Rattawant Lapcharoensap - Sightseeing - Stories

“Oi,” Mama muttered, still staring at the empty road. “I guess we should pack our bags.”

“You sure, Mama?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Mama said sternly. “I’ll call Miss Mayuree now.”

“I don’t know, Mama—”

“What don’t you know, Ladda?” Mama scoffed. “What are you so unsure about? You want to stay? Fine. Stay. Suit yourself.”

Mama went inside the house. For a while, I sat on the porch and stared at the wheelbarrow’s tracks on the driveway, its light lines trailing through the gravel like veins. There was a cold, eerie silence in the yard — this was the first time, I realized, that our property didn’t echo with the noises of chickens. I heard Mama pick up the phone to call Miss Mayuree. “Yes,” I heard her say. “Thank you, ma’am. You’re too kind. Yes. Just a few days. Of course we will. Thank you so much.”

Mama came back, stood in the doorway with a hand on her hip. She said Miss Mayuree was sending somebody to pick us up. I turned to face her. “Are we really leaving, Mama? Is this it? You don’t ever want to see him again?” Mama didn’t answer me at first. She just crouched down and packed her sewing machine into its plastic case. “We’ll see,” she said. “It’s not up to me. It’s up to your father.” I stood. “Don’t you love him, Mama?” She smiled. “Of course I do,” she said. “But that’s not the point, Ladda. Love or no love, the men in this world don’t leave women with much choice sometimes. It’s all we can do to hang on to our dignity.”

I nodded as if I understood, though what she’d said made no sense whatsoever. What did a woman’s dignity have to do with anything? I wanted to ask her. What kind of dignity would we have by going to Miss Mayuree? Wasn’t it Papa’s dignity in the balance? Wouldn’t we just add to the sum total of his humiliation by leaving him? I felt a slow, recalcitrant heat blooming in my temples. After a moment, the heat seemed like some dogged flower pushing against the top of my skull. Mama must’ve sensed my distress; she walked over and reached out to touch one of my shoulders.

“C’mon, Ladda,” Mama said softly. “Go get your things. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll probably be back by the end of the week.” I shrugged her hand off my shoulder. “This isn’t permanent,” she added. “At least I don’t think it is. I just want to scare some sense into him. We can’t go on like this anymore.”

I walked to my room. I sat on my bed, watched the shadows list back and forth across the floor. The throbbing in my head had traveled to the rest of my body; I felt as if I might combust, burst into flames, liquefy from the inside out. I grabbed the wooden hairbrush on the nightstand and flung it across the room. The brush bounced off the wall, landed quietly on its bristles. It was a disappointing gesture. I caught my reflection in the mirror and felt terribly foolish. I got up and started to pack my things.

Soon, Miss Mayuree’s blue sedan appeared. The driver honked, got out of the car, and opened the trunk. He didn’t say anything, though every so often he would smile knowingly at me. After a few trips, we managed to pack all our bags. We got in the backseat, the vinyl sticky against our skin. Upcountry music played softly on the radio. As we gathered speed along the road, Mama kept staring at her feet, as if she couldn’t bear to watch the house disappear behind us.

Miss Mayuree was waiting. She smiled as we pulled into her driveway. She put an arm around my shoulder. “You poor thing,” she said, shaking her head. “You poor, poor thing.” She smelled like baby powder. She wore a belt with a large gold buckle that glinted when she breathed. A fat, smiling Buddha had been carved into the buckle, and I stared at the thing, afraid that if I met Miss Mayuree’s eyes I might say something rude.

She showed us the back room where we would be sleeping, a small concrete cavern behind the kitchen. A solitary lightbulb hung by a wire from the ceiling. Mold hugged the cracks along the bare gray walls. On one wall, there was a calendar from the lingerie company, a picture of a skinny white woman with eyes closed, slender hands cupping gigantic breasts. “This is where the maids used to sleep before I built them their quarters,” Miss Mayuree said proudly. Mama thanked her while I stared at the moth-eaten pallet in the center of the room. “Just help around the house when you can, Saiya,” Miss Mayuree said. Mama nodded demurely and thanked her once again.

“Ladda,” Mama said after Miss Mayuree left us. “Manners. She’s doing us a favor.”

“I don’t care if she wipes my ass, Mama,” I said. “She gives me the creeps.”

“Now, now,” she said. “Now, now.”

We didn’t say much to each other the rest of the day. After unpacking, we went to the yard to help trim the hedges. We introduced ourselves to the maids, picked up shears and gloves. As we worked, Mama told them our predicament and they nodded absentmindedly, as if they’d heard the story before. Every so often, a pickup truck would drive by and people would peer out their windows to look at Mama and me working in Miss Mayuree’s yard. The rumormongers would have themselves a party today, gabbing about our family.

Miss Mayuree came out and told me she didn’t want me doing any work. She said I should rest. “You poor thing,” she said again. “You’ve been through so much.” She thought she was being kind; it made me want to trim her hedges even more. I snipped my shears enthusiastically, pretended that the branches were the blue-green veins on Miss Mayuree’s pale, wrinkled neck. “She’s just like her mother,” she said to Mama. “A good worker.”

We worked on the hedges well into the evening. I kept expecting to see Papa pushing his wheelbarrow down the road. I wondered how he was doing at the cockpit today. I wondered if he’d already come home to find the house empty.

As Mama and I lay down side-by-side on the foam pallet that night, I realized I hadn’t slept with my mother in a long time. I realized, too, that this was the first time I had slept in a room that was not my own. When I turned in that darkness to face the far wall, I half expected to find a window letting in light from Papa’s chicken house; instead, I found the woman cupping her breasts on the lingerie calendar. I listened to Mama’s breathing; I could tell from its short, choppy rhythm that she was still awake. I closed my eyes.

I had a dream. I dreamed that Papa and Mama were running a sideshow involving chickens. The show took place in our front yard. People came from all over to watch. Even the strays had stationed themselves on the road in front of our house, howling happily along with the crowd. I watched everything from above. The town and the streets and the rubber trees and our property lay before me like a model train set. All of Papa’s chickens were there, alive. Papa made them fly through hoops of fire while Mama stood beside him smiling and gesturing in a glittering pink and lavender bikini. Then Mama stood against a makeshift wall as Papa threw the chickens at her like knives, the chickens gliding gracefully through the air, their sharpened beaks missing Mama’s face and body by inches, the crowd oohing and aahing in anxious delight with each throw. The trick completed, Mama put the chickens into her mouth, slowly swallowing each one whole, their bodies and their feet wriggling between her lips before disappearing into her cavity. The crowd gasped in horror. Papa produced a top hat and pulled out the chickens one by one and everybody, even I standing above it all, laughed and clapped and cheered him loudly. As I did so, I realized that everybody was looking up at me, that all those tiny little people were pointing at me, standing above them in their sky like a god. Somebody screamed. The crowd began to scatter like flies, even Mama and Papa and the chickens. I called out to them, told them in a booming voice to come back. A trembling rage passed through my body. I wanted to reach out and squash them all between my fingers, but as I began to pick one out from that model world below me, I felt a hand touch my shoulder, and I woke up to find Mama peering at me through the darkness.