The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Read online

  One afternoon, in the middle of their daily nap, Thuy suddenly awoke. Her eyes flew open and she sat straight up in the cot, jostling Kieu—who was asleep with one hand clutching Thuy’s elbow—but not rousing her. Thuy’s nose was tingling—she smelled something new. She thought she was imagining it at first; it was so faint against the smell of dust and motorbike exhaust from the street. But then she caught another whiff and there was no mistaking it: bread. Hot, fresh bread, with the hint of something savory underneath. She closed her eyes, lifted her nose in the air, and for a full three minutes, she sniffed. When she opened them again, she knew that she needed to find the source of it, needed to with an urgency that she had never experienced in her fifteen years. Thuy looked down at her arm, where Kieu was latched on firmly. She could now understand how animals snared in hunters’ traps could chew off their own limbs to escape. Holding her breath the entire time, Thuy used her free hand to slowly pry Kieu’s fingers off one by one. Kieu’s eyelids fluttered slightly during the process, but she did not wake up. When Thuy had extricated herself successfully, she placed her sister’s hand around one of the metal legs of the cot she was lying on. Like some sort of strangling jungle vine, the fingers immediately tightened around it, and Kieu, oblivious to the exchange, slept on.

  Thuy stole away from the balcony with a speed she did not know she possessed. She was so eager to get away that she didn’t bother looking down into the garden to see where her grandmother was. Her feet barely lighted on the stairs as she descended them. On her way down she retrieved a handful of bills from her sister’s money stash in the bedroom and grabbed her sandals from the hall closet before gliding out the door and shutting it noiselessly behind her.

  This was the only time of day when the street was completely deserted, save for the stray dogs that lay panting in what little shade they could find. The scent was much clearer now, and Thuy, whose stomach was pleading hungrily with her, was in its thrall. It enveloped her, intoxicated her, drew her away from her grandmother’s house and into the concrete labyrinth of twisting lanes and side streets. Her footsteps quickened as the smell grew stronger, to the extent that she was practically cantering by the time she turned a corner and discovered its source.

  A mud-splattered stall on wheels, with the words Bánh mì emblazoned on its side in red paint, stood at the end of the empty alley beneath a large green umbrella. Bánh mì, the Vietnamese sandwich, was one of the more positive souvenirs from the colonial era—a culinary hybrid of French bread, pickled Asian vegetables, pâté, and assorted meats—and though Thuy had never tasted one before, she knew it would be delicious from the smell alone.

  The hot wind that had brought the scent to Thuy in the first place now spun clouds of dust around her ankles as she approached the stand. Because of the dust and the shadow cast by the umbrella, she didn’t notice the figure seated on a plastic chair beside the stall until it rose to greet her. At first Thuy wasn’t sure if it was male or female: Half of the face was obscured by a conical straw hat, and a yellow kerchief was tied around the other half. Only the hands were visible—thin and brown with white scars around the knuckles, poking out from the sleeves of a drab olive work shirt buttoned to the neck. But the voice that came out from under the kerchief was sweet and gently cascading and distinctly feminine.

  “Hello there,” it called out in softly accented English. “You look hungry.” It took Thuy a moment to realize that the words were in a language she could understand, and this both relieved and alarmed her. She froze. “Don’t be shy,” said the bánh mì vendor. “Here, come closer. Try some.” Thuy heard the crackle of breaking bread, and then one brown hand emerged from the shadows, a hunk of baguette resting in its palm. Thuy stepped forward and took the offering, her chubby fingers trembling slightly. She suppressed the urge to hold the bread close to her nose and breathe in its warm aroma as she took the first bite but couldn’t help closing her eyes as she chewed with pleasure. After two weeks of flavorless, texture-less, rice-based meals, it was the most exquisite thing Thuy had ever tasted.

  The vendor let out a rippling laugh, which bounced lightly off the concrete walls around them and filled the space with sound. Thuy wondered how old she actually was, beneath all those layers. “Did you like that? Let me make you a real one now. Have you ever had one before? No?”

  Thuy shook her head. “We don’t ever eat Vietnamese food at home,” she said.

  “Well, just you wait,” said the woman. “One bite and you will never want to eat anything else, ever again.” Her hands moved as she spoke, arranging ingredients in the shadows and chopping slivers of meat deftly with a large knife that glinted from time to time in stray sunlight. “What’s your name, con?”

  “Thuy.”

  “Your full given name.”

  “Well I guess it’s ‘Bích Thủy,’ ” said Thuy, wrapping her voice with difficulty around the vowel tones. “But I go just by Thuy in the U.S. Because, um, a lot of people accidentally say ‘Bich’ like it’s, um …” She lowered her voice, “ ‘bitch.’ ” Thuy seemed relieved when the swear word didn’t get a reaction from the vendor. “ ‘Thuy’ is easier,” she finished weakly.

  “It may be easier, but it’s only half of your name. Only half the meaning,” the vendor mused, as she daubed something pasty onto a baguette half, “and only half your identity. Hmm, how old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” answered Thuy.

  “And which month were you born in?”

  “April.”

  “Let me calculate … that makes you the year of the cat, correct? And how curious—I happen to be a cat as well.”

  She asked Thuy question after question, and Thuy, to her own amazement, responded. She wasn’t sure why she was so comfortable talking with this stranger, but her words were spilling forth rapidly, so eagerly that they were practically tripping over themselves. She found herself recounting without shame that she was really in Vietnam all because she had been caught eating cake.

  “Well, con, I don’t believe there’s any cake in the world that could be as delicious as this,” said the vendor as she handed over the finished sandwich.

  Thuy took a bite. Her eyes opened wide in wonderment. She took another, hastier bite, then another, and another, barely chewing as she gulped the bánh mì down. When she had eaten it all, the vendor made her another one, which she ate even more quickly. Something warm and light was spreading from her stomach throughout the rest of her body, flooding her, lifting her; she had the sensation that she was at once within her body and floating two inches above it. Thuy tried to pay with a couple of the crumpled bills she had taken from Kieu, but the woman refused. “Keep it,” she said, closing Thuy’s hand around the notes she was extending. “Talking with you was enough. I don’t want your money”—she paused to wipe the blade of her knife with a checkered cloth, and when she spoke again, Thuy imagined she was smiling beneath the yellow kerchief—“just your story. Why don’t you come back tomorrow at the same time? I’ll make you a bánh mì even tastier than the one you had today, and you will tell me more.”

  Thuy nodded before she realized what she was doing. The woman continued to clean her knife slowly and deliberately, and Thuy left the alley and began retracing her steps.

  When she reached the balcony, Kieu was still asleep, one hand clinging to the leg of the empty cot. Thuy lay back down, then wriggled her hand into her sister’s. The fingers squeezed hers, and a few minutes later, Kieu began to stir. She woke, looked down, saw that she was holding Thuy’s hand, and then smiled. Thuy was too full to feel guilty.

  HER DAYS WERE MEASURED in bánh mì now. The taste of them haunted her every hour of the day, a thousand times worse than any imagined sandwich she had concocted in her head. After spending the lunch hour rearranging the rice in her bowl with her chopsticks, Thuy would retire to the balcony with Kieu, feigning sleepiness while her stomach gurgled in anticipation. She would lie back with her eyes closed, listening as her sister’s breathing slowed. Then, when she was c
ertain that Kieu was asleep, she would free herself and disappear into the winding Saigon alleyways, her feet and her empty stomach leading her to where the sandwich vendor was always waiting. Kieu noted with dismay that Thuy’s pants had gone back to fitting her snugly. “I just don’t understand,” she would murmur, pinching the roll of flesh at Thuy’s waist. The daily bánh mì were making their presence known on Thuy’s waistline, and Thuy knew it; she could feel herself bloating, growing round and bulbous like the dragonfruit she still swallowed halfheartedly at breakfast every morning.

  If Grandma Tran suspected anything, she never let on. Thuy thought it should feel wrong, sneaking away as she did every day instead of staying with her grandmother—she suspected that the old woman’s days were numbered, and that this was the last time they would see each other. But, Thuy reasoned to herself, wasn’t it a good thing that she had found something in this country that she loved? Something new to her; something that felt uniquely her own? Wasn’t it a good thing that she had a friend here? Even if she didn’t know what she looked like?

  It was true: Thuy had never seen the bánh mì vendor’s face. She had spilled out her life story to this woman with every sandwich she gulped down, but she still didn’t know what lay beneath the kerchief.

  THEIR TIME IN VIETNAM passed quickly, stealthily, quietly. On the second to last afternoon, as she lay on the balcony waiting for her sister to fall asleep, Thuy suddenly realized that she hadn’t thought about her home in America in a very long while. And that she didn’t want to go back.

  Once more she slipped out of Kieu’s grasp and down the stairs to freedom. But just as her hand touched the front doorknob, she suddenly paused, sniffing warily. It was odd, she could have sworn that for a moment she had smelled a—

  She turned and looked down the hallway that led to the kitchen and suppressed a shriek: Watching her through the kitchen window, dark against the violently pink flowers of the bougainvillea, was the face of her grandmother.

  For several long moments, the old woman held her gaze. Then, slowly, she raised one hand—one thin, brown hand with white scars around the knuckles—and beckoned to Thuy with it. Thuy shook her head frantically, groped for the doorknob behind her, then turned and fled down the street.

  “HOW WILL YOU BE ABLE to live without this in America?” said the sandwich vendor with a teasing edge in her voice as she handed Thuy her second bánh mì.

  Thuy could not shake from her mind the image of her grandmother’s face in the window. She didn’t reply, just tore at the sandwich with her teeth.

  The vendor watched her chew for a moment and then began cleaning her knife with her checkered cloth. “Why do you think your mother never cooks Vietnamese food?” she asked Thuy softly, without looking up.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” said Thuy with her mouth full. A fat black fly buzzed near her face and she swatted at it but missed.

  “Don’t be like that, con. Think about it.”

  Thuy swallowed and then shrugged. “I guess … to protect us. No, I don’t know … I don’t know why I said that. I don’t understand my mother.” She stuffed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth.

  “Haven’t you noticed that you never talk about her?”

  The fly was back and three more had joined it. Thuy waved them away with her hand before saying through her crumbs, “I don’t really think about her here; she’s just so far away.”

  To her surprise, the vendor burst out laughing, and it was not the light ripple that Thuy had become accustomed to but a high, brittle chuckle that lasted a little too long. Thuy plucked a couple of bread crumbs from her collar and popped them into her mouth, and tried to ignore the growing sense of unease that had started somewhere at the base of her stomach and was prickling through the rest of her body. It didn’t work. And when the vendor finally stopped laughing and spoke, her words caused a chill to run through Thuy despite the heat. “She is far away, isn’t she? In another world, you could say. And there are many, many worlds within this one. Worlds alongside each other, worlds that overlap each other; you might not even know if you wandered into one that wasn’t your own.” With horror, Thuy noticed that more and more flies were gathering. Several had landed on the vendor’s yellow kerchief, where they buzzed and crawled in dizzy patterns across the fabric, but the woman would not stop speaking. “You never talk about your mother, and your mother never talks about her life in Vietnam. She never has. But which world does she really live in, Thuy? Vietnam or America? And you, Thuy, which world do you belong to now?”

  The woman covered in flies walked out from behind her stall, and Thuy recoiled when she saw that she was still holding her long knife. The woman chuckled and the flies buzzed along with her.

  “Did you think I was going to hurt you?”

  Thuy began to back away slowly.

  “Don’t you know who I am? Haven’t you ever wondered why I can speak to you? Haven’t you wondered why there are never any other customers here? Haven’t you wondered what you’ve been smelling this entire time?” Then she laughed and laughed and kept laughing as Thuy sprinted away without looking back once.

  After a couple of minutes Thuy slowed to a jog because she was out of breath. Then she stopped completely and looked at her surroundings. With a terrible, sinking feeling, she realized that for the first time in her life she had no idea where she was. She was as lost in this city as she would have been if she had been dropped blindfolded into the middle of a jungle. The sun had passed its zenith, and people were beginning to filter back into the streets, back to their markets and gambling corners and motorbikes. Without her grandmother there, Thuy could feel their eyes on her, mocking her, the lost girl, the fat girl, the girl who didn’t belong.

  She walked down alleys that seemed to coil and rearrange themselves like a knot of serpents. Her feet did not lead her home as they had done before; her nose had nothing to follow now. The streets became wider and Thuy laughed bitterly when she saw that she had ended up in front of the church from her mother’s photograph. A skinny young couple in a Western wedding dress and tuxedo were posing on the steps for their own pictures. Thuy caught the bride staring at her as she passed. The streets turned narrow again and Thuy accidentally wandered into a strange house, mistaking its long, winding entryway for another alley and startling the family that lived there. Their small child started crying when he saw Thuy, and she made a hasty exit. After what felt like hours, Thuy looked up to find that she was in front of a familiar doorstep; the city, having tired of toying with her, had deposited her at her grandmother’s house once more.

  As Thuy dragged herself over the threshold, she met Kieu coming down the stairs. “Oh, there you are! I woke up and you were gone. But I thought you might be with Grandma,” Kieu said, wiping the sleep from her eyes.

  Thuy sidestepped her and started down the hallway toward the kitchen.

  “Hey! Thuy! Where are you going? What are you doing out there?”

  In the garden, past the water pump, behind the lime trees and golden hibiscus and creeping tendrils of a particular flower-specked vine that had no name in English, was the body that had once been her grandmother’s. Greedy black flies and a mass of wriggling white worms were fighting one another for the last of the decomposing flesh. But Thuy knew that she had been dead for about three weeks from the smell alone.

  LITTLE BROTHER

  HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I made the trip? More than the number of hairs on my head, and you see how thick it still is, even if it’s white now. Back when I started the job, over forty years ago, I would leave Ca Mau at noon, when the roads were hot and empty, and wouldn’t reach Saigon until dawn the next day. The roads are better now, so I could make it in seven hours if I drove without stopping. Can’t, though—too old. Every two hours I need to break and take a dribbly piss in a rice paddy. Children bicycling past me while I’m stopped like to peek at the harmless, wrinkled remains of my cặc and giggle. “Too many women,” I’ll call to them. “It’s all worn
-out now.” I usually grow sleepy somewhere between Soc Trang and Tra Vinh, so I’ll sling my hammock between the truck’s back tires and nap for a while.

  These days I only ever get hired for boring jobs. I mostly move motorbikes and the kind of traditional carved furniture that no one actually likes to sit on. Occasionally I make the odd coconut delivery and that’s about as exciting as it gets. But when the truck and I were both younger we carried anything and everything you could think of. Guns? Of course! Sometimes they heaped the open back of the pickup with AK-47S—just tossed them in like sacks of rice and didn’t bother covering them up—and I would spend the entire ride listening as the guns rattled around, praying one wouldn’t accidentally go off. Other times it was soldiers crammed in the cargo hold; when the sun got too hot they all took their shirts off but kept their helmets on, and when I hit potholes they would reach up to keep them on their heads in unison. In the nineties it was a lot of livestock: wooden crates of pigs and goats, and every week a huge shipment of ducks, their feet tied together, twelve stuffed in each sack, twenty-five sacks in each load. If it rained during the drive, the quacking was deafening.

  Let me tell you my favorite story. Once, the son of a certain general—you’d know the name if I said it—paid me to transport a baby shark from Saigon to his house in Vinh Long. Well, they called it a baby when I took the job. I thought it might be catfish-sized, cute even. But when I came to pick it up at the docks I discovered that the beast was the size of a boat, with more teeth in its mouth than you’d want to see in a lifetime. It took me and seven other men to load the tank into the pickup. That was one of my fastest trips. I drove without sleeping and kept a bucket of fish heads in the passenger seat to feed to the thing whenever it started thrashing, for when it got restless the entire truck would shake. It was a spectacle. Curious motorbikes followed the truck for leagues, so distracted by the creature in the tank that they almost hit each other. When I made it to Vinh Long, the general’s son himself oversaw the transfer of the shark to a pool out behind the compound that could have fit most of Ca Mau inside it. While he was counting out my payment I couldn’t resist asking him why he wanted such a wicked-looking fish in the first place. The general’s son looked surprised that I had spoken.