A Wedding Invitation (11 page)

November 1986

I
t was the day Lien almost went to the Monkey House. We wondered why she and her family never showed up at the wedding held at the community chapel; it was her mother’s cousin who was marrying a thin man with a nervous twitch. The new couple would relocate to Los Angeles, where family and a Vietnamese nail salon were waiting.

Carson and I drank from lukewarm bottles of Sprite and helped ourselves to crisp
chiayo
inside the chapel. Other guests spoke to us, some in English, but mostly in Vietnamese. Carson asked the bride where the Hong family was. She shook her head and then turned to smile for the photographer, who told her to turn to her left so that he could get a side view of her in her silky traditional Vietnamese dress, designed with gold and orange butterflies sailing up the front of it.

“You wear white gown in America?” the bride asked after the photographer took his lens off of her and focused on a group of teens.

“Sometimes,” I said and then took a bite of the spring roll.

“Sometimes?” Carson’s eyes suddenly were like darts, ammunition, ready to act against me.

“Not all brides wear white gowns.”

Carson dismissed me with a roll of the eyes, and then he and the bride chatted in Vietnamese and I realized that he could very well be saying that all brides wore white. I wanted to say, I was invited to a wedding where it was the bride’s second marriage and she wore a floral dress with fuchsia stilettos. But neither of them seemed concerned with what I’d seen.

The groom, decked out in a solid blue shirt, the long sleeves rolled up at the cuffs, and a pair of brown pants with a leather belt, came over to our table and joined in the conversation with his bride and Carson. Getting the attention of the photographer, the groom asked him to take a picture of Carson, the bride, groom, and me. We had to move to get the pose the groom wanted. His eye twitched as he positioned Carson and me on the left side and then stood with his arm wrapped around his bride’s shoulder. After two shots like that, he asked the photographer to snap a picture of just Carson and me. Carson and I were seated again, and Carson moved closer to me as we both smiled for the camera.

Later, in Carson’s classroom, under a dull fan, he and I sat on benches and talked about effective tactics to teach cultural orientation to our students. Carson said he liked to use the visual aid of the American house, pointing out each room and explaining what people did in each one. Then, slowly and with strain in his voice, he shared a memory of his father at Thanksgiving. His father insisted on slicing the turkey at the meal, but he always took so long that his mother would end up taking over the task to appease the table of hungry family.

“That was our tradition,” he said. “Knowing Dad would be taken over by Mom. Yet every year he wanted to be the one to cut the bird.” Carson produced a slight smile, and spontaneously, I grabbed his hand. He let me hold it as I absorbed the excitement of the moment, but once I started to talk about our Thanksgiving traditions, the few I recalled from when my dad was alive, he let my hand go. I assumed that Mindy was on his mind.

When the door banged open and a distraught Huy entered, I was in the middle of talking about one of my Cambodian students who, as we studied the letter
P
, had said she wanted to live in a house in California with movie stars, an outdoor pool, a poodle, and plenty of pineapples.

Using Vietnamese, Huy spouted a large amount of words. Sweat glistened on his face. He paused as Carson said to me in English, “Lien’s in trouble.”

I was not surprised. The Amerasian could be nicknamed Trouble. Now that she was no longer in my class after having received her graduation certificate, I tried to avoid her. In the marketplace, she’d call out to me, “Miss Bavecoo, Miss Bavecoo!” Her energetic wave made everyone turn and look.

Carson said, “They are accusing her of stealing money and jewelry from the billets.”

“How much did she steal?” I asked.

Carson’s eyes were cold and didn’t indicate he’d heard me. I waited while he said a few things to Huy and then to me, “Lien wouldn’t steal.”

When Huy left the room, I said, “I think she would.”

Carson’s jaw was like the barbed wire at the guard’s gate at the entrance to the camp. If I touched it, I was certain that my fingers would bleed.

“She isn’t like that.”

“She is, Carson.”

“How can you be sure?”

I thought of how Lien was once in the marketplace with a lacquer bangle brought over from Vietnam and some of my students were trying to catch up to her because the jewelry was not hers. Three girls approached me as I paid for two carrots and a head of cabbage. They announced that Lien had taken the item. I recalled the scenario for Carson.

“She was only playing,” he said. “I later saw her with that bracelet and she gave it back to the proper owner.”

“Well, she stole my watch once.”

Bleakly, he looked at me. “She did?”

“She picked it up and took it.”

“Off of your wrist?” Sarcasm was evident in his tone.

“No. I always remove it and put it on top of my desk when I teach.”

“And she saw it and was playing with it?”

“No.” I steadied my voice. “She took it.”

“Took it away? Put it in her pocket?”

Today, Carson’s Southern accent grated on my nerves, like fingernails on a chalkboard. Just moments ago I had held his hand and now I wanted to walk away from him. Why was it that Lien could do no wrong in his book? What was it about the Hong family that he revered? Accusingly, I stated, “She had it in her hands and was walking away with it.”

He pointed to my Citizen watch, sitting securely on my left wrist. “And she gave it back.”

“But she picked it up and held it.”

“That’s not stealing!”

Carson’s tone shocked me. It was loud and seared my skin. I hadn’t seen this side of him before.

“She had no business taking it!” I gulped, reminded that I had prayed to have patience with Lien, but now patience and understanding seemed miles away.

“That’s not stealing.” Carson’s eyes looked like dark valleys, no room for light.

“She took scissors from my desk and kept them for two days.”

“But she returned them, didn’t she?”

“Carson!” Then my words spilled, toppling over each other. “You protect Lien all the time. You can’t ever see her faults. She isn’t perfect! If you’re so in love with her, then just go off and have a happy life.”

It was a stupid thing to say. I regretted it later.

I regretted a lot later.

fourteen

W
hen I finally get Dexter on the phone, his apology is profuse. “Sam, you have to forgive me. My car wouldn’t start. Crazy, huh? I cranked the key over and over, but it was dead. I got a friend to come over and try the whole jumper cable routine. That didn’t work.”

“So what did you do then?” I’m admiring the recent photos I took of Dovie’s butterflies at the cemetery. I dropped off the roll of film after work and waited the one hour for the drugstore’s lab to process it into glossy prints, which are now spread over the kitchen table.

“He drove me to Sears to get a battery, but even with a new battery it wouldn’t start. I had to have it towed to a repair shop.”

“Did you find out what was wrong with it?”

“Yeah, it was the water pump.”

“Ohh. That can be expensive to fix.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “Really. I bought a gift and everything. How was Avery?”

When I tell him it was the wrong Avery Jones, he laughs so loud I have to move the receiver from my ear. “Now that is funny,” he says, and laughs some more. “You went to the wrong wedding, Sam? Just like you went to the wrong lab that time in chemistry. Remember?”

I think he must feel there’s a pattern here, but really, I am not as ditzy as I seem.

Taylor calls me and he is as sweet as he was at the reception. He wants to take me for a boat ride on the Potomac River next Sunday afternoon. Jokingly, I ask if this is part of an investigative job he has to do.

“No,” he says. “I leave my work at home.”

“So this is for fun?”

“Unless you get seasick.”

“Are we going as far as the sea?”

“Actually, no.” I hear the rustle of some papers. “I have this brochure here that describes a cruise down the Potomac River on one of those old tour boats. Don’t tell me you’ve already done that a million times.”

“A cruise down the Potomac?” The idea sounds intriguing. During all the years I’ve lived in this area, I’ve never boated on the Potomac River. “That sounds fun.”

When I tell Mom the news about my date, she wonders if I need a new outfit. “Something pretty?” she asks.

I think the word
outfit
is a funny English word, like it should describe a Halloween costume rather than something we choose to wear to work or to church. I recall one of my students in camp wondering why the words
out
and
fit
together meant an ensemble of clothing.

“He said to dress casually,” I tell Mom. “We’re going out on a boat.”

“Shorts and one of the Liz Claiborne cotton V-neck sleeveless shirts,” she suggests. I know exactly where those shirts hang and am grateful when she lets me choose the light purple one to wear.

On Sunday after church, I park my car at the wharf along the bank of the Potomac. The day is sunny with no visible clouds, the temperature hovering around ninety. After putting on a pair of sunglasses, I watch a sailboat glide across the water. As sweat glistens on my skin, I’m tempted to take a splash in the river to cool off.

Instead, I walk, meandering along the docked yachts, reading off their given names. There’s
Enchanted Sea
,
Chesapeake’s Charm
, and sillier names like
Little Putt-Putt
and
Sight Sea
. Their fiberglass hulls sparkle in the sunlight as waves lap gently against them. Realizing I’ve been here a while, I hope that I’m in the right place at the right time today. I followed the signs for the
Potomac Jewel
as Taylor instructed me to do, and unless there is more than one steamboat by that name in Arlington, I should be okay.

When I hear, “Hey there, Samantha!” I smile with relief.

Taylor, dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and an aqua T-shirt, approaches me. He gives me a warm hug and a smile so wide I can’t see his mole at all. “Ready?” he asks. “We have to get our tickets. The tour starts in thirty minutes.”

After purchasing our tickets, Taylor buys us cans of Sprite and we wait in line to board. He looks for a restroom as I read the brochure to learn more about this large apricot-colored steamboat docked in front of me.
The
Potomac Jewel
is a triple-decker masterpiece
, I read, and looking at the boat, I see that it does have three layers to it, like a wedding cake. The top deck is considerably smaller than the others, but my adventurous side yearns to climb to the very height of it.

Taylor returns just as the line starts moving. Children cling to their parents’ hands, excitedly anticipating the ride.

“Daddy, do you think it will go fast?” asks one boy.

His father says, “I think it’s a slow boat, but we’ll be able to see far.”

The boy seems pleased. “I hope I can see all the way to China.”

Once on the
Potomac Jewel
, I note how majestic it feels. This is going to be romantic, I think as I give Taylor a smile. We stand close together on the promenade deck as a whistle blows and the vessel groans away from the dock.

We watch the wharf grow smaller, and the men standing on it, who have untied the heavy ropes from the vessel, shrink into toy sizes. The docked yachts now resemble white candy-coated Chiclets.

As the tour guide welcomes us aboard, Taylor comments, “That wedding reception was fun, wasn’t it?”

I consider telling him that the funniest thing was that I was at the wrong wedding, but I’m not sure I should reveal my ditzy side just yet.

He launches into a story about a man who hired him to find his missing wife, a woman who really was not missing; she just didn’t want her husband to find her. “The woman was angry when I located her,” Taylor tells me. “She threatened to burn my house down.”