Tiger Girl (7 page)

“Um, three inches from the bottom.”

Anita smiled and winked at me, then peered through her fingers, and, once again, hit her mark.

“Damn, you are good!” I said. “Why'd you stop?”

“Ah, I killed a person.” Anita waited a beat, then laughed. “Just kidding. Carpal tunnel syndrome. That and tennis elbow. And golf shoulder. Plus I herniated a disc in my neck. But it's not the injuries. To be honest, I got lonely. Too much traveling, too many hotel rooms. I didn't get to watch my kids grow up,
and then, seems before I knew it, they were married with kids of their own. My marriages never lasted.” Anita shrugged and retrieved her knives from the board, pulling each one out with a sharp flick of her wrist.

“Anita used to throw in Bangkok. She was in Phnom Penh, too,” Sitan said. “That's where she got her dope tat.”

“And Battambang and Sihanoukville. I only regret I never made it to Saigon. Those were the days. U.S. government was sponsoring all kinds of wholesome entertainment in the region, trying to keep the people on the so-called good side. I got to travel all over Southeast Asia. There was this one couple from Hong Kong, wife was some kind of movie star. I remember she used to do a little song-and-dance number. It was supposed to promote positive feelings. Soft power, they call it.”

“You're kidding me. Was this for the military?”

“I'm a pacifist. I don't do military shows.” Anita shook her head. “Not like some of the magic acts I could name. They'd perform for anybody who paid. No scruples whatsoever. But that's what I'd expect from an illusionist.” She packed her knives back into their case lovingly.

“Is that how you met my uncle? In Cambodia?” I had to ask.

“Oh, no, no, no. I wish I'd known him then. We met at the hospital here. I was going in for my carpal tunnel syndrome and he was volunteering, translating for some of the refugee families. One thing led to another, and he hired me to work for him at the pâtisserie.”

Something about the tone of her voice, the way it changed just slightly, and the flush in her cheeks, the flutter of her lashes, made it sound as though she were talking about the start of a love affair and not a job at a donut shop.

Anita locked up her case. Her tone turned brisk, “We should head back in. Never know when a customer might pop over.”

Sitan followed Anita into the shop, begging her to teach him how to throw knives, too.

“You weren't born a lefty. I don't know if you'd have the coordination, and I don't want to be responsible if something awful happens.”

I let them go on ahead. I hung back and took the makeshift target off the cinderblock base, fingering the holes in the plywood made by the knives.

Suddenly, I had more sympathy for my birth mother. Even if Uncle hadn't met Anita yet, there would have been other women, and Auntie was so jealous. To know she'd lost her beauty, her children, her standing, and see her husband whole, attractive to other women. That kind of bitterness could kill somebody. Maybe it had killed her.

A little before noon it started getting busy again, but amidst the lines of customers I recognized the young men from last night. They pulled up in a red Maserati lowrider with rims and new whitewalls. Music loud enough to hear inside the donut shop despite our boom box playing the Earth, Wind & Fire mixtape Anita favored.

Sitan looked up from the cash register.

“Gotta go, Anita,” he said, pulling his apron off his head. “Gotta practice. Can you cover for me?”

“Practice what?” I asked. “Skipping out on work?”

“You go on, Sitan, honey. I've got your back.” Anita winked at him. “But you better remember me when you're rich and famous.”

Sitan's soft Buddha face melted into a smile. “I'm buying you a mansion, Anita. You better check out the real estate in Beverly Hills. The nine-oh-two-one-oh, just for you.”

Sitan grabbed the baby seat where his daughter slept and practically skipped out the front door, brushing past customers.
He slapped the hands of his friends, then jumped into the Maserati and roared out of the parking lot.

“They're not going to rob a bank or something,” I sneered to Anita as she rung up an order of crullers.

“He's going to be a big rap star someday,” Anita said.

“Oh, brother.”

“He's very talented. I've heard him.”

“Glad he's got a backup plan in case the donuts don't work out for him,” I said.

Anita gave me a glinty-eyed stare. “Everybody has to have a dream. Not everybody gets to go to college.”

I felt embarrassed then. I didn't know when I'd become such a snob.

Shortly after two, business had slowed. Actually it stopped completely, and I went over to a stir-fry place down the street and bought lunch for Anita and me. We were sitting in the booth, eating our noodles and Buddha's delight, talking about Anita's “show business days,” as she called them, and sharing a cigarette, when Uncle returned.

He must've parked in the back and come in the kitchen without our hearing. I was facing the counter, my back to the wall in the corner booth, when Uncle popped into the donut shop. He was hurrying in the front door, his thoughts elsewhere and a slightly distracted look on his face, when he saw me. He blanched, as though he'd seen a ghost. He stood stock still for a second, frozen, then scurried back into the kitchen without speaking a word to either of us.

I'd seen his expression as he looked at me, first blank, like “Who is that?” and then the shock, the way his features jumped, when he remembered. He looked like he'd seen the dead.

“What's up, Hon'?” Anita asked. Her back was to the door, and she hadn't even noticed Uncle coming in.

“Uncle's back.”

She craned her neck, looking around, before she realized he'd disappeared without saying hello. Then she turned back to me, a fake smile plastered on her face, and I could immediately tell why Anita hadn't succeeded on the knife-throwing circuit. She couldn't fake a smile. She looked at me now with anxious, sad eyes and her lips pulled back from her teeth. I imagined that a wild animal trying to bluff a bigger opponent in a fight at a watering hole might look like this just before it got eaten.

My nose burned, and then my eyes started to water, and I knew I was feeling sorry for myself. I hated myself even more. I picked up my Styrofoam takeout container and threw it in the trash. The smell of sugar was oppressive. I couldn't swallow properly. My throat felt as though it were narrowing.

“I'm going for a walk,” I managed to rasp to Anita, and I stumbled out the door without waiting for her reply.

The sunlight was too bright. The asphalt was bleached white, sticky under my sneakers. I squinted and tried to keep moving, one foot in front of the other, but the world felt as though it were tilting. In my memories I was being rejected all over again. I was eight years old, walking onto the playground in Texas for the first time, and the girls circled Sourdi and me, pulling the skin back from their eyes, taunting us, and I had no idea what I'd done wrong. I was eleven, meeting Auntie for the first time in Nebraska, and she looked at me as though inspecting for damage, my every gesture an insult, my voice too loud, my accent too American, my ways too bold. Everything that had been good about me became wrong all over again.

Now the world was spinning and the sky turned white and then black, like a photo negative. I sat down on the curb in front of the Asian grocery. I could smell the fresh bok choy wilting in the heat of the afternoon sun, overripe mangoes, cilantro, and a dusty scent from the root-vegetable bins. My
head felt very heavy and fell against my knees. I held it in place with both hands.

I was wrong to come here. Uncle hated me. He was only pretending he'd been happy to see me. I was wrong. I made him unhappy. When Auntie was alive, I'd made her unhappy too, when I was just a kid.

When she ran the Palace with Ma, Auntie had nothing but complaints about me. I clomped when I walked, I shouted when I spoke, I showed all my teeth when I smiled. I was too tall, I ate too much. I wasn't dainty. Auntie saw me get in a fight in the parking lot. Three white boys attacked my sisters and brother and me during our first week in Nebraska. I fought them off. I saved the rocks they threw at us and threw them back, and, terrified, they fled on their bikes. I thought it was a victory, but Auntie saw it all from the window in the Palace and thought it was shameful.

She didn't care that I'd saved my siblings. She didn't care that the boys threw the rocks at us first. She didn't care that no one else had come to help us when I'd screamed. She didn't like me. I was a disappointment.

I didn't know then that she was my mother.

She missed her oldest son. But finding me alive had been a disappointment.

I was no reason for her to try to stay alive.

I was everything wrong that could have happened to her daughter.

Maybe she wished she'd never found me. Maybe she wished I had died.

Maybe Uncle wished that now.

I could taste the fried noodles on the back of my tongue. The grease, the salt, the soy sauce and MSG. I breathed through my mouth, trying not to be ill.

I didn't want to throw up in public, where people could see, strangers, the girls who worked in the grocery, the men who worked in the video store, the who-knows-who potential customers in the parking lot.

Something cold and wet nudged the side of my arm, and I jumped.

One of the checkers from the grocery was holding a cold can of 7Up in her hand. “You okay?”

I nodded.

“Take it. Don't work too hard,” she said with a smile, and went back inside.

I mouthed, “Thanks,” as though she could still see me, and opened the soda. The pop! and hiss, so familiar, made me feel better. Sometimes the smallest acts of kindness made me melt.

I took a sip of the soda. It was too sweet against my teeth, but it was like the treasured cans of pop we used to share when I was a kid. When we first came to America, the Church Ladies never gave us soda pop in the bags of groceries they brought. And food stamps didn't let us get brand names either. If Ma bought us a soda, we had to share it. I didn't even like the taste at first, but I'd seen kids on TV drinking Coca-Cola and Pepsi and 7Up, smiling and strong and running and popular and happy, and I wanted to be just like them. I wanted to give the world a Coke, too. I wanted to take the Pepsi Challenge. I liked the pretty green cans of Sprite with the fancy lettering I couldn't read yet, not like the ugly type on the generic soda we could afford.

We used to blindfold ourselves, using an undershirt that Sourdi tied around our heads, take sips from the same can of soda, and say, “It's Coke!” or “It's Pepsi!” Sourdi would make a buzzer sound or a “ding!” like a bell, depending on her mood, to signal if we were correct or wrong.

Then Sam would exclaim, “I can't believe I like Pepsi better!” and slap his forehead just like the man in the commercial, and we'd laugh and laugh.

Sitting on the curb in front of the grocery, facing the donut shop, I drank the whole can of 7Up that the girl had given me. It still tasted like a luxury.

Then I went back to work.

Nobody was working in the donut shop when I returned. I peeked into the kitchen and spotted Anita and Uncle conferring by the mixers. I was going to tell them that I was back and that I'd man the register, but something about the furtive way they huddled together made me hesitant to interrupt.

“I haven't seen you look this down in a while,” Anita was saying. “Is it Nea?”

My heart stopped. Then started up with a jerk.

“She looks just like Sopheam . . . When they were the same age,” Uncle's voice sounded strangled, stretched too taut. “I see her and I remember everything.”

“Does she know?”

“We don't talk about these things.”

Then the bell on the door rang behind me, like a really big cat bell signaling the arrival of a customer, and I quickly shut the swinging door to the kitchen and jumped behind the counter, hoping Uncle and Anita hadn't realized I'd been spying on them, and wouldn't know that I'd heard them and that I knew Uncle was sorry I'd come.

You do not fear the thorny plant (underfoot), yet you fear the tiger (far away)
.

—traditional Cambodian proverb

Ma used to tell me a folktale, the story of the three sisters who turned into birds. We must have been living in the refugee camp, where it was safe to tell stories again. Under the Khmer Rouge, stories were forbidden, language was dangerous, and we had to be quiet all the time. I loved Ma's stories, but I was hungry, I kept interrupting, I didn't let her finish.

Once there were three little girls who were living alone with their widowed mother when she remarried to a wealthy gangster from the city
.