4
Linny
Linny had lived in Chicago for five years, enough time to inure her to the touristy crowds on Michigan Avenue where suburbanites traveled great distances to shop at Nike and Banana Republic. Still, whenever she approached the city from her Wicker Park neighborhood she couldn’t suppress a little catch of joy at seeing all those skyscrapers coming into view. They created a chart on a graph that she could follow. Even on a day like this one, the second week of April, cold and gray, the buildings seemed to collect the gathered gleam from Lake Michigan and throw the light back into the air.
Sometimes Linny imagined running into Pren here, on the northern side of Michigan Avenue, between Barney’s and the Drake Hotel, where Linny’s friend Sasha ran the Paolo Francesca Salon. It was easy enough to get there from Lincoln Park. Linny had walked the reverse route, heading north past all of the doormen buildings in the Gold Coast to get to Lincoln Park itself, then down a side street lined with oaks, toward Gary’s limestone house with its wide front stoop and bay windows. Most of the families Linny cooked for lived in homes that carried a similar sense of tidy well-being, a scent of children with freshly shampooed hair. How many of them ate her dinners night after night, the parents checking the large-font instructions to know which temperature their ovens should bear?
Before answering the ad for You Did It Dinners, Linny had lasted eight months as Paolo Francesca’s receptionist. She sometimes returned to get a free haircut or manicure, but mostly just to get after-work drinks with Sasha. They used to wait tables together, back when Linny first arrived in Chicago, and over the years had shared countless stories about dates and jobs gone wrong. Sasha had grown up in a working-class neighborhood just outside the city and made no secret of her desire to get ahead. She always knew what to do on weekend nights, bringing Linny to parties and lounge openings, places that tried to lend out a sense of being somewhere significant.
When Linny arrived at the salon, Sasha was neatening a stack of fashion magazines in the waiting area. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said. “Are you wearing a new jacket?” It was a habit they had, appraising the ebb and flow of each other’s wardrobes.
“Sale,” Linny began to reply, but was interrupted by a client swathed in a plastic Paolo Francesca cape. Blond highlighting foils twisted the woman’s hair into an alien look.
“Excuse me,” she said, drawing her arms out from under the plastic. She touched the edges of her forehead gingerly, as if afraid to know what was there. A bride-to-be, Linny decided—diamond ring flashing, getting ready for the big day. “I thought someone was going to give me a pedicure while I’m waiting for this color to take?”
“We’ll be right there,” Sasha said, putting on a customer-service smile that Linny knew well, and used herself, when the mothers gathered in the assembly-line kitchen.
“Well, I’ve been waiting.” The woman turned to go back, but paused to point at Linny. “Are you doing the pedicure?”
“What?” Linny’s word came out like a bark.
The woman, realizing her error, began to laugh. “Oh, sorry, I just thought—”
“Someone will be right with you,” Sasha rushed in. She escorted the woman back to the inner rooms of the salon, glancing back at Linny to mouth the words, Fucking bitch.
Linny waved a hand to indicate, Don’t worry. It was not the first time she’d been mistaken for the manicure girl.
During her time at Paolo Francesca, Linny had quickly tired of the brides that clouded up every weekend. They arrived doughy-faced in button-down shirts and left shimmering, haloed in veils, their updos anchored with bobby pins and a shellac of styling cream. Eventually they all looked the same, or wanted to, with heavy “natural” makeup and an inevitable strapless dress. Salons like Paolo Francesca promised, and often delivered, the magic of metamorphosis. But Linny had seen the process too up-close.
She had spent much of her adolescence perfecting her own hair, makeup, and nails, but realized that doing so for other women was worse than a chore. Besides, she had always vowed never to become just another Vietnamese girl running a nail shop. Even though Paolo Francesca, with its steel counters and relentless techno music, was far removed from the strip-mall joints where some of Mrs. Luong’s friends worked, the very space of white on a woman’s French-tip manicure never failed to remind Linny of those striving, Lancôme-wearing Vietnamese women in Wrightville. Linny would shudder just driving past all those nail salons with orange adhesive letters spelling out signs on the window. Nails by Kim. Nails by Hoang. Or the worst, Oriental Manicure. Where bargain-conscious white women who stopped in to get their nails done always believed they were being gossiped about in Vietnamese. Where the same whiny soap opera music would blare from a boom box, the same Vietnamese magazines would cover the tables, and the same odor of nail polish remover and incense would linger in the air. Linny had promised herself that she wouldn’t end up filing other women’s nails for a living.
She’d never told Gary, or any guy, about that. As far as Gary knew she would be working at You Did It Dinners forever. He once said he admired her work ethic, whatever that meant. He spoke of his middle-class background as if it forged a connection between them, when he had no idea how Linny had really grown up, first in that little apartment, then in the ranch house in Wrightville. The voices of her parents rising in argument while Linny and Van increased the volume of the television.
In the week since she had left Gary at that restaurant he had started leaving her enough voice mails to make her cringe. Where once she used to call back immediately, engaging in the banter that would lead to their next meeting, now she felt like she was part of some show. When he said, Come on, Linny. Bring back your kumquats, Linny wanted to tell him, Do you know how you sound? But instead she didn’t answer at all. Just that day, working in the company kitchen at You Did It, Linny had realized that for months now she had fancied herself a stand-in wife, the kind who kept her man fed. Had Gary ever thought that, too?
At Paolo Francesca, waiting for Sasha to grab her coat and bag, Linny tried to picture Pren stepping into the salon, holding forth her hands so Linny could get to work on the nails. But the image didn’t last. Pren was too polite, for one thing. And try as she might, Linny never could sustain a vision of her and Pren in the same room for long. Linny just didn’t belong in that sphere.
Although Pren surely understood, as Linny did, how beauty equaled currency. Linny had figured that out even before middle school, when she memorized makeup tips from Cosmo and Glamour while standing in the magazine aisle at the grocery store. Linny put in long hours experimenting with shadows and liners, trying to make her eyes look bigger, deeper-set, less Asian. She painted plum colors up to her eyebrows and applied three coats of mascara. She ran peroxide-soaked cotton balls through her hair to create caramel highlights. Van, meanwhile, didn’t use any makeup at all. She bit at her nails until they bled; she called Linny vain. Coming home from an afternoon at Woodland Mall, Linny would see Van sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by school and library books. Linny would avoid her sister’s gaze, walk right past her without saying a word. Even then, she thought, Van was too full of worries, always thinking ahead.
When their mother returned from work, her hands cramped from a full day of sewing, she would smile to see Van studying. “Good girl,” she would say to her. To Linny Mrs. Luong would shake her head, make a low noise at the back of her throat to express her thoughts about Linny’s bird’s-nest hair and rainbow makeup. She wasn’t home enough to control how Linny looked.
Mr. Luong would be holed up in the basement, working on the Luong Arm or Luong Eye, occasionally popping upstairs for tea or to make announcements to his wife and daughters. He liked having them a captive audience, especially when they were eating. A favorite topic was statistics about short people.
“The average height of American men is five feet nine and one-half inches. That is tall. We live in this country with some of the tallest people. That’s America. But for guys like me, like Vietnamese, it’s five feet three. American women average height is five feet four inches. But girls like you, five feet.
“Did you know you girls are called petite? Petite is women five feet four inches and shorter than that. I think they should say five feet two inches.
“Did you know that men who are short have hard times getting jobs?”
When he went on like this about the plight of short people in America, Linny, Van, and Mrs. Luong tended to tune him out. Van would continue reading; Linny would watch TV; Mrs. Luong would clean the dinner dishes. It was no use to challenge him in any way, though Van, in her teenage years, sometimes tried. What about tall people? she’d ask. They have problems too. Maybe even worse than us. My friend Keri is really tall and she has just as hard of a time. To which their father would always counter, This is a country of tall people.
Usually Dinh Luong liked to lecture at them, needing little response. He would start off with a confidential tone in his voice, almost charming, beginning sentences with “Did you know.” When he got excited he would misuse idioms, like the time he told them all to “cut me some slacks” and Linny and Van had howled with laughter. He would go along with the joke until the moment it went too far—no telling when that would be—and then he’d command them to shut up and listen. He would flick his daughters’ chins to make them face him. He would jab the off button of the television so violently the set would tremble. He would pick up keys, a newspaper—things that wouldn’t break—and throw them into the living room.
Mrs. Luong reacted to these outbursts with deliberate calmness, so Linny would do the same. What did knowing any of this information change? her mother would ask while Linny folded her arms, silently agreeing with her.
But Van played Mr. Luong’s game, always more willing to be the dutiful daughter. Perhaps as a way to diffuse his fits of anger, she even went to the library and gathered a list of famous short people, starting with James Madison, at five-four the shortest U.S. president, and including Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa, and of course old Napoleon, whom Mr. Luong didn’t like because he resented the idea of the “complex” that Van had repeatedly explained to him. At first he thought it referred to a “non-pole” complex. “Just because the short people can’t be tall like a pole,” he fumed. “Now we can never get mad or be the boss without getting called a complex! Plus then people say we have the short temper. Not fair.”
Such a focus—who was tall, who was short—became woven into their lives, so that a person’s name couldn’t even be mentioned without one of them wondering or stating out loud that person’s height. In sixth grade when Linny had been assigned a report on David B. Steinman, architect of the resplendent Mackinac Bridge, Van piped up that Steinman had stood barely five feet tall. “And,” she added prissily, “he was one of the most successful and famous bridge designers ever.”
“Very good,” their father had praised her. “You know to keep track.” He had offered Van a big smile, rare enough to make Linny feel forgotten.
Linny knew lots of families lined their kids up to record their height, but to her father it wasn’t just for fun—it was a living record of their identities. Whenever Linny complained about wanting to be taller he would reprimand her. “Not about being tall,” he said. “It’s about being being just as equal as tall people.”
“Well, that problem would be solved if we just were taller.”
“No, Linh. It means we want to be smarter. If you not seen as equal you do whatever you can to make equalness happen. Why you think I invent things?”
In the final tally Mr. Luong was five-foot-three, Van five and one-eighth, Mrs. Luong four-eleven-and-a-half, and Linny four-eleven. In Linny’s seventeenth year, Mr. Luong had noted, “That’s it for you.”
“I could still have a growth spurt, you never know,” Linny said.
He shook his head. “It’s done. Now you got to do work by yourself.”
Linny had heard her share of lame short jokes—How’s the weather down there?—Do you want a booster seat?—Oops, I almost stepped on you!—but that was the first time she felt sorrow, real hurt, at the fact of her height. She had wanted, at least, to be as tall as Van.
Her father said, “It’s not your fault. It’s your family.”
Linny had never heard him say such a thing before. They stood there for a moment, looking at the pencil marks that crept upward on the hallway wall. The lowest mark belonged to her at age eight, when they had first moved into the house.
Her father admitted, “You maybe drink more milk to be same as Van. Too late now.”
When Linny started acquiring boyfriends she bragged to Van that she liked being short: she could make even the scrawniest guy feel tall and powerful. “What scrawny guys?” Van had countered with a sneer. “No one’s short in this town but us Vietnamese, and you only date white guys.”
“You don’t go out with anybody.”
By high school, their roles were set. No going back: Linny would join the popular girls at lunch and Van would get praised by her teachers. School felt like floating—or inertia, one of the few things she remembered from science class. The path of least resistance. Linny managed to date a lot of boys without quite being labeled, in spite of Van’s ominous predictions, a slut. She was elected to Homecoming Court (though the title of queen went to leggy Melissa Heinke). She was, in fact, invited to every dance from the moment she stepped into ninth grade. Meanwhile, Van went to debate tournaments, took Advanced Placement classes, headed up the school’s quiz bowl team, eventually earning a partial scholarship to the University of Chicago.
Linny went to the local community college, and when those two years were up began a series of moves from one state school to the next. Each place seemed the same, for in each place she found herself seeking out boyfriends because she didn’t know any girls to hang out with, didn’t know how to keep friendships with them. Her high school group had scattered, and some were even getting married, a leap Linny couldn’t fathom. She took classes in fashion merchandising and marketing, always losing interest before declaring a major. At four o’clock on a winter day, darkness already falling, Linny would find herself in the middle of a campus, surrounded by new trees and buildings resembling those in an industrial park, and she would need a minute to remember where she was.
When Linny dropped out of school for good and moved to Chicago with a boyfriend, her father and sister told her she would waste her life without a degree. But Linny found satisfaction just writing down her city address. Growing up, most of the kids she knew said they couldn’t wait to get out of west Michigan. Chicago was the word they revered, nearly as bright a beam as New York. And Linny was the one to achieve it. She lived with the boyfriend long enough to meet a new one at the restaurant where she worked, and move into an apartment with a few other people he knew. During the day she worked retail jobs, aiming to get her own place, finally borrowing the security deposit from Van. During her two years of bumping from one college to the next, her overriding goal had been to have a place by herself. She couldn’t stand any more kitchens overflowing with other people’s dirty dishes, dried spaghetti sauce everywhere, and girls, whether they lived there or dated someone who did, who kept stealing her clothes. She couldn’t bear the same drinking games, the pizza boxes, the stained sofas and the people on them, soaking up each other’s cigarette smoke.
In her own apartment in Chicago, Linny wasn’t afraid to be alone. She was more afraid of the opposite: letting someone encroach, scatter the order of the small household she had created for herself.
Sasha selected the new Henry Hotel for drinks, since it was two blocks from the salon and close to the stores around Oak Street. They often browsed together, using shopping as another way to talk. Holding up four-inch metallic heels, they talked about their friends, complained about their love lives, conjured new ways to assess the situation of Gary and Pren. Lately, such conversation had been making Linny feel stalled, impatient. A couple of weeks ago she had even walked to her neighborhood library to see if they had any course catalogs from DePaul or the University of Illinois at Chicago. But, thinking of her sister’s dreaded question, the one everyone asked—What do you want to do?—she left before talking to the librarian. Van’s voice followed her anyway. Is this what you’re doing with your life? Linny didn’t want to answer the question; she wanted to erase it.
When Linny and Sasha settled at the bar of the Henry, a collusion of copper tables, mahogany, and mosaic tiles, Linny said, “This place looks confused.” She pointed at the blue pendants snaking down from the ceiling and the garish faux-coral webbing across the walls. “It’s creeping me out.”
“Forget about it,” Sasha said. “Tell me the Gary update.”
But Linny had no more information than what she’d already relayed over the phone. “He wants to keep seeing me, as he says, even while trying to have another child with her. Which is just—”
“Fucked up,” Sasha supplied. She set down her martini and added, “Are you into that? Because you’re looking at a huge mess.”
“I know.” Linny had seen Sasha through her own tangled relationships; they had always been able to advise each other straightforwardly, without too much judgment—a rare thing in a friend, Linny had learned. “Everything is suddenly more real, when I’ve been preferring the make-believe. With him and with work.”
“Work?”
“Oh, you know—how You Did It Dinners is this whole make-believe world of home cooking.”
“Is Pren going to start coming in and putting together her own meals there? That’ll be loads of fun.”
Linny hadn’t considered this scenario before, but now she saw Pren securing one of the white aprons that bore the whimsical company logo and stepping up to the trays of ingredients. She would probably go for the fancier menu items Linny and Barbara were about to roll out. Exotic was the word Barbara kept using whenever Linny suggested ingredients like harissa and lemongrass, fenugreek and coriander.
“Maybe she knows.”
“She doesn’t,” Linny insisted, though she wasn’t so sure anymore.
As Sasha beckoned the bartender for another drink, Linny glanced around the room. She expected to see the kinds of people she always saw in bars and restaurants around here, their faces eased by money and alcohol, their bodies still tense with all that the workday had troubled and not resolved. Men in ties, women with highlights in their hair.
But then Linny saw her sister’s husband fitting right in, sitting at the far end of the room, at a table with a woman who almost looked like Van, except her hair was too long, too studiously flipped.
“My brother-in-law is here,” Linny said, and Sasha immediately swiveled to take a look.
“Is that your sister?”
When Linny shook her head, Sasha raised an eyebrow. “What the hell kind of family do you have?” she joked.
In the mirrored wall behind the bar Linny saw herself and Sasha reflected against shelves of liquor—Sasha’s pale skin glowing within the frame of her big wavy hair, Linny’s own narrow shoulders flanked by bottles of Maker’s Mark and Courvoisier, the favorite drink of her father and every other Vietnamese guy. Linny glanced over at Miles and the Asian woman again. They were drinking white wine, their elbows leaning in toward each other on the table. It was startling to see him out of context, and disturbing to see him with someone other than Van. Maybe they were both lawyers, working on a case in Chicago. Perhaps Asian American lawyers gravitated to each other the way Asian kids in college did.
Linny couldn’t help thinking that Van could do her hair like that woman, with layers and lowlights. She remembered how she’d suggested just that at Christmas, the last time they saw each other, saying, “Do you ever think about doing something different with your hair?”
Van had touched her shoulder-length pageboy self-consciously. They were in the kitchen, Van helping Linny prepare dinner. “I like it like this. It’s easy to take care of and it’s a classic style.”
“All I know is, you shouldn’t have the same hairstyle for years and years.”
“Is that what your magazines dictate?” Van was cutting up potatoes slowly, though Linny had tried to teach her how to use the knife more efficiently. Van worked with too much caution, afraid of the blade.
“I’m just trying to help. You could look so much better if you only tried.”
“I happen to think there are more important things in life. A college education, for instance.”
That was how their conversations usually went, filled with barbs, veering toward each other’s weak points.
In the Henry Hotel bar, Sasha wondered out loud if the woman with Miles was a girlfriend. Linny didn’t want to respond to that. She kept an eye on them as they finished their drinks, rose from the table with their jackets and shopping bags.
“Let’s find out,” Sasha murmured. Miles and the Asian woman would have to walk past Linny at the bar, would have to say something.
He seemed not at all flustered when he stopped to say hello.
“How are you?” Linny replied. They always spoke to each other with near-formal politeness, never venturing beyond topics he brought up, like real estate in Ann Arbor and Chicago. He always remembered to ask dutiful questions about Linny’s job, though they never failed to sound condescending. Linny once made the mistake of telling Van he was suspiciously nice. “One of those rich, been-here-for-generations Asian American guys,” she’d said. “And calculating, like a lawyer.” Van, furious, had said, “Trust me, Miles couldn’t care less what you think of him, and neither could I.”
Linny introduced Sasha, and though she was curious about the Asian woman, she had a feeling she might find out something she didn’t want to know. It made her nervous enough to long for a cigarette, though she hadn’t smoked since college.
“This is Grace,” Miles said, and the woman smiled. She and Linny sized each other up for a moment and it only took that second for Linny to know: Chinese girl, second- or third-generation, from an upper-middle-class family. Dark jeans, cashmere sweater under a short jacket, a named handbag. Her lipstick was glossy and her eye shadow held a hint of shimmer. She was thin and angular, nearly as tall as Miles, the kind of girl who could wear a shapeless tunic and look good in it. Linny envied those rare tall Asian girls, though she never admitted it out loud. Sometimes, catching her reflection in a dressing room mirror, Linny remembered the pencil marks in her parents’ house and felt indignation, even shock, at the unchangeable fact of her height: she should have been a tall girl.
Miles interrupted the stare-down. “She’s a lawyer in our firm.”
“You have a case here?”
“We don’t have meetings on Saturdays, thankfully,” Grace answered. Up close, Linny saw that they actually had similar hairstyles, layered with side-swept bangs.
Turning back to Miles, Linny said, “I haven’t talked to Van in a while.”
“She’s fine.” His tone was mechanical, almost dismissive.
“Is she here?” Sasha asked loudly. “I’d love to meet her.”
Miles barely let his gaze rest on her. “She’s in Michigan,” he told Linny. Then he touched Grace’s shoulder. “We should get going.”
As they sailed across the shiny stone floor toward the lobby of the hotel, Miles’s hand drifted to Grace’s back, as if escorting or protecting her. It was the kind of gesture Linny had seen him use with Van.
All at once she snapped awake. She slipped down from the barstool. She hurried to the lobby and crossed it, heading toward the hidden bank of elevators. Rounding the corner, she spotted Miles and Grace stepping into the same gold-toned car. Her impulse was to jump in after them. But instead she stopped in front, in full view. Her face was what Miles saw as the doors closed.
Later, after Linny and Sasha had questioned and rehashed the whole scene—was Miles cheating on Van so brazenly? and what, if anything, should Linny say to her sister?—she found a seat on a bus heading west to her apartment. The days lined up in front of her—more meals, menus, her father’s citizenship party—and Linny thought of her sister driving through her subdivision in Ann Arbor, deaccelerating, directing the car into the driveway. She pictured Van just sitting there, almost unwilling to move. How well Linny knew that feeling, every time she relinquished an off-street parking spot to drive somewhere, and every time she returned, circling blocks to find a space. During winter storms some people dug out their cars in the morning and left lawn chairs in their place to stake a claim; trespassers would find their cars keyed. Whenever Linny did nab a space she felt a mixture of relief and dread. Now I have to get out of the car, she thought at those times. And she always did, even though she dreamed of driving on without a map, or even steering her way to a garage at the airport, abandoning the car there, and buying any ticket she could afford. For the first time, it occurred to Linny that maybe her sister had fantasized that very same thing.