Читать книгу Dragon Chica - Mai-lee Chai - Страница 8

“Hurry up, Sourdi!” I hollered to my older sister. I was packing the spring rolls Ma had made before she left for work that morning so that we could sell them to the pilgrims lining up to see the apparition of the Virgin Mary on the freezer case at Mrs. Lê’s QuikMart. “If the taco trucks find out about the pilgrims, we are hella screwed!”

“You said a dirty word! You said a dirty word!” My little brother, Sam, started jumping up and down excitedly on the sofa bed that I hadn’t bothered to fold up since it was Saturday and Ma had to work all day and wouldn’t know. Plus, I was busy wrapping the spring rolls in Saran Wrap so they wouldn’t leak through the paper bags and ruin my T-shirt again.

“Shuddup, squirt. You’re not allowed to jump on the bed,” I snapped. “Come over here and help if you’re not gonna watch cartoons.”

“I’m watching cartoons,” he said and sat back down on the bed next to my younger sisters, the twins, Navy and Maly.

I finished packing the two grocery bags full of spring rolls when Sourdi made her entrance, emerging finally from our apartment’s lone bathroom. She’d reached the age where she liked to lock herself in there to do her eyes and cover her pimples with Clearasil—though I could still see them under the Cover Girl—and make movie star faces in the mirror. I know what she did, because she used to let me stay in the bathroom with her when she put on her makeup. But this summer, when I was eleven and she turned fifteen, she locked me out, too.

“’Bout time,” I said.

She ignored my sour mood. “Come on,” she said, picking up one of the paper bags. “Y’all behave while we’re gone, you hear me?”

“I’m in charge, I’m in charge!” Sam shouted, jumping again.

“Sourdi’s in charge,” I snapped. “Anything goes wrong while we’re gone, we’ll tell Ma.” Then I grabbed my own sack and ran out the door after Sourdi.

It was a typical hot summer day as we headed over to the QuikMart, four and a half blocks from our apartment. We only had the one dinky air conditioner in the window that didn’t work so good and two fans, so it actually felt better to be outside, although the asphalt was melting beneath our flip flops when we crossed the street. I turned to look over my shoulder to see if we’d left footprints, but Sourdi was impatient now, and tugged on my arm.

“Who’s the slow poke now?” she said.

“It’s just cuz you like Mrs. Lê’s stupid son, Than,” I said, and Sourdi pulled my hair, hard, so I stopped teasing her.

Then I could see them. Already snaking around the corner, two blocks from the QuikMart, all the Pilgrims come to see the Virgin, and my heart beat faster in my chest as I calculated how much more we could charge everyone, and I wished Ma had made more spring rolls. Sourdi ran ahead to get the Pepsis from Mrs. Lê. (She gave us a deal; she’d started charging admission so she was okay if we made a profit too. Maybe she figured if the people were fed and hydrated, they’d keep coming.) The Pilgrims were snaking down the sidewalk in an uneven line, some sipping from Icees and cans of Tab and thermoses of hot black tea, others just panting in the hot sunlight. Mostly the Pilgrims were older, people who had begun to fray around the edges, chipped teeth, thinning hair, liver spots, but there were a few families, women with squalling babies, and crippled people. A very few were just young, like the pair of round-faced nuns from India, their foreheads bright with sweat, smiling like happy Buddhas, who had arrived one Thursday and reappeared in line every day for a week. They remembered us, their bright black eyes lighting up and their tiny white teeth flashing in smiles as they waved me over, ready to buy their lunch. It was strange. They would wait in line all day, and then, just as it was their turn to go inside and see the miraculous appearance of the Holy Mother, they would give up their place and move to the very back. I asked Mrs. Lê about the mystery of it once, and she whispered almost in awe that it must be a form of penance. I nodded then sagely, even though I didn’t know what that meant.

“Spring rolls! Fresh spring rolls!” I called out, and a couple of old people pushing a listless looking young man in a wheelchair waved to me.

It was amazing how much you could charge people for simple spring rolls when they were hungry and hot and desperate enough to wait for hours in the sun to see a shadow on some permafrost on a freezer case. I would’ve said that was the real miracle. If anyone had asked me.

We made three hundred forty-seven bucks that day. So we treated ourselves to a six-pack of soda and a box of rocket pops for the kids waiting for us at home. We figured Ma wouldn’t mind if we spent a little of the money, since we were flush.

“She’s gonna be so happy,” I said to Sourdi as we walked home, sucking on our own popsicles. Mine was Green Apple, Sourdi’s Grape Surprise.

“Who will?”

“Ma! Who do you think?” I stuck my green tongue out at her, wiggling it for effect.

She returned the favor, flashing her purple tongue at me.

Sourdi was always dreamy after talking with Than, although they didn’t really talk that much. Mostly I talked to Mrs. Lê as she counted her money for the day while her husband restocked the shelves. Sourdi and Than stood there looking at each other like deaf mutes, until Than got up his nerve to say something dumb, like “Did you see that guy on ‘The Price Is Right?’ Man, what a freak! He thought the whitewalls retailed for three ninety-five! Three ninety-five for all four! Man, that’s lame! Those were Firestone, man. Major tread.” And Sourdi giggled, like he was so witty.

I had made gagging sounds then, but if she heard, Sourdi never let on.

Now as we crossed the street, the wind finally coming up, whipping loose plastic bags down the sidewalk, flinging them into the tree branches and on tops of fire hydrants, I tried to get Sourdi to stop thinking about Than.

“If Ma makes more,” I said, “I bet we could sell double tomorrow. It’s Sunday. All the church people will be coming in the vans, even from the ‘burbs. You think we could make a thousand dollars maybe?” I tried to imagine what that would feel like in my hand. A thousand whole dollars.

“I dunno,” Sourdi said, licking her popsicle daintily. “They bring potluck.”

That was true. I hadn’t thought of that. The church groups were organized in a way that the ordinary Pilgrims, who were just desperate and poor mostly, weren’t.

“Still. I think we could sell more than today,” I said. “It’s like the crowds are just growing. Mrs. Lê said when her husband opened this morning at six, there were people camped out on the sidewalk. Word’s spreading. They’re thinking of staying open twenty-four hours like the Hinky Dinky in Dallas.”

Heat lightning flashed in the distance.

“It’s going to storm tonight,” Sourdi said, as though she weren’t listening to me at all. “Good. It’s so hot. I can’t sleep lately.”

Then the first drops of rain hit the top of my head like pricks from an acupuncturist’s needle. I held my left hand out. Thick raindrops pooled in my palm. “Look!” I tried to show Sourdi, when, all at once, the clouds like a flock of angry hens dropped hail the size of eggs upon our heads. “Ow!”

“Run!” Sourdi shouted.

I stuck my popsicle in my mouth, grabbed Sourdi’s hand, and ran as fast as I could in my flip flops.

That night the storm raged for six hours. Ma came home from work drenched to the skin, just before the hail started falling again. The brown bag of leftovers she’d brought us for dinner had disintegrated in the rain, and she clutched the styrofoam containers to her chest.

“Here, Ma, let me help you.” Sourdi jumped up from the sofa where we were seated, watching TV.

The weatherman interrupted “The A-Team” to show a Doppler radar image of an angry mass of red approaching like a marauding army. The thunder boomed. The lights flickered, and then the electricity cut out.

We ate by candlelight. The stove was electric, so we couldn’t heat up the food, but it didn’t matter. The kids were upset. The thunder reminded Sam of the sound of bombs falling. Once he started crying, the twins followed suit, and there was no consoling them. Ma held the twins, and Sourdi tried singing a lullaby for Sam. Still, he cried.

Sirens wailed, and I jumped up onto the sofa to peer out the window to see if I could see flames, a building burning up, a twister bearing down, but there was only a blur of lights as the fire trucks rushed down the street. Then, nothing but water pounding against the glass and the bright flashes of lightning.

Finally, the rain no longer drummed at the glass but calmed to a mere patter. Thunder growled in the distance, a hungry animal moving far away, and lightning forked infrequently. Sam stopped crying. I fluffed the pillows on the sofa bed so that he and the twins could curl up and fall asleep, and Sourdi went to the mattress in the corner that she and I shared and slept as well.

Only Ma and I remained awake in the pale blue light that seeped inside the apartment in the hour before dawn.

She used to say that was the only trait we shared in common, our insomnia.

Ma sat in the kitchen, before the humming air conditioner, and lit up a cigarette.

“I have such wonderful memories,” Ma sighed. “When I was a little girl, before I was married, it was the best, most wonderful time of my life.” Ma’s night voice was dreamy, sensual. She only spoke to me in this voice when everyone else was fast asleep. It wasn’t at all like her morning voice, her business voice, the loud voice she used for talking with the outside world. It was a spoiled child’s voice, and it emerged from the very pit of her heart.

“I was very protected. My father would have done anything for me. I was his favorite.” Ma smiled, remembering. Then she described how every night before she went to bed, her father would go to her room and methodically kill every insect he found. Cockroaches and mosquitoes, brown spiders and black, centipedes and scorpions, and all the ants, biting, flying, stinging, black ants, red ants, fire ants. He also killed the gentle bugs, beetles and crickets, even though they were supposed to bring good luck. He killed them all because she disliked them so.

Ma drew on her cigarette then exhaled a long sigh of smoke that curdled in the pale light of dawn as it slipped into our apartment.

“I pity you,” Ma said to me. “You’ll never have memories like that.”

“I have good memories, Ma.”

“No.” Ma shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry.” She added, tiredly, her voice beginning to fray at the edges, “It’s already too late for you.”

Then she patted me on the back. “You should go to bed. Go to sleep.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Go to sleep anyway. I have to get up soon.” Then she stood up, stretched her back, and left me to go to her room. We only had the two rooms—her bedroom, our outer room with the kitchenette—and the bathroom, so I knew she didn’t want to talk anymore.

I wished then that I knew how to talk sweet like Sourdi, in a soft voice that didn’t make my mother irritable. Then I could get her to tell me what was bothering her. But I only knew how to speak in my one voice, and everything I tried to say seemed to make my mother sadder.

I went to bed then, lying down by Sourdi on the mattress without even bothering to change into my pajamas. I wasn’t tired at all, and I knew I’d never be able to sleep, not with the refrigerator humming back to life, and the fans whirring, and Sam and the twins grunting and kicking and farting in their sleep. But when I opened my eyes again, the sun was shining bright as new nickels throughout the apartment, Sourdi was already locked in the bathroom, and Sam and the twins were watching TV. A Western, it seemed like, from the sound of the gunfire and the whooping cries of the movie Indians.

Because I overslept, we had a late start getting off with the spring rolls Ma had left for us to sell. I wondered how Ma always found time for everything. She could work all day, make us dinner, go to bed, and never forget to get up in time to make the extra spring rolls before leaving for work again. She never seemed to need an alarm.

“Do you think Ma takes drugs?” I asked Sourdi as we walked to the QuikMart.

“What?” Sourdi appeared genuinely shocked. “Are you crazy?”

“They showed us this movie in school. This kid takes drugs, and, in the beginning, he has a lot of energy, and he thinks he’s a superhero. He never needs to sleep, so he can play superfly basketball and skateboard like a punk, and he can do his homework faster than the calculator. But then he gets all skinny and he has dark circles all around his eyes, and he thinks he can fly. He jumps out a window like Superman and dies.”

“That’s stupid,” Sourdi said. “They just show you that so you won’t take drugs.”

“But Savannah Lee said there really were drugs that made you stay awake all the time. Her dad’s a trucker, and she says her dad used to take them, but he got addicted, then he got in an accident, and now he’s in prison. But they really worked for a while. You don’t need to sleep for months.”

“Savannah’s a liar.” But Sourdi chewed her lip, so I knew she was worried and thinking.

“Should we look in her purse ‘for signs’?” I asked. Because that’s exactly what the mother in the movie in school said. She didn’t say what “the signs” were, but after she searched in her son’s backpack, she looked straight into the camera and started to cry. Everyone else in class started laughing then, and I laughed, too, like I knew what it was all about, but I didn’t really know.

“Don’t talk so much, Nea. I have a headache.”

Then Sourdi squared her shoulders and walked a little faster, so I was left in her wake, dodging the puddles and broken branches and trash that were strewn about the sidewalk after the storm.

I was so distracted by our conversation, by Sourdi’s moodiness, by my own worries, that I didn’t notice until we were practically at the door of the QuikMart that the Pilgrims were gone. Only their trash—the Pepsi cans and the wadded-up candywrappers and the empty chip bags and spent flash cubes—lay in a line extending behind us all the way to the gutter.

We ran inside the QuikMart where Mrs. Lê was sitting behind the counter looking desperate. She didn’t even see us come in at first, so intent was she on shouting at her husband in Vietnamese. He was banging on something with a pipe while her son, Than, was busy trying to spray the freezer case with a plant waterer, trying to grow the miracle frost back. Apparently it had all melted during the storm when the electricity was cut off; all the permafrost was gone now, and with it, the Virgin Mary’s face.

“I’m so sorry,” Sourdi said.

“Maybe she’ll come back,” Mrs. Lê sniffed. “I put a mass card inside. And my grandmother’s rosary.”

Sourdi nodded politely.

“You girls, see if there’s any popsicles you want. Just take them. Take them all. No good to me now.”

“Cool! Thanks!” I ran to the freezer cases, and mostly everything was melted, but in the very bottom of one case, there were some Eskimo Pies, Strawberry Shortcake Good Humor Bars, and even a box of RocketPops that weren’t too bad. They’d been in the very corner, frozen together. They were sticky, and half-way melted, but half-way good still. So I gathered them up. They were free, after all.

“Do you want some spring rolls?” I offered Mrs. Lê a bag.

She didn’t answer but reached inside and pulled out a spring roll, and without looking, unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth whole, her cheeks bulging dramatically as she chewed and chewed. Then she did the same with the next spring roll, and the next. Finally, she began to cry, large messy mascara-laced tears that bounced down her cheeks in an endless stream.

Her husband and son were working on the freezer case, oblivious to her pain, as they banged away from behind with monkey wrenches and ratchets, louder and louder.

Sourdi and I waved good-bye quickly to Mrs. Lê and hurried home. Something about her despair seemed contagious.

That evening, Ma returned with more money than usual. She’d been paid, plus two weeks. We all knew what that meant: she’d been laid off.

But it was good news, Ma explained. She’d had a dream three nights in a row. Even though she’d tried to stop sleeping, if she even so much as dozed off, the dream came back to her. It was time to move again, she said.

Sometimes Ma had visions in her sleep and then she had to wait to understand what they meant, but this time Ma said she knew immediately. This neighborhood was not right for us anymore.

She’d had dreams like this in the past. Once in our first year in America, when we lived in the mustard-colored trailer our sponsors at the First Baptist Church rented for us, some of our neighbors got into a fight, and the police came to break it up. At first it had been the same as every night, the same kind of argument, with bottles breaking and a baby shrieking. Then a gunshot rang out. My sisters and brother and I clambered to the windows to see better, standing on the edge of the sofa bed, but Ma made us come down and move away from the glass.

She herself stood in the doorway, however, watching, her arms folded over her chest, her lips pressed together tightly, until the police finally came, their sirens wailing unhappily. Standing before the screen, Ma didn’t move. She was bathed in the light from the police cars. The red light made her face look angry and the blue light sad.

She stood there watching as the police dragged the man and the woman away, both still shouting, and then drove off. Long after the police had left and the rest of our neighbors had gone back into their trailers, Ma continued to stand in the open door, her arms crossed over her chest, staring into the dark.

The next morning, Ma looked older. It was as though those red and blue lights had penetrated to her bones and changed her face. Sourdi said Ma was merely tired, it was only the shadows under her eyes, but I saw the way Ma’s mouth turned downwards at the corners, the way her skin pulled away from her bones.

Ma announced over breakfast that she’d had a dream that we should move to the city. The Refugee Services Coordinator was going to help her find a job. He was supposed to be a good guy, a nice guy, a hero who’d escaped Cambodia by swimming to Thailand before the Khmer Rouge took over. That’s how he’d lost his arm, he said. A shark bit it off.

When he and Ma first started dating, he liked to brag like that all the time.

I never believed him.

He had a name, but Sourdi and I called him “One Arm” behind his back.

One Arm liked to dress flashy, in a nice suit, even on a hot day, his hair perfect, heavily pomaded and slicked over the top of his head so that you couldn’t see the bald spot, see that he was really a lot older than he pretended to be. At first glance, most people almost didn’t notice the missing arm either, because he pinned up the extra sleeve onto his shoulder as if it were really just a scarf; he dressed with such aplomb.

Ma used to say that he had “élan.” When he lied about something, but in a charming way, she called it “esprit.” Later, when she was angry at him, she called it something else, but in the beginning he really enchanted her. I think she liked best of all his beautiful movie-star smile, all those white teeth. Ma’s teeth were brown and some were missing. Gum disease, the Red Cross dentist had said, very common. But One Arm had never had to live in a work camp, eating gruel. He’d escaped.

One Arm worked for Refugee Services in Dallas and used to drive to our small town, some three hours west, periodically to check on us. After he got to know Ma, he started coming out more often.

Ma prepared special food just for One Arm. She let him eat first and made us wait until he was done, because our kitchen table was too small for all seven of us to squeeze around. She smiled when he spoke and listened without interrupting as he complained about all the hard work he did visiting all the other refugees. Ma nodded, and said, “You work so hard, it’s not fair to you.” She was lying because we all knew One Arm liked this job. People were grateful to him and always cooked him fancy dishes and treated him with respect, more respect than he would have had back home in Cambodia before the war. I could tell by the way he spoke that he had not been an educated man—he had a funny provincial accent, plus, he spat his bones out on the table. Whereas Ma always spoke beautifully, with a Phnom Penh accent, her grammar perfect, and she never spat.

Sometimes while we were living out in the sticks, Ma would burst into laughter for no apparent reason. She’d be standing in the kitchen, her arms elbow-deep in suds in the sink. Or she’d be hanging out the laundry to dry on the line that ran from the corner of our trailer to the neighbor’s pecan tree, our underwear flapping in the wind with a sound like hands clapping, and Ma would bow, graciously receiving her applause, and then she’d laugh. Hysterically. Until she hiccupped and tears ran from her eyes, and still she laughed on and on.

We all joined in, giggling around her, touching the hem of her shirt, her arm, her thigh. We couldn’t keep our hands off her when she was happy. It was as though we thought the feeling were contagious, something we could catch and pass among us as we had chicken pox and pink eye and bronchitis, one after the other, after we first started school.

But sometimes Ma sat in the kitchen with her head in her hands and refused to speak at all. She sat completely still, as though she’d been turned to ice.

And then my sisters and brother and I sat around her forlornly on the linoleum like a circle of stones.

One Arm did eventually find Ma a new job working in a Chinese restaurant in East Dallas.

He also stole all the money she’d saved from working as a maid, the job our sponsors had found for her at the Motel 6. I said then that we should call the cops, but Ma said we couldn’t afford to call attention to ourselves. She said One Arm promised to pay her back; he was basically a good man but he gambled. She said he’d pay her back when his luck returned.

I didn’t think One Arm was gonna pay her back, but I didn’t say anything then.

I obeyed my mother in those days.

The next time we moved, Ma had had a dream about the war. In the dream, it was just as it had been in real life. She was walking through a minefield, the twins in her arms and Sam riding on her back. They were so thin in those days, they didn’t weigh much. Ma was thin too, though, so we had to walk very slowly.

We only traveled at night, so the soldiers wouldn’t see us and shoot us for trying to escape. But it made it hard to see, not just the mines—sometimes no one could see them, and you just died or you didn’t—but we couldn’t even see the stars. Clouds covered the moon, and we didn’t know which direction to go. If we were headed east or west, south or north. If we were doubling back through the jungle or heading toward Thailand.

Ma made us all lie down once when the moon was hidden behind thick clouds. Lie down just where we had been standing so we wouldn’t trip a mine and die. I remember lying down next to Sourdi, who fell asleep almost immediately. She had to carry me on her back most of the time, so she was very tired. I felt her breath on my neck.

A giant snake slithered by. It stopped, and I realized it must have seen the whites of my eyes. (I didn’t know snakes could sense the heat of my body.) I didn’t dare blink then. I hoped the snake would think my eyes were just stones, or bones, or glass, or metal. Something it wouldn’t want to eat. Debris that lay in the fields everywhere, signs leftover from battles or bombings or soldiers laying mines so the people couldn’t escape.

My eyes grew dry as dust. I wanted to blink. I almost didn’t care if the snake bit me, or squeezed me to death, but finally the snake extended its forked tongue, touching a stone in its path, then quickly it slithered away, farther and farther, slinking in S shapes into the dark jungle behind us.

Then I heard my mother whisper.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“Don’t move. There’s a bomb hidden in the dirt.”

“I know, Ma.”

“I can see this one,” Ma said. “There’s an arm bone beside it. So there must have been two bombs. But the person only stepped on the one. The explosion exposed the second bomb. Lying here, I can see it.”

“I won’t move, Ma.”

“I fell asleep,” Ma whispered. “I dreamed we were walking in the wrong direction.”

“Are we, Ma? I saw a snake. It went behind us.”

“Yes, that’s right. We’re going the wrong way. In my dream, I realized at the last second, but before we could turn around, I stepped on the bomb. Then I woke up.” My mother’s voice was parched, a raspy sound, the same sound when she cried without tears.

“It’s okay, Ma. You didn’t step on the bomb. It’s good you had that dream.”

“I know,” she said.

And then slowly she got back onto her feet. She woke Sam and the twins, ordered Sam to hold onto her back. Then she picked the twins up, having wrapped them in cloth slings so she could carry them.

I woke Sourdi, and we turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Like the snake.

That’s how we didn’t die. Ma’s dreams kept us alive.

Later, Sourdi would claim she was the one who was awake, she was the one whispering to Ma, and that she’d told me this story later. I only thought I remembered. But Sourdi never mentioned the snake. That’s how I know this is my memory, not hers.

After the storm that destroyed the apparition of the Virgin Mary, Ma didn’t tell me what her dream was that convinced her that we needed to move again.

“Where are we going, Ma?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But we should start packing.”