On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Read online

  Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows. I willed myself into a severe obedience and said his name.

  I let their laughter enter me.

  “Again,” he said.

  “Kyle.”

  “Louder.”

  “Kyle.” My eyes still shut.

  “That’s a good little bitch.”

  Then, like a break in weather, a song came on the radio. “Hey, my cousin just went to their concert!” And like that it was over. Their shadows cleared above me. I let my nose drip with snot. I stared at my feet, at the shoes you bought me, the ones with red lights that flashed on the soles when I walked.

  My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.

  * * *

  —

  That night you were sitting on the couch with a towel wrapped around your head after your shower, a Marlboro Red smoldering in your hand. I stood there, holding myself.

  “Why?” You stared hard at the TV.

  You stabbed the cigarette into your teacup and I immediately regretted saying anything. “Why’d you let them do that? Don’t close your eyes. You’re not sleepy.”

  You put your eyes on me, blue smoke swirling between us.

  “What kind of boy would let them do that?” Smoke leaked from the corners of your mouth. “You did nothing.” You shrugged. “Just let them.”

  I thought of the window again, how everything seemed like a window, even the air between us.

  You grabbed my shoulders, your forehead pressed fast to my own. “Stop crying. You’re always crying!” You were so close I could smell the ash and toothpaste between your teeth. “Nobody touched you yet. Stop crying—I said stop, dammit!”

  The third slap that day flung my gaze to one side, the TV screen flashed before my head snapped back to face you. Your eyes darted back and forth across my face.

  Then you pulled me into you, my chin pressed hard to your shoulder.

  “You have to find a way, Little Dog,” you said into my hair. “You have to because I don’t have the English to help you. I can’t say nothing to stop them. You find a way. You find a way or you don’t tell me about this ever again, you hear?” You pulled back. “You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going. You have a bellyful of English.” You placed your palm on my stomach, almost whispering, “You have to use it, okay?”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  You brushed my hair to one side, kissed my forehead. You studied me, a bit too long, before falling back on the sofa waving your hand. “Get me another cigarette.”

  When I came back with the Marlboro and a Zippo lighter, the TV was off. You just sat there staring out the blue window.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, in the kitchen, I watched as you poured the milk into a glass tall as my head.

  “Drink,” you said, your lips pouted with pride. “This is American milk so you’re gonna grow a lot. No doubt about it.”

  I drank so much of that cold milk it grew tasteless on my numbed tongue. Each morning after that, we’d repeat this ritual: the milk poured with a thick white braid, I’d drink it down, gulping, making sure you could see, both of us hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy.

  I’m drinking light, I thought. I’m filling myself with light. The milk would erase all the dark inside me with a flood of brightness. “A little more,” you said, rapping the counter. “I know it’s a lot. But it’s worth it.”

  I clanked the glass down on the counter, beaming. “See?” you said, arms crossed. “You already look like Superman!”

  I grinned, milk bubbling between my lips.

  * * *

  —

  Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

  Lan, through her stories, was also traveling in a spiral. As I listened, there would be moments when the story would change—not much, just a minuscule detail, the time of day, the color of someone’s shirt, two air raids instead of three, an AK-47 instead of a 9mm, the daughter laughing, not crying. Shifts in the narrative would occur—the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. “Make me young again,” Lan said. “Make me black again, not snow like this, Little Dog. Not snow.”

  But the truth is I don’t know, Ma. I have theories I write down then erase and walk away from the desk. I put the kettle on and let the sound of boiling water change my mind. What’s your theory—about anything? I know if I asked you, you’d laugh, covering your mouth, a gesture common among the girls in your childhood village, one you’ve kept all your life, even with your naturally straight teeth. You’d say no, theories are for people with too much time and not enough determination. But I know of one.

  We were on a plane to California—do you remember this? You were giving him, my father, another chance, even with your nose still crooked from his countless backhands. I was six and we had left Lan behind in Hartford with Mai. At one point on the flight, the turbulence got so bad I bounced on the seat, my entire tiny self lifted clean off the cushion, then yanked down by the seatbelt. I started to cry. You wrapped one arm around my shoulders, leaned in, your weight absorbing the plane’s throttle. Then you pointed to the thick cloud-bands outside the window and said, “When we get this high up, the clouds turn into boulders—hard rocks—that’s what you’re feeling.” Your lips grazing my ear, your tone soothing, I examined the massive granite-colored mountains across the sky’s horizon. Yes, of course the plane shook. We were moving through rocks, our flight a supernatural perseverance of passage. Because to go back to that man took that kind of magic. The plane should rattle, it should nearly shatter. With the laws of the universe made new, I sat back and watched as we broke through one mountain after another.

  * * *

  —

  When it comes to words, you possess fewer than the coins you saved from your nail salon tips in the milk gallon under the kitchen cabinet. Often you’d gesture to a bird, a flower, or a pair of lace curtains from Walmart and say only that it’s beautiful—whatever it was. “Đẹp quá!” you once exclaimed, pointing to the hummingbird whirring over the creamy orchid in the neighbor’s yard. “It’s beautiful!” You asked me what it was called and I answered in English—the only language I had for it. You nodded blankly.

  The next day, you had already forgotten the name, the syllables slipping right from your tongue. But then, coming home from town, I spotted the hummingbird feeder in our front yard, the glass orb filled with a clear, sweet nectar, surrounded by colorful plastic blossoms with pinhead holes for their beaks. When I asked you about it, you pulled the crumpled cardboard box from the garbage, pointed to the hummingbird, its blurred wings and needled beak—a bird you could not name but could nonetheless recognize. “Đẹp quá,” you smiled. “Đẹp quá.”

  * * *

  —

  When you came home that night, after Lan and I had eaten our share of tea-rice, we all walked the forty minutes it took to get to the C-Town off New Britain Avenue. It was near closing and the aisles were empty. You wanted to buy oxtail, to make bún bò huế for the cold winter week ahead of us.

  Lan and I stood beside you at the butcher counter, holding hands, as you searched the blocks of marbled flesh in the glass case. Not seeing the tails, you waved to the man behind the counter. When he asked if he could help, you paused for too long before saying, in Vietnamese, “Đuôi bò. Anh có đuôi bò không?”

  His eyes flicked over each of our faces and asked again, le
aning closer. Lan’s hand twitched in my grip. Floundering, you placed your index finger at the small of your back, turned slightly, so the man could see your backside, then wiggled your finger while making mooing sounds. With your other hand, you made a pair of horns above your head. You moved, carefully twisting and gyrating so he could recognize each piece of this performance: horns, tail, ox. But he only laughed, his hand over his mouth at first, then louder, booming. The sweat on your forehead caught the fluorescent light. A middle-aged woman, carrying a box of Lucky Charms, shuffled past us, suppressing a smile. You worried a molar with your tongue, your cheek bulging. You were drowning, it seemed, in air. You tried French, pieces of which remained from your childhood. “Derrière de vache!” you shouted, the veins in your neck showing. By way of reply the man called to the back room, where a shorter man with darker features emerged and spoke to you in Spanish. Lan dropped my hand and joined you—mother and daughter twirling and mooing in circles, Lan giggling the whole time.

  The men roared, slapping the counter, their teeth showing huge and white. You turned to me, your face wet, pleading. “Tell them. Go ahead and tell them what we need.” I didn’t know that oxtail was called oxtail. I shook my head, shame welling inside me. The men stared, their chortling now reduced to bewildered concern. The store was closing. One of them asked again, head lowered, sincere. But we turned from them. We abandoned the oxtail, the bún bò huế. You grabbed a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of mayonnaise. None of us spoke as we checked out, our words suddenly wrong everywhere, even in our mouths.

  In line, among the candy bars and magazines, was a tray of mood rings. You picked one up between your fingers and, after checking the price, took three—one for each of us. “Đẹp quá,” you said after a while, barely audible. “Đẹp quá.”

  No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level.

  As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

  That night I promised myself I’d never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you. So began my career as our family’s official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.

  When you worked for a year at the clock factory, I called your boss and said, in my most polite diction, that my mother would like her hours reduced. Why? Because she was exhausted, because she was falling asleep in the bathtub after she came home from work, and that I was afraid she would drown. A week later your hours were cut. Or the times, so many times, I would call the Victoria’s Secret catalog, ordering you bras, underwear, leggings. How the call ladies, after confusion from the prepubescent voice on the other end, relished in a boy buying lingerie for his mother. They awww’d into the phone, often throwing in free shipping. And they would ask me about school, cartoons I was watching, they would tell me about their own sons, that you, my mother, must be so happy.

  I don’t know if you’re happy, Ma. I never asked.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the apartment, we had no oxtail. But we did have three mood rings, one glinting on each of our fingers. You were lying facedown on a blanket spread on the floor with Lan straddled across your back, kneading the knots and stiff cords from your shoulders. The greenish TV light made us all seem underwater. Lan was mumbling another monologue from one of her lives, each sentence a remix of the last, and interrupted herself only to ask you where it hurt.

  Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.

  It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now—as Lan called to me, “Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother.” And we knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.

  You groaned with relief as we worked your muscles loose, unraveling you with nothing but our own weight. You lifted your finger and, speaking into the blanket, said, “Am I happy?”

  It wasn’t until I saw the mood ring that I realized you were asking me, once more, to interpret another portion of America. Before I could answer, Lan thrust her hand before my nose. “Check me too, Little Dog—am I happy?” It could be, in writing you here, I am writing to everyone—for how can there be a private space if there is no safe space, if a boy’s name can both shield him and turn him into an animal at once?

  “Yes. You’re both happy,” I answered, knowing nothing. “You’re both happy, Ma. Yes,” I said again. Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?

  “I’m happy!” Lan threw her arms in the air. “I’m happy on my boat. My boat, see?” She pointed to your arms, splayed out like oars, she and I on each side. I looked down and saw it, the brown, yellowish floorboards swirling into muddy currents. I saw the weak ebb thick with grease and dead grass. We weren’t rowing, but adrift. We were clinging to a mother the size of a raft until the mother beneath us grew stiff with sleep. And we soon fell silent as the raft took us all down this great brown river called America, finally happy.

  It is a beautiful country depending on where you look. Depending on where you look you might see the woman waiting on the shoulder of the dirt road, an infant girl wrapped in a sky-blue shawl in her arms. She rocks her hips, cups the girl’s head. You were born, the woman thinks, because no one else was coming. Because no one else is coming, she begins to hum.

  A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission. Behind her, the fields have begun to catch. A braid of smoke through a page-blank sky. One man has black hair, the other a yellow mustache like a scar of sunlight. Stench of gasoline coming off their fatigues. The rifles sway as they walk up to her, their metal bolts winking in afternoon sun.

  A woman, a girl, a gun. This is an old story, one anyone can tell. A trope in a movie you can walk away from if it weren’t already here, already written down.

  It has started to rain; the dirt around the woman’s bare feet is flecked with red-brown quotation marks—her body a thing spoken with. Her white shirt clings against her bony shoulders as she sweats. The grass all around her is flattened, as if god had pressed his hand there, reserving a space for an eighth day. It’s a beautiful country, she’s been told, depending on who you are.

  * * *

  —

  It’s not a god—of course not—but a helicopter, a Huey, another lord whose wind’s so heavy that, a few feet away
, a lint-grey warbler thrashes in the high grass, unable to correct herself.

  The girl’s eye fills with the chopper in the sky, her face a dropped peach. Her blue shawl finally made visible with black ink, like this.

  Somewhere, deep inside this beautiful country, in the back of a garage lit with a row of fluorescent lights, as legend has it, five men have gathered around a table. Beneath their sandaled feet, pools of motor oil reflect nothing. On one end of the table a cluster of glass bottles. The vodka inside them shimmers in the harsh light as the men talk, their elbows shifting impatiently. They fall silent each time one of them glances toward the door. It should open anytime now. The light flickers once, stays on.

  The vodka poured into shot glasses, some ringed with rust from being stored in a metal bullet case from the previous war. The heavy glasses thunk on the table, the burn swallowed into a darkness invented by thirst.

  If I say the woman. If I say the woman is bearing down, her back hunched below this man-made storm, would you see her? From where you are standing, inches, which is to say years, from this page, would you see the shred of blue shawl blowing across her collarbones, the mole at the outside corner of her left eye as she squints at the men, who are now close enough for her to realize they are not men at all, but boys—eighteen, twenty at most? Can you hear the sound of the chopper, its dismemberment of air so loud it drowns the shouting beneath it? The wind coarse with smoke—and something else, a sweat-soaked char, its odd and acrid taste blowing from a hut at the edge of the field. A hut that, moments ago, was filled with human voices.

  The girl, her ear pressed to the woman’s chest, listens as if eavesdropping behind a door. There is something running inside the woman, a beginning, or rather, a rearranging of syntax. Eyes closed, she searches, her tongue on the cliff of a sentence.