8: Child Visitor
It was Dot’s father, Trang, who answered the door to her mother’s house. Trang was her own height, and probably not much heavier. His cheekbones seemed ready to cut through the skin of his face. He grumbled and turned away from the door, meaning for her to enter if she wished. She removed her twenty-eyelet, calf-hugging Dr. Marten boots and clunked them down heavily beside the door and her father’s own shoes. “Is my mother home?” she asked her father in English.
Taking a Vietnamese “33" beer from the refrigerator, Trang answered her in his native tongue even though he spoke serviceable English out of the house, and knew that Dot’s understanding of Vietnamese was imperfect; she could decipher much of what she heard, within its given context, but never spoke in the language herself.
“At work,” he replied brusquely. “Working third shift.”
“Really?” Dot said in English. “I thought she had the night off. Huh.” She considered sitting at the kitchen table, just leaned her palms against it instead. “I tried calling before I came but no one answered the phone.”
“I didn’t hear it,” Trang snapped, as if she’d accused him. “I’ll bet she switched the ringer off, and the answering machine, too. She does that when she naps in the day, and she’s too stupid to turn them back on again.”
“She’s tired,” Dot said mildly, trying not to make him angry. Angrier, at least. Her father was the angriest man she had ever known, and wondered how he could maintain the energy and the inspiration to fuel it. “Sometimes she forgets.”
Trang grunted. “Did you call her cell phone?”
“Yeah; I think she has it turned off.”
“Stupid,” he grunted again. “What do you want?” As he said this he was already walking away from her, back into the living room where a Vietnamese videotape played on a large screen television. Trang didn’t care for American films.
Forced to follow him, Dot replied vaguely, “I just wanted to talk to her.” She lied, “About...work.”
“You want to work with her?” Trang asked, stretching out on the sofa. “Better than that low-class waitress job. No future in that.”
“Yeah,” she lied again, “I wanted to talk to her about that.” Dot crossed her arms, standing in the doorway, and numbly watched a little of the movie, a drama (essentially a soap opera) in a boxed set of multiple tapes, rented from a Vietnamese market. She didn’t understand everything that was being said, but the actors looked very intense, the lead actress with tears in her eyes. The Vietnamese were not quick to tears. She had never seen her father cry. She couldn’t even imagine that he had cried as a boy. She, however, was as quick to tears as an American girl.
She glanced over at her father, who already seemed to have forgotten his daughter’s presence. Even though she was now as tall – relatively speaking – as he, she still found herself ever wary of the man...if not outright terrified of him, as she had been countless times in her childhood. On one occasion, when she was two years old, and had accidentally dropped and broken a TV remote while playing with it, he had chased her outside the house, raging. Her mother had run out of the house, too, and had thrown her body over her daughter’s on the lawn to cover and protect her. But one of Dot’s legs had poked out from beneath, and her father had stomped on it with such force that she could not even find the air to voice her scream.
On another occasion, when she was five, her father had become so furious over some forgotten misbehavior or innocent accident that he had fetched the machete he used to hack weeds in the backyard, and held it above his head as if he meant to swing it down and bury its blade in the center of her skull. Later on that evening, while he was out with a friend, Dot had found where her father kept the machete, and she had hidden it away where she hoped he wouldn’t find it. Luckily, he had never remarked on its absence, perhaps had forgotten that he possessed the machete. She should ask her mother, who knew where it was hidden, if it were in the same secret location, still.
She had locked him out of her room, once, when he had struck her and pursued her. He had pounded on her bedroom door, swearing that he would set the house on fire, so that she would burn behind her locked door. He had threatened to kill his wife that night, as well. But instead of burning his house, and killing his wife and child, he had left for a local coffee shop where he spent hours almost every day, chatting with an older Vietnamese friend. He had told Mai, in Dot’s presence, that he could lose his wife and it wouldn’t matter...but if he ever lost his friend, his heart would be broken. An earlier best friend of his had become closer friends with another man, no longer joining Trang in the café, and Trang had sulked for weeks like a jilted lover.
Dot had heard him swear at her mother on too many occasions to ever recall (at times like these, he decided to utilize some English, with words such as, “Bitch! Bitch! Fuck you, bitch!”). He had even threatened Mai with a knife in front of Dot, once, because his dinner wasn’t ready or wasn’t what he’d requested (he did all the grocery shopping, wouldn’t permit her to do so because he kept a tight fist on their money), but had backed off when she didn’t challenge him. And he had chased Mai outside the house on another occasion, Dot in her arms, because she didn’t want to return the extra credit card he had given her for emergencies, but Mai had yelled for help from the passing cars and his visiting older friend had been there to pull Trang back. To date, though, Dot had never seen him actually beat his wife. Mai had told her that it was not out of love, but that her father was too cowardly to strike an adult. Too frequently, when he was enraged with his wife, he had punished her by lashing out at Dot instead...often hitting her with whatever object was at hand.
Mai had apologized to Dot when she was older. If she told the police, she’d reasoned over the long years, the authorities would take Dot away...and Mai wouldn’t see her again.
But Dot was an adult now. Her father hadn’t hit her in nearly two years. She thought that if he did strike her now, she might very well just strike him back.
“You should leave him, Mom,” Dot had told her. “Divorce him.”
“I can’t,” Mai had whispered. “My family back home, and here, they won’t talk to me any more. They will hate me. And I’m a Catholic, honey. What can I do?”
“Jesus Christ, Mom, never mind what anyone thinks or says! This is America. You can do whatever the hell you want!” But as frustrated as Dot would become, she knew that her words were easier to say than to be acted upon. America was a young country. Vietnam’s culture, adapted largely from China’s, dated back centuries upon centuries. Culture was as ingrained in her mother as the genes that gave her slanted eyes, black hair. Still, if she could dye her hair brown, if she could learn to speak this language, why couldn’t she learn to choose between happiness and unhappiness? Being a servant, and being free?
Her mother had come to this country free, full of dreams, of hope. Dot’s favorite photo of Mai had been taken outside the airport, twenty years ago, as she first walked American soil. In her arms she carried a bunch of flowers her sponsoring family had given her. In her beautiful face was an innocence that hurt Dot almost physically to gaze upon.
She had been a prisoner of the Communists for twenty months – for two months confined to a building and for eighteen months working shoeless in fields under a sun so blazing that she wore not only a straw hat, but wrapped her hands and covered her face up to her eyes to protect her skin. Or, she would wade barefoot in rice paddy water that was occasionally up to the women’s chests, and which caused many of them to develop internal infections. She had been captured while trying to escape Vietnam on a boat; the soldiers were letting children go if they were fifteen or younger, but Mai had been too naive to lie, had admitted she was seventeen. Later on, after her sentence was finished, she had had a second chance at escaping. That time she had been a successful Boat Person. And now, here she was...driving along the same streets, walking the same supermarket aisles, as Yuppies and Soccer Moms who could not conceive of being a p
risoner, a slave. Of being one of eight children, six of whom had died as infants. Of being disgraced, castigated, disowned, should she divorce a husband who had never told her he loved her, had never laughed at her jokes or thanked her for taking care of him when he was sick, who had never taken her alone to dinner or a film even as newlyweds, who had never even complimented her on her cooking. Mai and these women, when they crossed paths, though they could be searching through the same sales racks at Filene’s, might just as well be from separate planets, two entirely different dimensions.
There was a Muslim woman in Nigeria Dot had read about on the Internet, who was on trial for apparently having had sex out of wedlock. Should she be found guilty, she would be buried to her waist in the ground, and stoned “until all life left her body.” A photo of the lawyers had shown Nigerian men wearing white powdered wigs out of the 18th Century. Whether those men were the ones working to save her, or those condemning her, Dot had found the sight too appalling to be comical. Buried to the waist. She thought of her mother as being buried to the waist as well, even if the stones were psychological.
She took her eyes from her father. She withdrew from the living room’s threshold. He did not acknowledge her movement, did not ask if she were leaving. Well, at least this time he hadn’t commented on the shortness of her skirt, her nearly black oxblood lipstick.
In the kitchen, she poured herself some soda. She was disappointed that she hadn’t found her mother home (she could have sworn that Mai hadn’t been scheduled to work tonight; it must have been a last minute decision, some unexpected overtime). She had hoped to ask her mother about her dreams of the living sea, if they meant anything to her at all. This last dream had shaken her badly, it had been so real. She found it hard to forget that image of the half-made figure struggling hungrily, apparently, toward her. That too-real grip on her arm as she had been hoisted onto the platform, and transported back to her bed (she had imagined that she still felt the indentations in her flesh when she awoke). That man’s voice close to her ear. Had he spoken in Vietnamese, or English? She couldn’t recall, oddly.
Her mother was full of bedtime stories and folktales – like the one about how Chu Cuoi used the leaves from an enchanted banyan tree to save the life of a beautiful young woman who was dying. Later Chu Cuoi grew his own tree, but when his wife – the beauty he had saved – disturbed the banyan (acting in the tradition of other morality tale female troublemakers like Pandora and Eve), the tree uprooted itself and carried poor Chu Cuoi to the moon, stranding him on that distant world forever.
Her mother had also told her ghost stories, some of them related to Mai over the phone by her older sister who still lived in Vietnam, managing a pepper farm. Dot’s aunt claimed to have seen figures in the fields on occasion, who looked like real people but who disappeared when she turned away for a moment, and who sometimes turned out to have been standing in a thick patch of nettles or brambles or someplace that it would have been difficult and illogical for a living person to have ventured into.
And Mai had had her own uncanny encounter with the supernatural, if Dot could trust her mother’s memories, and more importantly, trust that her mother hadn’t actually been dreaming at the time – though Mai swore that she hadn’t. She had been a child (how old, Dot couldn’t recall) and had only just gotten into bed, hadn’t yet had a chance to fall asleep. She was suddenly struck so hard with a thrusting finger that it partially entered her rectum. Mai had spun around to see that a baby, a girl child of perhaps a year and a half, had pulled itself up the side of the bed. It was there, on the mattress beside Mai, that the child had reached out a hand and poked her to get her attention. Mai had said that the baby’s eyes – never once blinking – had gleamed like those of a far older person. She had been terrified; there should be no infants of that age in the house, and she did not recognize this child. She crossed herself, a Catholic, and the child scurried backwards so that only its upper body showed above the edge of the mattress, but its eyes didn’t leave hers, as if it wanted to get her to do something, to become aware of something, but Mai could only let out a scream. The infant had then scurried off the bed altogether and scampered across the floor, under a cupboard, disappearing from sight like a flesh and blood child instead of vanishing like a ghost.
Worship the Night Page 17