If You Lived Here (5 page)
“Yeah,” I say.
“Did you get weeks like this in Vietnam? Where it changes back and forth so often?”
Could the woman be more annoying? I force myself to recollect sum-mer afternoons of blinding sunshine followed by driving rain, then sunshine and rainbows later. “Days,” I say.
She lets out an extravagant gasp. “How dramatic! I really can’t imagine.” “It not that different here,” I remind her. Wilmington has moments when the fertile smell of the summer air reminds me exactly of home. But I am really only interested in putting her off. I push my
ph
d
aside, pick up
a pile of order forms, and start to fill them out.
“Um. Here,” she says suddenly, unzipping her bag and reaching inside. “I brought you these.” She pulls out five faded
National Geographic
magazines and sets them on the counter. When I glance up at her, she shrugs and says, “My husband’s a subscriber. We’ve got, like, a zillion of them.” She looks kind of embarrassed, but also curious to see how I respond. Despite myself, I look through the covers. Each bears a photograph of Vietnam. Four come from the 1960s and early 1970s. The most recent,
published thirteen years ago in 1989, bears the headline “Vietnam: Hard Road to Peace” and promises articles on Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon. Hanoi in 1989, ten years after I left it. I feel as if I’ve been offered an invitation to peek at what would have been my future.
I look up at Shelley. Actually, I’m touched by her thoughtfulness, but I’m also uncomfortable with interactions that have no commercial purpose. “Thanks,” I say.
She busies herself by zipping closed her bag. “It’s nice to have a use for them,” she tells me and then, after an awkward silence, she mumbles, “I should be heading home anyway.” She lets her fingers tap the air in a little wave, and then she’s gone.
For a while, I just eye the magazines on the counter. Part of me would like to ignore them altogether, but I’m tempted to look. Warily, I pull them closer, run my finger across the covers. Then I open an early issue, just to check. It contains familiar images—water buffalo, women wearing
áo dài,
children spooning out their morning bowls of rice—and images like the ones I remember from North Vietnamese newspapers depicting the war in the South—sick babies, anguished parents, a U.S. Navy flotilla steaming down the Mekong. Though the photos interest me, I find myself happily unaffected. I’m an American now and I experience the same feelings of curiosity and pity that any American would feel viewing photos of an exotic country, a long-ago war. I’ve endured many emotions over the past twenty-three years, almost all of which I’d rather have avoided, so it comes as a pleasant surprise to look at pictures of Vietnam and feel, well, nothing.
Marcy ambles over. “Cool,” she says, pushing the magazines around on the counter. But Vietnam doesn’t really interest her. After a couple of minutes, she wanders off.
I look at every picture. Then, braced, I push the other magazines aside, ready to peruse the most daunting one, the one that features photos of Hanoi. I am primed and ready, immune. But it takes only a moment to discover that I am not invulnerable after all. There, on page 558, my city lies before me in all its dingy grandeur, a lost treasure that I’d convinced myself I no longer missed. In the ten years between the day I left and
the period during which these photographs were taken, my city hardly changed. In one picture, a bride, posing in front of a gauzy mosquito net, reminds me of my cousin. In another, a man rides a bicycle exactly like the one my family used to own. Every detail in every photograph feels personal. Worn rubber shoes. Wooden doorways covered in peeling paint. The gritty, uneven slabs of city sidewalks. A woman scrubbing a baby in a basin of water, gripping its leg to keep it from slipping. I miss my mother, my father, my sister, my niece. Vietnam.
A few days later, Shelley appears again. This time, Marcy’s at the register, while I perch on a stool back in produce, dividing a crate of basil into four-ounce plastic bags.
“Everybody on campus knows me,” I hear Marcy say. “Even people I don’t know, they know me.” The girl’s body is slender but curvy, and her clothes fit as tightly as the skin on a ripe tomato. It isn’t hard to see why she’s famous at UNCW. Even in worn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, she looks like one of those “Talk to a Sexy Lady” girls in the phone number ads on cable.
“Try studying for a chemistry exam when guys keep wandering by ask-ing for your number,” she complains.
“It must be kind of rough on you.” Shelley’s voice sounds both sympathetic and amused.
Eventually, she wanders back to where I’m working. “Hey,” she says.
She pauses, tugging at a curl.
I smile. “How you?” I ask. I don’t want to admit that I’ve been staying up past one
A
.
M
. reading and rereading her magazines, but I do want to convey that I remember that she brought them.
“Okay, I guess,” she says, wavering a little. I imagine that, with a job like hers, she’s always depressed, at least a little. In Vietnam, we didn’t mix with funeral people. They kept to themselves, which seemed like the price they paid for earning their livelihood off burying our dead.
Her eyes skim the contents of my shelves as if she’s glancing through the headlines in the morning paper. “I need something good to cook for
dinner,” she muses. She’s tall and sturdy, pretty in a healthy, thoughtless way. Today, she wears a silky peacock-colored dress, the kind of thing another woman might flounce in, but she seems indifferent to it. The truth is, a stranger wouldn’t notice the dress. Not when she’s got that hair. Would she need a mirror, often, just to marvel at it? Would she consider it an asset or a burden, or both? I can’t even imagine how you’d comb it. My father used to say that the heavens give each person one spectacular gift. Marcy has the body. My mother got her fine gray eyes. My father got his voice. Shelley has that hair. And me? I don’t know yet.
She picks up a bright yellow packet of Knorr tamarind soup base, looks at the picture on the front. “Do people eat this in Vietnam?”
“Tamarind, yeah. But I don’t know they have that soup base. You can use it for
canh chua
. Sour soup.”
“Sour soup?” She grimaces.
I nod my head encouragingly. “It’s good. When I’m little, my mother make it for me like a special treat.” Somehow, it seems important that she believe me. It’s
good
.
She laughs. She seems so at ease. “My mother used to make me TV dinners,” she says. “You probably don’t even know about TV dinners.”
“I learn a lot on cable,” I tell her. I want her to know that I am fully integrated into American society.
She leans against the shelf, watching me stuff another bag of basil. “Swanson’s did an entire turkey dinner. It was gross and gooey but my sister and I loved it. If my mother was going out, we got to eat Swanson’s and watch horse racing on TV.”
She talks as if we’re exchanging vital information here. Then her face turns serious. “I don’t want you to think that’s all my mother fed us.”
I look at her, surprised that she would care. “I don’t,” I mumble.
This response seems to satisfy her. “She makes an unimaginably delicious quiche, but I wouldn’t rave about her pies.”
I can’t help myself. I laugh. She says, “I’ll give you the recipe for the quiche. And you tell me how to make sour soup.” Now we’re back to sour soup?
I look down at my basil, stuff another bag. “Okay,” I tell her, with
a sense that I’m trying something different here. It doesn’t feel danger-ous, though. It feels more interesting than normal. What could it mean to exchange recipes with a stranger?
Shelley pulls over Marcy’s little stool and perches on it, then slaps her hands against her knees to signal that she’s ready. “Let me tie the knots,” she suggests. I can always use an extra hand. I give her a bag. She holds it open for a moment, inhales the scent of the herb, and then, apparently satisfied, expertly knots it. “Okay,” she says. “Sour soup.”
It takes me a moment to start. The truth is, I’m embarrassed about my English. I can understand every word I hear on TV, and I can read anything I want, but I don’t converse much, and I know that when I do, I sound like an idiot. Now I feel a sudden urge to say to Shelley, “I’m smarter than you think.” But that just sounds more stupid.
Sour soup. I pull a handful of basil from the box. “You eat it when the weather get hot,” I begin. “It make you sweat, keep you cool inside.” I look at the packet of Knorr on the floor next to Shelley’s purse. It’s a simple dish, really. “I can write it down. You need lot of garlic, sugar, ripe pineapple to balance sour ingredients—tamarind, lemon grass, tomato,” I tell her. And then, because the talking feels easier than I expected, I tell her more. I explain the things she doesn’t need to know, the things that suddenly seem important. I tell her that, when you make it right, it tastes just like summer: earthy, sweaty, fresh. I tell her that, during those hot months of my childhood, with the food rationing and the war, we rarely had fish, but we could get tamarind, a fist-size pineapple, a few tomatoes. If we had no sugar, my mother used sugarcane juice instead. On summer evenings, the whole family squatted on the sidewalk in front of our house, holding steaming bowls of soup balanced on our knees. The smell could make your eyes water, but the broth slid easily down the throat, a perfect blend of sweet and sour. All of Hanoi would be out on such nights, eat-ing soup, drinking hot tea, nibbling on chilies in hopes that the sweat on our faces would catch some slight breeze floating in off the river. I was just a kid then, I explain. More than thirty years have passed, but I can still see the tower of empty soup bowls left forgotten on the sidewalk, and hear my father, squatting in the doorway, telling stories to the neighborhood kids. During those summers, my father drew crowds. They used to call him Ông Ngàn Ti
Õ
ng, Mr. Thousand Voices. With the most imperceptible shifts of tone, he would become a ferocious dog, a cranky old woman, a cunning thief. The older children vied for position around his knees. The little ones watched from a few feet away, peeking out at him from behind the shoulders of their parents. I, too, felt frightened by my father’s voice. My earliest memories revolve around listening to his stories while staring intently at the strands of hair that curled like elegant writing against the damp skin of my mother’s neck.
Shelley listens, sealing my Baggies with firm little knots. Every time she glances up, her eyes fix on me. I’m surprised that an American would listen so closely, or care about such unimportant things. After a while, she says, “That’s not the Vietnam I ever heard about.”
“No,” I say. The Americans hadn’t even dropped their bombs. We had only four in my family then: my father, my mother, my sister, Lan, and me. It was before Lan married Tan and lost him. Before she gave birth to My Hoa. Before I fell in love with Khoi. Before the cancer came and took my mother. “It was nice then,” I tell her.
Shelley has stopped what she’s doing. “My husband was in Vietnam,” she says. “He worked as a military mortician in Danang.”
I look at her. “He describe the place different?” The box of basil sits empty. I toss in the knotted bags that lie scattered like herb-filled balloons across the floor.
She says, “He never told me anything.” “Can’t blame him for that.”
Often, my words come out sounding harsher than I intended. Now Shelley blinks and I can see that I’ve hurt her. I stare at her, unsure of what to say. Then, quite suddenly, she smiles, almost as if to reassure me. “No,” she says. “I don’t.”
From the register, I hear Marcy calling, “Hey, Mai.” A moment later she appears in front of us, not even registering the oddness of the fact that I am perched on the floor with a customer, bagging basil. “This afternoon can I use the kitchen to bake a cake for Travis’s birthday?” She stands above us, hand on her hip, a beautiful Vietnamese all-American girl.
“Cake?”
She nods. Marcy and her boyfriend enjoy hobbies. They believe there’s a value in making things from “scratch,” even if the cake would taste better and look prettier if you bought it at Food Lion. They will use up a whole good Saturday making hand-stamped wrapping paper, and then they’ll spend Saturday night downtown at Marz, where Travis plays drums with a band called Maximum Go-Go and Marcy dances in some cage, like a Saigon call girl.
“Fine,” I say.
She bounces from her heels to her toes. “After work, I’ll just run out and get some eggs.” She makes it sound like a statement, but it’s really a request.
“Just use mine,” I tell her, waving her away. I find Marcy’s manipula-tions kind of endearing. She offers me one of her blithe, grateful smiles and dashes back to the register. I don’t envy Marcy her youth or her beauty, but I would like to remember how it feels to care so much about wrapping paper, or surprises, or cake.
Shelley grins. “Must be nice,” she whispers, exactly what I’m thinking.
