14
Linny
While Linny was in Ann Arbor, Gary called six times. She refused to answer when his number came up and erased his voice-mails as soon as she heard them. I’m smoothing things over, he insisted. I’m talking Pren down. By the time I’m done she’ll be calling your work to apologize. Linny had hidden in Van’s bathroom to listen to the messages, as if her sister would be able to discern the whole situation otherwise. Instead of calling Gary back, she called Tom.
Two days after Linny and Van followed Miles, Linny returned to the kitchen of You Did It Dinners. Barbara, looking up from supervising a gaggle of moms, had nodded her assent. Later on, neither of them brought up the subject of Gary and Pren. Instead, Barbara talked about the future, looking ahead to the targeted opening of her new branch in Lincoln Square. Linny unofficially agreed to stay in the Oak Park location, and Barbara unofficially agreed to allow her. So for now Linny returned to her search for new dinner ideas, calling up recipe sites and reading through back issues of food magazines. She spent most of her evenings like that, taking notes and e-mailing Tom.
It’s not thrilling work, she admitted to him. They’d been exchanging more and more messages since her father’s party, talking on the phone at night.
What would be?
She sent him links to sites she’d bookmarked more than a year ago. The Cordon Bleu Institute in Chicago. The French Culinary Institute. The Culinary Institute of America.
The CIA, Tom typed back. Serious stuff. New York?
But Linny wanted to stay in Chicago. All of her years in Michigan, the city had seemed a beacon, a promise that she still wanted to have fulfilled. Here, in the middle of the country, an unlikely avant-garde spirit had risen, taking shape in neighborhoods edged by skylines, flatness interrupted by heights, midwesternness mixed with modernity. Linny had almost begun to take it for granted. It had taken Wrightville and Ann Arbor, seeing her father and sister, to make Linny long to stop wasting so much time.
More than once, Linny had almost told Tom about Gary. She just didn’t know how to explain it. Nor could she say why she had the compulsion to confess, except that it had something to do with sensing that the pattern of her days in Chicago was shifting. If she told Tom the truth, as she might have back when they were fifteen, what else might change for her?
Look at how Van had already changed. That evening of the confrontation with Miles and Grace, Linny had driven Van back to Ann Arbor in silence, thinking her sister was in full retreat mode. The quiet between them dominated as it always had, seemed to expand like a bubble until it became a fearsome thing to break. When they got back to the house Van started to march up to her bedroom but got no farther than the stairs, where she suddenly sank down. For a moment she drew her legs up to her chin.
She surprised Linny by saying, “I would absolutely destroy his things if it weren’t such a fucking obvious thing to do.”
Linny, relieved that Van hadn’t burst into sobs and relieved to hear her cursing, said, “It doesn’t mean you can’t do it anyway.”
“Yes, it does. Because then Miles would say that’s such a fucking obvious thing to do. And then I would be the immature one.”
“It’s funny to hear you swear.”
“Miles said swearing was crass and the sign of an uneducated mind.”
“Then he must be a hypocrite.” Linny took a seat on a lower step, leaning against the banister.
“I should never have learned about the Trung sisters.”
At this unexpected mention, Linny recalled the way they used to run around the living room of that old apartment, mixing up the Trung sisters with Charlie’s Angels. Neither the Trungs nor the Angels would have walked away in defeat from Miles. “Just remember that they threw themselves off a cliff and drowned in a river.”
But perhaps Van was not fully ready to sustain the anger she should have had. She pulled herself up like an old lady from a park bench and said, “I’m going to go to bed. I guess you’re heading back to Chicago?”
“I don’t know.” She meant, Do you want me to?
“You should go.” Van sounded weary, threatening to recede into some cold depth and take the whole evening with her.
“I can leave early in the morning,” Linny suggested, wanting to say something else to bring back that momentary glimmer of fierceness. Van nodded, then moved up the stairs. At the very top she turned back for a moment.
“Will you do something?”
“Sure.”
“Go to Dad’s TV show audition.”
There was no way Linny could say anything but yes.
On the day before the audition, Linny demonstrated a new chicken, roasted vegetable, and couscous dinner while Barbara took notes. They used to talk over every aspect of building a new dish, brainstorming—one of Barbara’s favorite words—to reach the compound of ingredients that she judged would most satisfy the demographic. Now Barbara typed on her laptop, made a few noncommittal noises meaning nice and possibly, and let Linny go home early.
Walking her neighborhood to clear her mind, Linny told herself to expect the chilliness from Barbara. All she had to do was push through it. She would shop for Tom’s upcoming birthday instead, focus on how bright the days had gotten: a glorious spring had arrived at last, bringing pansies from window boxes, kids selling silk-screened T-shirts at every corner. Near the five-point intersection where the El stopped, a restaurant owner, dressed all in white, stepped onto Milwaukee just as Linny walked past. They nodded at each other, a simple exchange that made Linny feel the satisfaction of being acknowledged. She headed down Damen to the row of new clothing boutiques that had completed the street’s gentrification.
Linny was browsing a shop filled with sale sweaters and the gleam of fresh summer dresses when the entrance of a woman with honey-red hair generated a call of hello from the hipster girl refolding clothes at the center table. Before she even looked, Linny knew it was Pren.
She had been expecting to see Gary in the neighborhood. Sometimes at night when the door buzzer sounded in the apartment next to hers she started, certain of Gary. In his most recent voice mail, left earlier that day, he had said, How much longer do you think I’m going to wait for you to call me back?
The scene with Miles and Van, all of it too close to Gary and Pren, had more than unnerved Linny. She couldn’t talk about it to anyone but Sasha, who could only say, “Oh, lord, that poor girl. Poor sweet sad used-up girl.” Well, there wasn’t much else to say, was there? There was no resolution. Linny had never seen Van look so timid, so small. A violent feeling had surged up in Linny on that porch. If she’d been in Van’s place she would have lashed out. Forget the semblance of control. She would have made Miles fear her.
But as soon as Linny imagined this she was chastened by her own role: as Grace. No getting away from that comparison. If Gary and Pren showed up outside her apartment, both of them screaming, their tall figures blocking out the store awnings across the street, what would Linny do? Gary would be Miles, trying to keep everyone quiet. Linny could no longer hold onto her excuses. I wasn’t looking for someone else’s man, she had defended herself to Sasha. He approached me. What do I owe Pren? And so what did Grace owe her sister? The question made Linny uncomfortable, spurred her to duck away, as much as she could, from Pren, who stood in the same shop, reaching forward to touch a chiffon dress.
Linny slid behind a mannequin dressed in a trapeze shift. Hiding was one of the few advantages to being small. But she couldn’t avoid Pren’s eye for long.
In the past, whenever Linny had run into her while dropping off a supply of dinners, Pren had been adept at making small talk. She never failed to compliment Linny’s clothes or ask where she’d gotten her necklace. They had talked about Bucktown and Wicker Park too, how Pren adored the neighborhoods’ shops and restaurants.
Now Pren’s face drew down into a hard stare. She moved closer, fairly towering, smelling of honeysuckle perfume. This wasn’t a woman who ran away. Pren said, “I’m sure the owner of that company told you we won’t be needing those dinners anymore.”
“I heard.” Linny glanced past Pren, at the girl in tight jeans trying not to eavesdrop too obviously.
“I hope you don’t think you’re special. In fact, I’m glad I ran into you, because you should know that you’re just another notch on his fetish belt. He’s got a thing for you ethnic girls. Thai massage. All that stuff. Didn’t you know?”
Linny felt her face getting hot. She thought about saying, I’m sorry, but the words seemed pointless.
“Thought you’d want to know.” Pren turned away, but Linny stopped her.
“Wait,” she said.
Pren glared. “Do you have something to say to me?”
“To him,” Linny said. “Tell him not to contact me again.”
Pren’s lips seemed to furrow together, but she said nothing more. She pivoted, her expensive handbag flaring out. Her heels thumped on the distressed hardwood floor of the shop.
The girl folding clothes watched Pren go, heading north on Damen, and Linny knew she could never step in that store again. When she left she went directly back to the small space of her apartment where, at least, everything could be claimed as her own.
It took four and a half hours to drive from Chicago to the center of Detroit, and on the Saturday morning of the reality show tryout Linny spent most of that time thinking about Gary and Pren. Another notch on his fetish belt, she had said. The words, the idea, made Linny feel sick, as Pren had surely known they would. While Linny assumed that most white guys who hit on her were possible fetishists, she had never sensed that in Gary. He didn’t fit the giveaway signs—didn’t use the word exotic as a compliment or say stupid things like Vietnamese girls were the prettiest, or generally give off that subtle but clear vibe of guys who collected Asian porn videos. Was Pren lying, knowing just how to deliver a punch? Or was Gary really the kind of guy who boasted about dating various Latina, Asian, and black girls?
Linny knew she had almost reached the convention center when she caught a glimpse of the distant Ambassador Bridge that connected Detroit to Windsor, Canada. In the foreground the Renaissance Center, the skyscraper that used to have a revolving restaurant at the top, mirrored back the spring sky. It had once seemed romantic to Linny, before she knew what it was really like. Senior year in high school, she and her friends would drive all the way to Windsor because the drinking age there was eighteen. Some people preferred to take the eerie orange-lit tunnel but Linny liked the long wiry bridge and the way she could clearly see herself crossing from one country to another. Once in Windsor, they would head straight to the casinos, smoking and playing the ten-cent slots, pretending to be in Las Vegas. It had all seemed so innocent, full of play. The same as when Linny’s guitarist boyfriend called her “Yoko Ono.” She had laughed too, and it had taken years of dating enough guys to understand what the subtext meant. Linny wondered if Van had ever encountered fetishists—maybe the nerdy, engineering ones. As far as Linny knew, her sister had only dated one or two other guys before settling with Miles.
They had agreed to meet in the lobby of the convention center but the place was massive, a wide expanse of navy carpeting. Several conferences were going on, with signs pointing to hair care and chiropractic exhibits. Van had called Linny earlier in the week to report that their father’s audition would probably fall around the midafternoon; somehow he had procured a number guaranteeing a tryout. He’d checked in with Linny, too, to make sure she would be there.
Linny was about to dial Van’s cell phone when she saw her standing by a far pillar, under an electronic billboard that blinked 16th Annual DHA Members, Welcome!!!! Linny walked toward her just as Van started moving in the opposite direction. Linny sped up, wanting to call out, Wait for me. It was like being ten years old at SeaWorld, where their mother had taken them one time, and not knowing how to find the actual sea lion shows. Back then Linny decided all she had to do was let her sister, who never seemed to get lost, guide the way. Sure enough, they found the sea lions. Van could read maps; she stayed on course.
Linny followed her into the ladies’ bathroom. She reapplied her lip gloss and smoothed down her hair, motions that had become second nature to her. In one of the stalls a toilet flushed, sounding like a bowling ball hitting a strike, and Van emerged.
“Oh!” she said, startled, fixing the hem of her shirt over her pants. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“Just now. Have you seen Dad yet? I was shocked that he didn’t call me while I was driving.”
Van washed her hands and Linny was struck by how briefly she glanced in the mirror. Didn’t pull any products from her bag, didn’t even seem to care that the side part in her hair lay crooked. “They’re already upstairs in the waiting area. You and I have to register first.”
“What do you mean, ‘they’?” Linny immediately thought of Nancy Bao but Van rolled her eyes.
“Your new boy toy Tom drove Dad here.”
“Really?” Linny swiveled toward the mirror again, checking her face one more time before Van led the way back to the lobby.
“Are you two together or something?” Van spoke the words with a tone of something like distaste.
“I only saw him at that party,” she answered. “We’re e-mailing. Why? You act like there’s something wrong with him.”
She shrugged. “I thought you didn’t date Asian guys.”
“That’s not true,” Linny argued, though she had to admit Tom was the first Vietnamese guy she’d ever really been interested in. She could imagine, suddenly, how her mother would have smiled at Tom, a little dimple showing in her right cheek that conveyed her approval. She would have fawned a little, talked too loudly so other people would know about his dental practice. And here he was, wasn’t he, a good Asian son, shuttling her own father to and from Wrightville.
It took them five more minutes of walking to locate the lone registration booth for Tomorrow’s Great Inventor. It looked like one of those kiosks where people hawked credit cards on college campuses. The plastic sign drooped in the middle.
“This is it?” Linny had expected it to be something akin to American Idol, with teams of producers wearing headsets and lines of geeky guys holding on tight to their secret inventions. Her father among them would stand proud, attaining at last his long-held goal nurtured from years of infomercials.
The girl at the registration table had Linny and Van write down their information on clipboarded sheets. They signed a confidentiality agreement and video release form, then received adhesive tags printed with the show’s logo.
“You’re all set,” the girl told them. She couldn’t have been older than twenty. “You can go on to the Oakland Room upstairs.”
“Do you know when the show will air on TV?” Linny asked.
The girl shrugged. “I’m not sure it’s been sold anywhere. My aunt’s a coproducer and I’m just helping out for the day.”
Linny mulled this over as she and Van took an escalator to the second floor. She doubted her father knew about the status of the show. She began to worry about how he might react if he got rejected, if some young judge dismissed his lifetime of products for short people. Mr. Luong had never yet appeared to waver in his confidence about his inventions, yet this moment, this hour at the convention center, seemed all too typical: the big break he had aimed for could turn out to be another false hope, another rotted shoe pulled up on the fishing line.
As they headed down a carpeted hallway, Van suddenly spoke up. “Miles called me.”
“What’d he say? What’d you say?” Linny talked too fast, glad that Van had brought up the subject.
They reached the doors of the Oakland Room. “Well, I took half the money out of our bank accounts.”
“Good,” Linny said. But then they were inside the waiting room and there was Mr. Luong, in the same navy sport coat from the citizenship ceremony, sitting next to Tom Hanh, who jumped up and waved. He looked like a bodyguard the way he hovered near Mr. Luong, and Linny realized he kind of was—he’d brought her father here, ushering him safely across the state. They stood out in the room of mostly white contestants, family members, and friends. Of course, the would-be inventors were easy to spot—gawky and fidgety, mostly a pale lot. Engineers past, present, and failed, Linny guessed. The last of the Science Olympiad hangers-on. Guys with video cameras were rolling tape but not much seemed to be happening. Linny felt a little let down, wishing for something grander for her father.
Tom crossed the room to greet them. “Hi, Van,” he said. “Hi, Linny.”
“You’ve known about this all along?” Linny asked.
“I helped him with the application a few months back,” he admitted.
“How?”
“Nancy Bao. She came to get her teeth cleaned and asked for my help. I guess your dad doesn’t use the Internet and Nancy barely understands e-mail, but she saw an ad for the tryout in a magazine. I was going to tell you at the party, but then I thought I would surprise you.”
Linny was actually filled with relief that he was here. “Thanks for doing all of this.”
Van, clearly losing patience, moved ahead of them to sit down with Mr. Luong.
“Hey, Dad,” Linny said as she and Tom reached their row of saved seats. “Good luck today.” She had never known how to greet him. Her voice came out stilted, careful-sounding.
“You girls been taking your time,” he said with a scowl. He studied a crinkled page of notes, the cuffs of his pale yellow oxford shirt peeking out from the sleeves of his jacket. He had the Luong Arm and the Luong Eye near him, tucked in a box, plus a suitcase, and a ladder that stood behind the chairs.
“What’s with the ladder?” Linny asked.
“Shh. It’s for the show,” her father said.
“I’m sure you’ll do well,” Van told him, like a schoolteacher. She knotted the straps of her purse in her lap.
“Did you see the cameras?” He nodded his head toward the video guys across the room. “Be careful what you say. They catch everything. They’ve got to make the best TV.”
“Did someone already interview you?” Linny asked.
She was glad when he answered, “Not yet. I see some other guys talking to them but I’m going to wait. It’s almost my turn.” He pointed toward a set of double doors. At that moment they opened and a man in plaid pants emerged, unsmiling, carrying a contraption that appeared to be made up of small wheels. “Guess he got the reject too. So far that’s everyone except two people.” He looked back at the papers in his hand. Linny could see English and Vietnamese words mixed together, with underlines and exclamation points.
“We’ve been here about three hours,” Tom said.
Mr. Luong had always claimed independence, saying no one could boss him or tell him what to do, but in truth, people were always helping him. Even when he and Mrs. Luong fought she still left meals for him and kept the rice cooker on warm. She made sure the basement bathroom was stocked with enough toilet paper and sometimes she left the newspaper leaning against the door for him. And how many times had she, Linny, and Van gone to the stairwell to listen for music? If the telltale Vietnamese folk and opera songs were playing, they knew Mr. Luong would be at work in his studio, which meant he couldn’t be disturbed. They had flowed around him, treated him like a stubborn rock in a river. When late at night Mrs. Luong would sometimes awaken, frightened by the sound of explosions and fistfights playing out on the basement TV, she rarely told her husband to turn the volume down. Epic action movies were what he liked, disaster films, the more outlandish the better, and Linny and Van had watched them too. Even now Van was still sending him checks, and they both still traveled back home to clean up the house and look in on him. For all of his independence, Mr. Luong needed many people in his life.
Van, looking restless, checked her watch and excused herself. “I’ll be back,” she said to Mr. Luong before he could object.
Tom caught up Linny on how many people had gone to and from the audition area. Mr. Luong fidgeted, shifting his legs and reaching into his coat pocket as if he’d forgotten something important there. It took a while for Linny to understand: this was as important to him as citizenship, the first time he had truly struck free of his own basement. It was a moment of exposure, and Linny hadn’t even considered that until now.
“So what do you get if you win?” she asked, wanting to encourage him in some way.
“Being famous and having a hundred thousand dollars,” he answered. “That’s a lot of commitment.”
Someone flung open the double doors and yelled, “Number three-oh-six!”
A man with a layer of sweat on his bald head leaped to his feet. He had a giant metal case that looked like it held a trombone.
“He looks sick,” Mr. Luong said. Then, “I wish we didn’t wait so long.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Linny said, though she didn’t manage to make the words sound convincing. Was that all she could come up with? “I think your inventions are great. I use the Luong Arm all the time.”
Her father’s face swung toward her. “You do?”
“Yeah,” Linny said, though it wasn’t true. “And there are tons of short people out there.”
“Of course. But don’t say anything too loud. I don’t want anyone to steal the idea. Where your sister go?”
A few minutes later the sweaty bald guy burst into the room and shouted, “I’m going to Las Vegas!” His family started shrieking and the camera guys moved in. Even Mr. Luong looked excited.
“Now it’s finally like TV,” he said with satisfaction. “Where’s Van? Linh, go get her.”
“I’m sure she’ll be back.”
“Go get her.”
So Linny did as she was told and wandered out into the hallway, where Van, apparently, had been all along. She was leaning against the low windowsill, her arms crossed, backed by a view of long stretches of parking garage.
“You’re missing all the excitement. Some guy just got the green light for the next round. He’s all in a lather.”
Van didn’t crack a smile. “Did Dad tell you to go fetch me?”
“Of course he did. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What do you mean, what’s wrong with me?”
Linny had momentarily forgotten. “Sorry,” she said. While Van stared into space, Linny went on, “I thought you were doing a good thing. Taking out your half of the money?”
“It’s an aggressive action.”
“You should have taken all of it.”
“He might file now, after this.”
“File for divorce? Why don’t you do it first?” Linny couldn’t believe that her sister, in spite of everything that had happened, still seemed not to grasp the state of her marriage. It gave Linny a strange sense of having changed places, of having become the older sister.
“You don’t understand the way Miles works.” Van opened her purse and let the magnetic closure snap it shut again. She did this two, three times.
“You know what I think of him. He’s a phony. One of those I’m-so-self-aware Asian American guys.”
“Actually, he’s an optimist, even if that seems phony to you.”
“I can’t believe you’re defending him.”
“It was a mistake to follow him.”
“Where is this coming from?” Linny leaned against the windowsill too, lowering her voice as two men rode up the escalator and headed toward the Oakland Room. They didn’t look like inventors—more like Gary types, the kind who did vague finance work. One of them turned to stare at Linny and Van and when Linny looked back he gave a little smile.
“Jesus Christ,” Van said, not missing a thing. “You’re like Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls.”
Linny laughed. “I love that show.”
“I know. We used to watch it when we were kids.”
“He was looking at both of us, by the way. If you pay attention, it’s not hard to see what guys are thinking. Most of the time they’re pretty transparent.” Van emitted a little scoffing noise, the kind their mother used to make. “It’s true,” Linny insisted, though she didn’t have the exact words to explain it to her sister. Maybe it took years of practice, years of gauging the expressions of interest that flickered over a guy’s face. “Haven’t you ever played the Asian card, just for fun?”
Van looked disgusted.
“You know how there are these white guys with Asian fetishes.” Linny blushed, thinking of Pren and Gary. She knew she should shut up but she kept going. “You can manipulate them. For fun. Use that fetishizing against them.”
“This is just—” Van uncrossed her arms, letting her hands fly out. “Absurd.”
“You have to know how to keep the power.”
“It’s always a little game for you,” Van burst out. “If it’s not Tom, it’s someone else. If it’s not someone else, it’s yet another someone else. It’s not like that for everyone.”
And that was when Linny finally began to understand: her sister thought she was losing a life, not just a husband. Linny had been so fixed on her own dislike of Miles that she hadn’t truly considered that maybe the continuity of Van’s days had depended on having him there, directing the next turn, the next event.
Linny’s mind floated back to Tom in the waiting room, and what would happen between them from here. Soon he would visit her in Chicago, hurry up the three flights of stairs to where Gary had stood not so long ago, surveying her unmade bed.
It wasn’t Tom, she realized, whom she had to tell about Gary and Pren. It was Van.
So she said it. “I just broke things off with a married guy.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Van exploded. She pushed herself away from the windowsill, from Linny’s proximity. “Are you trying to be smug? Are you trying to rub it in?”
“No! I was trying to tell you something else. To reciprocate.”
“You’re messed up.”
Linny had never heard such trembling anger, such hurt, in her sister’s voice. She wanted to lie to her, cover up what she’d said, smooth things out. But she couldn’t. The thin veil that had bound them closer together these past few weeks was dissolving.
“It’s been over for a while,” she explained hurriedly, feeling like a little girl again, no longer the older sister. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”
But Van just got madder. “I don’t want to hear it. There you were, acting all self-righteous to Miles. How can you call him a hypocrite? How can you have all these accusations about Nancy Bao when you’re worse than she is? I don’t have to stay around for this.”
She ran to the escalator. Linny, following, wanted to respond in full—I’m not Grace, Grace is not me, I’m not Nancy Bao; the situations are different—but her voice faltered. A South Indian couple passed them on the up escalator and she didn’t want them to hear. The woman, wearing a brilliant turquoise outfit, nonetheless stared right into Linny’s eyes as if discerning the entire story.
“You can’t leave. Dad hasn’t had his audition yet,” Linny called after Van as the escalator began to flatten out to the first floor.
“I don’t care.”
“He won’t understand.”
“Why don’t you take care of things for a change?”
Van didn’t even glance over her shoulder as she spoke. She kept walking, not the slightest hesitation in her step as she reached the row of revolving doors.
Upstairs, Linny took a minute to calm herself before going back into the Oakland Room.
“Where’ve you been?” her father demanded, getting up from his chair so fast he dropped his notes. “Where’s Van?”
“She had to go.” Linny retrieved the notes for him, noticing that one page had the Randy Newman line written in large print and underlined. Was he going to incorporate that in his audition somehow?
“Go where? I got to go in that room.”
Tom, worried, said, “Is everything okay?”
Linny nodded as the headset guy popped into the waiting area and shouted her father’s number.
“I told you,” he said to Linny. Grabbing hold of the box that held the Luong Arm and Eye, he made a move toward the door, then stopped. He looked so nervous that Linny felt afraid for him. “I need to get all this in there,” he muttered.
“I’ve got the ladder,” Tom said.
Linny gathered up his notes and the suitcase, which was much heavier than she’d expected. “What’s in here?” she whispered to her father.
“Dictionary,” he said. “For showing off the Luong Arm.”
The guy with the headset pointed at them. “Time’s a-wasting. Let’s go.”
Linny and Tom ended up going into the audition room with Mr. Luong. Three bored-faced judges, all men, sat behind a long table, surrounded by cameras. Mr. Luong put his inventions on the desk set in the middle of the room and arranged the suitcase and ladder nearby. In the background, a huge screen printed with the block-lettered logo for Tomorrow’s Great Inventor loomed.
“Who’s the one trying out here?” demanded one of the judges, a bearded man with wiry glasses who was clearly the leader. His blue shirt had four distracting flap pockets.
“Me,” Mr. Luong said. His voice seemed to shrink as he uttered the one syllable, and in that moment Linny knew: she could not leave him there.
“We’re the assistants,” she said to the row of judges. “Can we stay?” Remembering that they were men, she smiled at them.
The lead judge waved Linny and Tom away to the corner, out of the view of the cameras. “Let’s get to it,” he said impatiently, looking back to Mr. Luong. “Show us what you got.”
Mr. Luong stood behind the desk. He tried to strike a shoulders-back posture, keeping his hands folded in front of him, and to Linny he looked like a kid in the final anxious round of a spelling bee.
“My name,” he started, squinting at the camera lights, “is Dinh Luong. I am inventing products in Michigan and the United States and I am a U.S. citizen. I have three products today to show for short people in the United States and America. Some people say short people are no reason to live, but I say short people have many reasons for becoming happy.”
“Show us what you’re referring to,” one of the other judges interjected. He was the shorter one, thin and intense-looking. The third judge, the only one wearing a suit, laughed.
Mr. Luong fumbled with the box to reveal the Luong Arm. “This is my Luong Arm,” he said. “It’s very useful. I can demonstrate on many things how useful it is. All my inventions are very useful. I have the Luong Arm which is right here. Here I also have the Luong Eye and then I have the Luong Wall. So I have a big three, which is important.”
Linny cringed at his deteriorating English and thickening accent, the way he was even now falling into an embarrassing Mr. Miyagi-like cadence. His eyes darted from camera to camera. For once in his life, perhaps the only time in his life, he was attempting to make good on two decades of promises; he was trying to stand in front of that panel of judges and pitch his work, let it go forth to critics, the world, when Linny and Van had never truly thought he could. And he was going to blow it all with his unsteady English.
“Listen, man, I can hardly understand you,” the short judge said. “Can either of you?”
The lead judge shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t think this is going to happen.”
Linny made herself walk to the center of the room, right in front of her father, under the hot lights of the cameras. She said, “Let me explain. May I? There are three great inventions here, all designed to help short people make their lives a little easier. One is a Luong Arm, that can get things that are out of reach; another is called the Luong Eye, to help people see in a crowd; and the third is called the Luong Wall, which is basically a set of shelves that rise and lower with a remote control. All of these make it easier for short people to get what they need, or to have whatever they need come to them.” The descriptions flowed with surprising ease, and when she glanced at Tom he nodded.
“Not bad,” the short judge said. “Are you the translator?”
Linny glanced at Tom again, who gave her an encouraging smile. She didn’t dare check her father’s reaction when she said, “Yes. I’ll translate.”
The next few minutes blurred together so that later Linny wouldn’t be able to remember what she’d said about the inventions. She only knew that her father moved away from the desk a little, not even once jumping in to add to her speech. She took over the whole thing.
Linny rushed through the description of the Luong Wall. She was more nervous about the thought of her father standing where she couldn’t see him, folding his arms, than she was about the presence of the cameras.
“Let me demonstrate the Luong Eye,” Linny said, bringing it to the judges’ table. “You look into the viewfinder here, but the image you get is from up there. The height is adjustable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I could see over people’s heads in a crowd. Plus, it can collapse to fit into a handbag. It’s very convenient.” She realized this was true, though she had hardly ever used the Eye.
“Like a periscope,” the short one said, testing it out. “Not the most necessary thing in the world, and a little unwieldy, but it seems to work okay. A decent gadget.”
When Linny pulled the Luong Arm out of its box she realized it was a different, newer version from the last one her father had given her. This one had rubber grips and was made of a lighter material. “The Luong Arm is my father’s original invention. As any short person knows, it can be difficult to reach things sometimes. Actually, it can be difficult even if you aren’t short. The Luong Arm solves those problems.”
“What do you use that for besides pulling something off a shelf?” the head judge asked.
Linny’s mind raced. “You could use it to clean the gutters, or hang a painting, or change a lightbulb. You could use it to grab a cat out of a tree.”
The judges laughed. “Okay,” the short guy said. “Show us what it can do.”
When Linny turned back to the desk she saw that her father had moved the ladder forward and positioned a thick dictionary—Van’s, from high school, its gold tabs worn down with use—upright on the very top. Linny had never used the Luong Arm to grab anything more substantial than a bag of potato chips, and she wondered how many times her father had rehearsed this demonstration. She could see him finding the dictionary in Van’s room and placing it on the Wall as a challenge, then picking up the Luong Arm, willing it to take hold.
Linny slipped her hand through the brace and secured it with the Velcro strap. Aiming the wand of the Luong Arm toward the dictionary, she secured its jaws around the wide spine of the book. She couldn’t help imagining the thin metal snapping under so much weight, sending the dictionary thudding to the floor. But as she drew the Arm back it felt like a taut wire, the dictionary’s solid mass—all those bound pages, all those words her father would never learn—becoming almost featherlike as she set it onto the desk.
“That’s the Luong Arm,” she said to the judges, as pleased and surprised as she had been the first time her father had shown her the invention and Linny had been certain she had inspired it.
She couldn’t help smiling at her father, but his mouth was set in such a way to indicate any number of emotions—anger, betrayal, satisfaction, relief? As Linny turned back to the judges, who said they were impressed by what they’d seen, the peripheral vision of her father made her wonder how he would ever view her again.
When the judges invited them, with Linny as the presenter, they emphasized, to the second round of the competition, next month in Las Vegas, her father stood so still that the short judge called out, “Don’t get so excited there, buddy!” Linny made a show of thanking the judges, going up to shake their hands, while her father silently gathered the Arm and Eye back in their box, refusing even to look at Tom.
The three of them should have been among the few cheering as they left the audition room. Linny actually did feel like celebrating, and Tom seemed to share the feeling, but Mr. Luong stormed toward the exit.
The camera guys zeroed in on them.
“These stupid TV people,” Dinh Luong finally spat out as he reached the hallway. “They’re all about the TV. My friends warn me. They said it. Watch out for the TV people. Well, they can take their Las Vegas somewhere else.”
“Dad, I’m sorry,” Linny said. “But it did go well. You made it to the next round.” He snorted at that and she didn’t want to say more, to have it preserved on film.
Her father set the box with the Luong Arm on the floor near the escalators. He looked flustered and confused. A camera guy zoomed in on his face.
“Could you say what you said again?” he asked. “Tell us what you’re feeling.”
Mr. Luong glowered at him. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he announced.
Immediately the camera pointed toward Linny and Tom.
“Is that your father, miss?” the guy prompted. “How do you feel right now? How do you think he’s feeling right now? Just talk into the camera—say whatever you like.”
“Yes,” was all Linny said. “That’s my father.”
Mr. Luong was quiet all the way to the parking garage. After securing the ladder in the back of his truck, he got in and rolled down the windows; he preferred manual ones, in case, he said, there was an accident that landed him in water. “What we waiting for? Where’s Van? I want to go home.”
“We can’t go home yet,” Linny said.
“We’re going. I go.”
“We have to find Van. Van’s lost.”
“What?” Mr. Luong opened the door and started to get out of the truck as if he meant business. Then he gave a scornful wave and stayed where he was.
Linny handed her car keys to Tom. “I’m pretty sure she went back to Ann Arbor. Will you follow us? My car’s on level E, orange. Look for an old teal-colored Toyota. If you get lost, call me.”
Tom took the keys. “Listen,” he said. “It was good you jumped in. He’ll see that eventually.”
“Thanks,” Linny said. “You know how he is.” And she was startled to think that it was true.
Linny opened the door on the driver’s side of her father’s truck. “Will you let me drive?”
“No way. You already do a lot today.”
“I’m sorry, Dad, but with the way you’re acting you’re liable to run off the road.”
Mr. Luong sputtered at this, but slid into the passenger seat.
Driving to Ann Arbor, she ventured to say, “In a way, it all worked out. The judges liked your inventions.”
“They’re my inventions.”
“I know they are. And they’re good. You got invited to Las Vegas! It’s a chance at the hundred-thousand-dollar prize.”
Her father stared out the window. They were speeding past the gigantic Uniroyal tire that had once been a Ferris-wheel exhibition, perched at the edge of the battered expressway. Linny guessed that he was thinking about how the judges had made a point of congratulating her on the presentation.
“I’m not going,” was all he said.
As they drove by the Detroit Metro Airport, planes swooping in overhead, Linny tried again. “I was only trying to help.”
“You go help yourself then!” her father burst out. “You do go do that! Why don’t you go finish college!”
It was the retort both he and Van would never give up.
“I’ll finish college if you go to Las Vegas,” she said. “I don’t know what you did with that new Luong Arm, but that dictionary didn’t even feel heavy. It was pretty amazing.”
“Of course it works good.” His annoyance made Linny feel guilty all over again, reminding her that she hadn’t, for most of her life, believed his inventions would have a life outside their house.
He took his cell phone out of his pocket and switched it on. When it rang a moment later Linny recognized the loud voice of Rich Bao. Her father started talking a swift stream of Vietnamese and Linny, comprehending none of it, settled back in her seat. She thought ahead to how angry Van would be when they got to her house. She thought about Tom, and how long she could keep him with her before he had to take her father back to Wrightville. In her rearview mirror she saw him driving her car, keeping up, staying in the same lane. She wished she were in the car with him. They would turn down the radio and talk the whole way; it would be just the beginning of the conversation. Linny would say I have so much to tell you.