“The mouth,” said Long. “Could I have your mouth now, please?” His eyes were already scrunched up and he was proactively biting his bottom lip.
A bit presumptuous, Winnie thought to herself, but, ever consenting, she slid down below the quilt. She had known the request would come once the lights were turned off. Long only ever wanted the mouth. He was always polite when he asked, but he never looked at Winnie while she plied the soft cuttlefish of his penis for him, and he would not speak again until it was over. Winnie wondered if he was pretending to receive a blowjob from a ghost. After she had ingested a half-teaspoon of semen she would crawl upward again and resurface above the quilt, like some sort of marine reptile emerging after a swim. At that point Long would be able to look at her once more, and he would brush back the sweaty hair—now grown out nearly to shoulder length—that clung to her neck, and say, “Is there something I can do for you, Winnie?” and she would whisper no, then wait for him to fall asleep so that she could get out of bed and wander around his house.
The houses on either side of Long’s were slightly newer constructions, four stories high and occupied by large multigenerational families with very young children and very old grandparents, whose coughs and yells Winnie could hear through the adjacent walls. But the building directly across from Long’s was a restaurant, advertising “Dog Meat: Seven Ways” on a glowing sign. Its red letters were right at eye level with the small balcony outside his bedroom, along with a stock photo of sleeping golden retriever puppies that perhaps in America would have been used to advertise fabric softener instead. While Winnie knew that the dogs being eaten in seven ways were not fluffy designer puppies but the kind of strays she used to watch from her window at the Cooks’ house, in a way this made her even sadder. This was not a country for mutts. Every day at sundown, the Dog Meat sign flickered to life with a buzzing sound like the stirring of a large, weary bee, welcoming the night’s customers, and it tinged the whole bedroom red until three in the morning, when the restaurant closed and the drunk businessmen drove back home and the beer girls changed out of their heels and started sweeping discarded bones into piles on the sidewalk. Only then did the light go off. But Winnie would still be awake.
The house had two and a half floors for her nocturnal prowling. The half floor was the airless crawlspace beneath the roof. Winnie did not venture up there often, because it was about fifteen degrees hotter than the rest of the house and the lock to its sole window was stuck shut, but occasionally during the night she would get the urge to spend an hour crouched in it like some sort of attic ghoul.
The master bedroom and its balcony were directly below. Winnie’s suitcase now lived underneath Long’s bedframe. Her five dresses occupied a corner in his closet next to his week’s worth of pressed slacks and identical Oxford button-downs, two pairs of knockoff A.C. Milan soccer shorts, a single pair of jeans, and a giant T-shirt from the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City. Winnie sometimes borrowed the shirt to sleep in, as a kind of pantomime of intimacy.
At the other end of the hallway, the bathroom with its allegedly paranormal bathtub. It was small and old and high rimmed—an odd and mostly inconvenient luxury to have in place of the standard Vietnamese unwalled shower with a sloped floor and corner drain. But the beauty of bathing was that Winnie barely had to touch her own body to come out clean. When she was a child, there had been a game that she liked to play in the bath: Winnie would sink back in the tub and go slack, keeping her eyes open and unblinking, feeling her hair floating around her, and then she would let her jaw fall open and the water trickle into her mouth and throat. She would stay like that, imagining she was a corpse in a pond, until the pinching in her lungs became too much to bear and she coughed out the water and sat back up, spluttering to life. Now that she lived with Long, Winnie found herself returning to the game. She soaked until her edges were soft and pretended to drown three or four times until she was so light-headed that she didn’t really feel her own fingers when she shampooed herself as an afterthought.
Across from the bathroom: a tiny spare bedroom where Long stored odds and ends, a few cardboard boxes that he had never gotten around to unpacking, and a pile of books he’d bought from the secondhand shops on Tran Nhan Ton Street.
Winnie had been delighted the first time she saw the pile; “I love the used book stalls here!” she told Long excitedly. “We could go together next time. Which of these are your favorites?” She’d started flipping through them, hoping that there would be a few in English, or anything accessible enough for her poor Vietnamese reading comprehension.
But Long had coughed awkwardly. “I’m not actually very into books,” he said. “I got those a few years ago for a friend back home who reads. I used to buy a few random ones and mail them up every couple of months. But now we don’t keep in touch anymore. You can pick out any you want and I’ll donate the rest later.”
As she scanned their titles more closely, it became clear to Winnie that the books had been selected without care—outdated military histories, a memoir, a cookbook, a water-damaged book of street photography.
Long saw Winnie’s face fall and quickly added, “I can still take you to buy more sometime, if you’d like.” He never had, and Winnie had never suggested it again.
On the ground floor was the kitchen, with its warped floor tiles over the spot where Long’s landlord had tried to exhume the building’s ghost, and a small alcove beneath the stairs with a toilet that had been rendered unusable after the landlord’s body search had failed to do anything apart from damaging the house’s already temperamental plumbing. In the square entryway, Winnie’s sneakers were flung in a corner across from Long’s neatly arranged work shoes, soccer shoes, casual shoes, and sandals. And past the shoes, just before the gated door, the spot where Long parked his motorbike. Inside its seat, the spare raincoat where Winnie’s fake lottery ticket was still folded. She had taken his motorbike keys and checked for it the very first time that Long had left her unattended, the dog greeting her with its wagging tail and counterfeit number. But instead of taking the ticket back, she had folded it up again and left it inside the pocket. It felt like it belonged there, now.
On the day Winnie had washed up to Long’s house, bedraggled and bruised and bleeding down her arm, she had looked into his strange, ichthyoid eyes and identified the yearning there. She hated herself for it, but she could see that she was as close to perfect as she could ever be for him—a helpless girl, a shivering girl, a girl who needed saving, a girl brought to him by fate.
Winnie had waded over to him and collapsed in his arms. A calculated collapse—his arms were a touch weedy and Winnie could not fall with her full weight for fear that he would drop her, thus spoiling the dream she was trying to spin for him. She had been taken inside. She had let him run the hot water in his haunted tub for her, peeled off the wet dress before he left the bathroom and then tugged at his sleeve and asked him to stay when he chivalrously made to leave, sought out his mouth with hers when he leaned over to gently mop her with a washcloth. Later, in bed, when he asked softly, “Who hurt you, Winnie?” gently tracing the purple bruises and blood-crusted abrasions, she became hysterical for him. She sobbed against him but did not answer. The hysterics were the answer he really wanted anyway.
“I can’t go back to the Cooks’ apartment” was all she said, once she was done sobbing. “And I can’t go back to that school.” She buried her face in Long’s chest so she couldn’t see his face when he came to the conclusion she knew he would. She was not proud of what she did, but she knew that this was New Winnie, finally braiding her long, hard roots over the soft trunk of her former self, keeping her safe.
“Of course not,” he said, and brushed his lips against her forehead. “You’ll stay here, and I’ll take care of you.”
Long had given Winnie’s notice to Mr. Quy on her behalf and brought home her final paycheck. “It just makes me sick when I see the two of them at the office,” he said. “They even asked me how you were doing. Winnie, I have to tell somebody. I can at least get them fired.”
“No, no, no,” she replied. “I don’t want the Cooks to be fired. I just want to forget about them. I want to forget about everything.”
He had taken her key and gone over to the old apartment while both Cooks were teaching, then packed up Winnie’s room for her and brought the suitcase with all of her belongings over to District 6. If he had been horrified by the mess, he hadn’t said anything. Ah, no—not all of her belongings: when she opened her suitcase, the policeman’s hat was missing. Either Long hadn’t seen it or he had but thought it wasn’t hers. And why would he, when it was wrapped in plastic and hidden away? But losing the hat was not a large price to pay, Winnie had to remind herself, for her lies and the new life she had used them to buy. Long was not even asking her to pay rent. All she had to do was become the Mouth for him when he asked her to. She needed to be a Grateful Mouth.
It wasn’t the coffee that had been keeping her awake. She now knew this definitively, because she no longer drank it but still couldn’t sleep. During their first month, Long had spent every minute he wasn’t working with Winnie. When he returned home from the academy in the evening, he would first present her with a snack (a frozen yogurt, a bag of seaweed-flavored potato chips, a plastic sack with a pineapple inside—a Grateful Mouth was always hungry) and then take her with him to meet his three old college roommates at Café Cúc, which was a coffee shop during the day and became a low-budget karaoke club after eight p.m. Winnie thought that Café Cúc must be struggling, because she had never seen any customers in it apart from their group. It had no air-conditioning, and its couches were stuffed with a synthetic foam so soggy that Long’s friends could safely stub out their cigarettes on it where it poked out through the holes in the vinyl.
Like Long, the three friends were Saigon transplants from the countryside—two from the Delta, one from outside Hue—but they seemed to have been honed to sharper points by the city than he had. They all worked in restaurants and hotels, they wore their hair identically shorn at the sides, and they treated insulting each other as a competitive sport. They mocked Long for his job at the academy, for the way he dressed, for the preposterous concept of renting a whole two-and-a-half-story house for himself.
The first time Winnie had shown up with Long, the three of them had welcomed her with eager, carnivorous smiles. “Long’s always liked foreigners,” said one. He turned to Long. “Weren’t you in love with that other teacher for a while, the pretty Việt kiều one who rejected you?”
“Which half is the American half?” another asked Winnie, looking pointedly from her head down to her legs, then back to her head again. The boys had all laughed then, so she did too.
She, like everybody else, had ordered an iced coffee, but she spent an hour sipping it with boredom while the four boys played cards, and their banter become increasingly hard to follow. None of the others had brought along a girlfriend or significant other, and Winnie neither knew how to play cards nor was well versed in the lexicon of male Vietnamese shit-talking.
On their drive home, Long asked Winnie not to order a coffee the next time they met his friends. “It’s not really something that good girls do,” he warned her. Winnie, thinking this was a joke, had laughed at first. “I’m serious,” he said. “Polite Vietnamese girls don’t drink coffee.”
“Polite girls don’t drink coffee in coffee shops?” Winnie asked sardonically. Long had turned around on his motorbike to frown at her.
“It’s fine to drink coffee at home. But the next time we’re out together, order a juice or a smoothie. My friends felt uncomfortable today because you were drinking coffee.”
Winnie pressed her lips together hard and did not say anything until they arrived back at the house. She was sure his friends had been more uncomfortable with Winnie joining them at their special Manly Gambling Club in the first place than they were at the fact that she had ordered coffee. It didn’t matter, she thought. Now that she had offended them, she wouldn’t have to spend any more time with them. She felt relieved.
But the next evening, Long had taken her with him again. His three friends had looked up with obvious displeasure when they saw Winnie walk into Café Cúc, but they had benevolently tried to mask it. While she spent another hour sitting in silence, watching the boys play tiến lên, Winnie drank a winter melon tea, which had seemed like the most ladylike beverage on the menu because it came in a pale green can. Long had seemed pleased with her. Since that day, Winnie had given up coffee entirely.
When Winnie was there again the next day, they told her that she could at least make herself useful by tracking their scores. Winnie was oddly flattered, and she was pleased to have something to do. Unfortunately, she was not very good at it. The rounds moved too quickly for her to keep track of, she didn’t understand the points system, the boys’ card-flinging and insult-trading distracted her, and the pen that the owners of Café Cúc had let her borrow was running out of ink, which was not her fault but made things even more difficult. It was a disaster, and Long had ended up doing most of the math for her. Still, by the fifth or sixth time, Long’s friends seemed to have resigned themselves to having Winnie as a new fixture at their gatherings, and by the second week she had almost gotten the hang of the scoring.
Sometimes after cards Long and his friends wanted to go drinking, and so they would drive over to Bia Hơi Baby, which served glasses of draft beer for 8,000₫ and a variety of grilled or deep-fried dishes in an open building that looked like a garage. The first time she had gone with them, Winnie had assumed that girls who were too polite to drink coffee in public were also forbidden from drinking alcohol, but the rules were slightly more complicated for beer; Long made a point of boasting to his friends when they arrived that Winnie was able to hold her liquor, but he also whispered to her in English that she should stop after two glasses so that she could drive them home if he got too drunk. Winnie was not surprised when he drank eight. The beer was weak to begin with, and it was normal for Long to have three cans of Saigon Green with dinner.
It was difficult for Winnie to handle the bike, but she always managed to get them back to the house intact. One night, in a celebratory mood after winning at cards—a rare occurrence for Long—he had twelve beers and made her pull over by the river on the way home so he could pee. Midstream, he had started crooning twangy Vietnamese pop ballads down to the dead fish in the water. As she watched Long sing to the river, his hair flopping over his eyes, Winnie knew that while what she felt for him was not love, it was closer to it than she deserved.
Now that she no longer drank coffee, Winnie did not have any reason to leave the house on her own. The first day that Long reluctantly left her to go to work, she had gone out and tried to find Café Max again, attempting to replicate the sequence of meandering turns that had brought her there on that rainy afternoon. She successfully located the meat market alley, but no matter how many times she walked the length of it, she was unable to identify the café’s back wall that she had climbed over, or locate the street with its front entrance.
The next day she hadn’t left the house on her own at all. It was much easier than she thought it would be. She sat in the bathtub, she sat on the balcony, she nibbled at the least squishy member of a browning claw of bananas, she took an unsatisfying nap, and then Long was home again. This must be how it feels to be Goji, she thought. Two days later, she needed to go to the pharmacy. There was a deep, wet itch inside her ears that had been eluding her, and she was out of Q-tips. But when Winnie got to the gate, she hesitated. She did not feel like she was doing the hesitating; it was her feet that were refusing to move. They suddenly each weighed four hundred pounds. Winnie took a few careful breaths. “I am going to walk out this door,” she said out loud, and willed herself to inch her right foot forward. It finally obeyed her. But it had taken her nearly two minutes to cross the threshold. The pharmacy was just around the corner, a walk that took less time than the act of leaving the house had, but Winnie felt utterly, inexplicably drained by the errand. She stumbled through the door in her haste to get back inside, nearly collapsing in the entryway. The warm rush of relief she felt flooding her body the moment she returned to the house was overwhelming.
Winnie had nowhere to go the next day, but she decided to get dressed and try to go somewhere, just to see what her feet would do. Once again, when she reached for the gate, she felt an irrational torpor take hold of her body, stronger than yesterday. She was physically unable to go out the door. In a small voice, she thought to herself: The house does not want me to leave. Then she had gone back up to bed.
When Long was at home, Winnie was released from whatever bound her. He could move freely in and out of the house, and he could take her with him. But during the day, when she was on her own, Winnie was not able to walk out the door. What surprised her the most was how little she minded her captivity. It was a good feeling to belong, and Winnie belonged to the house.
She began making excuses to get out of going to coffee with Long and his friends, saying that she was too tired, or that her ear itch was bothering her too much. (The itch was not a lie—it had come and gone since Winnie had moved in, and she could not figure out what was causing it. Twice, Long had taken her to see a doctor: the first time for an examination where nothing wrong was found with Winnie, and the second time, a few weeks later, to extract a Q-tip bud she had gotten stuck inside her ear canal while trying to go after the irritation on her own. Winnie was more careful when she poked herself now, but sometimes she thought about how nice it would be to take a sharp bamboo skewer and end the itch for good.) Enough time had passed that Long was no longer afraid to leave Winnie home alone in the evenings; he did not press her to come with him when she pleaded out.
Winnie could not, however, get out of going to Long’s hometown with him for Lunar New Year.
“I can’t leave you all alone for four days!” said Long. “I’d go crazy worrying about you. But I have to go home and visit my mother and grandmother. It’s my turn to go up—my brother and I alternate Tết years so we won’t have to see each other.”
The brother whose mere mention had caused Long to fold in on himself like the leaf of a mimosa plant before. Winnie could tell that Long was being careful to keep his tone even, but one hand sprang up to touch his forehead when he said the word “brother,” like an involuntary twitch.
Still, he continued smoothly. “The rest of my mom’s family is dead. And we’re not close to my late father’s side. They’re all down in the Delta anyway. Don’t worry, I don’t have to tell them about us,” he said, sensing Winnie’s reluctance and misinterpreting it as her being worried about what meeting his family would mean for their relationship. The truth was that Winnie did not want to leave the house. “I’ll just say that you’re my American friend from work, and that I didn’t want you to be alone during the holidays. It’ll be an awful trip, but I promise to make it up to you. Once we get back, I’ll take you to the beach. How does that sound? We’ll go to Vung Tau for a long weekend and eat grilled oysters and watch the sun rise over the ocean.”
Vung Tau. Winnie knew that this was where her father had been evacuated from in 1975, the last place where he had touched Vietnamese soil. She had no desire to go there, but this wasn’t because of its history, it was because she disliked the seaside in general. Growing up, Winnie’s summer vacations had consisted solely of her parents taking her to Ocean City for five unhappy days in the beginning of August. It was the only place they had ever gone. Perhaps unfairly, this had instilled within Winnie a lifelong hatred of the beach. But she knew that there was nothing a good Grateful Mouth would want more than to meet Long’s family, see where he grew up, and then be taken on a weekend getaway in Vung Tau. “I love grilled oysters,” she said with a smile.
The night before they left, she lay awake in the empty bathtub, whispering apologies at the wall, telling the house that she was sorry for going.
Winnie couldn’t remember the names of all the provinces they drove through on the thirteen-hour trip; she charted their progress by what was being grown alongside the road. For the first few hours it alternated between sugarcane fields and spindly rows of rubber trees. Then they turned onto a narrow mountain highway and the coffee plantations began. The asphalt at twistier passes was marked with rune-like squiggles of white paint, which took Winnie a long time to recognize as police outlines at accident sites. The coffee fields became tea fields, which gave way to unruly, uncultivated miles of thirsty brush and thickets of yellowy bamboo. When the pepper plantations began, Long called over his shoulder that they were getting closer.
Downtown Ia Kare was a small, dusty collection of low buildings, most of them painted brick with corrugated tin roofs, but some newer ones were made of concrete and tile. There was an empty gas station, a motorbike repair shop, and a stand selling chicken and rice where a woman was napping in a hammock. There were two coffee shops: one with a large sign outside that advertised Free Wi-Fi and was full of teenagers, and another directly across the street from it, without internet access, that was full of old men drinking rice wine. They drove past a beauty salon featuring a poster in the front window of a platinum-haired American boy band from the nineties, a shoe store whose inventory consisted of only rubber sandals, and a store that appeared to sell tombstones. Two men played chess beneath a leafless, witchy-branched tamarind tree with shriveled brown pods, while a third man watched. In a small park, stray dogs chased each other around manicured hedges and tiled walkways flecked with sundried pellets of their own shit.
After passing the semi-enclosed concrete square of the Ia Kare central market, they turned onto an uneven orange-dirt road that took them away from town and made Winnie feel seasick. Flocks of electric yellow butterflies hovered along the edge of the road, and a few unlucky ones, fluttering directly in the path of the motorbike, turned into smears of golden dust on Long’s helmet and Winnie’s sleeves. For a time, the road ran alongside a cemetery. Within it there was a curious-looking statue—an enormous one, great and black and hulking—but Winnie couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be because they passed by so quickly.
The small brick house where Long’s mother lived was so well camouflaged against the ochre fields and the orange dirt of the road that Winnie didn’t notice it when they pulled up in front, and she was confused as to why Long was stopping. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw the figure of Mrs. Phan, clad in black, watching them from the front window.
They were ushered into the front room. Winnie was told to make herself comfortable on a wooden bed covered in rush matting that buckled and made splintery squeaks when she sat on it. Her eyes did a sweep across the room. At one end, an altar with a color photograph of Long’s late father in his army uniform. At the other, two geckos shimmering across the wall and disappearing into a crack. Mrs. Phan brought out tea from the kitchen. She moved like her bones were too heavy for her skin. She seemed neither perturbed nor intrigued by Winnie. In fact, she didn’t appear to feel any sort of way about her at all. Her hair was entirely white, but her complexion was remarkably unlined and possessed a sort of blankness that Winnie found comforting. She asked Winnie twice if she wanted something to eat and gave a vacant smile when Winnie replied both times that she was fine with tea.
A sudden cadence of sharp taps came from behind the door in a corner.
“Oh, Grandma’s up,” said Long, and Mrs. Phan wordlessly rose to her feet and went to tend to her. “That’s her room,” he explained to Winnie. “She doesn’t really leave it anymore. Would you like to freshen up before we eat dinner? The outhouse is in the yard, straight back toward the lychee grove after you go out the kitchen door.”
Winnie did not meet the grandmother at all that first evening. She wondered if Long had gone into the side room to greet her while she was out back in the bathroom. If she was being kept secret from the old woman she didn’t mind, but she was curious about what was going on behind that closed door. At dinnertime, Mrs. Phan spread out a simple meal for Winnie and Long on a woven floor mat—boiled quails’ eggs, braised pork that fell apart into strings at the touch of chopsticks, pickled greens and sticky disks of rice cake—and then piled some of everything onto a dish and took it into the back room when the tapping started again.
Even though there was still another day before New Year’s, that night there were early fireworks in the hills. Winnie and Long watched from the front yard, leaning against his motorbike. The fireworks were homemade, sporadic and weak. They were more noise than flash, and even then, they were nearly drowned out by the howling of all the local dogs. They were over quickly, and the hermetic countryside darkness descended over everything once more. Then the dogs quieted down and all that remained was a glottal chorus from miles of toads chirping in the surrounding fields.
Long slept in a hammock slung up in the kitchen, his mother retired to the room behind the door with the unseen grandmother, and Winnie was assigned the unforgiving wooden bed in the front room, beneath the translucent dome of an ornate mosquito net that unfolded like an old lace parasol. Winnie felt like a trapped spider, or a cake beneath a glass cover. She lay stiffly on her back to keep the bed planks from squeaking and anticipated a normal, sleepless night, perhaps a more uncomfortable one than usual. But miraculously—was it because of the pitch blackness of countryside or the soothing toad sounds?—Winnie was unconscious within minutes and remained that way until morning. But her excitement at waking up well rested for the first time in longer than she could remember was eclipsed by the dismay of discovering that her period had started. Winnie’s menses were capricious; they adhered to no reliable schedule. She had brought tampons with her to Ia Kare, just to be safe, but had not been fully prepared for the plumbing and system of waste management at Long’s house.
Long was still snoring in the kitchen hammock, even though his mother was already up and cooking, chopping garlic beneath him. Winnie slipped outside to the washroom, which was a separate wooden structure at the back of the house beside the outhouse. At the doorsill she traded her sneakers for the rubber showering sandals inside. Her feet were too big to fit inside the straps, so she had to balance on the balls of her feet on top of them while she crouched down to splash herself clean with cold water from the wall faucet. When she was done she corked herself with a tampon, trying not to panic about how to dispose of it later. The previous night she had helped wash the dishes and observed that trash was collected in a small, clear plastic bag that was hung from a nail by the kitchen door. Winnie was too embarrassed to put the tampons in there for Long’s mother to find.
They spent the morning in the cemetery cleaning the family grave. Mrs. Phan was in all black again, walking in her slow, painful way and holding a broom and some old rags. Long carried a bundle of long incense sticks in his arms and kept accidentally dropping them on the ground and then crouching clumsily to pick them up, usually dropping more in the process. Winnie had never seen him quite this nervous. Each time they crossed paths with another family in the cemetery he would practically jump out of his skin. Winnie had nothing to hold, and kept her empty hands folded somberly across her chest. The Ia Kare graveyard looked like a spilled bag of sun-melted candies to her, all fading electric colors and warped, semifamiliar shapes. The stale, sweet smell from burning incense and rotting flowers was everywhere. As they walked by the large, dark statue Winnie had spotted on the drive in—it was a woman, she now saw—Long reached out a hand and lightly touched a carved fold of robe. Winnie twisted her neck and bent backward to try and see the face under her hat but couldn’t make it out.
Together they swept and polished the tomb of Long’s father. When Winnie’s sweat dripped onto the grave she rubbed it in with her cloth and made the stone even shinier. Past the distant edge of the cemetery she could see a crooked hem of treetops stretching off beyond her line of vision. This in itself was not remarkable, but what caught Winnie’s eye was that the trees were all blackened and charred. “What’s that over there?” she asked Long, pointing. “What are all those dead trees?”
He looked up from plucking the weeds at the base of his father’s tomb and frowned. “That’s the old rubber plantation. I’ll tell you some of the stories about it later, once we get out of here,” he said, but Winnie could tell that he wouldn’t. Long reached down and ripped out a clump of dry grass with unnecessary force. “God, I could use a beer,” he muttered to himself.
They returned home and Mrs. Phan once again disappeared into the grandmother’s room, this time bringing her tea. Long had purchased two cans of Saigon Green from a woman with a beverage cart at the cemetery gates and was noticeably less edgy after drinking one. After he finished the second he suggested to Winnie that they go for a walk.
Instead of going down the main road they went out the back door, past the outhouse and washroom and through his mother’s twelve lychee trees. They reached a skinny dirt road, only about a foot wide, that marked the edge of the Phans’ property, and then crossed over it and into a neighbor’s grove of shaggy longans. Winnie could smell that they owned pigs long before the sty came into view.
The pig encampment was made from dark cement, long and rectangular and roofless, with a trough running along one side. There were about ten of them, and their odor was so strong that it seemed to distort and blur the air around their bodies. They were larger and darker and hairier than American pigs, and they examined Winnie with hungry, clever eyes.
“Don’t try to pet them,” said Long, even though Winnie wouldn’t have dared. “They’ll bite your hand off. Whenever I was bored as a kid I used to sneak over here and feed them. I would give them the worst things I could find and they would eat it all. Sticks and pencils. Dead rats. Every kind of garbage. My brother threw up in their feed trough once and they ate that too.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a bag jiggling with leftover rice porridge from breakfast. Winnie knew most of it was hers—she hadn’t been able to finish her bowl in the morning because she thought that cháo had the texture of hot glue. Growing up, it had been the sole Vietnamese dish that her father ever cooked for them, and only if someone in the house was sick. Winnie wished she could say that it tasted like her childhood, but if she tried eating it, all she could taste was the memory of stomach flu.
Long jiggled out the porridge into the trough, where it was slurped up by eager snouts and clung to long, porcine chin hairs. “I still feel guilty about it,” he said, “so I always make sure to bring them something nice to eat whenever I’m back for Tết. Mom and Grandma don’t care about any of the fancy gifts I bring back for them, but at least I can make the pigs happy.”
After folding the empty porridge bag back up, Long checked to make sure that there was no one else around. “Winnie,” he asked slyly, taking her hand and pulling her toward him, “Are you hungry at all?”
He had inadvertently smeared a little gray dab of rice gruel on her wrist. Winnie tried to ignore it. “Here?” she asked. “Are you sure the neighbors can’t see?”
“I’m sure.” He was leaning back against the cement wall. A Grateful Mouth was always hungry. Long closed his eyes and Winnie crouched down. She could hear the pigs’ jaws grinding and the sound of their wet grunts. She could feel them watching her, even if Long wasn’t.
Afterward, they returned to the dirt road, and this time they turned to stroll down it, leaping aside into the brush whenever motorbikes laden with lumpy burlap sacks of coffee beans came puttering by. They walked for fifteen minutes, until they reached a grove of unfamiliar trees whose branches appeared to be sprouting red bell peppers.
“Do you know what these are?” asked Long, smiling. Winnie shook her head. Long found a long stick and whacked the closest tree with it until one of the fruits dropped to the ground. “It’s a cashew!” he said, picking it up and handing it to her with a grin. “This one’s not ripe yet, but do you see the little nub growing out at the end of the fruit? See the shape? That’s the nut.”
The cashew apple fit in Winnie’s hand comfortably, like a grenade. She ran her thumb over the little embryo-shaped protuberance of the nut and thought smugly that the Cooks probably didn’t know where cashews came from, before that smugness was replaced by guilt.
“This way,” said Long, and walked farther into the orchard. He stopped at a sturdy-looking tree with branches that arced low, then hoisted himself into them effortlessly. It was clearly a tree he was familiar with, thought Winnie as she clambered up after him, skinning a knee in the process. Long tucked himself into a smooth L-shaped crook. His arm rested on the tree’s trunk in the casually possessive way that some men liked to drape their hands on their girlfriends’ thighs in public. Not Long though. It was not polite.
“This orchard actually belongs to the family of an old friend,” said Long.
“That’s nice. Are we going to visit him?” asked Winnie, picking little bits of bark from her knee.
“Ah, no. She’s not here anymore.”
Winnie looked up. “Where is she?” she asked, hoping that she sounded nonchalant, struggling to restrain the curiosity trying to claw its way into her voice.
Long patted his jacket pocket before he remembered that he had already finished his last beer back at the house. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she moved to Pleiku. Maybe Hanoi. She didn’t even tell her family that she was planning to leave. One day they just realized that she wasn’t there anymore. I only heard about it from market ladies.”
“Was she your book friend?” asked Winnie. Her curiosity had broken loose; it had made the question come out too high and too eager.
Long nodded slowly. “She was my book friend. She was my best friend. She and my brother and I were close, when we were all growing up.” Long absently reached out and took hold of a low-hanging cashew, gently squeezing its little tan knob like it was a nipple. “But I haven’t spoken to either of them in six years. Why?” he said, intercepting the question with a sad smile before it had fully formed on Winnie’s lips, “Because I was stupid. We had a falling-out before I left for Saigon. It was small enough that I thought she would just forgive me when some time had passed, but it was big enough that I couldn’t bring myself to apologize, because I felt too ashamed.
“So I waited instead. I wrote the occasional letter. I mailed her the books. She never wrote back. I didn’t reach out to my brother, because I didn’t really miss him at all. Maybe that’s why I like you, Winnie. You moved to the other side of the world. You never talk about your family. They don’t have a hold over you. You make me feel less guilty about how little I mind losing mine.” Winnie opened her mouth. She would have told him that a part of her was always thirteen, watching her brothers and sisters and mother and father at her brother’s graduation from the corner. Then she closed it again. Long was talking to her, but he was looking at a point past her head.
“In a way,” he continued, “I’m happy she left. She had always talked about wanting to leave this place but never actually did it—because of money, or because she was more afraid of leaving than she let on.
“Now whenever I come home, after I visit my dad’s grave, I’ll come out here to visit this orchard. It’s another cemetery for me. For my memories of her, maybe. For our friendship. For our old life.”
This was a lie, thought Winnie, but without jealousy. He was not here to honor their friendship. He was here because he was still waiting and always would be.
That night there were bonfires in front of every house, distant orange smears of light in the dusk that Winnie and Long could see from Mrs. Phan’s front yard. They did not make a fire of their own, but the wind carried the smell of smoke to them. Long sat in the grass and tugged Winnie down with him. His skin smelled like dust and beer. That afternoon he had driven over to the convenience store in town and bought an entire case of Saigon Green, and then made impressive headway with it during dinner. When midnight struck, scores of fireworks were set off all at once, and it sounded like the fabric of the sky was being ripped apart.
In the early hours of the morning, long after the explosions had stopped and the fires had all burned out and everyone else in the house was sleeping, Winnie slipped out from underneath her mosquito net. She crept outside and found her shoes. Then she felt her way through the lychee trees, tripping over roots in the dark. In her hands she held two used tampons that she had wrapped up in newspaper and kept hidden during the day. The pigs were not asleep. They were swaying by their trough, all reeking shadow and flashes of eye whites in the moonlight. Winnie tossed them the soggy tampon parcel and left when she heard chewing.
The next morning there was fresh fruit and incense for the family altar. More sticky green rice cakes for breakfast. Long had bought a lucky kumquat tree to place in the corner. Festive music was being piped over a loudspeaker in town, and the histrionics of electric bamboo flute reached them even out here. But it was still a skeletal Tết—a Tết that was just going through the motions.
Winnie’s New Year’s present was that Long would be driving his mother to the temple that morning and he had gently suggested to Winnie that she might feel awkward if she came along—they would see all of their neighbors, who would have questions about her.
When they were gone, Winnie crawled back beneath her mosquito dome even though it wasn’t necessary during the day—the ones she needed to worry about only came out after dusk, she’d been told. She allowed herself to slide into the pleasant kind of half doze where her consciousness sagged just until the point where it felt like the hard surface of the bed was tilting gently underneath her. She didn’t know how long she had been laying there before she heard the tapping coming from the grandmother’s room. Winnie turned her head to look—the door was cracked open about an inch and a half. The tapping was soft, but insistent. It was an invitation. Winnie lifted the edge of her net and rolled herself out. She padded barefoot across the concrete to the bedroom and then, using one finger, she pushed the wooden door open wide enough to peep through.
Long’s grandmother lounged in a wooden bed twice the size of the one in the sitting room. She was a large woman, three-chinned and bounteously berolled in flesh, wearing a purple pajama set. That such an unapologetic abundance of female body existed in Ia Kare was astonishing to Winnie. She had only seen women here like Long’s mother—gaunt, with deep cheek hollows that looked pecked out by vultures. There were certainly fat men—she had noticed them in town, their white undershirts rolled up all the way to the armpits to stay cool, smooth brown guts puffed out and gleaming in the sun. But only they were allowed to expose their bellies, or to even possess them; in their world, Long’s grandmother’s extravagant size was an act of defiance. Winnie could see that Long had inherited his peculiar eyes from her—hers were almost identically wide set and bulging, but while his were dark brown, hers were an unusual pale color, a yellowy gray, as if the color had been seeped out of them, and they lacked the warmth of his. Her wild hair was still more black than white; it was cropped to her shoulders and frizzed out in a triangle around her head.
“Girl,” she said. In one hand she held an empty glass, in the other, a long, stripped lychee branch, which she used to deliver a dactylic series of whacks against the wall beside the bed. This solved the mystery of the tapping. “Girl—I’ve run out of tea.” She stopped hitting the wall and now aimed the stick at a low table at the foot of the bed, where there was a dented tin thermos and more empty glasses with slimy shreds of old tea leaves clinging to their sides. Winnie pushed the door open just far enough to let herself in. “Not too much water; I want it to be strong,” the old woman said, as Winnie poured out a lukewarm stream from the thermos into one of the glasses, unable to find a clean one, or any fresh tea leaves. When she brought it over, the grandmother dropped her other glass down on the folds of the filthy quilt beside her before taking the new one. Winnie inched backward toward the door.
“Well,” she said, sipping the watery tea, “tell me, do you think I seem well?”
Winnie realized she had been staring at her again and blushed. She leaned back lightly, resting in the gap between door and doorframe, wondering how she could escape. “Yes,” she said, and it was true. Long’s grandmother seemed to pulsate with an energy that made everything else in the room pallid and bland in comparison, including Winnie.
The old woman barked with laughter and spat a tea leaf out onto the wall. “You’re wrong. I’m all rotten inside,” she informed Winnie with relish. “If you sliced me open, black goo would ooze out. I’m full of poison. Full of pus. I’m dying. Would you like to know how I’m so sure that I’m dying?”
Winnie nodded because it seemed like it would be rude to do otherwise. The grandmother grinned. “Because I did it to myself. Do my eyes seem unusual to you, girl?”
It felt like another trick question. “Yes,” Winnie said eventually. She had decided it would be best not to lie.
“That’s because they are. I have a special sight. When I was twelve, my family sold me to a Frenchman like a farm animal, and every single night, before I went to sleep, I wished that I could climb out of my own body and run away. And then one night, after I made my same wish and closed my eyes, I figured out how to open my other set of eyes. And these eyes did not have to stay with my body, no, no. My other eyes can drift off my face and go wherever I want them to go. They watch whoever they want to watch, and no one can see them. While my body was sleeping, my other eyes would go out into the world. They saw nasty old Louis get up to all sorts of perverse things. They peeped in the windows of his neighbors—they liked to spy on the handsome Frenchman, but not that other one, not the boring one who was in love with the handsome one. They would see what kinds of creatures were sneaking around in the woods. They saw wondrous things. But there is a cost for the special sight. And it’s the body that pays it. Every time I looked, a little more poison would trickle into me.
“My joints started to grow weak. Sometimes I wouldn’t have the strength to stay on my feet all day long. I started swelling up. And then one day my legs stopped working. That’s the wicked trick of the gift—the more I looked, the less I was able to move, but the less I was able to move, the more I needed to keep looking, to see what was lost to me. My body’s been trapped in this room for years, but my eyes still go roaming every day and all night, whenever I want. My magic eyes have seen such awful things happen in this place. I saw what happened out in those rubber trees when it was still a plantation. And I saw as much of the war as any soldier. I saw what happened to the rich man’s daughter when she was lost out in the trees, years later. I saw evil being committed by members of my own family tree.” Grandmother emitted a guttural little chortle. “But the second wicked trick of these eyes is that the more I see, the less I care. I see such beastly things, yet I am never horrified anymore. The black goo inside me keeps me from feeling. But I still can’t stop looking. And I won’t stop until I’m dead.”
Grandmother suddenly started to cough. She took her stick and thumped herself on the back with it, then spat out another tea leaf. “Talking makes me tired; bring me a slice of rice cake, and then I’ll tell you more.”
Winnie nodded, backed out of the door, pulled it shut, and then turned around to see Long and his mother, back early from their social calls.
“Grandma was talking to you?” Long’s eyes flashed alarm.
“I just got her fresh tea,” said Winnie. “And she asked me to get her some bánh tét.”
Long looked relieved. “Mother will get it for her. And just ignore anything she said to you—Bà Nội is a little bit of a lunatic.”
In the middle of the night, after disposing of her tampons at the pigsty again, Winnie did not return to the house. Instead, she kept following the little dirt road, stumbling occasionally over tire ruts. Every few steps, she would pause and look around furtively, wondering where the eyes were.
The cemetery was somehow a friendlier and less frightening place at night, without the sun blistering the colors into distorted hues. The shapes of the stones softened in the cool dark, and the smell of incense, which draped thick and heavy over everything during the day when it was being burned, had dissipated. Stranger and more interesting scents were now allowed in: wood smoke from the bonfires in town, soil and the distant stink of pig on the wind, the metallic odor of the dry-season sky.
It felt like it took ages to cross the cemetery, but Winnie could not know for certain because there was no moon to help her keep track of time. When she passed by the statue at the center of the graveyard, something pale suddenly fluttered at the edge of her vision and her heart slammed against her chest. It was just a large bird, perched on the statue and rearranging its wings, Winnie realized, but her pace quickened anyway. When she finally reached the plantation she was slightly out of breath.
Winnie looked hard into the darkness between the rubber trees. The air still had the faintest tang of charcoal. The trunks were scorched, blacker than the rest of the blackness surrounding them, but there were already thin new shoots growing out from them. Winnie closed her eyes. There was not much difference between the night and the inside of her own skull. She raised her arms above her head like branches. She tried to open her other set of eyes. From somewhere deep in the stomach of the forest, she heard a humming.
The sky had not lightened by the time she made it back to the house, but that was still no indication of what time it was; the dawn here was the kind that arrived without warning. It could have been hours away, or it could have been ready to erupt over the hills in a matter of minutes. She crept back inside, but before she could seal herself back underneath the mosquito dome, she heard tapping from the grandmother’s room again—quiet this time, more of a gentle scratch than a tapping. She hesitated, knowing that Long’s mother was asleep in the same room, but the scratching did not stop and so she tiptoed over and softly pushed the door open.
“Don’t worry—she won’t wake up.” The mound of shadows and blankets called softly from the bed, and gestured with her stick at Long’s mother snoring on the floor near where Winnie stood in the doorway. “She sleeps like a corpse. But you can stay where you are—I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad you didn’t go into the forest.”
It was true, then. She could leave her body. Winnie smiled, overcome with wonderment.
“Because my fool grandson didn’t warn you, did he? Those trees are full of snakeys!”
The smile dropped off Winnie’s face.
Grandmother threw her head back and cackled so hard the bed shook, but Long’s mother continued sleeping, undisturbed. “They’re why no one goes in the rubber-tree forest—it’s full of them. Rắn hổ mang—you know that kind?”
Winnie shook her head, unfamiliar with the Vietnamese. Grandmother set her lychee stick down across her lap and then curved her hands around to the either side of her face to mime a cobra hood. She flicked her tongue in and out. “You know. The spitting ones. There are nests and nests of them in there. Some of them were barbecued when the forest burned, but still, snakeys everywhere! You can never kill them all. Only I can go in, with my special eyes, and not get bitten. You’re lucky, stupid girl. Even though you’re slow and you can’t speak correctly and you never brought me my bánh tét like I asked, you can still marry my grandson if you want to.” The grandmother used the stick to itch one of her feet. “It doesn’t make one lick of difference to me, because I’ll be dead before too long. This is all I wanted to say to you. You can go now.”
By morning, her period was nearly gone. Winnie didn’t have time to visit the pigs before she and Long drove back to Saigon, so she dug a shallow hole in the ground behind the washroom and buried her final tampon in it. She tried not to think about what would happen in a couple months, when the rains returned.