the Pharmacist, will be of help. She is at their house now, putting together her final plan.
22
History Is Responsible
BAO, 2006
We are on the outer edge of winter, impatiently waiting for spring to arrive. Melted snow has disappeared and the first hardy heads of daffodils are poking through the earth’s shadows with raw abandon. I watch as Mai steers the car in turgid silence, slowly, cautiously, through an utterly familiar road that stretches from the house to the nursing home.
Yes, our father has just moved to a nursing home. Both he and Mai, he especially, put forth a common front regarding this fact: that it is temporary and hence utterly reversible. They see it as purely a matter of his health. He is not being abandoned. His belongings are still at home. The bed is as he left it the day he moved, blue cotton sheets, blue comforter neatly folded, lying at its foot. Every few days Mai peeks in. Sometimes she takes a paper towel and dusts his night tables. Being inside a space that has been his for years inspires an abiding sense of tenderness in her. When she closes the door she says a quiet “I love you,” something she has yet to tell him in person.
In Vietnam there would be no question that he would remain at home where, frail or not, he would continue to exercise his commendable prerogative as father. There is a stubborn faith that illness itself would not transform the fundamentals. More personal and financial resources would be turned over to the necessity of his care. Family would stay together—four walls, one roof, and many generations. Think of Aunt An, her husband, their son, and the son’s wife and baby, all together, struggling through the shared ruins of addiction and debt.
When Father was first admitted into the nursing home, it was meant to be temporary. He left with one bag, as if he were going on an overnight trip—a set of pajamas, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a hand towel, a pair of slippers, two undergarments, and a comb. Aunt An’s history at the nursing home facilitated his admission. Her presence also made his departure from home less abrupt.
I remember watching with a premonition of loss. His life was being pared down to the simplest elements. He feared he was becoming a responsibility. That was how he slipped away. He had become progressively weak, but after the fall in the bathroom, his decline was precipitous. The spectacle of his frailty concerned him—the cane, the tentative steps, the increasing effort it took to do his daily chores.
Mai fought the urge to flee the truth of our father’s diminishing existence. One moment she was sitting with a notebook and pen in her law firm office and the next moment she was driving home to pack him up. He had called the police and reported seeing a corpse on the floor of the apartment. The need to have him monitored was no longer something to be postponed. To keep Mai from feeling the prick of her own and others’ criticism, he characterized his move as temporary. It was an inaccurate rendering of the truth. Indeed, Mrs. An, efficient as always, brought a small suitcase from our apartment to the nursing home and filled out the post office change of address form for him. A morning passed, an evening, and then another. Light and dark sifted through his room at home. Just like that, he was gone, leaving behind a big space in a bedroom that remained incongruously full of his belongings. The towel he used to wash his face that morning still hangs on the bathroom rack. Mai never truly faced this manifest but unmentionable fact, that her father would remain at an institution for the rest of his life.
Indeed, at some point it was no longer her choice to make. He became sicker and weaker. His heartbeat became irregular. His lips sometimes turned purple, the color of dusk in Saigon. One lung, then another, collapsed and every breath he took had to be negotiated with increased agitation. His breathing became labored and erratic. He made moist, breathy sounds. There were good days but often there were terrible relapses.
When the doctor announced that he should stay at the nursing home, he gave the idea an approving and endorsing nod. Ever since then, Mai has become bound up with a sense of precautionary solicitude where our father is concerned. She is forever grateful that the nursing home he is in is the same one Aunt An has been working at for almost twenty years.
Still, she calls it the assisted-living facility presumably to miniaturize his daily needs and make them seem more manageable.
The window on the driver’s side is partly open and offers a light, cool breeze. Everything is bathed in a sun-warmed light tinted with a crisp freshness promised by the imminence of spring. A daylight crackle of new possibility hangs in the air. Yet she is driving as if she were headed for something less welcoming.
Today is the day Uncle Number Two visits Father at the nursing home. It is a new and absolutely astonishing development. It will be the first time we see Uncle Number Two in more than twenty-five years. He is flying from California, where he has been living since arriving in the United States by boat many years ago—when Mai was still in high school. Every few years he threatens to fly out to Virginia for a visit on the single stubborn conviction that his friendship with Father is too important to abandon. The first and only visit to Father within the first year of Uncle Number Two’s arrival was a colossal failure. There was no vindication. There were no embraces.
He first wrote Father a long letter when he made it to Malaysia and for some reason Father holds him responsible for what happened to Mother and Uncle Number Five after 1975. This is the insurmountable fact: He of all people is here and Mother is not. Why not?
Still, Uncle Number Two will arrive at Father’s bedside with, I imagine, the furious attention of a man trying to sidestep his friend’s deep reproach so he can salvage their common past. He is willing to suffer whatever humiliations necessary to resurrect their once-sanctified friendship. Mai believes she needs to play the part of buffer. I am privy to her thoughts but she is not privy to mine. Imagine it this way. She is the exterior. I am the core. I am buried inside her and can see her from the inside out. She believes she can make sense of the befuddling accusations that she knows Father will heap upon Uncle Number Two.
But I suspect otherwise. Father will lie in his bed with his arms rigid at his sides. Even in this position, he will strike a pugilistic stance. Uncle Number Two will bemoan the fact that his show of remorse, his desire to make amends, and his admission of fault, all thirty years’ worth of it, have failed to reunite the two. And Father will say that he does not believe any of Uncle Number Two’s contrition. And their conversation will, in the end, resolve nothing, accomplish nothing, mean nothing, despite the pain involved. Yet every year it seems they are destined to repeat it.
How have they gotten
so lost, Mai asks in her small voice.
I can guess at the answer. Perhaps the cracks in their friendship lie in a much larger perversity that transcends the intricate calibrations of who did what to whom. The cut is too deep and Father is too wounded to release the hurt. He hasn’t “let it go,” as Mai puts it, despite Uncle Number Two’s pleas of so many years ago. He will not let it go now, least of all now. Letting go is something Mai has done but it is not something we do.
Unlike me, Mai doesn’t have violent flashes that make her squint and blink and scream and gasp for air as if she could barely breathe. There is no terrible seizing up, no obstreperous thump that echoes through the gathering darkness of night. There are no moods or outbursts to send her staggering. There is, instead, just an aqueous, meager stillness that she perfects as she slowly progresses into Americanness, navigating through the routine of our new lives, slightly detached from the present, slightly unavailable. Nothing in the here and now truly gathers significance or makes a dent. It doesn’t matter because ultimately she can shrug it all off. I know, with a sense of droning certitude, that I am the one among the three of us who has been holding our blemishes inside me. She is where she is, fine and assimilated, because I have made it possible.
Our father is in bed, physically there, though seemingly disembodied. The shape and form of him, of his body’s physicality, can be discerned under the white sheets. I am equivocally moved. I reach out to him as if he were already slipping away. I want to sit by his bedside and listen to him spill his stories from long ago into the here and now. I like being the keepsake of his memories.
I call him Ba, which means “Father.” He leans forward and holds my hand. He is still unsure. Am I Mai or Bao.
“Is it you?” he asks. I nod. Mai nods.
He is discernibly tired. “Ba, let me sit you up,” I say as I prop a pillow behind his back. I touch his face to see if he needs a shave. His hair glides smoothly between my fingers. It doesn’t need to be brushed but I brush it anyway.
“Bao Bao,” he says as he relinquishes himself to me. I smile. He knows I am the one who tends to his daily needs.
He squeezes my hand. I am touched. Our individual consciousness converges. Ba is a beautiful word. A word that gives and receives. Ba is that simple, elemental word, one of the first words babies know how to make. I love it. One vowel, one consonant, working together to make a sound that requires no coaxing because it effortlessly slips from the mouth.
I was here by his side when he received a phone call from Uncle Number Two last week. Uncle Number Two did not ask to visit but merely announced he would be coming. Our father rolled his eyes as he listened.
“I want us to see each other’s face when we talk this time,” Uncle Number Two said, his voice beaming through the speakerphone.
When the short phone conversation ended, our father turned toward me with a look that was neither sullen nor petulant. Was this visit meant to be a resumption of their friendship? Or the culmination of it?
Mai hesitates at the bed’s footboard. She pauses, almost with acute formality, as if she were standing on tiptoe at the edge of the ocean, as if that moment of hesitation will somehow better prepare her for the water’s chill before the full-body plunge into the blue depths. She fears the shock of cold and water. She dislikes the manifestation of anxieties, the aura of gravity and remonstrance already in the room.
She stands nearby, looking around. Her eyes scan the room, checking the surface of things for dust. She touches his shoulder. She can feel his delicate anatomy.
She can hear his wet, raspy breaths. His face is proffered toward her. It is the mild, eager face of a father marked by a hollow space that fear has carved. Hard to imagine before her is a man who has killed. Perhaps as a Buddhist, he regrets that he has and knows the karmic consequences of this fact. And here he is now, waiting to be fed. Lunch, yes, she will feed him lunch. We both will. She will not eat because she cherishes the feeling of emptiness in her stomach. It makes her feel clean and light, unburdened by the deadweight of food.
“How are you doing?” she asks. She puts her lips against his forehead. Her phone is in her hand. She glances at it discreetly. He can see that she is edgily checking her e-mail.
Our father motions her closer. “Tell me how your work is going,” he asks. I know he wants to engage her but the simple American present is elusive for him—and me. His voice becomes overanimated.
Mai nods uncertainly.
“Tell me about a case you’re on,” he suggests.
I know work is not an ardent interest but it does keep her occupied. And so she proceeds to tell him the details of her case. “It’s not the sort of case our firm usually handles,” she says. She tells him that the client is an executive from a big respectable company charged by the federal government with murder and extortion. “Murder is hardly ever tried in a federal court,” she informs.
“It must be interesting, then, that it is,” our father declares, but his voice lacks conviction.
“It’s only in federal court because of a federal statute and that federal statute contains a list of predicate acts that constitute violations of the statute. Those predicate acts include things like murder, which is usually a state crime.”
“You’re doing fine at work, then,” our father states.
Mai nods. I watch as she holds his hand.
He looks at his watch. He must be in a sea swell of nostalgia, I think, as he waits for the arrival of his old friend.
“I don’t need him to come,” he mutters. He looks at the door expectantly.
“Can you not talk about what happened or did not happen with him? Let it alone,” Mai suggests. She is solution-oriented. She wants to help him by making pragmatic suggestions.
“Huh,” he says, as if to expel something unwanted from his lungs. He is probably weighing a series of contradictory impulses. “Then what else will we have to talk about! We have nothing else that would even link us together.” He nods to himself, as if to agree with his own observation. He looks at Mai, me, us. A smile lights up his face. He can afford to stare at us with the offhandedness of someone possessing unquestioned paternal authority.
“Okay, but whatever he brings up, I’m just saying don’t let it bother you. Whatever happened between the two of you, it’s already done. Finished. There’s nothing you can do to change it. So just let it be,” she advises.
I roll a side table to his bedside and put a bowl of pho noodle soup on it. The rich, heady broth is exactly as he likes it—cooked on a low fire overnight with bones still covered with fat and gristle and tender bits of brisket and flank. Charred whole onions and ginger had been added to produce an extra-brown coloring. Wisps of heat rise from a special oolong tea.
I give him one spoonful, then another, but he eats only meekly. He has no appetite. The bedside table is crammed with appurtenances of old age—bottles of pills, an oxygen tank, and cans of liquid food containing fortified vitamins and minerals. His face is defined by lines and angles and a protrusion of bones. Mai watches him eat and flashes him an indulgent smile. She sighs. She feels a sharp tear inside her, like the sound of a nut being cracked. Blue stripes dance up and down the white cloth of his cotton pajamas. He pulls the cord to ask for Aunt An, who quickly appears, draws the curtain around his bed, and proceeds to change him.
We are fortunate he is in a home where she works. I think this thought many times a day.
Mai and I watch over him as he naps.
Mrs. An lingers, knowing that Uncle Number Two will be here soon. She can be a comforting presence these moments before his arrival. We have never spoken about the multiple selves folded inside Mai but I get the sense that she knows there is something off about us. She understands problems. She has her own—an addict for a son and, as a result, continuing financial difficulties that our father has somehow managed mysteriously to ease.
In the
patchy light that shines an unstirring yellowish glow, I look at her. Over the years, the flurry of age has turned the smooth, unlined face gaunt. Her hair, dyed black to hide strands of silvery white in the front, is still thick. Despite her troubles, she is here to comfort, cutting through the shadows that will undoubtedly loom when Uncle Number Two arrives. I notice that she is glancing at my neck, head cocked, to check for bruises.
It is winter. I am wearing a scarf for warmth, not camouflage.
• • •
Soon an old man appears, his ravaged face peering through the doorway. Shivers of sunlight from the window shine directly at him. I barely recognize him. He squints, shielding his eyes with one downturned palm. He is so slim and frail inside his blue suit that you could think he might evaporate before your eyes. But his body is erect; he stands tall and steady.
“Uncle Number Two,” Mai says because she must say something to fill up the muted moment. She quickly stands up from the metal folding chair. She harbors misgivings about him but she does not let this show. He is the one to whom questions about our mother during the long interlude of absence could be asked. That alone is enough to allow him access.
Despite our insistence that she stay, Aunt An leaves the room after acknowledging Uncle Number Two with a quick, flustered nod. Uncle Number Two walks softly toward the bed but stands at a respectful distance. Mai hooks her hand into the crook of our father’s elbow.
“There you are,” he says in a flat, unsympathetic voice once he sees Uncle Number Two. Our father pushes himself upward and glowers in typical southern pugnacity. He is unprepared for anything as extreme as this visit. The magnitude of his feelings are exposed for us to see. For one instant, for less than an instant, his face softens as if he were seeing a person who he once believed was a true friend, before he discovered otherwise.