The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (10 page)

Uncle Bao and Auntie Tri's apartment had three bedrooms: one for Uncle Bao and Auntie Tri, one for Uncle Viet, and one for cousin Linh. Whenever Grandmother Vo moved in, Linh had to give up her bedroom and sleep on the pullout sofa in the living room.

Grandmother Vo sat on the brown-and-yellow plaid sofa, stuffed between the neighbor fortune-teller Ba Liem and her twin sister Ba Nhanh. They were the only identical twins Cherry knew and their physical similarities, down to matching liver spots on their right cheeks, frightened her. Grandmother wore a royal blue
ao dai,
a matching scarf around her neck, and caramel colored sunglasses. She liked to wear sunglasses even indoors.

Lum and Cherry fidgeted in front of her and bowed. Grandmother nodded. Lum approached her first, quickly pecking her on the cheek. Cherry repeated the gesture. The smell of menthol from Grandmother's green medicine oil slid up her nostrils, reminding Cherry of what their house would soon stink of once Grandmother moved back.

“You're late,” Grandmother Vo observed, barely nodding at the present their mother placed on the coffee table. “I thought you were coming early to help your sisters cook.”

“Tri called and asked us to pick up more ice,” their mother said.

“Ice is so important,” Grandmother said, exchanging glances with the twins. “There must have been a long line at the store.”

It was as if Grandmother knew their father had taken a detour through the orange groves to relax their mother. Maybe she could smell the citrus on them. They had rolled down the windows of the station wagon, stuck their heads out, and inhaled deeply. It smelled better than the ocean.

“Ba Nhanh, your glass is empty,” their father said. “Would any of you ladies like another beverage?”

“Chi Tuyet,” Auntie Tri's voice called from the kitchen. “Where have you been? Get in here.”

Their parents swiftly escaped to the kitchen. Before Lum and Cherry could bow and join them, the fortune-teller grabbed Cherry's arm.

“I don't know what you're talking about, Ba Kim,” the fortune-teller said, sharply pinching Cherry's shoulder. “I think this one has potential to turn out nicely.”

“Her Vietnamese is atrocious,” Grandmother Vo said. “She has her father's accent and with her half-English, I can barely understand her.”

“Let me read her palm,” Ba Liem said, and then nodded at Lum, who mercifully had not abandoned his sister. “I'll read both of them.”

“We've done enough of that today,” Grandmother said. “This one is too young anyway.”

“It's never too early to determine a child's luck,” Ba Liem said. She was already rubbing Cherry's hand, making it itch. She dropped her eyelids, wrinkling her forehead, concentrating.

Cherry's gaze lingered above the couch where the Vietnam-shaped clock hung. Sometimes when she felt drowsy, the clock looked like a dragon. Four minutes passed. Cherry could hear her parents laughing guiltlessly in the kitchen with her aunts. Where were her cousins? The greasy smell of the
banh xeo
was unbearable. It would be cold by the time she'd get to eat. Ba Liem's eyes finally opened.

“Good brains,” she declared, squeezing her hand in her moist grasp. “It will be her brains that secure a solid, dependable husband. Vietnamese, of course. From an honorable family. He could be a doctor or a dentist. She will be his assistant, perhaps a nurse … medical maladies … she will have earaches in her late fifties. This may cause hearing problems.”

“A nurse!” the fortune-teller's sister Ba Nhanh said, clapping her hands.

“I'll tell her mother to check her ears,” Grandmother said. “Who knows how often her parents clean them?”

“It's very important to keep a child's ears clear of wax,” Ba Liem solemnly said. “Wax encourages stubbornness.”

Lum was next. Cherry sat on Ba Nhanh's lap as the fortune-teller pressed her thumbs into Lum's palm. This time, Ba Liem seemed to hum as well, the oracle settling inside her head. She opened one eye to peer at Lum.

“This one is murky,” she pronounced. “I can't get a clear reading on him. He is too impressionable, easily influenced by his peers. He must be watched very carefully … his eyes are good now, but he may require reading spectacles when he is forty-two.”

Both Grandmother Vo and Ba Nhanh leaned forward, as if to examine Lum with a new perspective.

“I suspected this one may be more troublesome,” Ba Nhanh said.

“He doesn't do as well in school as his sister,” Grandmother Vo said to the twins. “His parents say he has poor reading skills, but perhaps it's more than that.”

Lum withdrew his hand. “I'm doing fine in school.”

The old ladies stared at him with oval mouths.

“Impudent child!” Grandmother Vo said. “Ba Liem is honoring you with a reading and you disrespect her like this?”

“We shouldn't be surprised,” Ba Liem said, nodding in satisfaction. “I will speak with his mother later. We will stop it, Ba Kim, before he gets too unruly.”

The children bowed and left the elder women, determined not to return to the living room for a good while.

“Don't listen to her,” Lum said, recognizing the worry on Cherry's face. “She's just saying what Grandmother wants to hear. That way she'll get paid.”

Cherry hoped so. She didn't like the idea of her future laid out, with no choices of her own. And to think she'd be a nurse. She hated the sight of blood. Even the possibility of seeing it was enough to make her wince. Cherry stared at the creases in her palm, at the lines that stretched out to her fingers. They said no two palms looked alike, so no two fortunes could be the same. Then why did hers sound so common?

In the dining room, Cherry and Lum circled the buffet table carefully, determining what to fill their plates with. They could hear the clinking of chips and shouts of both luck and defeat from Uncle Viet's bedroom, where the uncles played poker. After weighing down their plates with egg rolls, beef salad, chicken curry, and scoops of fried rice, Lum left for Uncle Viet's room, while Cherry wandered down the hallway.

In Uncle Bao and Aunt Tri's room, Cherry's cousins were watching a
Paris by Night
video, her aunties' favorite Vietnamese variety show. Duyen and Linh lay side by side on their stomachs, wrinkling their good dress-up clothes, elbows planted in the mattress, fists tucked under their chins. Another girl lay in Cherry's usual spot. She looked older and had two long French braids in her hair. The girl grinned a mouthful of braces and hot pink rubber bands.

“This is Quynh,” Linh said. “We're in homeroom together.”

The bed already crowded, Cherry sank to the floor and sat cross-legged, her plate balancing between her knees. On the television, Rocky Lam, Linh's favorite Vietnamese singer, crooned, winking at the camera during his close-up. Behind him on the glittering neon-color-splashed stage, a bevy of backup dancers preened and sashayed in low-cut leotards and feathered boas.

“Isn't he beautiful?” Linh sighed, and collapsed to the mattress. Her pigtails bounced as she shook her head. “Mom says he's married.”

“Well, he has to be at least thirty,” Duyen said, rolling her eyes. Unlike Linh and their mothers, Duyen and Cherry didn't find Rocky Lam so attractive. His face and hair were too oily. He made facial expressions when singing that looked more painful than seductive.

“Thirty's not old,” Quynh said. “I've got cousins who are in their thirties.”

“It just means he's mature,” Linh said, sitting up to smile at her reflection in the heart-shaped mirror hanging on the wall. “When I'm old enough, I'm going to be a pop singer and maybe he and I will sing a duet together on
Paris by Night
.”

“Oh, yeah?” Duyen snickered. “How?”

“I'm going to take singing lessons.” Linh puckered at the mirror before turning to look at Duyen.

“With what money? Your mom wouldn't even let you sign up for ballet classes with me.”

“I'm going to join the choir when I get into junior high, dummy,” Linh said, scowling. “Right, Quynh?”

“Yeah, choir is free,” Quynh said. “My older cousins are doing it.”

“You don't know everything,” Linh said. “A ballet recital for a beginner's class is not a real performance. The choir sings several times a year and travels all over the county.”

“You have to have a good voice,” Duyen reminded her.

“I have a good voice!” Linh said. “My dad says so.” Uncle Bao had been a singer in hotels in Vietnam. Now he worked at an auto garage. He said if it weren't for the Communists, he'd be famous back in Vietnam.

“Lessons don't give you everything. You have to have talent first,” Duyen said. “Besides, Ba Liem said you're going to be a housewife and that I'll be the performer.”

“Fortune-tellers only guess at the future,” Linh said. “They don't really know.”

“You had your palms read, too?” Cherry asked.

“Grandmother's having all of our palms read,” Duyen said. “Why do you think Ba Liem is here?”

“My mom says you can do anything you put your mind to,” Linh said.

“You're so gullible,” Duyen said. “Did she read that off a cereal box?”

“I
can
sing,” Linh said firmly. “And if I need lessons, then Mom will ask Grandmother for the money. Singing lessons can't cost more than beauty school.”

“Who's going to beauty school?” Cherry asked.

Duyen gave Linh a hard look. “No one,” Duyen said.

“You're lying,” Cherry said.

“It's grown-up stuff,” Duyen said, waving her hand, further annoying Cherry. “You won't understand.”

Linh had turned twelve last month and Duyen was eleven, not much older than Cherry, yet they acted as if those years mattered a lot. They believed they were so mature. Cherry didn't mind not having a sister. Cousins lorded enough power.

The Vo relatives arrived in Orange County when Cherry was five. Duyen and Linh had known each other since they were babies, lived in the same house in Vietnam, and fought like sisters. Cherry knew she should love both of them, but she didn't like being treated like a baby. Cherry wanted one of her aunts to have another kid, so that the three of them could keep secrets from someone else.

Lum once tried to explain it to Cherry by pinching her arm.

“Ow,” she said, rubbing the sore spot.

“You'd rather I keep that to myself?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“That's what grown-ups are trying to do when they keep secrets,” he said. “They don't want to pinch you. They'd rather pinch themselves.”

Cherry couldn't understand why all grown-up stuff had to hurt, why there couldn't be anything good to share. If everything worth knowing hurt so much, she wondered why people bothered talking at all.

Another singer, Melody Ngo, floated across the television screen, wearing a glittery blue evening gown.

“Turn it up,” Quynh said. “This is my favorite song.”

“Mine, too!” Linh said, eagerly turning up the volume to a level that hurt Cherry's ears.

Duyen rolled her eyes at Cherry again, but she turned to Linh and her new friend. The two older girls lip-synched the cheesy lyrics, forgetting the last few minutes in the room.

*   *   *

A loud whistle pierced their ears. Linh scooted toward the window and slid open the glass partition. The girls sat up, pressing their noses against the dusty screen.

Lum waved from the grass square next to the parking lot, surrounded by other children from the party. His tie hung on a rosebush, shirtsleeves already rolled up.

“We're playing Frisbee,” Lum said, cupping his hands into binoculars to see through the sun glare. “Come down, we're picking teams.”

Four boys and four girls were eligible for teams. The younger kids were sidelined as fans because they were too short to play. Duyen's brother, Dat, demanded that he should be captain of the team opposing Lum.

“We need to keep the teams even,” Dat said, his chest lifting a little.

Lum looked like he was hiding a smile. “Okay by me.”

While Dat and Lum were in the same grade at school, they rarely played together.

“Why can't you be nice to your cousin?” their mother asked, after Auntie Hien loudly complained that Lum ignored Dat at school. “He's new to this country and you're his family. It's your duty to help him.”

“I ask him to play lots of times,” Lum said. “He always wants to go to the library.”

On Dat's first day of school in America, Lum invited him to play in a game of softball at recess. But when a fly ball shattered Dat's left eyeglass lens, a new pair, his parents forbade him from playing again. Dat obeyed his parents, but because of it, he remained dreadful at any kind of sport. Running down the block was enough to get him wheezing. Still, it didn't keep him from wanting to win at everything.

After picking off the two remaining boys Huy and Johnny, Dat chose his sister, Duyen, while Lum picked Cherry. And even though Dat didn't know Quynh, he waved her over, leaving Linh to join Lum's team.

“I would have chosen you over her anyway,” Lum said, welcoming their sulking cousin to his team.

They pulled off their shoes and threw them underneath the stairwell. In preparation, Cherry gingerly stepped on the sun-fried grass, allowing her feet to adjust to the prickles.

If they were going to throw any sort of object in a game, Cherry wanted the Frisbee. It was made of light, harmless plastic and didn't smash your face or other body parts when you missed a catch. She shuddered to think of Dat's broken eyeglass. The worst injury she ever had was a sprained finger from a tetherball game and she could still recall the throbbing and aching. So many injuries could happen from games. Their parents only allowed Lum to play sports for fun, but never to join any school teams. They wanted him to concentrate on his studies. They didn't understand why Americans paid so much attention to games when athletic scholarships to college were so difficult and risky to acquire.