If You Lived Here (46 page)

From his wicker chair in the courtyard, he supervises everything, from the cooking in the kitchen to the arrangement of mats in the main room, where we will eat. He breathes more easily now that Dario has set up an oxygen tank and shown him how to use it. We keep it in a little cart and he pulls it behind him like a traveler dragging a suitcase through the airport. In the early mornings, I walk with him to Thanh Ha Pagoda and back. It takes us an hour, not only because of my father’s speed and the trouble he has maneuvering the contraption on the uneven sidewalk, but also because he likes to show off his new appliance and his newly rematerialized daughter. We visit with Ba Nguyet, the tea stall lady at the corner, the paint shop proprietors down the street, the gatekeeper at the pagoda, the neighbors he hasn’t seen in months. My father made Dario explain every knob and valve and tube, once, then twice, then again one more time. Certainly, he wants to be sure he uses it correctly, but he also wants to understand the machine in the most absolute and detailed way.

He is a man who loves technology but never had a chance to use it. If, by some different stroke of fate, he’d been born an American instead of a Vietnamese, he might have spent his youth tinkering with computers instead of hiding out in the forests, memorizing old poetry.

I had forgotten how much my father loves to be in charge. He has a list in his hand and, every hour or so, he goes through the whole thing, checking items off. If my mother were still alive, they would have spent the day bickering over exactly how to accomplish each task. They never fought over anything significant, like money, or the children, or politics, or whose relatives caused more trouble. But they could argue for hours over where to put the rattan mat, dinnertime, who more accurately remembered the day’s price of rice in the market. This afternoon, with eight people expected for dinner, my father seems delighted that no one has questioned his right to run the show. He wants three mats instead of two. He wants stuffed mushrooms in broth, not chicken with baby corn soup. He wants two trays of food, so no one has to reach for anything. He wants Heineken, not 333. He wants Courvoisier, and Old Hiep’s rice wine, too. He wants all of these things, and I make sure he has them.

By five o’clock, though, he has fallen asleep. The tubes of his oxygen tank fill his nostrils, and he sits with the radio on his lap, a cool wet rag draped around his neck, luxuriantly breathing. I’ve turned a fan on him and the breeze makes the silk strands of his white hair dance around his head. Air. The man has come to love air like the rest of us love food, or sleep, or sex, or water. He delights in it. He savors it like a fine wine. If I could, I would perch at his feet and feed it to him with a spoon.

Lien and I squat in the kitchen, just off the courtyard, each of us hovering over a wooden chopping block. This morning, she and I walked to Hang Ma Street to buy ceremonial goods to burn as offerings for Nguyen Thai Son, and, while we were at it, My Hoa and my mother. When I was a girl, if we wanted to burn
vàng mã
to offer to our ancestors, we could only find the old-style paper hell notes, or maybe gold coins made from disks of cardboard and a little orange paint. Now, the shops sell money in two currencies, Vietnamese dong and U.S. dollars, plus the old-fashioned gold coins and hell notes. The gold coins, though still cardboard, now have the

shiny tint of real value. These days, I discovered, the
vàng mã
shops sell all sorts of fancy paper outfits, fashioned like clothing for a set of life-size paper dolls, as well as cardboard houses and VCRs, computers and refrigerators—in short, all the luxuries that we want on earth are now available for the ancestors to enjoy in the next life. Because Lien and I imagined Nguyen Thai Son to be an old man, we bought what seemed appropriate to his age: a man’s traditional
áo dài,
complete with tunic and pants and hat; a pair of simple slippers; and, because Lien is silly, a cardboard motorbike. “An old man is not going to want a motorbike,” I reminded her. But she insisted. “Maybe old men drive motorbikes in the next life,” she argued and, since I had no reason not to, I relented. For my mother, we bought a pretty purple
áo dài,
with shiny yellow swans glued on to look like appliqué. To match the outfit, we found a pair of cardboard purple high-heeled shoes, light and sturdy as papier-mâché. My mother, who came of age during the era of military fashions, never wore heels herself, but she was a person who appreciated beautiful things, so we bought them for her. For My Hoa, who would have turned twenty-five this year, we started with a dress, light blue with navy diamonds around the hem and the cuffs, a youthful but sophisticated look, the closest we could find to Western fashion. “My mom wouldn’t let me wear a dress like this,” Lien said uncertainly, fingering the deep V of the collar. “Do you think that grandmother will let My Hoa wear it?” I considered for a moment. To be honest, it wasn’t hard to imagine the two of them, standing in front of some netherworld mirror, my mother telling My Hoa that she couldn’t step out of the house in that outfit. Lien and I unfolded the paper dress and held it up for inspection. It seemed likely to fall well below the knee, we agreed. “Let’s let her have some fun,” I said, then picked out a pair of heels to go with it.

Now, squatting in the kitchen, Lien pulls apart the cloves from three heads of garlic, sighing over the fact that I have asked her to peel and mince every one. On the altar by the banyan tree lie all the offerings, including a box of cardboard cosmetics for My Hoa that Lien grabbed as an impulse purchase. Above the courtyard, the sun is bright, but the shade from the banyan makes the hot air mild. I could grow to like these

Hanoi summers. I perch on a low wooden stool with a knife in my hand, peeling the cellophane-like skins off a kilo of raw shrimp, then using the knife to pull out the blue-black veins and wipe them onto the sheet of newspaper we’ve laid out to catch our scraps. From my father’s lap on his chair in the courtyard, the radio sends the unmistakable cadence of the afternoon news in a volume that is soft, bleating, and incomprehensible.

“Does Marcy wear those short shirts?” Lien has chosen Marcy for her role model.

“Short shirts?”

“I saw it in last week’s issue of
Young People
. In America, there’s a pop star named Britney and she doesn’t even cover her navel.”

I have often seen Britney on
Entertainment Tonight
. That girl is trash. “Marcy wears jeans with holes in them,” I say.

Lien, forgetting the garlic, looks at me excitedly. “I know those jeans. The holes are just below her butt? Big rips. And she wears them tight, right? So she can be sexy?”

She says the word in English. “Sexy.” “You don’t know what that means.”

“I do,” she says, nonchalantly, pulling the skin off another clove. “What, then?”

“It’s like the word ‘cool.’ It has to do with the way you walk. You never laugh and everyone thinks you’re beautiful.”

I lift another shrimp out of the basket. “Right?”

“Right,” I say, then I add, in English, “You are going to kick ass in Australia.”

“I know ‘kick ass,’ too.” “Terrific.”

“It means really perfect. Like,
kick-ass
steak. Everyone loves steak in Australia, did you know that? So, when someone invites you over to their house, you say”—she switches to English—“Thank you very much for this delicious
kick-ass
steak.”

“Good!” I tell her.

“I didn’t know a person could be kick ass, too.”

“Now you know.”

The sound of voices coming along the entryway makes both of us pause and look around. My father stirs at the commotion and we see Shelley and Martin come through the doorway with Hai Au.

“Oh!” Lien leaps across the room. “The baby!”

Martin carries Hai Au in one arm and their diaper bag in the other. Shelley balances three bakery boxes in her hands. I stand up, crouch for a moment to rinse my hands in the spigot, then go help Shelley with the boxes.

“Did you have hard time finding the place?” I ask.

She shakes her head, looking around the courtyard. “The taxi driver came right here.”

I lead them to my father. Lien stands behind Martin’s shoulder, mak-ing funny faces at the little boy, who alternately hides his face and peeks.

“Bo,” I say. “These are my friends Shelley and Martin, and their new son, Hai Au.”

My father lifts his hand. Sometimes, he seems to enjoy the invalid thing, the holding-court aspects of it, at least, and he looks like gracious royalty now.

Shelley takes his hand. “
Chào bác,
” she says. Hello, uncle.

He looks at me, raises his eyebrows, then back at her. “
Chào cô. Xin m
o
i vào. Hôm nay vui quá.
”

Shelley looks at me. Her Vietnamese, impressive as it may be, is spent.

“He says, ‘Welcome. Today a very happy day.’ ”

Shelley nods, smiles at my father, seems not quite sure of what to do with herself. “Isn’t it a death anniversary?” she mumbles.

I wave the idea aside with a flick of my wrist. “The ancestor died seventy-three years ago. We didn’t even know him. My father just needed an excuse for celebration.”

My father gazes up at me, obviously delighted by my English. I introduce him to Martin, both of them to my niece. Lien seems captivated by Hai Au, but he is unwilling to relinquish the arms of his father. Father? Who knows?

By six, everyone has arrived but Lan. The guests and my father have moved inside. Lien sits on a stool at Bo’s feet, translating for Martin, Dario, and Bo. Ever since Dario helped to set my father up with the oxy-gen tank, Bo has watched him with particular interest. I haven’t said a word to him, so maybe it’s the way that Dario looks at me, or the sound of his voice when we talk. I’m not sure, but I can see that my father knows. And I can see that he’s pleased by it.

Hai Au has fallen asleep on a mat in the corner, the fan turned now in his direction. Shelley and I watch them from the kitchen. Shelley sits on a low stool next to mine, filling the mushroom caps with minced sausage. Each time she completes a plate of them, she hands them to me and I slide them gently into the boiling broth, where they sink, then rise, bobbing in the bubbles. From where we sit, we can hear the conversation in the courtyard, but we can also have our own.

“Martin’s surprised that people here don’t seem to hate him,” Shelley says in a low voice. “Everyone’s so gracious. Look at your dad. He knows Martin’s a vet. And so does Lap, who spent three years eating wild roots in the jungle. Yesterday, when he took us out for shrimp cakes at the West Lake, he asked Martin all sorts of questions about the war. After a while, they acted like buddies. It was as if they’d been through it together. Martin seems relieved that they’re nice to him. I thought he might be angry at the Vietnamese, but mostly he just talks about how he doesn’t understand their attitude. I mean, Martin hasn’t gotten over the war. Why should Lap?”

“It easier to be nice if you won,” I remind her. I lay out three plates and use my chopsticks to build a pyramid of spring rolls on each one.

Shelley stares down at the mushroom in her hand. “Well, that’s true,” she admits. She smooths the filling across the top with a spoon, surveys it, then works it over one more time, a sculptor perfecting her art.

I pick up a spring roll, choose its prettiest side, then set it on the dish. “It complicated, really,” I continue. “One day they feel one way. One day they feel something else. Now they’re curious. They never have a chance to speak with Americans before.” Earlier in the week, I told my father that Martin had seen his friend killed in Danang. Bo just nodded. There’s

a point, I think, when the details of war cease to startle a person who has experienced too much of it. Bo reached that point a long time ago. I imagine that Lap did as well. It’s not that they’ve gotten over the war, though. How can you get over something that shapes your entire life? An evening’s chat with Martin might be interesting, but it won’t affect my father in any way that’s fundamental.

I can see that he’s enjoying himself, however. He seizes the opportunity to ask all sorts of questions. How did the postal system work? What did the GIs do to keep up their morale? How’s Jane Fonda getting on these days? Martin answers each question with great thought, like a diplomat sure that a single word could make or break the negotiation.

“You think my dad too nosy?” I want to know. “I can say something to get him to stop.” He doesn’t know the whole thing about American vets. Post-traumatic stress disorder and all that. They don’t have
Oprah
here.

Shelley shakes her head. “Martin’s okay,” she says. “I think he’s enjoying himself, actually.”

We look over at Martin just as he leans forward and says to my father, “I wish that you could just see the movie
Barbarella
. Mai”—he calls over to me—“do you think you should try to translate the word ‘hot’ for him?”

Lien turns and looks in my direction. “I know what ‘hot’ means,” she says, apparently insulted by this underestimation of her skills as a translator. “
Nóng,
” she announces, offering the adjective for the temperature, but not a synonym for the kind of heat generated by Jane Fonda. My father gazes back and forth between us, puzzled. Dario looks at me and grins.

I wave the idea away with a chopstick. “I’ll explain later,” I tell Martin. I know my father will get a kick out of such information, but, really, what with Lien’s notion of “sexy” and all, I just don’t want her to hear it. The conversation shifts as my father launches into some kind of question about C rations, which he sampled when, after liberation, a cousin brought a can back to Hanoi. “What were the options?” he wants

to know. As Martin begins to answer, I pick up a spoon, stir the broth a bit, then lower the heat. “How you two doing?” I ask Shelley.

She hands me the last plate of mushrooms and I slide them into the boiling broth. “It’s strange,” she says. “He didn’t want another baby, but now I think he loves Hai Au too much to abandon me entirely.”