Chapter 32
CHAPTER 32
Evelyn
Even after all these years, I still remember his scent.
Tu?n’s scent was steel, sandalwood, and fresh soil. But my scent? My scent was so distinctly feminine and expensive, it needed no introduction. May rose, jasmine, and a hint of bourbon vanilla. Chanel No. 5. Why was a woman like me, whose hands were rough and calloused from scrubbing crabs raw for years, wearing Chanel No. 5? What was the point of it?
All the girls around me were obsessed with anything designer, anything that would give us the illusion we weren’t living a pitiful life. Were we even living ? We were women working at the crab factory, stuck in a Podunk town in Texas, where our small lives were made even smaller by the prejudice around us. I didn’t want any trouble; I just wanted to keep my head down, and grieve for a Vietnam that would never be mine again.
I’m still allowed to grieve for an alternative life lost, am I not?
How little did I know that I’d continue to grieve again and again, for the rest of my life. A cyclone of sorrow. Had I known that I’d experience even more heartbreak in America, I wouldn’t have come.
The girls at the factory and I loved to play pretend with our designer dupes and bootleg perfume. We pretended to be like the women in bigger Texas cities like Dallas who walked around exuding Americana and richness. We cackled about their styles openly, but went home and dreamt about having the same red lipstick as they did. But I had a secret that the girls didn’t know. While their perfumes were bootleg copies, my scent was real. Even during the months when Tu?n and I were so poor that we had to comb through the dumpsters behind restaurants, Tu?n had somehow saved up enough to buy me the tiniest sample of Chanel No. 5. It wasn’t even a mini size; it was barely longer than the length of my pinkie. I used to cut the sample with grain alcohol to make it last for as long as I could, or I’d spray all my clothes with the scent and store it tightly so the smell would last. Tu?n would encourage me to use it all up, that he’d get more, but I still lived in fear, as I did for most of my life.
When Tu?n and I lay together at night, our scents would merge, meeting at the bittersweet intersection of young love and poverty. My mother hated Tu?n’s smell, and she wondered how I could stand to be around him all the time. Whenever she had to have dinner with him, her nose crinkled so deeply it almost disappeared inside her skull. Her number one insult: She didn’t have to season her food with fish sauce if Tu?n was around, because he smelled enough of the sea and fermentation.
I tried to convince her that our scents canceled each other out. I kept pleading with her to stop calling Tu?n “just another dirty fisherman.” He was more than that. But she was convinced that Tu?n was never good enough for me. She didn’t want me to have the same life she had. But did she know that Tu?n had worked so hard for us to have a stable life that my hands weren’t as calloused as hers had been? At least there was still life left in the crevices of my palms. Did she know that he loved me so much, he never once said “I” and only said “we”? Did she know that he bought me Chanel No. 5?
If she saw me in the following years, would she have still felt the same way about Tu?n? Would she see beyond the mansion, the designer bags that Duc kept throwing at me because he thought it’d keep me happy, or the way that Huey grew further away from us, still convinced that he didn’t deserve to be around us? Would my mother understand that living a life based on a lie was not a life to live?
Tu?n took my life along with him, the day he never came back from the Gulf.
I knew. I knew something was wrong. When Duc and Huey came to my house that morning, and told me that Tu?n had disappeared off the boat, and his body now belonged to the black waters. They told me that the Klan was there that night. That the fire happened so quickly, they didn’t see it coming. That there was nothing they could have done. I knew that they were lying, but that one lie stuck out the most.
“There was nothing we could have done.”
I looked them straight in the eyes, these two men, who promised me that they would do everything they could to keep searching for Tu?n. They even did the most dangerous thing of all: They gave me hope. They were convinced that he must have crawled to shore, must have kept swimming, must have stayed alive somehow. Even though they knew that Tu?n didn’t know how to swim. But I couldn’t help myself, I believed them. I believed the charlatans. I believed that Tu?n would have done anything to stay alive, and return back home to me and our unborn baby.
I went out on a volunteer search boat every day. The seasickness and my pregnancy combined were like oil and water. But I stayed. I stayed and combed the Gulf floor with shrimping nets, hoping for something to turn up, then I went home relieved when nothing came up. I called every local hospital, in broken English, giving a description of my Tu?n: 5′9", dark hair, deep-set eyes, thick eyebrows, hollowed cheeks. He was unintentionally funny, loved his Marlboro Reds, listening to the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, but most of all, he loved coming home to me.
Have you seen this man? He must be there. Has he turned up? Has he asked for me?
Eventually, people around me moved on. The Klan was closing in on their sixty-day threat, so everyone had to focus on their own families. Tu?n became a martyr, a lost symbol. “Don’t worry, em,” people would say to me. “We’ll get revenge for Tu?n’s memory.” But they didn’t know the truth. That Tu?n wasn’t a martyr. That something else had happened to him that night. But what really happened?
I kept waiting for Duc and Huey every day, borrowing any boat left, so we could keep looking for Tu?n. But Duc stopped showing up one day. Only Huey tried his best to keep his promises, but eventually, even he stopped looking for Tu?n.
Huey still wouldn’t tell me the truth of what happened. He just let me believe the gossip.
That’s why now, whenever I looked at Duc, I felt ill. Yes, he was there for us when the kids were growing up. But where was he back then? Why did he lie to me? What really happened to Tu?n that night? But most of all, how could Huey keep lying to me? I married Huey out of fear. He was gentle, kind, and I knew he loved me, so I thought I could love him enough. I wanted a father for my son.
Lies. I was still caught up in the swirls of Duc’s and Huey’s lies, and now I’ve lost control of my own story.