Street Music Page 17

  “She told us about the candy,” he says, as she scrubs at her face and blows her nose. At a loss, he withdraws his hand and says, “Eat your banana.”

  “She remembers the candy?” She’s blotting her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “She remembers everything. She said it lasted a long time.”

  “One hour. Maybe two.”

  “She said it felt longer.”

  “I know,” she says, and then she’s weeping again. “Long time, not two hours, long time.”

  The boy behind the counter looks distressed. He says, “Another banana?”

  “No,” Rafferty says. To Hom, he says, “Why don’t you go to the bathroom? Wash your face, take a little time.”

  She says fiercely, “I watching. I watch until boy come. Cut string, take her. She cannot see me, but I watching. When the boy take her, I follow.” She pulls the plastic raincoat open, lifts one of her blouses and scrubs her face with it, then blows her nose into it. The boy’s eyebrows are practically at his hairline. He grabs a thick wad of napkins and comes out from behind the counter as the door swings open to admit a Western man with two heavily made-up Patpong women. The boy glances back, says, “Moment,” and hurries up the three steps that lead to their table, bearing the napkins in two hands like an offering. “Here,” the boy says in Thai, “Here, here, here. Please take these, please.”

  “Hey,” the man calls, “you got salted caramel?”

  “One minute,” the boy says.

  “You can answer from there,” the man says. “Don’t you even know which—”

  Rafferty raises his voice as Hom scours her face with the napkins. “There’s no fucking salted caramel, Jack,” he says. “Everything else in the world, but no—”

  “Poke,” one of the women says, and he recognizes her: she’s been in the apartment a couple of times since the baby was born. Denise or some other Anglo name, pulled out of an old movie or, perhaps, a hat. “Why you’re not home?”

  The Western man, who has thinning hair drawn back in a dry, autumnal-looking ponytail, gives Rafferty an appraising once-over and says to maybe-Denise, “You know this guy?”

  “Him marry my friend,” maybe-Denise says. “Her have baby now.”

  Around the wad of napkins, her eyes enormous, Hom says, “You have a baby?”

  “Your friend pretty?” Ponytail says to maybe-Denise. He’s still aiming the dread Stare of Dominance at Poke.

  “Number one,” says maybe-Denise. “Number one lady in Patpong.”

  “Long time ago,” Rafferty says.

  “Wow,” the Western man says, “you married one of these?”

  “I don’t actually think of her as one of these,” Rafferty says, feeling his face heat up. “I don’t think of any of them as one of these.”

  Hom whispers “You have baby?” as Ponytail takes a step toward Poke, and the boy cuts between them, saying, “I make ice cream, have ice cream too much, too much. Maybe have what you want. What you want?”

  Ponytail holds Rafferty’s gaze just long enough to feel manly and says, “Salted caramel.”

  “Not have,” the boy says promptly. “Have chocolate, have vanilla, have some kind cherry, have chocolate moooooose, have—”

  “Shit,” Ponytail says, and Rafferty realizes, a bit late, that the man is drunk. Rafferty pushes the table back and gets up, and Hom watches him, looking anxious.

  “How about this?” Rafferty says. “How about I buy a double for all of you, since you’re with my wife’s friend Denise here.” He has crossed his fingers for luck as he says the name, and she catches his eye and smiles, putting her head down to hide it from Ponytail. “My pleasure, okay? One American to another.”

  “I wan’ strawberry,” Denise says, tugging at Ponytail’s sleeve. “Two strawberry.”

  The other woman says, “Chocolate chip. Can I have sprinkle on it?”

  Rafferty feels the boy behind the counter looking to him, waiting for a decision. “Sure,” he says. To the man, he says, “And what about you?”

  “I wanted salted caramel,” the man says. He’s sulking.

  “And I wanted to play professional basketball,” Rafferty says, “but look at me. Barely tall enough for miniature golf. Life, it’s just one disappointment after another. On the other hand, looks like you’ve got a nice evening lined up.”

  “Yeah,” the man says, sounding like someone who’s having second thoughts. “Guess it does.” For the first time, he looks at Hom, and his mouth drops open. Rafferty clears his throat very loudly, and the man turns back to the counter. “I’ll have . . .” the man says to the boy, “hell, I’ll have whatever you think I’d like.”

  “Okay,” the boy says, “for you, triple. You lucky man. I give you special.” Two minutes later, they’re gone, with a parting smile from Denise as the door closes, and the boy lets out a loud sigh. “Drink too much,” he says to the room at large.

  As though there has been no interruption, Hom says, looking at him fiercely, “You have baby.”

  “Less than two weeks now. A boy.” He sits down again. “I didn’t know what to do when it came. I still don’t know what to do.”

  She leans forward and buries her face in her hands, her elbows on the table. He studies the ravaged profile, seeing bits and pieces of Miaow. She says, without looking up, “You should be happy.”

  “I am happy. I just . . . it’s complicated.”

  “Why?” she says. “You papa. Mama do all the work.”

  “I help,” he says, thinking how little he actually does.

  She says in Thai, “Two children. Lucky, lucky.”

  “After all this time,” he says, dodging the subject, “how did you find us?”

  “I tell you already. Boy who take Miaow,” she says without looking up. “I hiding, I watching, watching. I see boy, see him talk her, see him cut string. They go, I go behind, hiding, they talking not see me, but I see where him take her. Him have other boy, other girl—”

  “A street gang,” Rafferty says. “A bunch of kids. The boy called himself Superman.”

  “Yes, him bad boy, take thing, fight too much. I see where they sleeping, five boy, two girl. One boy, more old than Miaow, later I know him—I see him before, I see him ask money, ask on street—”

  “You mean beg? He begged on the street?”

  “Same me,” she says. “I do, too.”

  “So wait, wait. You knew where Miaow was, where the boy was, but—”

  She shakes her head. “No. They go. One week more, I go looking but they not same place. Empty. Then, long time, long time not see boy, not . . . not know nothing about Miaow. Think I never see her again. My husband, him . . . him crazy. Pill too much. I run, run somewhere long time.”

  “Somewhere where?”

  She shrugs. “Bangkok. Bangkok wery big. Him not find me.”

  He says, in Thai, “And you lost Miaow.”

  “I lost everything,” she says, “but only Miaow broke my heart. I thought—I really thought—I would die.”

  “But still, you found us. How?”

  She pauses and closes her eyes, as she’s done several times during their conversation, and he realizes she’s lost her place in the story. He’s trying to think of a way to prompt her when she says, “See same boy again.” She rubs her eyes with her palms. “Boy I see ask money in street. See him maybe one week ago, maybe more.” She’s scratching at the back of her left hand with the nails on the right, scratching hard, and she’s already drawn a little blood. He looks away.

  “I come Patpong, ask for money on street. Patpong police no good, but some police not take all my money, leave me little bit. Some police, him take everything.” She’s still scratching, and he has to fight the urge to stop her. “So I see boy, same boy I see . . . begging,” she says carefully, sounding it out, and then draws a deep
breath and switches to Thai. “He’s eighteen, nineteen, now, something like that. He works outside a bar, sending people up the stairs—a bad bar where the ladies dance with no clothes and do bad things for the customers. I saw him and he saw me. He told me he’d seen Miaow in Patpong. She was going into a small bar with a foreign man. I thought, oh, no, Miaow is too young, but he said, no, the man had a wife, a beautiful Thai wife. He said he saw you two or three times more. But never with a lady. You went into the bar alone, you came out alone.”

  “Must have been . . . what, a year ago?” The only time Rose, who has no fondness for Patpong, has been on the street in years was when she went to the little memorial service at Leon and Toot’s a few days after Leon died.

  “Maybe a year. I don’t know.”

  “When did he tell you this?”

  A shrug. “One week, maybe ten days ago.” She’s still scratching, and he can’t stop himself; he reaches over and puts his fingers on the back of her hand, and instantly she snatches it away and it comes up, fingers curled, a weapon at the ready. He pulls back, and as he does he sees that the palm of the upraised hand, her left, is covered with writing in deep blue, smeared ballpoint ink.

  He hears the unmistakable chime that heralds the opening of a door in a 7-Eleven store, which for some reason has become ubiquitous in Bangkok as a phone ringtone. He’s glancing over to see whether it’s the boy’s phone when Hom slips her right hand inside her dress, and it stops. She glances up at him anxiously, as though she’s hoping he hadn’t heard it, and finds him regarding her.

  “My . . . my friend,” she says.

  “You have a cell phone?”

  “Yes,” she says with the first anger she’s shown. “Have no money, have no room, but have phone. Friend . . . give me.”

  “So,” he says, backing away from the issue of the phone and running straight into the big one, the one that can’t be avoided. “We need to talk about Miaow.”

  Instantly the phone chimes again, and again she silences it. This time she pulls it out, a battered, deeply fingerprinted no-name clone, and turns it off.

  His nerve fails him, and he says, “Do you . . . do you want some coffee?”

  She shakes her head, looking at the table, and says, “Banana.”

  Her plate is still heaped with whipped cream and sprinkles, but the banana is gone, leaving a collapsed little tunnel, a bit of dessert archaeology. He calls out, “One banana, plain.” To her, he says, “We need to talk about you. You and Miaow. I mean, I don’t know what you were thinking, but my wife and I, and Miaow—”

  She’s shaking her head. “I see,” she says. “I hear. She not want me. She, she . . .”

  “It was a big shock.”

  “She never love me again. Love you now.”

  “Maybe she’ll see you later, maybe in a month or two, but now—”

  “No. I know. Her not want see me. Never see me. Her want me go away.”

  “But maybe in a little time—”

  “Never.”

  He finds himself wondering about the writing on her palm, but he can’t just abandon the topic, so he says, “Well, then, if you don’t think Miaow will . . . will change, what can we do for you? What do you want?”

  The banana arrives, looking naked and alone on its plate. She doesn’t give it a glance. Instead, she takes a breath to say something, blows it out, closes both eyes, and starts over. “Money,” she says. “Want money.”

  19

  Banana Rice

  The fifth time her mother-in-law slapped Miaow, not long after her first birthday, Hom raised her hand in fury, and her mother-in-law took an amazed step back and screamed. Instantly, Hom’s arm was seized from behind, and she whirled to find her husband, Daw, standing stone-faced with his own open hand raised and ready to strike. When she backed away from him and turned to comfort Miaow, she saw the gleam of satisfaction in her mother-in-law’s eyes.

  Her face burning and her throat almost clogged with fury, Hom let her lids drop in submission; she’d learned by then that any display of resentment would only make things worse. She brought her breathing under control, and the three of them endured a tense, precariously balanced silence, enveloped in the scent of the rice on the stove, until Miaow, in a delayed reaction to the slap, began to scream—in pain or rage, Hom was never quite sure which. Ignoring her husband’s sharp question and her mother-in-law’s reproving tut tut tut, Hom stooped down and gathered the crying child to her, pushed her way out of the kitchen, and hurried through the cramped rooms of the house, out into the merciless midday heat.

  Much of the village was indoors in sheer self-defense. Even the dogs were quiet, either sleeping or licking themselves with admirable focus as they took shelter in the shaded dust beneath the wooden houses, raised a meter or so against the rainy season’s inevitable floods. She smelled food; people had come in from the paddies and fields either to nap or to sit around tables together, talking and joking as they rewarded themselves for the morning’s work and strengthened themselves for the afternoon’s. Families, people who lived and worked side by side, coming together over the shared sacrament of food.

  To Hom, who had come to dread mealtime, the day stunk of food.

  Straddling her hip, the baby had stopped crying and made the transition to the hiccups that usually followed tears. The hiccups were also a sign that the child was hungry.

  The child was always hungry.

  Her mother-in-law had insisted, practically from the beginning, that the baby should be weaned as quickly as possible. At first, Hom had thought it was just about the time it took her to breast-feed Miaow, which cut into her time in the paddies, but she soon realized that it was really about control. The relationship between the baby and Hom’s breast was the only one in the house the old woman couldn’t command, and she had to disrupt it. She had to own it. So Miaow was weaned early—too early, according to Hom’s own mother’s view of things.

  Not that Hom had been able to see much of her mother. Somehow, the time was never right for her to go home. There was always some imperative, some emergency, that was manufactured to keep her in her mother-in-law’s house. Only in Miaow’s fifth month, after Hom subjected her husband to three days of wooden silence, behaving as though she and Miaow were the only people in the world—only after that, and after the first time Daw struck her to bring her back in line—only then did her mother-in-law permit her son to take Hom home for an afternoon so her mother could hold the granddaughter she hadn’t yet seen. Permission had been given again several months later, but except for that, Hom’s mother had heard her granddaughter’s voice only on the telephone; Miaow usually protested when her mother’s attention was focused elsewhere.

  Hom’s stomach grumbled, and she knew that the baby was hungry, too, but going in to eat would just start another skirmish. Her husband’s mother insisted that Hom overfed Miaow, saying she knew more about babies than Hom did, and that overfeeding her now would make Miaow fat and lazy and useless, “a little lump of grease,” she had said, “squatting in the kitchen corner all her life.” When the child graduated from the breast to rice gruel, her mother-in-law watched the path of every spoonful of Hom’s own rice that was lifted to the baby’s lips; several times, she even moved the bowl out of Hom’s reach. The old woman had demanded that she look at the big strong man, her son, whom Hom had wisely married, and claimed that even he, an active male, hadn’t eaten as much as Hom was forcing down Miaow’s throat. She’d also suggested that Hom needed that food herself to supply the energy for her day’s, and night’s, work.

  So Miaow was hungry day after day, and fretful about it. Hom had taken to sneaking into the kitchen when her mother-in-law was out, stealing a paddleful of rice, and putting it into a little jar that had once held mashed peaches, which had been Miaow’s favorite before they were relegated to the proscribed list. “Fruit is no good for a girl,” she’d been told.
“It makes them soft and sweet and useless. Girls need to be strong. Women carry the world.”

  Five times now, the old woman had slapped Miaow, and the baby was only a little past a year old. It wasn’t right. Life couldn’t be like this. It couldn’t.

  It had never been like this before.

  And she knew—her eyes told her, and the neighbors confirmed it almost daily—that Miaow was a beautiful baby, an unusually beautiful baby. She looked very much the way Hom had as an infant, when the old village ladies gathered around her and sighed, and floated prayers heavenward to help her avoid the vengeance of envious female ghosts. As she’d grown older, become a teenager, the village aunties still told Hom what a lovely child she had been. And she had been, she knew it; as one of a trio of beautiful sisters, she had heard often when she was growing up that she was the loveliest of the three, that she was the most beautiful girl in the entire village. Even Daw had once told her so. But now she felt like a drab, colorless collection of aging, aching muscles and infrequently washed hair, held together by resentment and sentenced to a life of labor by people who couldn’t recognize a beautiful baby when they saw one.

  And this was not just wounded vanity on Miaow’s behalf. Hom believed that people who were blind to beauty were blind to goodness, immune to goodness, because what was beauty but a sign of goodness in a former life? Her husband didn’t see the beauty of his own daughter. Neither he nor his terrible mother loved Miaow; and it was clear to her now, despite almost two years of stubborn, stupid refusal to see it, that they didn’t love her, either.

  She tiptoed as invisibly as possible through the remainder of that day, trying to anticipate her mother-in-law’s demands and avoid any additional conflict. She even sidestepped the frequent dinner-table squabble over how much, or how quickly, she was feeding Miaow. Before she went to bed, in the shed she and Miaow shared because the child’s middle-of-the-night calls for attention disrupted Daw’s sleep, she took half an hour or so to lay out the things she would need, and as she closed her eyes, she commanded herself to wake up at three. The baby often awoke a little after three and wanted company; Hom had trained herself to anticipate the noise and get up in time to have a pacifier in her hand before the child could begin to squall in earnest.