If You Lived Here (16 page)

Somehow, I’ve adjusted to her speed in conversation, the way she jumps into a subject as if we’ve been discussing it for hours already. I pick up the papers. The first is on Southeastern Adoptions stationery. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Marino,” it says:

As I stated to you on the phone, I’m sorry about this new postpone-ment of your adoption. In cases such as this one, I don’t anticipate the problem delaying your trip to Hanoi by more than a month or two. However, as you know, it’s impossible to speculate on such matters, particularly when it pertains to the rules and regulations of a foreign government. At your request, I’m faxing a copy of the embassy letter. Please understand that our staff is doing its best to facilitate this matter. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I appreciate your continued patience.

Yours sincerely, Carolyn Burns

Parent Liaison Officer Southeastern Adoptions

The second page, which bears the insignia of the embassy of Vietnam, is even shorter:

Re: International Adoption Case #20166 Child’s Name: Nguyen Hai Au

Location: Ha Dong Children’s Center, Ha Noi To Whom It May Concern:

Due to administrative backlog, we must postpone the finalization of the adoption of Nguyen Hai Au until further notice.

Sincerely,

Mr. Phung Van Luan Political Counselor Embassy of Vietnam

Shelley watches me, eyes crinkled with worry. “What does ‘administrative backlog’ mean?” she asks.

“It’s embassy talk, I guess.”

Her lips begin to tremble. “I don’t even know when to buy plane tickets!” she cries. These days, she’s plagued not merely by her own anxiety and the breakup of her marriage, but also by the tension between bureaucratic vagueness and her mother’s need to travel to a third world country with a definite itinerary and firm reservations.

I read the letter again and try to interpret it. I can remember standing in line for hours every month just to pick up my family’s ration tickets. As far as I’m concerned, “administrative backlog” just means “business as usual” in Vietnamese. I hand Shelley the letter and try to look confident. “You don’t worry. This just normal slow, that’s all.”

Shelley throws herself down on a stool. She reaches toward her mug of tea, then lets her hand fall back to her knee. “I can’t take this,” she says, staring at the smiling cat on my Happy Time Korean Wholesale calendar. I fold the papers and put them back in the envelope. I could remind

her that she wanted to understand Vietnam and, well, bureaucracy is Vietnam. That would be cruel, though. “You’ll get your boy,” I tell her, trying to sound confident. But what do I know, really?

Shelley’s eyes alight on me. She twists a strand of hair around her fin-ger. “When are you heading to D.C. next time?”

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

But her eyes already shine with the plan. “Please go by the embassy with me.”

I can make it to Charlotte and back in a single day. But with D.C. I have to drive up on Sunday night, shop Monday morning, then turn around and drive back that afternoon. It’s six hours each way. I always feel sick on Tuesdays. “Won’t do you no good,” I tell her, trying to squirm out of it. “I’m just
Vi
Ù
t Ki
e
u,
not even real Vietnamese no more. They hate people like me.”

Shelley just looks at me. “Don’t say no,” she pleads.

Shelley’s mother brings her over to the store at seven on Sunday night, just as I’m closing. The trunk of their car contains an Igloo cooler, a thermos, a case full of CDs and cassettes, a portable stereo, and a small suitcase on wheels. They start hauling everything to the back of my van.

When I go to D.C., I stick a toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, and change of underwear in my purse. “Why so much stuff?” I ask. “We back tomorrow.”

“It’s twelve hours on the road, at least,” Shelley says, plaintively, as if I’m complaining that she even brought a pair of shoes. She pulls a gallon jug of water out of the trunk. “I guarantee you. We will need this.”

Shelley’s mother walks over to me. She’s small and stylish and wears her hair in a shade of blond that, on a woman her age, has got to come from a bottle. Still, she looks surprisingly pretty and youthful. I imagine she’s the sort of person who, confronted with the fact that nature hadn’t given her hair that color, decided that nature was wrong.

“I hear you going to Vietnam, too,” I say.

“I made her promise that we take one suitcase each. No exceptions,”

she tells me, watching Shelley crawl around in the van, shoving parcels into corners. “By the way, you’re lovely to indulge her like this.”

I shrug. “It a long drive. She good company.”

The mother folds her arms against her chest and sighs. “Actually, I’m proud of her,” she says, as much to herself as me.

I smile. “I hope she understand this trip to embassy won’t do no good.”

We can only see Shelley from the back, squatting in her khakis, sorting through plastic bags of food. Her mother laughs. “That doesn’t mat-ter. I mean, it would be delightful if you two could push things forward. But, really, she just needs to feel like she’s doing something. She’s already painted the baby’s room twice, and, as you know, she doesn’t even plan to stay in that house.”

Shelley has now squeezed herself between the two front seats. She holds the stereo plug in her fingers, then turns her head and yells, “I’m putting the cigarette lighter in the glove compartment, Mai, so I can plug this in. I’m putting my maps in there, too.”

“I got my own maps,” I tell her. “And I know how to get to D.C.” Shelley’s mother puts her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t even bother,

dear,” she tells me.

I’m worried about my transmission, so, even though Shelley offers to take a turn, I plan to drive the whole way. We’re twenty miles out of Wilmington before she feels organized enough to settle down. Some singer I’ve never heard of—Willie, Billie, a black lady with a boy’s name—is on the ste-reo. Shelley has filled the thermos with coffee, and brought two special mugs with tiny holes in the top, good for holding drinks without spilling. Maybe I’ll get myself one of these.

Outside, the sky has turned a steely black. When I first arrived here, the smooth, unblemished highways of this country impressed me. In Vietnam, it would have taken me more than a day to go the distance I’ll drive tonight in just a few hours. But I miss the life on the roads back home: the farmers in the fields, the villagers hauling goods to market.

In comparison, these I’s I drive—I-40, I-95—are barren, endless, lonely. Sometimes, driving by myself on these roads in the middle of the night, I half-believe I’m lost in space. I’m an astronaut cut loose from my rocket, condemned to drift forever.

“You hungry?” Shelley asks, pulling me back in. She reaches over the seat and drags a plastic bag onto her lap. “I made us some dinner.”

I start to shake my head and tell her that I don’t have a big appetite. Normally, I can make it to D.C. on a couple of apples. But then I realize that, actually, I’m starving. She has lugged a huge amount of food into this van, and I want it. “Sure,” I say, taking a sip of coffee. Over the past few days, the temperature has settled into summer, but here in the cool car, the hot liquid tastes good.

Shelley pulls a plastic Tupperware container out of the bag. I hear the sucking sound of the top coming off, then she holds some kind of hard-boiled egg between her fingers. “Just try this. For a snack.”

“What is it?”

“A deviled egg. Haven’t you ever been to a picnic?” “I been to picnics.” Not in the States, though.

“Just try it.”

I hold the egg between my fingers and take a bite, keeping my eyes on the road. It’s creamier than a hard-boiled egg, and less bland, too. Somebody had a good idea.

“Well?”

“It’s cute.”

She watches me chewing. “But do you like it?” I nod. “Cute.”

“My mother used to take me and my sister on car trips when we were little and she’d bring, like, a stick of gum for each of us. She’d be pointing out the sites along the road, ordering, ‘Look at the scenery, girls! Absorb! Absorb!’ and I couldn’t do a thing but fantasize about McDonald’s. Now I always make sure to have a lot of food with me when I travel.”

“What you bring on the plane with you to Vietnam?”

She throws back her head and stares up at the ceiling. It’s an issue she’s clearly considered. “I’m thinking granola bars, Planters peanuts,

apples—they don’t spoil too fast. My mother bought a supersize box of cheese crackers at Target. She’s gotten more liberal about food, maybe because she’s got money now.” Shelley pops another egg into her mouth, chews for a while. “She’s going to drive me crazy over there. She wants to be a help, but everything has to be perfect. Where’s our hotel? Does it have an iron in the room? Does it have a blow dryer? Can she get coffee in bed in the morning? I can’t worry about that stuff. I’m going to have a baby to deal with.”

We eat more eggs, letting Willie’s voice drift around us. Shelley has taken her shoes off and planted her bare feet against the dashboard in front of her. She sips her coffee and sighs. “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

I smile, move into the inside lane, pass a sputtering truck. “You want to hear about first time I ever taste coffee?”

Shelley looks at me as if my kindness knows no bounds. I could describe the sound of boiling rice and, if that rice was boiling in Vietnam, she’d listen.

Interstate 40 spreads out in front of us, a plain brown ribbon stretched across the dark farmland. In my mind I see Hanoi. “It was the middle of summer, so hot. I had to take my daddy’s bike to be fixed.” I remember the morning perfectly, even though I haven’t thought of it in years. How old was I then? My mother died that summer, so it was 1976. “I was sixteen.”

That morning, the sidewalks were scattered with the blossoms of the flame tree, bright orange and shaped like fans. The toothless old mechanic sat at the corner of Hang Dao and Cau Go streets, not far from my house. He spent hours working on the bike, pulling off the rusty broken chain, cleaning the gears, submerging the tire tubes in a basin of water to search for holes. He probably could have done the job in less than an hour, but he took his time with it, talking to me, telling stories, scouring the grungy spokes with the bristles of a worn toothbrush. I didn’t care how long he took. “My life so different then,” I tell Shelley. “Now I got no time. Back then, I got nothing but time. Americans say, ‘Time’s money.’ I’m rich back then.”

I glance at Shelley and she grins. I don’t mention the relief I felt that

afternoon, which is probably the reason I remember it at all. My mother had been screaming for weeks, crazed from the pain. She wasn’t even strong enough to lift her head from the pillow, and she’d begged us all to kill her. She was headed for the next life anyway, she argued, making beautiful promises to the person brave enough to do it. To me, she promised good marks in school. To Lan, she promised brilliant children. She promised my father robust health. She didn’t care how we did it. Strangle her. Stick a knife through her heart. Just do it, fast. Lan, my father, and I took turns in the hospital, wiping her face with cool rags, trying to soothe her. It was strange to see a woman who’d gone through so much sorrow in her life suddenly refuse to put up with one more minute of it. During those brief intervals when she finally screamed herself to sleep, we’d cluster together, whispering, as if we might be able to find a solution. We’d heard of drugs that made people numb, but we didn’t know how to get them. It was 1976, just one year after the end of the war, and that bar-ren hospital had nothing that would ease her pain. Some days, I was so frantic to make the misery stop that I worried I’d actually take a knife and stab her. But then, as suddenly as the pain had started, it went away. One afternoon, in the middle of a wail, my mother closed her mouth. After that, she lay there silent, staring at the ceiling, faintly smiling. When we took her hand, she squeezed it.

The morning after the screaming stopped, sitting by the old bicycle mechanic, I felt a relief that colored everything around me. Even the glint of the sunlight on the asphalt seemed cheerful. Up until my mother’s illness, my life had not been particularly sad—no more so, that is, than the life of anyone else in Hanoi at that time. But because I’d never felt deep sadness, I’d never felt such relief from it, either. The knowledge that my mother wasn’t suffering gave me a sense of joy that was as powerful an emotion as I had known.

We reach the junction of I-95 and head north toward Washington. Outside, the sky has grown perfectly dark and all I can see is the triangle of pavement in my headlights and the two red dots that represent the car ahead of us. “I wish I could describe that day,” I tell Shelley. “It was something beautiful. Seems like everybody smiling. And when the old

man finished his work, I try to give him his money, but he won’t let me. He say I should buy him a coffee instead.”

I pause to let a small car speed past in the fast lane, then I continue. “Now, that’s funny in Vietnam. Nobody ever hear of a sixteen-year-old girl buying an old man coffee. But, like I say, I got the time, and I’m happy that day. So we walk my bike down to a café by the lake and we drink coffee.”

“Did you like it?” Shelley asks.

I shake my head. “It’s real bitter. Like tree bark. Sweet tree bark. But I drink the whole thing.”

We travel on, listening to the sorrowful tunes of Willie. “Then the old man did something I couldn’t believe.” I can remember it perfectly, how I’d gotten on my bike to ride home and the old man bowed to me. “Who would ever imagine this! A grandfather bowing down to a young girl. But he did, like I was a princess. And then he said, ‘
Làn thu-th
u
y nét xuân-s
ê
n, hoa ghen thua th
Ä
m li
Ø
u h
o
n kém xanh
.’ To me, nobody ever said anything better.”

Shelley looks at me, waiting for a translation.

“That sentence real famous to Vietnamese, because it comes from
Truy
Ù
n Ki
e
u,
The Tale of Kieu, our most beautiful poem. It long as a book. It about a girl, Kieu, whose life is real sad, but she’s a good girl. Lovely girl.” I consider the words for a moment, then say, “It mean something like, ‘Her eyes like autumn rivers, her eyebrows like the hills in spring. She makes the flowers jealous because her beauty, and the willow trees jealous because her skin so fine.’ ”