Rattawant Lapcharoensap - Sightseeing - Stories

The temple isn’t far; it takes only fifteen minutes. The wife helps me out of the car. After she straps me in, she takes a finger from my dead hand and scratches her own face with it. Everybody thinks it’s a gas. The kids laugh, Jack laughs, and the wife’s so happy with herself tears stream down her face. She’s still holding my dead hand and I can almost feel it shaking with her hilarity.

“Ha ha,” I say. “Very funny. Now give me my damn hand back.”

There’s bright lights and loud music and people all over the temple grounds. The boy’s beside himself with excitement. He races ahead with his sister, runs back to report on what he’s seen. Jack and his wife nod absentmindedly and the kid sprints to join his sister at the gates once more.

“Somebody give that kid a tranquilizer,” I say. “He’s gonna poop his pants if he doesn’t calm down.”

It’s the usual carny fare. A Ferris wheel, a carousel, giant teacups, a Tilt-A-Whirl, a mini-roller coaster speeding through some poorly conceived jungle scene. All sorts of games and stuffed animals. The temple’s monks sit in booths collecting tickets, ruffling their saffron robes every so often like orange birds preening themselves. Thai music blares from the temple’s staticky speakers. There’s some clown walking around on stilts. He’s poking people with a giant foam noodle, laughing and guffawing loudly, his stilts clopping on the pavement like hooves. He’s walking toward us now and I’m thinking that if he so much as grazes me with that noodle I’m gonna kick the goddamn stilts from under him. The children are excited. They approach the clown, peer stupidly up at his face. He whacks my grandson on the head a few times. The boy’s practically epileptic with delight. When the clown approaches me I give him my best snarl. He seems to get the point. I can almost see the man’s smile disappearing beneath that coat of ridiculous clown paint. He quickly diverts his attention to a group of teenage girls nearby.

For a while, we just let the kids lead us through the fair. We stand by the rails and watch them take a few rides. At the Ferris wheel, I can hear my mongrel grandchildren yelling down at us from the sky. The boy waves every time their car dips to its lowest point. One time, the boy screams “ass” over and over again as he’s coming down. I laugh. Jack gives me a look. “Nice, Father,” he says.

“I didn’t teach him that,” I say. “Why would I teach him that?”

The girl sees a group of her girlfriends from school. I can tell that she wants to wander the fair with them. She asks Jack and he looks over at his wife. Tida shrugs like she can’t see any harm in it. The little boy wants to go with his sister. Jack and Tida are talking to them both now. They have stern, parental looks on their faces. They’re telling the girl to take care of her brother. Jack takes off his watch and gives it to my granddaughter. We’re to meet back at the Ferris wheel in an hour. Before we can even say good-bye they’ve joined the crowd snaking their way through the temple grounds.

The three of us wander over to a tent outside the temple gates. Most of the adults have congregated there. There’s an empty dance floor with a mirror ball. They’re serving beer. I ask Jack to get me one. “I don’t know if a man in your condition should be drinking,” Jack says, and I say, “Don’t be stupid, Jack. My condition’s the reason a man like me should be drinking.” I tell Jack I want a Budweiser and he looks at me like I have horns.

He comes back with a beer for each of us. I’m concentrating hard, trying not to spill it on myself, the liquid dancing against the lip of the plastic cup. Jack asks me if I need help, but I tell him I still know how to drink a beer, thank you very much. Then I spill a little on my lap.

“Dammit,” I say.

The wife laughs. Jack smiles and takes the cup from my shaking left hand. “I’ll get you a straw,” he says. “Dammit,” I say again. “Don’t get me a straw, Jack. Nobody drinks beer with a straw.”

“You need a straw,” he says.

A little later Jack tells me his wife wants to dance.

“Go,” I say. “Dance. You’re a grown man, Jack. You don’t need my permission. I’ll just sit here and play with my sippee cup.”

Jack leads Tida to the dance floor. They’re the only people out there. It seems the whole place is watching them. Everybody looks up to watch my son — this tall, foreign man — dancing with his Thai wife. It’s a slow Thai song and another couple, both Thai, join them on the floor, the lights from the mirror ball sweeping back and forth. Jack’s holding his wife close. They’re smiling at each other like there’s so much love between them they don’t know what to do with it. I’m a little embarrassed; I don’t really want to look, though I also can’t take my eyes off them. I’m sucking on my beer, thinking how you never get used to seeing your child’s romantic side, when I look around and see some of the men under the tent snickering in Jack’s direction. I notice, too, that the women are talking to one another sternly, peering at Jack and his wife. I can tell by the way they look at her that they think Tida’s some kind of prostitute and suddenly I’m proud of them both for being out there dancing, proud of my boy Jack for holding his wife so close, because their love suddenly seems for the first time like something courageous and worthwhile, and I’m thinking: There he is, Alice. There’s your boy. There’s our little man.

* * *

When we meet the kids back at the Ferris wheel, the temple’s starting to empty. Some of the monks are sweeping the grounds. My grandkids are talking a mile a minute to Jack and Tida, telling them about all the things they’ve done. The boy shows me a ratty stuffed giraffe he’s won at some game. “How do you do?” he says. He holds the thing proudly above his head. “Geeraahf!” he says, and I say, “Yeah, kid. Giraffe.”

“Grandfather okay?” the girl asks. There’s a purple rose painted on each of her cheeks. “Grandfather have fun at temple?”

“Sure,” I tell her. “Grandfather had fun. Grandfather drank some beer. Grandfather got a little drunk.” The girl looks at me perplexed. Jack and his wife laugh. My son translates for the girl and she grins mischievously at me. “I see,” she says, nodding earnestly. “Drunk.”

We’re halfway out of the temple when I see four teenage boys in bumper cars ramming into each other, giggling like hyenas. My grandson runs up to the rails and watches the boys in there for a while, hugging the giraffe close to his chest.

“Look at that, Jack,” I say. “He’s just like you. Remember how you used to love bumper cars?”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Sure.”

The boy wants to ride the bumper cars. He wants to get in there with the older boys. Jack and his wife both shake their heads no. “C’mon,” I say. “Don’t be such a curmudgeon.”

Jack peers down at me like I amuse him. He says something to the wife, who shrugs, and then he calls his son over. The boy skips excitedly back to his father. The girl’s excited now too. She wants to get in there as well.

The bumper cars come to a sudden stop; time’s up for the teenage boys. They all get out, walk over to the monk manning the lever, hand him more money, and return to their cars again, broad smiles on their faces. The monk looks over at Jack and the kids. Jack fishes out his wallet, gives the boy and girl some money.

“We should all go,” I say suddenly.

Jack looks at me like I just farted.

“Very funny,” he says, watching the kids run over to the monk.

“C’mon, Jack,” I say. “It’ll be a blast.”

“You can’t get in there, Father.”