Home. The things Genevieve had taken for granted: the clean floors and walls, the unsticky air, the pure water rushing from the tap. The changes of season—delicate springs, piles of crisp autumn leaves, properly cold Christmases. Snow! Philip and Laura probably didn’t remember ever having seen it.
The sojourn was to last only a year, four quick seasons away and then back to normal life, to the garden on the double lot wrapping around the house Genevieve loved, to the choral society where she sang mezzo soprano and the Arts Council, to whose board she’d been elected just before they’d left America. The council had been enthusiastic about what they called her adventure—Genevieve had thought of it that way then too—and proposed a slideshow after her return, tentatively titled “My Year in Siam.” She hadn’t received a council newsletter in a very long time. Possibly the fault of international mail, but more likely her name had been expunged from the mailing list. As though she had died.
Genevieve spent one morning per week writing letters, at a drawerless teak desk pushed under a small window in the master bedroom. While the geckos ran over the walls and the overhead fan lifted the corners of everything in a ruffling ocean shush, she would dip her pen into the deep inkwell that had belonged to her grandfather and summon the bright, game voice she used for correspondence:
Dear Sally, It’s the rainy season again! The streets downtown have flooded so completely that locals are boating about; it’s almost like Venice…
If Venice were boiling hot and its air thick with disease-bearing mosquitoes.
Dear Mother, Thank you for the hairbrushes. We saw a lovely exhibition of Thai dancing the other day. We must take you when you come…
Not that her mother would ever visit Thailand. She might have done so in other circumstances, perhaps as part of a round-the-world extravaganza, but to travel to Bangkok to visit her daughter who now appeared to be living there would be quite impossible. Genevieve imagined her mother telling her father across the dinner table, “It would only encourage them.”
“I’ve sacked him, of course,” Genevieve said now, to the wall of newsprint.
“Who?” asked Robert, and then sighed in comprehension, bringing the newspaper down. “Was that necessary?” he asked. “We’re getting a reputation. We’ve sacked an awful lot of servants.”
“You mean I have. But Robert, really. I’m the one who has to live with them.”
He regarded her through the rippling, rising smoke of his cigarette. Did he really see her? Three babies in five years and she’d looked eighteen after Laura, everyone had said so. Now she was thirty-three and dangerously close to looking it. Despite the sun cream; despite the wide-brimmed hats.
“Did you sack him completely?” Robert asked, his forehead creased and hopeful, as if there were a halfway measure.
No, Robert didn’t see her. She knew she was partly to blame for that, so determined had she been to rise to the never-nagging, never-flagging examples of her mother and grandmother, who voiced no dissatisfaction in any circumstance, who always preached make do and needs must. Genevieve had withstood a monologue recently from a Swede at an embassy party, a minute description of an obscure sport. She’d been half listening, making the usual encouraging noises, when her attention was yanked fully to what he was miming: frenzied, focused sweeping. That was the sport, apparently: silent, tactical sweeping of ice in front of a sliding stone, guiding its path while never touching it. To Genevieve, it had seemed an amazingly apt metaphor for her married life.
“It’s all right,” she said, taking up the coffeepot again, tilting a thin brown stream into Robert’s cup. “Harriet has made arrangements for her son-in-law to come.”
“All right,” he said, mollified. “Good.” He crushed out his cigarette, flicked his fingers free of moist bits of tobacco from its filterless end—flick-flick, flick-flick, flick-flick—brought the coffee cup to his lips and sipped, then returned it to its saucer and lifted the newspaper again. Smiling, his good humor restored. “Sack them all, if you want,” he said. “We can always get more.”
* * *
The new driver was there the next day, well before he was needed, smartly turned out in jacket and long pants, already perspiring in the early heat. Laura noticed him when she went outside after breakfast to skip rope, a strange man crouched where Fred should be, rubbing a cloth over the headlamp of her mother’s car. He must have already cleaned her dad’s car: yesterday the chrome had been foggy and the wheel wells encrusted with mud, but now the two cars were almost identical. Only the small crushed place on her dad’s front fender identified it as his.
She began skipping, counting silently, watching the new driver out of the corner of her eye. She had a private goal to skip one million times this summer, mostly because Bea had said she couldn’t. She did it in lots, keeping track of the daily number, writing it down on a paper. One thousand thousands was one million. If a person did one million of anything, it had to mean something.
Twenty-two. The driver looked up at the slap of the rope. Twenty-three, twenty-four. He saw her looking at him, and smiled. She stopped skipping.
“Sawadee-kha,” she said, letting the wooden handles drop onto the grass and stepping toward him, putting her hands in front of her face, palm to palm, and bobbing her head slightly. “I’m Laura.”
He stood, still smiling, and returned her wai and her greeting, in masculine form, “Sawadee-khrap,” the white cloth hanging like a flag between his palms. He put a hand flat against his chest. “Somchit.”
“Are you our new driver?” said Laura. He smiled, but didn’t reply. “The cars look very nice.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, watching her elongated, curved reflection in a shiny hubcap. “Perhaps you can take us to the toy shop today.” They usually went on Tuesdays after their riding lesson, but this week their mother had needed the car for an errand and they hadn’t gone. In Laura’s calculus, a toy shop visit was owing.
Somchit smiled and nodded.
“Not the one on Sukhumvit, the other one,” she instructed. “With the ship in the window. Do you know that one?” He nodded again.
“He probably doesn’t understand English,” said Bea, coming up behind her. “Cheap bastard,” she said to Somchit. He made another smiling wai. “See,” said Beatrice. “You’re an idiot,” she told Somchit in a bright voice. His smile didn’t change; Laura laughed.
Robert came out of the house carrying his briefcase, and the girls ran toward him. Somchit made a deep wai and Robert waved a kind of salute with his free hand, opening the door of the nearer Mercedes, getting in. “Daddy, may we please go to the toy shop?” cried the girls. Repeating the please, drawing the syllable out again and again into long girl-screeches. “Ask your mum,” he said, as Genevieve came out and told the girls to Quiet Down. They turned their beseeching faces to her as Robert shut the door and started up his car.
“There’s no time,” Genevieve told the girls. “I have a luncheon at eleven and after that Philip has his lesson.”
“We can go now, with the driver,” said Bea.
“It’s his first day,” said Genevieve. “We don’t even know if he speaks English.”
“He does,” said Bea, her mendacity making Laura goggle at her. “We’ve been talking to him.”
* * *
NOI, THE Number Three servant, watched the girls teasing the new driver. She’d seen him before anyone else had that morning, when she opened the screen-wall of the house just after sunrise. He’d flashed her a wide white smile, and she’d been bewildered: Where was Fred? She hadn’t returned the new man’s smile, and under his eye she didn’t sweep the terrace as she usually did, but left the broom propped there and went back into the house to help with breakfast. She’d avoided going outside again until ordered to do so by the Number One, who’d noticed the dirty terrace, strewn with blown petals from the twisting vines that crept across under the roofline.
Noi wasn’t surprised to hear Beatrice lie to her mother. The farang childre
n were gargantuan in size but immature in every other way, driven by wants like babies, always quarreling. As she bent to sweep the last of the petals into the dustpan, the movement caught Mrs. Preston’s eye.
“Sarah,” Mrs. Preston called. “Will you please go with the girls to the toy store?” As the girls shrieked with joy, she said, “I’ll need the car in one hour.” Her index finger went up for the emphatic repeat, “One hour only. One hour, Sarah, say it back to me?”
Saying the words One hour only, Madame got Noi her first-ever ride in the Mercedes. The girls clambered into the back seat while the new driver opened the front passenger door for Noi. As the motor rumbled to life, Laura leaned out the window and called to Philip. After a minute or two of waiting, Bea said, “He’s sulking about something, let’s just go,” and the driver pushed the stick in the middle of the car, brushing his knuckles against Noi’s hip as he did, and then they were moving down the driveway, Kai running to open the gate.
While the girls punched each other in the back seat, Noi perched in the front, the inertial forces pulling her deeper into the cushion and then pushing her out of it, tipping her now toward the window, now toward the driver. Who, without taking his eyes from the road, put a hand to the dashboard and adjusted a louvered vent to blow a cool chemical breath in her direction. That felt nice, but she didn’t acknowledge the kindness. She’d liked Fred, who’d treated her like a little sister. She was sorry Fred was gone.
Chapter Five
WHEN NOI was eleven, her mother took the four daughters to the fortune-teller, whose house on stilts stood only a mile or so upriver from their own. The family was at a crisis point: the harvest had been poor, and the land tax would be coming due soon. Everyone had heard of the opportunities in the capital city; many families had sent a girl south to work. That seemed to be the answer. But how to choose which of the girls should go?
After the rice transplanting ended, Noi’s mother collected money for the fortunes in a twist of her skirt, counting the coins several times before tying the knot. Fifty satang for each girl’s fortune; it would have been twice that for boys. She poured a measure of rice onto a broad banana leaf and made it into a square package, tied it closed with a strip of the same fibrous leaf, and brought that along too.
In the prow, Noi’s eldest sister, Pla, paddled; in the stern, their mother. Sao, the second sister, held the rice bundle in her lap; she had been charged with watching over it, but she had her eye on the bank, waving at everyone they passed. Nok, the youngest sister, sat quiet, watching the long pleats of water raised by Pla’s paddle. Noi sat near Sao and rested a hand lightly on the rice.
The fortune-teller was sweeping out her house when they arrived. She looked up as the family tied the boat to the ladder. As they rinsed their feet preparatory to climbing up, she made a vigorous scrape across the wood to send a line of dirt flying into the water. Then she stood the broom against the wall of the house and sat on the platform. The visitors knelt before her.
Noi’s mother tugged at the knot in her skirt to retrieve the coins; the fortune-teller accepted them and politely put the rice bundle aside unopened. She beckoned to Pla, who came forward and put her hand out.
The old lady scrutinized Pla’s hand and then her face, frowning in concentration, her jaws working as she chewed a betel nut, while the others waited in respectful silence. Noi could not tell what the woman was looking at; she had heard that fortune-tellers relied greatly on the shape of the ears. She wondered what her own ears looked like. She and Sao had each tried to describe the other’s, drawing in the mud; they had pressed their heads together, ear to ear, feeling with their fingertips to compare their sizes, but with the rushing in Noi’s head, the warm skin of Sao’s ear had felt like her own.
The fortune-teller let Pla’s hand go. “She is a fish,” she told Noi’s mother, who drew her breath in sharply in surprise: the girl’s play-name meant just that. The woman went on. “A fish swimming wisely, far enough below the water’s surface to avoid distress from the rain above, but close enough to dart up and snatch a hovering insect.” The old woman smiled at Pla. “She has a cool heart. She will make a good marriage.”
Even Noi could have predicted a good marriage for the beautiful Pla, and without having had to look at her sister’s palm.
Sao was next; she went forward eagerly. She had been looking forward to the fortune-telling. The woman pulled the hand onto her knee, looked into it, and scowled. No clues from this one’s nickname, which meant “young girl,” expressing the parents’ hope that she would be the youngest girl in the family—that all the children to follow would be boys.
“Stubborn,” declared the fortune-teller. “A pebble at the bottom of the river; no matter how the water rushes over her, she does not move. She is lazy, not a good worker.” She leaned, spat betel-nut juice over the side of the platform. “But she is a loyal friend,” she added, as Sao backed away. Noi put her arm around her sister, but their mother removed it.
“Go on,” said Noi’s mother. “She is ready for you.”
The woman inspected Noi’s hand, pressing her thumbs against the fleshy part where the fingers joined, turning it on its side and drawing a forefinger over the braided tracks there.
“This one is a weed,” pronounced the fortune-teller. “Growing up in the dry cracks of the road, where you would think nothing could grow. She is pretty, and hardy, but attracts little attention.” She cackled. “Not a flower to place before the Buddha.”
Noi retreated as her little sister crept forward and laid her trembling hand, palm up, on the old woman’s knee. They all waited to hear the verdict. “Bird” would have been obvious—her play-name Nok had been given for her birdlike tininess and timidity. But that might have been too easy; anyone could see the bird in the girl. If Sao was a pebble, and Noi herself was a weed, probably their meek little sister was something even less substantial, a gnat or a tadpole.
But the old woman, after smoothing out Nok’s hand and looking closely, broke into a beatific, betel-red smile. Nok, to the surprise of them all, was a lotus, serene in the moonlight, blooming on a pond in the garden of a king. Their mother looked at Nok with new respect: she’d had no idea.
That night, the family gathered to discuss the fortunes. There was no doubt that Nok and Pla were meant for marriage; but of the other two, which would be better to send away to the city to work? The pebble, who was lazy, would make a bad wife; but then she would also be a bad worker. The weed was pretty, but prettiness alone does not portend anything.
“She grows where you wouldn’t expect anything could grow,” mused one of the aunts. “That could mean she would be an economical wife, always able to stretch a meal.”
“A pebble is smooth and round,” said Noi’s grandmother. “A pleasing shape for a wife.” Sao was their grandmother’s favorite among the girls.
“Stubbornness is a terrible trait in marriage,” said an aunt.
“Stubborn can also mean steadfast,” argued the grandmother.
“Ye-es,” said their mother, in a considering voice. “The fortune-teller did say loyal.”
“She doesn’t budge,” the grandmother reminded them. “Perhaps not someone who should be plucked from the riverbed and sent away.”
In the end, it was one word—dry—that propelled Noi toward the city. The family’s life depended on water. The rains brought the beginning of the farming season, flooding the rice fields and making them ready for planting and also bringing fish, easily caught in the shallows. Everyone ate well during the wet season. When the hot season came, the water shrank away from the land and the difficult time began, the time of heat and hunger, of walking the water buffalo long distances each day to find a tiny fringe of grass. Water meant prosperity. A person who flourished in a dry place might even be bad luck, keeping away the rains. “If she is a weed in the dry road,” reasoned Noi’s mother, “then she should take the dryness with her.” She noted that the weed had also been deemed hardy, so would adapt well to t
he change.
“Lucky,” whispered Sao when she and Noi were lying side by side that night on their bed mat, the sleeping breaths of their family all around them. “Soon you’ll be in the city, living in a brick house.” The amulets around her neck slid on their chain with a tinkling sound as she turned onto her side. “You’ll never have to plant rice again. You won’t have to go to school anymore.”
“I like school,” said Noi. She vastly preferred school to field work and, despite the scant schedule of classes broken around the rhythm of farming, had learned to read and write a little.
“Tee says you’ll take a long bus ride,” said Sao. Tee was the son of a neighbor, who had been to the city. “Hours and hours.”
“I don’t know if I want to go,” whispered Noi.
“Mai pen rai,” said Sao. “It’s not so far. I’ll come to visit, and we’ll go to the king’s palace.” Her voice was full of longing. “We’ll eat something from every cart.” Tee had told them about the vendors along the streets, a hundred different choices in a mile.
“In the next life, maybe you will be a weed,” said Noi.
“Then you’ll have to be the pebble,” said Sao, and the two fell asleep with smiles on their faces.
A cousin already living in Krung Thep, the city of angels, agreed to train Noi for service and place her with a household. Sao had been wrong about the brick house—there was a house made of white-painted stone, but Noi didn’t live in it. The walls in her cousin’s room were made of wood. In fact, the whole structure of the servants’ quarters could have been plucked from the banks of the Suphan River as if by a giant wind, transported to the city and set down with a thump in the garden behind the white building where her cousin’s farang employers lived.
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