Pioneer Girl (19 page)

I
didn't tell my mother and Ong Hai about the fellowship right away. I worked at the café through morning and lunch and spent the afternoons writing. My adviser, congratulating me about the postdoc, made sure to emphasize that it was a lucky strike, and she hoped that it would motivate me to get my chapters revised and articles sent. I understood: I had been granted an academic miracle, saved for a year from the slushes of adjuncting. I supposed she knew without my ever admitting it how close I had come, and how often, to walking away. I still couldn't say what the point of it all was for me, or what I was in it to achieve. All I knew was that this reprieve was a buying of time. A possibility. A whole new city.

But I couldn't exactly say
that
to my mother and Ong Hai. They had come to believe that I'd be staying at home indefinitely and the past week at the Lotus Leaf could only confirm that: I might become a decent daughter after all. I might even find myself a moneymaking Asian husband, at which point I could leave with permission, ribbons and bows taped to the getaway wedding car. By then, my mother no doubt hoped, Sam would have come to his senses and returned. After all, he knew it was the son's obligation to care for the older generation. I remembered learning this idiom from friends in college:
A daughter is a daughter all her life; a son is a son until he takes a wife
. Whoever came up with that wasn't Vietnamese.

It had been nearly two weeks since I'd returned from San Francisco and told my mother and Ong Hai about Sam, and Rose, and the pin. But it felt like I'd never said anything at all.

I had no idea what my mother, in the privacy of her thoughts, her room, her shower, planned and imagined. I could see her seizing the idea to move to San Francisco herself, or finding a way to lure Sam back with money, fulfilling the lie that I'd told and that Sam had seen right through. I wondered if she even had his new phone number, if she called him or left messages. Or perhaps she'd resolved to ride it out, figuring he would need her again one of these days.

On Saturday nights she and Ong Hai stayed up later than usual because the café opened at ten on Sundays. I waited until then to tell them about the postdoc. My mother was settling into a new Hallmark Channel movie and I asked Ong Hai to come sit with us for a while. He'd just finished another batch of pickled vegetables for the four different kinds of banh mi—chicken, pork, shrimp, and tofu—he kept practicing.

“Is this a job?” Ong Hai asked, and when I said pretty much, he said, “Well, that deserves congratulations!”

“Is it a real job?” my mother asked.

“It's only for a year. But it gives me time to find something else in the meantime.”

“What kind of job only lasts for a year?”

“Philadelphia's not that far,” Ong Hai said, as though it were just another suburb. “Sounds like a good opportunity.”

“It is,” I said.

“What if you don't get a job after that?” my mother asked.

“Then I'll keep looking, I guess. Same as everyone else.”

It crossed my mind for a moment how differently this news might have gone over in another household. I had a fleeting fantasy of a family rallying around with cheers and hugs. It was the kind of life that someone like Alex might know. But it had never been my family. If the postdoc was an accomplishment—a lucky strike, a miraculous reprieve—it was also, in my mother's eyes, a sign of structure gone wrong. When I lived in Madison, it had been easy enough to drive back to Franklin, so it had been easy for my mother and Ong Hai to believe that I was just an extension away from home. Now I really was going to leave, just as Sam had done. And there was no telling when either of us would be back.

Of course I thought of Rose and Laura again, and how they too had left their homes and families, their known structures. For what? Laura, her sisters, and her parents had filled up a covered wagon and driven away from the comforts of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, had floated across seasons and rivers and rattled over hundreds of miles of prairie, searching. They knew the risks: injury, death, failure, loneliness, never seeing their families again. Letters would take months if they arrived at all. And Rose had hurried away from home while still a teenager, eager for the dramas she believed only a bigger city might provide; even when she came home she never could call it her own.

“Everyone has to leave,” I said, feeling like I needed, in some way, to defend myself. “You left too. You both did. And we've moved a dozen times since.”

“We had no choice to leave Vietnam,” my mother countered.

But Ong Hai overrode her. “We did choose,” he insisted. “Maybe it didn't seem like it, but we did.”

And that's where we stayed, those words, at least that night. My mother turned up the volume on the television, which was now in the midst of a movie about a city girl in stilettos finding romance in a Texas ranch town. Ong Hai headed back to the kitchen to finish the banh mi. And I returned to the blinking cursor on my computer. I was learning, more and more, to obey it. To stay in my chair and see where the words I typed would take me.

—

W
hen I called Alex about the postdoc—we'd talked only once since my return from San Francisco—he asked me to come up to Iowa City. He said that every time he saw a piece of bacon he thought of salt pork and the
Little House
books and thus he thought of me. We could spend what was left of the summer writing, me revising the diss and him finishing a draft of his story collection, and meet up for evening dinners and movies. The idea was tempting: a pretend life, a pretend relationship. But soon, e-mails about meetings and readings would start, letting us know that the fall was upon us. I was moving and, next year, Alex would be too. We could only ever end up in the same place through sheer coincidence or through one of us jettisoning plans, tying one boat to the other's, and trailing along.

“You know that's how it is,” I said.

“I do know.” There was a pause, then, “I just don't know where this leaves us.”

“Nowhere,” I answered, and then, because the word sounded so harsh, “Which is where you and I have always been, right?”

“The undefined space?”

“Liminal, academics call it.”

“Of course they do.”

“If you're going to be in D.C. sometime, Philly isn't too far away.”

“Maybe one day we'll take that dream trip to De Smet,” Alex said.

I had told him the rest of the Rose Wilder story, or where it had ended so far—her notes buried in the pages of
Free Land
, the image of a woman standing outside that gray house in northern California, trying to recognize something of herself, trying to know if the people in it had ties to her. Was it really Rose? he asked, and I wished I could answer. I wasn't even sure if I could hope that it was, to wish that kind of fate, that kind of hunger, on a woman I had come to know and respect.

Of course, I never said what had happened between me and Gregory, and Alex, if he wondered, didn't ask.

In the olden days, courtship hadn't been any easier. Whether in
These Happy Golden Years
or
The Age of Innocence
, so much had had to be left unspoken. A girl could never state her feelings or be so bold as to show she even had them, not until her suitor made his intentions clear. For months, Almanzo walked Laura home from church and drove her miles in his sleigh, to and from her teaching school, and still she did not think of him as a beau. It would take many more months, and more buggy rides, and the force of habit and routine—people in the town getting used to seeing them together—to make their courtship something real. Rose, coming of age in the new 1900s, hadn't bothered waiting for marriage. She wanted great glamorous love and got it, for a while, until she saw into Gillette Lane's smile and found nothing on the other side, realizing she could do better on her own. Meanwhile, Laura and Almanzo's marriage lasted sixty-four years, until his death at the age of ninety-two. It had seen them from deep debt to royalty riches, from a two-room house to a sprawling farm. Still, late in life Almanzo was quoted in an interview as saying, “My life has been mostly disappointments.”

As for me, the sad fact was that I had yet to have a great relationship, yet to feel the flurry and fury of obsessive love, and I was far from the slow calm of settling down into a domestic life. No one in my family ever spoke of such things. The very prospect of a kissing scene on TV used to prompt my mother to change the channel. In high school, I had overheard Sam talking to a couple of girls on the phone but, except for that one ill-fated prom, he made sure any romantic dealings were concealed. I'd hardly ever heard Ong Hai say anything about his wife, my grandmother. And my mother rarely mentioned my father. I had never brought a guy home to meet the family, had never even mentioned the existence of a boyfriend. My mother and Ong Hai would never have inquired about my love life, and the idea of asking them about relationships seemed laughable, impossible, and far too private. In such matters, I was always on my own too.

—

O
ver the next week I helped Ong Hai finalize the banh mi, adjusting the spice level down just slightly, and trying baguettes from different bakeries. A wine shop had opened a few doors down in the same strip mall that housed the Lotus Leaf, and Ong Hai was friendly with the florist shop next door, so he brought both places a sampling of banh mi as part of a trial run. They asked for more, and Ong Hai returned to the café with two free bottles of wine and a bucket of fresh ranunculus. I went ahead then and finished redesigning the take-out menu, finally ditching the Oriental-looking font for modern, cleaner lines. For the website I used the same saturated persimmon color I'd chosen for the café's new decal sign. It had arrived while I was in San Francisco, and on the day Hieu returned to the café, Ong Hai helped me take down the old sign and apply the new one.

Ong Hai had already told me what my mother never would have—that in agreeing to a business partnership, she'd conceded that focusing more on take-out sandwiches and spring rolls might be a good idea. She would not have admitted that she didn't really have a choice, that her other best option was to shut down the café and start over somewhere else. I couldn't imagine her going back to the buffet life, its grease and odors weighing down her hair, and maybe neither could she.

I was bringing in some napkin refills from the storage cabinet when Hieu came up to the counter and handed a cream-colored envelope to my mother. She waved him toward one of the tables. Ong Hai put together a late lunch of banh mi, summer rolls, and a bowl of pho, more food than one person could eat. When I brought it all to Hieu's table he invited me to share the meal with him. I glanced back at my mother, who was rearranging the pastries in the glass case. The envelope was still on the counter and she didn't look back at me, so I sat down.

“I hear you're moving to Philadelphia,” he said.

I guessed he already knew too that I was headed there that weekend to find an apartment.

He zigzagged Sriracha over the pho. “I remember you and Sam singing songs to us, over and over, until your ma got mad. I still know those words for ‘Puff the Magic Dragon,' and the one that goes, ‘Oh beautiful for spacious sky, and amber waves of grain.'”

“Yeah, we liked to pretend we were a famous singing duo.”

“You were good kids.”

“And then what happened?” I said jokingly.

Hieu smiled but said, “I always wanted children of my own.”

It was uncomfortable to hear this kind of statement. It was one thing to comment on someone's weight or height—that was an Asian thing to do—but this was getting downright confessional.

I dared myself to ask, “Why didn't you?”

He gave a small, easy laugh. “No one knows why some things happen or not.” He pushed the banh mi and summer rolls toward me, but I shook my head.

“It's the same with La Porte,” Hieu said, his voice turning pensive. “I think about it. I wish I had never convinced your ba to move there.”

I asked him what he meant. Ong Hai had always said that Hieu had followed us to La Porte, that he had relied on my father for jobs and advice.

“Oh, well, your Ong Hai—you know he tells the stories.”

“So you were the one who got us to La Porte? What about after that?”

“Well, after that you went to Naperville, remember? That's where my friend Lan was.”

“I don't remember. I was only six. What about all those community college classes my dad paid for?” But even as I spoke, I realized the truth. My father had never paid for any classes. How could he even have afforded any for himself?

Hieu was looking uneasy now. I could tell he was about to clam up, so I said, “It's fine. I get it. You were the one who got us to La Porte and then got us out of there too, right? And the other places?”

“Your ba—well, he didn't like to stay in one job,” Hieu said. “He was all the time looking. But what difference is it? He was a good father. He was a good man.”

Just then a group of hipsters walked in, so I had to get up.

Hieu said, “You're a good daughter, Lee. Don't worry—we will take care of this place.”

While I waited on the hipsters, who talked among themselves about the banh mi they'd had from some food truck in New York and how amazing it was, my mother took my place at Hieu's table. I could hear them speaking softly in Vietnamese but couldn't discern any of the words. My mother had the envelope in her hand and she drew from it a piece of paper that might have been a check. No paperwork, no legal documents to designate a business deal. Of course. This was always going to be the terms of their partnership—classic, old-school, old-fashioned Viet-style. A deal made and sealed not with a handshake but with a promise of loyalty. My mother put the paper back in the envelope, folded it, and stuck it in her shirt pocket. Then she slid the plate of goi cuon summer rolls toward Hieu, telling him to eat.