she said. “But my husband was a good man, and I know he’ll have a better life next time. I know this. We were never wealthy in our time together, so I don’t mind working now. It helps me to bear my memories.
“But for my sister, it’s different. She was so beautiful. Her face was like the moon, white and round. Perfect. Her beauty made her ambitious. She married a man above her rank, a man with a government position. She had money and all those servants. Because she was beautiful, she thought she was special. She thought she could have anything she wanted. People always treat a beautiful woman like that when she’s young, like the world will stop turning just for her.
“She never learned to bear things.”
Ma turned away from the window and looked at me with her dark, sad eyes. “I’m a lucky woman. My sister is the unlucky one. She isn’t used to that. When she sees you, you remind her of everything she’s lost. And everything I still have.”
Ma took one last puff from her cigarette before stubbing it out gently in an ashtray. She then picked up her mop with both hands. “Just try to be good. Just try a little harder. Okay?”
I nodded. She smiled, the edges of her lips pulling up quickly before dropping back down again, and then her face resumed its usual, neutral expression, the one that was neither sad nor happy.
I tried to obey my mother, I really did.
But as our days in the Palace turned into weeks, Auntie’s complaints only increased. She said her head hurt, as though the plates of her bones were drifting apart. And her heart beat funny—stopping, she claimed, for minutes at a time. She retreated to her apartment above the Palace, drawing the shades and the curtains, lying on her bed in the gloomy darkness, refusing to come down at all.
On these days, Ma sent me to check on Auntie with a tray of food and a pot of tea. Ma told me to be good and do as Auntie instructed. But sometimes Auntie said nothing at all, only staring at me, her eyes glittering in the dark, and sometimes she complained to me nonstop because nothing I did was ever right.
If I massaged her neck and back and arms, knotty as tree branches, she grimaced and grunted and said I might as well have been born a boy, all the use I was, I only made her bones ache more. When she wanted me to rub her back with spoons to promote healing, she yelped with pain and said I was trying to take the skin off her body. When she handed me her bottle of essential oil, which she wanted me to rub into her joints, I managed to spill the foul-smelling green liquid onto her sheets.
“In Cambodia,” she told me, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, “children learned to take care of their parents.” She said as a girl, she had bathed her own mother every Buddhist New Year, in water that was filled with herbs and flowers, to ensure her mother’s longevity. She had done so willingly, and her mother had lived to be quite an old woman.
I was afraid then that Auntie would want me to bathe her next, so I said quickly, “Ma likes to take showers. She says modern life, that’s really living.”
Auntie fell silent for a long period, in which she merely glared at me with her dark, unblinking eyes, disappointed by my obtuseness. I pretended not to notice as I went about tidying up her apartment, dusting the television set and the end table, the reading lamp and its plastic-covered shade, and finally the tiny shrine to Buddha she had set up in the far corner, where the light never seemed to reach, not from her dimbulbed lamp, not from the sunlight seeping beneath the edges of her tightly drawn drapes. Still, the whole time I could feel her snaky eyes staring at my back, as though she were waiting for just the right moment to strike.
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