If You Lived Here (11 page)
ooking is violent.
I slice through the flesh of chickens, crack open eggs, chop beautiful vegetables into tiny pieces. Destruction, then
recreation. Again and again. It’s the most valuable thing that I do with my life, this nourishing of people. I imagine my sister, my relatives, and my childhood friends alone in their kitchens on the other side of the world, slicing and chopping and whisking and frying, making food for other people, just like I do. If only in my own mind, cooking gives me a bond with them. It’s a solitary and precious thing in my life, so I’m rather surprised by myself for inviting someone else to join me. But after all these years, I guess I’m ready for something new.
At a few minutes before seven
A
.
M
., I pull my van in right by my door. The rain is coming down in dense sheets of water, so even the dash from the van leaves me drenched. Inside, I shake off my wet raincoat, switch on the lights, then the fan. On a day like today, it’s all I can do to keep the mildew from racing up the walls. My watch says 6:54. The clock over the noodle aisle says 6:59. Other than my van outside, there’s only a single green car parked on the far side of the lot. Maybe she won’t show after
all, which would come as a relief. I don’t know if we have anything else to talk about. Those few conversations may have been flukes, actually. I haven’t really talked with anyone since I came to this country. Even when I lived with Khoi in San Francisco, we didn’t talk much, or we tried to talk and found ourselves going in circles, then finally gave up on it. Here in Wilmington, I don’t talk, either. I interact, of course, with Marcy, Gladys, my customers, and delivery drivers, but that’s just exchanging information, entirely different from what I used to do in Hanoi with my sister, Lan, my parents, my friends. On winter evenings, Lan and I would lie together under the blankets, feeling too cold to sit up and read but too awake to go to sleep. We would talk then, earnestly, but heedlessly, too, sometimes listening and sometimes not. The topics didn’t matter; lying there whispering in the dark gave comforts that I didn’t even know I needed. In fact, it wasn’t until years later, observing Gladys and Marcy on their good days, that I realized how much I missed that kind of aimless conversation.
A tapping at the glass makes me turn around. Shelley, in a yellow rain jacket, stands outside, peering through the door. With all that hair hidden beneath the folds of her hood, her face looks scared and lonely. She gives a sad little wave.
“Where you park?” I ask as I let her in. I can only see my van and that one green car on the far side of the lot.
She pulls off her jacket, freeing her hair amid a shower of raindrops. “That’s my Honda,” she says, gesturing toward the green car. She pushes a few wet curls off her face, then holds the dripping jacket in her hand, unsure of what to do with it.
I take the jacket and hang it on the hook next to my own wet raincoat. “Why you park so far away?”
She smooths down her shirt. “I was just watching the sky,” she says.
Outside the window, the sky is gray. Like the sidewalk. Gray. She looks like she might cry. “You sure you want to do this today?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says.
In the kitchen, I fill the electric kettle and plug it in while Shelley wanders around, looking at everything. There’s not much to see. The room is
an attachment to the original building, a shed with a metal roof. Before heading home every night, I spend nearly an hour scouring dried food off the pots and pans, wiping grease from the counters, sweeping bits of raw broccoli and onion skin off the floor. The health department gave me a 99.5 percent rating. I should have gotten 100, but the overhead light is too far from the stove and the landlord won’t move it. Here’s another thing the landlord won’t do: replace the roof. On days like today, the rain comes down like rocks crashing over your head. I almost have to yell. “I only got Vietnamese coffee,” I tell her, pulling from a drawer two metal coffee filters that fit over the tops of glasses. “I don’t got no Mr. Coffee coffee or anything like that.”
“That’s fine.” Shelley rubs her hands together as if she’s cold.
It’s 7:06. We wash our hands and put on plastic caps. Shelley’s hair fills her cap like the foam in a cushion. I open the door of the refrigerator and pull out a steamed pork sausage. It’s big as a loaf of bread, made in Westminster, California, but produced in the Vietnamese style, with a thin layer of banana leaf around it to keep it moist and fresh. I unwrap the leaves, letting loose the fragrance of banana and exposing the pale pink meat within. “You got to cut this very thin,” I tell her. I pull a knife from a drawer and demonstrate on a cutting board, slicing a few discs of the sausage, then laying those on top of each other and cutting down through the middle of them, again and again, until I have a pile of tiny matchstick pieces.
She picks up the knife and goes to work. I pull a bag of bean sprouts out of the refrigerator and carry them to the sink to wash. Shelley and I stand only a few feet apart at different ends of the counter. She asks, “Who taught you to cook?”
“My mother,” I say, feeling vaguely sheepish. I will never be the cook my mother was, able to know, intuitively, that roasting a chili over flames will give your broth a smoky flavor, or that searing a chicken will hold in the juices. I never make up anything new, like she did. I just try to fol-low her technique and remember her recipes. “She could really teach you how cook for your kid.”
I glance at Shelley. She’s stopped cutting. “What’s funny?” I ask.
“ ‘My kid.’ ” But her words come out unevenly. They sound cracked and forced, which is how I realize that she’s crying. I keep my eyes on my bean sprouts, trying to figure out what to do. In my life, I’ve witnessed people crying of course, but I can’t remember what I did about it. You get out of practice. Who cried? My mother never cried. My father cried when my mother died, and I held his hand, but I can’t do that with Shelley. Khoi never cried (I cried, and he did what he could—which wasn’t much—to soothe me). My sister cried when her husband Tan went off to war, but she tried to be stoic about that. Later, when he died, she wouldn’t let us near her. I’m sure I had friends cry over broken hearts, or failed exams, but my mind goes blank as I try to recall what I did, if anything, to help them.
For a long time, we say nothing. Shelley pulls some tissues out of her purse and cries into them, the sausage forgotten. I shake the bean sprouts in the colander and let them drain, then start on the egg pancakes. The sound she makes—a faint, rhythmic gulping—reminds me of the last time I cried around Bo. It was only days before Khoi planned to leave Vietnam and I had decided against going with him. My father had insisted that, at nineteen, I was old enough to make my own decision and, after vacillating for weeks, I felt surprisingly confident that I’d made the right choice. Still, I cried. Bo didn’t try to comfort me directly, but he refused to abandon me, either. While I lay on my bed and wept, he sat at the table, tak-ing apart a broken clock, and talking. Nothing that he said related to my decision, and I remember understanding, even through my tears, exactly what he was doing. He talked about his boyhood, his parents, my mother, a man at the veterans’ center who made toys out of old tin cans. None of it mattered, but it helped.
I shake some fish sauce into the eggs and whisk the mixture until yoke and white meld together. Then I pour my first thin pancake into the pan and begin to talk. “Vietnamese cooking, you got think about everything. Not just taste. You got think about how the food look together on the plate. How it smell. You got mix texture. Like, soft eggs with crunchy bean sprouts. The color red with the color green. Salty and sweet. You need contrast.”
I wish I didn’t sound like such an idiot in English but, once I’ve started, I find it fairly easy to keep going. I talk. I fry pancakes. When bubbles form across the yellow skin, I prick them with a fork. A rich and mellow fragrance begins to fill the room. I talk about seasoning, cooking times, sugar. I talk about soaking noodles, boiling noodles, heating wet noodles in the microwave to soften them. I finish the pancakes and peel three pounds of shrimp. I discuss different ways you can cut an onion, depending on the dish it will go in. I talk and talk. I fill the air with everything I’ve ever known or imagined about food. And my father’s method seems to work. Shelley cries until she’s had enough, and then she stops. Without saying anything, she gets up, washes her hands, and goes back to her task. She cuts, turning the entire sausage into tiny pieces. Her sausage sticks are more perfectly regular than mine have ever been, a pink haystack of meat at the edge of her cutting board. I pause to say, “You do good,” because I really do admire her skill.
She lifts a hand and uses it to push her cap up her forehead. Her eyes are red and puffy but clear now. She smiles at me. “I never knew that microwave trick with the noodles.”
I shrug. “I learn it on
Iron Chef
.”
At the other end of the counter, the coffee has finished dripping through the filters. I’ve already poured the sweetened condensed milk into the bottom of the glasses and now I stir it to mix it in. “Here,” I say gently, handing her a glass. She looks calm now, but no more cheerful. “You okay?” I ask.
She nods, stretches her long legs. Her face is grim. “My husband’s backing out of the adoption.”
“Completely?” “Completely.” “Why?”
She takes a sip of coffee, then says, “He’s been having a hard time lately. I guess he thinks a child would just push him over the edge.”
I say, “He got a hard job.”
She looks at me impatiently. “People manage,” she says. Then, rubbing the back of her wrist against her swollen eyes, she adds, “I don’t
have any more sympathy. I’m so angry. I just keep thinking that I’m too young to give up on being happy.” The words come out frankly and without hesitation, as if the two of us have confided in each other for years.
I stare down at my coffee, unsure of how to respond. How can I talk about happiness and grief? Would she expect that of anyone? Or does she just expect it of me?
Shelley lifts her glass to take another sip, then asks, “What matters in life, really? In my business, we end up wondering about that. I want to value the things I can appreciate at the end of my life. Money doesn’t matter, ultimately. Status means very little. The most basic things matter. Love matters. Family matters. Happiness matters. Mai, don’t you think we’re entitled to that?”
I look up. She holds my gaze. Is happiness a right? Did my mother think about happiness when she ran from her village, afraid for her life? Did my father think about happiness when he became a soldier for the revolution? Actually, they did. My father always said that they fought the war for selfish reasons—food on the table, a better life for themselves and their children. The Communist Party used the words
freedom
and
independence,
but it also used the word
h
Â
nh phúc.
Happiness. People fought the war for happiness, too. In all these years, I’ve forgotten that. I say to Shelley, “We are,” and then, to my surprise, I add one minor but revealing truth about myself. “For long time,” I tell her, “I don’t think about happiness much.”
Shelley smiles at me. Despite all the tears, her face is radiant. “Here,” she says, standing up. “Let me show you something.” She lifts her purse, which has been hanging on the back of her chair, and pulls an envelope out of the side pocket. From inside, she takes out a photo and shows it to me. “This is my son,” she says.
I’m not sure what she means. She looks calm, though, holding the photo in her hand and waiting for me to take it. I wipe my hands against my pants, then lift the photo by the edges. We look at it together. A baby lies on a rattan mat on the floor. The mat has a red design running through it, and there, behind the child’s shoulder, I see part of the character for “double happiness” in old Chinese. I can’t read Chinese, but any
Vietnamese will recognize that word. Every Vietnamese has sat on a mat like that one, with the very same inscription, the fibers brown and pliable, retaining the vaguest smell of the fields. Every Vietnamese baby has lain on a mat like that, swaddled in quilts, staring up at mother, brother, fam-ily, ceiling, sky. Happiness, it says.
Double
happiness.
“What his name?” I ask. He’s a pretty little boy. Pale skin. Plenty of hair.
“I can’t pronounce it.” She turns the picture over to show me the name written on the back. Nguyen Hai Au.
“Hai Au,” I tell her, carefully splitting the syllables: Hi-Oh. “It’s a nice name. Unusual. It’s a seabird.”
Shelley stares down at the picture. “Hai Au,” she says, trying out the sounds on her tongue.
We finish cooking. Shelley cuts the green onions and shreds the boiled chicken while I heat several gallons of broth and arrange the ingredients for the steam table. I prepare a couple of servings of
bún thang
for Shelley to take home, then walk her out to the front door. She seems relaxed now, almost content. I’d forgotten this feeling of camaraderie with another person.