World and Town

by Gish Jen

  Hattie having heard that the church was going to do something someday, but having somehow envisioned that someday to be like the Rapture—a day that might or might not be on the immediate horizon. One week, though, the trailer sat as normal in its old site near town. The next its yard looked like a truck trade show. Hattie, out walking the dogs, stopped more or less dead as a churchload of folks jacked up the trailer and split it right down the middle, then with considerable adjusting and cranking and readjusting, opened it up like a child’s pack-’n’-go dollhouse. Things snapped and sank; things leaned and bowed and split. This was not the growth of a crystal or a protein—some natural process bordering on dance. No, this was manmade inelegance itself. Still, only one worker swore (cussed to make the heavens blush, Hattie’s mother would have said), namely baby-faced Everett, husband of Hattie’s walking-group friend, Ginny. Whom someone had up and volunteered, unchurched though he was, on account of his size; never mind that the poor man was bound to incur more ambivalence than gratitude for his pain. Hattie knew him as a guy who would shovel her out in a storm—a man who’d show up without her asking and refuse to be paid, and a regular snow mason to boot, who over the course of the winter would produce path walls so plumb, you could have checked a spirit level against them. He was a kind man, an obliging man. And yet said kind and obliging man would not leave off cussing when people gave him the eye, quite the contrary. Said kind and obliging man seemed, if anything, to cuss all the louder for the looks—a man after Hattie’s own heart in that way, but less dear to his coworkers, she could imagine, as the day wore on. For hear tell a jack gave, a hitch snapped. The coffee ran out. The cold got colder. One man just about took his thumb off, and had to go to Emergency with his hand in a bandanna tourniquet. So who knows but that Everett’s mouth might have proved contagious—who knows but that he might have led others into Error—had the Lord not eventually gotten those trailer halves up on wheels.

  There they were, though, finally, up up—at last—hallelujah! The group disbanded; heathen Everett disappeared. Then down the road the trailer halves rolled, one after the other, their private parts all in public. Did not a body have to wonder how intelligently designed we can be when none of us has so much as a wheel-like option? Well, never mind. The most intriguing part of all this, to Hattie’s mind, had nothing to do with the brute grunting and heaving-ho—or even the dawning realization that the halves were headed toward her house. (Which was not intriguing, by the way—which was a shock!) It was rather when one of the trailer halves passed her on the road. For in the kitchen, as it rumbled by, was a blink of a girl, holding up the cabinets. Young—fourteen or fifteen, Hattie guessed—a tea-skinned pipsqueak of a thing with a swingy black ponytail and a shocking-pink jacket. Some cabinets had gotten knocked loose when the work was being done; the girl was put in there, it seemed, to keep them from coming down completely. Never mind that her spindly legs were wholly inadequate for the job—there she was all the same, gamely holding them up. Having taught high school for the better part of her life, Hattie waved at the poor thing; this being one of the things teaching’s made of her, besides a habitual hoarder of chalk: a compulsive supporter of gumption. True, she’d retired right after Joe and Lee died. (As she had had to, being unable to bear the campus at which they’d all taught—being unable to climb the hill with the crocuses, or to set foot in the teachers’ lounge, anything.) But never mind. That the girl did not wave back is the thing—that she could not begin to think about waving back, probably. Still, Hattie waved anyway—as the girl might never have even noticed, had the trailer not happened to hit a pothole.

  A well-known pothole, this was, more famous in these parts than any movie star. It was top of the summer list for the road repair crew—a gap big enough to make you fear for your car axle. If locals had drawn up the map, this thing would have been on it in red. But that driver hailing from parts unknown, he failed to slow down—making for a jolt. The top of the trailer tilted like a fair ride; the girl was slammed askew. She lost her footing; a door sprang open; some cabinets tore off and a drawer shot out, sailing with surprising aplomb out onto the road, where it landed, spinning.

  “Help!” the girl shouted.

  “I’ve got it!” Hattie called back.

  Did the girl hear? In any case, as the trailer pulled back level, the dogs and Hattie went and rescued the drawer—a wood-veneer affair, with a pitted, copper-tone, Mediterranean-look pull. Empty. The sort of thing you don’t even see as a thing unless it’s lying in the road and about to get run over. The dogs sniffed it immediately, of course. Wise Cato dropping his tail even as Annie the puppy attacked it; Reveille the glutton nosed an inside corner. For the thing did smell of cinnamon—someone’s ex–spice drawer, guessed Hattie, as she picked it up. A thing worth something on its own, but a thing you’d have to say had suffered a loss, too. Its fellow drawers, after all—not to say all the cabinetry it had ever known.

  Ah, but what has happened to her that she can find herself feeling sorry for a kitchen drawer?

  Hattie gone batty!

  Anyway, there the thing was, still in one piece.

  She would have brought it back the very next day, except for the rain attack—these huge drops leaving the sky with murderous intent. Anyone foolish enough to pit an umbrella against them would only meet defeat even before the onslaught turned, like this one, into something resembling concrete aggregate. Of course, it will let up soon enough. Soon enough, Hattie’s friend Greta will be whizzing by again, her white braid flying and her back baskets full—honking Hi! at Hattie’s house, midwestern-style, as if to remind her of the music series, the dam project, the water quality patrol! So many ways to Get Involved, so many ways to Prove an Exemplary Citizen!

  For a blessed few days, though, Hattie the Less Exemplary sits painting bamboo. One stalk, two.

  Wind. Sleet. Hail.

  She dips her máobĭ in the ink.

  Rain.

  Until finally comes a big blue sky, solid as wallboard.

  Hattie admires the mountains as she crosses her side yard—the mountains in Riverlake being neither the highest hills around, nor the most dramatic, but quite possibly the most beguiling. Folding into one another like dunes, if you can imagine dunes dark with trees and sprinkled with farms. The west side of the lake, where Hattie lives, tends to the plunging and irregular—irrepressible granite heaves with drifts of unidentified other matter in between. (Including, this time of year, a few last gray amoebae of snow.) The east side, though—which she can see from her side yard and back porch—is rolling and dotted with some of the big old farms that used to be everywhere around here. They’re squares of spring green today, like handkerchiefs dropped down from someplace they use green handkerchiefs; Hattie likes the barns, especially. It’s hard to say why plain nature would be improved by a red barn or two, but she does feel it so. Maybe it is just the Chinese in her, always partial to the civilized, but she likes silver-capped silos, too, and farmhouses.

  Peace.

  Though look what’s floating from the crest of the hill today: the trial balloon for the proposed cell phone tower. A long long string with a white balloon bobbing at its top—the whole deal a-waft like a ghost in a kids’ play now, but just wait until it’s a lunky metal affair with trusses and uprights and baubled appendages. There’s a family hoping to make a killing on the thing, people say, as well as a big select board meeting on the subject coming up, to which—meeting-ed out as she was by her fervent youth—even Hattie will go.

  But first, her neighbors.

  The land is a swamp, but the trailer site itself isn’t bad. As nobody has built steps up to the front door yet, though, she has to step up onto a milk crate to knock, and even so finds herself knocking at the door’s knees. An awkward thing to do while holding a drawer, especially if you have a bag of cookies set in the drawer, as she does—butterscotch chip, nothing too extraordinary, though Hattie did use turbinado sugar in them instead of regular, seeing as how it was on sp
ecial one week. Whatever turbinado even is or means. Anyway, the sugar gave the cookies a chew; and now here the door is opening, with a scrape—a half-gone hinge. The air has the mushroomy smell of rot.

  “Hello,” she says from her pedestal. She hoists the drawer before her like a popcorn vendor at a baseball game. “I’ve come to welcome you to the neighborhood.”

  Her audience being a half-stick of a man—looming over her at the moment, but not actually much taller than she is, which last she dared measure was all of five foot two. He has on a blue buttoned-up polo shirt, a black leather belt, and blue denim pants that look as though they are meant to be jeans but somehow look like slacks. His hair is white and thin, his skin pale and loose, and his face the fine result, she guesses, of a Pol Pot facial: One of his cheekbones sits a half-step high. She shivers. The man’s nose is likewise misaligned; his pupils are tiny; and his gaze has a wander, as if possessed of a curiosity independent of its owner. Nystagmus, she thinks—damage to the abducens nerve. (Recalling old science terms more easily than she recalls her grocery list, naturally.) His gaze lists left, like a car out of alignment, then jerks back—left left left again, and back. It is strange to think him around her age—younger than her, even. Mid-sixties, people have said. He looks, she thinks, to belong to his own reality; and who knows but that he thinks something similar of her, for he beholds her with a blankness so adamant that the closed door he’s replaced does seem, in retrospect, to have been friendlier.

  “Hello,” Hattie says, all the same. And, when he does not answer, “Do you speak English?”

  He gazes at the top of her head as if she is growing something there.

  “Do you speak English?” Slower this time.

  A pause.

  “Lit-tle,” he says finally. He pronounces the word with equal stress on both syllables.

  “Well, welcome to town,” she says, trying not to speed up. Half the trick with English language learners, she knows, being the maintenance of a certain stateliness. “My name is Hattie. Hattie Kong. I live across the way, in the red house. See it over there? The red one.”

  She inclines her head in the general direction of her place—a two-bedroom cottage, one floor, with aluminum roof flashing that does, well, flash in the sun. She isn’t the kind of city close where you can chat just fine without availing yourself of a phone, but by country standards they are cheek by jowl. Nobody would have picked it. Her neighbors’ front door faces west, like hers, and if they’d been set the same distance from the road, she’d probably have found it intolerable. It is just lucky her new neighbors are set downhill and a little farther back than she is. They can’t see into her place; nor she, she doesn’t think, into theirs. Of course, with a little figuring she could probably set a basketball to roll from her back porch down to the milk crate, but never mind.

  “I came to say hello and welcome,” she says again, politely enough. “And to give you back your drawer.”

  Nothing.

  “I came to return your drawer.” Repeating herself like a record with a skip in it, if anyone even knows what a record is anymore. But there, at last: He glances down. Belatedly registering, it seems, that there is a white-haired lady bearing a kitchen drawer at his door.

  “It’s yours. It belongs to you. Part of the trailer. I believe it fell out while they were moving it. The trailer, I mean.” She motions with her chin in case “trailer” is new vocabulary. “My name is Hattie Kong. I saw the men bring your house here.”

  Silence.

  Somewhere in the woods a woodpecker pecks its brains out.

  “Chi-nee?” he asks finally.

  A stress on both syllables again.

  “Half,” she says, with a twinge. She has no earthly right, of course, to expect others, Asian or not, to perceive what she is. But having been asked all her life—well, there it is, a well-established little neural pathway, or should she say rut. “My father was Chinese, my mother was white.”

  “Peo-ple say you Chi-nee,” he says.

  “Well, that is half true.”

  “Half Viet-nam,” says the man.

  Viet-nam, accent on the first syllable—Vietnamese?

  “No no no,” Hattie says. “My mother was American, my father was Chinese. Do you know what a mutt is?”

  “You speak Chi-nee?”

  “I do. I grew up in China—a city called Qingdao. When I was growing up they spelled it T-S-I-N-G-T-A-O. Like the beer.”

  He does not appear to have heard of the beer.

  “I came to the U.S. when I was sixteen. Ten years ago,” she jokes.

  No laugh. His eyes go on with their roving.

  “You speak English good,” he says.

  “My mother was an English teacher at a Methodist mission. Before she married my father, that is. So I guess I got the phonemes when I was a baby.”

  Phonemes.

  “Sounds, I mean,” she says. “I heard the sounds.”

  “You speak Chi-nee too,” says the man. “Boat.”

  Boat. Both.

  “Yes,” she says. “I speak both.”

  “Amm-erri-ken.”

  Amm-erri-Ken, with a rolled r—American.

  “I’m American now. Yes.”

  The woodpecker pecks.

  “Eat Chi-nee food?”

  “Do I eat Chinese food? Of course.”

  He brightens. “Chi-nee food number one.” He puts his thumb up. His eyes seem to focus, his face to broaden and regularize—a handsome man, once upon a time. For a moment she can see him in a suit and tie, with slicked-back hair and a cell phone.

  She changes her grip on the drawer. “And your name is?”

  “Ratanak Chhung.”

  Ra-tanak. Ra-tanak. She repeats it to herself to fix in her memory. Accent on the first syllable. Chhung is easy.

  “Chhung is your surname?” Checking because though Asian surnames usually come first, people do often switch things around when they come here.

  He nods, but with nothing like the woodpecker’s energy, she has to say. He is more like the tree being pecked.

  “May I call you Mr. Chhung?” Somewhere she has gotten the idea that respectful forms of address are important to Cambodians—from Greta, probably. Greta the well informed.

  “American call me Chhung,” he says. “Just Chhung.”

  “Ratanak is too hard,” she guesses. “Not that hard, but too hard for some. Too long.”

  A delay. But then finally he nods, as if in accordance with an order sent from afar.

  “Americans can be so lazy,” she goes on. “Hardworking as they are.”

  A more definite bob.

  Such an odd sound, pecking.

  Hattie did not teach English as a Second Language back when she taught high school; she taught Biology and Mandarin. Still, in-house immigrant that she was, she’d been called in to help with the English Language Learners all the time, and had heard, over the years, all manner of accent. And yet she’d never encountered one quite like Chhung’s. The chop of his speech, certain features of his grammar, that trouble with ending consonants—all these resemble problems native Chinese speakers have. Problems her father had, and that she probably had too, fifty or sixty years ago. But Chhung has that bit of a rolled r, in addition—kind of a Spanish-lite deal. Also those very short syllables, and an odd stress pattern. She has to still herself to understand him. Concentrate.

  And so it is that she is concentrating—carefully casually asking about his wife and children or some such—when a corner of the crate sinks. She shoots her hand toward the doorframe but still half steps, half falls off the crate, turning her bad ankle and dropping her drawer clean into the mud. Her bad ankle!—she works it a bit, to make sure it’s all right; this being her right foot, her bad foot—one of the reasons she always wears lace-ups with real support, though don’t those sheepskin jobs look easy on.

  Chhung diplomatically says nothing. But then he answers, “One boy, one girl”—as if that information, like the instruction to n
od, has finally reached him. He forwards it on with a gentler voice than before, though—not wanting to go knocking her over again, maybe. “One baby. And two udder one, not here.”

  Two other whats? And why aren’t they here? Well, never mind. Hattie goes on with her joint trials.

  “Please say hello,” she says. “Please tell them welcome to the neighborhood. Tell them they can drop by anytime. Okay if I leave you your drawer?”

  It does seem unmannerly to leave it there on the ground, but then this Chhung is not exactly Mr. Manners himself.

  “I’m going to leave you your drawer,” she says. (A good helping of her mother’s sorry-to-do-this in her voice, she notices.) “The cookies are for you and your family.”

  He nods, more or less.

  Pecking.

  A porta-potty sits in a dry spot up behind the trailer—a ladies’ toilet they have, for some reason, with a little triangle-skirted figure on its green door. Did zoning okay that? And how are they going to get a septic in, what with the ground so wet? The trailer is quiet except for the shush-rat-tat of a mop or towel being wrung out into a pail. Shush-rat-tat. Shush-rat-tat.

  That roof seam must have leaked something terrible.

  Shush-rat-tat.

  An interesting counterpoint to the woodpecker.

  Shush-rat-tat.

  Is that the girl mopping?