Chapter Thirteen #2
She scrubbed the surfaces, sprayed every corner and patch of floor, got down on her knees to wipe away every stain, picked up every hair.
The lemon-scented bleach cleared her sinuses.
She left the taps running, and steam came in through the bathroom as the water roared at searing hot temperatures.
She soaked the cloths in the sink, her hands burned for a moment when she squeezed them and hung them up to dry.
She wiped the mirrors and windows. She preferred the finish of vinegar and water on the surfaces.
She stripped the sheets, made crisp folds into the edges of the beds.
She looked over the room at the neat lines of the bedding, the gleaming side tables, and smelled laundry powder and cleaning products.
For a moment she let the happiness envelop her as she sprayed the air with mosquito deterrent.
The extra money, the bowl of pho that morning, had put a spring in her step as she walked down to the supply room and put away her trolley, slotting it neatly into its numbered space.
The other housekeeping girls kept their distance from her when she passed them in the hallway.
She noticed they had stopped whispering years ago, but they still didn’t look her in the eye.
She wandered out of the entrance, reading her cell phone messages from Cam, when someone ran into her.
His weight pushed her forward, and his hand caught her arm before she lost her footing.
The air had been knocked out of Mimi’s body. She hung in midair before scrambling onto her feet, realizing the man’s hand still gripped her forearm. She pulled away and looked back to see his round flat face and a nose that was too small for it. He looked her over, and she started to walk away.
“Look where you’re going,” she snapped, although she had been the one who hadn’t looked where she were going.
She felt his eyes on her as she walked away but refused to turn back.
···
Toan liked to say it was love at first stumble. People never asked how they met, but Toan always told them how he crashed into a distracted Mimi one sunny November day at the Paradise, and his life changed forever.
Oh, it took you so long to even smile at me , he reminded her years later.
At first, I thought you were beautiful but without a nice face.
You know the kind of women I mean. Some girls are beautiful, but you don’t see any kindness.
And when you finally laughed, I realized you were not beautiful but had a kind face.
You have a very nice face. Which is much better in a wife.
The day after the stumble, Mimi observed him for the first time.
He had a bounce in his step, a broad smile that swept up his face and creased his eyes and nose, taking over every part of him.
In Mimi’s opinion, being a driver was not an especially ambitious profession, but if they were lucky enough to have a foreign employer, it at least meant a regular income.
To her, running your own business was the ideal, though her sister’s husband had tarnished this image with the rotten stench of fish bait that Cam described.
A man living in a fancy compound in Thao Dien, whose name she couldn’t recall, had begun a coffee chain, and now he was one of the wealthiest men in Asia, the only Vietnamese on that list. A master of oneself. That was the Vietnamese dream.
Parked along the street outside the Paradise Hotel were lines of Toyota Land Cruisers.
The more industrious drivers cleaned and polished the cars—she noticed Toan did this.
Others napped for hours with their feet sticking out of the window, occasionally emerging to sit on their foldaway stools and read the newspaper.
Mimi wondered how they could bear it, to always be at the mercy of someone else’s clock.
She at least knew the hours she was required to work.
She knew when to arrive and when she could leave. There was a small freedom in that.
In those days, Mimi believed the need to sleep and rest bore down into the very essence of being Vietnamese.
Everyone seemed to wake early, worked from the first light of day, filled their bellies at lunch, and as the heat rose and rose, a nap was expected.
Sleeping bodies could be found all over the city, in hammocks hung between lampposts, or trees, in the back of trucks, or even on construction sites.
A worker might place a cardboard sheet down as a makeshift bed in the coolest place they could find for a snatched moment of rest. Yet something in Mimi’s Americanization meant that she viewed it as laziness.
How would you make it in this world when you were sleeping through the middle of the day?
Toan, she saw, was someone who didn’t sleep either.
He was always busy, washing his car with pride as the sun’s rays hit its gleaming surface.
That afternoon she watched him from the window of a room she was cleaning.
He wore sunglasses as he sat on his folding stool beside his parking spot, and she wrote him off as ridiculous.
How could a man in service to another consider his appearance so much that he would spend time looking in the mirror to try on sunglasses, she thought.
Months later, she learned that they were given to him by his last boss, an Englishman who had only worked in Saigon for a year but had no family and treated Toan like a friend.
···
When she finished her shift that day, she walked out of the staff entrance and found him standing across the road.
She knew he was there for her, but she ignored him, her eyes fixed firmly ahead.
She put her hand to her waistband, and felt the folded paper still there.
He leaped across the busy street, his hand expertly held up to tell the motorbikes to move around him as though he accompanied a foreign dignitary across the road.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine, thank you,” she said quickly.
“I just didn’t want you to hit your face, that was all.”
“I didn’t. Thank you.” She quickened her pace.
“I’m Toan…” he called after her.
No man Mimi had depended on had ever turned out to be reliable.
She was suspicious, dismissive even. But Toan was insistent.
Every day he waited for her, standing in front of the Paradise.
He would walk beside her, matching her pace, footsteps in unison toward her bike, and then he’d watch her disappear into the dusty pink light of the evening streets.
He pressed her to smile, pressed her to eat more, and insisted he walk her to her bike when her shifts ran too late. One evening he wasn’t there because he had to take his boss to the airport, and she felt her shoulders drop.
Six weeks into their courtship, she decided it was time to tell him about Ngan.
“I suppose you’ve heard the rumors about me,” she said as they walked down the riverbank.
“That you are a lovely woman seeking a husband, someone like me?” He smiled and nudged her with his shoulder.
“About what happened to my child. And the man who left me, unmarried and pregnant in America. I’m damaged goods.”
“I see nothing damaged here,” he said and took her hand.
She let him hold it.
“We have all suffered in this country, all of us have lost and felt pain. But to lose a child is something I cannot imagine.”
She knew he had questions. But he never asked her why nobody had helped her that day at the airport.
Whether she ever found out if Ngan was dead or alive.
And how she could return home and know her child was still there?
He didn’t know yet that they had sedated her to board her on the plane after seventy-six hours of sitting in their immigration office and accusing her of trying to regain entry into the country illegally.
He didn’t know that every day she tirelessly went through every American newspaper that was thrown away in the hotel garbage to see if she could find anything about a lost child, nor that she still woke up screaming at night because of the unspeakable nightmares she would have about her Ngan, imagining her limp body lying somewhere in a forgotten wood outside of Philadelphia.
She still remembered her own silent screams as she was dragged away.
Mimi was too tired to explain any of it.
They watched the river moving faster now. Evening had arrived, and the air cooled, large collections of leaves and river weeds floated by. They sky was pink over the Mekong. Toan picked up a stone from the ground.
“If I get this in that cluster of weeds there, you’ll have dinner with me next week.”
Mimi nodded and stared out at the cluster. He threw it in silence, and it landed short.
“Best out of three?” he asked.