Absolution, p.2
Absolution, page 2
To love the distance I had traveled and all the strangeness—some of it beautiful, some of it startling—that, up until now, I thought, I’d been seeing as if from the corner of my eye.
I looked again at the lovely ao dai hanging on the screen. So simple and elegant, and sensible, too—no need for panty girdle and garters when you dressed like this. No need either for face powder and lipstick, rollers and hair spray, when you had the smooth skin and beautiful hair of the Vietnamese girls.
No need for the gloved handshake, breath held to convey a steady confidence, when you can instead, more authentically, simply bow your head and lower your eyes.
No taking control of any mishap at your party with a jaunty napkin flourish; no sunburned athleticism that can make a question like “Do you play tennis?” seem the beginning of a moral assessment, if you can whisper, simply, “All will be well” and then move out of the room like a pale leaf stirred by a breeze.
I had worked myself into a good state of anti-Americanism when I heard my tennis-playing nemesis enter the room, asking, “Is she here?”
I stood, pulled the kimono firmly closed, and stepped from behind the screen.
There she was. She let out a laugh when she saw me—a kind of surprised guffaw that she then pretended to smother—and quickly replaced her amusement at the sight of me with contrition.
“I am so sorry,” she said. The little girl with the Barbie doll was in her wake. “Truly. How awful. I hope your dress isn’t ruined.”
I saw her glance through the window behind the sewing machine and turned to see, through the open blinds, that my dress and my slip and my bra were hanging in the bright sun in the drying yard just outside the window. I felt at some further disadvantage that this woman, this Charlene, had seen these things first, before I even knew where they’d gone.
“I hope you’ll let me buy you a new one if it’s stained. Or better yet”—she turned, just as the house girl came back into the room, a small tray with a glass of lemonade in her hands—“we’ll get Lily here to make another one for you. An exact replica. She’s a marvelous seamstress.”
The girl smiled, placed the tray on the cutting table, and indicated a small settee. “Will you stay?” she asked, and my very American friend shook her head.
“No, dear. I’ve got to get back to the gathering.” She turned to me again. “I’ve sent the baby home with one of the girls. I am just so sorry,” but in a jolly way that clearly conveyed that her guilt about the incident in no way diminished her fondness for herself. “It was stupid of me to bring him. Kent so wanted to show him off. I thought that if I fed him before we came, he’d sleep through the afternoon, but I’m afraid, with this heat.” She shrugged. “Well, it was stupid of me. And now I’ve ruined this lovely party for you.”
It was really a triumph, the many things she had accomplished in so short an appearance. She had laughed at me—acknowledging that this was the most honest response to seeing me, braless and shoeless, in a pink kimono—and then smothered the laughter with the better angel of her good nature, her pity. She had established herself as an insider here—she knew the servant girl by name, knew she was a marvelous seamstress—and so revealed me as the novice, the stranger. She proved herself a devoted wife to her husband, the doting father, and she finished me off by implying that I’d come not because I understood that these gatherings were how things got done in Saigon, but because I wanted a lovely party.
She was saying something in rapid French to Lily. And then she turned to me again. “You just have to allow me to replace it if the stain doesn’t come out,” she said, as if I had already insisted on refusing her offer.
“It will be fine,” Lily said in careful English. “It will be okay.”
“I am so glad,” Charlene said, as if the entire incident had come to a happy conclusion. “You’ll be back outside in no time.” And then her eyes went to the cocktail dress hanging from the screen behind me. I saw a ferocious curiosity, perhaps envy. “Isn’t that lovely? For Mrs. Case?”
Lily ducked her head demurely. “For the daughter,” she said.
“Of course. So youthful.” She turned to her own daughter. “Isn’t it lovely, Rainey?”
The girl nodded. “I love the color.”
“Really fabulous,” Charlene said, without taking her eyes from the dress. Without any effort to engage anyone else in the conversation. In fact, mother and child might suddenly have been alone in the room.
They both reached out to touch the fabric, to peek beneath the hem to the tulle underskirt. A cousin’s wedding was mentioned. How perfect for the season, this shade of green. Eventually, Charlene shook herself as if from a dream and said, “Well, I must get back. Kent will be frantic.” She turned to leave.
But you remained, the Barbie in the crook of your arm, your little patent leather pocketbook hanging from your elbow.
Charlene seemed hardly to pause as she said, “Oh, yes. Rainey went out to the car when we sent the baby home, to fetch some doll clothes. She wanted to show you.” She dropped her brown, freckled shoulders, expressing as she did her polite reluctance to ask this, which was, her smile also conveyed, really a very small favor. “Would you mind terribly? While you’re back here, would you mind if she showed you these few things? She’s madly bored outside.”
“No,” I said, “of course. I’d love to see them.” The fact that this was true made my tone no less false.
“All right, darling,” Charlene said to the child. “Don’t make a burden of yourself. Come out to the garden and find Mommy when you’re finished.”
And now I was reduced to a child’s playmate.
Lily followed her out, and you and I sat side by side on the settee.
I have to admit, the clothes were lovely. Tiny zippers and snaps, even mother-of-pearl buttons. You drew three small dresses from your purse and laid them out between us. With what I saw as your mother’s humorless efficiency, you also consulted the little Barbie catalogue you had shown me earlier, confirming for me that each dress was a legitimate replica of the one illustrated and described.
And then, as if we had been playmates all our lives, you asked me, “Which one do you want her to try on?”
I selected a long-sleeved sheath with a dark blue sash and saw immediately that I had not chosen wisely.
“Don’t you think she’ll be warm in that? With this heat?”
You were swinging your legs idly. There was a Band-Aid on your plump knee. I wondered if you had fallen on the tennis court.
“Good point,” I said, and selected instead a sleeveless white dress printed with small roses.
As you were undressing the doll, Lily returned with another glass of lemonade. I heard the mother’s voice again as you said, “Thank you so much. Can you place it over there, please,” indicating the sewing table.
Lily did so, obediently, and then returned to us, shyly intrigued, I could tell, by the elegant little clothes.
I handed her the rejected choice, the long-sleeved dress, to examine. Lily studied the seams, the tiny snaps. When the doll was dressed in her new, cooler outfit, Lily put out her hand and you asked—your condescension diluted with childish generosity—“Would you like to look see?”
“Please,” Lily said. “Very pretty.” She turned the doll over in her hands once or twice, Barbie’s blond ponytail swinging, and then she measured it against her palm. She was smiling. Her front tooth was chipped. She had a slight overbite.
She nodded. “I’ll make you something,” she said.
Here it all starts to feel like a fairy tale, in recollection. Me in that fragrant silk kimono and you in your golden garden-party dress, looking on as Lily carried the doll to the sewing table and found a length of white silk and a scissors—in recollection they were comically large, unwieldy scissors—and measured and cut and measured again. Then we were behind her at the ancient black sewing machine. The smell of the motor, a touch of warmed rubber, of oil. The industrious humming. Another recollection from my own childhood.
Beyond Lily’s bowed head there was the bright drying yard, my clothes unmoving in the sun.
A fairy tale: the elves and the shoemaker or Cinderella before the ball. Lily’s quick and homely little hands, her dark head bowed as she hand-stitched the final touches. You quiet beside me. At one point I felt for sure you were holding your breath.
And then, with an elfin grin—I’m sorry if that sounds like a caricature, but that’s how it struck me at the time: elfin—Lily held up the perfect little ao dai—the slim white pants, the long overdress.
“Oh my gosh,” you cried.
“Try on,” Lily said.
It was quite remarkable, magical even. How beautifully the clothes fit the little doll. You were beside yourself, literally dancing with thank yous and mercis and cam on bans until you finally added—as if you understood how insufficient the words were to your joy—“Number one dress for Barbie!”
“Something,” Lily said calmly. “To take home.” And then she left us.
You, of course, wanted to show your mother. You hurriedly packed the doll’s dresses into your purse. And then—you were a well-raised child—paused to ask if I wanted you to wait with me. “I don’t mind,” you added, but weakly.
I told you no, of course. Said I’d be right out to the party, and watched you fly from the room, the doll’s ponytail swinging.
Lily returned with my clothes not long after, and although, on close examination, I could see a pale water line on the silk lining, the linen front was utterly restored. I thanked her. Called her—I was trying out some of your mother’s self-confidence— “a marvel.”
Lily bowed her head modestly. But there was some satisfaction in her demeanor, I thought. She knew I had been given a glimpse of her gifts.
“My name,” she said sweetly, laughter in her eyes, “is Ly.” She drew in the air. “L, Y. Just Ly.”
* * *
WHEN I RETURNED TO THE PARTY in the garden, an agreement seemed to have been made that everyone there would pretend I’d never left. Even our hostess only briefly glanced at me as I edged past her in the crowd. She wore a warm smile, of course, but it conveyed nothing. I was looking for my husband, could not find him, and once again felt the flush of embarrassment, incompetence.
There was little I dreaded more than finding myself unengaged, conversation-less, solitary, at one of these gatherings. I had nightmares about this: standing alone in the midst of a happy crowd of elegant and worldly-wise Westerners, my voice paralyzed, my mouth benumbed, my teeth sealed. Humiliated. Inconsequential.
I saw you and your mother chatting with a small group of women. One of them was holding the Barbie, turning it over in her hands as Lily had done, examining the lovely ao dai. I resisted the impulse to use you, my little friend—my only friend, I felt at that moment—as an excuse to end my awkward isolation, but with no alternatives available—all the other groups of chatting Americans seemed impenetrable, my husband was nowhere to be found—I headed toward you anyway.
The trick in walking unaccompanied through these parties was to pretend there was someone just over there to whom you simply must speak …
The fear, of course, was that I’d get to the end of the room or the hall or the courtyard and find myself alone and unengaged still … my nose bumping against the wall.
Nearing Charlene and her crowd with that wholly false look of determination on my face, I was fully prepared to walk past them.
But Charlene reached out. She drew me into the circle. “Here she is,” she said, as if they’d all been awaiting my return. I braced myself to hear her recite some comic version of my mishap with the baby. These girls from wealth, I also knew, were always willing to welcome you into their cliques if you were willing to be a hapless sidekick.
But what she said was “It was Mrs. Kelly’s idea. She’s been working with Lily. Don’t you think it’s perfect?”
The woman who was holding the doll, a broad-shouldered woman, perhaps forty, in a bright pink sundress too youthful for her, looked at me, assessing. “How much are you charging?” she asked.
Charlene turned to me—I might say she turned on me, her face to mine, smothering my confusion at the question with a blanket of girlhood camaraderie. “I don’t know,” she said, speaking into my eyes. Hers seemed to be flashing at the moment. “What did we decide to charge? Five dollars, did we say?”
“For a little doll outfit?” the woman in pink asked.
At a loss, I said—I assure you, I still had no idea what was going on—“They charge five dollars for the wedding dress.”
“And this is handmade,” Charlene added. I felt her slip her fingers under my elbow. She pulled me closer. We were suddenly, all unaccountably, a united front; for or against what I still had no idea. But I confess to some satisfaction in knowing I had won her over, if that’s what I’d done. It was another inborn talent of these privileged girls: they were irresistible, much as you hated them.
“Handmade and utterly unique,” she said. “Send these home to your girls in McLean and they’ll be the toast of the Barbie set.”
The pink lady from McLean turned the doll over in her hands. I could feel you growing anxious beside me. “I’ll have to order three,” the woman said. And paused. “Make it five. My brother’s girls as well. Does it come in other colors?”
Charlene grinned. “Absolutely.” She had the smallest, straightest, whitest teeth I had ever seen. There was a flatness to her tanned and freckled face that I was just beginning to notice. It was part of her confidence, somehow, her air of forging ahead, getting done whatever needed to be done; a face pressed to the glass with the assuredness that the glass would always give way.
But also something feral, as I said, fox-like, not only in her determined reddish hairline but in the sprouted thickness of her well-groomed eyebrows. The look of something on the hunt. A face utterly incapable of aligning itself into any expression that might indicate introspection or self-doubt.
Once again, she placed that face in front of mine. “You’ll talk to Lily about this, yes?” she asked, and then quickly turned to the others. Had I been another kind of girl, one who knew how to claim an advantage, I would have corrected her—“It’s just Ly.” But I didn’t.
“Lily can easily turn out five,” Charlene was saying, “Eight, actually. Peg Smith wants three.”
And then she said, “Who else?” And lifted her short nose to survey the party. Still holding my arm—she had managed to move me closer to her, we were joined at the hip—she called out to another wife, a petite blonde in a lime green shift, a maple syrup tan, who moved toward us as if summoned. The women she had been chatting with followed.
“Have you ladies seen this?” Charlene asked, and took the doll from the McLean woman’s hands, not rudely exactly, but with the authoritative air of a matron among small children. “Any little girls in your lives who play with Barbie dolls? We’ve got a fundraiser going.”
In only a few minutes, it seemed, she had requests for twenty outfits. Five dollars apiece. The lime green blonde reached into her purse to pay but Charlene touched her arm. “On delivery,” she said. “American dollars only.”
Another asked Charlene if she should be writing this down, and there was laughter all around. “Photographic memory,” she answered.
When any of them remarked on the cleverness of it all, this little fundraiser, Charlene pressed herself against my arm, and gave all the credit to me. Not her idea at all, she said. It was Mrs. Kelly here who saw the opportunity.
And then she introduced me to everyone, not merely as the young wife of a young engineer on loan to the navy but as the passionate fundraiser, the clever conduit to the talented locals.
And then there were just the two of us, you following along, making our way through the party.
I learned in a few efficient sentences that Charlene had started “a little group” of women who brought small gifts to the hospitals and the various orphanages—candy and crayons, baseballs, baby dolls—and she wanted to add something for the nurses and the parents, especially the grandparents, who were often at the children’s bedsides. Tea, chocolates, cigarettes would be nice. She had just begun looking for ways to raise some funds for this. And then Rainey appeared with the little outfit Lily had made—“Bingo,” Charlene said in my ear.
She added, matter-of-factly (need I tell you at this point that Charlene said everything matter-of-factly?), “I gave you the credit for the idea because everyone here is so tired of smarter-than-they-are me.”
* * *
WE WERE IN THE LIVING ROOM. And then through the kitchen where we found Lily—Ly—at the sink, breaking up a block of ice. Charlene disarmed her of the ice pick in the same way she had effortlessly taken the Barbie doll from Mrs. McLean, handing it to a startled boy in a white jacket who had just carried in a tray of stubby glasses. “Come,” she said to us all.
Back in the sewing room, the French was too quick for me, but the negotiation was clear enough. Lily showed Charlene a remnant of white silk—which Charlene, nodding, slipped into her purse, agreeing, I think, to buy her more. And then the spool of thin elastic that Lily had used for the waistband of the doll’s pants, a card of tiny hooks and eyes. I gathered Charlene would provide these as well.
Numbers were exchanged—how much fabric, how much thread, elastic. How much time it would take. How much Lily would be paid. I have no memory for numbers, but, as I recall, it came to maybe about a quarter—twenty-five cents for each outfit. Maybe less.
The poor girl was agreeing to it all, not reluctantly, pleasantly, eagerly, in fact, but with a kind of resignation that looked to me a little like grief. Every now and then, she glanced at you, as if taking a fond last look as she was being swept out to sea on the riptide of Charlene’s swift French and indomitable will.
