How to Pronounce Knife

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

  I rushed over to the swings, hopped on the seat of one, and pumped my legs so I shot myself high into the air. My mother sat on a park bench alone, in her blue winter coat, facing me. She was not far. I called to her to pay attention to me, to see how high I was going all by myself, but her head was turned away, her eyes focused on something else.

  I stopped swinging and turned to see what she was looking at, the swing slowly coming to a halt. A man had run out of an apartment building in his boxers and a white T-shirt. He seemed flustered, in a hurry, as though he had not planned to be outside in the cold dressed like that.

  A woman dressed in a pantsuit had followed him out. Heels tapping on the sidewalk like a pencil on a table.

  The man glanced behind him, stopped, and screamed, “It’s over. We’re finished!” When the woman tried to embrace him, he refused, batting away her arms.

  I walked over to where my mother was and stood right in front of her, blocking her view of the couple. I said, “Let’s go home.” She looked up at me and there were tears in her eyes. “It’s snowing,” she said and glanced away. She said it once, like that. In a small clear voice. It’s snowing. But the way she said it made it seem like it was not about snow at all. Something that I can’t ever know about her. Then my mother looked up at me again and said, “I never have to worry about you, do I.” I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure if it was really a question.

  Soon after, sometime in the night when I was asleep, she walked out the door with a suitcase. My father saw her leave, he told me. And he did nothing.

  All this was years ago, but I can still feel the sadness of that time, waiting for her to come back. I know now what I couldn’t have known then—she wouldn’t just be gone, she’d stay gone. I don’t think about why she left. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that she did. What more is there to think about than that?

  Often, I dream of seeing her face, still young like she was then, and although I can’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice, she is always trying to tell me something, her lips wrapped around shapes I can’t hear. The dream might last only a few seconds, but that’s all it takes, really, to undo the time that has passed and has been put between us. I wake from these dreams raw, a child still, though I am forty-five now, and grieve the loss of her again and again.

  My father did not grieve. He had done all of this life’s grieving when he became a refugee. To lose your love, to be abandoned by your wife was a thing of luxury even— it meant you were alive.

  The other night, I saw an image of the Earth on the evening news. I had seen it many times before, and although my mother was not there, I spoke to her anyway as if she was. “See? It really is round. Now we know for sure.” I said it out loud again, and even though it disappeared, I knew what I said had become a sound in the world.

  Afterwards, I went to the bathroom mirror and stared at the back of my mouth. I opened my mouth wide, saw the hot, wet, pink flesh, and the dark centre where my voice came out of, and I laughed, loud and wild. The sound went into the air vent, and I imagined people living in the building wondering to themselves where a sound like that came from, what could make a woman laugh like that at this hour of the night.

  The School Bus Driver

  The school bus driver was named Jai. It rhymed with chai. He was looking at his wife’s breasts in a photograph. They were tight and perky in the white spandex top she wore. Below that, her bikini bottom was just a patch of cloth in the front, held up by thin strings tied into a small bow. She was sitting on the white sheets of an unmade hotel bed and looking straight at the camera, her knees tucked underneath her. The school bus driver thought his wife looked odd in these vacation pictures. She’d never posed this way before, for him. Her black hair was set in big soft curls and she looked like a child’s doll: blue eyelids, long artificial eyelashes, round rosy cheeks, red lips. She would never, on her own, make herself up like this. This bikini would never be something she’d choose for herself. “Hee keyow,” she would say, shaking her head in disapproval if he ever suggested she wear anything even slightly revealing. This bikini must have been Frank’s idea.

  “Oh, Frank. He’s such a goofball,” she said, giggling, trying to make light of the whole thing. Frank was her boss at Coffee Time.

  The school bus driver had intended the trip to Laos to be a surprise gift for his wife. She was working long hours these days; she deserved a nice vacation. He bought one plane ticket (it was all he could afford at the time), thinking she’d go alone to see her family. But when she asked Frank for time off from work, he said she could go—if he came along.

  “I’ve always wanted to see a foreign country with a native,” Frank had said.

  He was in almost every one of these photos, smiling and posing with her cousins, parents, grandparents. But in the photos where Jai’s wife was in the white bikini, it must have been Frank behind the camera. There were so many of her alone.

  The school bus driver and his wife lived in a newly built brick house—two-car garage, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a finished basement. There were two other houses exactly like it on the block. The developer was supposed to tear down the neighbouring shopping mall and parking lot to build more new homes like theirs, but there was some problem with the fees, the licences, the zoning approvals—it got too messy for the builder to deal with. So now, there were just these three identical brick houses between a shopping mall parking lot and a tall apartment building, all facing a busy main street. The developer needed to unload these homes quick, so no one questioned whether the bus driver and his wife could really afford it. Still, they owned a home of their own now, even if they couldn’t quite manage the mortgage payments. How could they, with the school bus driver working part-time and his wife making minimum wage at Coffee Time? They just barely made the monthly payments.

  Sometimes when they were very short on money, the school bus driver’s wife would come home with extra cash, saying that Frank had given her a bonus at work. She said it was a bonus for her good work. “Just this one time. This bonus. For my good work,” she said. Frank was really good to them in that way.

  Since her trip to Laos with Frank, the school bus driver’s wife had started to put in longer hours at work. She came home much later than usual now. At first, she blamed the bus schedule—they didn’t come as frequently after dark. She said, “You don’t know how scary it is, to be a woman standing there at the bus stop at night. I hold my keys in my hand and put them between my fingers so I’m ready to defend myself against some pervert. You just don’t know!”

  It didn’t make sense to him, but she was right. He didn’t know what it was like for a woman. The school bus driver suggested he pick her up after work. But she laughed and said, “Not in that big yellow thing you drive.”

  So she arranged for her friend Frank to pick her up on the way to work and to drive her home too. He was going to and leaving from the same place and at the same time, after all. It was only reasonable.

  Frank drove a dark-green Jaguar. It was fancy. You never heard the engine at all, creeping down the street to pick up the school bus driver’s wife or to drop her off after work. He took good care of this car. Even in the winter, when there was snow, Frank’s car was always newly washed and polished. All year round, he kept it like this.

  When the school bus driver thought about how things used to be, he would remember what his wife used to smell like when she first started working at Coffee Time, a bit like burnt coffee beans. He had to admit to himself that she seemed happier now, not having to rely on public transit. Now she smelled of cigars. Frank’s cigars. The scent was a bit metallic and dusty. Frank probably smoked in the car. That’s how the smell got all over her like that.

  The first time it happened was on a Saturday afternoon. Frank came over. He rode up in his dark-green Jaguar and parked it in their driveway as if he lived there now. The school bus driver thought it was odd for Frank to stop by on a weekend, when his wife didn’t have to be at work.
She greeted him at the door, invited him in. The school bus driver was watching television in the living room, but they did not join him.

  His wife said they had to talk about work. “Very boring,” she said.

  They went into the bedroom.

  The lock clicked into place.

  He wondered what they were doing, if they were naked together. If so, how they kept it all so quiet. He didn’t want to make a big deal of it.

  “Why don’t you want me to have any friends!” his wife said when he asked her about what happened in the bedroom with Frank. He hated arguments. He would do anything to avoid them. He had thought of forgetting this whole thing, but he didn’t want to be seen as spineless or, worse, not caring. Other times, when he tried to protest, to confront them, Frank would step in, his face red and sweaty, the white patches of his hair damp and rumpled, and say, “Be cool about this.”

  Sometimes he was certain Frank was mocking him, but it was just too awful to think about. How could he be sure, and to whom could he bring this up? His wife would just say he was jealous of their friendship, and accuse him again of not letting her have any friends. He didn’t want to seem like a possessive, jealous husband, even if that’s how he was feeling.

  “Jay. People form this kind of friendship in this country,” she said.

  He thought for a few seconds that she was talking about someone else, or to someone else. But then he realized, that’s what his name was now. Jay. Like blue jay, a small blue bird, a little dot in the sky. He wanted to remind his wife that his name was Jai. It means heart in Lao! he wanted to yell. But then she would just remind him how men in this country do not raise their voices at women. Or tell him to practise his English. “No one here knows jai means heart,” she would say. So what if that’s what it means? It doesn’t mean anything in English. And English is the only language that matters here.

  “That is just the way things are here,” she said.

  And if he was going to live here, he had to learn to adapt and fit in and not be so uptight.

  “Be cool,” she said in her perfect English, sounding just like Frank.

  On monday morning, the school bus driver went to the parking lot to dig his bus out of the snow. He took the shovel he had bought from Canadian Tire and started shovelling around the wheels. It had snowed five inches overnight, but the snow was light and fluffy; it hadn’t had time to harden or turn into ice yet. The shovelling was easy. In less than ten minutes he moved the snow out of the way as easily as if he were dusting. He did not really have to shovel the bus out—the tires could have handled it—but out of habit, he did.

  He thought about clearing off the snow from the top of the bus. He didn’t want the snow to fall off in chunks and land on a car driving behind him. But even with the shovel he couldn’t reach the top of the bus on his own and he hadn’t brought a ladder. For now, this would just have to do. When the school bus driver was done shovelling around the wheels, he threw the shovel on the floor of the front seat and turned on the engine to warm up the inside of the bus. From the driver’s seat, he noticed a yellow slip of paper tucked underneath the windshield wiper.

  Another one.

  He went outside again, grabbed the parking ticket, and folded it until it became a tiny square. He tucked it into his wallet, underneath a picture of his wife. It was an old photo of her, in black and white, taken when they were still in Laos. She was smiling. Her hair was parted in the middle, her face plain, her smile shy. Next to the photo was a plastic flap that held his driver’s licence. He looked at his first name. Jai. It rhymes with chai. It means heart. Heart.

  You Are So Embarrassing

  Everything outside was blurry and wet, and there was nothing to be done about it. The windshield wipers sounded like sobs. Eeek. Eeek. Eeek. The woman’s small blue car was parked in an alley. She was hoping to catch a glimpse of her daughter, who left work every day at around four in the afternoon.

  The woman had done this before, sit in this alley and wait. She never worried about being noticed. She was sure the girl didn’t even know what kind of car her mother drove these days, or anything else about her for that matter.

  A few months ago, she had gone to her daughter’s house and stood on the sidewalk across the street, in the dark, waiting for a glimpse. She had wanted to see if her daughter was happy, but she didn’t want to embarrass herself looking the way she did. Her hair felt like straw to the touch. And no matter how much she scrubbed, the dirt was still there under her fingernails and the smell of the farm lingered.

  The woman had noticed little details outside the house. There was the light turning on in a room, the shape of a black garbage bag left at the curb. Then she saw her daughter’s face, framed by the kitchen window like a small photograph. She was standing at the sink doing the dishes. Her husband came into view, caressing the back of her neck before turning her around into a slow dance. Her daughter seemed happy. When you’re a mother, you create a life and then you watch it go on its own way. It’s what you hope for, and want, but when it happens, it happens without you.

  The woman slipped back into her car and drove away.

  The woman had wanted to call after the stroke last year, but she didn’t want her daughter to hear her slurred speech or to see that one side of her face now drooped. She didn’t want her daughter to think she needed to be taken care of. She didn’t want to be a burden. It had taken six months of therapy before she looked and sounded like herself again. Sometimes, when she let her guard down, like when she laughed, you could see some of her facial muscles were slow to react. Food didn’t taste the same as it did before, either. Her sense of taste comes and goes now. Most of the time it all tastes bitter. And all that bitterness in her mouth is hard to swallow.

  She had been working on a farm at the time. Got the job through a friend. It had been difficult to find work after the plastics factory shut down. She had been there for forty years. They don’t have jobs like that anymore. The factory had paid severance, so she had a little something left over after she spent all her savings putting her daughter through school. But that wasn’t the point. It was a job she wanted. Something to do for twelve hours. At least she knew how to drive. A friend had asked if she could give him and a few others a ride to the farm where they worked, and she did. She liked their affectionate teasing, the bawdy jokes they told, how they included her in all their stories, the way they took you in, no questions asked. When they told her the farm was looking for more workers, she offered to join them. “But you know how to drive and speak English better than anyone we know. You can get a job anywhere.” She didn’t want to tell them it wasn’t true. And out of pride, she just said, “I’m bored. It’ll be something to do.”

  It was good to be outdoors and on the land, feeling the sun on your back. She pulled weeds from the ground—the ones with thorns. She wore gloves to protect her hands, but once in a while, a thorn sharp and fine enough would pierce through. They didn’t use weed killer out here, not next to the strawberries that get harvested and sold as organic. She did whatever they needed done, though—she even drove the tractor. She liked that. Seated so high above everything. But the job didn’t go through the winter months, and in this country, there were so many winter months. That anything grows here at all feels like a miracle. She had to find something else to do once the cold set in.

  What she found was carrots. At the farm, where the processing took place, the carrots arrived from warmer climates and sometimes came in unusual shapes. She had to discard those. No grocery store was going to buy something that looked like a balled-up fist and call it a carrot. Carrots have unique growths and bumps on their skin. No machine could handle peeling each and every one. The blades would get jammed and they’d have to shut everything down until a mechanic could come out to fix it. It was just cheaper to get somebody to peel the carrots by hand. When you work on a farm, you’re just a body. You have to be there on time and do the work. Bending, kneeling, lifting, picking, pulling. And you have t
o do it for at least eight hours, sometimes twelve to beat the weather. You work around the weather all the time.

  At first, the physical demands made her body ache—her knees and especially the bottoms of her feet. They don’t hurt while you’re working, when you’re too busy thinking of what needs to be done and getting it done. It was at night, after a shower, when the pain would arrive.

  When it happened, she didn’t know she was having a stroke. She’d been tired and couldn’t get out of bed for three days. It was only once she’d managed to get up to wash her face that she saw the right side of her face drooping in the mirror. When she got to the hospital, they said since she drove there herself, she was functional, and they couldn’t do anything for her beyond keeping her under observation. So they sent her home. And she did go home, but the right side of her face kept sagging, and then her ear started acting up, like she was underwater. She drove herself back to the hospital, and this time they kept her for two months. How she was able to drive herself back and forth like that, she couldn’t explain. But she had been lucky. When you live alone, it can take a while for someone to discover you’ve died. You know, the insides go first. That’s what people smell when they smell a dead body. It’s the insides.

  Almost twenty years ago now. It had rained then too. And she had been waiting in her car just like this, outside that school. Her daughter was a creature of habit. She always left the school at about four. When she had yet to appear at the doors, the woman got out of the car. She stopped the first student she saw. “I’m looking for Chantakad?” The student said, “Oh, you mean Celine?” and pointed. And there she was, standing by a locker, throwing books into her knapsack. On the inside of the locker door was a small mirror, sticky notes, magnets shaped like hearts.