The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (14 page)

“Excuse me, I brought a little treat,” Hoa said. She picked up her purse from the floor and opened it on her lap. The aluminum foil felt cool as she struggled to unwrap the shrimp toasts onto her soiled plate. She stood and nodded as she presented the plate in front of Monsieur and Madame Bourdain. “They may be a little cold,” she said apologetically.

“Thank you, Madame Truong,” Michel said, his blond mustache widening with his smile. “You are so kind. But I'm afraid I must pass. The last time I ate them, I did feel a little ill.”

“A little!” Émilie said, looking both aghast and amused. “He complained of it all week. You have to remember our French stomachs, Madame Truong. They can't handle the spices and oils that your people use all the time.”

Hoa's eyes dropped as Michel handed the plate back to her. Twelve cold shrimp toasts, misshapen by their travels in her handbag. She knew what Hung's face wanted to tell her. She did not need to acknowledge it.

Another hand reached over and grabbed one of the shrimp toasts from Hoa's plate. “I'll have one,” Ngoan said. “I can never pass up something Mother has made.”

Hoa smiled, her shoulders relaxing. She began rewrapping the rest, when Ngoan put out her hand to stop her.

“Leave them out,” Ngoan said, not caring that she spoke Vietnamese at the table. “It's the best thing I've had all day.”

*   *   *

Although Hoa didn't work like Yen and Phung, or volunteer at the community center like Hung, she kept herself busy and productive. In the mornings, she and Ngoan made breakfast in her ground-floor apartment. Hoa would prepare for Hung and Phung thermoses of crabmeat soup or baguette sandwiches for lunch, while Yen usually ate at cafés with his colleagues. The children were fed and Trinh walked them to the elementary school eight blocks away.

Ngoan still worried about allowing Trinh to take the children to school. Trinh had the habit of getting lost on the metro, and she hadn't really improved in the last five years. But Hoa assured Ngoan they'd be fine, since no public transportation was involved.

“Trinh needs to feel like she's contributing,” Hoa reminded her. “She doesn't like to cook or clean. This is what she can do.”

“Anyone can walk,” Ngoan grumbled.

“Exactly,” Hoa said. “Even Trinh.” So far, she hadn't managed to lose the children.

After the house was empty, Hoa proceeded to clean each apartment. None of the family bothered to lock the doors inside the building anymore. Hoa liked this part of the day, organizing her children and grandchildren's belongings, holding and dusting the items that mattered to them. She felt hopeful when she found a technical college brochure on Phung's dresser and disappointment when she later emptied the crumpled paper out of the wastebasket. She knew when Cam had tired of her coloring books and had moved on to reading chapter novels. Or when Xuan outgrew his fear of murderers lurking on the fire escape and dismantled the barrier of pillows and stuffed animals along his bedroom windowsill.

The only area Hoa avoided was Hung's desk in the spare room. He specifically requested she not come near it when he was away from the apartment. He had been the same way about his study in their house in Nha Trang, which irritated Hoa. The entire study, which was a pleasant space—good windows with afternoon sun—would collect dust and he wouldn't care. Hung and Hoa shared the spare room, half of it his office, the other half her knitting and prayer space. Though Hung hardly kept anything on the desktop, Hoa couldn't help but linger over that corner of the room. The items of significance, his journals and letter correspondence, which he'd carried over on the boat and protected all those months in the refugee camp, lay secure in one of the three drawers on the right side.

There was no padlock. Hoa easily could have read all she pleased. But she knew that Hung would find out. It had happened once, early in their marriage. Hoa did not ever wish to incur that level of wrath again.

Still, she felt free to privately speculate about the journals and letters. She assumed they contained information about his business dealings, correspondence with the educated elite of Nha Trang, scholars that included both French and Vietnamese women. It no longer bothered Hoa that Hung once kept mistresses. When she first learned of these poets and artists, she had been pregnant with Yen. Hung's older sister assured her that continuing to bear sons secured Hoa's status as his only wife. Now, Hung was frankly too old and tired to indulge in such frivolous relations, but it irritated her that he kept such tangible evidence of his indiscretions. Sometimes, she walked past the room and saw him reading these letters. While she was busy cooking and cleaning for their family, he was reminiscing about his shameful past.

Hoa truly didn't want to know any more of Hung's thoughts. She knew enough of his stubbornness, his denigrating opinions; to read them in print would give them more significance than they deserved. He never hid his disappointment concerning the kind of wife she turned out to be.
If my father only knew before he died,
Hung would say to her on difficult days,
he would have driven that matchmaker out of Nha Trang.

While Hoa cleaned, Ngoan and Trinh left to pick up groceries for dinner. Ngoan had favorite grocers spanning the arrondissements, though she preferred the open-air markets, which reminded her of Saigon. She had grown up on a sugar plantation and still relished buying the freshest produce available. Hoa usually stayed home. She did not like to go out unless the rest of her family was with her.

When Hoa did leave the house, she preferred remaining either in the 5th or 13th Arrondissement, where other Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants frequented. She remembered when Yen took the family to the Eiffel Tower for the first time. On the balcony, a small blond boy, cheeks sticky with chocolate ice cream, stared open-mouthed at Hoa. When Hoa grinned at the child—she was only trying to be nice—his face crumbled and he burst into tears. After Yen exchanged words, apologies, and much laughter with the boy's father, he finally explained the confusion to his mother.

“He was scared of your teeth,” Yen said. “He's never seen a woman with black teeth before.”

Just a little boy. He did not know and probably would not care how many hours Hoa's mother spent soaking those teeth with red sticklac and betel nuts so they would look that dark. It was fashionable back then to have lacquered teeth,
the darkest in all of Vietnam,
her mother would proudly say. With a lacquered smile, suitors knew you came from a respectable family. During their matchmaking ceremony, Hung complimented her teeth; one of the few compliments he ever gave her. Since the Eiffel Tower, Hoa tried to smile as little as possible. When her children weren't around to help and she was forced to speak with native Parisians, she kept her head low, lips close together. No one had cried or laughed at her since.

When the girls returned from the markets, Hoa would prepare a simple lunch of leftovers. Afterward, if it were either a Monday or Thursday, she'd sit at the dining room table and write letters to Sanh and his family. She used three sheets of paper: one for Sanh, one for Lum, and one for Cherry. For Tuyet, she included her name on Sanh's letter, but Hoa rarely thought of her daughter-in-law. She spent most of her time on Cherry's letter, the granddaughter she'd only seen three times. Hoa wondered if the five-year-old girl could tell how much she was loved by the words Hoa carefully printed on the paper. Tuyet's mother and family had recently arrived in America, and Hoa was ashamed to admit she worried what the Vo relatives would tell the grandchildren. She prayed that her son would have enough sense to protect the children from such unpleasant memories.

On the other days, Hoa crocheted or knitted, skills she picked up from another grandmother at the community center. She embraced the new hobby, appreciating its substantial results: sweaters, scarves, and hats, but mostly blankets, one for every Truong. When she noticed during morning cleanups that one was fraying, she'd begin another. There was always a blanket waiting to be replaced.

At three o'clock, Trinh left to pick up the children from school and Ngoan and Hoa started dinner preparations. The children and men came home. The house once again bulged with her sons' stories and Cam and Xuan's laughter. Full of food and exhausted from the day's activities, her family slept, the walls and ceilings leaking their snores, mumbles, and bed creaks, and Hoa felt secure knowing she could hear every sound.

*   *   *

A few days after brunch, Émilie called to say that Michel had reserved a time-share for the last weekend in October. Lourdes was a five-and-a-half-hour train ride away on the TGV. They would leave on Friday.

Although Phung and Ngoan were staying home, Cam begged to go to Lourdes with the rest of the Truongs.

“Why do you care about Lourdes?” Ngoan asked. “You don't even like going to Mass in your own neighborhood.” But she eventually agreed to allow Hoa to watch Cam over the holiday.

One morning, Hoa noticed during her cleanup that Yen's desk in his dining room had been cleared. In the kitchen next to the wastebasket, Hoa found his lamp, desk clock, assorted files and folders, pens, and calendar carelessly tossed into a stained fruit carton.

After staring at it for a moment, Hoa emptied out the fruit carton and restored Yen's belongings to the desk, trying to recall as best she could their original arrangement. The next day, Hoa found the desk cleared again, this time with Yen's things thrown in the corner of his bedroom.

“Trinh needs to use the desk for prayer space,” Yen explained to his mother that evening. “She wants to buy a Virgin Mary statue when we go to Lourdes and she is trying to decide where it should sit.”

Hung and Hoa's apartment contained the only prayer altar in the house. Yen had a metal cross on the wall and Phung and Ngoan kept a small portrait of Jesus on a coffee end table. Since the church was close to their home, there wasn't even a need for rosary prayer in the apartment.

“Don't you need a desk for your work?” Hoa asked.

“I'll get another desk.”

“This is ridiculous. We don't leave for two more weeks. Can't you use your desk until then?”

“Trinh really wants the space now.”

Hoa stared at Yen. Over the years, she'd tried her best to stay out of her sons' relations with their wives. She loved them and respected their judgments, grateful they hadn't inherited their father's methods in marriage. But they'd gone too far to the other side. She couldn't understand how all three of her sons could have such weak dispositions to their wives, especially smart, industrious Yen.

“Mother,” Yen said. “I appreciate your concern, but Trinh can have the desk. I want her to have it. She's endured enough because of me.”

It wasn't until the next morning that Hoa understood. After breakfast, Hoa watched from the window as Trinh led the children across the street. On the sidewalk, Trinh and the children appeared to be engulfed by French businessmen and women hustling past them on their way to work. With Cam walking slightly ahead, it looked for a moment like Trinh and Xuan were alone in the crowd. No matter how much Yen tried to fill their future with desks and trips to Lourdes, Trinh and Xuan would always remember and would serve as a reminder of those five years when he wasn't there.

*   *   *

Despite the frosty bite in the air, the baths at Lourdes attracted lines that looped throughout the grotto. At the basilica's central kiosk, Yen read that the average wait time for general entrance was three hours.

“That's too long for me,” Michel said. “Besides, I only came for the procession.”

The line for parents and children was significantly shorter, promising only a one-hour wait for each child and accompanying parent. While the men went into town for some coffee and reading, the women and children went to the baths.

Shuffling along in line, Hoa yawned. She was still recovering from the train ride from Paris. Hoa disliked traveling. After half a decade of living in France, Hoa had little interest in traveling beyond Paris. What was the difference? The French were French. If Paris was the largest and most diverse city in the country, she saw no reason to subject herself to anything outside its city limits.

But this, she recognized, as she observed the small children in wheelchairs inching ahead in line with them, was worth the hassle. The morning sun had stained the clouds pink across the snow-capped Pyrenees Mountains, adding temporary warmth to the gray sky. Hoa had never been to a sanctuary before. The Virgin Mary didn't appear in too many places in the world and it was a lucky coincidence she had in France.

While the children happily chatted with a blind boy from Switzerland, Trinh related to Émilie all the facts she learned from her well-worn Lourdes guidebook, which detailed every apparition Saint Bernadette experienced. It was a poor, sick French girl's relentless loyalty and vision that had transformed Lourdes into the most visited pilgrimage shrine for Catholics and Christians to this day.

“She didn't care what others thought of her,” Trinh said, “even when the priests were threatening to silence her. She believed the Blessed Virgin was speaking through her.”

“I wish I had more faith when I was younger,” Émilie said. “It could have saved Joan.”

“Didn't your daughter die of leukemia?” Trinh asked.

“We trusted science,” Émilie said. “We weren't attending church every Sunday, because we were at the hospital. All the drugs they forced into our daughter killed her, and not peacefully. The doctors took our little girl and squeezed every ounce of happiness out of her. All I remember is her crying on the day she died.”

“We can be saved here,” Trinh said. “Our children and ourselves.”

Émilie smiled. “But Trinh, you're healthy.”

Trinh leaned forward. “You can't see it,” she whispered. “But inside, I'm broken. I've come here to heal myself, so the Holy Mary can give me back my virginity and I can be whole again.”