The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Page 14

  I’m finishing my breakfast and Momma is finishing her dinner when she informs us of another impending union. Cousin Tu is getting married.

  “Who’s Cousin Tu?” Tommy asks through a mouthful of cereal. I’m not sure which meal this is for him. Possibly lunch. The last time I saw my older brother was Tuesday morning, and he was eating cereal then, too.

  “Cô Ha’s oldest son.”

  “Is he short? Like, really short, and kinda fat?”

  “I think he goes by ‘Dumpling.’ ”

  “Dumpling!” Tommy spews Cheerios. “I know Dumpling! I hate that kid!” Momma and I both wait for him to justify his hatred of Dumpling, but Tommy just looks at his watch and then gulps down the rest of his bowl. It’s almost half-past nine. I have no positive or negative feelings toward Dumpling. I remember him as one of the older cousins that I rarely spoke to but would see drinking in corners at weddings and funerals and Lunar New Year parties. He is about five feet by three feet in dimension and styles his hair in a poofy crest that does, in fact, resemble the pinched top of a dumpling.

  Momma sticks a toothpick in the corner of her mouth and begins to clear the dishes. Later she will wash them in a bucket of water in the bathroom, squatting barefoot on the floor with her hair piled up in a topknot. Old habits from the motherland die hard. When I was in elementary school and still had friends I never invited them over for meals because I was so embarrassed.

  “Who’s he marrying?” I ask.

  Momma begins coiling her hair. It should be mostly gray but she dyes it every week. “Skinny girl. Named Duyen or Quyen or Xuyen,” she says through clenched teeth to hold the toothpick in. “The family’s from Hue and I can barely understand their Vietnamese. Superstitious bunch, too—they’re rushing to have the wedding before one of the great-aunts with liver cancer dies and brings them bad luck.”

  I wonder if a family death was responsible for Momma’s ill-fated marriage to my father. She removes the toothpick to tell us the next part. “So the ceremony’s on Saturday morning at eleven. Write it down somewhere before you forget.” The toothpick goes back in again. I never actually see Momma clean her teeth with the things—I think she just likes chewing on them.

  Tommy gives her one of his patented squinty stares. “Superstitious or not, they couldn’t plan a wedding in what, three days? Just how long have you known about it?”

  Momma looks guilty. She pretends to be busy with the dishes and says under her breath, “A couple weeks.”

  “How long?” He’s playing patriarch now.

  “Maybe a month,” she finally admits. Tommy sighs loudly.

  Momma looks pouty. “I meant to tell you earlier but kept forgetting. I only get to see you and Phuong in the evenings, and I’m tired then.” This isn’t entirely true; I see Momma most mornings when I get off work. I don’t say anything; she only cares if Tommy’s there, too.

  “Don’t you try playing the pity card, kid. It doesn’t work on me and Phuong. You raised yourself two cold-blooded killers.” What Momma doesn’t know is that he’s only half joking.

  “But you’ll be there, right?”

  Tommy stands and digs his car keys out of his pocket.

  “Right?” Momma wheedles.

  “Saturday at eleven,” Tommy says and musses Momma’s bun with one hand. When she opens her mouth to complain, the toothpick falls out. Tommy laughs and kisses her on the forehead. He has to bend to reach it. In one smooth movement that he secretly practices, he grabs his jacket from the back of his chair and slings it over his shoulder. I dig my own keys out from under a pile of junk magazines on the table and get stuck in my Texas A&M sweatshirt when I pull it on too quickly. By the time I have my head free and my appendages in the correct sleeves, Tommy’s already out the door. I run after him without saying goodbye to Momma.

  WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW about Tommy is that he is the fourth-greatest failure in the family, after Great-Uncle Dong the Communist-Sympathizer, a cousin who went to prison for double homicide, and our own esteemed father. The family’s full of gamblers and violent drunkards and deadbeats, but what sets Tommy apart is how much potential he started with, how much he threw away. Back in high school Tommy was Tâm Nguyen Jr., your average piano-playing, calculus-loving, honor-roll–topping, MIT-bound Asian wunderkind. But after graduation, things took a rather unexpected turn. Tommy abruptly shed poor old Tâm Nguyen Jr. like a skin that had grown too tight. He dropped out of MIT after his first semester and moved back home. Stopped speaking Vietnamese and adopted an oily East Texas drawl. Grew his hair long just so he could flip it out of his eyes around the pretty girls. He started disappearing for days at a time, always saying that he’d just been at a cousin’s place. Momma still wasn’t worried; we have handfuls of cousins—it could have been true. Then he turned up one morning with a stab wound that he blamed on a stapler and told us he was going by “Tommy” now. When the money started coming in, his clothes changed, too. Tâm Nguyen Jr. kept a closet of pressed polo shirts arranged by color, but Tommy prefers things like pinstriped suits. Snake-skin boots. Silk shirts with absurdly high thread counts in the kinds of colors that should get his bony ass jumped in most neighborhoods. Jewelry that even Momma thinks is too flashy. Belts with silver buckles that weigh more than I do.

  Underneath his slickster ensembles Tommy is still the skinny Viet nobody he’s always been, but he’s got everyone fooled now. He has reprobate allure. People don’t look at him and see skinny; they see lithe. They don’t see Vietnamese; they see a borderless brown. Tommy gets along with the Asian kids, with the black kids, with the Mexican kids, with the white kids. It was his talent for getting along with everybody that made him some powerful friends in Houston’s shadier circles of not-strictly-legal commerce.

  It’s no secret that Tommy is now a bottom-of-the-barrel gangster. Everyone in the family knows; even Grandma, who talks to dead people, isn’t delusional enough to think that Tommy is an upstanding citizen. Only Momma still believes that he works the night shift at a gas station. For her sake we all just play along. I tell the necessary lies and Tommy pays the rent and Momma can stay happy.

  Even his new car hasn’t made her the teensiest bit suspicious: a sleek little blue-black convertible that no one on his imaginary salary could afford. He can leave it parked outside because everyone in the neighborhood knows what he does and knows who he knows and wouldn’t even think about jacking it. No one ever tries to steal my car, either, but that’s because it’s a piece of shit and most people would sooner ride a unicycle than be seen driving it. I share Momma’s 1987 rust-brown Buick that’s shaped like a boat, farts clouds of exhaust, and has a taped-up trash bag in place of a passenger seat window. Tommy christened my car the Drug Deal Mobile and the name stuck. Ironic, considering the activity that his car has seen.

  HE’S SITTING SMUG, top down, engine purring, in the driveway as I come out. He hasn’t risen quite high enough in the ranks of Assholery to wear sunglasses at night, but he’ll be there soon. He laughs while I try to get the door of the Drug Deal Mobile unstuck.

  “Picking up chicks in your sweet ride tonight?” he says laughing.

  “Shut up!” And then under my breath: “I’m not a lesbian.” The door finally opens.

  “Then stop dressing like one. I’m gone, kid.” With the smoothest of rumbles, Tommy pulls away. It’s Thursday night. I probably won’t see him again before the wedding on Saturday. I yell at the car for five minutes trying to get it to start. Momma has covered the dashboard with black-and-white pictures of my grandparents on their wedding day and my great-grandmother sitting in a wooden chair, and a crucified Jesus hologram. I yell at them, too, especially toothless wrinkle-bag Great-Grandma, who looks like she’s laughing at me. Eventually the car wheezes to life, leaving me fifteen minutes to get to work.

  KWON’S WORLD GROCERY IS off the 610 loop on the Northside. Seven years ago it was Kwon’s Kwikmart and the size of a closet, but it swiftly expanded, first taking over the laundromat next door and th
en the hardware store. Now the only other business left in our little complex is the flashy Fiesta Mart across the parking lot. I often catch Mr. Kwon staring intently at it through the blinds in his office, as if he thinks the building is plotting against him.

  Mr. Kwon didn’t realize I was a girl until two weeks after I was hired for the night crew. It’s understandable: I’m basically boobless and have the same haircut and wardrobe as most thirteen-year-old boys. Plus, the name “Phuong Nguyen” doesn’t do much to suggest femininity. You should have seen his expression when I passed in front of him to walk into the women’s bathroom.

  There are four other fools who work the night shift with me: Akash is the Indian Hulk. At six foot five and roughly three hundred pounds, he has the capacity to destroy the entire grocery store but is generally docile. Instead of getting a ladder on the rare occasions when there’s something too high for him to reach, Akash will just toss me up with one arm and I’ll grab it.

  Jeremy and Sebastian Lee are twins. They don’t particularly look alike, but both are convinced that everyone else has them mixed up despite Sebastian’s mohawk and the fact that Jeremy is about two inches taller and has violent acne.

  And then there’s Los, our brooding, Byronic figure on the night shift. Los was Carlos before he left his home in Corpus Christi when he was fifteen, hitchhiked down to Brownsville, and stood at the Mexican border wondering whether to cross, then turned around and started working his way up to Houston. Somewhere along the way he lost half his name. Los is the closest thing I have to a friend, and when I can I drag him along with me to weddings; he goes for the free food and because he knows I can’t stand them on my own. Consequently, the faction of my family that doesn’t think I’m a lesbian believes Los and I are dating. Both camps are disapproving of my presumed life choices.

  Jeremy Lee looks up from unpacking crates of ramen as I walk in. “It’s Jeremy, not Sebastian,” are the first words out of his mouth.

  “I know! God!” I try to slouch past Mr. Kwon’s office without him seeing me; he’s been living at the grocery store since his wife filed for divorce and only leaves for his court appointments. Too late. He stops glaring at the Fiesta Mart through the window and spots me. I cringe before he even says my name; my efforts to politely correct his pronunciation have been fruitless.

  “PWONG!” The way he says it sounds like spit hitting the bottom of a bucket.

  “Greetings, Comrade K.”

  “I have told you before: I don’t appreciate your using that term of address. Or that tone.”

  That’s okay; I have plenty more terms of address. “My apologies, Chairman K.”

  “Very funny, Pwong. Very funny.”

  I run away to find and bother Los before General Secretary K tries to talk to me about his marital problems. Ever since he discovered I’m a girl he has mistakenly believed that I am sympathetic merely because I own a vagina. It’s no wonder I pretend to be a boy.

  Los isn’t in the sauce aisle. He’s not in frozen foods or the aisle devoted to the various incarnations of the soybean. He’s by the pineapples with his hood up and his earphones in, so I jump him from behind. He shrugs me off like nothing and I fall onto the linoleum. I bounce up a second later and attack again. This time Los swings me sideways and puts me in a choke hold. “Go play with the Wonder Twins or something—I’m busy.”

  “We’re never busy. What’s wrong with you? Estrogen levels out of whack?”

  He lets me wiggle free and unplugs his earphones. “Sorry, P. I’m in bad shape tonight. Things have been rough lately.” I suppose now’s not the time to inform him that he’ll be accompanying me to another Nguyen wedding on Saturday.

  “Money problems? Syphilis? Existential angst?”

  For a minute he mulls over whether he should tell me or not. “Girl problems,” he finally admits.

  “Ha! Knew you were PMSing!”

  Los pulls the hood of my sweatshirt up and yanks hard on the drawstrings so I can’t see. “You don’t know anything about it,” he says, and kicks me in the direction of the vegetables.

  I run off to attend to the very important business of putting things onto shelves. Restocking is boring, but I’m too scrawny to unload the trucks. Akash and Los are responsible for that, and JerBastian and I move things from the storeroom to the shelves. It sounds simple enough, but things always go to pieces before the dawn—literally, in the case of Akash, who accidentally destroys a crate of something at least once a night. The Lees bicker constantly and drag race in shopping carts when Commissar K is preoccupied. Los is fine unless he’s in a mood, like tonight, and then he starts sneaking sips from a flask. By four we’re all sick of one another and cursing in our respective mother tongues until four thirty, when the seafood trucks come and we put aside our differences to unpack the crates of salmon and shrimp and things with tentacles. At six we’ll emerge blinking in the early sunlight, nod to the denizens of the Fiesta Mart night shift in the parking lot, and then scuttle off to whichever highway exit we call home.

  When Momma asks I tell her that the job’s only temporary, that of course I want to go back to school soon—that’s why I still wear my sweatshirt—but it’s always a lie. I was a part of that daylight world for a long time. It’s full of things like slow traffic and hot sun on office buildings and kids going to swim practice and divorce settlements and weddings. I have no interest in any of that. I choose the comfortable little universe of Kwon’s instead, where nothing ever changes except for the seasonal produce.

  TONIGHT THE HOURS GLIDE BY. At midnight I get hungry and steal an apple and a packet of weird-tasting chips from the Korean snack food aisle. At two Los stops drinking after he knocks over half a dozen bottles of fish sauce and says that Akash did it. At three thirty I call Sebastian “Jeremy” on purpose and he refuses to talk to me until the shrimp truck arrives. At five he and Jeremy take over the PA system and pump reggaeton until Benevolent Dictator K wakes up from a nap and puts an end to it.

  And then at five thirty I take out the garbage and there is an old Asian man, completely naked, crouched by the dumpster.

  We both look at each other for a moment in frozen panic. Then I let out a gargly half scream and everything starts moving again. I’m looking for something to hit him with and I can’t stop yelling and my legs are doing a jittery grapevine and I’m digging around in the garbage bag because I know there’s an old daikon radish in there and I’m going to throw it.

  “Please! Please! Miss! Oh please don’t!” the naked man begs.

  I realize two things: That he has recognized me as a girl. And that he’s speaking in Vietnamese. I stop yelling but I don’t release the daikon, which I’m clenching like a grenade. The man slowly stands, keeping himself covered with both hands. He looks about seventy, with close-cropped white hair and wrinkled skin loosely concealing the pointy suggestions of bones. I’ve never seen this much saggy grandpa-meat before and never want to again.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I squeak out in English, because I am far too freaked out to manage Vietnamese.

  “I apologize for startling you,” he says, switching into careful English, too. “I realize that I may not be able to convince you of my sanity, but rest assured, I mean you no harm. Now, if it’s not too much trouble, could you help me find some clothes?” He doesn’t sound like a serial rapist.

  “Are you homeless?”

  “No, no, not exactly.”

  “What are you doing here, and why are you naked?”

  He smiles politely, vaguely, as if I’ve just asked him about the weather or his weekend plans. “I have a condition,” he says.

  “Sleepwalking?”

  “It’s slightly more complicated.”

  “Yeah? You get your sick kicks perving around dumpsters in the middle of the night?”

  The naked stranger seems taken aback. The settings dial in my brain has been stuck in the Aggression/Insolence position for so long, sometimes I forget how I come across to other people.


  “My child,” he says, “I promise you, this isn’t a …” He struggles for words for a moment. “It’s nothing as predictable as that. This affliction that I suffer from has a story behind it, and not a pleasant one. It’s not of a sexual nature, but it still isn’t the sort of thing that nice young girls like to hear.”

  I flutter my eyelashes faux-coquettishly. “Do I strike you as particularly nice or girly?”

  “My child, I’m just trying to clothe myself before the sun comes up.” There is a note of panic in his voice.

  I take my sweatshirt off and toss it to him. I’m only doing this because in the back of my mind I feel the twinge of the old Motherland Complex: Respect your elders. I’d thought I’d kicked the habit, but I guess not.

  He can’t catch the sweatshirt because his hands are clasped over his crotch, so it lands with a soft whump on the ground in front of him. For some reason this feels almost more embarrassing than finding him here naked in the first place. “I’m going to go find you pants,” I say. “Against my better judgment.”

  “I am, of course, much obliged.”

  As I turn to go back into the store I take a moment to hurl the daikon with all my strength at the wall, where it smashes and leaves a satisfying white smear on the brick. I hope he flinched. Once inside I head for aisle 16, grabbing a bottle of grape soda along the way.

  Beneath the large sign that says “Appliances” is another, smaller one reading: “and Bidet World.” This refers to the display of high-tech Japanese toilets for sale but sounds more like the world’s most disturbing amusement park. After a quick look around to make sure I’m alone, I pour the contents of the soda bottle into the tanks of the two demo models and remove the plastic shields from the bowls. Then I press down hard on both control panels, mashing all of the buttons at once, and run away as the toilets erupt into fountains of purple.