How to Pronounce Knife

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

  Raymond was sure the warts did not come from his female clients. Most women took care of themselves. Their toes were clean and groomed to begin with, after years of salon and spa visits. He blamed the men. It was the men who had never had a pedicure their whole lives and wore heavy socks and leather boots all year round. The men who had been too embarrassed to show their untreated toes to a female pedicurist. Now that there was a man working at the salon, they came to him. As a man, Raymond knew not to mention or acknowledge the mess, the years of neglect just because the feet had been out of sight. The layers of skin he had to slough off like cutting a pat of butter. His sister would say, “You know why the skin there is yellow? Well, the fucking guy pees in the shower! That’s why. Disgusting fucker!”

  Still, Raymond didn’t spend much time focusing on that part of the job.

  Raymond had a favourite client. Miss Emily. He didn’t have much to do when she came in. Her cuticles were already peeled back and her nail bed was long and thin and smooth. The skin on her hands and feet felt like a baby’s, plump and soft. She would always do him the courtesy of removing her nail polish before she came in so he could start right away on the filing and paraffin wax, and then lay down the three layers of polish. The first layer was to protect the nail from the polish, the second layer was the polish colour itself, and the last layer was to help protect the polish from chipping and to keep it shiny.

  At the start of each shift, Raymond would check the appointment log at the front desk, running his finger down all the names. When he saw that Miss Emily would be coming in, he would take a deep breath, as if some wonderful event was about to happen. He’d spend extra time polishing his tools and fluffing the chair’s pillow. He even went out to buy a few red roses to put in a vase at his station. And after Miss Emily left, he couldn’t stop smiling and asking the girl at the front desk when Miss Emily might come back to see him again.

  One day his sister said, “What, you think you got a chance with that Miss Emily there? She’s rich and educated. None of the things we are or are ever gonna be. Don’t you be dreaming big now, little brother. Keep your dreams small. The size of a grain of rice. And cook that shit up and swallow it every night, then shit that fucking thing out in the morning. It ain’t ever gonna happen. If there’s something I know in this life, it’s rich women. And that woman ain’t for you.” But even when his sister talked him down like that, Raymond just kept daydreaming about Miss Emily. When she didn’t come in, he painted and shaped all his clients’ nails like Miss Emily’s. Anyone could be her.

  Then one afternoon, while he was sweeping the floor by the glass door, he looked up and saw Miss Emily with a man. Raymond watched the two of them, standing close together, touching hands. He hadn’t seen anyone with her before. The man wore a three-piece suit and expensive shoes. The black leather had a polished shine to it, and where his toes bent there wasn’t a crease. Raymond put the broom away and sat down at his station to prepare. When Miss Emily came in and took the seat, the smell of this man’s cologne came in with her. It was not one of those drugstore scents. Raymond knew about those. He had tried them all. Although Raymond held Miss Emily’s hand over his small work station, he felt a wide space between them. Her smile was just polite, and nothing more. His sister had been watching him and she saw his face fall, the way it would fall in the ring when he knew he was losing.

  Later, Raymond’s sister drove him home. It was their routine, and the one moment of the day when they could be brother and sister—a family again. Raymond didn’t get out of the car right away. He didn’t want to go in to his apartment just yet. The sun was out and he wanted to feel it on his face.

  As they sat in the car outside his apartment, his sister lit up a cigarette and smoked with the windows rolled down. She shook her head. “Raymond. Didn’t I tell you. You’ve got to not have dreams. That woman ain’t ever gonna love a man who does nails. That’s not real life. You and me here, we live in the real world. You’re given a place and you just do your best in it. Fucking give it up. I hate when you get like this. Plenty of girls for you! They want to get with you all the time, but you don’t let yourself see it. Like the girls at the shop. They’re all wet for you.”

  Those girls were married or serious with someone. What his sister didn’t know was what they talked about behind her back when she went out for a smoke or to go get supplies. How they tried to get pregnant, but no babies ever caught on because of the chemicals from the salon. How their coughs started and didn’t ever stop. How they wanted to quit but had nowhere else to go.

  Raymond didn’t like to talk back to his sister, but this time he thought she was wrong to say what she did. “Well,” he said, “you know, maybe Miss Emily ain’t ever gonna be with a man like me, but I want to dream it anyway. It’s a nice feeling and I ain’t had one of those things to myself in a long time. I know I don’t got a chance in hell, but it’s something to get me through. It’s to get through the next hour, the next day. Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man like me ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.”

  Raymond’s sister didn’t say anything. She just stared straight ahead beyond the steering wheel. He knew his face resembled hers, but damaged—a dented nose, the left eyebrow split and made crooked by a scar. Although her face was treated to facials and creams and anti-wrinkle serums and was smooth and glowing, Raymond could tell she felt the way his face looked, beaten and busted. She didn’t want to recognize that face and see it hoping. Hope was a terrible thing for her—it meant it wasn’t there for you, whatever it was you were hoping for.

  After a moment, she went back to her cigarette. Every puff was a small grey cloud that disappeared like the dreams she was always telling him to keep small. Raymond dropped his head and gazed down at his palms, where the warts that would put him out of work for a few more weeks were coming in again.

  They sat there in silence, in the oncoming darkness, the car windows still open. They could hear a family in their backyard somewhere nearby, the sizzle on the barbecue, and the giggling—young and fragile and innocent. It was the kind of giggling they themselves did as kids. Now, that kind of giggle seemed foolish for them to do. It was like a far distant thing, a thing that happened only to other people. All they could do now was be close to it, and remain out of sight.

  Chick-A-Chee!

  Our building had five floors, and each one looked the same—two green doors on one side of a hallway facing two green doors on the other side. We didn’t know anyone else who lived in the building. We kept to ourselves and didn’t walk around on the other floors. There was no reason to—you only went to the door where you lived.

  My brother and I were often left at home alone after school, even though he was six and I was only seven. Dad worked at a factory putting wires into electrical cords, and if he didn’t reach his target numbers for the day, he’d sometimes have to work the night shift to get it done. Most of the time he worked twelve-hour days, taking his lunch break around four in the afternoon so he could pick us up from school and drop us off at home before going back to work. Mom couldn’t leave work to do anything like that because we only had one car and Dad drove it.

  Every time Dad left us to go back to work, he’d remind me to put the chain on the door and to keep quiet, and not to open the door for anyone, not even if they said they were a friend. He had me go over the places in the apartment where we could hide if we got scared: under the bed, in the bathtub behind the shower curtain, in the shoe closet.

  If we were ever in trouble, Dad said, we were not to go to the neighbours for help, or to call 9-1-1. He said it would be like calling the cops on him—he would be the one who’d get in trouble for leaving us alone and unsupervised. Whatever trouble we were in, we would have to handle it ourselves, he said. Then he’d point to where he kept a small red axe with a wooden handle hidden behind the radiator.

  The first time he put the axe in my hand, the handle was surprisingly light. Dad said, “Now, you only
get one chance, so go for the neck or the face. Right here”—he pointed to the left side of his neck—“is where you should aim for.” I lifted the axe up high, but Dad chuckled and said the blade was turned the other way. He came over and showed me how the sharp end is the part that does the damage. I raised the axe over my head again and then brought it down in a single chop. This time, Dad laughed as though he was just watching me throw a rubber ball— a laugh that said it was cute, what I was doing. When he saw how nervous I was, he said, “Ah, don’t worry. I’ve done worse things than this at your age. Younger even, maybe.” Dad reassured me that I’d probably never have to use the axe, but it was important for me to know I could.

  But all I could think of was the time when, late at night, someone came to our door and banged on it loudly, yelling, “Open the door! I’ve got a knife!” Me and my brother stood by the door, terrified, and thought of the places we could go hide while Dad went to peer through the peephole. When the banging wouldn’t stop, we held on to our father, each grabbing fistfuls of his shirt. I was so relieved we weren’t alone, and that it was a Sunday and Dad wasn’t working an extra shift at the factory but was home with us. Dad looked down at the both of us and brought a finger up to his lips so we wouldn’t say anything. Then he whispered that he had been thinking of opening the door but changed his mind after the man said he had a knife. “That’s no way to ask anyone for help!” Dad laughed and slapped his knee, and my brother and I laughed too, but quietly, so that the man on the other side of the door wouldn’t hear us.

  The next morning, as we left for school, I noticed there was a smear of blood on our door.

  Most Saturdays, dad drove us all out to a neighbourhood we wished we could live in, with wide, tree-lined roads and big Victorian homes. It was something we did on our way to Chinatown to buy groceries. We would drive slowly down the street, pick which house we wanted to live in, and point to the window where we wanted our bedrooms to be. My parents and my brother always chose the large, sprawling houses, but I paid attention to the things people left outside. Sometimes there were hockey sticks, unmarked goalie pads, and a net left out in the driveway, or a pink bike abandoned on the front lawn. It seemed to me no one here was ever afraid someone would take their stuff if they could just leave it all lying out in the open like that, not put away or locked up with a chain.

  One time, I noticed that every house on that street had raw pumpkins on their front steps—either a giant one or a cluster of little ones. There were faces carved into most of them: triangle eyes, a circle for the nose, and a mouth with one or two teeth hanging from inside a wide smile. A few of them had the seeds pulled out and arranged around the pumpkin’s mouth as if it were throwing up. At school, we had painted orange circles or cut them out of orange cardboard paper and glued googly eyes on them.

  I leaned forward from the back seat and asked Dad, “How come people here love pumpkins so much?” and he said, “Humph. Seems like a waste of food to me.” After we looked at all those pumpkins, Dad said to Mom, “No one would put poison or sharp blades in their candy in a neighbourhood like this, would they.” Then he turned back to us and yelled, “I’ve got a knife! Open the door!” And me and my brother screamed like we were scared, but we were not at all.

  After that, in October of every year until my brother turned nine, our parents always took us out to “Chick-A-Chee.”

  The first time we went, my brother put a white bedsheet over his head, with holes cut out for his eyes and for his arms. Dad didn’t have much time to make him anything. He had spent weeks making me a tight-fitting long-sleeved black shirt and matching pants with glow-in-the-dark fabric bones sewn on in the front. In the dark, you wouldn’t see me at all. You would just see a skeleton walking across the room. It made my brother squeal with excitement, knowing that someday soon this outfit would be passed on to him like everything else I’d ever had.

  It was unusual to see Dad come home from work so early. I didn’t understand why, and worried he’d lost his job. It was something he always told us, that he had to work long hours or he wouldn’t have a job at all. But then he told us to put our costumes on and he drove us out to that neighbourhood we wanted to live in, even though we weren’t buying groceries. Dad parked the car and told us we were to walk from house to house dressed like this, then yell “Chick-A-Chee!” at the person who answered the door and hold out our open pillowcases for them to fill with all kinds of candies. I did not believe him. I was certain then that he really had lost his job and what we were doing was part of his plan to send us away, something our parents often threatened when we were misbehaving or we wanted something they didn’t have the money for. I wanted to cry, but I saw how my brother was looking at me—like he needed me to be brave for the both of us.

  Dad got out of the car and tilted the seat forward so my brother and I could get out. He took us both by the hand and led us to the first house. It was huge, the windows as large as doors, and I wondered who lived here. As my brother and I climbed up the front steps alone, we turned around to make sure Dad was still there. He was standing by the curb, hands in his pockets, only pulling them out to puff warm air into them. He was dressed in a light jacket and jeans, his idea of looking good. A warm coat and mittens would cramp his style. When he noticed us still standing on the steps, just looking at him, he encouraged us to go on, lifting both arms and sweeping the air in front of him, reminding us, “Say Chick-A-Chee!”

  When we got to the door, we stood there trying to find the doorbell like Dad had told us to do. “That’s how you know it’s a nice house,” he had said. “It’s so big, no one inside would hear a knock at the front door, so you have to push a button to ring a bell.”

  My brother tapped my arm and pointed to the button on the right side of the door. It turned out that neither of us could reach it. I lifted my brother up and he pressed the doorbell once, and again, and then I let him down softly. A light came on and a woman with brown, shoulder-length hair and blunt bangs opened the door. She wore glasses and had a friendly smile. She said, “Well, now, you are a ghost … and you are … oh my! Look at that costume! Now, isn’t that a sight! Where did you get that? Did your mother make it?”

  I was too nervous to answer her, so I whispered, “Chick-A-Chee.”

  “Oh, Harold, come out here! These children are just so adorable! Harooooold! Get out here!”

  Harold came to the door, shuffling his fluffy slippers along the floor.

  “Chick-A-Chee,” I said again softly.

  Harold gave a laugh and said, “Elaaaaine! That is so adoooorable! Give the kids a little extra, won’t you?” And he reached for a large glass bowl from somewhere behind the door and dropped two bags of potato chips in each pillowcase.

  As soon as the treats were in our pillowcases, we both shouted, “Chick-A-Chee!” and ran away from the house, giggling like we’d gotten away with something we never thought we could have. We ran to Dad, who was still standing by the curb, and showed him the potato chip bags at the bottom of the pillowcases.

  “See! I told you,” he said. “Just say Chick-A-Chee!”

  And all through the night, we went from door to door yelling “Chick-A-Chee!” until our pillowcases were so heavy we couldn’t carry them anymore. There were other children in the neighbourhood dressed up as princesses, pumpkins, witches, and baseball players. We didn’t know any of them. Sometimes, we would end up on the same front porch with a group of them, and we would hold out our pillowcases and they would hold out plastic pumpkins with handles. When my brother and I said, “Chick-A-Chee!” the people behind the door always told us to come closer so they could give us more candy.

  When we got home, Dad and Mom emptied the pillowcases and sorted the candy. We couldn’t have anything homemade, or any loosely wrapped or already-opened things.

  At school the next day, my brother and I took out our candies at lunch and displayed them on a table like we were street vendors, telling our friends we went Chick-A-Chee where the houses
were gigantic. Our friends had kept to their buildings or to the houses next door or hadn’t gone out at all, so they had only little gum balls or one or two tiny chocolate bars. We had bags and bags of chips, whole chocolate bars, and packs of gum—and there was more waiting for us at home.

  The lunch woman on duty leaned through the crowd around us and said, “Don’t you mean you went trick-or-treating?”

  We shook our heads. The woman did not know what she was talking about. I looked up at her big, round, intrusive face and said, “No, Missus Furman. We went Chick-A-Chee!”

  The Universe Would Be So Cruel

  Mr. Vong stretched his neck to peer over the heads of the wedding guests, trying to get a good view of the bride and groom. When he spotted them, he turned to his wife and daughter and made a bold prediction: “Ah, don’t they look lovely. Too bad it isn’t going to last.”

  Mr. Vong had been invited not because he was a relative or because he was a friend of the family. The young couple had turned to him because he was the only printer in town who offered Lao lettering on wedding invitations. He was highly sought-after for his Lao fonts, his eloquence with the language, his knowledge of how little things can shape big outcomes. Sure, his clients could download the fonts themselves and print them out at Kinko’s, but that kind of lazy effort might signify a lazy marriage, one where their bond might break at the first sign of trouble.

  Mr. Vong printed other things at his shop besides wedding invitations. He didn’t make much money. Most of his clients were the ones the bigger printers didn’t want to deal with—men and women who worked for themselves, who didn’t buy in bulk, who didn’t have time to be on the Internet, and who didn’t speak English (through hand signals and sounds, Mr. Vong found a way to communicate with them). He liked these clients best. The farmers with dirt under their fingernails from working out on the fields all day, the butchers who didn’t have time to change out of clothes stained with blood, the seamstresses who only had twenty minutes before they had to get back to work. They reminded him of himself—all of them doing the grunt work of the world.