Thai Die

by Monica Ferris

  Alice had the hat in her hands during Doris’s recitation. She surreptitously held it to her nose, inhaling gently the remaining molecules of air brought home from a place so exotic as to have golden monsters guarding a little jade statue that only the king could dress.

  The reporter asked, “Why did you go to Thailand?”

  “Because I wanted some surgery that my medical insurance wouldn’t cover, and it was cheaper to go to Thailand than to pay for it here, even including air fare. And their hospitals are the equal of any I’ve seen here.”

  “How did you learn about going to Thailand for surgery?”

  “A friend told me, and then I did some research on the Internet.”

  “Did your friend go there for an operation, too?” he asked.

  “No, she just went there on vacation with two other women. She loved it so much that she wanted to see it again.”

  “That was Carmen, wasn’t it?” asked Shelly.

  Doris nodded. “She was supposed to come with me, but her husband got an assignment in Santa Fe for six weeks, starting a week before we were supposed to leave, and her son goes to college in Albuquerque, so she decided to go with him.”

  Doris went back into the suitcase and brought out a white paper bag sealed shut with gold tape. She pulled the strips of tape away, opened the bag, and pulled out a big fistful of skeins of floss in shimmering gold. The skeins were about the size and shape of a skein of DMC cotton, but the single band around each was white paper with printing in an exotic, curvy alphabet on it, except for two words: THAI SILK. She tumbled them with shy carelessness onto the table. “These are for you. Each of you may have one.”

  “Oh, they do needlework in Thailand, too!” exclaimed Emily, reaching for one. The photographer took her picture as she laid the silk across her palm and studied the writing on the band.

  “Well, only sort of,” said Doris. “Over there it’s more of an occupation than a hobby. And these are . . . kind of special.”

  “How so?” asked Betsy, running a finger along one end of the skein. It wasn’t smooth like the silk floss she sold. This had a faintly rough grain.

  “Well, I got these from a silk factory just outside of Bangkok. It’s an interesting story. I wanted to see silk made, and I didn’t realize that most Thai silk comes from the north. I found out about this factory, but there wasn’t a tour, so I had to go there by myself.”

  “Brave of you,” said Alice.

  “Thank you, I thought so, too. Anyway, this factory, it was called Bright Works, was a small place, and it was kind of rickety and noisy. Hot, too. The spinning and weaving machines put out heat and there’s no air-conditioning. They make fabric to sell to tailors who can make a suit or a skirt or a shirt to your measure in five days.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of them!” said Betsy. “Did you get one?”

  “Yes, I did, and it’s beautiful, but it’s a summer dress, so I can’t wear it for a few months. Anyway, a man there spoke enough English to translate for me. I talked with the man in charge of making solid-color fabrics, and he showed me the whole process, from spinning raw silk off the cocoons, to dying it, to weaving it. And when I asked for a sample of spun, dyed silk, I had to show him the piece of counted cross-stitch I carry in my purse to explain what it was for. He told me I had to talk to his supervisor—who turned out to be an American! He came to Bangkok on leave from the Marine Corps, back during the war in Vietnam, and decided to live there after he got out. He looked like an ex-marine, too, big and tough and kind of battered, but charming—you know?”

  Betsy, who had spent a few years in the navy long ago, smiled and nodded. She knew.

  “Do you remember his name?” asked the reporter, pen poised.

  “Yes, David Corvis.”

  “Can you spell that? Corvis, I mean. With a C or a K?”

  Doris thought. “I can’t remember—I think I’ve got jet lag. I can find out, if you like. Anyway, he told me to come back the next day, and when I did, he had these all made up for me. Isn’t that just the nicest thing? I cried, I literally broke down and cried, and told him I’d send him something from America, anything he wanted.”

  “Oh Doris!” exclaimed Betsy. “What if he’d said he wanted a car?”

  “He couldn’t use an American car,” replied Doris, “because they drive English-style, so our steering wheels are on the wrong side for them.”

  “Well, what did he want?” asked Shelly.

  “Would you believe a Minnesota quarter!” said Doris, laughing. “He collects state quarters, and he has about thirty of them, but not a Minnesota one. I’m going to the bank tomorrow to get a nice new one for him.”

  “How will you send it if you don’t know how to spell his name?” asked Emily.

  “I’ve got it written down somewhere. But it wouldn’t matter, I’m sure he’s the only David at the factory, and I have its address.” She looked around the table. “But there’s more. I want you to let me know how good or bad Thai silk is for stitching. I haven’t tried it myself. They don’t make floss, so it may snag or pull apart or just not look as good. But if it is good, he will let me buy silk floss from him to sell over here.” She leaned back and began to smile. “I may go into the silk import business!” She raised both hands. “In a small way, of course. Kreinik has nothing to fear!”

  The women laughed as each selected a skein. There were more than a dozen of them, and Doris said the rest should be saved for members of the Bunch who weren’t present, and anyone else Betsy chose to try out the silk.

  “Thank you very much!” said Betsy. She picked up a second skein, saying, “I want Bitsy Busby to try this. If it doesn’t disintegrate under her lickety-split stitching, then we’ll know something good about it.”

  The show was over. Doris began to fold up her silk pieces. Bershada, sitting on her left, said, “Wait, there’s something else.” She pointed to a cardboard box in a corner of the suitcase.

  “Oh, that,” said Doris. “That isn’t mine.”

  “Whose is it?” asked Betsy. “And what is it doing in your suitcase?”

  “David asked me to bring it home to Minnesota and deliver it to an antiques store, which will sell it to a customer already waiting for it. David has a little business on the side, exporting Thai art.”

  “Hold on, Doris, isn’t that illegal?” asked Bershada. “Bringing something home for somebody else?”

  “No, he didn’t sneak it into my luggage. Besides, I declared it. And he didn’t pay me to carry it.”

  “What is it?” asked Betsy, a shade impatiently.

  “Yes, let us see!” said Alice.

  The reporter, who had been about to put his camera into its bag, instead turned on the flash again.

  Doris hesitated. “It’s a Buddha, and it’s stone, not bronze. I don’t know if I should open the box, and not just because it’s not mine. What would I do if one of you dropped it?”

  “We’ll be careful!” promised Alice, and the others heartily agreed.

  Doris picked up the box and picked away the strips of transparent tape holding it shut. “I think you’ll be surprised when you see it. It’s not really old, but carved in an ancient style.”

  The object inside was wound into Bubble Wrap, and under that a length of grimy old cloth, a faded green printed with a complex pattern. Doris laid the statue on the table and carefully removed its wrapping. As she lifted the last fold of fabric away, the camera flashed from behind her left shoulder, apparently catching her in the corner of her eye. She blinked a few times to clear away the spots before she set the figure upright on its low pedestal, turning it to face the group. The camera flashed again.

  “That’s a Buddha?” asked Emily. The statue, a pale cream color, was of a slim man in a shin-length robe.

  “I don’t know why he used this old thing,” Doris said, leaning sideways to drop the rag into the wastebasket under the table. “The Bubble Wrap was good enough.” She turned the Buddha around so it faced them, then put a st
eadying finger on its head. “So, what do you think?”

  It was nothing like the jolly fat man sitting on a pillow, which is the more familiar depiction of the Buddha. This statue was of a slender man with downcast eyes and just a hint of a smile. He wore his robes fastidiously arranged, covering just one shoulder, reaching halfway down his calves. Both hands were upraised with long, slender fingers. His left hand had the little finger and thumb touching, the right had his forefinger and thumb touching. His hair was done in tiny, tight curls, lifted slightly at the crown.

  “Ooooh, he’s gorgeous!” said Emily, reaching for the figure—she was tired of being the last one to be handed something going around the table. “Wow, it’s heavy!”

  “Oh, please be careful!” cried Doris, reaching to steady it. “Remember, it’s not mine! I don’t know what I’d do if one of those hands broke off!”

  “Yes, of course, you’re right,” apologized Emily, holding it more carefully, using both hands. She put it down on the table and turned it around and around, her head tipped to one side.

  “It looks dirty,” Bershada said, leaning sideways to peer at it through the magnifying glasses she wore well down her nose.

  “I think that’s called patina,” said Betsy in a dry voice.

  “Whatever. If it were mine, I’d give it a good scrubbing. I bet that stone is a nice color under the dirt—excuse me, patina.” She reached for it, hefted it—Doris could not quite suppress another gasp—and then put it down and scooted it along the table.

  Betsy tried lifting it with both hands. “It is pretty solid,” she said. The grubbiness, she noticed, was lighter on the high surfaces and darker inside the folds of the robe. Whoever carved this copy was careful to get the imitation patina right. She leaned it back to get a look at it and was struck by the expression on its face. “I like this,” she said. “He looks very serene.”

  “Didn’t Buddha invent serenity?” asked Bershada.

  “The Buddha,” corrected Alice before Doris could. “He had some other name. Buddha is like a title. He was born in India five hundred years before Christ and invented a religion that is all about rejecting concern over things of the world. ‘Wakeful serenity,’ they call it.”

  “How much is that little statue worth?” asked the reporter.

  “About two hundred dollars if you buy it in Bangkok, because it’s hand carved. It would cost about eight hundred here, wholesale.”

  “And whatever you can get at retail,” said Bershada.

  “That doesn’t seem like very much,” mused Betsy. “I mean, it does, until you think of all the trouble he took to get it here.”

  Doris shrugged. “It wasn’t that much trouble. Besides, he said it was for a repeat customer. He told me he wants to keep on the man’s good side.”

  Betsy nodded. She understood the value of the repeat customer. Still, she had to ask, “Weren’t you just a little suspicious about this request? I mean, being handed something in a foreign country to bring to the United States?”

  “Well, of course, at first!” said Doris, indignant at being thought a willing cat’s paw. “But I went to his office—his other office, where he has his export business. It’s on Silom Road—an important part of the city—though it seemed to be just one room, and half of it was taken up with boxes. He said the statue was to go to Fitzwilliam’s Antiques in St. Paul, which is an actual antiques shop—I looked it up on the Internet. I’ve already talked to Mr. Fitzwilliam on the phone. He asked me to hold it until Friday—he doesn’t want someone else to see it and want it—but he sounded happy and said his customer would be very pleased to hear the piece is here. So see? Nothing secret about it.”

  “And you didn’t get questioned about it at customs?” asked Alice.

  Doris grinned. “Let me tell you about that,” she said. “I bought another hat besides that fan one. It’s the kind peasant farmers use in the fields. It’s beautiful, but it also looks like a lampshade.” She bent sideways to reach into the grocery bag, which didn’t hold milk and bread after all, but a big stiff hat made of thin blades of rattan. It had a flat top and sides that bent ever more sharply outward into a broad rim about eighteen inches across. She turned it over to show her friends the underside. The rattan strips were supported on the inside with open work of much finer rattan, cleverly woven in small circles. But the interesting part was a beautiful cylinder about six inches across and six deep, woven of even finer rattan into open spirals. It was fastened to the crown of the hat with knots of thread and reached down almost level with the brim. “See,” said Doris, turning the hat over and putting it on, “this is the thing that touches your head, not the hat, so there’s always air moving over the top of your head. You get shade and a breeze at the same time.”

  The women nodded, smiling, and their smiles kept getting wider and wider until they turned to giggles.

  “I know, I know,” said Doris with a sigh, taking the hat off. “It looks ridiculous on me. I saw these tiny Asian faces peering out from under these hats and thought they looked adorable. So I bought a hat from a street vendor at a temple called Wat Pho. Our guide almost hurt himself trying not to laugh at me—and the sweet ladies behind the counter at my hotel didn’t even try.” She handed the hat to Emily. “Go ahead, you try it on.”

  Emily looked at the design on the inside, then obeyed and they all laughed at her, too. And Alice, and Betsy. Even Bershada, who could wear just about any hat, drew laughter.

  “See? It looks ridiculous on anyone but East Asians. Still, I liked it, so I brought it home. I had to carry it in my hand; it won’t fit in a suitcase. Then going through customs I wore it, since I had my hands full of luggage. The customs officer said, ‘What do you have to declare?’ I handed him my list in fear and trepidation—I was two hundred dollars over my limit and just knew I was going to spend the next hour opening suitcases and paying a lot of duty. But he looked at my jet-lagged face under that silly hat and said, ‘Go on through.’ So I don’t care if it looks ridiculous on me, it’s a wonderful hat, a lucky hat, and I say God bless it!”

  Two

  DORIS slept late on Friday morning, hitting the snooze button on her alarm clock over and over until she woke enough to remember her appointment in St. Paul. Jet lag was still with her, she supposed. She blundered her way around her small kitchen, burning the eggs, putting too many grounds in the little coffeemaker, settling for warm bread from the toaster when she realized how late it was getting.

  It had snowed lightly the night before, so morning traffic moved slowly. She was more than fifteen minutes late arriving at Exchange Street near the Xcel Energy Convention Center where Fitzwilliam’s Antiques Shoppe was located. The street, high above a curve in the Mississippi River, was lined with small, old stores in weathered brick. She had to park near the far end of the block, since all the other places were taken. She got out of her aged black car, coming around to the passenger side to get the box with the statue in it. The weather seemed especially cold after four weeks in Thailand, and the biting wind went right through her coat as she tucked the box under one arm while she pulled her knit hat down over her forehead with a mittened hand.

  The antiques store looked faded and shabby on the outside—its wooden framework was worn to the point where mere paint couldn’t fix it—but then Doris noticed that the gilt on the wooden letters across the façade was fresh and bright.

  The display windows looked like the work of a bipolar window dresser. In one were some old standard lamps whose torn shades were draped with sun-faded scarves. But in the other was a pair of very beautiful bowlegged arm chairs upholstered in green and silver damask. A cardboard sign in the glass of the door, black with Day-Glo red letters, announced that the store was open.

  An old-fashioned bell hanging on a curved metal spring announced her entrance. There was a smell of aged wood and vegetable soup. A man, tall and thin, with white hair and a close-cropped silver beard, appeared out of the back room. He wore a blue chambray shirt and tan slacks h
eld up with red suspenders.

  “May I help you?” he asked in a tentative voice, as if he thought she might be here by mistake.

  “I’m Doris Valentine, and I was asked to deliver this box to you,” she replied, holding it up.

  “Ah,” he said, looking more lively. He smiled and his blue eyes shone. “You’re here at last.”

  “I’m sorry to be late,” she said.

  “That’s quite all right, quite all right.” He might have been Katharine Hepburn’s brother by his accent. “Will you follow me?” He walked stiffly to a glass counter near the back, and Doris noticed when he turned on a goose-necked lamp that his finger joints were swollen. He reached under the counter and came up with a length of old pink velvet which he spread on the glass. “May I see what you have for me?”

  Doris handed over the box. He hesitated briefly when he saw that the tape had been broken and replaced, then picked at the new tape, pulled it off, and opened the box. He paused again when he saw the cream-colored hand towel, then carefully scooped the wrapped object out.

  “Did it come wrapped in this?”

  “No. It was wrapped in a piece of dirty cloth, which I threw away.”

  “Hmmm,” he said, frowning as he held it in one hand while gently lifting the folds of the towel. But he nodded when he saw the Buddha, and stood it up on the counter. “Who did you show this to?” he asked, but as he spoke he was looking at it, not her. His voice was quiet, but hard, as if he were angry and trying not to show it.