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
