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