Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Hta Hta,” Louisa broke in, as Mama took a long sip of tea, resolved, it seemed, not to acknowledge her daughter, “would you mind telling my father that I need to speak to him? If he’ll come to the living room, I’ll be there in a minute.”

Hta Hta glanced uneasily at Mama, then wiped her hands on a dish towel and set it on the counter, as if in begrudging surrender.

Only when the woman was gone did Mama look up from her cup and set her fierce eyes on Louisa, still standing opposite the table from her. And for a few moments, across their persistent silence, it seemed to Louisa that anything could happen between them: that they had never been closer to perfect understanding, now that they were poised to part.

What she wanted was to fall down on her knees and tell Mama that she loved her.

But a question rose in Mama’s eyes, and then those eyes all at once went dim, and she said, “He acts quickly, doesn’t he? No time to think. ‘You in or you out?’ That’s Lynton. What was it — a proposal of marriage? Or just an invitation to be his mistress?”

“Please don’t—”

“ You don’t — don’t pull out your acting tricks! Pretending to be contrite when it’s obvious you’ve been wanting to get away from us for a long time.”

The accusation that she was acting —that the worry and remorse Louisa had come into the room with were contrived — was there any crueler form of depriving another of her right to be? It occurred to Louisa dimly that her years of pretense had been encouraged by a mother who was frightened of her daughter’s feelings. And for a moment, all she could do was stand there, fighting off the tremors of old hurt and rage, as Mama threw her hands over her own face, as though to hide what it had to say, or as though to hide from what its eyes might perceive.

“Sixty-nine wives,” she heard Mama mutter from behind her hands. “Aren’t you ashamed ?”

“Of course I am.”

This brought Mama’s peering eyes out from behind her fingertips. It seemed she was uncertain whose victory Louisa had just declared.

But it wasn’t a victory.

“For a long time,” Louisa confessed, “that’s all I’ve been— ashamed . Disgraced.” She was referring not only to the rumors, she realized, but to her whole run on the catwalks and at the parties and before the cameras. “I’ve gone along with it,” she pushed on, remembering how she’d felt at her first Miss Burma pageant, “because we’re all degraded here.”

The truth was never in her life had she felt more naked than now, baring herself to this woman, whom she loved beyond any other, and to whom her nakedness and truthfulness were so obviously threatening. But something in Mama’s questioning eyes told her to keep trying to explain.

“But I can’t go on indefinitely enduring . I want to serve , Mama. And service is Lynton’s life.”

“Is it? Maybe service to whatever he happens to want.”

The explicit reminder of the service that Lynton had rendered Mama, and that she had rendered him, appeared to raise the cup to the woman’s repelled lips. She pretended to drink and then set the cup down in feigned indifference.

“You’ve been overly influenced by your father,” Mama finally continued with lowering eyes. “Two of a kind. Sentenced to your own self-importance.”

“I hope that’s not true.”

“You have a low opinion of me. You see nothing but an ordinary woman content to sit here at her kitchen table, day after day.”

What Louisa saw was a woman who couldn’t help suddenly throwing a beseeching glance up at her.

“I’ve never met anyone stronger,” Louisa said, and she found that she wasn’t lying. And there was only quavering honesty in her voice when she went on: “The way you help people — the way you’ve always helped people, everywhere we’ve gone. You’ve never thought twice about it. The sick. The children who needed to be delivered. The dying. All of us. You never stopped serving. I’m also your daughter. And you need to give me the freedom to do the same.”

She hadn’t meant to refer to what Mama had done with Lynton, but she saw — by the dark blush that consumed Mama’s face — that her final words had thrown that dimension of their past straight back into her mother’s sight line. And too shamed or bewildered to reply, the woman simply sat in the echoing implications of all that had been said.

Then finally she announced, with defeat, “Go then. Make every mistake I made.” You might as well hold me accountable while you’re at it, she could have added. Instead, she said, “A mistaken marriage is also a life sentence.”

This last assault took Louisa’s breath away.

“Is it so impossible with Daddy?” she managed.

“Your father is my burden to bear. You think, so long as he’s locked up here, I can just do as I please? Your father gave up everything for us. His freedom. He could’ve escaped to India when the Japanese came. That’s what all the other Anglos were doing. But he stayed. He became a Karen. He gave his life to my people. He belongs to me. And whenever I see him, ugly as he’s grown, with his foul breath in the morning and his disgusting belly and his bad manners, the way he wears his torn underwear in his study and talks with a full mouth. Whenever I see him, with his other woman on the side in that hallowed prison—”

“Other woman?”

“Yes, I know — who am I to talk?” Now she peered back into the recesses of her cup. “Whenever I see him, I see a man who nearly sacrificed himself to the Japanese so that we wouldn’t be slaughtered — you and Johnny, my children. my children, who are my life. ”

She seemed to have lost her way. With tremendous sadness, she lifted the cup to her lips again, and this time she drank. She drank deeply. And Louisa wanted to say something, to say everything, to convey the depth of gratitude and pain that was her inheritance.

But the fear of seeming false held her silent.

And then Mama said, “Go. Have your freedom with him. He’ll assert his freedom from you soon enough.”

She didn’t find Daddy in the living room. Instead, she discovered Hta Hta standing by the suitcase she’d placed by the front door — open to a view of Lynton’s imposing black car and the general seated beside her father in the rear.

“He must have seen them driving up,” Hta Hta whispered guiltily. “I couldn’t stop him from going out there.”

“It’s better this way,” Louisa said, though dismay kept her pinned in the doorway a moment more.

Alongside the car, a man in uniform — no doubt Lynton’s driver — paced through Mama’s beds of roses. He raised his glance bashfully to meet hers when she emerged and then watched as she proceeded out from under the portico, finally stopping a few feet from the car. Evening was coming along with a breeze that drew her anxious gaze down the hillside. Was Mama right? Was her desperation to leave this prison so intense she had to flee with the first man foolhardy enough to offer her a means of escape? She hardly knew him!

A noise drew her attention back to the car — one of the doors was opening. Soon Lynton emerged, and everything about him confirmed the soundness of her rash choice: his straight stance as he faced her, his aura of respectful calm, the reassuring smile he cast her (a smile that was, well — yes, dashing ). And the pistol. That ultimate form of resistance that partly expressed his ultimate strength and that she sensed he would resort to using only in the direst of circumstances. Don’t you see? his searching glance seemed to tell her. All of that — that suffering you put yourself through — it came out of a need not to offend. And as long as you concern yourself with upsetting others, you’re in prison. And: As I see it, you are your father’s daughter. He was a warrior, too, in his way. Trust him to endure this.