If You Lived Here (47 page)
“He love you, too,” I tell her. I have seen the way he gazes at her when she isn’t looking.
She smiles, idly poking at the bobbing mushrooms with a chopstick. “Well, it seems sweeter between us,” she says. “Somehow.”
“Did you ever see that
Oprah,
‘Couples at a Standoff’?” She rolls her eyes dramatically.
“You could do worse,” I snap. “I’m not talking about Jerry Springer.” Why are Americans so down on
Oprah
?
I’ll miss
Oprah
. I remember how I felt when Rosie quit.
Across the room, the men are laughing. My father smiles beatifically. He must have made a joke. Dario reaches over and fiddles with something on the oxygen tank.
“Could you love him?” Shelley asks. “Who?” I ask.
She cocks her head and smiles, revealing to me that she has known everything for a long time. “The doctor,” she whispers.
I pick up my ladle and move the mushroom caps around in the broth, carefully turning them to make sure that they cook evenly. “Yes,” I say, not just because she has pushed me into a corner, but because I want her—Shelley—to know. My sister was wrong in one important way about my life in Wilmington. I did make one friend there.
When everything is ready, I ladle the soup into a bowl and arrange a dish of each type of food on the offering platter, then carry it to the altar in the main room of the house. “Come on,” I announce in English and Vietnamese. “We each got to pray.”
Only my father does it properly, and even he lacks the stamina to stand for long in front of the altar. Everyone else comes up with their own odd method. Lien, distractedly, races through the gestures before
skipping over to where Hai Au sits now, groggy eyed, reaching for a foam rubber soccer ball that has rolled into the wall. Martin holds his incense uncertainly, as if he’s afraid he’ll do the wrong thing. Shelley stands there for many long minutes, eyes closed, perhaps going through every prayer she’s ever known. Dario holds the incense above his head, like he’s seen them do at the pagoda. He, too, closes his eyes, and whispers words that sound like chants, resolute and steady, in Italian. I raise my incense when all of them have finished and wandered off to take their seats around the mats laid out across the floor. I can hear them, speaking softly behind me, but when I look up I see the photographs of my mother and My Hoa, looking down at me. I lose myself, not in the images on paper, but in my memories of who they were. Mother, I pray, watch over us. And My Hoa? I ask her for nothing. I’ve taken too much already.
When I hear sounds of greeting, I turn around and see Lan standing in the doorway. Apparently, someone has already introduced them all because she moves, without looking at me, toward the altar herself, picks up three sticks of incense and lights them. We stand there side by side, staring up at the photos of the dead. Lan doesn’t say a word, but I can feel the force of her prayers. What would it mean, I have to ask myself, for her to forgive me? Neither of us moves. I close my eyes. I am concentrating on the two women in front of me and the one who stands a few inches away.
Later, after Shelley and Martin have taken Hai Au back to the hotel, after Lien has gone to study, and Dario has headed to his clinic to check on a patient sick with bronchitis, my father sits out in the courtyard again, listening to the World Cup while Lan and I wash dishes. My sister and I have done this together so many times, after so many days and so many meals. I remember singing on cold winter nights, loudly and quickly, to keep ourselves warm. I remember hissing beneath our breaths, not wanting our parents to hear us fighting over whose turn it was to scrub the pans. I remember telling each other secrets there, secrets we didn’t want anyone else to know. And now we move through the motions, silent and awkward.
We set the dishes to dry on the rack, then Lan gets up and goes over to the altar. She picks up all the offerings, still folded neatly in their plastic sleeves. “We should burn these now,” she tells me. “Go get the metal bucket and some matches.”
We move my father’s chair close to where we’ve set the bucket and help him get comfortable again. Lan sits on a stool on one side of the bucket, a pair of iron tongs in her hands. I set down a stool on the other side and pull the plastic off the
vàng mã.
My father sits quietly, just watching us. Lan picks up Nguyen Thai Son’s paper
áo dài,
bunches it into a ball, then stuffs it into the bucket. She lights a match, touches it to the paper, and starts the fire. The flames sputter and pop in the air.
“Lan,” I say, glancing back and forth at both of them. “What?”
“Do you remember Mother’s last words?”
She stares down at the flames. “Of course,” she says. “Don’t you?” “I wasn’t there.” Bo wasn’t there, either. Only Lan was there.
She nudges the paper with the tip of the tongs. “Yes, you were.”
“No. I ran home to cook dinner. She hadn’t spoken for days. And then, when Bo and I came back to the hospital, you told us she’d spoken. She died the next day. Tell me again.”
She looks down at the flame.
I’m sure my father remembers, but, still, he wants to hear it. “Tell us, child,” he says.
Lan’s voice sounds irritable and impatient, but she doesn’t refuse the request. “I could barely understand her. She said, ‘
Lan, Xuân Mai
ê
i!
’ as if she were calling us home for dinner.”
I look at my father. He just shrugs. After a while, I say, “It’s not always very meaningful.”
Lan lifts the burning paper and turns it in the basket to expose it to the air. “It can’t always be meaningful,” she reminds me. As the
vàng mã
begins to burn down, she points with the tongs to our mother’s
áo dài
and I hand it to her across the top of the bucket. She crumples the
áo dài
and pushes it in. Immediately, the flames dance up again.
Next, I hand her one of our mother’s high heels. “Shelley told me that once there was a guy who started counting in the last week of his life. He had Alzheimer’s and he couldn’t count in order. Seven, one million, sixty-three. Like that. Until he died.” Some chemical in the shoe turns the flame a deep blue, then it hisses and shifts back to orange. The smoke makes your eyes burn, like onions do.
Lan looks at me across the top of the bucket. “Do your friends really bury people for a living?” She sounds somewhat appalled.
“Yes,” I say, “but it’s considered a respectable profession in America.”
I hand her another shoe. The flames sputter blue again. The entire shoe catches fire, but holds its shape for long seconds, glowing and popping, before suddenly disintegrating into a heap of burning embers. My father has left on the radio to hear the World Cup and you can tell by the sound of the announcer’s voice that someone has scored. From the neighbors’ houses in all directions come the echoes of other football fans, clapping and shouting, “Argentina!” which is, apparently, a favorite. My father grins with pleasure.
“My Hoa now,” Lan says. I hand her the dress. She unfolds it and considers it for a moment, then without a word she crumples it and sets it in the bucket, turning it with the tongs to catch the flames. The dress burns. The first shoe burns. The second shoe burns. Then the cosmetics. The smoke rises in a thin column up through the branches and leaves of the banyan toward My Hoa and the sky.
Lan rubs her eyes. “They must think about death differently in the U.S.,” she says. I remember people making similar remarks as we sat in the shelters, waiting for the Americans to drop their bombs on our heads.
Slowly, the box of cardboard cosmetics disintegrates in the bucket, sending embers like gray moths flying through the air. “Not really,” I tell her. “They’re pretty much like us.”
We have nothing left to burn. The air smells of carbon and something slightly sweet. My father looks tired, but refuses to go to bed. The sight of his two daughters burning
vàng mã
together seems to give him exquisite satisfaction. Lan sets the tongs down and holds her arms around her
knees. For so many years, I have wished for nothing in my life, and so it strikes me as surprising to realize that, had I given myself the chance, I would have wished for exactly this.
For a long while, Lan’s eyes scan the upper reaches of the branches. “What’s it like over there?” she asks.
I gaze at my sister and my father across the smoldering ashes. And then, without any other fanfare, I begin to tell them about it.
For helping me to understand the experience of Vietnamese Americans in an out-of-the-way corner of the United States, I thank Nga Erdman, Solange Thompson, and Lan Washington, proprietor of one of Wilmington’s great treasures, the Saigon Market. Also in Wilmington, I benefitted from the information provided by the Andrews family of Andrews Mortuary and Bernie Kantowitz of Coble Ward Smith Funeral and Cremation Service.
American Funeral Director
magazine and the books of Robert G. Mayer and Mary Roach supplied additional helpful information. I am deeply grateful to Helen Lane, whose life as a funeral director in San Jose, California, provided me with the first seeds of an idea that eventually grew into this book. Thanks, also, to Allison Martin, Lael Martin, and the members and moder-ators of the Internet e-mail list Adoptive Parents Vietnam for their willingness to share, both privately and publicly, their experience and knowledge.
A number of people helped me with this book, either by reading drafts or through other kinds of support. Thank you, Dwight Allen, Karen Bender, Ginny Berliner, George Bishop, Wendy Brenner, Nguyen Nguyet Cam, Vern Cleary, Amy Damutz, Sherry Goodman, Peggy Hageman, Carolyn Jones, Amy Keith, Andrew Lund, Alison Lurie, Sarah Messer, Hope Mitnick, Barbara Namerow, T. T. Nhu, Celia Rivenbark, Robert Siegel,
324
acknowledgments
Kathy Steuer, Mark Street, Eric Vrooman, and Kathryn Winogura. I am grateful to Bui Hoai Mai for the beautiful drawings that grace the cover and interior of this book. Thanks to the entire Sachs family, especially my brother, Ira; my sister, Lynne; my mother, Diane; my father, Ira, Sr.; and my grandmother Rose for your love and support. Thank you to Douglas Stewart, my agent, for sticking with me and for being so smart, and to my editor, Marjorie Braman, who is wise and patient and has an excellent temper.
Thanks, and love, to my husband, Todd Berliner, not only for reading innumerable drafts, but also for putting up with me and inspiring me in countless ways. And thanks to my sons, Jesse and Samuel. I lucked out when I got you.
D
ANA
S
ACHS
is the author of
The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam, which Publishers Weekly
praised as “engrossing and engaging” and which the
Orlando Sentinel
called “genuinely beautiful.” She has published numerous translations of contemporary Vietnamese fiction. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, Todd Berliner, and their two sons.
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The House on Dream Street: Memoir of
an American Woman in Vietnam
with nguyen nguyet cam and bui hoai mai
Two Cakes Fit for a King: Folktales from Vietnam
Designed by Susan Yang Interior artwork by Bui Hoai Mai
Jacket design by Georgia Liebman
Jacket photograph by © CK Ltd./Getty Images
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
IF YOU LIVED HERE
. Copyright © 2007 by Dana Sachs. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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