“Our men need our support,” Mrs. Hoa said. “And we need good citizens like yourself to contribute.”
My mother rubbed one ankle against the other, her -nylons scratching. A seam had opened behind her knee, but my mother would keep wearing the same hose until the run nipped at her heels. “I wish I could help, Mrs. Hoa, but times are hard,” my mother said. “Our customers are cutting back on everything, what with the recession and the gas prices. And our daughter’s in college. Her tuition is like a down payment on a house every year.”
“I struggle making ends meet, too.” Mrs. Hoa unclasped and clasped the silver latch on her purse. A thin gold band encircled her ring finger, and the red enamel on her nails was as polished and glossy as a new car’s paint. “But people talk. Did you hear about Mrs. Binh? People say she’s a Communist sympathizer, and all because she’s too cheap to give anything. There’s even talk of boycotting her store.”
My mother knew Mrs. Binh, owner of Les Amis Beauty Salon a few blocks farther west downtown, but changed the topic to the steamy June weather and the price of gold. Mrs. Hoa agreed about the temperature, smiling and displaying a formidable wall of teeth. She glanced at me before leaving my mother with this: “Think about it, dear. Taking back our homeland is a noble cause for which we should all be proud to fight.”
“Idiot,” my mother muttered after Mrs. Hoa was gone. As we drove home that evening along Tenth Street, my mother recounted the episode to my father, who had been too busy at his own register to overhear the conversation. When she mentioned the guerrillas, I imagined them to be unshaven, mosquito-bitten men with matted hair wearing ragged tiger-stripe fatigues; living on rainwater, wild boar, and aphids; practicing hand-to-hand combat skills by bayoneting jackfruit. From the backseat, I said, “How much are you giving Mrs. Hoa?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “It’s extortion.”
“But they’re fighting the Communists,” I said. Also known as Chinese and North Koreans, with Cubans and Sandinistas threatening infiltration and invasion from south of our border, as President Reagan explained on World News Tonight. “Shouldn’t we help them?”
“The war’s over.” My mother sounded tired. “There’s no fighting it again.”
I was outraged, for Mrs. Hoa’s appearance proved the war was not over, in that she had somehow followed us from the old Saigon to the new one. What was more, I had read Newsweek in the dentist’s office and knew we were in the midst of an epic battle against the evil empire of the Soviet Union. But if I was unhappy with my mother’s response, I was even more upset with my father’s.
“The war may be over,” he said, wiggling his little finger in his ear, “but paying a little hush money would make our lives a lot easier.”
My mother said nothing, merely drumming her fingers on the armrest. I knew she would have her way with my father, a bald man with the deliberate moves and patient eyes of a turtle. Late that night, hurrying from the kitchen to my room with a glass of water, I heard my mother working to persuade him behind their closed door. There was no time to eavesdrop. We had recently read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in Ms. Korman’s class, and the fear of seeing someone undead in the dark hallway made me rush past their door, just as my mother said, “I’ve dealt with worse than her.”