Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

I try not to think of my father at that moment when Ben’s lips first touch mine. But the smell of the incense of my father’s shrine is very clear to me and I try to hold that smell away from me and it is very hard. I have lit the slender tips of the incense a thousand times for him, more, five thousand times perhaps — every night since I was ten years old — and it is not easy to pretend that this smell is not here, that his soul is not here, but I want only to feel the touch of Ben’s lips. And little claws of panic are burrowing deep into me in the place between my breasts where his hand touched me moments ago. I think: I am missing my first kiss with Ben. I concentrate on the soft touch of his mouth. I press my mouth harder against him and his lips open mine slightly and he is touching the inside of my lip with his tongue and I am forgetting now, forgetting the past, I am touching Ben and I am not expecting what is next. I feel suddenly his hand on my bare stomach and then it slides down and inside my pantaloons and I yield to him as easily as the silk and his hand goes to that place between my legs.

There are many things that I do not fully understand about my body. I know the ways of understanding from before the revolution: a woman’s body was given to a man by her parents and it was to make children for him. I know the ways of my mother: a woman’s body was something of such little value to her that it could be sold to any man. But the ways of our leaders now are not very clear. We are to be modest about our bodies because they are to be given to the service of the state. I think in order to make children for our country. Something like that. There were words about these things at first when the country was finally made one. That was in those early years when the streets of Saigon were thick at night with darkness except for a few scraps of fire in a gutter, a kerosene lamp burning down an alleyway. And there was such a terrible quiet. I sometimes wish in this era of our country that the motorbikes would stop outside in the streets, but they are better than the silence. I can wake at three or four in the early mornings now and it is quiet but it is quiet from a sound that was there only a few hours ago and will come again soon, it is still not like those years when the sun went down and there was no electric light and there was the smell of wood fire and a little kerosene and there was no gasoline and there was only the faint click of bicycle chains and we all whispered to each other. In those years I think a woman’s body was intended to make children for our great socialist state, but now I do not know. The lights returned and the sounds, but I do not know where our bodies are.

When I met Ben, before he touched me for the first time, I crouched in my bathroom one night and I sponged my naked body and I began to tremble. It must have been because of him. He had been in the other room that very day and I had served him tea and now he was gone, but something of him remained, like a faint scent of smoke, and I was naked and this part that he would soon touch felt as if it had begun to pout, like a child, pout from being left out of something she wanted very much to do. I stood up and I was still wet from my bath and I was naked. I moved to the little mirror and I could see only my face and my throat and only a little of my chest, not my breasts at all. I was modest still, in this great socialist state, modest even to myself in my own bathroom.

The mirror hung with a cord from a nail and I touched it with my fingertip just at the bottom and it moved and my face disappeared and my breath caught when I saw my own nipples like this, before me, apart from me, and it was because of him. I tipped the mirror farther and I could see the little dark flame of hair coming up from that secret place between my legs and I let the mirror go and my face rushed back and quaked there and I remembered my grandmother’s question, and though I saw only me in the mirror, I did not feel alone: I had seen my nipples, my secret place, as he would someday see them, naked before him. And here was my face as he would see it. I tried to smile for him, but the pouting between my legs was very strong, and I had to stop because it was becoming painful now, this pleasure, this yearning.

I dried myself and I covered myself with a silk robe and I lay down on my bed. And I thought that if I ever had a baby I would wish to have a girl, though my husband would certainly want a boy. If my husband were a Vietnamese. I blushed at this. This thought carried the possibility that I would not marry a Vietnamese and I knew who I meant. I wondered if American men wanted only boys or if they could love a girl child too. I would raise her as a good daughter of a great socialist state but I would do the old ways, as well.

In Vietnam we worry about a child, if it will live very long. My grandmother told me how in the countryside, for the first month, the mother would remain in bed with her baby and the baby was wrapped tight in its bedclothes. The baby would be held safe from the sun and the rain and the winds and from those in the spirit world who would take her away with them. Then at one month old the baby would be brought into the sunlight and everyone in the village would gather around and they would take a white jasmine flower made wet from special water from the altar in the pagoda and they would hold the flower over the baby and a drop of the water would fall into the baby’s mouth. This would make the baby’s words sweet as the scent of jasmine all her life.

I asked my grandmother if that was done for me and she shook her head sadly and she said, “No, I tell you this thing because as you become a woman of Vietnam you should know this for your own child someday.”

I was sad when she said this. I wished to speak with words sweet as jasmine, but I could not. Perhaps I should not be sad about this, in this modern Vietnam, working in the job that I do. Perhaps I am better off this way. But I would want this thing for my own daughter. I lay on the bed on the night I saw my body through Ben’s eyes in my mirror and I dreamed of my own child, and this was so foolish, I realized. I did not know this man, this man I was already thinking of marrying. But that has always been the way of my country. In the old customs, the parents made the choice for their child and the woman met her husband only after they were betrothed. Is that so very different from this? I sat with Ben and I made tea for him and he knew about the spirits of the ancestors and he spoke gently to me and I loved his face with its dark eyes and dragon’s jaw. So I thought of how I would let a drop of water fall on my daughter’s lips.

Though the memory that had come upon me did not stop. I asked one more question of my grandmother when she taught me this necessary thing about being a Vietnamese mother. I asked, “Did you do this for my mother?”

She seemed a little surprised at this question, though she should not have been. “Yes,” she said.

I was thirteen or fourteen years old at that time and my mother had been gone for a while and I was glad she was safe and I wished she was dead and I was happy she had the drop of jasmine water on her lips when she was a baby and I was angry she did not give me this precious thing. And then I thought of something that made me question it all. It was this woman, my mother, who had received the precious water. “So it must not work,” I said. My mother had spoken some sweet words, I suppose, but none that I could remember, and certainly not all of her words for her whole life, and even if her words to all the men had sounded sweet to them, surely that was not the point of this tradition, to sweeten the words of a prostitute for the men who would buy her body.