World and Town (46 page)

Nothing too interesting, but of course that’s the point. The point is to have no point—to empty the mind. To free oneself of oneself, good riddance. To rise beyond want, to rise beyond pain. Detaching oneself,
dá guān
. One day Mum cuts her hair off short—even shorter than Sophy’s, and using those same dull scissors. It’s about as even as a pasture the sheep ate down. She doesn’t care. She sports a white shawl, too, over her blouse, and the next day there it is again—a plain white swath that should show dirt like crazy but somehow doesn’t—as if it’s beyond dirt, somehow, as if it hails from a world beyond laundry. A better world, indeed. Sophy calls it the temple granny look, and Mum does look as if she belongs in a long line of women sitting on a floor somewhere. It’s as if Chhung isn’t the only one to have removed himself from the trailer; it’s as if in her mind and spirit, Mum has, too.

A lot of the time she is too tired to clean, so Sophy cleans for her. She cleans though Hattie tells her she doesn’t have to; she cleans though Hattie tells her she can find someone else to do it. Sophy cleans because she wants to clean, she says; she wants to clean and clean and clean. Plus, she doesn’t want anyone to steal her mother’s jobs. And so she cleans and cleans while Hattie cooks Chinese food for anyone who wants it. Pork with asparagus, shrimp with peas. Beef with broccoli. Simple things, home-style. They like them. Hattie tries to help with Gift, too—Gift, who likes it when Hattie brings Annie to play with him. And so she does, though it means protecting Annie from infant torture. For Gift will pull Annie’s tail if Hattie lets him. He’ll feed Annie candy. Hattie tells him how she once had a dog who ate a bag of chocolate and died; and though he’s too young to understand, he does listen, wide-eyed. Barely blinking—children his age don’t blink much. Hattie remembers from Josh what an event it was to behold his lashes lengthening, then retracting again. And now here are Gift’s, an event, too. Gift has Sophy’s lashes, and Sophy’s eyes—bright eyes, with a tilt. Though how relaxed his face is; even his lips are relaxed. He breathes through his mouth, his wide chin shiny with dribble.
A-beh!
he says.
A-beh!
Putting the stress on the second syllable, she would swear, and looking at Hattie as if to see if she can say it, too.
A-beh!
she says finally. He stamps his feet, delighted. His cheeks jiggle; his pant legs pool by his feet. She rolls them up for him, feeling him pat her head as she does, his warm tummy pressing like a compress against her forehead.
A-beh!
His shirt is stained on the shelf of his belly, where food always lands—a problem she had when she was pregnant, a problem she understands.
A-beh!
she says again, and he answers again,
A-beh!
It’s a conversation. He has a few words, now, some of them multipurpose:
A-da!
is dog, but also birds and maybe bugs, for example—creatures. As for what language he’s speaking, that is not clear. Sophy thinks
Ba-ba-ba!
is “yes” in Khmer—doesn’t it sound just like
Bhat-bhat-bhat?
she says. But now as he pats Annie with concern he says,
A-beh
—wanting to give her his bottle.
A-beh, A-beh
. No, Hattie says, No bottle. Bottle for Gift, not for Annie, no. Still he insists,
A-beh
. A generous soul, speaking his own language, maybe. His hair has never been cut, so it’s downy up top and wispy at the bottom, the hair he was born with—hair from another world, it seems. Angel hair. Sophy says they should cut it, people think he’s a girl, but what with everyone so scissor-happy these days, Hattie’s hoping they’ll leave his alone. He’s too young to be shorn by these self-shearers, too young to be clipped.

Sophy wants to clean Hattie’s house in return for her babysitting, but Hattie tells her she’s been doing her own cleaning. Some things you’ve got to clean yourself, she says, and Sophy nods.

“I get that,” she says.

The trailer is not so much about teaching Mum English now as it is about teaching Hattie Khmer. Of course, she will never learn to speak it properly. The Internet says Khmer has some twenty-three vowels and sixty vowel sounds; that’s too many new sounds for an old lady like her. She sees how Mum must feel about learning English, how it’s like standing at a doorway you just can’t enter. Hattie’s learning to recognize some words and phrases, though.
Sra’ngout sra’ngat
, for example, which means “sadness,” and
ah songkhim
, “hopelessness.” Those are for Mum. And for Chhung,
ch’kuot
, which means “crazy,” and
samlap khluon
, “suicidal.” Sophy and Mum show Hattie a children’s book about the Khmer alphabet. Neither of them can decipher its little upright assemblies of spears and zigzags and hooks and teardrops, but Sophy does know how there are no spaces between words when they’re written, and how a vowel can go beside a consonant, but above it or below it, too. Above a consonant? says Hattie. Below it? Or around it, says Sophy. And when Hattie asks, Around it? How can it go around it? Sophy writes a letter and draws a kind of
C
around it; it looks like a clamp from Carter’s woodshop. Like this, she says. The
C
is the vowel? Hattie asks, and Sophy nods with a little pride. She knows because her dad used to try to teach her about it, she says. Because it’s the kind of thing he knows, he knows a lot of things. She starts to cry.

They all cry and cry.

Sophy has not been in school since the accident, but the church is not worried, she says. She says they know she’ll come back; they have confidence. They believe it’s the Lord’s plan—even the accident was His plan.

If only Hattie believed in a plan.

Yesterday there was a storm, with a big wind, and lines of white-caps that passed and passed; Hattie sat in her car at the town beach and watched them. One line, another, another. How do the loons stay put the way they do? This one loon calmly, magically, holding its place in the waves—a lone black periscope, under which the waves rolled and rolled. The loons are an ancient species—twenty-five million years old, people say, relatives of the dinosaurs. To hear their laugh, their yodel, their howl—their many unearthly warbles—is to be put in touch with the numinous. But how weird that they’re still here. Thanks to the weather, they’re still here, and not just the juveniles—the adults are here, too. And so many other birds, as well: What with the leaves down, Hattie can see not only all the birds’ nests—all the secret birds’ nests—but dozens of the nest-makers, perched like snipers at the very tippy-top of the trees. Watching. Chattering. Why are you here? Hattie wants to ask them. Go south! Go south!

They do not move.

Today it is warm again. Hattie has only to step in the shade to know it’s not summer, because in the summer the shade’s warm; this shade’s cold. But the heat is building in a summerlike way, as if something’s stalled—building and building so it can break. How can the holidays lie right around the corner? Turkey! Lights! Santa!

They watch for winter the way they used to watch for spring.

At least the days are shortening; there’s that much right with nature. At least the planets are still in gear. Hear tell, too, that there’s a bear hibernating under Grace’s front porch. Imagine. People are surprised—warm as it’s been, after all. If they were bears, they say, they would keep on with their fat-building, why stop? But they’re not bears, and that bear has always wintered on Grace’s property—claws her trees up good every year. And maybe there was a shortage of beechnuts this year—something. Of course, there’re people who think she should get it out of there. Think how lightly it sleeps, they say. And they’re right. A bear can wake in a flash. You might even call them nappers; a female can give birth smack in the middle of the winter. But Grace would never think of disturbing a creature’s sleep. That’s when you can feel its spirit, she told Hattie once—what it is besides its instincts and ways, namely innocent. They sense her interest in them, Hattie thinks. A couple of years ago Grace had a moose in her swamp, and the only silver fox ever seen in this area dug its burrow in her yard—a beautiful animal. More dark gray than silver, actually, with silver-white paws and a huge silver tail.

Oh, lake: Hattie’s waiting for your shore to hem up and your waters to still—for a chill to spread itself over you once again, in so quick a sweep that it seems a spell has been cast—that some magician has waved a great wand and sonorously pronounced, “Saran wrap!” For there it will be, then, suddenly, again: a thin, still covering, complete with minute glassine wrinkles, as if the magician somehow failed to quite pull the wrap tight. Not that the wrinkles will much matter, in the end. In the end, the ice will thicken just the same; in the end, it will blanket the life below and keep it all safe. (How lucky that ice floats! Hattie used to tell her students. How lucky that ice insulates!)

And then in the spring, will come the thaw: cracks and slush and bays of melt. Open water. At the edge of the water there will be weasels, hungrily pulling up fish.

M
ore of the e-mail she’s been ignoring.

Dear Aunt Hattie
Dear Aunt Hattie
Dear Aunt Hattie

She reads and rereads them all. Decisions and accidents, parents and children, and worry—such a lot of worry. Such a lot of want. Not want such as she sees in the malls, but the kind of want her mother used to talk about—the kind that affected a person’s posture.
Do you not see
, her mother wrote to Grandpa Amos,
how people want? Do you not see how people hurt? Do you not see how you refuse to acknowledge them except as candidates for salvation?

Now Reveille and Annie sniff and hang around. Reveille puts his head in her lap. Annie chases down a mouse and brings it to Hattie, but then drops it, her tail wagging; the mouse scoots away.

Hattie sighs.

And that night, in her sleep, she sees her parents. Hattie has not dreamed of her parents for years; but there they are, waving their arms, whether in warning or greeting is not clear. In the morning, Hattie goes about her day as usual, but at night, there are her parents again. And there, too, is Qufu—the ancient trees, the mounds, the dust. The airless air. Though this Qufu lies right on the beach, somehow, like Qingdao; some of the grave mounds are made of sand. Hattie does not put much stock in dreams. Still.

Dear Aunt Hattie
Dear Aunt Hattie
Dear Aunt Hattie

Chhung at his station. Sarun in the hospital. Mum by her altar. Sophy, cleaning and cleaning. Even the Come ’n’ Eat is empty, as if the town’s lost its appetite.

“I don’t know what to do,” says Hattie. “I don’t know what to do.”

The chairs all around them are neatly pushed in, like the chairs of a classroom. Grace looks at her.

“Time,” she says. “Give it time.” For some reason she is wearing a watch today.

Watch.

“I can’t watch,” says Hattie.

“Watch what?” says Greta.

“Watch their lives fall apart this way.”

Grace hands Hattie a horseshoe-print handkerchief.

“I have to do something.” Hattie accepts the handkerchief, then realizes she’s crying.

“Aren’t you bringing them dinner?” Greta is singing a lullaby. “Aren’t you helping with child care?”

“You are. You’re helping. You’re helping.” Grace’s voice is a hymn. “You’re helping.”

But Hattie shakes her head. “They need more. New karma. New
fēngshūi
. Something.”

Fēngshūi?

Hattie explains—the graves. The e-mails.

“You’ve started reading them again?”

Hattie shrugs. “I see them differently now. Before they were all about superstition.”

“And now?” Grace tilts her head, her face soft and dimply.

“Now when I read them I just see Mum praying.”

“You wouldn’t try to convert her.”

“No.”

“But you don’t believe what she believes, either.”

“That life is suffering? That all we can do is build up our karma?” Hattie shakes her head. “No.”

Greta orders some more tea.

Flora is not the only one with a color theme today. Greta’s gold. Gold turtleneck, gold jumper—golden tea, and golden honey, too. And though Hattie knows Greta’s hair, of course, to be silver, in the sun it is golden as well, like her barrette. A vision of her friend more than her friend herself.

“Did your parents want to be buried in Iowa?” she asks.

“I’m sure they didn’t, though they didn’t want to be buried in Qufu, either,” answers Hattie.

“So what did they want?” Grace’s hair, live with static, stands on end—a dandelion puff.

“Probably they would just as soon have been sprinkled in a garden,” says Hattie. “I had a friend who did that—had us sprinkle her in a peony bed.”

“Wasn’t that your friend Lee?”

Hattie doesn’t remember having told Greta and Grace about Lee, but of course she has, many times.

“Yes,” she says.

“Some people are keeping their parents’ ashes instead of burying them,” says Greta. “I know someone who made a receptacle out of a prayer wheel. She put it in her kitchen, so she can give it a spin every now and then.”

“Really,” says Hattie, and wants to laugh—the first time in weeks she’s wanted to laugh.

“Maybe graveyards are becoming obsolete,” says Greta.

“We’re so much less connected to the earth than we were,” says Grace.

“Hmm,” says Hattie. “Maybe.” Though a prayer wheel! Goodness. She shakes her head.

• • •

S
he e-mails her niece Tina in Hong Kong.

I have reconsidered my decision re: the graves. I do not myself believe in this sort of superstitious nonsense, let me say. But as I have come to see that many are in distress, I would like to do what I can. And so, all right. If you can arrange for a bone picker, I’d like to meet with him or her this weekend
.