The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (3 page)

“Is this how you got so thin?” he asks, handing over his lighter.

“I don't know,” she says, not mentioning that smoking is a recent habit. He still occasionally looks at her like he doesn't recognize her, startled by her company.

“Do you remember Mom's old nail salon in Tranquillity?” Cherry asks. “They gutted the shopping plaza last year. They're putting in condos.”

“That was a long time ago,” he says, distracted.

“We played in the parking lot,” she persists. “You organized these huge games with all the merchants' kids.”

Hardly a response. Cherry tries another tactic.

“Dat and Quynh are getting married.”

Not even a sharp inhale or blink of the eye. Lum slowly nods.

“You already knew,” she realizes out loud. She wanted to be the one to share this news with him, to observe his initial, sincere reaction.

“Of course,” Lum says. “I'm in Vietnam, not dead.” The muscles in his cheeks tighten, preventing her from pressing further.

They retreat to typical chatter. Cherry again complains about his busy schedule, and Lum again promises it will let up soon. After the company's big debut next week, he will have much more time to spend with her.

“You can meet Tham at the ceremony,” he says. “She'll be back from Hanoi by then.” His girlfriend, this Tham, slips into every conversation they've had since Cherry's arrival, but she exists only in name. She does not drop by the house, and there are no pictures of her in Lum's bedroom. The relatives never speak about her. It is difficult to take this Tham seriously.

And Cherry still finds it strange to hear him talk about another girl. “How often do you talk to Quynh?” she asks.

Lum exhales loudly. “How often do you?”

Her nose wrinkles, but he can't see this in the dark.

Lum stares at the lit embers on the ground. “She's family now, Cherry.”

“You're family,” she clarifies. “You could talk to her, if you ever came home.”

Lum smiles. “I've been busy.”

“Busy. It's too much to get on a plane to America, but you can make it to France? Twice?” Cherry tries to keep her voice even, but the resentment scratches at her throat.

He doesn't even look ashamed. “Someone from our family should visit Grandmère.”

Cherry doesn't answer, stubbornly staring at her nails.

“She asks about you,” Lum says. “She misses you.”

Cherry fights the urge to roll her eyes. “I miss you. We all do.” Her head has begun to ache, but she resists the urge to pull at her hair. “They're getting older, Lum. Mom is okay, she's always okay. But Dad. He's starting to forget things.”

“C'mon,” he says, looking doubtful.

“It's true.”

“He sounds pretty sharp every time I call home and he passes the phone right to Mom.”

“You don't know,” Cherry says, shaking her head. “You haven't been home with them.”

“That's right,” Lum says, “because they didn't want me there.”

One of the stray dogs approaches Lum, licking his hand. He tenderly looks at the mutt, caressing its flea-infested ears, and when he turns to Cherry, his eyes look large and sad. “The thing is,” he says, “if I were a parent, I probably would have done the same thing. I know that now.”

Her vision blurs. Her hands grasp for the sticky underside of the vegetable crate. “But it wasn't just you,” Cherry says.

“I didn't mind,” Lum says. “I had to take responsibility. I understand that.”

“You can still come back,” Cherry says. “We're still your family.”

She waits for a spark in his eye, a nod, anything. But it doesn't come. Instead, he sighs. “Cherry. That family doesn't exist anymore.”

The pain has seeped to her forehead. She throws her half-finished cigarette to the ground and digs the heel of her flip-flop into it, realizing how silly she must look. Lum's hooded eyes blink sympathetically. Piteously. She is tired of people looking at her like that.

Cherry's eye is drawn toward an open window in the house across the alley. Two button-down shirts hang from the window like curtains. Can the neighbors hear them? Their words barely register above whispers, but given the houses' proximity, the neighbors can eavesdrop on every word. As recent as yesterday, she sat in the kitchen, listening in on the neighbors' bickering. But despite the harshness of their voices, the screams, the taunting, their words always felt rooted in intimacy.

She rolls the back of her head against the concrete wall, then stands. “My head hurts.”

“I didn't mean to give you a headache.”

Standing in the doorway, Cherry watches Lum finish his cigarette. “When they sent you away,” she finally says, “it hurt all of us.”

“I know,” he says, but she cannot see his face in the dark. She has to trust his words.

Later, Cherry lies in bed, watching a spider move across the cracked ceiling. She imagines her brother fast asleep, so comfortable with his life, confident in his knowledge. He hadn't asked what it was like for her after he left. Maybe he didn't want to know. But siblings should share each other's pain. That is part of the responsibility.

People don't realize how long it takes to heal. They never dramatize recovery time in the movies because it is slow, the rehabilitation tedious. After months of surgeries, physical therapy, and X-ray consultations, Cherry's body had begun to repair itself. Cherry's parents tried to distract her from these hospital visits by giving her anything she wanted … anything, except Lum's return. And when she had resumed her normal life, they couldn't understand why she looked so miserable. Her rehabilitated body was in better shape than before the accident and she had just received a Chancellor's Scholarship to UC Irvine. They never realized that a part of her wanted to feel that way. Cherry welcomed the scars on her back, the aches that vibrated along her spine. Even now, years later, she can sometimes feel a loose sliver of pain travel through her body, floating around her tissues, something the doctors will never be able to locate and remove. She hopes they will never be able to find it. As long as this abnormality lives inside her, scraping at her nerves, she remembers that while Lum suffers, so far away from home, she does, too.

*   *   *

Though the air feels humid, everyone pretends otherwise. Tall dandelion-colored canopies rustle over noisy oscillating fans. Guests wilt in plastic chairs, clutching portable automated fans and personal water spritzers. No one but the servers and musicians dares to step out from under the shaded tent. The guests nibble on French pastries and sip iced jasmine tea as they wait for the ceremony to begin. Granduncle wears his brown suit with a yellow tie that Lum bought for him. Grandaunt shows off a pale blue dress she's been working on for the last week. At her relatives' urging, Cherry concedes to a blouse and skirt, but soon regrets it, as the fabric sticks to her sweaty skin, perspiration spots already appearing.

The housing development's model home, the Magnolia, has already elicited approving nods and whispered speculations. The crew has transplanted roses into the garden beds around the perimeter of the house. A silky green ribbon drapes across the double doorways.

Along the aisles, journalists snap pictures and interview clients. Several prominent Asian financial newspapers and wire services are covering the debut of the New Little Saigon Community Project. As Lum stutters through his practice speech in his office trailer, Cherry smirks at his nervousness. The old Lum. But by the time he reaches the stage to introduce his boss, his voice is smooth and assertive, the suave salesman.

After a few speeches and brief applause, Mr. Pham, the chief financier, cuts the ribbon and the audience stands. The words sounded pretty (most expensive housing community project in metropolitan Ho Chi Minh City, private 220-acre golf course, twenty-four-hour guard-gated security), and the space looks idyllic, but now business can commence. The people make their way past the stage, forming a line to enter the model home.

While her relatives get in line, Cherry steals off to Lum's office trailer to avoid the outhouses. Someone is already in the restroom, so she relaxes on the sofa, enjoying the trailer's climate-controlled temperature. Cherry peers at the walls decorated with housing permits, real estate awards, and photographs of Mr. Pham shaking hands with assorted Vietnamese officials. Lum's desk is covered with miniature dioramas of the development's different housing options: the Magnolia, the Westminster, the Bolsa, and the Brookhurst.

The woman who steps out of the restroom looks like Lum's type: tall for a Vietnamese woman, graceful, with long, straight hair down her shoulders and razor-sharp bangs across her forehead. Her face reminds Cherry of the young military women she has seen around town: determined, arrogant. But instead of an olive-green uniform, she wears a long gray jersey dress.

“You must be Tham,” Cherry says, standing.

Tham steps back, looking as though she's been ambushed. “Hello,” she says in English, then shakes her head, realizing Cherry spoke to her in Vietnamese. “And you are Cherry.”

“Did you just arrive?”

“Yes,” she says. “I took a motor taxi from the train station. I was just freshening up.”

They stare at each other for several long seconds, smiling, blinking. Finally, Cherry nods to Tham's slightly swollen belly. “How far along are you?”

She drapes an arm across her stomach, protective. “You can already tell?”

“I'm going to be a doctor,” Cherry says.

“Well, I think you're going to be very good,” she says. She thinks Cherry is pleased with her news. Cherry has a feeling that outside of Tham's family in Hanoi, she must be the first to know.

Although Tham wants to walk together, Cherry persuades her to go ahead and meet up with Lum, saying that she will see them soon. Cherry counts five minutes in the office trailer. Then she counts five more. The numeration, in sync with her heartbeat, grows comforting. Finally, she stands. Her damp eyes wash over the walls that contain a world she knows so little about.

Stepping outside, Cherry sees Lum, Tham, Grandaunt, and Granduncle standing in front of the model home. Lum has his arm around his girlfriend. He gazes at her tummy, then kisses her cheek. The four of them, plus one on the way, make a lovely picture: a family Lum has created on his own, without their parents, without her.

“We were waiting for you,” Granduncle says when Cherry approaches. “Let's go inside.”

They step through the French doors and sigh pleasantly at the gush of air-conditioning sliding down their skin. Elegant, neutral-shaded furniture and landscape paintings decorate the expansive space; fresh flowers and bamboo arrangements balance on marble tables and molded plant shelves. Investors clog the wide staircase, gazing up at the skylight. An ornate chandelier, capturing the morning sun, transforms the hexagonal atrium into a prism of shimmering colors. The relatives and Tham ascend to observe the rooms upstairs, while Lum and Cherry remain on the ground floor. Everything down to the detailing in the tiles looks so familiar.

Cherry fingers one of the flowers, a fresh purple lily. “So, congratulations.”

Lum grins blissfully. “You, too. You're going to be an auntie.”

They look at each other. “I'm sorry about last night,” he says.

“I'm not,” she says. “I want to know what you think.”

Lum shrugs. “But there are nicer things to think about. I'm not upset that I came here anymore. I don't regret Tham or anything else that has happened here.”

“But I regret it,” Cherry says. “Mom and Dad do, too.”

His smile fades.

“What is it?” Cherry asks. “What aren't you telling me?”

Lum's boss walks by, stopping briefly to pat her brother on the back, before moving on.

“You're probably right,” Lum says, straightening his shoulders. “I don't know what it was like for them. That's the problem, isn't it? No one bothers to ask because we already think we know. It's always been like that.”

Cherry stares down at his black leather loafers, which he spent a good ten minutes polishing that morning. They are already covered in the day's dust. Her brother is right, and she cannot help but feel that she is the guiltiest of all. Cherry was so determined to recover from the accident, to rehabilitate her body, that she couldn't be burdened with anything emotional. Not her brother's feelings or anyone else's. Her parents and Grandmother Vo encouraged her willful ignorance, indulged it, because they did it, too. They'd grown so comfortable with forgetting, they'd begun accepting it as the truth. But that didn't have to continue. She could start listening, learning, right now.

A group of investors walks between them, gazing around the lush atrium, happily chatting in Japanese. One of them asks Lum a question, and her brother's rudimentary Japanese answer sounds impressive. As they enter the kitchen, Lum's face remains locked in its cheerful salesman mode.

“I'm glad you came here,” he says. “It means a lot to me.”

Cherry listens, folding and refolding the housing brochure in her hands, while he reveals his other surprise: one of the perks of working at the company is a substantial discount on the lots. He's already purchased a corner lot, the four-bedroom Westminster, for himself, Tham, and the Trans. Cherry can have the extra bedroom when she visits, whenever that is. Cherry smiles, but thinks instead of Grandmère's house: what will happen to it, who will take care of it, with the last of their family gone?

Tham calls out to Lum from upstairs. She says his name playfully, but the certainty in her voice lingers. Cherry asks to borrow Lum's cell phone and steps outside, where several crew members are busy watering the thirsty, drooping rosebushes.

“This call is expensive,” her mother says when she hears Cherry's voice.