If You Lived Here (8 page)
Shelley begins to smile and then she turns away. Her hand goes to her eye and rubs at it. If she’s crying, she doesn’t want me to know. Then she says, “I brought you something. Hold on.” She steps out the door and into the parking lot, then returns a minute later with an armful of books. I clear some inventory sheets off the counter and she lets the books slide onto the glass. They’re all guides to Vietnam. Together, we gaze down at them. “I’ve been trying to find out about his homeland,” she explains, then she motions with her chin. “Take a look.” Together, we page through the volumes. With this mountain of factual information to draw our attention, the mood between us lightens. I point at various famous sites. We joke. Shelley has a question for every picture, every page. “Have you been here?” “How far is that?” She pauses often to scrawl notes in
the margins or look something up. While she writes, I look at photos of Hanoi, more recent than the ones in
National Geographic
. I feel braver than I did when I looked at the old magazines, and I discover that I enjoy this. One guidebook,
Lonely Planet,
has a whole section of photographs of “the Old Quarter,” the streets surrounding my house. We never called our neighborhood “the Old Quarter.” The whole city was old, rundown, cramped, and rusty. There’s a hazy dawn shot of Hoan Kiem Lake—they call it “the Lake of the Restored Sword”—where my mother did her calisthenics, and one of a woman selling
bún ch
À
,
rice noodles with grilled pork, the fragrance of which I can remember so distinctly that the sterile air in my market seems suddenly quite filled with it. Then I spot a picture of the Dong Xuan Market, forget myself, and laugh.
Shelley looks up. “What?” she asks, as if she fully expects an explanation. I remember the casual interrogations that used to take place between myself and my sister. We felt entitled to information. Thoughts only existed to be shared.
I point my finger at the photo—a line of market women offering their wares—and try to explain. “These ladies,” I begin, “they’re very rude. Uneducated. When I’m a girl, my mom give me money to go buy bam-boo shoots. But when I get there, they hold up their vegetable—it’s long, skinny, like a man’s you-know-what—and they say, ‘Hey, girl! Get some practice on this guy before you meet your husband.’ ”
Does she have any idea what I’m saying? Apparently so. Shelley grins. “Yeesh. What did you do?”
“I ran away. I know my mom get mad that I don’t bring home bamboo shoots for dinner, but I’m too afraid to buy it.”
“By that point, you probably weren’t in the mood to eat them any-way,” Shelley remarks. She looks back down at the picture. “Was it at this market in Hanoi?”
Of course it was, and I’m about to say so, too, but then I remember that I have an old lie to sustain. Most Vietnamese Americans equate northerners with Ho Chi Minh, so for over twenty years I’ve called myself a southerner. “Saigon,” I say. “Wait. I show you.” I go back to my refrigerators and fill a bag with whole bamboo shoots, then take them back to Shelley. “Bamboo shoots actually delicious. Forget what I tell you about those ladies.”
She looks at the pale yellow vegetables, long and limp. “I see what you mean,” she says uncertainly. “They’re not like those little strips you get in Chinese food.”
“Completely different. Slice them longwise, stir-fry with lots of garlic, little bit fish sauce. Cook for a long time to make tender. Then add little bit green onion at the last minute, to make pretty and smell good.”
She holds the bag carefully, like a child clutching pet store goldfish. “I’ll cook it tonight,” she says firmly, as if she’s making a promise.
I’m about to suggest that she add a bit of pork, too, but a phone rings, muffled somewhere. Shelley sifts through her purse until she finds it. “Hello? This is Shelley?” She sucks in her breath. “Damn. I forgot. Okay.” She shoves the phone back into her purse, then pulls out her keys. “My husband’s going to be so mad at me,” she mumbles, then, becoming a customer again, asks, “What do I owe you for the bamboo shoots?”
I wave her away. “Don’t worry about it.”
She smiles and starts to collect her books, then stops. “You know what? I’ve got so much work the next few days. You keep them for a while.” She races out the door before I have a chance to say another word.
I walk over to my steam table, pick a Brillo pad out of a bucket of sudsy water, and begin to scrub at the caked-on grit from the caramelized catfish I served for lunch. Within moments, a swath of blue-gray foam spreads across the stainless-steel surface. The table is filthy, but today I’m impatient. I leave the Brillo on the table, then dunk my hand in the water and wipe it on my pants. In an envelope in my purse, I find Hannah Ellis’s drawing of my mother. She said she spent five hours completing it. So much time, and she came up with a mouth that looks too smug. Still, some mixture of my memory and Hannah Ellis’s talent did combine to create an image that is clearly my mother. When people described her, they always said she was
xinh,
pretty, not
dÓ
p,
beautiful. The difference is not one of degree, as it would be here in America, but of quality. I think of “beautiful” as smooth and lush, rich, like cream or velvet. My mother,
on the other hand, had a freshness, a lightness to her, a glow that reflected back at you, like sunlight bouncing off water. Somehow, in the shape of the face, the gaze of the eyes, Hannah Ellis managed to capture that.
But, even after three interviews, she hasn’t produced a single sketch that looks like My Hoa. Somehow, none of the drawings approaches the quality of single-mindedness that served, in her face, as a clear revelation of personality: the hard set of her mouth, the seriousness of her brow, the concentration in her eyes that, even in the giddiness of play, seemed bent on accomplishment. I know that Hannah Ellis was frustrated, worried that, after all this time, she’s lost her gift. Perhaps. Or maybe it’s My Hoa’s spirit, not wanting me to find her.
She would be twenty-five now, only a few years older than Marcy, which is both interesting and unbearable. We all knew what kind of girl she was, but what kind of woman would she have become? What kind of lover? What kind of mother? So many questions you can ask, but never answer.
hen I reach
the office, I pull in next to Martin’s car and immediately see that he’s in it. We look at each other, not happily,
then roll down our windows. “Where are you going?” I ask, my voice all friendly and light, hoping he doesn’t know that I’ve forgotten an appointment with a client. At this moment, I see my boss, not my husband.
“I have a meeting at the registrar of deeds,” he says. His face has a look of annoyed resignation, not just that I have let him down, but that I have always let him down. Something has shifted between us lately and, much as I’d like to locate some other cause, I have to mark its beginnings in the morning he agreed to adopt the little boy. These days, we’re tense with each other. He complains that I’m slacking off at the job, that the adoption has distracted me. He’s right that I’d rather bag basil at the Good Luck Asian Grocery than counsel the bereaved, but I don’t agree that I’ve given him any cause for anger. I could have flown to Europe and tried to win back our little girl, but I didn’t. Doesn’t that demonstrate the deepest sense of commitment to Martin and our business? But I can’t say that.
“I’m not that late,” I insist.
Behind his glasses, an eyebrow goes up. His focus on work has become so consuming that he hasn’t even taken the time to go through our adoption referral packet. “I’ll look at it later,” he tells me, but he doesn’t. Meanwhile, he has ample time to deal with the funeral home driveways, which, though they’ve been cracked for three years, he insists on repaving this week. Even at home, he has become businesslike and distant, staying up late at night to go over our accounts and leaving for the office early in the morning. Sometimes, he hardly notices me, and acts as if we’re bound only by the tattered professional connection we have at the office. I know we have a problem here, but I’m scared to bring it up. I don’t want to make things worse.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble.
“Can you try,” he says, “to get things right in the future?” I’m too surprised by his tone to answer. And then, before I can say anything at all, he rolls up his window, pulls out, and drives away.
I should rush inside, but I can’t move. My head falls back against the headrest. When I feel hurt, it starts in my shoulders, then moves up my neck to my head and settles, hot and throbbing, just behind my ears. Does the person in pain inside the building mean more to Martin than the person in pain inside this car? I remember the night, not long after we got married, when the phone rang while we were making love. It was my mother. We paused, staring at each other like teenagers caught on the couch.
“Shelley?” Answering machines were fairly new then. I felt a momen-tary panic at the sound of her voice, suddenly soaring, unannounced, across our bedroom.
Martin burrowed his face in my curls, the weight of his body keeping me from leaping out of bed. His voice was quiet, steady, speaking to my mother in the air. “We’re not home right now, Margot.”
“I thought you’d be home by now.” “We’re not,” he insisted.
“Where could you be?” my mother continued, thinking aloud. “We’re at the beach. At the mall. We flew to the moon. We’re in
Africa . . .” Martin’s voice was soft and ticklish, a murmur in my ear. I felt his hand move down, firm and persistent, between my legs. “Scaling Mount Everest. We have a meeting with the president. Shelley’s hosting
Saturday Night Live
. She’s become a matador.”
“Maybe you’re at the mall,” my mother mused.
“Please hang up.” I was fairly begging now.
She seemed to ponder the possibilities for a while. “Well, call me later,” she finally said. I heard the phone click off, the brief buzz of the dial tone, then silence. Martin pushed inside me. I laughed and moaned at the same time. I felt Martin’s lips against my neck. His hand skimmed beneath the covers, searching for mine. We kept making love. And then, afterward, our skin damp with sweat, he whispered, “I don’t want to miss a single day with you.”
I had been in the funeral business only a year or so. I had a lot to learn still, but I had learned the most important thing already. This business makes you grateful for the things you have, and grateful to be grateful, too, as if it’s some proprietary knowledge that only those of us who see death daily share. How can Martin and I, of all people, have forgotten about that?
It’s two-thirty when I get inside the building. Rita hands me a couple of message slips. “York called again for the urn order. Your sister wants you to pick up Keely from school tomorrow so she can get ready for the birthday party. Mr. Sloane’s waiting for you in the front receiving room.”
“Can you stick this in the fridge?” I set the bamboo shoots on her desk. “What is that?” she asks. We eye the bag together. I think of Mai, standing in front of the Vietnamese market women, getting an early and
utterly baffling lesson in sex.
“Penises,” I want to tell her. Instead, I say, “Dinner,” then head down the hall.
At this hour, the reception rooms look like yards of empty carpet, devoid of any practical function. We finish all our other business appointments by noon most days and the afternoon events won’t begin until five
o’clock. Empty, the place looks so forlorn that I have to remind myself that people call ours the prettiest funeral home in Wilmington. That’s probably because, unlike some of the newer mortuaries, designed to look like corporate conference centers, our building started out as a private home. In 1912, a Wilmington banker named Thomas Lask constructed it for himself and his family of seven. Martin’s grandfather Paolo bought it from the Lask family and converted it into a funeral home in the 1930s, building for himself a smaller private home next door, where Martin and I now live. Except for the Marino and Sons sign, and our oversize parking lot, the building still resembles a private home, antebellum in style with its stately white columns and forest green trim. We get a lot of trick-or-treaters at Halloween. Some kids mistake it for a real house. Some approach on a dare. Most come for the ice-cream cups, which Martin offers to anyone in a costume.