World and Town

by Gish Jen

  He and Chhung don’t stop work often, but when they do, the boy generally jabs his shovel into the dirt the way Chhung does, so that it stands straight up. Every now and then, though, when his father’s not looking, he stands it up on its point, steadies it with his palm, then lifts his hand free quick enough that the thing just thuds. Then he looks off. Relaxing the ciliary muscles of his eyes, Hattie guesses, not to say his back—and who could blame him? This is not an easy job, what with the soil so wet, and clay besides. Even uphill from the Chhungs’, Hattie’s had to lighten her soil, dig in some compost; roots rot on her all the time. Probably she’ll put sand in under her garden one day, the way Greta did, for drainage. But how about Chhung? Who’s going to tell Chhung how he should really try sand? Someone, she thinks, should tell Chhung.

  The girl brings the baby over, and at first it just clings and clings. When she sits it down in a pile of dirt, though, it begins to play and pretty soon wants to investigate the hole. Chhung yells and swats at himself; the girl tries to distract her charge, which is dressed in a frilly blue blouse and some overlong red pants, one leg of which stays rolled up fine. The other, though, seems bent on showing off its fine bunchy length. Hecq! the girl cries, swatting at the flies. Hecq! Hecq! Hecq! Clapping her hands, so the baby’ll switch direction, which works. Everyone watches, relieved, as the child crawls on one knee and one foot, bottom high in the air, away from the pit.

  Then it veers back toward it again.

  Chhung throws a shovelful of dirt at the girl’s toes, making her back away. He jabs at the ground, comes up with another shovelful, and for a moment seems about to heave that load at the baby. But instead, he stops and looks up at the sky, which is a wash of whitish blue—streaky, as if someone’s just squeegeed it, and about as inspiring as a whiteboard, when you come right down to it. Still, Chhung sets his shovel aside, crosses a hump of dirt, and picks the baby up. The baby’s crying and arching its back with frustration, but Chhung swings it like a pendulum, its pant legs a-dangle, as he calls up to the trailer. The woman hurries out with a bottle. She’s a slip of a thing, in black pants and a white blouse; the blouse has puff sleeves. Her hair is shoulder-length and wavy, her skin darker and smoother than her husband’s, and her face a little rounder, with hooped cheekbones like the fairy wings of a child’s Halloween costume. A lovely woman, and yet not nearly as lovely in her features as in her movements—in that simple way she makes her way down onto the milk crate, for example, and then down again, watching where she steps. Careful even in her hurry. The earth is packed down at the bottom of the step now; it’s not the mud pool it was when Hattie first went calling. Still, the woman picks her way across it as if across the mud she is aware is not there. Quickly—not wanting to appear to be dawdling, it seems—and yet somehow with the grace—the steady but light concentration—of a dancer.

  She reaches the pit as the girl swoopingly reclaims the baby from Chhung, standing it up on its feet. The baby stops crying and, its fists gripping the girl’s fingers, starts to step. One foot, then the other. Then the first foot again. Concentrating. Feet planted wide, and each step a stamp, as if there were a bug it wanted to shmush. Its hips loop around, hula hoop–style. Still, it goes on, determined; it doesn’t seem to mind even the pant legs, though when they get caught underfoot, the waistband pulls and the girl has to stop to roll the things up—a bit of a project, now that they are caked with mud. Still, she rolls, only to have them fall back down; they drag like the ankle cuffs of a chain gang. More steps. Chhung says something. The woman nods reassuringly; the girl answers reassuringly. The boy swats. The girl walks the baby away from the pit, swiveling her body as if in imitation of it. Planting her feet so wide, she looks to be wearing a diaper, too. She holds her head down.

  And with that, peace returns. Chhung and the boy work; the woman slips away. Hattie resumes painting—wetting her brush, contemplating her composition. What now? A moment of puzzlement, and then a How about this? It’s no substitute for Joe and Lee, but it’s something. Her hand begins to move; Annie launches a fierce and protracted attack on poor Reveille’s tail as Cato takes a nap. He lies on his side with his legs stuck out straight—his arthritis. She’ll get him a warm compress in a minute.

  By day three, the hole—a trench, really—is a lot bigger. A car and a half long, maybe, and deep enough to bury a vehicle up to its windows. The dirt piles along its edge are so high that Chhung and the boy can’t throw the dirt clear of them anymore; they’re piling it onto a piece of cardboard instead, and sliding that up an incline. It’s an excruciating procedure to watch—like farm life before not only the invention of the wheel, thinks Hattie, but the deployment of the ox.

  She finishes her current composition with disappointment. Three flat boards with thorns sticking out, her father would have said—a graceless thing. Ah, well. She feeds the dogs, bags up some old Nature magazines for recycling, then ventures downhill with a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow’s rusted out in one corner, an ancient thing left behind by Joe’s uncle when he moved north some years ago—back when Joe was wondering if it was enough to have moved, first out of the city, and then out of the suburbs; back when he was wondering if they shouldn’t move north like his uncle, too. Which Hattie did, of course, in the end: Here she is. But it was one of the differences between them that Joe was always looking to retreat from the world, whereas Hattie was looking for something else. To regroup, Lee said once. To reconcile your contraries and, one day, to fructify.

  Fructify?

  Well, whatever, as the students used to say. And who knows why Hattie brought the barrow with her when she moved. A little retentive, are we? Lee would have laughed—Lee who held on to nothing. You know, I have no last will and testament, she said, bald and weak, toward the end. But I bequeath to you my comments; may you remember them always. She opened her stick arms like a pontiff blessing a crowd; her I.V. line hung down.

  Lee.

  Anyway, for what it’s worth, Hattie’s always liked wheelbarrows. Their unassuming usefulness, and the feel of them, too. She’s always liked the spread of their handles spreading her arms—opening her heart, Adelaide, the new yoga teacher, would probably say. As if in stretching one’s pectorals one stretched one’s spirit, too. This wheelbarrow squeaks and rattles the whole way down Hattie’s driveway, though. Something’s loose; the tire’s flat; the handgrips have split. It’s work to push the thing even downhill. She wouldn’t give it to anyone else. So why give it to the Chhungs, then? Is it not insulting? She does not feel spiritually stretched by the idea, quite the contrary. She feels spiritually contracted, and by the time she reaches their drive, is half thinking to head back home.

  The Chhung men, though, have already come around the side of the trailer to greet her. They stand side by side—the boy half a head taller than Chhung—resting their shovels in just the same way, as if per some regulation. Then Chhung says something, and the boy goes back to work. He doesn’t slow down until Hattie actually approaches, and then it’s the gauged pause of the underling: Chhung may be taking this chance for a break, but his son is aware that his interest is not called for, and certainly no excuse to slack off. Chhung, on the other hand, unties his net and flips it back over his hat. He casually lights up; the cigarette tip flares, the bright ring travels. A large crow flaps through, cawing way up high above them, where there’s sun; Hattie can see the light on its wings when it banks, but it doesn’t cast a shadow because they’re already in shadow.

  “Hello,” she ventures. It’s colder and damper down here than at her place; enormous white toadstools gleam in the dark woods. She shivers. “Excuse me. Sorry to bother you. But can I give you this?”

  The boy watches, his fingers and clothes streaked with dirt. He sports dirt-edged Band-Aids on his hands, like Chhung.

  “Thought maybe you could use it,” she says.

  “Tank you,” says Chhung.

  “I hope it will be a help.” The flies are worse down here, too, with no wind. Hattie waves h
er hand in front of her face, but even so a no-see-um flies smack into her mouth. Of course, if she chose to reconceive the thing, she could probably find it not unlike a sesame seed. Instead, she spits it out.

  Chhung takes a drag on his cigarette and, in a kind of answering gesture, blows smoke out his nose. Two wispy streams float up, obscuring his face. “Tank you,” he says again.

  “You’re welcome.” Hattie has a look at the work-in-progress. The layers of dirt are clear as the layers of a cake—an icing of topsoil atop a gravelly mix, then clay and clay and clay such as Hattie knows well. If you pick that clay up, you can squeeze it into a ball; and if you let go of the ball, you will behold a beautiful impression such as could make a real fossil find in a few million years. For now, though, the clay is mostly a premium seal-all. The bottom of the pit is about as dry as the floor of a car wash.

  “That soil is heavy,” Hattie starts to say. Before she can broach the subject of sand, though, Chhung has signaled to a window of the trailer. The girl peeks out from behind a lilac curtain; Chhung barks something, giving a swipe of a finger. The girl’s head disappears then, only to materialize, complete with body, from around the corner; her mother and the baby accompany her. They present Hattie with a cardboard box of raisins, as well as a clear plastic box of something that looks like orange peels packed in sugar. The red Khmer script on the cover is all loops and squiggles, with an English translation below, in green: SWEET CHILI MANGO STRIPS.

  “Thank you.” Where the plastic box is sealed up with tape, Hattie pockets it and opens the raisins instead; she offers the girl and woman some. Naturally, they will not accept any until she’s had one herself. But then they each take a couple, shyly. The girl rolls several between her fingers, as if making spitballs; the baby leaves off its bottle, leans out of the woman’s arms, and opens up its molarless mouth. Aren’t they concerned about choking? Apparently not. The baby kicks; the girl softens a few more raisins; the baby placidly picks the raisins out from the girl’s outstretched hand. Not cramming them all in or hoarding them, as Josh would have, in those soft chipmunk cheeks of his. Just calmly picking them out, one by one, as if demonstrating the use of an opposable thumb; and what fine focus we Homo sapiens have! Courtesy of the foveal cells of our maculas.

  Hattie watches, amazed.

  “A-muhmuhmuh,” says the baby. The baby’s drool is brown with raisin juice.

  The woman is shy and still; her spirit abides within, Hattie’s mother would say. A tiny woman—even Hattie dwarfs her. They exchange smiles as, between raisins, the baby goes back to drinking something that looks a lot like cola: some dark brown liquid, anyway, with lines of bubbles running up the length of the bottle. The girl is plain beautiful. She has her mother’s smooth skin and hoop cheekbones, and her mother’s high, wide forehead, too—a windshield of a forehead—but with lovely lifting brows of her own, and a decided lilt to her full mouth. She looks as though she were not born, originally, but somehow blown, still soft, down into the world through a tube. And then what life was blown into her! Her brows lift and fall, her nose wrinkles and smooths, her lips purse and pop wide. And behind those gestures something more flickers—wariness, interest, boredom, confusion—a liveliness of response Hattie remembers from her teaching days. How she’s missed this, she realizes—how she’s missed young people in general. So many little gunning planes, as Joe used to say, on such highly interesting runways.

  “You’re welcome!” the girl says now, even as she shrugs her shoulders and ducks her head—embarrassed to have been effusive. Hattie introduces herself. And, suddenly forthright, the girl introduces herself in return: So-PEE her name is. People call her Sophie all the time, because her name is spelled S-o-p-h-y, but actually her name is So-PEE, meaning “hard worker”—not exactly what she would have picked herself, but anyway. The woman is Mum.

  “Which really is her whole name.” The baby takes another raisin from Sophy’s hand. “She’s from the country, where they have names like that. Not like a real name. It just means like grown-up or something. Mature. Like, nothing.”

  Chhung retires to the trailer, swinging his arms; he has the air of an overseer headed to his desk. Sophy accepts some more raisins.

  “I think I get what you’re saying,” Hattie says. “It’s like ‘Ma’am.’ ”

  Sophy considers. “Yeah, like ‘Ma’am.’ It’s a little like ‘Ma’am.’ Not exactly, but sort of. It’s hard to explain.”

  “I think I get it,” Hattie says again. She turns to Mum. “And where in Cambodia are you from?”

  Mum tightens her arms around the baby and shakes her head.

  “She doesn’t speak English,” Sophy explains. “And she doesn’t read or write Khmer, either.”

  Kh-mai, she says, Hattie notices. Not Kh-mer, but Kh-mai.

  “She’s, what’s that word?”

  “Illiterate?”

  “Illiterate. Yeah, that’s it. She’s illiterate. But she works hard, she knows you’ve got to work hard in America because, like, nothing grows on trees.”

  Mum says something then, holding the baby with one hand, and smoothing her shirt with the other. The shirt’s close-fitting in a way you don’t see much around here—a matter of tucks and darts. It doesn’t move, the way Sophy’s T-shirt does; it’s formal. Both shirts, though, show their wearer’s long waist and modest bust to advantage. Sophy tugs on hers with one hand behind each hip, as if adjusting a bustle.

  “She says do you know anyone looking for a house cleaner, because, like, she can clean. And she does factory work, too. Like, if anyone around here is making electronics or medical equipment. Anything like that.” Though Sophy shoos at the air with her raisinless hand, Mum, mysteriously, does not have to swat; the flies, for some reason, leave her alone. “She can do anything, she’s really good, you should see.”

  “No medical equipment,” answers Hattie. “But a lot of people do bake things.”

  Sophy translates. Looking in the air, thinking, speaking, looking in the air again. She gestures, swatting some more. Mum nods.

  Hattie nods back.

  And everyone smiles in the gray air—happy. In some basic, reasonless way, happy. A speckled pool of light—who knows where it’s from, it must have bounced off something, somewhere—flickers at their feet, dancing and live.

  The baby’s name, it seems, is Gift.

  “Because my mom thought he was, like, a gift,” says Sophy.

  He? The baby is wearing another frilly shirt today, with green-and-pink pants. Dangling its—or rather, his—legs on either side of Mum’s hip, he is having a two-handed swig from the bottle, which really does look full of soda.

  “Mehmehmehmme,” he says.

  “Gift. What a lovely name,” says Hattie. “Is he a boy?”

  “Yes,” says Sophy. “He’s my brother.”

  “I see.” Hattie does not ask why he’s wearing girls’ clothes.

  Still, Sophy volunteers, “We dress him like that because somebody gave us that clothes.” She shrugs. “And we don’t care.”

  “Ah,” says Hattie. “And here I don’t care, either.”

  Sophy tilts her head, thinking about that. Mum murmurs.

  “She says Cambodians can make—what?” says Sophy.

  “Do-na,” says Mum herself then, suddenly. Softly, but bravely. And again—a bit more slowly: “Do. Na.” She holds her mouth open after the second syllable, like a singer drawing out her vowels. Lovely as she is, her bottom teeth do zigzag.

  “Oh, right, doughnuts.” Sophy’s teeth are better than her mother’s.

  “Ah.” Hattie smiles at Mum. “Very good.”

  “She’s never made them herself, but Cambodians make, like, all the doughnuts in California. So it’s definitely something Cambodians can do,” says Sophy.

  “Is that so,” says Hattie.

  Mum adds something quietly, from behind Gift, in Khmer, then lifts her chin in Hattie’s direction.

  “They also can make—what?” says Sophy.


  “Ba-geh,” says Mum.

  “This French thing,” says Sophy.

  “Baguettes?” says Hattie.

  An inspired guess. Mum nods and smiles, but with her lips pressed together, so that her smile is more a matter of her eyes than her mouth—a radiance.

  “Yeah. If anyone around here likes that,” says Sophy.

  “I’ll ask around.”

  Beside them, the pit yawns, dark and rough, all roots and rock.

  “She’s a great worker,” Sophy says again. “Like she’s fast, but she pays attention, too, you know? She doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “She’s accurate?” says Hattie.

  “Yeah, accurate.” Sophy nods, tilting her head. “She’s, like, accurate. Where she used to work they always gave the most complicated stuff to her. They weren’t ever things she’d want herself, if anyone gave her one of whatever it was she’d just give it to the monks at the temple. But she made them because she was supposed to—like it was her fate. She’s Buddhist.”

  Hattie looks at Mum—keeping her in the conversation. Not that paranoia is the human condition, as Lee used to maintain. But Mum might just understand more English than she speaks.