Mãn (13 page)

kissing

MY HUSBAND AND I
didn't exchange kisses as did other couples, either as a greeting or as foreplay. We were still modest, even after two children, even after twenty years of marriage. Language probably contributed to that restraint. We talked about things without naming them. It was enough to say “to be close” (
gần
) to understand that there had been sexual relations. My husband just had to turn towards me and I would understand my wifely duty. It was enough for him to be happy for all of us to be. Our marriage was uneventful, undramatic.

vô hình

invisible

MAMAN HAD TAUGHT ME
very early to avoid conflicts, to breathe without existing, to melt into the landscape. Her teachings were essential for my survival, because she was sometimes called away on assignment. We rarely knew when she would leave and even less often when she would come home. While she was away, she sent me to stay with people she knew or who had been ordered to look after me. I learned very quickly to be at once invisible and helpful so that I'd be forgotten, so no one could criticize me, so no one could attack me. I knew exactly when I must set a plate down next to the mother who was on the point of taking the vegetables out of her wok without her seeing my hand, just as I could keep the porcelain filters filled with drinking water with no one seeing me empty the kettles that had cooled down during the night.

I could identify the needs of my foster families in one day, two at most. It was very easy for me, then, to anticipate my husband's wishes before he was aware of them himself. I saw to it that his underwear drawer always held enough white T-shirts with no shoulder seams, a garment worn by certain working-class Chinese. From habit and nostalgia, he had continued to wear one under his shirt. I replaced the worn-out ones with new ones bought in a store in Chinatown without his realizing it because I washed them twice to soften the fabric, to make them his. Similarly, the ball drawer always had new tennis balls for his
Wednesday and Friday game nights and more recently, golf balls for Saturday mornings. The advertising inserts were always removed from his
National Geographic
s because those pieces of cardboard irritated him particularly and pointlessly.

As for him, he never criticized me for spending too long in the kitchen, any more than he questioned me about my choices for the children's education. My husband and I were advancing along a road as smooth and level as a landing strip.

tóc

hair

LIKE LUC, I HAD A
perfect marriage until he smoothed my hair with the backs of his hands and breathed in the side of my neck, asking me not to move or he would fall, he would scream. The only trace of Luc that I could bring back to Montreal was that of his hands on my eyes, which he had covered so that I wouldn't see his tears flow silently in the airport parking lot. I stood there in front of him, motionless, overcome by a shock of emotions so foreign to me. He had watched me cross the security line, leave with no date and no promise of return.

thở

breathe

I LEARNED TO CONTROL
my breathing, to need very little oxygen, like mountain dwellers and those who lived in the Củ Chi tunnels during the war. When Maman and I were living in a room assigned by the government in Hanoi, we slept with a towel over our noses so we wouldn't be wakened by the foul smells that came out of the walls like putrid monsters. In those days, I exhaled more than I inhaled, but I never suffocated. Through the window, appearing and disappearing in the clouds, the image of the fullness of Luc's shoulder under his violet shirt, of his strong wrist with a red string around it or of his curls that spilled out of his helmet sucked up all the air in my lungs and made the enclosed space of the airplane stifling, unbearable.

lụa

silk

ASIDE FROM THE NAIL
clipper he kept permanently in his trouser pocket that I'd used on his sons in his mother's garden, I still knew nothing about this man who had suddenly become the centre of my universe, though I had neither centre nor universe. I may have been mistaken to have mocked people who believe in the story of Saint Ông Tơ, whose role is to bind two persons with love by twining two red silk threads together between his fingers. Maybe Luc was the red thread intended for me?

And perhaps he was right after all, the young student Alexandre, a customer suffering from heartbreak who'd sworn to me one day that he would never love another and had upheld his conviction by clipping onto a cord in the window this quotation from Roland Barthes: “I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of those millions I may desire hundreds; but of those hundreds I love only one.” At the time, that sentiment was utterly foreign and incomprehensible to me because I had never experienced that sensation of exclusivity and uniqueness.

sân bay

airport

I AM CERTAIN THAT
not one passenger had noticed Maman in the crowd in front of the sliding doors on the way out of Customs. To me, she looked particularly thin and old. She seemed to have reached a threshold where she let herself be lulled by time, not in an attitude of surrender but tenderly, as if they were confiding in one another and poking affectionate fun at the whirlwind of youth. Maman stroked the ends of my hair three times, as she'd always done when she came to pick me up from my babysitter. When my hair was short or tied back, I could feel the warmth of her hand on my back, tiny but powerful, like a healer's. I found myself doing the same to my own children when they got off the school bus in front of the house, after a week-long absence. The contrast between the minimalism of my action and the spontaneous affection of Luc's children, who had held me in their arms for an eternity to say goodbye, stunned me.

bảo hiểm

insurance

THE CLOSENESS BETWEEN MY
children and Julie has always reassured me. They kissed, embraced, murmured secrets and sweet nothings. Julie took them regularly to concerts, where the conductor would show them how to listen to the instruments to hear the voices of the characters in the stories told in music. She signed them up for hockey, swimming, ballet and drawing. She decided, with my daughter, on her hairstyles: shoulder-length, medium, bangs, no bangs. My children knew Julie's phone number by heart and called her
Má Hai
, Mother Two.

In a family, “Two” expresses the highest rank, and Julie occupied that place because she was older than me, because she was my big sister. Often, the aunts in a family are called “mother” because they have nearly the same duties and the same rights concerning the well-being and education of the child. As soon as Julie came along to guide them, correct them, entertain them, I stepped aside so the relationship between them could deepen and exist without me, after me. In Vietnam, it is said that the fatherless child still eats rice and fish while the motherless child must spread leaves on the ground for sleeping (
Mồ côi Cha ăn cơm với cá; mồ côi Mẹ lót lá mà nằm
). My children were very lucky. They had life insurance and mother insurance.

tim