The Deep Green Sea (10 page)

It was summer and it was late in the afternoon and my father had just disappeared down the street with his lunch box, gone till midnight. I sat on the top step of our front porch and I'd just watched him, the slow roll of his shoul­ders in his walk, until I couldn't see him anymore. Then there was a rustle behind me and my mother sat down at my side. “He's gone,” I said.

She looked off in the direction of the mill and then she turned back to me and she said, “That's okay. I have some­thing for you, anyway.”

Suddenly there was a book in her lap. Something from the library that she'd waited till my father was gone to show me. And I can't think of what book it was. I'm sorry, Mama, but I can't think of any of the books, really, though I did read them for you and maybe I got some good from them. But she had a book and then she heard herself, how she'd just sounded. “I don't mean it's okay your father is gone. He likes books too.”

I didn't say anything in answer to this. And my mama never wanted to tell me lies. She was very careful about that. So she had to keep talking till things were straight. She said, “He doesn't
like
them, exactly. But he doesn't have anything against them. He just doesn't love them like you and I do. Like I don't love all the things to do with the mill. You and he love that together. See how many wonderful things there are about you? There's so much more to you than anybody.”

She went on like that, listening very carefully to every word she said, trying to correct this or that, down to the tiniest possible misimpression. She comes back to me like that, my mama, when Tien scrambles around trying to undo her words. And I don't think I'm remembering my mother's words from forty years ago. Not really. Not so exactly. But she comes into my head while Tien and me are sitting naked on the bed and we've just made love and Tien is going on in that suddenly familiar way. And I can hear my mother's voice speaking those exact words that may not be exact at all. And she seems tangled up in all of this, somehow, maybe like she was pointing me toward the woman I would someday love.

But I say only, “You remind me of someone.”

“Who's that?” Tien says.

“My mother, for a moment.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes. It's very good.”

“It's gone, though? That feeling is gone?”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me, but I'm glad. I like to be your lover better than a mother.”

I laugh and put my hand on the calf of her leg. “I do too. It was never anything like that.”

“Good.”

“And your mother?”

“You don't remind me of her at all.”

“Good,” I say. “I like being your lover better than a mother.”

“I do too.”

I love Tien's play, but I'm interested now in a real answer. I say, “Where is your mother?”

“She's dead.” Tien says this instantly, looking me straight in the face.

I think of Tien's shrine. “You don't pray for her?”

“She's not worth praying for.”

I say this lie to Ben without thinking. It is very easy and that scares me.

Then I speak a hard truth without thinking and maybe that scares me, too, because it is a true thing that I am not ready to say.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

So because I say one lie that I do not want to say, I tell him a truth I do not want to say either. “There is no reason to be sorry,” I say. “She was a prostitute.”

“After your father died?”

He is wanting to make excuses for her. He is asking things that make me want to lie some more. But I also feel I have to speak the truth to this man. I am sitting here naked for him. I have opened my body for him. I do not want all the lies. The lies my mother figured out for me. But to open my mouth and tell all the truth, all at once, seems a terrible thing. I have no strength for that. I try to shape the true words in my head and move them through my voice into this space between Ben and me and I feel suddenly like I am made of stone, like I have looked now at the woman with snakes for hair and all of my insides are turning to stone. But I do manage to say, “No. Before he died.”

I hear my voice and I sound very sad. And Ben, being gentle in his way, says no more. He lowers his eyes and murmurs some quiet thing, something full of sorrow and love for me. I love him even more now. Just in these few moments I love Ben more. It fills me with the urge to speak, to have only the full truth about this between us, but it also fills me with the fear of losing him. I say nothing for a while. He says nothing for a while.

Then he speaks. “I don't know who were the criminals and who were the victims and even what the crime was, exactly. But I did see some very bad things when I was here. It's funny. Those things bothered me for a few months when I first got home. But that faded away. It was very bad, but I was able to handle that. It wasn't burning in me after those few months.”

“That is a good thing,” I say, trying to make up for my foolish words from before. “I am glad for that.”

“But something else took over. It was odd. It was another feeling and it didn't burn hot but somehow burning dull made it even worse, and it never stopped. Never did. And it came
from me being in the war. I knew that clearly. Because I was in the war, when I got home and faced the rest of my life, everything seemed flat, heavy. There wasn't anything important around me. For a year, here in Vietnam, I woke up every day and I was scared and I could see people dying, or walking around and about to die, not even realizing what was next, though it was like it was all arranged somehow, because tomorrow's death roster was going to be what it was going to be, and it could be me who was chosen, and I never lost a sense of that. And it made everything else .
. . I don't know. Clear, I guess. Strong. I felt alive when I was here. Keyed up. Back in the States I didn't even know what being alive felt like sometimes. I'd wake up in the morning and I'd look around at the furniture and out at a few trees in the yard and I'd look at the smoke from the mill in the sky and nothing felt like it was really there. I felt like nobody could kill me now but it didn't mean a fucking thing.”

He says all these things and I think I understand him. I put my hand on his leg. He puts his hand on mine and he looks at our hands together. I look down, too. I say, “You tell me things that sound true.”

“I haven't said these things before. Except to myself out over the road. I left the mill a few years before Mattie and me broke up and I started driving trucks. I drove a truck in Vietnam and it seemed a good thing to do at home. It got me away from the furniture. But it didn't really solve anything.”

He squeezes my hand and lets it go and for a moment his hand and mine lie beside each other. “Look,” he says.

But I am already determined to say something. “My mother was a bargirl,” I say. “And I do not know if she is alive or dead. That is the truth.”

He keeps his eyes on our hands. I do not know if he is really listening to me. His voice goes soft and he says again, “Look.”

I do. He strokes his hand gently over mine and then
lays it on me so that our fingertips are flared to each side like the wings of a bird. He says, “Our hands look the same.”

He says it very softly. Like how sweet this is. The light upon us is red, from the neon, and his hand is very thick and strong and mine is fragile and thin, but suddenly I see what he sees. The moons are the same. That is the first thing I see. He has wide rising moons there at the bottom edges of his fingernails and so do I. Then he slides his hand until our thumbs are beside each other and they are different, of course, in some ways, but there is something else there, a squareness to them around the tip, that we share.

“You see,” I say. “I was made for you.”

“Yes,” he says, very quiet, still studying our hands.

And I think I understand something about the quietness in him. He is sad about the way life seems to him after the war. He is sad about his father and his wife and his mother and all the miles he has to drive because he cannot find something to make life lift him up, light and sweet, and now he finds me and thinks that I am sweet and he lifts for me and we touch. These are good things. This is a good moment, and looking at our hands proves that, for our hands seem somehow to come from the same maker of hands, some maker who is a very fine artist and his work is very clearly his when you see it, even if the subjects are different.

He looks at me now and he smiles, at this sameness, I think, and I ask him, “Did you hear what I said?”

“I'm sorry,” he says. “About your . . . mother?”

“Yes.”

“What was it you said?”

I take a breath, wishing not to say this once more. “I do not really know if she is dead. She was a bargirl.”

“Did she leave you?”

“Yes. When the liberating forces were about to enter the city. She was afraid for her life. She was a bargirl for the Americans.”

I feel a little thump of something in me at that. Like hitting a pothole in the dark. But I figure I know what it is. Tien doesn't like what her mama did, and I don't blame her, but I'm guilty of the same sort of thing. If Tien was a little girl feeling bad about her mama taking Americans to bed, I was one of those Americans taking a woman to bed back then who might've been some child's mother. Though I knew Kim wasn't. Still, it was the same sort of thing. That's how I take it. And there is the reminder, too, of the difference in our ages, Tien and me. Not that it bothers me. If it doesn't bother her, it shouldn't bother me. I figure it all out like this. And she's still talking and I'm missing it. But I feel okay now.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “Tell me that again.”

She starts it over without a pause, without a dirty look, not holding it against me at all that I haven't heard her for a moment. I have no clear memory, but I know this is different from what I was used to, what I came to think was normal from Mattie. That's how my thoughts are running, to things that just make me love Tien more, at each little turn. She says, “She left me with her mother, right here in this apartment. Then she went away. I think she went back to where she grew up. Up near Nha Trang.”

“What was your mama's name?” I ask.

When Tien says, “Huong,” I'm surprised to feel a quick little letting go of something, though I don't stop to try to figure out why.

“I don't want to talk about her,” Tien says.

“Okay,” I say.

“She doesn't matter.”

“Of course not.”

“She never brought me around her men,” Tien says.

“She was trying to protect you.”

“Yes. You're very sweet to try to let me see it that way.”

“It's true,” I say.

“She went away for that reason, too. To protect me. She was afraid my father . . .”

Tien stops. I think it is just the pain about him. Her face goes hard and she looks away from me, into the dark of the room, and I figure she's thinking about all the prayers she's made, all the incense she's burned. She's never let go of him. As she sees it, he's still in this room.

Tien says, “She made me lie. All my life. Now to you. I can't even just speak the truth.”

“You can always tell me the truth.”

She turns back to me. She smiles. She lifts her hand and touches my cheek with her fingertips. “Yes,” she says. “My mother went away, too, because she did not want anyone to find out that my father was an American.”

“He's dead.”

“Yes.”

“Your American father.”

“Yes. I would not carry a lie this far.” Tien nods in the direction of her ancestor shrine. “I pray real prayers.”

“Of course.”

We fall silent for a time. I feel like pressing this issue and I don't know why. I don't try to figure it out. I just feel the impulse to press her. I say, “How did you learn of his death?”