Either the Beginning or the End of the World (14 page)

He reaches for me, his fingers on the flesh inside my wrist. Somehow I feel it to the cradle of my spine. We pull back in the din of voices in the café, crack up at ourselves, as if we weren't drowning. He opens the book on the table. “Had a friend over there who read Rumi. Took it with him on patrol.”

He presses the frayed spine to the table and turns the book so that we can both read. On one page, Luke drops his finger to a line.
What hurts you blesses you.

Is this what praying is? Cinnamon in our coffee, in our hair; deep-red Turkish carpets; the clink of cups; threads that hold a spine.

I'll stay a little while.

TAPS

Luke comes for dinner to little Cambodia to meet my grandmother and my mother and see where we all have regular, small fights at the top of our voices.

Maybe we are all grateful when he walks in, all five foot ten of him towering over both of them. He smells like the sea and woodsmoke. I want to wrap both of my legs around him and pull him down on the couch. Who knows what my mother would say about that?

He is polite, but straight-lipped, shyly stern. He has parted his dark hair carefully and combed it flat down to his ears. It's still a little damp. Yiey puts bowls of rice and green curry on the table. She and my mother have been snapping at each other as they chopped. There is so much rage in their fingers that hold the chopping knives I think the rage must infiltrate the red peppers and we will all begin shouting after the first mouthful. But the food also surprises me with its colors and beauty.

My mother brings more. She brings chaquai, the long fried bread, warm from the oven, and jackfruit and slices of golden mango she must have bought at the Asian market by my Dunkin' Donuts.

“You're a fisherman too,” my mother says to Luke.

“I'm a soldier,” he says.

I look at him, alarmed. I look at his hands, wound tight in a ball. Pilot places her nose on top of his knotted hands. He does not look at me.

“When she was little—” my mother says, pointing at me.

I say, “How would you know about when I was little? You weren't there.”

“When she was little,” she says, “I used to change the sheets at the Ashworth Hotel, me and the Irish girls. They got visas for the summer. And this one . . .” She jabs her finger at me again. “She followed her father up and down the fishing pier at Rye Harbor. She had red rubber boots.”

“I did not,” I say, vaguely remembering tiny red rubber boots in the attic.

“I bought you pink dresses,” she accuses. “I got her a stuffed bunny in a pink apron and baby dolls that cried. Do you think she would wear a pink dress?” my mother asks Luke.

Luke says, “She wears a lot of olive drab and boots.”

My mother shakes her head. “Never,” she says. “Stubborn girl.”

Yiey tells him about fishing in Cambodia. Catfish, she says. “And in the river here,” she says. “If you go at right time, they play songs from the river.”

“She means from the shipyard,” I say. “They play it on the sound system, and the fishermen on Peirce Island can hear. Some song with bugles at sunset. Taps?”

“It's not Taps,” Luke says. “A bugler plays Taps at a funeral. More likely it's Retreat.”

“Maybe it Tap,” Yiey says. I know she likes funerals. She had said they often didn't get to bury people in the war. “What is Tap?” Yiey says.

Luke clears his throat. He gazes outside, out the window nearly covered with windblown snow. He begins to whistle Taps for her. He becomes the Lucas Sanna I don't know. His whistling is darkly gorgeous. He walks to the window. He holds the notes, and the sound sends chills through me.

We are still as we listen.

“Yes,” she says. “That is where I fish. Off the rocks and maybe they play Tap. The wind blow it across the water. It a sad song.”

Luke clears his throat again. Maybe he forgot we were there. His hands hang by his side.

“My husband, soldier kill him,” Yiey says. I am aware that she uses the present tense when she talks. It makes it seem like the killing is now, in the present. Right now the soldiers are wrestling her husband to the ground; the first sound blasts.

Luke looks at the ice on the window. “I'm sorry,” he says, so softly we can barely hear him. Our conversation is painful. We have vast silences, but it is better than the haranguing. My mother rubs her hands down her belly, “Aghhhh,” she moans and digs her heels into the rug laced with tiny black dog hairs.

“You're not going to have that baby now?” Luke teases my mother.

The women gaze at him.

“I was a medic,” he says, “but I'd just as soon not handle this.”

Pilot eyes the hot dishes of beautiful, spiteful food. We eat, and for a few minutes we don't have to talk. Yiey pulls the gold locket she wears from her shirt. She opens the locket and shows Luke the photo inside.

I know it is a tiny picture of my grandfather.

“My husband,” she says.

Luke nods.

“You a soldier,” she says. “Who do you kill?” Still present tense.

“Anyone,” Luke says. “They arm the medics. But if we fire it's a last resort.”

My mother has eaten for two. My grandmother's plate is empty. We are sitting around the coffee table. A bowl with remaining egg rolls and a bowl a quarter full of rice are on the coffee table. All the other food is eaten.

“Did you have food to eat?” Yiey asks Luke. My mother eats more rice.

“Food in plastic,” he says. “We weren't hungry.”

But I am thinking of the gun.
Who do you kill?
my grandmother asks.

“When I come to this country,” Yiey says. “I lay in bed. I cannot move. I cannot sleep. I feel hands around my neck to kill me. They get me around my neck and I cannot breathe. At Lowell General, they say I am crazy. Nothing wrong. Five times I almost pass away when the hands squeeze my neck.”

I have no memory of this story. I have a shadow of a memory of my bed in Lowell.

Maybe we all slept in that bed, like the children in Cambodia. My mother doesn't tell stories. She inches down on the couch; her head rests on her mother's shoulder.

“You aren't crazy,” Luke says. “I'm in the war every second of my life. Those hands around my throat.”

I say, “He dreams about someone.”

“Who?” she speaks sharply. She demands to know, as if she knows all the ghosts and maybe this one is hers, too.

I don't know if he'll answer, but it feels good to me to take his nightmare out of the dark night in the cabin and bring it to Yiey.

His voice shakes, but he answers her. He tells her the story he told me. The dream of trying again to save a soldier. “He dies again. Every night. Then they get me. I think that's saying, you weren't meant to come back. Just the ghost of me came back.”

My mother has fallen asleep. My phone chimes—a text from my father. He's fishing in the morning.

My grandmother says, “Sophea, she should not be with a ghost.”

I can tell my grandmother likes him, but that does not stop her from scolding. I want to tell her,
Stop it! He's fine
, but they aren't talking to me.

“No.” Luke agrees. “She shouldn't be.” His face is drained of feeling.

It's as if I'm not here. They've become allies.

“What did you do to be able to sleep?” Luke asks my grandmother.

“Go to monk,” she says. “The monk help me. I have to go eight time.”

“Eight,” Luke says, as if this number is magic and he must remember.

“Eight time,” she says. “In Lowell is the monk.”

Luke says, “And after eight times, you slept?”

“I do no pass away.”

I leave them and go to the window. My grandmother brings me my plate of food. “Sophea,” she commands. “Eat.”

READING KEROUAC

I'm reading Kerouac to understand Luke. He's cooking shrimp to understand me. In my imagination, Luke is Kerouac as a boy—he flies down a field, hooks a football on an orange fall night.

“Are you hungry?” Luke calls as he spins the shrimp in butter and garlic in a cottage in Rye. I wander the streets in Lowell with a boy in love. First my name is Maggie. Then I am a Cambodian girl, and we squat on the floor of a triple decker, spooning rice and shrimp in our mouths, and the moon is full.

When he talks to someone I don't know on the phone, Luke is Kerouac in war. He falls into a voice I don't know.

I imagine him as a soldier in the movies, crouched outside a door, gun ready, his eye to the gun sight. Or he is giving chocolate to kids. Dozens of arms are reaching up to him to get the chocolate. Anyone could have a grenade; anyone can be the enemy.

UNPROTECTED

I'm doing my homework, and Luke stretches out in the chair. I am stuffed with shrimp and rice. I hear the bell buoy sound. I look up from my small light and see him as a shadow. I think he is finally sleeping. I see him in gray profile. First his long nose, the square tension of his jaw, the soft tissue I know is around his ear.

I imagine the tiny curls of hair where his ribs curve below his heart. His chest is not protected. I watch it lift. The ribs expand. What if I placed my palms on the exposed fleshy part of his arms? The part no one touches. Not even the wind. Then I let my eyes roam the shape of his chin, his cheeks now more visible as my eyes adjust. Hard jaw. The sockets of his eyes.

His eyes. For the first time since I met him, for a second I'm afraid. He's not asleep. His eyes are fixed, open. They watch the door with the concentration, the tremor of an animal.

A gull screams. Now I listen with him. I see all that can harm us.

The clock—its ticks.

The cottage's electric hum.

From the breakwater, the foghorn.

His shoulders drop, grip the bed. His spine arches.

If I startled him, would he forget for a second who we are?

CAMBODIAN

“You say you aren't Cambodian,” Luke says the next time we meet.

“No, I'm not Cambodian,” I say.

I have cut three branches of winter berries I found behind the horseshoe of cabins near Rye harbor. I place the branches in a jar. Beside the jar I place a tin of sand, and in the sand three sticks of incense.

In the dark I light the incense. The scent of jasmine settles on us.

“There,” I say. “Maybe we will be safe.”

“You made a shrine,” he says, “like your grandmother does.”

I look at my hands that collected the branches. One rests in the other.

JAM

The incense burns. I am almost Luke's lover. We live in a cabin near the ocean, where seals will soon have pups and sun themselves on the breakwater, and I cook rice for us and sometimes we lie together in each other's arms until 9:00 p.m.

Tonight when it's time to go, he makes me coffee. He puts in three sugars and three fingers of milk. He makes toast to warm me and slathers my toast with bright raspberry jam. It makes me feel childlike and in love.

“Stay warm,” he says.

- - -

I'm also the schoolgirl who gets out of bed for my shift on Saturday in a Cambodian house. I imagine him kicking up the fire in the woodstove. I make coffee with hot milk and sugar the way he does for me, and I drink.

I drive to work.

In the parking lot, I call my father. I'd give anything to hear his voice.

“It's my girl,” he calls into the phone.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“Gonna lose the call. The signal won't hold.”

“Just wanted to hear your—”

I hear him faintly. “. . . try to make it home . . .” I hear. “. . . don't know.”

“Are you coming?” It is almost my birthday. But I hear only silence. He's somewhere offshore, in the Atlantic Ocean. I need to stop calling. It only hurts when it's done.

The trees still bend to each other, weighted with snow. The plows have scraped snow from the streets, yet ice caps on piles of snow remain like scar tissue.

But I love the color of the jam Luke gives me on toast. It brightens all this long February.

WHY THEY DON'T SPEAK FRENCH

My mother and Yiey sit by the woodstove. I am upstairs after work, but I can hear them. I'm working on my business plan for a CSF. I'm writing lists in my computer and sketching notes and fish on a brown paper bag. Monkfish, cod, hake, dogfish. To do:

“What are you doing?” my mother shouts.

“A business plan for homework,” I shout.

“My grandfather had a business,” she shouts.

I imagine a fishmonger dragging eels, gasping for breath, on a cart.

“In Paris,” she shouts. “Where he studied.”

My eyes pause, as I hear this, on the hake fins I am shading, overwhelmed with the paperwork to sell the fish you catch, the rules, the government that thinks it is god.

“A banker,” Yiey shouts. “At home speak French. Pa say in France, you lucky, you learn French and Khmer.”

“You lived in France?” I shout.

“Until I am five,” she shouts.

“But if the Khmer Rouge hear you speak French, they beat you till you die. She never hear a whisper of French,” my grandmother shouts. She must be talking about my mother.

“Here, you can be clever, like a rabbit,” my mother shouts. “You can have a business. If you can keep your mind from Cambodia.”

I imagine them downstairs, sitting side by side. My grandmother with a scarf tied over her thin hair. And beautiful Lydia, my mother, her black hair fashioned in spirals she made with a curling iron, wearing a polka-dot dress. She shouts, “He hiccupped. See!” and I imagine one of the red dots flick in her red silky dress.