World and Town (33 page)

C
hhung is unhappy about Sophy quitting Chinese, but cheers up when Hattie offers to tutor Mum in English instead. Your trailer seems a little quiet, she says, what with Sophy at school during the day. And he agrees: Mum could use both the company and the practice. Thanks to the English program on TV, Mum understands more and more. And thanks to
Sesame Street
—Big Bird. She’s learned a lot from Big Bird. But her pronunciation—he shakes his head. Not clear. Hard to understand. Hattie suggests they ask Mum what she thinks of the idea, but Chhung insists he knows.

“She like it.” He raps on his brace with his knuckles for emphasis. “I know.”

The air smells so strongly of cigarettes that Hattie asks if she can open a window.

“Would you like lessons, too?” she goes on.

“No, no,” he says. “I don’t need.”

But late the next day, when Hattie sits down with Mum at the kitchen table—an L in the counter, really—he pulls his easy chair in extra close. The TV is, what’s more, off—a surprise to Hattie on more than one count. Hasn’t he heard?

“America has been attacked by terrorists,” she says.

Chhung blinks even as his eyes shoot back and forth. “Wha?”

“Terrorists,” she says, slowly. A new word for her, too, and how to explain? The World Trade Center—big buildings—New York. New York City. Mum and Chhung nod. Hattie finds a pencil and draws the two towers. Didn’t they see it on TV? The plane, the fire, the people jumping out the windows? Desperate, she says, they were desperate—the easiest part of the story for them to understand. People jumping rather than burning, people having no choice—of course. Not owning a TV herself, Hattie watched as much as she could stand at Greta’s—the events repeating again and again on the screen and then again and again, all night, in her head; only to be recounted so often on the radio today that it seemed that history could just get stuck; no one was ever going to move past this. And what a different America they live in now, with such a different idea of what’s possible—a world so different from the one Lee and Joe knew, she could never explain it to them. It’s a cockamamie way to see things, Hattie knows—plain nuts. And yet she feels it—how Lee and Joe have retreated to the back side of a divide. How she’s gone on. And how she’s left them behind now—she who was once left behind herself. She feels that. She’s gone on.

Chhung, meanwhile, thought it was all a movie.

“I don’t like.” He waves his hand. “Watch DVD instead,” he says. “
Killing Fields.
”

“It wasn’t a movie,” says Hattie. “It was real. Terrible. Many people died. Many, many people.”

She knows, of course, that it will not seem like so many people to the Chhungs; that like her parents, they counted hardship by the millions. The millions wounded, the millions dead. Still, she is annoyed when Chhung shakes his head. He translates for Mum, who likewise shakes her head and frowns matter-of-factly. Her hair bun bristles with pins and looks about as likely to unravel as a polyp, but still she pats it, as if to keep it under control.

“Not so serious,” says Chhung. And, with confidence: “He cannot win. American destroy him right away.” He taps on his back brace. “American verry srrong.”

It was what Hattie’s father used to say about America way back when: America is strong. America is not weak like China. Hattie understands, but knows herself on the other side of a divide here, too. Is there any point in going on?

“Lesson time,” she says finally.

She turns her attention around like a cart.

Officially, Chhung has left Sarun to dig on his own because of Gift; Chhung is supposed to babysit so that Mum can concentrate. Right now, though, Gift is napping on the couch, his bare tummy rising and falling. His legs turn out like a ballet dancer’s; his short arms lie along the sides of his head as if that is as comfortable a position as any. He looks to have no shoulders.

“Tie?” asks Mum.

“
Tea
,” says Hattie. “Yes, I would love some
tea.
”

Mum fills a white enamel saucepan with water and offers Hattie some dried anchovies.

“Thank you. Delicious.” Hattie has always loved little fish—salty sweet things, too. “Thank you,” she says again, her irritation subsiding.

Mum’s head bobs.

“You should say, ‘You’re welcome.’ ”

Mum tries. Hattie takes notes: stresses all three syllables, and the syllables are very short.

“You’re welcome,” Hattie says again.

“Yor wel-cum.”

Hattie’s mother may have been a heretic, but when Hattie was a girl, her English lessons were based on the Bible. She can still see her old green primer with the cross on its cover; all those bearded foreign devils with helmets on, too. Still, it was a textbook. Mum should probably have a textbook. For now Hattie simply runs through the vowels, noting problems.

“Can you say
bait?
”

“Baay,” says Mum.

A bit of twang there; trouble with the ending consonant. Hattie goes on. “Can you say
bat?
”

“Bat.”

Good. A bit short, but good.

“
Beet?
” “Beee.”

Hattie makes a note. “
Bet?
”

T
he next lesson, Hattie works on pronunciation again, but adds some phrases:
Thank you, Thanks, You’re welcome, How are you
. The sounds are hard for Mum, but she smiles the whole time, tentative but eager. Learning English at her age is not easy; she might as well be trying to
tuck Mount Tai under her arm and jump over the North Sea
, as Hattie’s father used to say. Still, she reminds Hattie of how students make the teacher. Mum is such a different student from Sophy, but then her students were all different, she remembers. And how each one gave her a bit of herself—she remembers that, too. She looks forward to coming again.

T
he third lesson, Gift is awake and hurling things. Having just discovered that he can walk and throw things at the same time, he picks up the remote control and throws it. Next, a bottle opener. Next, a bunch of keys.
A-meh!
he shouts,
Ma! A-meh-meh-mam-mam-mam
. His chest is streaked with drool, his face bright with naughty delight. Still, Mum calmly opens the kitchen window and sets out a dish of dried mango, leaving it to Chhung to make loud scary noises—
hecq! hecq!
He leans forward, raising a threatening hand when Gift tries to touch one of the figures on the TV stand. But Gift just laughs and reaches for a porcelain basket instead.

Mum frowns.

“Do you want to meet another time?” Hattie asks.

Chhung shouts. Gift goes running out of the room, his diaper hanging half off.
Meh-meh-ma-maa!
Chhung glowers. Mum leans forward—to comment on all this, Hattie thinks. But, no.

“Why,” she says, instead “Caa.”

Hattie thinks. “The white car? Is it back?”

“Frren,” Mum says. She closes her eyes, shaking her head.

“You are worried about Sarun. His friends.”

“Wor-ree,” she says clearly. A word she knows.

“He’s upsetting your husband.”

Mum nods, pensive. She presses hard between her eyes with her thumbs, her other fingers spread-eagled, then lets her hands fall to the table. “Chiouw?”

“Child? Me? Yes. I have a son.”

“He-ahr?”

“Here? No,” says Hattie. “He lives far away. Far far away.”

“Gone?”

“Gone? Yes. He’s gone.”

Mum takes this in. Her face is smooth as a girl’s, but her glance is a mother’s gaze, appraising and thoughtful. She has brilliant dark eyes, with wonderfully clear whites.

“Chiouw gone,” she says. “No …” She hesitates.

“Stay?”

“Staay,” says Mum. “No staay.”

“Do children stay in Cambodia?”

Mum nods.

“It’s hard here, you’re right. The children don’t stay.”

“Mo-der, fa-der …” Mum stops.

“Yes. Mother, father are alone here. The children don’t stay. The children go.” Hattie speaks clearly and slowly. “The children go.”

“You, sef?”

“Do I live by myself? Yes.”

Mum shakes her head. “Hahd.”

“Yes, it’s hard. Quiet.” Hattie continues to speak clearly. Slowly. “You do everything yourself. Decide everything yourself. Eat by yourself.” She smiles a little, though she can see it would be all right if she didn’t—that it would be all right with Mum. “Some people like it but I find it hard.”

“Hahd,” Mum says again, sympathetically. “Sarun.”

“Sarun.”

“Why. Caa.”

“Sarun is getting in the white car.”

“Sophy.”

“Sophy, yes.”

“Brew. Caa.”

“Sophy is getting in the blue car.”

Mum shakes her head.

“It’s hard.” Hattie doesn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry.”

They should really work some more before Gift comes back. And Hattie has a lesson book for Mum in her bag; she should get it out. But instead they just sit a moment, two women at the same table. It’s quiet.

N
ow Mum huddles with Gift. Chhung drinks. The TV is loud.

“Are we having a lesson today?” asks Hattie.

No one answers. The kitchen window is closed; the air is full of smoke.

“Sarun?” asks Hattie.

Mum nods, stroking Gift’s hair; he gnaws on her shoulder.

“Do you want to go look for him?”

Sophy bursts into the trailer with her backpack. She glances over at Hattie as she heads to her room—not intending to say hello, apparently—but then stops, realizing that Mum has started to cry. Chhung says something in Khmer; his finger slices the air.

“I don’t care what happens to him,” Sophy says.

Still, they all pile into Hattie’s car—even Sophy, and even Chhung, who seats himself in the front passenger seat. He rolls his window down, sticks his elbow out, and lights a cigarette. No back brace today; he could reach for his shoulder belt easily enough. Hattie does not dare ask him to buckle up, though. Neither would she say no to Sophy, probably, if Sophy asked for a Christian radio station, but happily she does not ask. Instead, they listen to a talk show: It’s the cities everyone’s worried about—all those subways that can be bombed, all those communications that can be jammed, all those reservoirs that can be poisoned. Will people be moving out of the cities with time? Will they be moving to towns like Riverlake, seeking haven? Hattie can only hope not as she makes a quick round of the Come ’n’ Eat, the skate park, the lot with the hoop back behind Town Hall. The library. The town beach. Millie’s. It’s a gray fall day, with mist that hangs like something in a Chinese landscape painting—the sort of shifting, breathing layer you get with wet paper and a soft brush. A loose wrist, a little luck.

No luck.

“Maybe we should call the police?” says Hattie.

No answer.

“Maybe we should call the police?” she says again.

Stonewalling
.

“You know,” says Hattie, “if you people don’t want to help yourselves—”

“We can’t call anyone because the police in our old town could come after us,” says Sophy, finally. “After me, because I ran away and after them because of the 51A.” She explains.

“But if they left before it was filed?” asks Hattie.

“In case it got filed, I guess.” Sophy shrugs. “It’s not, I don’t know—”

“Rational?”

Sophy is quiet again but then asks, “Is that like ‘sensible’?”

“Sort of. It’s more like ‘reasonable.’ ”

Sophy thinks. “It’s not, like,
rational.
”

And though Hattie is the enemy, Sophy does meet her eye in the rearview; and in that glance, Hattie at least recognizes, for a moment, the Sophy she knows.

She takes a good look.

They head back home to a terrible wait. Happily, they are in a wet spell—the first one after a dry summer. There is wind and rain to distract them, the pounding relentless at night, and the morning a distraction, too, what with its fast-moving clouds and its sense of letup and change.

Only fools hope things last
, Joe used to say.

Hattie hasn’t been painting much, but now to kill time she starts working on some bamboo in snow—trying to convey the weight of the snow. Of course, the snow is just the white page, actually—a judicious absence of ink. The weight of it’s all suggestion—a matter of bending stalks and burdened leaves, and of using these things to trick the eye into “seeing.” It’s the sort of trickery they were always interested in at the lab for what it said about how people saw—for what it told them about how the brain put things together. But her interest is different now; she thinks and works, trying to forget about the Chhungs. Why should she care about the Chhungs? When, look! What a good heavy load she’s evoked—wet snow, it seems. Spring snow, such as would have represented the spiritual hardships of the literati, in her father’s view. The burdens borne by scholars like himself who “retired” rather than collaborate with a foreign invader—
yĭn shì
, who were strangers, in many ways, in their own land.

If only the Chhungs would call the police.

Dá guān
. She paints.

It is a full week before, finally, on a day of real sun, with bright, leaf-littered roads and dark, newly nude trees—hallelujah!—Sarun reappears.

“Where was he?” asks Hattie, over tea and candy.

“Can-a-da.” Mum’s face is so girlish with relief, she looks like Sophy.

“Canada? What was he doing in Canada?”

“Eat frut,” she says.

“Frroot.” Chhung, behind them, enunciates carefully.

“Eat fruit?” guesses Hattie. “Like pears and apples?”

Mum nods, smiling. The window is open; she lifts her face as if smelling a breeze.

“Have a lot fruit up there,” explains Chhung. “More fresh.”

“The fruit is fresher.”

“Cambodian like to go there eat. America fruit no good. No tay.”

“No taste.”

He gestures at his nose, his eyes jumping excitedly. “No smell.” He grins his lopsided grin. “Like baiseball.”

Baseball.

Hattie laughs at this rare joke as Mum produces a durian, which to Hattie smells as rotten as the durians in the United States—like something you wouldn’t want to step in, much less bring home special. Still, Mum slices it open with pride. Six quick slices, top to bottom, with their big kitchen knife, and there: the fruit opens like a petaled flower. There is a fingered mass in the middle, which proves delicious; Hattie smiles her approval as Mum shows off a big bowl of other fruit, some of which Hattie recognizes: Tamarind. Pomelo. Dragon fruit, lychees, jackfruit. Things Hattie hasn’t seen in decades, and is excited to see again.