How to Pronounce Knife

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

  I do not remember much about the drive there except seeing a blue-and-red sign with the number 75 on it. We followed it for many days. I couldn’t see much out the window. I only saw black wires like underlines in the blue of the sky and then the dark and my own little face staring back at me.

  At the concert, we were so high up on the outer ring of the audience I could not tell if it really was Randy Travis onstage. His face was the size of a pin. I closed my left eye and measured him with my thumb and index finger from where we were. He wasn’t more than an inch between my two fingers. And I don’t know why, but I closed that space he took up until I couldn’t see him anymore. It was when he started to sing that I opened my other eye and realized it had to be Randy Travis on that stage. His voice matched exactly the one from our records. He did not move around much onstage. He mostly just stood there, strumming his guitar. He actually seemed shy, casting his eyes to the ground whenever the crowd rose to their feet with applause. He’d nod to acknowledge their praise, then begin another song. He did not look at anyone in particular. Didn’t single out anyone to sing to. He stared out into the crowd and the spotlight lit him with a glow I hadn’t seen before. He seemed to sparkle. Once in a while, he would wave in our direction and my mother would wave back. But we were just a black dot in the dark to him. I thought of what it must have cost my father to bring us to this concert. The hours he put in lifting and packing all that furniture into homes we could never own ourselves. Homes owned by the kind of people who could afford to sit closer to Randy Travis. From where we were sitting, the stage lights lit up their heads so they gleamed.

  After the concert, we waited with all the young teenage girls by the tour bus, but I was too small to see anything besides people’s backsides. I saw my father reach for my mother’s hand, but he missed. So he put both his hands in his pockets and looked to the ground, at his cowboy boots.

  When I think of it now, I’m not surprised that, a few years later, my mother would find something else to devote herself to. This time it was slot machines. She sat up close as those machines lit up her face and swallowed her hope coin by coin. I knew my mother was no stranger to hoping; it’s how we all ended up here in this country in the first place. She got in the habit of not coming home, sleeping in the car most nights in the parking lot of some casino, my father waiting up to see if she’d come home. It wasn’t long after that we were told she was found collapsed in the parking lot. People die sometimes, and there doesn’t have to be a reason why. That’s just the way life is.

  It seems wrong to say, but I felt relief for her then.

  Last month, it was my forty-second birthday. I went to visit my father in that old apartment. Everything was the same, except the view. There was a building now where there had once been a park. It had become a place where the light did not get in. My father took out his wallet, which was made of brown leather and frayed at the edges. It was packed with receipts, coins, and mints. He grabbed a bunch of twenty-dollar bills and held them out for me, but I waved the money away and said I didn’t need it. He asked me if I had eaten and when I said I hadn’t, he fried fish with grated ginger and brought out a plate of papaya salad and sticky rice. We didn’t say much to each other. We were eating. I got choked up at the first taste of the papaya salad. Fermented fish sauce is like a fingerprint—you could trace who it belonged to by how it was made. My father added crabs to his sauce, which was thick and dark, fermenting for years. That wasn’t how my mother made her sauce.

  After dinner, my father and I went into the living room to watch television. He came upon the country music channel and there was a Randy Travis special on. We watched a few of his music videos and then my father got up and turned on his karaoke machine. I was nervous for him, cringing at the memory of how he had sung all those years ago, when he didn’t know the lyrics or how to pronounce the words. Now, with the help of that machine, he knew what to do. I was the only one there, and I was sitting up close. The instruments started and a white dot hovered over the words. Then, he opened his mouth, and I was astonished.

  Mani Pedi

  The bright industrial lights hung in neat rows on the ceiling. Raymond was alone in the dressing room. It’s how you know you lost. He knew it would come to this. They only ever talked about winning and knockouts and the ways in which he didn’t measure up. But, in his mind, the joy of boxing was in the small details no one was there to see. He loved what it took to get here— the routine, the training, the discipline. And the buildup before the fight, the few moments after he finished wrapping up his hands and put on his gloves, his heart racing, and before he entered the ring and touched gloves. Before anything had been decided about him, when the possibility that he might win this one—just this one time—was a chance as good as any and all he had to do was step into that opening. Even when that didn’t happen, being in the ring still meant seeing a champion up close, becoming a small detail in his list of bouts. It meant he, Raymond, had been there.

  And it was hearing his sister’s voice in his corner that he loved the most. Raymond heard the excitement of the crowd, their chanting, screaming, and jeering. But no matter how loud they got, his sister’s voice always broke through. The way she would cuss out the other guy or the audience when they turned on Raymond. He came from nothing, and to stand up anyway and to try for something—well, if that wasn’t courage, he wasn’t sure what was.

  Raymond didn’t know what had happened out there in the ring—a flurry of jabs and punches, and then he was out. At the time, none of that hurt. The pain came afterwards, and matched the sadness he carried around in him, anchored in his body like an extra set of bones. He knew he would lose even before the fight began. Knew it for sure once he was in the ring and he couldn’t lift his arms or his head, couldn’t see his opponent’s face or understand what he was doing in the ring. He couldn’t think out there. Couldn’t move his feet fast enough, couldn’t move out of the way when a punch came. They landed in the middle of his face. Quick, hard, sudden. He was trained to see them coming, but he just stood there like some fool waiting for them. When he played back tapes of the fights his sister had recorded for him, he saw the punches in slow motion, how the impact rippled across his nose, his cheekbones, his hair. And when it was over, he could see nothing but black light, those little dots that peppered everything in his vision. He knew it was about time for him to be through with fighting. He had to get it out of his mind that he could ever be a champ. Truth was, he had become what they call a trial horse. He was just there for someone to punch, a body to pass through on the way to some victory belt. He said he’d quit if it ever got to be like that, and it got to be like that. This wasn’t the way he wanted to leave boxing, but it was over now, and he knew it.

  Raymond wasn’t the only person who’d ever lost the place he saw for himself in the world, but that’s not how it felt to him then. He lived in a mouldy, cold basement with just one window. When he first got the place, he thought he would be able to see sky once in a while, but the floor wasn’t down low enough so all he saw were shoes and boots and heels. Feet.

  Raymond’s sister did well for herself. She owned Bird Spa and Salon. The slogan was “Nails! Cheap! Cheap!” It was catchy. She wanted him to come work with her. She said he didn’t have to go to school or nothing. He just had to listen to what she told him to do. It would be just like it was in the ring. She’d yell at him like he was in the corner and he’d just go out and get it done.

  Instead, Raymond had gotten a job scooping out icecream flavours at the mall, and when that shift was over he started another one frying bland cabbage. He hadn’t seen his sister in weeks. Hadn’t called her or picked up the phone when she rang. But she wouldn’t have that, him not calling her back, so one night she came over, worried about what he was becoming, what he was doing with his life. She was real dramatic about it. She had a key to his apartment and kicked open the door and beat him on the chest, her small fists hitting him like water droplets in the shower. She told hi
m that even if he didn’t want better for himself, she did. She brought up their dead parents—she always did that when she was desperate to make a meaningful point. She said they didn’t leave Laos, a bombed-out country in a war no one ever heard of, “on a fucking raft made of bamboo to have you asking, ‘You want sprinkles with that?’” She slapped him across the face. “Raymond, what you cook at the mall, I can vomit up shit better than that!” So he agreed to join her at the nail salon just to get her to calm down. Not long after that, he was answering the phones and saying, “Hello, Bird and Spa Salon. We do nails. Cheap! Cheap!”

  At first he mopped the floor and refilled the bottles with nail polish remover, cuticle oil, or whatever was running low. He cut paper towels into neat little squares to save everyone time. He turned on the switch to keep the waxing oil hot. When all that got to be easy for him, his sister asked him to sit in and watch whenever the girls did manicures and pedicures or waxed an eyebrow or upper lip. It amazed him to see clients transformed. It was like what happened in the ring, but in reverse. They came in looking like they’d been through a few rounds, sad and exhausted, shoulders slumped, but left carefree and happy and refreshed. He thought of the injuries that happened to guys like him and what it did to the lives they had outside the ring—if you could even call it that. There was the guy who didn’t wake up from a fight until a year later, and the guy who never got back his confidence, stopped training, ate doughnuts all day, threw away his whole career. Then there was the one who died. Raymond thought of seeing only the black light and waiting for the little flickers to disappear. Waiting for the bell to ring so he knew they were into the next round. Boxing, the way he knew it, didn’t do the kind of good that he saw happen every day at the salon.

  When one of the girls who worked at the shop suddenly quit on his sister because of a bad cough that wasn’t going away, Raymond was given his own station. The first thing he did was put the plastic basket of supplies and lotions to the left of him. His sister didn’t like that. “What the fuck, Raymond. You going southpaw on me now. You a right-hand. All your supplies go on the right. Fuck! Maybe you shoulda thought of that when you were boxing. You know how fucking hard south-paws are to fight—they do everything backwards. It’s too late, isn’t it. To go southpaw now.”

  Raymond didn’t say anything. He just moved the basket to his right. He didn’t like arguing or talking back to his sister. She’d always taken care of things, and of him. She talked tough and was for real tough, but she had a good heart. It was possible to be both.

  His sister had him practise on a plastic hand. Thing was, it wasn’t attached to anything. It was severed at the wrist and stood straight up in the air like it was waiting to give you a high-five. The plastic hand could be moved around for a better angle to paint a heart or put on dots. His sister watched him without saying a word. When he was done, she picked up the plastic hand and waved it in his face and said, “But hands come with fucking bodies! You can’t be turning a client’s hand three hundred and sixty degrees to draw a fucking heart! And is that what this is supposed to be, Raymond—a fucking heart? Looks to me like a stinking blob of disgusting shit.”

  She plopped the plastic hand down onto the empty station behind her, clearing Raymond’s small surface area for him, and then held out her own hands. “Here,” she said. “Try on me.” For someone who did manicures all the time for other people, his sister sure didn’t have the best nails. They were too long and yellowed at the tips, and her skin was dry and flaking. “Watch your fucking face! I know what you’re thinking about these nails. If I paint them, the polish remover I use on clients will just fuck them up. And I ain’t going to use that gel shit on myself. It’s fucking expensive.” He had started to cut her nails when she added, “Talk to me like I’m a client. Go on. Ask about my day, the weather, say something nice about me, try to make conversation.” Raymond tried to think of what he could say, but before he could open his mouth his sister reassured him, “Don’t you worry too much about this part. Most of the time they won’t talk to you because they think you don’t know how to speak English, which is fine because it’s exhausting to make conversation. I don’t care about their kids or husbands or boyfriends or what the fuck they’re doing this weekend. If you don’t want to talk to a client because you’re tired or not interested, just turn to me and speak Lao. They’ll think we’re talking about them and that’ll shut them right the fuck up.”

  For cheap nails, Raymond thought, he had to do and remember so much.

  Raymond made a lot of mistakes on the job. He would forget to brush off the excess nail polish on the bottle’s mouth, so the polish went on too thick. He would check too soon to see if the paint was dry, pressing a finger on a client’s painted nail and leaving a fingerprint. He also didn’t leave enough room between the nail and the cuticle to draw out the shape of the nail. He had to start all over again each time, and what was supposed to be a twenty-minute job often took him an hour. But the clients his sister gave him were patient, and they didn’t say anything about the hearts he drew even though they did appear to be, like his sister said, blobs of shit. No one complained. When they left, his sister said, “You see that, Raymond? I woulda been cussed out if I did what you did. But you? It’s ‘Oh sweetie, take your time’ and ‘Don’t worry about it, honey. You’re doing fine.’” Whenever his sister pretended to speak in the voice of a client, it was high-pitched and annoying, and she’d stand with one hand on her waist and float her other arm around and swat at the air. He had to admit, it was fun to work with her. She always found a way to make him laugh.

  Over time, the work got easier. There was a pattern to the day and he just had to follow it. His sister liked to brag that Raymond was a boxer, and the clients seemed to like that this big, burly former fighter was handling their small hands. He thought some might be uncomfortable with a man handling them this way, but his sister told him the clients thought it was wonderful to be touched by that kind of muscle so gently.

  Raymond was good with the endless repetition and with assessing what needed to be done. It reminded him of sparring at the gym, having to think and act quickly, anticipate what was coming, and then respond. Every client wanted something different, but there were some basic things everyone needed. He removed polish, cut nails, applied cuticle oil, and pushed skin away from the nails to give them a clean look and shape. Some nails had no shape; they came out straight and flat on the nail bed and he had to round them with a file. He had to work the file at a forty-five-degree angle, deciding where the nail should begin to bend. It was very subtle, the bend. At first, he wore a mask over his nose and mouth and he wore gloves too, but he couldn’t get a proper grip and his clients couldn’t hear what he said. After a few days he stopped wearing them, exposing himself to those tiny shards of nail dust that now entered and scratched at his lungs.

  There were many nail polish colours. He couldn’t remember them all so he just told his clients to pick a colour once they walked through the door: Shrimp Sunday Orange, Funny Cool Purple, Double Personality Blue, Alter Ego Pink. The names and colours went all along and around the walls. Because it was so unusual to see a man doing nails, or simply because they enjoyed a good flirting, his clients gave him twenty- or thirty-dollar tips. They told him, “Why don’t you buy something nice for your little lady,” or “Go out and have yourself a little fun, why don’t you.” His sister, always one to notice things, said, “Fuck! I’m lucky if I get two or three dollars. It’s because you’re a fucking man, isn’t it? Even in a business I own myself and built up myself, men are still being paid more. And these are women who are doing this. They should know better!” And she’d look on angrily while he counted his tips, which often added up to more than what his sister charged for mani-pedis.

  If there was one thing that Raymond didn’t like about the job, it was toes. After only a few weeks of working on them, he got warts on his hands.

  His sister said, “Gross! I ain’t gonna let anyone see that nasty shi
t while you’re working on them! You better take time off. Plus, it might be contagious, I don’t fucking know. I told you to wear gloves!”

  He picked at a wart on his hand and winced.

  His sister said, “You ain’t gonna quit on me now because of this, are you? You know people come in just to see you. Never seen anything like that.”

  But it wasn’t the warts he was worried about. Warts were nothing compared to how bad things could get in boxing, with the bad headaches and black lights and mumbling nonsense or being dead. Warts went away eventually. That didn’t bother him. It was the smell of feet. It got into the pores of his nostrils and took root there, like a follicle of hair. It was becoming a part of him, the smell—like spoiled milk. He could never forget what he did for a living because it was always there. He was beginning to taste the smell of feet at the back of his throat. Soon he stopped enjoying food altogether, which made him lose weight, but his sister said this was a good thing since it meant more clients coming in to see him. She bought him tight-fitting black T-shirts and insisted he wear them at the shop. His muscles bulged out from the sleeves and the neck, the fabric clinging to him like an overstuffed sausage casing. His sister said, “Work it, Raymond. You don’t got to be shy about what you got. Tighten it up, flex. We need that for the shop. It can’t just be about the nails—anyone around here can do that.”