It was eight thirty when my mother parked the car in Mrs. Hoa’s driveway, behind the Datsun. Mrs. Hoa answered the door wearing an orange tank top and a pair of shorts in a purple floral print. Her hair was pinned back in a bun and her face, bereft of mascara, lipstick, or foundation was creviced, pitted, and cracked—it belonged to a woman years older. Her small breasts were no bigger than those of Emmy Tsuchida, and a map of varicose veins on her skinny thighs and shins led south to gnarled toes, the yellowing nails spotted with red dabs of chipped polish.
“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Hoa said.
“I want to speak to you,” my mother said. “Aren’t you going to invite us in?”
Mrs. Hoa hesitated and then stepped back begrudgingly. We took off our shoes and picked our way past the loafers, sneakers, pumps, and flip-flops jammed around the door. Racks on wheels, crammed with hangers for girls’ clothes, hid the window, while a pair of bunk beds ran along two walls of the living room. In the center was a long folding table, stacked with notebooks and textbooks.
“We’re having dinner,” Mrs. Hoa said. Other voices rang from the dining room. An aerosol of grease clung to the air, along with the warm, wet sock odor of cooked rice. “Have you eaten yet?”
“Yes.” If my mother was surprised at Mrs. Hoa’s politeness, she didn’t show it. “I’d like to talk in private.”
Mrs. Hoa shrugged and led us past the dining room. At the packed table sat eight or nine people with heads turned our way, little girls with bowl cuts, a quartet of grandparents, and a man and woman around my mother’s age, the shadows under their eyes so pronounced they looked as if someone had punched them again and again. Just as crowded was Mrs. Hoa’s bedroom, the first one down the hall. An industrial steel-frame table, a sewing machine fastened to it, dominated the middle of the room, while the velvet ao dai and the white jacket and pants hung from the bunk bed, blocking the window. Mrs. Hoa sat on the only chair, behind the sewing machine, and said, “What do you want?”
My mother glanced at the closet, doors removed to reveal hand-built pine shelves stacked with bolts of silk and cotton. One of the two clothing racks behind Mrs. Hoa was hung with everyday clothing—women’s slacks and blouses, men’s suits and dress shirts—while the other was hung with uniforms, olive-green fatigues and camouflage outfits patterned with blotches of brown, black, and green in varying shades, the same kind issued to the marines who had liberated Grenada not long ago. My mother said, “You tailor uniforms for the soldiers?”
“American sizes are too large for Vietnamese men and the proportions aren’t right. Plus the men want their names sewn on, and their ranks and units.” Mrs. Hoa reached under the sewing table and lifted a cardboard box, and when we leaned over the table to peek inside, we saw plastic sandwich bags filled with chevrons and the colorful badges of Vietnamese units. “Some of these uniforms are for the guerrilla army in Thailand, but others are for our men here.”
I wondered if she meant the rumored secret front, or the men my father’s age and younger that I saw at Tet festivals, veterans of the vanquished South Vietnamese army who welcomed the New Year by wearing military uniforms and checking tickets at the fairgrounds where the festivals happened.
“Your husband’s a soldier?” my mother said.
“He’s a commando. The CIA parachuted him into the north in 1963. I haven’t heard from him since.” Mrs. Hoa spoke without any change in inflection, clutching the box to her chest. “The Americans sent my younger son’s division to Laos in 1972. He never returned. As for my eldest son, he was in the army, too. The Communists killed him. I buried him in Bien Hoa in 1969. My daughter wrote to tell me the Communists scratched the eyes out of the picture on his grave.”
My mother was silent, fingering a tiger-stripe camouflage jacket hanging from the rack. At last, she said, “I’m sorry to hear about your husband and your sons.”
“Sorry for what?” Mrs. Hoa’s voice was shrill. “Whoever said my husband was dead? No one saw him die. No one saw my youngest son die, either. They’re alive, and no one like you is going to tell me otherwise.”
I studied the patterns in the beige carpet, shapes of a frog and a tree, trapped there along with odors of garlic and sesame, sweat and moisturizer. My mother broke the silence by opening her purse and digging inside. From the crumpling of paper, I knew she was opening the envelope with the day’s cash. She extracted two hundred-dollar bills and laid them on the sewing table in front of Mrs. Hoa, smoothing the face of Benjamin Franklin on each bill, the same way she ran her palm over my hair before entering church.