All of Us and Everything (5 page)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2012

Ru Rockwell was the only one in the family who knew nothing about the storm. She was living in a longhouse in a M'nong village in the Highlands of Vietnam. She shared the longhouse—just one room—with seventeen people, one family spanning three generations. The fourth generation was in utero.

When the storm reached its crescendo on the East Coast of the United States on Monday night, it was already Tuesday morning in the village. The children had been capturing crickets, and after the appropriate daylong wait they were cooking them over a fire in the center of the room, which didn't have a chimney. The lack of chimney was supposed to help the house-on-stilts keep its structure—she wasn't sure how—while also deterring unwanted insects. It made it hard to see and breathe.

When the matriarch offered some smoked crickets to Ru, she ate them, of course. She was trying to assimilate, which was why she was wearing a long striped skirt down to her ankles, even though the children were in Hello Kitty and Elmo shirts.

She noted that the crickets weren't as seasoned as the stir-fried ones she'd picked off the appetizer section of the menu at Typhoon in Santa Monica, not as nutty, but not bad.

I miss doughy foods,
she said softly into her handheld battery-operated recording device.
Some people equate doughy fullness with a kind of maternal love. Augusta outsourced that maternal task.

She didn't record her thoughts in order to remember them. She had an eidetic memory. She wrote them down in case she died here.

The thought crossed her mind many times a day. The idea that she was here to experience something visceral now seemed so manufactured that she was sure that an ironic death would be more fitting, that her death seemed inevitable—if only from a writer's perspective.

She wasn't really a novelist or even a screenwriter so much as a collector of one-liners that went viral. She'd won a Win-Back Award for her leading man's famous speech to win back the woman he loved. Her cult following had inched over into a short-term mainstream popularity. For a short time, it became a kind of flash-mob thing—to videotape someone in a mall, for example, start to give the Teddy Wilmer win-back speech to a clerk, only to be joined by all of these other people previously arranged to join in. There were thousands of Teddy Wilmer win-back variations on YouTube; one performed by a four-year-old in Teddy's famous baby-blue tracksuit had over seven million views.

But what she'd really mastered in her career was the art of taking meetings in offices, fiddling with water bottle caps while pitching story lines, and sucking on pot lollipops—Jolly-Lollies kept her calm, an eccentricity she'd become known for.

Why in the hell had she decided to chuck it all—including the Jolly-Lollies—for something
more serious
?

Desperation, that's why. Her second novel was three years overdue. They'd amended the contract so many times to push back the due date that Ru had lost count. Her editor, Hanby Popper, had acquired Ru's first novel when she was a very new assistant editor for a low six-figure bid. Hanby had quickly scaled the ranks. The movie-tie-in editions sold gangbusters. The second book was likely to grow a bigger audience still. Ru's book played mysteriously well in ex-communist countries.

But Ru had no more whimsy, romance, or comedy in her tank. She'd decided to turn her sights on nonfiction—in particular the inner workings of this matriarchal society. Maybe she could borrow authenticity. Wasn't that what nonfiction was? Borrowed authenticity?

Now she was here waiting out the rainy season, constant drumming on the thatched roof. With her eidetic memory, Ru would have learned the language the way she had many others—with tapes and subtitled films. But that wasn't possible with M'nong. They'd only created a M'nong alphabet for the first time in 2008, along with a twenty-five-thousand-word dictionary that translated to Vietnamese.

She'd learned Vietnamese before she came so she could use the damn dictionary.

That morning—while Ru's oldest sister Esme kept calling her errant husband on his Skype account, to no avail, and Liv was scaring her acupuncturist by sticking her upper body out of a window in a hurricane, and her mother watched waves reach across Asbury Avenue and splash into the downstairs of the old family home—Ru dictated her notes into a mini tape recorder in the far corner of the longhouse, eating crickets.

Light peeks in through the woven walls.

The matriarch says she wants the new baby to be a girl. This is a typical desire of the M'nong's matriarchal bias. Daughters are preferred to sons.

She thought of the matriarchal household of her own childhood. It felt imbalanced by a weighty invisible presence, the old absent spy. A girl among girls, she was the only daughter who still harbored him. At sixteen, she started researching Vietnam because a spy her father's age would have surely been involved in the war somehow, right? Her father was a secret secondary reason why she'd picked this place to write about.

Fathers were hard, she'd heard from all of the men she'd dated. Even Cliff. Sometimes, lying in bed, she'd put her head on his chest and listen to him talk about his father's heavy expectations—a drum of a voice talking about his father drum.

Hadn't her fatherless childhood been a good thing?

One of her main female characters once said, “Marriage is billed as an end to loneliness, but each of us is alone in this world. The only unit is the self.” Of course a quirky young man—handsome, damaged, and tinged with some intangible lovability quotient—would change her mind.

In some ways that character, Marta Prine, was based on Ru's mother, Augusta Rockwell, and sometimes Marta was Ru herself, and sometimes Marta was Liv and occasionally Esme. Ru only knew what she knew.

Did Ru believe in love and marriage? She was engaged to Clifford Wells. That was proof of something.

After
Trust Teddy Wilmer
was a hit and Clifford Wells proposed to her and she accepted—a knee-jerk reaction—she realized that she'd actually never lived in a family bound by marriage. She had no idea what she was committing to.

The elephants were lowing in the distance. She read into her recorder,
The domesticated elephants are having conversations. They have inner lives. They understand love more than human beings do. I'm sure of it.

Maybe the elephants would be the key to her book. She was getting used to their different kinds of calls.

She said:
Note to self: More elephants?

Just then, a man in a government uniform walked up the steps to the longhouse and pointed at her. He spoke to the matriarch, who looked at Ru. The man was asking permission. The matriarch was giving it.

The man pointed again and said in Vietnamese, not M'nong, “Letters for you.” He held out a bundle bound by a rubber band.

Ru walked around the family members huddled by the fire and took the bundle. “Thank you,” she said, but he held on to the bundle.

“You are still not a missionary?” he asked Ru in Vietnamese. The region suffered human rights violations due to religious persecution. She hadn't really researched this enough.

“I'm still not a missionary. I'm here to research love.”

“Love?”

“Like marriage.”

The man laughed, showing his blunt dark teeth, and let go of the package. “Like marriage!” he said and walked out of the longhouse back the way he'd come.

She returned to her corner spot, squatting as the other women often did, flat-footed, knees to her chest. The children gathered around her, and one petted her hair. Ru was getting used to this.

The letters were all from Cliff. She opened the sealed envelopes and sorted them by date.

And as she read, she responded in a letter—in the order of the questions asked.

Cliff had written,
How long are you planning to stay?

She wrote,
I haven't seen a ritualistic teeth filing.

She already realized that she probably wouldn't see this. Only the M'nong elderly had filed teeth and elongated earlobes. The tradition had waned. It made her think of a future time when piercings, gauges, and certain tattoos would be a sign of having outlived a tradition.

She went on…
or the crying for the bull ceremony.
If he looked this up—and he would—he'd know that this was tied to New Year's, two months away.

No one's died yet so I haven't seen them banging the drums beside the coffin.
She added this hesitantly, not wanting to sound like she wished this on anyone in order to fulfill her mission.

And most of all, I haven't seen anyone get married, which is key. I'll have to stay on a good while longer.

He'd written in the next letter,
I'm worried that you left so quickly and right after we got engaged. Are you happy about the engagement? Do you feel pressured? I didn't mean to pressure you. I'm so sorry but my mother insisted on sending the news into the
NY Times
engagement announcements and they're running a notice.

She wrote:
No need to apologize. It's a public fact. It's a ritual that is recognized. It's the truth.
A Statement of Personal Honesty, she thought.

Reading the mounting anxiety in Cliff's letters, she wondered if she was just running away.

She'd run away many times before. The first time was when she was just sixteen.

She ran away from college twice to live off the land. That was where she'd started indulging in pot for its calming effects. She was otherwise too high-strung and her memory was too sharp—always sending her backward into the past instead of forward.

She ran away from a graduate program in archaeology to become a novelist, and ran away from writing her second novel to be a screenwriter, albeit one who only adapted her own work.

She'd run away from three previous serious relationships—an Olympic fencer, a pot farmer (long before pot was legal anywhere and eventually where she'd get her pot lollipops), and a producer of indie horror films.

I have to stick this out,
she wrote to Clifford.
I can't leave. Not until I know something true.

At some point, we all want the truth even if we aren't particularly suited to accept it.

What truth was she after?

She said into her recorder,
If I am running away, I can't run away from running away.

This was the moment when she froze and her mind recalled
Symphonie Fantastique,
each of the girls standing at the windows on the third floor of the house on Asbury Avenue. She could feel the lightness of the small baton in her hand. She heard the notes as they started to dance. She remembered everything that was said, but mostly the exact ring of their voices set against the hard rain. Her mother's declaration,
Yes, but I have lived a life—before you three were born.
And young Liv, hopeful and defensive at the same time, saying,
What if only one person is worth it? Then isn't all the time and energy worth it? For just one?
It was strange to think that Liv was once a believer in love. The lightning, thunder, and then Esme leveling her accusation at Augusta,
I'm calling you a bad liar. No one has a father who's just a spy, who can never be met or talked to. You probably had sex with strangers!
There was the snap of the limb, the dented hood of the car. And then Ru's own voice piped up, so small and high-pitched:
There's a fourth kind of person. The kind who tries to control a storm, right? We're that kind.

No one is that kind.

Ru didn't know about Hurricane Sandy, and yet she was sure something was coming, a vibration in the air.

Suddenly anxious, she moved to a slit in the weave of the longhouse's wall. A tiny window, a view of fat green leaves.

Meanwhile, Esme stood at the bay window of the home she was getting kicked out of in eight months' time, her daughter curled under the sofa comforting the nervous collie.