Читать книгу Quiet As They Come - Angie Chau - Страница 8

THE PUSSYCATS

It sounded like a purely capitalistic concept when her six-year-old explained it. “You bring something special into class and tell everyone about it.” In Vietnam, this was called bragging. In America, it was called Show and Tell. They had arrived in this country only six months ago and already her daughter was begging for things, and of all things, Sophia wanted a cat. The best Kim could offer was a movie called The Pussycats. It would be Sophia’s first ever outing to a movie theater and Kim hoped movie magic would cure her daughter’s meowing.

Although the movie outing was indulgent, she wanted to make it up to Sophia for missing their promised Fourth of July play date. Kim’s schedule consisted of ESL class in the mornings, Miss Marty’s beauty school in the afternoons, and weekend work at a beauty salon to earn extra cash. This was her first entire weekend off in two months.

She held Sophia’s hand as they walked at a brisk pace to the discounted matinee. The sun was out, her heart raced, and Kim felt alive, as if anything was possible on a day like this. When they passed a phone booth she thought, why not call him, poor guy’s probably home alone. Kim hopped in and dialed but the longer the rings grew, the more nervous she got. Every succeeding ring became shriller than the one before. The blank spaces in between them were dark pockets to spin inside and cause to hold her breath.

She was unprepared for her foolishness. After all, they’d been friends for decades. She reminded herself that Bao was all alone in this country. She reminded herself that while she had the security of her entire extended family sharing a house with her, he was living in a rented room at the Y. Her rationale gave her the strength to hold on long enough to hear the receptionist say, “Sorry he’s out.”

Because of the delay, mother and daughter ran the last two blocks to the theater. Kim was disappointed by the look of the place when she arrived out of breath. She checked the newspaper clipping in her purse. She blinked and reread the address a second time. Kim had somehow imagined an American theater to be flashier, with gilt and bright lights, and glossy posters behind shiny glass. Before her was a nondescript brown box of a building. Behind a scratchy plastic panel, a frizzy-haired young man sat reading a paperback.

Kim approached, knocked, and made her hand like a peace sign. He nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose, squinted and nodded, pushed out the money tray, and returned to his reading.

Inside the darkened theater, her daughter squeezed her hand and said, “I can’t see!” It made more peculiar the silence. As they made their way up the aisle she noticed that most moviegoers were sitting alone and at wide intervals. Something simply felt odd. The room smelled sanitized as if it had been doused with a large bucket of bleach. And when she finally took a seat, it was so scratchy it felt as if she were sitting on a pineapple, This final assault reminded Kim of all the ways big and small she kept on blundering in this country. Her once keen judgment seemed constantly off-track. She was about to usher her daughter out when the projector lights flickered on. It illuminated Sophia’s black Mary-Janes which had been polished for this very occasion and shined against the glow of the screen. Sophia pointed and said as if already seduced, “Mama . . . it’s starting, look.”

On screen, half a dozen nurses all slim, young, and pretty, lined up in a row. They wore starched white dresses and little white caps. Their hair was pinned into buns. Their legs were in tan nylons. Each woman would twirl when a man passed by jotting notes. Their dainty feet were all in white round-toed heels. The man in the scene was middle aged and ordinary. He wore a pressed shirt that strained across his midsection. When he reached the end of the line, the girls gathered around the chart, put their hands to their mouths, and erupted into a tide of giggles. Kim fidgeted in her seat. She had always preferred Italian films. Her children were evidence. When counseled to give her children Western names to make their assimilation easier, Kim had renamed Sophia after Sophia Loren and Marcel for Marcello Mastroianni.

Despite her efforts to forge ahead with life, an act as benign as going to the movies made her miss her husband even more. Back in Sàigòn, Kim and Duc used to go to the movies every Friday night. They would get durian shakes and boiled peanuts and as soon as the lights went out, she’d rest her head on his shoulder, inhale his cinnamon smell, and give herself over to the fantasy of the film.

Her favorite American movie was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She remembered Elizabeth Taylor stunningly hissing for affection. Her favorite scene was when Elizabeth Taylor’s character said, “I’m not living with you! We occupy the same cage that’s all.” In that moment, Kim was so transfixed that she forgot all about the M&M’s in her hand. She smashed every single one of the candied shells. Her husband teased her endlessly. She thought that was bad enough but then it got even worse.

Something about Liz Taylor’s performance was so thrilling that after seeing the movie, Kim wanted to cut her waist-length hair. She clipped a photo of the violet-eyed actress out of Ciné Monde. Over Duc’s favorite meal of clay pot catfish and seafood sweet and sour soup, she slid the picture beside his bowl. He eyed it flatly and continued slurping.

Finally, he said, “Uh-huh, the girl from that Tin House movie.”

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, silly. But how about her hair? I want to get mine cut like that.” Kim rolled up her folds of blue-black hair and held it at the nape of her neck.

“I love you the way I married you,” he said. He took her hands and flattened his palms against hers, causing her hair to unroll down her back.

“But Duc . . .” she pulled her hair up again and smiled.

“No,” he said and excused himself from the table, fish unfinished.

Kim cleared the table, washed the dishes, broke a bowl.

The following week, she was shopping on Sàigòn’s fashionable Boulevard Bonard, when she found herself in front of the beauty salon. She stood at the window watching the scissors swim and glide through a lady’s hair. A man waved her in and said, “Don’t just stand there.” Once in the salon seat, the hairdresser gathered her hair as she had done for Duc and nudged her chin toward the mirror. He said, “Quelle jolie,” and whispered in her ear, “This cut will accentuate your already elongated neck. You’ll be a swan among mortals.”

Kim said, “But my husband will hate it.”

He said, “Then your husband’s a fool, darling.”

She sat vigilant, watching her tresses falling to the floor. With each snip, she felt the stiffness in her shoulders loosening, the burden of heavy hair no longer straining her neck. She had worn it long since her school days. She could still feel the thick thumping of the braid against her back, skipping rope. She remembered how it would get in her way, scratch her eyes, cause her to trip up. She hated how the boys yanked at it. Later, she used the long layers as a shield, hid behind it when the boys grew into men and stared. On the red leather chair, Kim slowly began to admire the new cut. She liked the way it revealed the shape of her skull, its ability to capture her expressions with clarity, and most of all, how it forced her to be brave.

That evening, Kim felt shaky preparing dinner. She had the maid clean the house over and over. She put on Duc’s favorite traditional dress. When the brass doorknob rattled, she reached for the back of her bared neck. She greeted Duc at the door. He wore his ARVN officer’s uniform. She leaned in to hug him. He took a step back, hands to his side, and stared at her. She lunged to kiss him, but he turned, giving her only his strained jaw to look at. Under his breath he said, “You look like a whore,” and then tramped inside tracking red dirt on her polished floors.

“What’s wrong with you?” she screamed after him. “I’ve asked you to take your boots off in the house.”

From the bedroom he screamed back, “I guess neither of us listens.” He didn’t speak to her for two weeks. And for two weeks Kim forbade the maid from scrubbing those muddy footprints.

Inside the theater, Kim reached between her feet for the M&Ms inside her purse. She squeezed Sophia’s knee once she found the candy and held them out to her daughter. Sophia didn’t respond. Kim whispered, “Chocolate.” Sophia’s eyes stared straight ahead. Kim tapped her daughter’s hand. The little hands resisted, clutching the armrests.

Puzzled, Kim turned to the screen and in larger than life techno-color got her response. Ample breasts and bare butts jiggled in her face. The nurses were completely nude, slithering about on the floor. They had wild manes and smoky eyes. Their rhinestone collars glittered around their necks like leashes. They were crawling around, licking each other, cat-like. Kim slapped her hands over her daughter’s eyes. The candy flew.

“Stop it, I can’t see. Let go.” Sophia tried to pry her mother’s hands loose. The camera panned up. Before her, the man stood naked, his penis fully erect. Kim gasped.

When they began to do what they did Kim was unable to look away, unable to move. When they began making noises, she was shaken from her paralysis. She didn’t have enough hands to cover the child’s ears too. She gathered their jackets and rushed her daughter out. Sophia cried, digging her heels into the bald carpet of the cinema floor. A bearded man in an aisle seat cringed at them. Outside, beneath sunlight, the girl’s neck was still craned toward the movie screen, fighting each step home. She didn’t want to leave her first ever outing to a movie. As they crossed the street, Kim heard a cat-call followed by a slow steady whistle. She thanked God, Buddha, and every Bodhisattva she could recall, that Bao hadn’t come too.

Back at the 22nd Avenue house, she realized that Bao wasn’t at his place because he was at hers. Kim stood in the middle of the living room and told her family, “I’ll never understand this country. I thought we came because it would make more sense here.” The women were watching TV on one end of the room and the men were drinking beer and roasting cuttlefish on the other.

Her son sat with his uncles. He was fidgeting with the mobile stove on the table and didn’t even look at her. She said, “Careful you don’t burn yourself, love.” Marcel’s eyes didn’t lift. He was probably mad she hadn’t taken him along to the movies. Kim had insisted he go to the park with his uncles. She wanted him to run around and kick a ball. She wanted him to do boy things, all the things she couldn’t provide because his father was locked away in a prison in central Vietnam.

The men laughed so hard tears streamed down their reddened cheeks when she described The Pussycats. She realized then that they were already drunk. She played into it, told them about the naked women crawling around but left out the part about the man. This morsel she would save for the women, in the kitchen, over food. But first, she needed to stew it over so she could interpret her own gasp of disbelief and unwanted arousal. She hadn’t seen a man or more accurately a man’s in years.

Her older sister Huong asked, “How are we supposed to raise our children in a place like this?”

Her sister-in-law Trang asked, “How was a child permitted into this kind of establishment in the first place?”

The women sat in a row, crossed their arms, shook their heads and tssked their disapproval. From the other side of the room, her youngest brother Tri, who had lived in America the longest of them all said, “Don’t blame the business owner. It’s America, capitalism.”

Bao waved a slice of cuttlefish in his hand and said, “You get what you pay for, remember?” As if it were a stage, he joined her in the middle of the living room floor and said, “Pussycat in English is the same as Butterfly in Vietnamese.” He tossed the dried fish in his mouth. “She knew that!” He chomped on his food and bared his teeth to her. All her brothers laughed.

Kim said, “We have the same lesson plan at school and yet somehow he’s an expert on these matters.” At this, the rest of the women roared too.

The only person who didn’t laugh was her oldest brother Lam who sat placid and sipped at his beer. He was the patriarch of the family and Bao was his best friend. Lam stated, “Little sister, Bao’s only offering advice of one who’s like an older brother to you.”

Lam’s wife said, “Ah, it just goes to show the Americans are much smarter than the Viet Cong, see? Here, the evil is masked cunningly.” Trang doubled over on the brown corduroy couch laughing at her own joke. She had to cross her arms to hold her breasts down. As a teen she had been all curves and hazel eyes. It landed her on billboards for Coca-Cola and they paid her with a lifetime’s supply. Lam explained his wife’s weight saying it was all the soda she drank during her modeling days. Nobody dared mention her fat French father and genetics playing a part.

Later when they were alone in the kitchen, Trang squeezed Kim’s hands in the pillows of her own and whispered, “I’m afraid my husband fears nothing, just kittens and butterflies leading to . . . birds and bees.”

In this house there were always secrets and alliances. There were the things everyone was supposed to know. For example, that Huong was an insomniac, so if she was sleeping, it meant tipped- toes for the entire house. And then there were the things one knew but pretended not to know, like big Trang’s mixed blood, or Lam’s volatile temper, or the fact that Huong and her husband no longer had sex. So if Viet is sleeping out in the hallway, don’t ask. But be careful you don’t trip over his body in the middle of the night on your way to the bathroom. This was what it meant to live with your extended family, an entire nuclear family to a room, in a three-bedroom house.

That night little Sophia fell asleep immediately, exhausted from her fits of crying. Marcel stayed quiet, withholding his affection, stubborn like his father. Kim changed as usual behind a sheet dotted with faded blue cornflowers, hung in the corner of the room. “If you’re nice, I’ll read you Father’s letter,” she said. She raised her arms, quickly pulling her pajama top over her head. Kim couldn’t stop thinking about the women on the big screen. She longed for their abandon, the way they had stretched and curled with nothing on except for those rhinestone collars with the little heart shaped name-tags dangling from their necks like jewels.

Kim asked Marcel to scoot his younger sister to the far side of their bed. She reached into the bedside drawer and pulled out the familiar grainy envelope, marked par avion. She received Duc’s letters with pure relief. These thin sheets and tight scrawls were the only proof that her husband was still alive.

Duc’s first words, I love you. I miss you. Prison teaches you this, to not waste time. The best comes first, don’t save anything for last. Kim whispered her husband’s words into her son’s ear. Marcel closed his eyes and pulled the blanket to his chin. His father said, get good grades, listen to your mother, take care of your sister. She told him that his father was proud of him. She left out the lines from a husband to a wife that said I miss your smooth skin and your soft touch . . . . I do not think I will ever be released from the fate of this grave site . . . . I want my son to grow up with a father. You must move on. Remarry . . . . You have always been and will always be the great love of my life.

She covered her face with the letter, trying to gather Duc’s scent. She had read it at least ten times since its arrival. But the last line destroyed her each time. You have always been and will always be . . . . It wasn’t the voice of the hot-tempered, hard-headed man she knew. Only a defeated man would give up his woman. She felt her eyes welling up and quickly wiped it away.

Marcel asked, “Are you sad, Mama?”

She put her pointing finger over her lips and then tip-toed down the hallway. She feared waking her brother and sister-in-law and their three sons until she remembered that the boys were spending the night with their “cool uncle Tri” and felt a pang of guilt for not having encouraged Marcel to go along too. Here she was reading him love letters, crying, and turning him into a mama’s boy instead.

At the end of the corridor, Kim saw the couple’s door slightly ajar. She reached to shut it, unprepared for the silhouette of Trang’s torso against the starkness of the full moon. Trang straddled Lam, allowing him to support her tremendous mass. The bun her sister-in-law wore by day now cascaded free and flowing down her back. Kim didn’t want to watch, but her feet were anchored, and the motion was intoxicating. They thrashed and swayed, and it appeared to her like a visual symphony. The momentum increased until it became an urgent rhythmic staccato and then the headboard pounded into the wall, a final crescendo. She heard Lam saying, “Quiet,” trying to restrain his wife’s reckless cries.

In the bathroom, Kim broke down and cried, resenting what she had witnessed, this flaunting of what fate and destiny had taken from her. She reread Duc’s letter again. I miss your smooth skin and soft touch. A man always missed the warmth and softness of a woman. She yearned for the opposite, for his firmness, the rigid angles, the span of his back that stretched like endless steppes and the emerald fields of home.

Kim had been a virgin on her wedding night. As the baby girl of the family, she received a lot of frantically whispered advice. Lan, her oldest sister, (the one who insisted in staying in Vietnam) had told her to lie still. If she wiggled too much, her husband might not believe she was a virgin. Huong, her middle sister, the aspiring actress, told her to wiggle a little, and sigh, sounds were sexy. They went on about things being too big or too tight, or small and dry, not to mention the pain. When her new husband climbed on top of her, Kim was confused, unclear if she should lay stiff as a board or pounce around. Before he had even entered her, she began making noises. After nine long months of anticipation, Duc flopped on his back and said to the ceiling, “Please tell me this is a joke, God.” Kim confessed, revealing her sisters’ secrets. Together they laughed, picturing Lan lying like a sack of potatoes and Huong wiggling around like a fish. Kim didn’t mind not consummating her marriage on her wedding night because her young husband caressed her, kissed her in places that had never known the lushness of a kiss, gave her new secrets all for herself.

For their honeymoon, they picked the Da Lat countryside for its scenic waterfalls and oceans of wildflowers. On the first day, caught in a shower, they ran for cover and happened onto a hidden grove of trees, a black-green canopy of pines. Kim was drenched, and Duc said, matter-of-factly, looking at her in her traditional white 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 caught her and waved her out.

The men progressed from beer to cognac. The women slowly inched into the circle. They passed the few remaining beer cans around. They made an excuse of it, saying, “We don’t want to waste anything.”

The 49ers were ahead. The men jumped out of their seats cheering. On the screen, a man on the red team caught a ball thrown from a great distance. He leapt straight up into the air and with the very tips of his fingers barely grasped the edge of the ball until he cradled it in his arms and protected it against his belly. Afterward, he flung it into the ground. The other team members hugged him and some were so happy they even patted his bottom. He was a big bear of a man and everyone agreed he was the best athlete on the team.

But Tri said, “Dwight Clark? No way, the best is right here baby,” pointing to the name Montana stretched across his back and then doing a stomp and clap before shaking his butt. All the kids giggled.

Bao said, “Try some,” and handed his cognac to Kim. She acquiesced when the women egged her on. She liked how relaxed she felt after only two sips. Lam was rip-roaring drunk and didn’t object. He was busy strumming his guitar and singing pop songs from the old country for the kids. Marcel sat on the floor, resting his hands in his lap, mesmerized. Sophia pulled at her brother’s shirttail, needy for his attention. When this didn’t work, she meowed in his ear.

Bao turned to Kim and asked, “Is there food left?”

They went to the kitchen and Kim offered to make him a plate. She gave him a scoop of rice topped with chicken curry, pan-fried noodles, shrimp salad, and spring rolls. She wanted to give him everything, all the good stuff.

Bao gestured to the freshly sliced peppers placed at the corner beside the basil. “That’s something my wife did.” He was looking at her as if he wanted to say something more, when Kim was certain there was nothing more, that there could not be.

“Duc liked spicy food, too,” she said. She felt the alcohol simmering inside and feared she had had too much.

“Any word on his release?”

Kim ran cold water from the faucet and distracted herself by preparing tea. She found the kettle almost too heavy to bear. She had become a weaker woman than she used to be. She stood on her toes reaching for the cups in the cupboards overhead. Bao grabbed them for her and stood behind her so close the tips of his shoes tapped her heels. Her hands shook when he handed her the delicate cups. She thanked him without meeting his eyes.

The kids were running down the hall. She heard their little footsteps echoing on the old floorboards. Marcel shouted, “Stop it or I’ll tell!” Kim froze, momentarily believing her seven-year-old son could see through walls, had seen through her.

When she lifted her face to Bao’s she hoped it was composed, expressionless, withholding. She suspected she had failed because her lips were trembling. He sat next to her, closer than usual inside the arm of the breakfast nook. They were lit beneath a naked dangling bulb. Kim cracked open the window and rested her head against the windowpane. Her nieces Elle and Michelle were outside gossiping. Frenzied chatter rushed in with the fog. One of them uttered an American boy’s name, something like Tyler or Kyle and then both girls fell into a gaggle of a giggling fit.

Bao blew out a defeated half-chuckle and said, “Me and you, we’re the same. We’re almost living, but not quite.”

“We’re living. My children don’t want for anything.”

“I’m talking me and you.” He squeezed her hand beneath the table. “I wish things were different,” he said. She settled her gaze into Bao’s red-veined eyes and wondered if he too slept with a pillow cradled between his legs, lost sleep because he cried at midnight, woke up before dawn grabbing for a warm body that wasn’t there.

Kim was scared but continued holding Bao’s hand. He interlaced his fingers between hers, pushing deep so that the dips and grooves of bone and flesh became a solid fist. With his other hand, he reached over and touched the nape of her neck with cautious fingertips. He swallowed hard and she watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall. “I like your hair short. Brings out your face,” he said. “I’m glad to see it’s not wet anymore.” He inched in with cognac and cigarettes on his breath.

Kim let him kiss her shoulder, while she watched the door. She let his lips graze her neck, while she studied for shadows under the slit of it. She let him place his hand on her thigh as she listened for approaching footsteps. She thought she could smell her own fear. She thought her heart would burst. And yet she couldn’t help but smell his scent, couldn’t help imagining how his mouth would feel opening upon her. Her husband had said move on, but would he forgive her? Or would she live with a lifetime of footprints stamped on her back?

Kim understood desire in its true form as a thirst, as a yearning so deep, it meant risking tragic consequences for the promise of only one sip.

Bao asked, “Can we go somewhere?”

But where? She pictured her and Bao in the cluttered hallway closet the kids called the phone booth, panting and grasping between the interview clothes, reaching for an arm to discover a broom handle, squirming between winter jackets and cardboard boxes. From this nook in the kitchen, in the central room of a shared house, Kim heard her sisters in the living room asking the men if they were finished with their food. She heard her brothers grumble and sigh. There was the clatter and ding of plates being stacked one on top of the other.

Bao said, “Please, anywhere,” and this time it was his lips that trembled. He squeezed her hand even harder, not letting go, leaning in closer, waiting for her reply. She could feel his warmth radiant on the tips of her lashes.

The kettle began to cry but they ignored it. Kim wanted to give herself over. She wanted to be like The Pussycats, arched back and easy abandonment. She wet her lips and waited. Bao’s mouth had barely skimmed hers when the boom of her oldest brother’s voice jolted her backward. From the other room, Lam shouted something incomprehensible, although she guessed it to be the punch line of a joke when a huge wave of laughter spilled into the kitchen. The tide of laughter peaked and crested, crashing to the shattering of breaking glass, followed by her daughter’s wail, screeching louder than the crying kettle. These decibels of life coalesced layer by layer, until the pressure of so much wanting under one roof finally swept the kitchen door wide open.

Sophia ran through and hopped into her mother’s lap. She cried about the glass she’d accidentally dropped and broken. Kim comforted her by smoothing down her hair. As was Sophia’s new habit, she meowed to show her gratitude. But this time, Kim didn’t scold her. She continued petting the sleek black hair. Beneath her hand, her daughter purred.