If You Lived Here (14 page)

“What did he say?”

“He says you’re the one who made the decision.”

We stare at each other across the top of the coffeemaker. “We both made decisions,” I tell her.

She takes in this information in the same way that she inhales when

a friend decides to smoke. She doesn’t like it, but she’s eager to let you know that she’s determined to make the best of it. “There’s got to be a solution here,” she announces.

“I don’t know what it would be.” “Shelley?”

“His name is Hai Au,” I say. “The baby.” “Shelley?”

“Say it. Hai Au.” Pronouncing his name means making a commitment to him. “Say it, Mom.”

She sighs as if I’ve asked her to do something extremely silly. “Hi-Ho.” “It’s really beautiful, if you just listen to the sound. And it’s perfect

because it’s the name of a kind of seabird and he’ll grow up here near the beach.” I have to admit, to myself at least, that he would have an easier time with a simpler name, like “Mai,” but he and I will manage.

“Shelley!” she says. “Listen to me.”

The floor of my mother’s kitchen is white-and-black-checkerboard linoleum. Every inch of it scuffs. But I’ve never seen a grain of dirt on my mother’s floor. Or a scuff. “What?”

“You should adopt another baby.” “No.”

She says, “It’s probably just the stress about Vietnam. I’m sure he’d take another baby.”

I look at her. “He doesn’t want a baby, Mom.”

Her expression shifts slightly, and I can see that, despite herself, she believes me. Before she can say anything, however, Sauly pulls open the screen door and races in. “Aunt Shelley!” he yells, although we’re only a few feet apart. “We’re all going to make these bees together.”

“Bees? Give me a kiss.”

The kiss is automatic, and then he pushes two bags of pipe cleaners, one black and one yellow, into my lap. “It’s for the nature fair. I need it by Monday. A whole beehive. We’re talking, like, thousands of bees.” Sauly is a ten-year-old version of my mother.

“Thousands?” “Maybe a million.”

My mother puts her hands on Sauly’s shoulders. “Let Aunt Shelley finish helping me in here, then we’ll come out and you can show her the hive.”

I grab the bowl of fruit salad. “Mom, I’ll take this on out,” I say. My mother’s face is taut and anxious. I follow Sauly out the door.

At brunch, we talk about bees. And how to attach a million knotted pipe cleaners to a hunk of Styrofoam sprayed yellow to look like a hive. Sauly has one prototype for a bee. His father has another. Nathan has made some weird Sid Vicious punk sculpture that he insists will play the role of queen.

“Mom, tell him to stop bothering me,” Sauly complains.

“You mean ‘bugging’ you,” says Nathan, finally yielding a smile.

Lindi cuts a piece of quiche. She says, “Nathan, leave your brother alone.”

Richard serves himself some fruit salad. He seldom gets involved in family squabbles, perhaps because of some privately negotiated division of labor. “Where’s Martin?” he asks, taking a bite out of a strawberry.

My mother shoots Richard a look, and a little shake of the head, that shuts him up. I love Lindi for the fact that she hasn’t told him, but now Richard stares at me. I glare at my mother.

Nathan looks up from his muffin. “Who died?” he wants to know. He loves the macabre.

“No one died.”

“So why didn’t he come?”

I lie. “He had a lot of work to do.”

“Yes,” says my mother, jabbing at her quiche. “Poor dear. I talked to him this morning.” When my mother lies, each word announces: “Don’t believe this.”

Luckily, the kids are distracted. Sauly says, “Aunt Shelley, do you know about the bee dance?”

I shake my head. I can think of nothing better than hearing about the bee dance.

Sauly jumps out of his chair and stands beside the table. “It’s how bees tell each other where the flowers are. There’s two main dances. The round dance and the tail-wagging dance.”

“Do the tail-wagging dance,” says Nathan. “I just love the tail-wagging dance.”

Sauly looks at his brother contemptuously, then resumes speaking. “The round dance says, ‘We found flowers and they’re close by!’ ” He takes a few steps away from the table, then starts walking in this slow cir-cle, jiggling his entire body in a way that’s apparently meant to resemble a bee. “Then, see, I turn around like this and go the other way. That means, ‘Hey, guys, the flowers aren’t even a hundred yards away.’ ”

Keely stands up. “Tail-wag dance!” she screams. Lindi whispers something to my mother, and they both look at me. Richard’s eyes move back and forth, trying to figure out what’s going on.

“Follow me, then,” Sauly says to his sister. He jogs in a half circle, Keely right behind him, then turns and runs straight across the patio. They both wiggle their rear ends. “Each time we wag our tails, that’s a waggle run. If we go ten waggle runs in fifteen seconds, that means the flowers are a hundred yards away. Seven waggle runs means six hundred yards. Four waggle runs means a thousand yards.”

At this point, all of us just watch the children silently racing back and forth across the patio. After about a dozen waggle runs, Sauly says, “And if we go to the right, it means the flowers are to the right of the sun. And if we go to the left, it means the flowers are to the left of the sun.”

I say, “I had no idea that bees were so smart.”

Sauly stops. He’s already breathing heavily. “Bees might be even smarter than dolphins.”

“I have an announcement to make,” says my mother. “What’s that?” asks Sauly, who thinks he still holds the floor.

“Aunt Shelley will need help with little Hi-Ho,” she says. “I’m going to go with her to Vietnam.”

Lindi, Richard, Nathan, and I stare at her as if she’s crazy. She takes a bite of her quiche and looks out toward the waterway. Keely and Sauly yell, “Hooray,” and take off again across the patio, relaying to their invisible bee colleagues that the flowers are out there, somewhere just to the left of the sun, sweet and pure, brimming with nectar.

8
‌

Xuan Mai

ladys wants to
play Scrabble, which is silly because she speaks terrible English. But Marcy and her friends play Scrabble, so Gladys insists that we play, too. Because it’s a slow afternoon and I’m

bored, we set up a card table by the front counter and lay the game out there. I have to admit, I kind of like Scrabble. I like the feel of the tiles and the little wooden stands. It’s just a game, but each piece is smoothly polished, free of splinters and cracks. After all these years, I still can’t get over the quality of goods in America.

“Who’s that picture of?” Gladys wants to know. She puts “R-A-T” down on the board.

“What picture?” I ask, though I know which one she means. I make “T-O-P” with an
O
and a
P,
then pull two more tiles and set them on my stand.

“The one you’ve been looking at so often lately. You keep it in your purse.”

No wonder Marcy never wants Gladys around. “That’s my mother,” I tell her. Then, just to avoid more questions, I say, “Captain Weatherbee,

the policeman, told me about a lady who can draw portraits from mem-ory. I didn’t have a picture of my mother, so I asked her to draw one.”

Gladys makes this kind of ticking sound with her mouth. She leans forward in her chair. “Let’s see.”

It’s too much trouble to argue. I go get my purse and pull it out.

Gladys holds the picture in one hand, glancing back and forth between me and the image of my mother. “
Xinh,
” says Gladys. Pretty.

I don’t like her staring at it. “Will you take your turn?”

Barely lifting her eyes from the picture, she grabs a
C
and an
A,
then puts them down on top of the
R
in “R-A-T.” Now we’ve got “C-A-R.”

“Finished?” I ask, reaching for the picture.

She returns it grudgingly. “I wish I had a picture of my mother.”

“I’ll give you the woman’s phone number,” I tell her. “Now can we play the game?”

Gladys fingers a tile, tapping it idly against the table. “Marcy always had a picture of me. You know what I did when I sent her off on the boat?”

I don’t move. I don’t look up. I don’t want to hear any stories about Marcy or Gladys or boats. I stare at our Scrabble game. I concentrate on finding a word.

Gladys says, “I sewed a little purse out of plastic sheeting. Inside, I put a photo of me and Marcy in it, a letter for her to read when she got older, and a twenty-dollar bill. That was all the money I had left after buying her place on the boat. Then I strapped the purse around her belly, underneath her clothes, and told her not to take her shirt off for anything.”

I have
A, R, P, Z, N, T,
and
V
. It bothers me that Gladys can beat me at Scrabble.

“She was only five years old, but she said, ‘Mommy, I promise.’ That just about killed me. An hour later, she was gone.”

I put an
A
and an
N
after the
P
. “P-A-N.”

“And you know what? When I finally saw her again, in Charlotte ten years later, she still had that picture. It was sitting in a frame on her dresser in my cousin’s house. She’d held on to it all that time.”

I look up to let her know that I have heard her. “Your turn,” I say.

Gladys rests her chin in the palm of her hand and looks down at the table. I can’t see her eyes, but it occurs to me that she’s crying. Suddenly, everybody starts to cry when I’m around. I stare at the Scrabble board and wait, but she doesn’t stop. And so I do the thing I would least expect myself to do. I put my hand on her hand, her leathery country hand that I have never touched in all these years, and I leave it there until she’s finished. When, finally, she sniffles and lifts her hand to wipe her eyes, we both pretend that nothing’s happened. Gladys fingers some tiles, then lays a
G
and an
N
on either side of the
E
. “G-E-N.”

“Gen?”

“Gen. Like the drink. Gen.” “That’s ‘G-I-N.’ ”

She nods, not surprised, and pulls the pieces off the board. “Try again,” I encourage her.

She looks down at her tiles, then picks up a handful. Around the
N,
she builds the word “E-N-G-A-G-E-D.” “Engache,” she says in her appalling accent. There it is, on the table. She’s used up six letters on that word, and gotten double points as well. Engaged.

“Your turn,” she says.

At four o’clock, Marcy and her boyfriend Travis come by the store to pick up Gladys. Because Marcy dances in that cage at the bar downtown, Gladys calls her daughter a GI slut, which is funny because Gladys really was a GI slut. Now Marcy looks down at the two of us, the Scrabble game, our little pot of tea, and she scowls distinctly. “Sorry, Mai,” she says in English, then continues, “Jesus, Ma. I’m the one who works here. Can’t you get a life or something?”

Gladys looks at her daughter and the smile on her face is both proud and insecure, as if she’s amazed to have produced something so lovely and worries that she’ll lose it. “What does she mean, ‘Get a life’?” she mutters to me in Vietnamese, but before I can answer, she has grabbed her purse and shuffled after Marcy, out the door.

I put the Scrabble board away, then take the tray with the teapot and cups on it back to the kitchen. I rinse the cups, letting the warm water rush over my hands. I never knew that Gladys and Marcy had been separated for so long. I guess I never asked. All Vietnamese have an ugly boat story, and mine has always felt depressing enough that I didn’t want to hear any others. I have spent so many years trying not to hear anything new, trying not to know.

Water. People would have given anything—the taels of gold hidden in the hems of their shirts, the jewelry stashed in the hollow heels of their shoes—anything to have water like this, clean and fresh, ready to drink. Once you’ve experienced thirst like that, it stays with you. At any moment of any day I can still recall that stickiness in the back of my throat, that ache to drink.

Khoi and I spent six days in the clammy, stinking belly of that boat. We were two out of forty-two human beings packed into the hull. In our previous lives, we might have been teachers, mechanics, doctors, students. We might have been clean, polite, good cooks. Here, we lived like animals. We peed and vomited and shit right there in front of each other, in buckets when we had the chance, on the floor when we didn’t. When we slept at all we curled up fetuslike, wrapping our bodies around our meager possessions. We didn’t trust each other. We didn’t talk.