Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  Daw and Hom had moved out of the harbor slum and into one of the plywood spaces with the first paycheck Hom earned in her new job. She was working for a company that laundered and dry-cleaned the clothes that belonged to the guests of the most expensive hotels in the city. The first time she emptied one of the big drawstring bags onto the table, she’d been dazzled. These were the kind of clothes she had seen on television, the kind of clothes the Queen might have in her closets. Fairy-tale clothes, movie star clothes. Beautiful as they were, her first revelation, as she sorted the garments into piles, as she’d been told to, was that the rich and beautiful perspired, too; and that, under the perfume, their sweat smelled pretty much like hers.

  That first morning she was worrying about Miaow, from whom she had never been separated, when a supervisor snatched a garment out of her hand and slapped her, bringing her present in a neck-snapping instant that had her blinking tears from her eyes. In the supervisor’s other hand was the item of clothing she had seized—a silk dress, light as a cobweb. Hom had been in the act of putting it into the wrong bag, the bag that would send it to the laundry rather than the dry cleaner.

  “Did you ask me?” the supervisor demanded. “What was the rule?”

  Hom had a hand pressed to her burning cheek. “Ask about anything that I’m not sure should be dry cleaned.”

  “You would have to work for two or three weeks to pay for this,” the supervisor said. “And the moment you paid it off you would have been fired. I would have already been fired for letting you make the mistake. Take your hand away, I didn’t hit you that hard. What were you thinking about?”

  “My baby.”

  “This job is for your baby,” the supervisor said. “If you put him with one of the women the other mothers here use, he’ll be fine.”

  “She,” Hom said.

  “Really.” The supervisor cocked her head and regarded Hom. “Does she look like you?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Must be very pretty.”

  She felt herself blush. “I think so.”

  “Well, you’re taking care of her now by working here. You’re going to give her a better life. So keep your eyes open, pay attention.” She glanced around the room, which had a dozen women in it, each sitting alone and silent at a huge table, sorting clothes. “Listen,” she said in a low voice, “the way you look . . . well, I could put you someplace where you’d make a lot more money.”

  “No, thank you,” Hom said instantly.

  “More in a night than you’d earn in two or three weeks here.”

  “No, thank you.”

  The supervisor straightened, brushed her white cotton apron with both hands, and did another quick survey of the room. “Well, keep it in mind.”

  That night, when Daw asked her about her first day of work, she didn’t tell him about the supervisor’s suggestion.

  By her eighth month on the job she had been given a small raise and she and Daw were in their fourth room in the nonexistent hotel, one on the side of the building that did not face the street, up on the third floor. They’d been waiting for that room because Hom had made friends with the family that had it when they moved in, and the man had been able to pry the windows free and set them on metal runners that allowed him to slide them up and down. He’d also tacked porous black cloth over the inside of the windows. They could be opened only at night when candles or lanterns were not lighted. But to Hom the darkness felt like a small price to pay. The movement of relatively fresh, relatively cool night air felt like a great luxury, and the sound of rain was pure music. The rain and Miaow were the things that made her happiest.

  Daw couldn’t find, or keep, a steady job. He had worked construction for a few weeks at a time, being fired—he said—on payday, sent away with only part of what he’d been promised and warned that he’d be beaten half to death and charged with stealing if he ever came back. Hom had asked the women at work if they’d ever heard of such a thing, and some of them said yes, that it was one way the contractors made extra money: hiring new workers, underpaying them, and then letting them go and pocketing the rest of their salary.

  When she heard that, she felt a wash of shame at having doubted Daw—because she had—and a wave of sympathy at how humiliating it must feel to be cheated, to be treated like someone so low he could be stolen from with impunity. Back in his village, he had been someone. Here, he was just another country boy who could be exploited by anyone with a solid job and a few thousand baht.

  But. He was getting money from somewhere, she knew that. He was drinking; she smelled it on him most nights, and once or twice a week he came home too drunk even to pretend. She herself didn’t drink, but she wasn’t unworldly enough to think alcohol was free. She hated the drinking, in part because it meant he was hiding money from her, but also because it frightened her. She kept quiet and watched him out of the corners of her eyes on those nights; the room was small and his mood was unpredictable. Nor was she the only one to sense that something was wrong. Miaow was becoming, Hom thought, an extremely attentive child, usually quiet but constantly aware of where everyone was in the room, especially her father. When she wasn’t beside Hom—Daw often didn’t want Miaow on the thin mattress they shared—Miaow always managed to turn herself so she was facing her father, like a more fearful version of one of those flowers that keeps its face to the sun all day long.

  When Daw was drunk, Miaow sometimes whimpered, a high, wispy little sound like a dog might make if she’d been locked in an empty room. She only stopped when Hom picked her up, and sometimes not until they’d left the room so they could go back and forth in the dim corridor. She usually fell asleep when Hom took her out there.

  But at least she didn’t worry about the baby in the daytime. At seven-thirty every morning she dropped Miaow off at the house of a woman who called herself Sonya—not a Thai name, although she was Thai—and picked her up a little after seven at night. Sonya was a tall, too-thin woman with hair dyed a violent red who seemed to be constantly in motion, almost unnaturally energetic. Hom had been uncertain about her at first, but she was obviously good with the six or seven babies she always seemed to have on hand. She lived in a big one-room apartment that she’d made over as a sort of baby park with soft carpet and foam-rubber pads everywhere, and plush toys and rattles scattered here and there. She kept the floor very clean and she was always moving the toys as far as possible from the children. “Make them crawl,” Sonya said. “If I don’t keep them moving, if they’re asleep all day, they’ll keep their parents awake all night.” Hom felt welcome at Sonya’s, often more than she did in their room in the not-hotel. She took to leaving Daw snoring in the room while the night sky was just going pale so she could arrive at Sonya’s an hour or so early and the two of them could talk, joined sometimes by other young women, village girls, most of them, whose children also needed looking after and who apparently didn’t yet know many people in Bangkok. One morning, about a week after Hom started dropping Miaow off early, Sonya asked if Hom would like her to speak to the baby in English some of the time.

  “You speak English?” Hom asked.

  “Little bit,” Sonya said, in English. “Have American boyfriend before.”

  Hom’s English was sparse, but “American” and “boyfriend” were within her zone. Sonya suddenly seemed more worldly, even a little more glamorous. She wasn’t skinny, Hom thought, she was slender. She decided not to think about how and where Sonya had met her American. “I’d love that,” she said. “It will make her smarter. Will it cost me extra?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you this,” Sonya said, “but I’d take care of Miaow for free. She’s the best baby of them all. No, it won’t cost you anything.”

  Warm with pride, Hom said, “Do you do this for all the babies?”

  “No. Right now, only Miaow.” Sonya put a hand on Hom’s forearm and leaned toward her, a gesture that had something confi
dential in it, a gesture that reminded Hom of her village friends. “Let me tell you something. My mother, who’s dead now, could sometimes see the future. Not always, not whenever she wanted to, but sometimes. When I was eight she told me that I would be with a farang man and that he would make me unhappy but he would not be a bad man. All that happened.”

  “And you can do this, too? See these things?”

  “Not like my mother could. I get pictures sometimes, just when I wake up in the morning. It’s like I can see an album full of photographs before they’ve been taken. Sometimes I hear things, too. Voices. I heard my American boyfriend telling me he had died in America more than a week before someone said it was true.”

  Hom said, “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it was long after we broke up. But he was a good man, I wasn’t surprised that he’d come to tell me.”

  “And you can see something for Miaow?”

  “Mostly hearing. When I look at her, sometimes I hear English, like there might be someone important in her life who speaks English. My English is not good enough to teach her, really teach her, not even good enough to understand everything that I hear being said to her. I just think it would be good for me to say English words to her sometimes. Hello, how are you, you are very pretty baby. That’s all.”

  Her heart suddenly feeling twice its normal size, Hom said, “I think it would be wonderful. Maybe someday she’ll go to America.”

  She worked hard, she paid attention, and she did well at the job. After a few months, the supervisor, once so brusque, smiled at her every morning and said, “Hello, Phuhỵing thi na rạk” or “pretty one.” Several times she asked Hom to work beside some terrified new girl, usually just down from the country, for her first day or two at the sorting tables, to help her get used to things. The girls she helped thought of her as a friend. For most of them, Hom was the first person in Bangkok who had been nice to them, who had extended a hand in any way. In the three brief break periods they were given each day, these women sat with her. They shared their food and their stories. Other women, women who had been there longer, heard the laughter and the babble of talk, saw the food changing hands, and began to join them. Even the supervisor sat with them occasionally, offering motherly advice from a chair that seemed to be a foot higher than theirs even though it was exactly the same size. Among the newcomers, Hom felt like a worldly-wise Bangkok veteran who knew how things worked. Among the older women, she still mostly listened, taking in the things they said, laughing at their jokes, and storing away whatever seemed to be useful. Several times each week, four or five of the women would go for a quick, cheap meal at the end of the day, and Hom was surprised to find that they always invited her, although she rarely went at first, eager to get back to Miaow and figure something out for Daw’s dinner.

  Still, she was, she realized, making friends. At first, she wasn’t quite sure how to cope with it. These were the first real friends she’d made since her marriage. In Daw’s village there had been two women she’d liked and could laugh with, but she’d been wary of sharing her problems with them, afraid her confidences would find their way back to her mother-in-law. She had begun to think of marriage and motherhood as the new geography of her life, a friendless geography. But now there were women who said hello to her, who joked with her, who wanted her to go out with them. Her life began to feel bigger and more real, now that there were people in it.

  But she could only go out with them occasionally and for a short time, because she had to make the side trip to pick up Miaow at Sonya’s, and she never knew when Daw might get home. Sometimes she’d find him waiting, the air ropy with cigarette smoke, and a pile of butts in the soup can he used as an ashtray, and sometimes he wouldn’t come home until long after Miaow was asleep, after Hom had covered the food she had made and curled up beside her daughter. On the nights when he was late, he was usually half-drunk, and the drink seemed to make him resentful of the bond between her and Miaow, resentful that they were still living mostly on her money in spite of his efforts to find work. The days when he most felt like a failure were the days when he would come home angriest, and on those days there was a wall around him that she couldn’t penetrate. He had underestimated Bangkok; he had thought he’d be accepted there as he had been in his village. He’d assured her that he could care for them all, and now he couldn’t even pay for the cheap, terrible little room they slept in. It took nothing to set him off on those nights: what she’d made for dinner, the fact that she hadn’t waited to eat with him and the food was cold, or the fact that she had waited and the food wasn’t ready. The anger was already in him, circulating with his blood, eager to burst out. And when he’d drunk too much, he wanted something he could hang it on, some excuse to take it all out on her.

  Three times, he slapped her. Each time, Miaow started to scream the instant she heard the sound, and Hom had to get between him and the baby because the screams redirected his anger at Miaow, or, as Hom said on the third night, the smallest person in the room. That had sent him out again, spiraling back into the night, even though it was pouring, slamming the door so hard it was probably heard by everyone on their floor and the one above them, and he hadn’t come back until the following evening. When he finally arrived, he ignored her, ignored the food she had made, ignored Miaow, who had tottered to the most distant corner of the room. He lay down on the mat with his back to her, and she caught a whiff of perfume.

  That night, as he snored beside her, she decided to make a point: she would let him see what it would be like to be alone. She wouldn’t be there when he got home, unless he came in very late. There would be no one to smile and say hello, there would be no food waiting for him. There hadn’t been a night since they left his mother’s house that she hadn’t cooked for him. Even in the awful little hut down near the port she’d always found a way to make a meal, no matter how sparse.

  But the following night, she went after work to a sidewalk food stall, bought the smallest portion the man sold, and ate standing up, leaning against the warm wall of a building and watching the city flow past. By then she was accustomed to the crowds; the people no longer looked as grim or as much alike to her as they had when she first arrived. Several women felt her gaze and nodded to her. In those first months, she had felt invisible.

  When the food was gone she carefully put the paper plate and the plastic utensils into a trash barrel beside the vendor’s cart, treating the city with the same respect she had shown to her village, and then, struck by the thought, she took another, slower, look around. It was true. Bangkok no longer felt alien to her. It had become her new village, even if it hadn’t become Daw’s.

  For a moment, that realization softened her heart; he was miserably unhappy and he had no idea how to deal with it. She asked herself whether she should give up on her plan for the evening and just go home. But then she remembered the slaps and the perfume.

  So now, joining the flow of people on the sidewalk, she headed for Sonya’s apartment to retrieve Miaow. Without thinking about it, she checked her purse for the half sandwich—avocado on soft white bread—that she’d made for the child that morning. Miaow hadn’t yet developed a taste for spicy food, but she loved the blandness of avocados, and Western-style white bread was easiest for her to chew and swallow. A quick detour into a 7-Eleven got her a small jar of chocolate pudding and a plastic spoon. Feeling guilty about the pudding, she also bought an orange, even though Miaow had no real affection for fruit other than bananas. When Sonya opened the door, Miaow looked up at Hom from the floor, beamed, and said, “Hello,” which drove Hom a surprised step or two back and made Sonya practically collapse in laughter. Hom said hello back and Miaow said hello again, and the two of them traded hellos for a minute or two until Sonya said, “I’ll do something this week to move this conversation along.” She bent down and picked Miaow up with a huge grunt that made Miaow laugh and handed her to Hom, saying, “You take care of my favorite pupil
.” Hom bounced the child in her arms—getting heavy now, more than eleven kilos—and carried her down the stairs, ignoring Miaow’s protests. Stairs were one of her favorite things, but the ones in Sonya’s building were too steep and the risers were too high. Once they were back on the street she put Miaow down and took her hand. Instead of heading in the direction of home, she led her to Lumphini Park.

  She hadn’t spent any time in the park although it was fairly close to her work and to Sonya’s place, and she’d never before seen anything quite so lush. Dusk was gathering itself and thickening into darkness, especially beneath the largest trees, and she was nervous about going too far in. She chose a bench at the foot of a small tree that let her look down over the long green sweep to the little lake, and after she took it in for a few moments, she gave Miaow her sandwich. The avocado made the child so happy she grunted as she ate it. Lights were going on in the buildings on the far side of the park, and the reflections flowed and rippled across the surface of the lake. For the first time in what felt like months, Hom relaxed almost completely, and the sigh she released was loud enough to stop Miaow in mid-swallow and start her coughing.

  Hom got up, laid a paper napkin over her shoulder, and bounced the child up and down, feeling the pull down low in her own back; she wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. She thumped Miaow between her shoulder blades for a few moments and then, with a little frisson of panic, lower down until the choking resolved into hiccups. She listened to Miaow and tried to make a hiccup sound of her own at exactly the same time the child did, and when she succeeded, Miaow’s eyes went enormous and her mouth opened so wide that Hom began to laugh. Still laughing, she walked in a tight circle, patting her daughter’s back until Miaow began to kick her legs and say, “Down.” She ran in slow motion, letting the child chase her around the bench until she collapsed, fanning her face with her hand and exaggerating her panting, and Miaow, shrugging off Hom’s help, clambered onto the bench beside her and put her head in her mother’s lap and they let out simultaneous sighs. Miaow laughed again, at nothing, and Hom looked at the lights dancing on the water and, for a long moment, life was perfect. The elation lasted for a companionable hour or so, until Hom started to walk her child toward the place where she could catch the bus for home. The moment they took their seats on the bus, Miaow fell asleep.