The next morning, I stood on the front porch of a house on a small street, and Richard went inside to get Eve. She was at the back of the house, where the kitchen was. She called to me to come inside, waved me in. She had long, shiny black hair and brown eyes. She said her boyfriend was upstairs taking a shower and that he’d join us in a few minutes. Richard talked to Eve, asked her about this new man of hers, teased her about him, about being in love.
Then Richard said, “Well, I’m in love,” and pointed to me. “With her.” We laughed, Richard and I, as if this was our joke and Eve was outside it. You can do that with a joke, hide how you feel and mean what you say at the same time, and no one will ask you which it is.
Eve’s boyfriend, Daniel, came down the stairs in plain khaki shorts and a white T-shirt that clung to his chest. “Hey, guys, how is everyone?” Richard answered for himself. I didn’t reply, and it didn’t seem to matter. They moved on.
For the rest of the morning, we played board games and charades. Eve and Richard had a way of talking with each other that made it difficult to join in. They made references and jokes and told stories about each other in bits and pieces that never came together because they’d break out in laughter. They never bothered to explain what any of this was about, always saying we would have had to be there to get it. I had been around. I knew what was happening. Richard was oblivious to what Eve was doing with him. Playing the two men off each other.
I got up and went out to the front porch. It was only three in the afternoon. I thought of going home, and then Daniel came out for a smoke. He lit his cigarette and we watched the trees around us. The leaves were far apart and they waved, darted left and right. Pushed by the wind, they looked like a school of fish in the blue sky. A thing out of place. We did not know what to say to each other. We were there at the same time, wanting the same thing but from different people. If there were anyone else who understood what it was like to be on the outside looking in on those two, it was Daniel.
After a while, he said to me, “You ever seen a tornado before?” I told him I hadn’t. He nodded and went on, “They destroy everything. You can see it coming in the distance. Most people would try to get the hell out of there. Some people see it coming and can’t help but watch.” I didn’t say anything. And then he winked at me.
Afterwards, Richard thought it would be a great idea to bike around the city. Eve and Daniel didn’t want to go, so it was just the two of us again. We arranged our bodies on the bike like we had done once before, me on the bar in front of the seat while he pedalled. We went around like this, without helmets. I wasn’t scared of getting into an accident. That’s what it felt like then, to be with Richard. I didn’t think about what would happen to me, what the future would look like. I was in it.
Richard biked past the crowd at the ferry dock, and we followed the trail out of the city until we got to the lake. We weren’t supposed to swim in it because the water was polluted, but he did, saying there was nothing wrong. He swam far out but close enough for me to see him pretend he was drowning. His arms waved about and his head bobbed. Then he swam out farther and did it all over again.
When we returned to his apartment, he told me his friendship with Eve was changing. She was getting on with her life, without him. She didn’t drop everything to see him anymore. “I should marry her,” he said. “I love her and I don’t want to lose her.” I did not tell him what to do about her. I did not ask what it would mean for me.
He took off his clothes, then mine. The afternoon had changed him somehow. He had always been very tender with me but was even more so now. He lay himself down on the bed and closed his eyes. I took him in. I did it slowly. “Yes,” he said. I wanted to put something inside him that we could both see go in and out. I put a finger into his belly button, and he got so loud about it, like the women I heard him with through the wall of the apartment. I was quiet, breathing, taking everything in. Then he gasped like something was about to happen to him. He sat up and pulled me closer. He kissed me very hard and did not pull away. We continued like that, face to face. I love you, he kept saying.
He asked me to sleep over, but I didn’t want to. I watched him with a sadness he couldn’t see. I didn’t want to be with someone who could do that—who could deny what I was. He had the time to have regrets, to be stupid. I didn’t. And when he turned away from me, I don’t know why I did what I did. I reached out and grabbed a piece from inside the anatomy man. It was his stomach. A small plastic thing. It wasn’t real, of course, but it was there, and it was something.
I went home and was surprised to find Rose there. She asked me where I had been, said she knew that I was spending a lot of time with that guy next door. She said, “He’s never going to love you, you know. Have you forgotten how old you are? Look at all your wrinkles.” That’s the thing about being old. We don’t know we have wrinkles until we see them. Old is a thing that happens on the outside. A thing other people see about us. I didn’t know why she was talking to me this way. Maybe it had nothing, really, to do with me. I didn’t say anything. It seemed to me she’d been drinking, so I let her talk. After a while, I didn’t hear anything she said.
I did see Richard one last time, later that year, in October. It was at Daniel’s funeral. Richard was there, with Eve, supporting her, holding her, like a partner. It seemed strange to me to see him go back to her. And it seemed strange to me for us to have done the things people who loved each other did, and for it to seem now like none of it had ever happened. But it was not just him. What kind of person was Eve, to see someone else’s love and agree to see it wasn’t there. But after a while, it didn’t matter.
I looked over at the closed casket and thought of what I’d read in the newspaper about Daniel, how he died. He was a strong swimmer, in excellent shape, but it had been very cold, and he must have gotten a cramp, and drowned. I thought of him and his whole life, how short it was. Forty. That isn’t much time. I was there with him when he loved someone, and he was willing to wait it out. I wondered whether, in life, you get one big role, some message you need to deliver to someone, and when it’s done, it’s time to go. I thought of what Daniel had said about tornadoes. He was wrong about me. We weren’t the same. I did not wait. I am not the kind of person who watches something happen in the distance.
Daniel’s family and friends stood up and told stories about him. I did not tell mine. It was for no one to know, and I left. I looked back at the black everyone was wearing. I could not tell which figure in the crowd was Richard. I was beginning to forget his face.
Once, when I was was walking down the street in front of my old building, Richard called out to me. I must have been closing in on eighty then. I looked through him and spun around. I wanted to be in the distance, beautiful and dark, spinning all by myself, in the clear. I didn’t want him to come close. Nothing, not even the call of my name, could make me stop.
Randy Travis
The only thing my mother liked about the new country we were living in was its music. We had been given a small radio as part of the welcome package from the refugee settlement program. There were other items in the box, such as snow pants, mittens, and new underwear, but it was the radio she cherished most. A metal box with a dial that picked up a few channels. The volume button had only three ticks, and then it couldn’t go any farther to the right. She held this little radio up to her ear like a seashell and listened. The host always spoke briefly between songs and there was the occasional laugh. A laugh, in any language, was a laugh. His laugh was gentle and private and welcoming. You got the sense that he, too, was alone somewhere. Grateful for the sound of a human voice and for the music that kept her company, she listened to the radio constantly while I was at school and my father was at work.
My mother especially loved American country music, because it reminded her of the way the women in her family talked among themselves. It felt familiar. The pleas, the gossip, the dreams of the big city, what it was like to come from a place no one h
ad ever heard of. The songs always told a story you could follow—ones about heartbreak, or about love, how someone can promise to love you forever and ever and ever, Amen. My mother did not know what Amen meant, but she guessed it was something you said at the end of a sentence to let people know the sentence was finished. “Three apples, Amen,” she would say at the corner grocery store. Because of this, our neighbours thought my mother was religious, and even though our family was Buddhist, she caught a ride to church with them every Sunday. She made friends easily, was quick to smile, and was never shy about practising her English.
At church, she told us they ate one cracker and took one swallow of red wine and the rest of the time there was a man talking. She did not know exactly what he said, but he said it for a long time. Sometimes, just to give her hands something to do, she would pick up the heavy book in front of her seat and open it. Even though she didn’t understand everything they were singing, she moved her lips anyway. It was just like at the citizenship ceremony. Whether or not you understood the oath you made, you had to move your lips.
After a while, for some reason she seemed to lose interest in going. She didn’t say why.
When my father got his first paycheque, he wanted to buy something that wasn’t a necessity. We were living in a new country now. We could have grand ideas of owning something luxurious. My mother suggested a car so he wouldn’t have to take a bus to work, but that was out of our price range. They thought of going to a fancy restaurant like the ones their friends took them to, but they did not like the way the steaks were cooked, thick slabs fried in butter. There was no fish sauce with hot spices and herbs at the table. They talked about getting a wooden bed frame to put their mattress on, but beds were for sleeping on, not for show. There were many things my father could have bought with his first paycheque, but in the end he decided on a record player. In Laos, it was something only rich people owned.
My mother loved the control the record player gave her. With the radio, she had to wait for what she wanted to hear. It could be days before she heard her favourite song again. Now she could drop the needle onto the black disc and watch it turn and turn, and listen to her favourite songs whenever she wanted. She never went back to the radio after that.
Later, once we could afford a TV and a VCR, she taped the country music award shows. After the nominations were read, she’d yell out her pick for the winner. If she got any wrong, she would memorize the winners in each category and replay the show and yell out the correct names. Whenever Dolly Parton was nominated, she chose her, and she was right every time. She’d yell, “I won!” I didn’t understand why she did that. What she’d won was nothing but being right.
The songs my mother loved most were by Randy Travis. Whenever we saw a new Randy Travis music video on television, she would quickly hit the Record button, and everything else slipped from her mind. She would kneel with her face close to the screen, then reach over and hit Rewind and Play, watch him sing again and again. After a while, the labels on the buttons began to fade and disappear.
By then, she didn’t care much for the things she usually did around the house. The laundry would be done but the clothes remained unfolded, dishes washed but not dried or put away. Then, she discovered frozen dinners. You could warm them up in minutes. And these dinners were my favourite for a time. It was what all my friends ate at home. I loved having mashed potatoes and corn and steak and roast chicken. My father did not. He wanted papaya salad, padaek, pickled cabbage, blood sausage, and sticky rice. But those dishes took days to prepare and getting the ingredients meant long bus rides to the market in Chinatown. It took time to ferment fish sauce, to pickle, to chop up a whole chicken into its parts, and to soak the rice to soften it. Time that my mother wanted to spend listening to Randy Travis sing.
My father was nothing like Randy Travis. No one noticed who he was or what he did for his living. He never used the word love or showed much sentiment. For my mother’s birthday, he gave her a few twenty-dollar bills. Not even a birthday card or plans for a night out. He thought that because he was there, that was all that was needed to show his love. He thought his silence was love, his restraint was love. To say it out loud, to display it so openly, was to be shameless. He thought it was ridiculous to be moaning about love so much. What kind of man was Randy Travis, with his health, his looks, his fame, and his money, that he should ever have anything to cry about?
One morning, my mother gave me some money to buy one of those teen Bop magazines so we could find a mailing address for Randy Travis at the back of it. She brought out a card printed with a pink heart on the front, but because she couldn’t read or write English, she told me to write a note to him for her. I did not know what to write. I must have been about seven. What could I know then about the language of adult love? While she curled a few strands of her hair around a finger and broke out in small fits of giggles, I stood there, unable to decide how to even begin a sentence to him. I didn’t like how she was acting, and I was afraid of what would happen to my father if Randy Travis ever wrote back.
So I wrote, I do not like you.
My mother would never know what I had written.
I told her I’d written I love you forever and ever, just like his song.
She smiled, and then signed her name underneath.
We sent these cards to Randy Travis again and again, and though no one ever wrote back, my mother insisted we keep on sending them. I tried to think of what to write and thought of the things people wrote in the bathroom at school or spray-painted on the brick outside our building. You’re ugly. Go back home. Loser. Sometimes I didn’t even get the chance to write anything before she signed her name on the card, sealed it inside an envelope, and pushed it down into the dark slot of the mailbox at the corner of our street. We must have sent out hundreds of these cards, spending money on stamps and envelopes, my mother always hoping to get something back. It wasn’t any different than what she had done to come to this country, she said.
Of course I told my father about what we were doing, thinking he could put a stop to her obsession. It was getting out of hand. By then I’d refused to help her anymore, saying I had homework, thinking this would stop the letters, but she kept mailing them on her own with just her name inside. I showed one of the cards to my father. He pointed to her signature. It looked like pretzels, loopy and knotted, and he laughed and said to my mother, “Randy Travis reads English. He’s gonna look at your name and see a doodle. That address you got, who knows what they really do there. For all we know, the cards probably go straight to the dump.”
But my mother continued to send those cards with her name written out in Lao. Randy Travis was all she could think of and talk about. When the pipe in the kitchen sink clogged and my father didn’t know how to fix it, my mother said, “Oh, I bet Randy Travis knows how to do that.” And then there was the time she said out loud over dinner, “I bet Randy Travis would like to have dinner with me.” She’d stare outside the window at the sky, the moon, the sun, or a cloud and say, “Randy Travis could be looking at the very same thing I’m looking at right now. Wherever he is.”
It was inevitable that my father got tired of hearing about Randy Travis, and he finally said to her, sadly, that the man was famous and that our lives would never cross his. “He doesn’t even know we exist. We’re not even a single glitter of light to him,” he said. Then he brought his hand to his face, formed a circle around his eye with his fingers, and closed the space inside until there was nothing left except a tight fist. But you could not talk her out of her Randy Travis love. It was a shadow that covered her up, and all you could do was wait for some light to come through. She even started dressing up like Dolly Parton, thinking this was the kind of woman he’d want. She dyed her hair blond, teased its strands, and tied it in an upsweep. She played his music and sat by the window, waiting and gazing out onto the street below, as if he was going to drive up and take her away.
Hoping for some of this Randy Travis lov
e to brush off on him, my father started wearing these cowboy boots my mother got for him at a garage sale. Pretty soon, he was wearing jeans and flannel tops, and standing like Randy Travis. He’d hook a thumb into the belt loop of his jeans and stand there with one leg straight and the other loose at the knee so it jutted forward. It made my mother happy to see him change in this way. But then when my mother asked him to sing, he failed spectacularly.
He did not know how to pronounce the words.
Her broad and hopeful smile vanished from her face, but my father only tried harder, belting out the chorus louder, holding on to the vowels, trying to produce a southern twang. He was no star. He was no leading man. He packed store furniture into cardboard boxes for a living. No one would pay to see him sing, but he didn’t care. He was only trying to be what my mother wanted.
One day, my father told me we were going to a Randy Travis concert. He said, “It’s what your mother wants. We have to do this for her.” He rented a car and we drove down south. In those days, there was no such thing as buying things online. You had to walk up to a concert venue and buy a ticket right there at the box office.
My mother was so thrilled, she made the kinds of food my father liked to eat. She spent the three days before we set out soaking sticky rice, and when it was done cooking, she put it in a thip khao and bundled that in a blanket so it would keep its warmth. She made papaya salad and crushed tiny dry shrimps into it, and fried up two quails and wrapped them up in aluminum foil. I hadn’t noticed how beautiful Lao food was before. After the bland yellows and browns of those TV dinners, it felt like a homecoming. Arranged together, the colours were so bold and bright, the flavours popped and sharpened. Every meal tasted like a special occasion. It was a reminder of where she came from and her love. I could now see why my father insisted on eating nothing but this.
How to Pronounce Knife Page 3
