by Philip Huynh
After Mass, Paul offers to walk them home and eventually Josephine relents. Paul has one hand on Christian’s shoulder and the other in a fist. Josephine walks by Paul’s side. They take their sweet time in the Vancouver sunlight, which shines as shyly as they do.
When they reach her backyard, they cannot see to the house because the clothesline from the apple tree to the fence is thick with her laundry, clothes that from afar look like dead birds strung upside down. Crows and pigeons, blue birds and red robins, seagulls and doves. Thuong has never done the laundry before.
There is the smell of lunch in the air. Thuong stands behind the clothesline. His shirt is off, his ribs are rack thin. He is urinating on Josephine’s mint.
“Do you want me to talk to him?” says Paul to Josephine. She ignores him.
“What are you doing?” she says to Thuong.
“Fertilizing,” says Thuong. He turns, zips up his khaki pants, and walks right up to Paul. “Eat with us,” he says.
“I don’t know,” says Paul, but before he can finish his thought, Thuong and Christian bring out the fold-out table. Then they bring out chairs — some wooden, some plastic.
“You might as well,” says Josephine.
Banh uot, vermicelli noodles, and prawns with their eyes still attached are doled out on paper plates by Thuong and his mother. “We save them for special occasions,” says Thuong of the plates and plastic cutlery. The five of them sit around the table and, after Josephine says grace, they eat in silence. Paul has never tried Vietnamese food. His nostrils flare when he smells the fish sauce. The food feels strange when it touches his lips, never mind his tongue. The banh uot has a rubbery consistency, and he is not sure if the filling is a ground meat or vegetable paste.
Thuong brings out a six-pack of Molson Canadian. “A friend gave me this gift, but I just keep it under our bed.” Thuong pours his beer into a glass full of ice. Paul would rather drink warm beer straight from the can. The fish sauce makes him thirsty and when he finishes one beer he accepts another. When the old lady offers Paul another helping of banh uot, he does not refuse. He did not know how hungry he is.
“I was supposed to be a teacher,” Thuong says. “But I was really meant to cut hair.”
“Being a teacher is so hard,” says Paul.
Josephine pecks at her food and looks at the line of hanging clothes as if at any moment they will fly away. Christian doesn’t want the day to end because when he sleeps, he always dreams his mother is missing. No one can protect her except for him.
When all the food and beer are gone, Thuong says something in Vietnamese and Christian gets up to clear the table. Thuong nudges Paul to get off his seat so he can put it away.
“Now, since you’re my guest, you should let me cut your hair,” says Thuong.
“No, that’s okay,” says Paul. He feels drowsy when he stands up.
“I insist,” Thuong says. Then in Vietnamese he says: “I need the practice. That’s my price if you want to take my family.”
“You’re being crazy,” says Josephine.
“Am I?” says Thuong.
“What are you all saying?” says Paul.
“Now that he is on my property, he can’t just leave,” says Thuong.
Josephine throws her hands up in the air and pulls out the reclining chair herself. “Have it your way,” she says.
“What’s going on?” says Paul.
Josephine turns to him. “The sooner you do this, the sooner we can move on,” she says in French. “Trust me.”
Paul thinks about his dead father and realizes that Josephine is the only one left in this world he does trust.
“I don’t understand you,” says Thuong.
“You don’t have to,” says Josephine.
Paul sits on the chair under the apple tree. Thuong barks something at Christian, who goes to fetch a white towel and scissors. The mirror is already hung against the tree. The sprayer is at the ready on the lampstand. The old lady is by the window, telling Thuong to leave the tall man alone. Thuong says something that makes her disappear from the windowsill.
Thuong gets Paul to remove his blazer, uses a piece of a Glad garbage bag as a cutting cape, and starts snipping away. “Why is kindergarten your profession?” says Thuong.
“I didn’t choose it,” says Paul. “I’m waiting to teach older children.”
Thuong puts a hand on Paul’s shoulder. “A man becoming something is just as good as a man who already is something.”
Paul nods, though he doesn’t really get it. Or maybe at some level he does get it, because all of a sudden he feels a little bit better about things.
Something about how Thuong turns the steel scissors into a butterfly, fluttering in the back, around the ears, an inch off the top, soothes Paul. When Thuong is done, he gives Paul a hand mirror, walks around Paul with the larger portrait mirror to show off his handiwork.
“It’s perfect,” says Paul. “Maybe you are on to something.”
“I’m not done,” says Thuong. He tilts the chair back so that Paul is facing the apple blossoms above. “You need a shave.”
“I don’t know,” says Paul, but Thuong has, from somewhere, pulled out a brush and jar of shaving cream. Josephine is nowhere in sight.
“Relax,” says Thuong. “I’m going to give you a real man’s shave.”
Thuong applies the cream to Paul’s beard. His son comes out with a paddle strop and a towel that Thuong’s mother has steamed in a pot. The steaming towel that Thuong wraps around Paul’s face is like a narcotic, and Paul almost falls asleep. When the towel is removed and Paul sees the straight razor in Thuong’s hand, dripping sunlight, he does not panic. Maybe it’s because his father used one, and taught Paul how to use it as well. Paul just closes his eyes, feels the razor brush against his cheeks, down to his Adam’s apple, and gives himself to fate.
When Thuong is done, he calls Josephine out, to show her his true talent, as much as to show Paul’s face, unmasked, so that there is nothing for anyone to hide.
The Tale of Jude
Lee will never forget his first bus ride to St. Crispin’s School, getting picked up on Sargent Avenue in Winnipeg’s West End, so early in the morning. The opening bell will not ring for another hour and a half. The approaching school bus gleams like a silver ghost, the only creature on the road at this hour. He is the first passenger. The bus picks up no other passenger until it is well south of his neighbourhood, past the dilapidated clapboard houses that in any other city would be given a heritage designation, would be snapped up by yuppies and restored to a sheen. Houses bunched up together, even though there is plenty of land here to spread out. The only way you could tell whether a house was lived in or abandoned was if the yard was overgrown with weeds or if the grass was mown down to a burnt yellow brush cut.
The bus fills up one by one, boys at various stages of puberty, in red blazers or black leather varsity jackets, carrying backpacks or briefcases or bulky hockey bags. The bus turns off of Pembina Highway towards the Drive. Lee leans towards the window and the immense riverside homes like a plant leans towards the sun. The houses get bigger the closer he gets to the school. It has been a hot, dry summer, but the lawns here are so lush it is as if Lee has travelled not to another neighbourhood but to another clime.
He expects to enter the school through massive wrought-iron gates, but there is only a wooden sign. The school has no need for a gate. The surrounding neighbourhood, the forbidding display of suburban wealth, is the school’s only necessary defence.
On one side of the grounds is a giant green field, multiple soccer pitches laid side by side, bordered by pine trees, fields where you can kick the ball as hard as you want without worry of hitting the road. On the other side are the school buildings, modern brick extravagances with large glass facades, like an institute of technology both vintage and modern. Tucked away from these buildings, closer to the riverbank, is a smaller, old brick mansion, with a single vine of ivy running along its side, li
ke a raised vein, and a porte cochère attached for ghost buggies.
Lee is the first one on the bus, last one out. He walks with his spine bent to his first class, following the orientation arrows. Before the first day has started, he already knows which of the boys he will tangle with before year’s end.
He will take to heart none of the school traditions. Not the morning assembly of the Upper School, with hockey players and science geeks breaking out in unison to sing William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” the sea of red wool blazers and the subtle variations between them, the differently striped house ties, the debating pins on a few of the lapels, the absence of them on the others, the geometric billowing of the double Windsor knots worn by the prefects, the brute single Windsors worn by the rest. Not the strange games played during phys. ed.: lacrosse, rugby, ultimate Frisbee, capture the flag. Not the lunches on long oak tables under the plaques of winners of the various mathematics contests — the Cayley, Pascal, and Fermat. Not ham sandwiches beneath engraved names. Not the honours and stripes recorded in the school diaries.
He will take home none of this as he changes into his jeans and T-shirt for the bus ride home. T-shirts that show off his biceps hung on a slim frame, like rats on a spit.
When he gets home, he goes to the back of their clapboard house, to the entrance of the basement suite, where he and his mother live. He knocks on the door, even though he has a key, because he never knows whether his mother is alone. Mondays are supposed to be his mother’s night off, so Lee expects to find her either napping or with company. But she is sitting alone at the kitchen table, dressed in her waitress uniform for tonight’s extra shift. Skirt, name tag, apron. She has worn the same skirt for years, but Lee is reaching an age when he is starting to think that it is too short.
She is counting her tips from the night before. Mounds of loose change. She hates these loonies, which the mint introduced just last year. Usually she changes her tips into bills, but last night she carried all of her change home in the front of her apron.
Dangling from her neck is a gold necklace anchored by a jade ring, like a green lifesaver. Lee has never seen it before. With his mother’s wage and tips she has kept a roof over Lee’s head and his belly full, but her money does not account for their sixteen-inch colour TV and VHS recorder, the stereo system in Lee’s room, the silk dresses in her closet, her Passat.
His mother is stacking the coins into towers of loonies, quarters, dimes, and nickels. “I want to see what my day was worth,” she says. “I think the tips are bigger during the day than at night. To think I’ve been working nights all this time.”
“It probably doesn’t make much of a difference,” he says, meaning his words as consolation.
His mother puts her fingers on one stack then another, like a chess player unsure what her move is. “You lost my count,” she says.
“Fifty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents,” says Lee. Both Lee and his mother know that Lee is right to the nickel. Bored once, he figured out the thickness of each type of coin. His mother, on the other hand, can’t keep numbers in her head. Lee has no idea where he got this gift.
Dinner is on the stove, and he eats his lemon grass chicken with the plate on his knees while he pores over his brand new analytic geometry text. He will take nothing to heart from his Latin, ancient history, or even his chemistry class. He is at the school for one reason alone: mathematics.
There are no girls on his bus, though Lee was told during his entrance interview that the Upper School had recently become coed. In his grade ten class consisting of over eighty students, there are only five girls. He did not spot one until mid-week.
Two of the girls, Tracy Felton and Chelsea Dubinsky, are reputedly to die for. In the locker room Lee can barely concentrate on getting out of his charcoal-grey pants and into jeans with the hockey players shouting over each other, laying claim to them. One of the girls is a studious Asian. Another one, Sofia Orlofsky, seems too cool for this school. The last girl is named Jude. Lee knows nothing about her other than that, for some reason, she has attracted the boys’ mockery and ire. The boys call her La Vache — the Cow — possibly because she is tall and big-boned.
Moos follow Jude wherever she goes. Moos take on the quality of water, seep through classroom walls and nip at her heels down hallways and in the dining hall and even outside, male cackles like raindrops off the leaves of the campus fruit trees. They moo everywhere except in the computer room.
The computer room at St. Crispin’s is an altogether different place. It is called the Dunster Computer Room, after one of the school’s many esteemed benefactors. The room is the size of a basketball half court on an upper floor, appearing to the outsider to be floating in the air, row upon row of computer screens flickering through tall glass.
The only adornment in the computer room is a large Chinese hand scroll of a lonely, willowy tree hanging over a misty mountainside, framed in an expensive-looking light wood. Lee expects that the landscape is there as a lesson of some sort, but Mr. Wharton, the teacher, never alludes to it.
The computers are the latest desktops from Compaq. The class is an introduction to programming in Pascal. Lee, to his surprise, is hooked. His first assignment is simple: make a program that draws a happy face. When he tries, the program simply won’t run and reports syntax errors. The screen remains blank. When he finally gets the program to run, a blinking green circle forms on the screen, but it freezes before an expression appears. He has made drawing a happy face into something complicated, like baking a soufflé that keeps toppling over. His code writing becomes ever more overgrown. But when he does succeed, when the happy face stares back at him, it feels to him truly a live thing.
The students here are different from those in other classes. Computer science is an elective, which eliminates all the jocks. There is a pressure to get to know each other here more than anywhere else. Everyone in computer class chose to be in computer class, and therefore chose each other, in a way. Chosen ones can’t just ignore each other. Lee can ignore geeks in math, but here he has to learn their names.
Everyone talks to everyone, that is, except to the girl Jude, who sits in the back row where the computers are in sleep mode. Jude, who has attracted the enmity of the boys in the school’s wider world — the jocks and the hand-pressing prefects who try to ingratiate themselves with the jocks — has found asylum here. Here, she is ignored, but not because she is despised. To the computerists she is a woman, and therefore a unicorn. They feel uncomfortable with her the way you would with jewellery in an unsecured room. Every so often they look sideways to see if she is still around. But they can’t speak to her. There is a sound barrier between them and Jude that they can’t break.
When Lee lifts his head from the fountain, it is Jude who is standing behind him. “You missed a spot,” she says, pointing to the spot under his chin where a hockey player’s fist had left a ripe plum.
“I wasn’t washing my face,” says Lee.
“It stings just looking at it.”
“Try wearing it,” says Lee.
“I have.”
The next challenge in computer class is to create a billiards program, something that plays eight ball and cutthroat. Lee can’t make his program work. The balls bounce off each other at angles that defy the laws of nature. The other students are already done. Lee stays behind after the bell to work out the bugs. He stays as long as necessary. He misses the bus. He will walk home, even if it takes him all night.
“Let me see.”
He turns around. The girl Jude has been sitting behind him all along.
“You’re not done either?”
“Just polishing up. Tell me what you think.” Her pool game hums like a Cadillac. The balls go where they should. She’s also added the possibility of putting English on the cue ball and various aesthetic embellishments — enamelling on the cues, glinting balls reflecting the light bulbs above the table, oak varnish on the side panels. Jude could package this program for Nintendo.<
br />
“Let me see yours.” Before Lee can do anything, like kick in his computer screen, she is already running his program.
“Let me see the code,” she says. Lee draws it up on the screen. She squints at his program, scrolling down with excruciating patience. “The program is as long as mine,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be. May I?”
Before he can deny her, her large, thick fingers flutter over the keyboard as if she is doing fine needlework, but when he looks at what she has done on the screen, it is clear she has conducted major surgery. His code has been sawed down to its essence. It reads elegantly and runs without bugs.
“Thanks,” he says. “See you tomorrow.”
It is pitch-black outside. The nearest public bus stop is a half-hour walk from the campus. He is standing at the stop, warming his hands, when a Saab pulls over.
“Let me give you a ride,” says Jude. “You’ll freeze to death. North or south?”
Lee looks around, then gets in. “North.”
“Good. That’s where I’m heading.”
They ride in silence past Osborne Village.
“What are you in for?” she says.
“I’m not in for anything.”
“You must be. Did you get into some trouble at your old school?”
“It’s nothing like that at all.” The reason he is at the school, the mathematics, suddenly seems like an intimate secret. “What are you in for?”
“My father went to this school. I’m the only child, the son he never had.”
Suddenly his secrets don’t seem too heavy. “I’m here for the math program,” he says.
“That’s beautiful. Good for you.”
Lee tells her to head east towards Main Street instead of west. When they pass Portage and Main, he tells her to turn left on Bannatyne Avenue, to the Exchange District, with its turn-of-the-century brick-and-stone office buildings aspiring to the grandeur of Chicago’s skyline. He tells her that this is his stop.