If You Lived Here (39 page)

“Bo,” I say. “Eat.”

“I stood on the pier. I could see the boat. They didn’t even lie about it, the women on the dock. They said the boat was headed for Hong Kong. Did you hear me when I called to you?”

I shake my head. “I called to you.” I shake my head.

“I said, ‘Xuan Mai. Come back, child. One is enough. Don’t make it two.’ ”

I shake my head. I shake my head. I didn’t hear a thing.

My bowl is in my lap. The chopsticks dangle from my hand, toward the floor. “I’m sorry, Bo,” I whisper. Maybe he hears me, maybe not.

“One was enough. Why did you have to make it two?” he asks, his voice forlorn, and it’s not a question so much as a demonstration of the way he stood there on the dock, calling after the daughter who had killed his granddaughter, then disappeared.

“I didn’t hear,” I say.

He nods. He’s crying now, and the crying sets off another coughing spell, this one worse than the first. I manage to get the rice bowl out of his hand, then I squat beside him, my hand on his knee. When he finishes, he’s panting. His arms go around my shoulders and he leans over, kissing me the old Vietnamese way, bursts of short, quick sniffs against the top of my head. I haven’t been kissed like that in so many years. It makes me see that I had a whole life ahead of me, and skipped it.

17
‌

Shelley

ap, the driver,
has plans of his own. He speaks very little English. But he’s got a clue, unlike Mrs. Huyen and Carolyn Burns. They expect (and want?) me to throw up my hands and head for the airport.

Vietnamese tradition seems to require that I, the customer, sit in back, but I sit up front with him. In the mornings, on the way to the orphanage, we share cigarettes and listen to tapes of Vietnamese rock and roll, or the World Cup on the radio. In the afternoons, he brings his kid along, a twelve-year-old named Binh who speaks pretty good English and uses it, mostly, to speculate about life aboard airplanes. Binh leans forward from the back of the Toyota, dangling his arms over the front seat as if he’s catching fish.

“My friend say, you have to go toilet in airplane, you go in cup. For man, no problem. For lady, big problem. Many lady die. On airplane, they die.” He speaks sadly and with conviction. I imagine him at school, relaying this information to his buddies on the playground.

“That’s not true,” I tell him.

He nods his head. “True. True!”

Lap nudges his son’s arm with an elbow and says something in Vietnamese.

“My father say my cousin can help you,” Binh relates. “He minister of interior. Very good.”

I look at Binh. “He’s the minister of the interior?” Today’s dialogue concerns plan number five. The first four plans washed out, through no lack of diligence on the part of Lap, so I can’t believe we didn’t approach this guy already.

Binh stares at me. His ability to express himself surpasses his ability to understand.

“The
minister
or the
ministry
?” I ask. “Person or place?”

The boy blinks. “Ministry! Ministry!” he says, making the
y
sound like the yips of a puppy.

“Oh.”

Lap talks. He drives with his hands hovering above the steering wheel, gesturing, fiddling with the lighter or the volume on the cassette player. When needed, his hands will alight for a moment to make a turn, or to pound on the horn, then fly up again, more necessary for communication than steering. His voice is emphatic. He repeats his sentences two or three times, as if he doesn’t trust Binh even to follow the Vietnamese.

“My father say we go to my cousin house right now, if you like.

Okay?”

What do I have to lose? It is six o’clock. Mai will be glad to have the room to herself. And I, having run out of other options, will try anything. “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

The boy grins and relays the information to his father, who gives me a thumbs-up and completes a U-turn across three lanes of traffic while dial-ing a number on his cell phone.

Ten minutes later, we pull to a stop in an alley lined with ornate-looking contemporary town houses, all three and four stories high but not much wider than the length of our car. Compared to the Lucinda, the space seems palatial, but in the States people have wider closets. Land is expensive here, but air is free.

We slip off our shoes at the doorstep and walk into a room that, though

narrow, is spaciously deep. In the front half of the room, three men sit on two wooden couches, facing each other across a coffee table with a white cloth over it. Behind the couches, a large set of glass-fronted cabinets juts perpendicularly into the room, serving as a partition between the front of the room and the back.

“Hello!”

“Hello!”

“Hello!”

The men stand up and surround us at the door. One is burly and unkempt. A second is slight and looks like a teenager. The third has white hair and hobbles toward me. Behind them, two women appear from the part of the room behind the cabinets, drying their hands with rags. They stop before they get too close, smiling and waving shyly.

The men laugh awkwardly, as if, simply by entering the house, I’ve told a funny joke. Then everyone falls silent, glancing around, trying to figure out what to do next. Luckily, my professional experience kicks in. “Shelley Marino,” I say, grabbing a hand and shaking it, then another and another, moving efficiently around the room. “Shelley Marino. Shelley Marino.” I go through all the men. And the women, too, who look surprised and pleased. Their handshakes are limp and unpracticed, but game enough.

I take the burly man, Duc, to be the owner of the house. He ushers me to a seat on the couch. On the table in front of me sit about a dozen unopened cans of 333 beer, a tray of glasses, a tower of bowls, and a pile of chopsticks. Duc, who is humming quite loudly, opens a can of beer, pours it into a glass, and offers it to me. I accept it, but look around. “Binh?” I ask. Lap may save me, but his son keeps me afloat. The boy, throwing his chin into the air, makes his way past his elders and takes the seat next to mine.

The women have disappeared into what I suspect is the kitchen. Here in the front of the house, the beer flows freely. The conversation becomes loud, witty, and, judging by the glances in my direction, focused on me. It’s hard to know for sure because my translator, concentrating on the prospect of pilfering sips of his father’s beer, forgets to pay attention. Lap

hands me a small ceramic cup with a clear liquid in it. He points to the cup, then at me, and says something that makes the others laugh.

“Binh.” I speak loudly and firmly enough to make the boy look up. “What is it?”

Binh lifts the cup off the table and sniffs it. “Our Vietnamese whiskey. My father say you like cigarettes and Vietnamese lady don’t like cigarettes. So my father think you like our whiskey, too.”

Whatever. I pick up the cup, taste it with my tongue, and swallow it like a shot. The men applaud. The liquid burns in my throat, but it goes down smoothly. “Not bad,” I cough.

“On airplanes, people drink whiskey only this big,” Binh holds up his hand to show a space between his finger and thumb about as wide as a pencil. “And, because they in the air, they very tipsy. So tipsy, sometime people die because they drink too much.”

I don’t bother to answer. The men keep talking. From the kitchen, I can hear the low voices of the women and I suddenly feel the need to see them. Pushing myself off the couch, I cause the men to pause in their conversation, but they don’t seem to mind my stepping over Binh and walking around the cabinets to investigate. The kitchen is a small space, off the back of the main room. I peek through the doorway, and find the two women squatting on the floor, one over a cutting board, chopping tiny red chilies, the other over a frying pan balanced on a small portable stove. She’s turning spring rolls sizzling in oil. The air is so full of the smells of the food I could almost lift my hand and catch them.

When the women see me, they grin. The one at the frying pan, who appears to be in her early twenties, says, “How you?”

“Just fine,” I say. “And you?”

She seems to have used up her English. Instead of replying, she giggles, using the back of her arm to push her hair off her forehead, then looks back down at what she’s doing.
“Binh
ê
i!”
she calls to my translator in the other room.

A moment later, the boy ambles around the cabinets and leans into the kitchen. He spies the spring rolls, squats down to snatch one draining on a plate, and receives a slap to the hand with a chopstick. He and the

younger woman bicker until she reluctantly lets him take a spring roll. Then he stands up and leans against the other side of the door, gingerly biting into it, then letting the steam escape.

The women ask Binh a series of questions, which he answers disinterestedly. In the midst of their labors, they continuously glance at me. Finally, they ask him something he can’t answer.

“Mrs. Shelley,” he says. “You don’t speak Vietnamese. They want know how you going teach that little baby Vietnamese.”

The older woman is chopping chilies now. The younger one stirs the spring rolls aimlessly.

“He may not learn Vietnamese,” I say. “Or he may learn when he’s older, if he likes.”

They absorb this information, cook for a while. Then, the older one wants to know, “How you going to feed him?”

“I’ll cook.”

“You know how cook Vietnamese?” “Not well.”

“You know how cook rice?”

I nod, which seems to convince them that, at least, the child won’t starve. Still, it’s hard to tell if they approve. Binh only translates the questions he feels incapable of handling himself, and the women mutter under their breaths in a way that makes me feel like a member of an international criminal ring dedicated to baby snatching. Have a little pity, I’d like to say, for our situation. Our. Hai Au and me.

The older woman, perhaps in her mid-forties, deep voiced and chubby, points her wrist in my direction and mumbles another question. “Why you no baby here?” Binh asks, pointing at my belly.

How to explain such a thing? I open my hand and wave it back and forth over my stomach. “Not possible,” I say.

The women stare at me, nodding and murmuring between themselves. The younger one pulls a golden spring roll out of the pan, shakes off the grease, and lays it on paper to drain. The older one finishes chopping the chilies. Then she pushes herself up, rinses her hands at the sink, and slips out the door, motioning for me to follow. She stops in front of a bureau,

yanks it open, and begins to pull out clothes: tiny pants, hats, mittens, a little shirt with a purple doggie on it. “
M
a
y tháng?
” she wants to know.

“How many months the baby?” Binh asks.

“About two years old.”

The woman squats on the floor with the clothes, sorting them, creating piles here and there, tossing the frilly pink dresses and rainbow pajamas into one heap, carefully folding the sailor pants, the choo-choo shirt, the soccer shorts, and the purple dog, then stacking them beside her. When she’s gone through everything, she dumps the heaps back into the drawer, then picks up the stack of folded clothes, stands, and pushes them into my arms. I look down at them, then back at the girl in the kitchen.

The girl in the kitchen urges me with her chin.

I think of my suitcase full of Baby Gap, Carter’s, and Gymboree. I think of the poor women I see every morning outside the windows of the orphanage, slogging through the rice fields. Certainly, they have children. Certainly, they could use a bag of hand-me-downs. I mean, face it: I don’t even have a baby. But I hug those clothes to my chest as if there is a shivering infant at my hotel. The woman lifts the clothes out of my arms, stuffs them into a plastic bag, and roughly pushes me back toward the dinner table, urging me—I know this much—to eat.

The men respond to the sight of the baby clothes with a little burst of applause, a few thumbs-ups, and a toast to my baby. Lap, who seems to have been holding the floor, bangs his hand against the table as if it were his steering wheel, and continues to talk. It’s stirring to hear him speak at such length, so eloquently, so capable of holding other people’s attention. I’ve already grown so fond of him, but now I’m filled with admiration, too. The women return to the room carrying bowls of rice noodles, platters of lettuce and herbs, plates full of spring rolls. Everyone squeezes closer together on the couch to give them room to sit down. Lap, still talking, picks up a set of chopsticks, fills a bowl with noodles, greens, and a spring roll.