Grass Roof, Tin Roof Read online

“The other ladies, when they come to Grandma’s house. Because you’re never with me, and you don’t know how to cook or clean properly. They say you walk like a rooster and smoke cigarettes and drink beer like the men, and that’s why no man wants to marry you. What man wants to marry a woman who’s like a man?”

  “I walk like a rooster?” Tran was appalled and amused by this, thinking Thien must be misrepeating what he had heard.

  “Yes, a rooster,” said Thien emphatically. Then he stood and demonstrated, with his hands on his hips and his elbows sticking out. From what Tran could gather, it had to do with her chest—the women were claiming she pushed it forward when she walked—and the bold uncouthness of her high-heeled boots that made her gait stiff and unfeminine and her footsteps loud, as if she meant to always announce her presence well ahead of her arrival.

  “They are just jealous,” said Tran. She felt miffed but slightly triumphant, too.

  That afternoon she took Thien to his grandmother’s house. She was thinking she would hire a maid soon, to lessen his visits to his grandmother. Tran and her mother did not converse in either a friendly or a strained manner; they nodded and gave each other perfunctory information. Tran’s mother brought a plastic bag out of the bedroom and immediately set items on the floor around Thien. Wooden cars, a toy helicopter, green plastic soldiers, some items that were not toys but appeared still to hold interest for him—an empty tin can with a colorful label, an assortment of mismatched chopsticks. As she was leaving, Tran saw her mother moving toward Thien with a plate of rice cakes.

  Her colleagues greeted her jovially as she entered the office. Shaking that morning’s issue, one reporter (whom Tran sensed fancied her) exclaimed, “And how does the beautiful, mysterious Trung Trinh find time to be both subversive and romantic? What a remarkable woman!”

  “Ah, but does it not take one to have the other? Does each simply not lead to the other?” teased another colleague. He was the same age as Tran, a photojournalist who kept mostly to himself and exhibited a carefree nature no matter the severity of his subject matter.

  “Quan the philosopher,” said the first reporter, not without admiration.

  “Quan the skeptic,” said Tran coyly; then reticently, coolly, removed her jacket and seated herself at her typewriter. She had her own desk now and composed her daily installments in the office, often finishing minutes before the deadline.

  Quan nodded and smiled. He shouldered his camera bag and walked away.

  “So,” shouted a woman from a desk nearby. “What are the lovers up to today, Miss Tran?”

  Tran glanced across the large room toward the stairs leading to the upstairs office where Giang worked. “Today I think I will put them on a boat,” she said grimly, “with a cake.”

  The boy was four now, and sometimes she saw too much of his father in him. She had only married the man because it had been expected of her, as it had been expected of her true beloved to marry his arranged bride. The general’s daughter. Now they worked side by side, caring equally for each other’s sons. All the men were gone. What did it matter anymore, the old rivalries among women? They all had love at stake now. Talk of fleeing was circulating in whispers in wash circles. The general’s daughter was secretly packing, weeping as she sorted memorabilia and made wrenching, frivolous decisions over items of sentimental value. Passions passed, Phuong-Li had learned, but true love was lasting. It did not need reciprocation, it did not require consummation, it knew nothing of time. It knew nothing of safety.

  Today was the boy’s birthday, and she would take him down to the water to watch the fishing boats. The boy loved boats. He was always asking her to “watch, watch” as he did one trick or another. Phuong-Li was not particularly patient with children and tired quickly of his enthusiasm. She sat in the sand and touched her ribs. It had been four years ago — oh, how she had hated being pregnant! She remembered. Too well. She drew circles in the sand. No, it could not be happening again, not so soon, could it? Out on the water fishermen’s nets arched through the air and landed, imprinting their grids on the shifting surfaces of the waves and catching sunlight in tiny squares of silver—fleeting seconds at a time—before sinking down into the warm darkness below.

  “We’re great friends, are we not?” said Giang that night. “I feel I can tell you anything.” They were working late as usual, drinking coffee and wine. Outside it was raining in thick, dank curtains of water. From a window across the way came the voice of a singer, wafting unharmonically against the drum of the rain in a pitiful, extended wail. This singer, whoever she was, was always singing melancholy songs late at night.

  “Sometimes I feel I live in a vaccuum, so isolated from the rest of society even when I’m in the midst of everything,” said Giang, “but I also feel this is the truest existence one can live. It is something about the forlornness, the sharpness of the forlomness—do you know what I mean?” He was sucking on his cigarette, one eye squinted, one hand poised above the typewriter keys. “I feel as if there is something happening, something vital. I think you must feel it, too. There are no accidents, you know. Though it may seem many things are against us in our work, in our personal situation, too. Still, I know I am right with the world. I’m doing what I can, what I should.” Then he shook his head and smiled gently, in a self-effacing way. “Look at me. I will type myself into oblivion.”

  She was sitting cross-legged on a chair on the other side of the desk, facing him. “Do you think we are losing our war?” she asked.

  “It’s inevitable,” he said, holding her gaze.

  A team of government police barraged the office the following morning. Rumors had been circulating of such police action against other newspapers. Semantics of certain ordinances were being interpreted now in stricter fashion and enforced, in order to tighten censorship rules. The police stopped at Tran’s desk and ordered her to come with them. She protested, demanding to know why, and the men stood in indignation around her—the reporter who fancied her tried to lie that he was in fact Trung Trinh, a man writing under a female alias; Quan the photojournalist yelled uncharacteristic (for him) curses; other reporters said, “Take us instead. Are you so cowardly you must pick on our women staff members alone?” Only Giang kept his face down, melted into the background, left by the back door.

  The police held her for interrogation. As they laid before her all the pages of the past episodes of her serial novel, they asked her to explain details of fashion and etiquette and dialogue between characters; they demanded to know what subversive messages each of these items encoded. She denied having encoded anything, but they insisted again that she “explain the codes.” In the end, they pushed her to her knees and lashed her hands with a bamboo cane, a symbolic gesture, they assured her, not meant to cripple literally (they knew it was more important to break spirit than body). Maybe next time she lifted her pen she would hesitate.

  Tran sobbed into her welted hands. The baby inside her kicked.

  ***

  Later that night, she did not consider where the smoke would go, or that it would have to rise. Her son was coughing when he crawled down the ladder of their sleeping loft and peeked in at her on her knees before the small metal pail in the middle of her papers on the floor. She had been burning the original manuscript pages of all her serial episodes, although she knew this, in fact, erased nothing.

  “Mama? What are you doing?”

  “It is only me,” said Tran, glancing up at the blur of her son through her heat-fogged eyeglasses.

  Tran found a maid in the week following the police interrogation. She did not want to rely anymore on her mother, did not want to face her patient but scrutinizing eyes on those nights (which seemed now to be increasing) she stumbled in at past midnight to retrieve her sleeping son.

  The maid was a charming girl, but simple. She loved children. She had come to the city from a southern coastal hamlet because her family needed the money. In truth the city terrified her—she said it was the ugliest, most exci
ting place she’d ever seen—and she was baffled by the impatient city folk and the women who ruined their God-given female beauty with strange, modern styles that cut and squared and blocked energy rather than letting it flow in the natural way. She declared to Tran with sincere concern: “Mrs. Trinh, you should never wear your hair like that. Hair is much more beautiful if you don’t cut it!” Tran was amused by the girl’s perceptions, her naivete and lack of intellectual preoccupations. She was sure her son would be cared for wholeheartedly.

  The maid’s name was Muoi Bon—“Number Fourteen.” This had been her place in the birth order of fifteen, only eight of whom were still alive. This kind of naming was standard in the countryside, where parents often didn’t count on all their children surviving; it was testament, too, to the parents’ humility—they expected nothing different for their children or themselves. (Tran had to credit the maid’s parents for including even the dead children in their numbering system—she had thought most peasant families would be purely practical, not sentimental, about their losses.) Muoi Bon was nineteen years old, with fluid black hair and dark, clear skin. By city standards she was not beautiful, and this seemed as apparent to her as the shape of her feet, which were soft and oblong and chubby around the ankles. Her whole appearance was soft—slope-shouldered, flatbodied, wide-faced, neither fat nor thin—and she seemed to have accepted being defined by her ordinariness. It connected somehow, Tran thought, to her willingness to work. (Tran saw something of the skewed power of Communism in this. How were these people to know any better or different, ever?) Though at the same time, Muoi Bon was eager to recognize beauty in other women and girls.

  The maid saw Tran as beautiful, or as a former beauty at least. In the maid’s eyes (Tran knew) she also appeared well-off and eccentric and probably selfish—living in her own apartment with her son but no husband and voluntarily away from her own mother.

  “You could be still very pretty, but now you are getting a little old,” the maid told Tran. “Don’t you want to be married?”

  And Tran would graciously try to explain some of the concepts of feminism. She would explain that the work she did, all this handling of paper, was in fact her “labor of love.” I make stories, little sister, she told the girl affectionately. But she could see the maid was confused. Weren’t stories well enough told through one’s grandmother’s lips? And what did paper have to do with love?

  For the maid, who had never learned to read, it was impossible to fathom the connection between strange symbols on a piece of paper and, say, the tree in her family’s backyard, or the brown riverbank she loved to roam. Reading in her world was akin to the act of listening to insects chatter in order to ascertain the weather.

  “Language is what can preserve your memories about experiences, you see,” Tran tried to say simply, “so that we don’t forget, and so that we understand those experiences better.”

  But Number Fourteen did not understand the meaning of the word preserve, nor could she understand the need to “understand better.” What did that mean? She was of the sort of mind that didn’t question what seemed readily apparent: she knew where she had come from and that she would go back, always. For her, there was no need for records or questions; home would always be the center of her world, and the rest was not so important. Language for her was no more than what people said or did. She never doubted words—she only doubted people. A lie was a lie if the teller was a liar.

  “And what is all this talk, talk, talk of troubles everywhere today? I hear people say ‘life is so bad in our country, we are doomed.’ I don’t know why they’re saying that,” said the maid. “I think our country is beautiful, only the city is ugly. But the city is not our whole country, is it?”

  Tran smiled, knowing she could feel free to leave her work lying about, certain the maid wouldn’t be able to make any sense of it.

  But occasionally on the evenings when Tran brought home a friend or two (usually men), she would notice a slight difference in the maid’s attitude. The girl would not look Tran in the eye and treated her deferentially, as she would any male guest, yet there was more to it than that. The girl’s deference, Tran thought, was not entirely submissive nor was it uncomprehending. Rather Muoi Bon seemed to be treating her now as a traitor. Sitting at the table with the men and laughing at their jokes, Tran would begin to have a feeling almost of shame, but also of lonely, indignant satisfaction. And though she felt her behavior—smoking, drinking, speaking her mind—affirmed her atypicalness, her eccentricity in the girl’s eyes, she also felt an absence, a question: was this—the men’s table—what she had partitioned herself off to? She was sure she appeared confident in her unorthodox ways, but she didn’t always feel natural or entirely truthful in exhibiting them, and she sensed the maid saw this.

  While the men did not.

  Some days the maid and Tran walked to the big Ben Thanh market. The maid clutched her small satchel, money and belongings inside, as they pushed through the thick, loud crowds of bartering women and shopkeepers. Tran observed how timidly the girl made her small purchases, and how she shook her head wordlessly at abrasive vendors who shouted to her. This market was ten times larger than any she had previously known, she told Tran in polite awe. It was interesting and deceptive, Tran thought, and yet entirely honest—this girl’s careful approach to new things. (Tran suspected the girl was tougher and more adaptable than she appeared; timidity was just the face she had been raised to present to others.) All she wanted to find here, the maid told Tran, were a few small gifts to take home to her family when she returned for her monthly visit.

  III

  Then she saw, through the window, out in the distance across the field a swaying light that could have been a handheld lantern. Could it be he? They had all fled south, but she had remained. She had even given her son over to the other neighbor-women’s care — or mercy, whichever it was — and let them fear her lost, she didn’t mind, for she had a greater concern. When it came closer, she heard the lantern’s clank and the whistle of someone’s tired breathing.

  He was walking gently on the stones outside—they turned and crunched beneath his tread. Oh, how she loved him! Oh, how she envied the stones their contact with his feet! She had to close her eyes for a moment and steady her breathing. This house and all the neighbors’ houses were empty; the two of them would be the only ones left to walk through the abandoned familiar streets and lament the losses, nothing to divide them now, nothing to save or comfort them but each other. He came now and pushed upon the door.

  But something was not right, something was different about him. His face showed no surprise at finding her, and he was not alone. His companion stepped forward and prodded her with his rifle. “Who are you? What are you waiting for? Who called you here? Why are you hiding? What are you hiding? Speak! Speak now!”

  His face stony, he refused to recognize her. He was turning his back on her pleas for recognition. “You are mistaken, Comrade,” he said. And then he added, almost sympathetically, “You should never trust a snake.”

  She awoke in a prison, a hole in the ground...

  IV

  In her eighth month of pregnancy, Tran was facing a trial, the newspaper was facing shutdown, and neighbors and many other people she encountered daily were either denying or praying in the face of coming changes in the political climate. In the countryside, entire families were lynched, their heads strung from tree limbs, mouths agape. This, among a long list of horrors the approaching Communist takeover was likely to bring. At the National Cemetery, mass graves had been dug and filled as bodies were shipped in by the truckload, with no time or means for proper identification. Reporters took gruesome snapshots of bloodied bodies and bulging eyes—the dead looked stunned. Suicide in the cities increased.

  Tran moved cumbersomely through these months, continuing to believe only in the newspaper’s single-minded rebellion, the artists’ cause of freedom of speech, which aligned itself with neither the approaching forces nor t
he failing and corrupt current government. She had spoken to no one of her pregnancy until it had made itself plainly visible and other women had begun—without acknowledging the pregnancy directly—to bring her extra food and pull out chairs for her to sit on during meetings. Giang was the only person she had told before this point, and he had shaken his head. As if it were the bearing of his own feelings about the situation—and not the bearing of the child, exactly—that would be most taxing. This had been enough to tell Tran he had no intention of supporting her. (Only Muoi Bon met Tran’s news with enthusiasm, and with genuine new vigor took to the household duties.) But Tran had been through this once before, and this time she figured it was best not to raise a fight or ask for compensation or even acknowledgment. She knew Giang’s reputation was more important to him than anything else. Nothing was personal that was not political here. They passed each other in the halls now with lowered eyes. Hers was not the only alias he used anymore; he had begun using it less ever since the first few visits from the police. And no one was interested in or entertained by her serial lately, either. For some reason it was not the same—with the writer so regrettably, unmentionably pregnant. Everyone, it seemed, shared a sense of chagrin and karma.

  Giang’s wife began to visit the newspaper offices regularly to bring him meals. She dressed tastefully, her hair done up immaculately. (Tran would not look up from her desk or would look up only briefly as the other women called out greetings to Giang’s wife.) She was an attractive but vain woman who Tran knew from hearsay fancied herself a poet, but her poems had been published only because of her husband’s influence, and she had never shed her true desire for wealth despite her husband’s unflagging idealism. Tran also knew from hearsay that though the wife was aware of her, they did not speak of the other woman. At least he has granted us this much, Tran thought. But she wasn’t sure whom he was really protecting.