I had a small victory at the music festival in New Orleans, a first-place win for my top piano student. There was an awards ceremony, and then I drove my rental car to Biloxi to see the Nguyens before flying home to Maryland. It was late April, already so hot in the muggy lowlands of Louisiana that my euphoria soon drained. The air was thick and weighty. My bad knee ached. I had been through a tense, competitive trip; at home there loomed recitals, papers, the hubbub of wrapping up the season. I thought again of retirement, a favorite theme lately. The Old Goat had left a little money; I could happily live out my days without giving another lesson. Why not?
Along the bayous, a fine mist rose from the wet ground, clouding the landscape like fatigue. I told myself no, no, I must not consider retirement yet, not until summer. Only a month and a half. Then I would be free to read books, tend my garden. Collect my thoughts.
Nga had given me directions to her store. Her new house was across the bridge in the residential suburb of Ocean Spring, but the store was in the center of Biloxi, not far from the casinos. The Nguyens had left Maryland 16 years ago, convinced by friends that the way to riches was to buy a boat in Mississippi and start a shrimping business. The Old Goat and I had visited them once, not long before his final illness. Biloxi was a squat, squalid town then, except for the elegant estates along the waterfront. Nga and Tran lived in a shabby apartment with their son Paul, who was in elementary school. Tran’s business was just hanging on. The younger children, Anne Marie and Zachary, hadn’t come along until later.
Now Biloxi was the Riviera of the South, with tall, glitzy hotels attached by ramps to casinos which sat a few yards out into the gulf. By law, the casinos had to be on the water. Neon signs advertised cheap dinner buffets, video poker, shows with Las Vegas stars. Just before the boom began, Tran had the good sense to sell his boat and go into real estate. Or–no. I vaguely remembered a story about a fire on board, an insurance claim. At any rate, real estate had been a good choice. On first glance, the once-dreary town seemed transformed.
But that wasn’t entirely true. Following Nga’s directions, I turned inland to the sight of the familiar slummy houses, the weedy vacant lots. Nga’s shop wasn’t much better. A rundown convenience store, it sat on a dusty corner where tough-looking men, Vietnamese and Hispanic and black, loitered in the street.
“Ah, Sheila!” Nga’s voice cried out as I opened the door. Although the Nguyens sometimes visited me in Maryland, I hadn’t seen them for several years, and when my eyes adjusted, the sight of Nga was a shock. Nineteen when she arrived in this country, she had been tall for a Vietnamese woman, reed slim, her hair shoulder length and shiny black. A beautiful girl with an ugly name: Naahh, like an animal braying. Now she was 45 and fat. Or maybe just broader. Waist, hips, even her face: thick and moonlike, as if layers of fat had been injected between her skin and her high cheekbones. As if she were on steroids.
She rushed toward me, her smile wide on cherry-colored lips. “Ah, Sheila! So nice you come. You look very good!”
“Well, so do you! So do you!” After my long week, I looked like hell. Was I supposed to hug her? Hold out my hand? “So nice to be here!” I shouted, falsely cheerful.
Nga grasped my hand, pumped it, pushed the awkward moment aside. Ever the diplomat, she possessed social graces I’d never mastered. I was both soothed and irritated. “You sit,” Nga said as she rushed to retrieve a cane-backed chair from behind the counter. “You tire? Sit.”
I laughed. “I’ve been sitting all day.”
“Oh, yes.” She fluttered her hands. “You want something to drink?” Without waiting for an answer, she hastened back to the refrigerated case, plucked out a bottle of a tropical fruit punch. “This very good. Very good.”
I unscrewed the cap, took a long swig, studied the store. It was awful. Brown paneling peeled from the walls, an ancient air conditioner churned and dripped. The shelves were so sparsely lined with goods as to be embarrassing: a few cans of green beans, a single package of toilet paper. Only the refrigerated case with beer and soft drinks, and a shelf of cigarettes above the cash register, were fully stocked.
“You give concert in New Orleans?” Nga rippled her fingers as if along a keyboard.
“Oh, no. Not for years. My students played. It was a competition.”
“They win?”
“One did.”
“Anne Marie play piano,” she said, pointing to a photo of her daughter taped to the paneling behind the counter. “Only 11 year old and she play very good.”
The door jangled open. A scruffy Hispanic man headed to the back for a six-pack of beer. In quick succession half a dozen others followed, working men with blackened fingernails and soiled shirts, paying for their beer with grease-stained fingers. Nga waited on them, pleasant but reserved. Pearl among swine.
I wandered the store, let her work. The supply of foodstuffs was meager, but there was a nice selection of combs and barrettes in the corner, and a surprising display of picture frames that made me smile. Twenty-six years before, the week after Nga and Tran arrived in Maryland, Nga had plucked a white filigree frame off a shelf in the supermarket where her church sponsors were buying supplies, and thrust it at the volunteer in charge. “I need,” she said.
“Well, nobody needs a picture frame,” the volunteer told the Women’s Auxiliary later. “Certainly not a refugee who’s arrived with only a few clothes and a box of photos from home.”
“And all those Vietnamese music tapes!” another woman clucked. “They must have thought when they got here, a tape deck was the first thing somebody would give them.”
More out of rebellion than sympathy, I had been tempted to rush to Nga’s defense. But as something of an outcast myself, I judged I could only aggravate the assault.
“I told her we were spending the church’s money to buy essentials, not picture frames,” the volunteer concluded. “First things first.”
Now I fingered one of the frames on the shelf and thought, well, there is more than one way to thumb your nose at somebody, even 26 years later.
I sipped my drink and watched Nga make change for a short, thick man whose baggy trousers seemed about to lose their tenuous hold on his hips. Would the haughty churchwomen feel vindicated now, seeing Nga cater to the downtrodden? Would they think, “Well, that’s exactly what she deserves, after being such a leech herself.”? A few would, I knew.
I’d felt that way myself at times, wasn’t proud of it. A week or two after the picture-frame episode, Nga had ogled an expensive red dress in the department store, and when I told The Old Goat about it, he insisted on buying it for her, against my objections. Months later she wore it to the church Christmas social, but by then she was pregnant with Paul and it didn’t fit properly, and we were all embarrassed.
The fruit punch was wickedly sweet, so sugary that I began to wake up. Between customers, Nga asked about New Orleans and gushed over my award. “Ah, you must be very good teacher!”
“I’ve been doing it a long time.” Long enough to grow bored, I thought. Long enough to grow old.
“You teach in summer?”
“No. Summers I have off.”
“Ah.”
“And what about you?”
“Me too doing same thing for long time.” Despite her thick accent, Nga’s English–unlike her husband’s–was easy to understand. “I have store since Zachary a baby. Eight year. I still here all the time.” She smiled to show it was all right. “Me and Tran have houses too. Many houses now.”
They’d bought their first slum house before the first casino arrived (“Very cheap then. Not so cheap now.”) and renovated it and rented it out. When the gambling business boomed, so did real estate.
“You probably don’t need this store anymore,” I suggested. Surely Nga knew she didn’t belong here, in this dangerous neighborhood, selling beer to workmen off the street.
“Sometimes I think we sell, but then I think, no, not yet.” She pointed vaguely out the window. “Soon they build a casino on the water over there.” There was a small lagoon a block away. “Then they buy this for a parking lot, we get good price.”
Several times the phone jangled and Nga spoke to the caller in rapid Vietnamese. Once a bewhiskered, white-haired man shuffled in and announced that he needed a cigarette, and for the first time Nga dropped her guard and spoke easily. “You buy a whole pack today?”
“No, just one.” The man turned sheepish and doubtful. “OK?”
Nga handed him a single cigarette from an open pack under the counter. The man counted out some change.
“For weeks he ask me to sell one cigarette,” Nga explained when he’d gone. “I say no, you have to buy whole pack. But he ask and ask and finally I do.” She laughed. “I sell anything to make money.”
“Nga!”
She shrugged. “I send money to my country, help my family. We go to Vietnam two year ago–remember I tell you? People there very poor. Also, Paul in medical school now. He study for doctor.”
Well, of course! Paul! He’d been born in Maryland, where Nga had given him his American name, fed him meat every day from the time he was old enough to chew, and insisted protein would make him grow. Now Paul was 6 feet tall and in medical school. Good for him. Good for her!
The door opened again and Tran entered, his face brightening at the sight of me. “Sheila! So glad you come!” His voice, oddly high-pitched, oddly twangy and singsong, reminded me of some exotic Oriental musical instrument.
Like Nga, Tran had filled out, lost the girlish slenderness most of the Vietnamese men had when they arrived in the ’70s. His hair, streaked now with gray, was slicked back so it no longer flopped onto his forehead, a formal style that made him look like the property owner he had become. I was impressed. I’d always thought him lesser than Nga–a rough country boy where Nga had come from Saigon, a city girl, polished.
On Tran’s heels came a natty-looking Vietnamese man in dark trousers and a crisp white shirt, following him so closely that I thought they were together. But Tran focused his attention on me while the other man turned earnestly to Nga.
“Last month I buy one house,” Tran told me after we’d exchanged greetings. “The house, it sit where they want to build casino. Not cost much, only 1500. But to move it to another lot–13,000. Whoo! Too much!”
I smiled because I remembered “Whoo! Too much!” from a quarter-century ago, and the good-natured way Tran delivered it, like the chorus of a comic song.
At the cash register, the Vietnamese man pulled a heavy gold watch off his wrist. Nga turned it over in her fingers.
“We got 12 houses now,” Tran said, speaking faster as he warmed to his topic. “Some just me and Nga. Some we partners with family in California.” His voice rose and fell, tonal and often incomprehensible. I nodded and tried to follow. “Last year I finish new house for my family. Wait, you see. Four bedroom. All winter Nga’s brother family stay with us. Anh. You remember Anh?” I nodded. “But they move out now. We got plenty room for you. Happy you visit.”
A few feet away, Nga set the watch under the counter, then opened the cash register, handed the man some bills. From his pocket he retrieved a few slips of paper, coupons of some kind, and placed them in Nga’s hand. The transaction looked sinister.
“Tonight, my family, we take you out to eat,” Tran said. “Nga, she like to cook you something but she in the store all the time, no food at the house. She don’t close till 7.”
I was disappointed. Nga’s tasty spring rolls were legendary, better than those in any restaurant. I had been looking forward to bowls of rice and pork and vegetables, to puffy shrimp chips in pastel colors. But especially to spring rolls. “That’s fine,” I said too loudly, “going out will be fun!”
Tran’s look of relief was all too familiar. Twenty-five years ago he’d called the church every morning to say Nga had the flu, a headache, sinus problems, and couldn’t come to work at the day-care center where the sponsors had gotten her a job. Whenever someone asked if she’d be at work tomorrow he’d say yes, the standard Vietnamese reply. It would be impolite to say no. No one knew yet that Nga was pregnant with Paul, plagued by morning sickness. The sponsors had gotten a translator to tell her about birth control, and she’d been afraid to admit she was already pregnant.
“Tomorrow we take you to special Vietnamese restaurant,” Tran went on. “Pho. Soup. You remember?”
“I have to leave in the morning. Drive back to New Orleans to catch my plane.”
“What time you go?”
“Ten-thirty. Eleven at the latest.”
“Plenty of time,” he said. Then he asked again, “You remember pho?”
“Well, of course. How could I forget?” Once, after they’d moved to Mississippi, Nga and Tran had come north for a visit and taken me and The Old Goat to a pho restaurant where different kinds of soup were the only items on the menu. They ordered for all of us and showed us which condiments to add to our bowls from the Lazy Susan in the middle of the table. The Old Goat and I were the only non-Vietnamese in the place. It was a wonderful meal. Tran insisted on paying the check, which he could ill afford. The Old Goat protested, but Tran was adamant. “Nga and me, we like to thank you for all you do for my family when we live in Maryland,” he’d said.
At the front, the Vietnamese man with the coupons took his money and left, and Nga retrieved his watch and examined it again.
“You run a pawn shop,” I said, realizing.
“Just with some. I don’t have license. Just with Vietnamese or Thai.” She gestured toward the door. “He a casino boss. You work for casino, make good money. But if you start to gamble– oh.” She shook her head. “Seventy-five percent who work for the casinos, they gamble.” Before I could reply, she changed the subject. “Now I show you my house. We take your car. Tran stay here till we come back. The children, they like to see you.” She grabbed her purse.
A black man in paint-splattered clothes lumbered in as we headed for the door. “Eight hours today,” he told Tran, who was now behind the counter.
Tran frowned. “Eight hour? I no think so. You take one hour for lunch.”
“No, man. Just a half hour. Half hour tops.” The man jiggled his right leg as if it had fallen asleep. “Bud told me I just missed you when you come by,” he said quickly. “I musta got back not two minutes later. This afternoon I finished painting the whole kitchen and the back door.”
Thoughtfully, Tran opened the cash register and lifted out some bills. The painter stuffed them into his pocket without counting them. As Nga and I went out to my car, I felt foolish for misunderstanding. No wonder Nga didn’t want to sell the store. No wonder she–who liked nice things so much–allowed it to look so seedy. It was a perfect front for the pawn shop, the remodeling business, any other enterprises they might be running off the books. The IRS was not going to think such a place was making money. I had forgotten how much Nga liked to cajole and finagle, wheel and deal. It was a game. Nga was having fun.
The Nguyens’ house was a two-story Colonial much like all the others on the block except for its bright-red front door. “The children wait for you,” Nga said as I pulled into her driveway. “They very excited.” I smiled, but I was thinking: Why would they care?
“Before we move here, I no leave the children home alone in the afternoon. They have to come to the store. Now, they fine. They do homework. Not babies now.” She surveyed the manicured yards, the two little girls roller-blading down the sidewalk. “Very safe here.” She sounded doubtful.
Nga insisted on lifting my bag out of the trunk. “Anne Marie, she very smart. I send you the essay from the contest she won?”
“Yes, it was good.”
“Zachary the only one not good student. Paul and Anne Marie, yes. But not Zachary.”
Inside, air conditioning purred, and everything seemed unnaturally tidy. A white-tiled entryway gave way to white carpets and pristine white walls decorated with Oriental prints. To our right was a dining room furnished with a black-lacquered table and chairs, a matching china closet. Across the hall, a baby grand piano, also of black lacquer, dominated the living room. The couch and chairs were scarlet.
Anne Marie bounded down the stairs in front of us, a replica of Nga but even chubbier, with her mother’s same wide smile. “Hi, Sheila!”
“Anne Marie, how are you?” I had met the girl a few times on her visits to Maryland. Her long hair was caught up in a ponytail, not as shiny as her mother’s. “I saw your essay. Congratulations.” I hoped she wouldn’t quiz me about it.
“Here, I made you this.” Anne Marie thrust a small package in my direction. It was a pin cushion, two pieces of bright pink felt stuffed with cotton and roughly sewn together.
“Why, Anne Marie! How sweet.”
Nga ushered me into the den. On yet another red couch, Zachary was curled into a fetal position, watching cartoons. Small for an 8-year-old, he lay with his matchstick legs tucked into his chest, his forgotten schoolbooks fanned out on the couch beside him. Animated creatures in bright colors ran across a ridiculously huge screen, more like a movie screen, something I’d seen before only in bars and restaurants. I glanced toward Nga, but she wouldn’t meet my eye.
We both knew how she’d longed for color TV all those years ago. How she’d wanted it more than anything. Wanted it to the point of embarrassment. This was in 1975, when not everyone had a color set, and those who did paid dearly for it. Someone from the church gave them an old black-and-white model, but Nga wasn’t satisfied. Smiling winningly, speaking in a soft, beggar voice that set my teeth on edge, she asked everyone she saw: “You have old color TV you give me? I like to have color.”
In the end I said: “Don’t, Nga, this is not something you can ask for. It costs a lot. People don’t have extra color TVs lying around. You have to save money and buy one for yourself.” What Nga appreciated about me, I thought, was that I was straight with her when everyone else smiled and stayed silent and soon deserted her.
“No TV till after homework,” she told Zachary now. “How many times I tell you?” She picked up the remote and switched it off.
Anne Marie crossed her fleshy arms in front of her chest. “Zachary slept through science again today,” she reported.
Nga regarded him sharply. “Did you?”
Zachary shrugged. He looked lost in his oversize T-shirt, his arms like pipe cleaners jutting from the sleeves.
“Don’t you like school?” I asked. He turned to me, his face brightening as he opened his mouth to speak.
“He doesn’t like anything but math,” Anne Marie cut in. “We Vietnamese seem to be good in math.”
Zachary sat chastened and mute. Why don’t you let your brother do his own talking? I thought. Anne Marie flashed a smile. “You want me to play something for you? Mama says you teach piano. I started taking last year.”
“Sure, I’d love to hear you,” I said.
We sat on the couch in the living room while Anne Marie settled herself on the piano bench and lifted her fingers to the keyboard. She began with “Morning Mood” from the Peer Gynt Suite, a pretty piece. I was glad her teacher had chosen something tuneful. Beneath the careful playing lay a certain soulfulness I wouldn’t have expected, after her rudeness to her brother.
She played several more pieces. She was good, as Nga had said. Not a prodigy but certainly a talent. She got up and curtsied when she finished. We applauded.
“Now,” said Nga, “we go eat.”
Zachary went over to his sister and whispered in her ear.
“He wants to ask you something,” Anne Marie told me.
“What?”
Zachary grinned mischievously but shook his head no.
“He’s afraid it isn’t polite.”
“Not polite, don’t ask,” Nga said, her expression darkening.
“I’m sure it’s all right,” I said.
Zachary shook his head harder, his shiny black bangs flopping against his high forehead.
“What he wants to know,” Anne Marie said, glancing at the floor so as not to be blamed, “is did you really have a husband named The Old Goat.”
“Zachary!” Nga admonished, though only Anne Marie had spoken.
“Yes. They called him that because of his goatee. A kind of beard.” I stroked my chin to demonstrate and smiled maniacally to show I wasn’t angry.
Zachary laughed and pointed to his mother with glee. “See?”
I didn’t tell them the rest. That such a nickname sounded derogatory but hadn’t started out that way. That he was a gifted historian and a warm, generous man. That his students used the name with affection.
I didn’t say he was 51 years old when we met, or that many people disapproved of us. At the church they began to use the term to refer to his sexual prowess. They believed I’d taken him away from his wife. To ease the sting, he began referring to himself in the third person: “The Old Goat doesn’t think so.” “You know what The Old Goat would like for dinner? A juicy, high-fat steak.”
We used the name proudly, in jest at first and then out of habit. It didn’t entirely ward off disgrace. Once, an elder in the church approached me. “Look at the two of you,” he said. “An older man, a younger woman. The commonest, basest kind of affair.”
We went to church every week, a matter of principle. It had been our church–mine and also his–before we ever got together. In the end, his detractors had the satisfaction of watching his decline. His diabetes grew worse. There were complications. Before it was over, he gave up a leg and most of his eyesight. I gave up performing and only taught. He would have lost the other leg if he hadn’t died when he did.
We picked up Tran in Nga’s minivan that had been in the garage. As the two of them closed the store, the children grabbed candies from the shelves and stuffed them in their pockets.
“We no like to bring them here because they eat, eat, eat!” Nga said. “Get as fat as me.” To the children she called: “Not too much!”
Nga motioned me to sit in front with her while she drove. Tran climbed into the back with the children. He had never liked to drive. That first year in Maryland, two different men had given up in frustration over trying to teach him. He hadn’t learned until later, after Paul was born and Nga’s brother Anh arrived and the sponsors stopped offering rides.
“I show you some of our houses before we eat,” Nga said. “While still light.”
We took a lengthy tour. There was a row of duplexes in a little court, with a few chickens roaming in the street. Several tiny ranches in what must have been the shabbiest section of town. And finally the building they’d moved from the casino site, small, with just two bedrooms, yet sitting now on a deep lot with attractive homes on either side. Proudly, Tran and Nga insisted we go in. It had been completely gutted and redone, the walls now white and clean-smelling.
“Who will rent this?”
“Casino boss, maybe.”
“Ah.”
“And do people bring their rent to you at the store?”
“No, I have to collect.” Tran made a motion as if knocking on a door. “Oh, very hard!”
A filmy dusk had gathered, but Nga drove the whole periphery of the waterfront to show where the newer “boats” had gone up–though the casinos weren’t really boats, only immovable concrete barges set out on the water to meet the law. In the back seat, Anne Marie and Zachary sucked on fruit-flavored candies whose scent filled the car.
“See that?” Nga pointed to an unsightly warehouse. “I was offered that for 75,000, but at that time I said no, too much. Then they build Boomtown across the street and now they offer the owners 600,000 because it too ugly and they want to tear it down.”
“Whoo. Too much!” Tran said.
“But the people say no, not enough. Now I wish I buy it.”
She said “I” whenever she spoke of money, not “we.” We drove past all the various properties she’d been offered, the possible casino sites, the lots that might have potential.
“When you finally became a capitalist,” I told her, “you did it with a vengeance.”
A look of pleasure spread across her face. “Yes,” she beamed.
By the time we parked at one of the casinos and walked through a long, red-carpeted hallway toward the huge cafeteria, I was faint with hunger and my knee had begun to throb.
“Sometimes we eat here too much,” Tran said. “Children get tire of it. But Nga, she busy in the store. Easier to eat here than cook.”
“I like the Casino Grand better,” Anne Marie piped up. “The food there is glorious.”
Glorious?
“And you?” I asked Zachary. “What’s your favorite?” Zachary shrugged.
From her purse, Nga pulled some pieces of paper I recognized as the coupons she’d gotten from the man with the watch. She handed them to the cashier at the entrance to the cafeteria. They were tickets for free meals, I realized, relieved they were nothing illegal.
“Casino bosses get these to give to big gamblers,” Nga explained as we got our trays and silverware. “They come to my shop, give to me.”
The line moved slowly. Zachary leaned sleepily against Tran. It was after 9 o’clock. If I had had children, they would have eaten at 6, been in bed by now, asleep.
“Seventy-six items.” Tran pointed to the food in front of us. Along with the usual chicken and roast beef were zucchini casseroles, seafood gumbo, a huge vat of king crab legs.
“This what Vietnamese like most,” Nga said, piling crab legs onto a plate.
Once we sat down with our food, a steady stream of Vietnamese diners came up to greet us. They seemed more deferential to Nga than to Tran. Had they all, at some time or another, had something to pawn?
Anne Marie ate ravenously. “The barbecued ribs are delicious.”
“They are,” I agreed.
“Scrumptious,” she said. “Superb.”
Zachary pushed his food around on his plate. He had nearly fallen asleep by the time Anne Marie nudged him and asked if he wanted to go back for second helpings.
“No eat too much,” Nga cautioned her.
“I won’t.” She skipped off toward the buffet.
“She just like me,” Nga murmured. “Sometimes I cannot stop eating. But Anne Marie, she too young to get fat.”
“She’s just chubby. She’ll grow. Maybe she needs some exercise.”
Nga watched her daughter in the food line. “She like to play basketball at school, but I scare. If she play basketball, she look like a boy.”
“That would take an awful lot of basketball!”
“Sometime I think I send her to ballet, but her feet will get very ugly.”
“Oh, Nga.”
“That why I send her to piano. She practice, give her something to do.” Cracking a crab leg with her fingers, Nga pulled a long strand of meat from the shell.
“But playing piano doesn’t use up calories.”
Nga bit into the white meat, slid it between her teeth. “Summers here very hot,” she said. “Zachary play outside anyway, but Anne Marie, no.” She picked up another claw, offered it to me. I shook my head.
“From Maryland and don’t like crab!” Tran said.
“Now and then I do.” I could get crab any time. What I really wanted was one of Nga’s spring rolls. They were part of the reason I had come.
“Back in Maryland, not so hot,” Nga told me. “If Anne Marie in Maryland, she play with her friends, lose weight. Maybe study piano too. She like to go to Maryland this summer. Maybe I send her, who knows?”
“Mmmn.” Back in Maryland, the Vietnamese had formed a tight community. Nga and Tran still had many friends there. But I was a bit surprised by her misplaced concern for her daughter. If either child needed special attention, surely it was Zachary. Was Nga so busy she didn’t see? Like many refugee women, she’d had her first baby right away, just as the Holocaust survivors had done a generation before, to show they were unvanquished. But after Paul was born, while most of her friends were having two or three more, Nga had saved money, come to Biloxi, supported relatives, waited to have another child for nearly 14 years. Even then, it had been a leap of faith. But at 45, running two or three businesses, maybe she found her son’s distress more than she could admit.
Anne Marie and Zachary returned with their desserts. A teenage boy who’d come over with his family to greet Nga clapped his hands on Anne Marie’s shoulders, leaned over, and said cheerfully: “Mmmn, a hot fudge sundae, my favorite. Can I have a bite?” For the briefest second, Anne Marie stiffened. She shuddered almost imperceptibly. Then she recovered and laughed. “Get your own sundae, Tuan.” She sounded so merry that I thought I’d seen wrong. At 15 or 16, the boy was just flattering her, teasing her, meaning no harm.
After dinner we walked next door to the Casino Grand, where Tran gave the children a few dollars to spend in the video arcade while we explored the casino. Decadently elegant, with crimson-tinted lighting, it was a monument to video poker and video blackjack, where overweight retirees in polyester slacks fed hungry machines from large plastic cups of change. At the live game tables, the dealers were mostly Vietnamese, young men and women in white shirts and black bow ties, dealing cards with swift, deft fingers.
“You remember my brother Anh?” Nga asked as we stopped beside a craps table, a game I’d never understood. “He here now, in Biloxi. He married. Got two babies.”
“Yes. Tran mentioned him,” I said, though a grown-up Anh was hard to imagine. And with a family! He’d arrived in Maryland a year after Nga and Tran did, a willful, skinny boy who proved too much for the church sponsors. I was the one who registered Anh for school. I was the one who bought him his first hard shoes because his accustomed open sandals were not allowed. When he whined that the new shoes pinched, I ignored him. I hadn’t wanted to help Nga just then. Like the church sponsors, I was tired of her. I didn’t care that she was busy with the infant Paul or that she couldn’t drive. I had no sympathy for the fact that she had now taken in another charge, a half-grown boy not much younger than she was. I did a few grudging tasks because I had once been a victim of the same sidelong glances from the people of the church, the same disapproving whispers. I wanted them to see that I was a better person than they were. I did it for revenge.
Anh stayed with Nga and Tran only two years. Even as a young teen, he was restless, troublesome, shifty-eyed. But that wasn’t why he left. When Nga’s father arrived and settled in California, Anh went to join him. By the time the Nguyens moved to Biloxi, I had lost track of him entirely.
“Anh come to Biloxi last year,” Nga said. “He stay with me long time. Just move out last month.”
“Ah.” It was 10:30. I was very tired. Tomorrow was a school day for the children.
Nga looked troubled. “I give Anh money to take class for casino dealer. He say he get certificate, but I don’t know. I in store, I cannot tell what he do.
“His wife, I no think she good for him. If he want to go out, she say OK. He want to spend money, she say OK. If the woman has no control, not good.”
We finished our round of the casino, came out into the hallway where the light was not so dissolute and red.
“Anh stay with me seven months, and then I say, you cannot stay anymore.”
“Well, of course. You couldn’t support him forever.”
“Now he in public housing. He drink beer all the time, not work.”
“It’s not your fault, Nga.”
“I know it not my fault. But still it bother me. He my brother.”
In the video arcade, Zachary had run out of money. Half asleep, he sat on the floor next to Anne Marie, who was driving a race car down a treacherous cartoon track, hurdling all obstacles in her way. She was very good.
Back at the house, Tran carried my bag upstairs. I had been concerned about the location of the guest room. In the past year, not only had the pain in my knee gotten worse, the joint had grown unreliable. Stairs were a real chore. Luckily, there was a sturdy banister. Zachary had fallen asleep on the way home. Nga tucked him into his bed. Anne Marie was still chattering.
On the upper floor, everything was as messy as it had been tidy below. Baskets of dirty laundry littered the hallway. Anne Marie’s bedroom was full of French Provincial furniture covered with clothes, as if she’d been selecting and discarding outfits for days. The guest room was jammed with wall-to-wall beds.
“This is where my Uncle Anh stayed,” the girl explained. “Mother and father and two little kids. Before that, we sponsored another Vietnamese family. We haven’t had time to rearrange it.”
Nga came in with a pile of sheets. “Yes. Sometime house very full.” She shook a sheet out and turned to Anne Marie. “Go to bed now. Tomorrow, school.”
The girl said goodnight and left. I envied her. Exhaustion had settled over me like a glaze.
“Last year, we have 20 people here,” Tran laughed. “Too much people. Whoo!”
I caught a corner of the sheet, helped Nga smooth it over the mattress. “In my country now, you want to leave, you have to come to Vietnamese relatives,” she said.
“All these people are your relatives?”
“Some, yes. Others no, but government think so.”
We talked a few minutes longer. I opened my suitcase and discovered the forgotten gifts I’d brought for the children, white cotton T-shirts with big red crabs in the middle, reading, “Maryland is for Crabs.”
“I’ll give them these tomorrow,” I said.
“Children get up early,” Tran told me. “Have school. You tire, you no have to get up.”
“Oh, I can’t help it,” I said. “When you get old, you get up.”
That night I dreamed The Old Goat and I were arguing. This was odd because in real life we almost never fought. I said I wanted to quit teaching. The Old Goat objected. Teaching piano was not that strenuous. Each life had a path. You followed it until you couldn’t. He himself hadn’t stopped teaching history until they amputated his leg. “Not everyone is like you,” I protested. Even in the dream, I could feel how tired I was, how powerful the ache in my knee. I awakened late and groggy. When I came downstairs Nga was gone and the children were about to go out to the bus. I gave them the shirts.
“I love it!” Anne Marie exclaimed. “It’s . . . ethnic!”
“Well, not exactly.”
Zachary held his shirt up to his chest and made a comic face. Anne Marie tugged at her shorts, which were made of some tight, stretchy fabric that squeezed her flesh into a pouch just below each hem. Looking at the lump of flabby thigh, I wished earnestly that Nga were here to make her daughter change.
“Come back soon,” Anne Marie said.
“I will. And I’ll remember you every time I use your pin cushion.”
The girl hugged me awkwardly, as if it were a gesture she had rehearsed.
After the children rushed out I opened the refrigerator, looking for juice. It was nearly empty. A few bottles of soy sauce and ketchup, nothing else. Not even milk.
Tran came into the kitchen. “Nga go in to open store,” he explained. “We meet her there, then go have pho.”
“Who’ll watch the store for her?”
“Oh, she close for a while. Don’t get busy until later.”
The pho restaurant was just a diner, but the help was as solicitous as the Vietnamese wellwishers had been at the buffet the night before. The soup was even more delicious than I remembered, the best kind of brunch, light but filling. Nga fished noodles out of her broth with her chopsticks and talked nonstop.
“Tran mother sick now, we like to go back to Vietnam to see her. But very expensive. Last time we spend $20,000.”
“Twenty-thousand dollars!”
“Everyone expect you to give them money,” Tran said. “Relative come from everywhere. Some you never know before, but don’t leave till you give money. Whoo! Too much!” He plucked a soaked green vegetable from his soup and lifted it to his mouth.
“My aunt, I give her $100 and she complain to my mother, I should give 300,” Nga said, laughing.
“Your mother. I thought she was going to come here.”
“No. She old now. She no want to leave her friends. We help her. Send her money every month.”
“Oh.” Some years after Nga’s arrival, she had confessed to me that her father had two wives. The younger one had come with him to California. Nga’s mother had stayed behind.
A young man approached from across the room to offer the standard respectful greeting. His wife, still seated at their table, waved to us warmly. Nga nodded with royal aplomb. Then she introduced me. “Sheila my sponsor from when we first come here,” she said. “From when we live in Maryland.” This was not precisely true since the church had been the sponsor, but the man seemed impressed.
“Very happy to meet you. Nga, she help me get work here. Before, I live in Florida, no good jobs. She tell me come to Biloxi, she help me.”
“He live in one house I buy,” Tran said.
“They very big help,” the young man said. “Help me very much.”
After he left, Nga put down her chopsticks and said to me dreamily, as if the thought had just flitted through her mind, “Anne Marie– I worry now that summer so close. I no like her be in the house too much this summer. Zachary OK, play with friends. But Anne Marie–“
After last night, I wasn’t sure why we were discussing this again. “You think she’ll sit around inside and eat?” What she would eat from Nga’s empty refrigerator I couldn’t guess.
“Last year and year before, we have many Vietnamese family in house. Anne Marie help take care of babies, have a lot to do. This year, house empty.”
“But like you said, the neighborhood is safe.”
Nga frowned. She took a deep breath. “You remember I tell you about Anh?”
Well, of course I remembered, we had discussed him the night before.
“Anh no live with me now, but sometime he drink too much, come over to see her.”
I was horrified. Everything I knew about the Vietnamese, which wasn’t much, had never suggested–
“You mean–“
“Nothing happen yet, he don’t touch her, but I see him look at her. Not right. She too young, she don’t know. But I worry. I scare.”
“Nga, that’s terrible.” It was sharply clear to me that Nga was wrong about Anne Marie not being aware of her uncle’s impropriety. Anne Marie did know. Her involuntary shudder last night when the teenage boy had touched her shoulders must have reminded her of some other touch, Anh’s touch, unsavory and unwanted. No wonder Nga was worried! “Well, you’re absolutely right. She needs to go to camp this summer. Even if it’s just day camp. She needs to be out of the house when you’re not there. Or like you said, you might send her to Maryland. To your friends in Maryland.”
“I no send her to friends.” Nga shook her head. “But you, maybe. You alone now. Maybe she come and–“
I ought to have been shocked. If anyone else had suggested this, I would have been speechless. But with Nga it was important to speak quickly and plainly, as I’d done so many times before. “Oh, no, Nga. It’s out of the question. I like Anne Marie very much, you know I do. But I’ve never had children, I wouldn’t know–“
“She like music. You teach her piano. She keep you company. Help you out.”
I shook my head vigorously. “If you want to send her to friends, or send her to camp, that’s different. I could help. I have a little money.”
Tran put up a hand to fend me off. “We no take your money.”
“You have to send your own money to Vietnam, you said so yourself. And I’m alone. I don’t have that many expenses, I don’t really need–“
A waitress came up and pointed across the room to the young man and his wife, who were standing up to leave. “He pay your bill,” she announced.
Nga lifted an arm to the young man to acknowledge his generosity. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” The young man grinned and waved back.
I felt abashed. I had thought the least I could do was redeem myself by paying for our meal.
We had left my car back at the store, where I meant to make a quick getaway to New Orleans. But a real-estate agent was waiting for Nga in the parking lot, a tanned, blond, thirtyish man in a golf shirt and khakis, who flashed a wide, all-American smile and followed us into the store. I disliked him at once.
“This Johnny,” Nga told me. “Sometime he find houses for us.”
“Lots too. We deal in lots of lots.” Winking at his cleverness, Johnny produced a business card hidden in the palm of his hand, a magic trick.
“Sheila not buy house,” Nga said. “She live in Maryland. She my sponsor from 26 year ago. Long time.”
“Oh, your sponsor.” Seeing I wasn’t a customer, he segued from ingratiating to patronizing. “Then you must be very proud of them.” The way his voice dripped, I half expected him to pat Nga or Tran approvingly on the head, a Vietnamese no-no.
“You make them sound like children,” I said.
“I mean–to go from nothing to owning all this property.” His handsome features sought the proper expression to direct at me, wavered, hung in unattractive limbo.
“Well of course I’m proud of them. They’re like family to me.” I used my old-dowager voice, a full octave lower than normal, that I’d cultivated to deal with difficult parents. “I always expected Nga and Tran to do well. It doesn’t surprise me.” I raked him up and down with my eyes. “Follow their example and maybe someday your own parents will have reason to be proud.”
Even Nga had trouble suppressing a smile at this. Who did Johnny think he was? Didn’t he see Nga’s peers pay their respects as if to a Mafia don? If I was proud of her for anything, maybe I was proud of that.
Undone by my displeasure, Johnny busied himself showing Tran and Nga a packet of real-estate information. Nga nodded and asked questions, but she seemed distracted. What a strain it must be, operating on the seamy edge of the law, no matter that the law was stupid. At least she was getting away with it. Sending money to Vietnam, sponsoring relatives who weren’t related. Why should the tax man have her money?
“Well, I’ll let you take this and look it over,” Johnny said, giving me a last furtive glance as he handed over the papers and beat a hasty retreat. Except for the three of us, the store was empty. Tran and Nga and I stood across from each other in the dimness, among the half-stocked shelves.
“Your plane–” Nga began.
An image came to me of Anne Marie, her tight shorts hugging the ample flesh of her thighs as she faced a drunken Anh among the sea of beds in the guest room. I imagined the smell of beer on his breath, though what I smelled was only the beer in the cooler.
What Tran and Nga was doing was very hard, I thought, harder than anything I had ever done, even when The Old Goat was dying.
Then I reminded myself what Nga wanted from me. I reminded myself to keep quiet.
“Oh! I forget!” she exclaimed, and rushed to a small refrigerator behind the counter. She extracted a paper bag, slightly stained with grease. “This spring rolls I make for you this morning. I no have time last night, but you take these with you. They very good.” She smiled with what looked like genuine delight.
“Nga, thank you! You remembered how much I like them!” I took the bag and said goodbye. I didn’t offer to take Anne Marie. Nga smiled and waved and didn’t judge me.
In the car on the way to the airport, it was as muggy as it had been the day before, but the air no longer weighed me down. Although not considering it seriously, I rolled the idea of Anne Marie around in my mind. She was an annoying child, no question about it. Yet she had made me that silly pin cushion. Really rather sweet. Away from Zachary, maybe she wouldn’t be so bad. And Zachary could certainly use the reprieve. I could teach her piano, send her to the girls’ basketball camp at the Y. She could run up the stairs for the laundry, help me weed the garden. Sometimes she could visit Vietnamese friends. She wouldn’t have to be my whole life.
The lovely aroma of spring rolls rose up from the bag on the seat. I remembered our delicious breakfast. I told myself again that Nga was the supreme conwoman. The idea actually made me laugh. For the first time in weeks I didn’t feel tired. I felt energized. Even my knee didn’t hurt. It must have been the soup.
