by Eric Nguyen
Under the stars, the apartment buildings became silhouettes. Walking, he heard birds singing. He didn’t know birds sang at this hour. He felt delighted and surprised.
Tuấn passed the gates of Versailles and walked toward the bus stop. When he got to Donald’s house, he stopped.
The lights were off. The dog stopped barking when it saw him. It began whimpering and pacing from one corner of the lawn to the other, stopping when its rope couldn’t go any farther.
“Walter?” Tuấn whispered. He felt as if someone was spying on him, as if Donald was outside knowing he’d come this night, though he had only come up with this idea while brushing his teeth. He walked closer to the dog. A light came on and Tuấn froze.
When no one came out, he set the container down and went to the dog. It barked, then whimpered again. Its voice was weakening, vanishing from endless barking. Tuấn petted its head. It seemed more a phantom of a dog than a real dog, what a real dog should be—its size, its shape. It needed a bath. It needed food. The dog licked Tuấn’s hand.
Tuấn moved to the tree to look at the rope knotted around it. When the dog began barking again, Tuấn whispered, “Shhh…” until it quieted down.
With all his strength, Tuấn pushed his fingers into the knot and tried to unravel it. The burning of the rope made him sweat and his palms became slick. It was tighter than he could have imagined.
After a couple of minutes, the knot was loosened and the dog began moving again, wagging its tail and panting with its tongue sticking out. Tuấn dropped the rope to the ground.
“Go,” he said, too excited to whisper anymore. “Go!”
And, as if understanding, the dog ran out of the yard and into the street. Tuấn watched until it disappeared. He stood and waited to see if it would come back.
“Anh,” a voice called out. Brother. Bình stood barefooted on the sidewalk under a streetlamp. “It’s cold,” Bình said, tiptoeing closer. “You got up. I followed you.” He wiped his nose with his hand.
“It is cold,” Tuấn agreed.
The two stood under Donald’s tree in silence.
Then Bình spoke up. “Is the dog coming back?” he asked.
“No,” Tuấn answered.
“Where do you think he’s going?”
“Somewhere” was all he could answer. “But he’s not tied up anymore. He’s free.” He liked the sound of those words—He’s free—in English. They felt light and floated off his tongue: He’s free.
Tuấn placed the Tupperware of cockroaches under the tree, next to the rope. “You won’t tell anyone,” he said.
“No one,” said Bình.
“And nothing happened tonight.”
“Nothing.”
“Let’s get back, then.”
And they ran back to the apartment. For the first time in a long time, Tuấn felt happy, as if he were where he was supposed to be, out in the starlit night under such a full moon. He swore he felt a breeze run through his hair, though the air was still.
Ben
1987
Most of Versailles was Catholic. There was one Buddhist family long ago, but they’d moved away. Where do we belong? Ben’s mother would ask. It happened after every Mardi Gras. After the streets were cleaned of streamers, the king cake eaten, the tiny plastic baby tossed out with the trash (though Ben always wanted to keep them), and the beads packed away for the next year (a tangled mess no one would use again), Versailles became quieter, calmer, more severe.
On Sundays, the neighbors—the Phạms, the Ngôs, the Nguyễns—dressed up for church, the women in plain áo dàis and the men in button-ups tucked into their pants. Are you going to Ash Wednesday service? they asked Ben’s mother. What about Palm Sunday? What about fish dinners? Do you have any new and exciting ways to cook fish? Fish on Fridays? His mother was offended.
Leave me and my children alone, she seemed to say with her eyes, though it would have been too rude to say it aloud. She learned a new phrase from one of her customers at the nail salon: “Bless your heart,” which meant, secretly, that they were dumb or lacking mental faculties or were otherwise impaired, but there was not a thing to be done about it—how pitiful they were, how one could pity them all day long until the cows came home. She said it to them all the time: Bless your heart! Bless your heart! Bless, your, heart!
From February to April, Ben’s mother tried not to talk to anyone in Versailles if she could help it. After work she would walk to their apartment, her breath held in, her posture rigid, her eyes down. A year without talking about Easter or Lent was a successful year, she would say to the both of them, Ben and his brother. Their family was never one for ideologies, she would say, and their father would have been against it all; Catholicism or communism, it would have been all the same to him.
Ben never knew his father. He was killed, according to his mother, after the war. The war, from what he had gleaned from books and TV, had been between communism and non-Communists. The Americans came to help the fight against the Communists. His own father was not a Communist. He was a teacher and a freethinker who despised Communists, and because of this they killed him. He died a hero. That’s the word his mother used, hero, whenever Ben asked about him. Whatever else he knew of the man were echoes of would haves, could haves. He would have thought this…he could have done this, your father….Not a real-life father but a ghost of a father, an afterimage of a father.
“That’s why we don’t live in Vietnam. We live in America,” she would continue, “where we can think what we want and not get arrested.” Last year, they became citizens—one of two families in the neighborhood so far—and it was something she took pride in. Ben didn’t know what it meant, how their lives would be different than before, but he knew it was something important, momentous: that night they ate cake at Gambino’s.
The summer between third and fourth grade, as the sun was setting one evening, a priest arrived in Versailles. He had a dark blue car with wood-grain panels. No one recognized it, and at first everyone stuck their heads out their windows to have a look. When the priest stepped out, he carried a large stack of door hangers. He began his journey door-to-door. Ben could hear his fist on wood every few minutes, at first hard and vivacious, but as the night continued it became softer, quieter. By the time he arrived at the last apartment, their apartment, they didn’t hear his knock and knew he was there only because they were expecting him.
He introduced himself as a priest who had come from Houston by way of Saigon to set up a brand-new church in New Orleans. A very special church. A Vietnamese church. It would also be a community center and safe place for everyone. Imagine ping-pong tables, he was saying, and basketball courts. And classrooms for catechism classes, English lessons for adults, and Vietnamese lessons for the kids. The priest looked at Ben, who stood behind his mother at the door. Ben smiled and he held his hands behind his back. His mother didn’t look like she was paying attention.
“That’s the dream, anyway,” explained the priest, “the Almighty willing. Right now, we rent a storefront off Chef Menteur. Next to a Winn-Dixie.”
“Ah, Winn-Dixie,” his mother said, as if, out of everything she was told, this was the one thing she understood. She looked at one side of the door hanger and flipped it to the other. But in the motion of it, the paper—thick like cardboard, so it would stay put on all the doorknobs—sliced her finger. In the next instant, the hanger flew out of her hands and dropped down off their landing.
“Trời ơi,” she whispered as if she didn’t want anyone to hear. She turned around and walked to the kitchen sink. Ben moved out of the way, so intent she seemed to get there.
The priest came running after her. “I am so sorry, cô. So very sorry.”
Ben closed the door because he wanted to be helpful.
The priest was younger than Ben expected. On TV, when you saw a priest, they we
re always chubby, old, pale men who mumbled when they spoke. But this priest was skinny with golden brown skin and a thick head of black hair. And, of course, he was Vietnamese. You never saw Vietnamese priests on TV. You never saw Vietnamese anything. A Vietnamese priest in real life—that was amazing!
His mother ran the water over her finger as the priest stood by. He kept on apologizing, and his mother was obliged to keep on telling him, annoyed, it was no one’s fault. She rummaged around the drawers for a bandage. They kept their first aid in the last drawer, but she kept looking elsewhere in her frenzied state.
“Let me help,” the priest said.
“No. Thank you,” his mother said when she found the box of bandages. She emptied it onto the counter. They were all different sizes, so she had to look through them before finding the right one.
The priest left after that, telling her she should consider joining their congregation: Our Lady of Saigon. They could come to mass tomorrow or Sunday. “Or anytime, really,” he said. “Our doors are always open. We’re here to serve the community.”
His mother didn’t answer.
“We hope to see you,” the priest repeated, and she closed the door.
“Catholics,” she proclaimed after watching his car pull away, “they can believe whatever they want, but that doesn’t mean they can go around telling you what to think or do or believe!” She opened her eyes wide at him as if she were about to say something important, a lesson he should learn and take note of. “That’s why we left Vietnam, you see?”
“But you left Vietnam because of the Communists,” said Ben.
“We left,” she said, as if he should’ve remembered, “because people like that are dangerous.” She peeked through the blinds. Ben wanted to know what she meant by “dangerous.” “I can’t believe everyone is falling for it. Bless their hearts. Bless all their hearts!” Suddenly she gasped and pulled away from the blinds. She walked toward her bedroom, and Ben wondered if the priest saw her spying.
“We’re Americans,” she said. “This is ridiculous!”
* * *
—
The next day, it was all he could talk about with Addy: the priest, his wood-paneled car, the door hanger that cut his mother. He showed it to Addy.
Addy lived out on Bullard Avenue, where all the families were from Haiti, the same way all the families in Versailles were from Vietnam. But instead of apartments, they were all in houses, small one-story buildings of whitewashed wood that made them look old and fragile. Ben thought they looked like they were made of paper.
In third grade, Addy had been the new girl in school. Ben’s previous best friend, Shirley Daigle, had just moved away last summer (they promised to keep in touch through letters, though they both knew it wouldn’t happen, Shirley being an overall bad writer and Ben not knowing what to say in these letters), and Ben’s ears had perked up when Mrs. Brownworth said they had a new student.
A counselor brought her in. She was a small black girl who wore her hair in an afro. She wore jeans and a pink Minnie Mouse shirt, and her backpack was a bright cherry red. The frames of her glasses were red, too, and so was the plastic ring she wore on her pinkie, Ben would later notice. Mrs. Brownworth introduced the new girl as Adelaide Toussaint and said that she just moved to New Orleans from Miami.
The girl corrected her then—interrupting the bulky, scratchy-voiced Mrs. Brownworth!—saying that she was actually called Addy and that they, her family, were in Miami for a while, but they, her dad and her, were really from Port-au-Prince in Haiti—did Mrs. Brownworth know where Haiti was?—which is very far away from New Orleans, and the weather was nicer there than it is in New Orleans, though she didn’t have much room to complain because her daddy, she said, said complaining was the devil.
Mrs. Brownworth didn’t know what to say after the lengthy speech and no one else did, either. Addy stood at the front of the class beside Mrs. Brownworth. It was silent until two blond girls in the back, Shannon and Ashley, started giggling, and soon the entire class was giggling, too, except Ben, who didn’t see anything funny about anything. Addy stared at them all and shook her head. “Timoun dyab,” she said, like an adult reprimanding a school of children. No one knew what it meant and they kept laughing. Ben knew, for reasons he did not understand, he wanted to be her friend.
At recess, as she sat alone under an oak tree watching other girls play hopscotch, Ben approached her and sat by her side. They both watched the girls skip across the chalk-drawn squares. There were five girls in all, including Shannon and Ashley. The entire group had been through the hopscotch once and were starting all over again when Ben said, “I have marbles.”
Addy didn’t say anything back. He wasn’t even sure she’d heard him, so he said it again: “I have marbles.” For good grades, Bà Giang had gifted him a set of marbles, and Tuấn became infuriated because he said (in his broken English that always made Ben cringe, though he would never admit that to anyone) first grade was for babies and easy and it was all unfair. (He stomped off to their shared room and their mother yelled back, “Well, life is unfair!”) The marbles came in a mesh bag, but that didn’t keep up for too long so he stored them in a Ziploc bag instead. He opened it and showed her. Each marble was different. Ben often thought there were as many marbles as there were people. This one, the first one he showed Addy, was white with different-colored polka dots. It was the size of a grape, larger than all the others. He held it in his palm and showed her another one, a clear one this time with a brown swirl in it that reminded him of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch they served for breakfast at school. He reached in again and took out a handful. He jiggled them and they clattered against one another. (This is what teeth sound like, he always told himself.)
Out on the hopscotch squares, it was Shannon’s turn. She wrapped her hair in a scrunchie and was telling her friends, “I can do it backwards,” and they were all saying, “No way. No way, Shan. You can’t do it! No way!”
“I bet,” she insisted, “with my eyes closed even.” Her hands were in the air, already triumphant, celebrating. “Here I go,” she exclaimed, jumping into the first square with one leg. She landed perfectly. She jumped again and landed safely.
“Look,” Ben whispered when Shannon landed on the next jump, a pair of squares side by side. He slid his fistful of marbles across the blacktop, aiming for the chalk-drawn squares. Addy squinted her eyes. At this distance they were so small he couldn’t even see them. Addy smiled.
Shannon stepped on a marble, then suddenly began losing her balance. She let out a moan as she flapped her hands—her hands like birds trying to grab on to something (a crumb of air, maybe) to keep from falling, but it was too late. Within the next second, she flew across the hopscotch squares and landed on her back on the ground at the edge of the blacktop, half her body in the dirt. The boys playing basketball stopped and watched. A few laughed. Shannon let out a long, wailing cry, not of pain, but of embarrassment, Ben was sure. The other girls ran away.
Ben and Addy held in their own laughter, covering their mouths, under the shade of the old oak tree.
“That was good for sure!” Addy said.
They became quick friends after that.
* * *
—
Addy studied the door hanger.
“Sai-gon,” she read.
Ben told her about the priest and the new church and how his mother slammed the door on him. (This last part Ben made up to make the story more exciting.) He said his mother didn’t like Catholics because they were like the Communists.
Addy was not offended because she didn’t know anything about Communists. She was Catholic; her father, too. What Catholic meant, Addy didn’t really know, but she said this: “It’s like a club. A secret club. We have to wake up early on Sundays and we go to this small, little building out in Little Woods. They chant and we stand up and sit down. Sometimes we stand on
our knees.”
Ben pictured exercise videos on TV with women and men in neon pink and green leotards jumping up and down to music. “And the adults eat bread,” Addy added, “and sip wine. And the kids, we go have playtime in the back, where there’s juice and animal crackers and music on a tape player.” She thought for a moment. Addy’s father, inside the house, was cooking joumou, and the smell of cooking beef wafted out into the sticky summer air. It made Ben hungry. “It’s like a party,” Addy said. “Every week, a party.”
“Like Mardi Gras?” Ben asked.
“Exactly like Mardi Gras,” she said.
* * *
—
The priest returned to Versailles the next week. On Saturday morning, Ben heard laughter outside by the bayou. He heard the sound of a rubber ball bouncing against skin. He got dressed and ran out. And there they were: the priest and the teenagers of Versailles. Ben ran down barefooted.
Two metal poles with a net in the middle were staked into the ground. Five teenagers stood on one side of the net, four on the other. A volleyball rallied back and forth, the teenagers jumping into the air to hit it with both hands. The priest stood to the side watching. He was wearing the same clothes he wore last time he visited, but this time a whistle, like the ones gym teachers wore, hung from his neck. His forehead was slick with sweat and glistened in the sun. Every few seconds, he wiped a paper towel across his entire face. Other times, his head went back and forth, following the ball’s trajectory in the sky. Ben did the same. Then a boy, one of the Nguyễns’ sons (Ben remembered his name being Huy but everyone called him Joseph), jumped right up close to the net and slammed the ball down. It bounced on the dirt hard and ricocheted into the bayou. Water splashed the players but didn’t reach Ben or the priest.
“Holy hell!” someone said.
“Why you gotta do that?” said someone else.
