Quiet As They Come. Angie Chau
tunic, “I love your dark nipples.” Against the trunk of a grand old pine, standing up, her husband made love to her for the first time. She held her palms flat against the cracked bark. Big great drops splattered on top of her head, the leaves clapped the applause of an audience a stadium away, and the winds howled feverish approval. Kim felt more alive than she’d ever felt and yet vulnerable, animal-like. Their lovemaking was as natural as breathing or sleeping. It imitated hunger. She promised herself, on the spot, that she would never belong to anyone else.
As Kim rocked in place on the toilet seat, she had to stuff away her thoughts of Bao. Looking around the bathroom, she noticed the mildewed tiles and the crooked floor, the splintered wood and the loose doors, she saw how slippery everything had become in her life. With this realization, she forgave her brother and sister-in-law. In this crowded old house, a slammed drawer or a loud laugh, a soft breeze, or a bit of gossip, just about anything could crack open, revealing even the slightest of indiscretions.
Mornings had to be tightly orchestrated on 22nd Ave. There were twelve people and only one bathroom between them all. Kim told the children “Brush your teeth so your teachers know you’re not the children of peasants.” She said, “Skip the shower but at least wet your hair down so you don’t look like a refugee.” She dried their hair but had no time to dry her own.
Kim arrived to her English as a Second Language class looking like a wet stray. Bao saved a desk for her and lifted the books beside him. When she sat down, he clawed at his desktop and smirked. It reminded her even more of his reputation as a tom-cat before he married. In Sàigòn, he’d strut around the city with a camera dangling from his neck. Once when she was a teenager, she let Bao watch her reading beneath a lemon blossom in their courtyard. It was fragrant springtime, and the pollen made her brave. She lay on her side propped up on an elbow and smiled at him every couple of pages. He approached, asking her to pose. She allowed him one quick snap before she ran away because she was young, scared, and swollen by the thought of him even then.
A decade later, he was the only man in her life who wasn’t family.
They’d gotten into the habit of going for coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts after class. Outside, it began to rain. Bao lit his cigarette and smoked it with relish. Over steaming cups he said, “Careful you don’t get sick, going outside when your hair is still wet.”
Kim shook her head, allowing the damp ends to splay out against her face. She said, “I’ll use the blow dryer when I get to beauty school,” when he reached across the table with fingertips stained from nicotine and without a hint of self-consciousness, brushed the hair from her cheek.
They sat nestled inside their booth watching the passersbys outside in trench coats and newspaper hats. Kim said, “I can’t believe Sophia and I walked to the movies just yesterday.” She blushed immediately regretting the mention of those Pussycats again.
“My sons would play in the rain naked and roll around in the mud. It made my wife crazy,” he said.
“It would have made me crazy, too. I hate mud in the house,” she said thinking back to Duc and his muddy footprints.
She watched Bao put out his cigarette and tuck the remaining stub back in its box. “I miss home,” he said. “American rain is ugly, gray, too much like that war.”
“Have you heard yet?” she asked. “Have you gotten any news?”
He wrestled with his hands and then slid the cigarette box across the table with a flicker of disgust. He looked out at the rain and said, “I should have waited for them.”
Kim placed both palms against the table’s edge and stopped the box as if she were a goalie. “You had no choice,” she said.
“No,” he said, “I could have stayed, but I chose to leave.”
“They were locking up American sympathizers. Who would you help locked up? Would you help your wife the way Duc is helping me?” Her hands trembled with her jolt of fury. Her voice was full of strain. Everyone knew that once he turned his camera from snapping pretty girls to documenting the decimated villages and then the war crimes, Bao’s life was at risk. She wanted to tell him that he was being stupid, irrational. But her reflection in the window revealed to her the disgraceful transparency of a schoolgirl. Instead, she shut up. She slid out a cigarette and lit up.
They said nothing, sitting in silence for what seemed like a long while, until Bao finally spoke. “What happened with Sophia yesterday, at least you got that. It made me realize that my boys will probably be men by the time I see them. I have to become a citizen before I can be a sponsor. Did you know that? Who knows how long that’ll take?” After six months, alone in a new country, Bao told Kim that he finally understood the depths of loneliness, its tendency to weaken the mind. “That’s why widows and prisoners are permanently changed,” he said.
Kim stroked the backside of his hand only once. She wondered which was worse. To be stuck in Vietnam while you knew your husband was free? Or to be free while your husband was imprisoned?
After an entire afternoon of beauty school and inhaling nail polish remover at Miss Marty’s Hair Academy and Esthetic Institute, Kim returned home to the smells of sautéed onions and fried fish. Inside the cluttered kitchen Trang stood over a cutting board with her head bent low. Without looking up she lifted her knife and pointed toward the window. “Playing,” she said. “It’s a good day. No fights and no crying.” She leaned in with her great weight and halved an onion. “Tri’s bringing the boys back and he’ll be bringing some friends over too. He wants to introduce us to Monday Night Football. ‘An American tradition, ’ he said. ‘Just potato chips,’ he said. But my husband said it’s dishonorable to have people over with no food to offer.”
Kim rolled up her sleeves. When Huong came home she joined in too. When her youngest brother Tri arrived with his friends, they wowed at all the food. “Four variations of fish sauces to choose from alone?” The single men said they hadn’t seen anything like it since they left their moms and sisters back in Vietnam.
Tri pulled Kim aside and said, “I told you guys just chips and dip.”
“I don’t even know what dip is,” she said.
“Sauce from a can,” he sighed.
Often it seemed that her own brother was an alien to her. Although there was only a three-year age difference between them, it was clear that his years in America had changed him. As the baby boy of the family, Tri was sent to America to get a Western education so that he could return with an American degree and be a sure bet for Vietnamese Parliament. Her parents would have never guessed when they sent him away that the American War would end with a Communist victory, that they would never see their youngest son again. However, it was Tri’s U.S. residency that allowed him to sponsor them from the refugee camp. Otherwise, they likely would have ended up in Australia, or Germany, or France, since America was top on everyone’s wish list.
Tri asked, “Who else is coming with all this?” He reached for his wallet. “You guys can’t afford this.”
She said, “It’s okay, you’ve given us enough,” and pushed his money away.
Kim dragged him to the ancestral shrine where framed portraits of their deceased parents sat beside a platter of fruit and some burning incense. “Look,” she said, “I prayed for your team to win.”
Tri said, “It’s kind of you Sis, but you should save your prayers for the big games. This isn’t the Super Bowl. It’s not even the Play-Offs.” He flapped at the collar of his red number sixteen jersey. “It’s hot. I need a beer.”
Just as the game began, Bao and Lam arrived. From the kitchen, Kim watched him shaking hands and greeting her siblings. As soon as he turned, she shrank behind the swinging door and stayed in the kitchen with the women and kids. Sophia hung on Kim’s thigh meowing for food. Kim shushed her and said, “Stop that. You’ll starve in this world if you don’t speak properly.”
The men in the living room were getting rowdier with each beer. When Kim peeked out, Bao