Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

The place wasn’t with Kim, though. I went home from the war in February of 1967, and for a few months before that, I didn’t even see her. I went home and that meant Wabash and I went back to my room in the little brick house on Hagemeyer Avenue where I still had baseball cards and my steel-toed shoes and some shirts in a closet that were the color of the deuce-and-a-halfs I’d just driven for a year and were still smelling like the mill. I went there and I slept till noon every day for three months and I went out until I found Mattie from Wabash High who I always liked to look at and she remembered me and she was a waitress at the Woolworth’s and she didn’t ask me any questions at that time and we got married and I lay in another room on the same street, with her, and she was tall, and though she was lanky, there seemed to be so much of her when she was naked, and she seemed soft to the touch, and she had heavy eyebrows and hair she kept rolled tight in a lace net when she was working but she let it down for me long and straight. That should have been what I needed. That should have been what I’d been waiting for all along and I should have gotten back on at the mill like my dad wanted me to do now that I was home from a war, but it never quite turned out that way.

There was nothing even like the moment when Tien rose from her prayers when she brought me to her room and was not ready for us to touch. There would be no touching and I knew it and still there’d never been a moment for me like when I sat on her straw mat and she turned to me and I was having trouble taking a breath with her hair down for me this first time like it was. I sat on the straw mat and she turned to me and behind her the smoke rose from the incense she’d lit, dark, without a flame, and her hair was coming down a little bit over one shoulder and she smiled at me and I said, “Why is there no picture?”

He surprised me when he knew about the ancestors. He asked me why I did not have a photo on my shrine and I think I acted in a strange way then. I had known for many years that someone would someday ask me questions. For too many years I waited for questions with fear in my heart, but no one said anything. I was the orphan daughter who lived with her grandmother and I knew all that I should say at school and my grandmother knew whatever she knew to say and you could not tell any other story from looking at my face.

I said to him, “I will make the tea now.”

He is a good man. A careful man. He said, “That would be fine.”

I went about the task that my hands know so well. But there were so many things in my head. My memories. As they have always been, some are clear. Some are not. My mother is clear, in a certain way. I thought of her while I made the tea. I lay with her sometimes and we slept and I do not remember when was the first time I asked the question. Maybe I never did ask about my father. Maybe this was a thing that she told me before I ever had a chance to notice. My father was a soldier and he was dead in the war. This was all there was for me to know. And she would cry very quickly about this and there were many tears and I did not try to know more. But once, I asked her why only Grandfather’s picture was on her ancestor shrine and she said that there were no photos of my father. I did not ask another why. She had not yet begun to cry and I stopped before she did.

Then there was one night, and it was near the end of things. The liberators — though I did not think of them in that way then; I was a child and my mother was a bargirl — the liberators were very near and there were many rockets falling into the city. So there were no men coming to her bed and I was beside her. I could smell only her on that night, nothing of the sea. She smelled good and I told her so and she said it was a soap that came from America. It was 99 and 44 one-hundreds percent pure, she said, like me, her sweet daughter. I pressed closer to her, at her side, and her arm came around me. I wondered for a moment what it was in me that I was not one hundred percent pure and I thought to ask her. But before I did, she said that I could stay a good girl even without a daddy.

He was on her mind that night. She wanted to speak of him and I waited and I was glad, I think, to hear whatever she might say. My friend who told me of the dragon and the princess and whose mother also worked in bars was very proud that she was the daughter of a Vietnamese colonel. And though he had not married her mother and had now gone far away, he’d taken my friend once to the beach at Vung Tau. Since all I really knew was that my father was dead, my friend said things that I did not like. She said that my father was probably some man who came to the bar. She touched my face and turned it one way and then another and she said that he might be an American. I had already heard some things about how babies are made, mostly from Diep herself, but I had not grasped it yet really and I was not entirely sure why she looked for this in my face, and I slapped her hand away and I went home, and that night I wanted to ask my mother if my father was an American from the bar. But I was with my grandmother instead and I asked her. I told how Diep had looked at me and said this thing. So my grandmother put her hand on my shoulder and took me to the mirror and her face hovered over mine there. This is Tien, she said. Then she gently drew away from me and only my face was in the mirror. Is there anyone else that you see? she asked.

I tried. I had no answer yet if he was a Vietnamese man or an American man and I did not yet know why he would show in my face, but I looked and I saw only what I had always seen. No, I said. And I stood there and looked at myself and my grandmother was nearby. I could feel her there for a few moments and then she was gone and I watched my own face watching me and I found I did not have any more questions.

But on that night in April of 1975, when my mother already had secretly decided to go away from me forever — so that I could live a better life in the new Vietnam — I understand that — and so that she could live at all, believing as she did all the slanders about what the new government would do to a prostitute for the Americans — I understand all of this — on that night, she had to explain more about my father. I think my grandmother made her do this. My grandmother must have known of her plans by then and though she taught me that I am myself and that I am alone, she also wanted me to know the truth about this from my own mother. What hard words must have passed between them that I never heard.

My darling, my mother said to me, your father is dead. Do not forget that.

I am certain that is what she said. Whenever I have remembered this as an adult she sounds a little bit crazy. She was, I suppose. In ways that at eight years old I could not see.

I know he is dead, I said to her, and she must have heard the tears in my voice because she sat up and turned to see me and there was still a lamp burning nearby and I could see her face and I looked hard there for something of myself. I remembered my face in Grandmother’s mirror and I wanted to see if there was something of my mother clear in me. I was not sure. She was blurred now with my tears and what I saw mostly in her face was the squeeze of a feeling that I had never seen in anyone’s face.

Your father, she said, and her voice quaked and would soon crack but then there was a great crack in the air and the room quaked and the lamp went out and we turned to the window, my mother and me, and the night sky was red and my mother turned back to me and I could not see her face clearly anymore. But her voice changed. It was very calm.

She said, Your father came from far away.