Cycle

by Jade Hidle

Pat Sajak taught her English. Vanna White taught her America. Vanna was the picture she took into the plastic surgeon’s office three nose jobs ago.

She is watching Wheel of Fortune now. The “Phrase” and “Before and After” categories are hard now that she does not have her children around to explain. The dog jumps up next to her on the couch and she tosses him some popcorn. He inhales it. “Fat boy,” she calls him and then gives him some more.

Her favorite newscaster interrupts Wheel to show her images of empty shelves and long lines for toilet paper, then footage of body bags in China. She surveys her pre-pandemic inventory and, the next morning, she covers her face with her sweater and goes to Costco to buy Pediasure and Spam and peanut butter in bulk. No need for toilet paper. She could go Viet Nam style, as she’d done for the first fifteen years of her life. Water is cleaner anyway, she thinks.

In Little Saigon, the siêu thị parking lot is full and no one wears masks. She buys pork shredded and dried to the texture of hair that she would sprinkle on rice. She loads up the rest of her cart with fruit. Her daughter once told her, “You know your mom is an immigrant if she says ‘I love you’ with fruit.”

She responded in English, “What you mean? You have fruit. Eat fruit. Simple. Nothing to do with how I got here.”

The girl rolled her eyes and that made her mother so mad she had to switch to their native language. “Your life is lucky. When I was your age, I had to eat--”

Her daughter interrupted: “Yes, Mẹ. I know, I know. You ate flower stems and bugs. Oh, and you never let me forget how someone stole your dog to eat too. Yes, I remember. You never let me forget.” Her daughter teared up, but she didn’t understand why the girl was crying when she was the one being attacked for having suffered and lived to tell the story.

*

One child had moved to the desert, the other to the beach. She had run out of excuses to go visit these kids who did not want to see her. She did not know what to do in one if she had no money to gamble, and the other’s ocean air made her joints curl and lock. The sea bore too many memories anyway.

She is the eldest of the family now, and her younger siblings had long lost their need for her care. Anyway, her abilities were limited to wiping faces and failed attempts at conversation that begin with her asking, “What’s wrong with you?” She always did things wrong.

At her mother’s funeral, the monks had asked her to place the bowls of food and water out. That was the eldest’s role. And she had messed it up by wailing at the coffin instead.

After grocery shopping, she drives to the temple where her mother’s photo is displayed on a communal altar, separate from the cemetery where her body is buried. She brings the photo gladiolas--her mother’s favorite--then prays incense, bows to Phật Bà and eats an orange the monks offer her from the tree. “Careful, child,” the monk warns as she tries to shuffle out of the temple with minimal contact. “They’re going around beating up our people because they think we brought the virus across the sea.”

Usually she was afraid that the spirits of the other dead in pictures would haunt or possess her. She’d heard stories. But now she is afraid that she would be put up there, in a photo that she didn’t choose, because someone killed her for bringing a virus into this country that she’d entered forty years ago.

And her children would surely get the funeral arrangements wrong because their Vietnamese was so poor. She’d tried to teach them, writing the lies their father had told them on a chalkboard and then having them recite and rewrite the vocabulary in new sentences. They were always so horrible. “No, no, no,” she’d correct. “Your father ăn cắp. Make the sound as sharp as the action is bad.” They mumbled a feeble attempt. She sighed. “The diacritics show you how to say it. How hard can it be?”

*

Back at home, all the doors locked and curtains drawn, she shares slices of Spam and spoonfuls of peanut butter with the dog. Despite, or maybe because of, the extra treats, the dog seems to know something has changed. He is barking more now, jumping at the back door begging to come in the house. The neighbors, now working from home, had already yelled “Shut up!” over the backyard fence.

She tears an onion skin-thin page of a one-a-day Chinese calendar from her wall. Today is not a good day for a haircut if you are born year of the rooster or dog, it reads. “Hmmm,” and she places it onto the pile. She counts the skins. Seventeen. Seventeen days in quarantine.

The next dawn, the newscaster tells her to stay home. She does. It must be airborne. They must be pumping it into the air, she thought. Same old government tricks. She texts this to her children and waits for a response. From the windows, she can see people wearing masks and walking their dogs. Brazen Americans, she thinks. Never thinking it can happen to them.

She brings her dog inside, and he poops from excitement or fear. She tapes the seams between the door, floor, and wall. She can’t reach the ceiling, even when standing on her stool where she shucks vegetables into plastic bowls of water. She hears her phone ringing with “Unchained Melody.” It is her daughter. Anxiety clutches her chest, so she doesn’t answer. The girl texts immediately after: Hi, Mẹ. Are you okay? Do you need anything?

She scrolls back and forth through emojis but can’t decide. Later, she decides.

*

During the third week of quarantine, she wraps a scarf around her nose and mouth to place buckets out to catch the forecasted rain. The dog eagerly races between her legs when she opens the backdoor. Even in the damp weather, sweat beads under the face covering. She is breathing in her own sweat. The dog barks as he runs circles around the yard, and she closes the door to protect her lungs. She turns to the sink to scrub whatever germs linger on skins of mangoes she hasn’t eaten yet, and once she turns the water off she realizes that the dog has stopped barking. She looks out the window and can’t see him running circles anymore.

She inhales deeply, then presses her hand over her mouth and nose. She runs outside. “Cứt gà!” she calls him. Chicken shit. “Cứt gà?” She peers around the side of the house and sees him heaving. Around him are stems of chili peppers. She looks up at the wall dividing her from the complaining neighbors. “Khốn nạn,” she curses under her breath and kneels down to gag the dog with her finger.

Later that night, the dog is sleeping next to her on the couch while whatever comes on after Wheel of Fortune plays. She wakes and goes to the backdoor to see if the neighbors are planting anything else.

She sees a man standing in the buckets of rainwater. He stares up at the sky and she cannot see his face, tilted away from the glare of gray clouds. The dog barks and as soon as the man turns to the sound, she rush-shuffles across the floor, bracing the hallway walls with her aching hands as she hurries toward her bedroom. Once inside, she locks the door with her key. She’d had the outer knob removed years ago so the kids couldn’t steal her things anymore. The purses on her closet shelves had shifted too many times. It had become too hard to remember who to be angry at.

The dog continues to bark. Through its echo she can hear the squelch of wet footsteps and the dog whimpers. Water begins to seep under the door and she pulls towels from the en-suite to barricade the space and soak up the leakage.

She hears the man snort mucus back into his throat the way her eldest brother used to.

She pushes the towels tightly against the gap and through the poorly installed one-sided lock, she can see the man’s hand. She holds her breath and forces herself not to blink. The double-jointed curve of that thumb was definitely her brother’s.

“Minh?” she whispers through the lock. His clothes squelch as he kneels and puts his face to the lock. He still looks familiar--that pale boy from the lake--but his eyes are heavy, and the skin around them seeming to bloat as she watches him. He presses his eye to the hole. She jerks back.

The dog barks from the hallway, and she catches her breath to look through the hole and make sure he doesn’t hurt little Chicken Shit. When she peers through, her brother is still kneeling but staring at his hands, where the dog nibbles at his fingertips. The bloating flesh pulls from the bone, and she sinks away from the door, the pulse of her blood noise over memory.

*

She wakes with her head on the roll of towels pressed against the bottom of the door. Sunlight filters in and she can see the hallway empty. She presses her ear against the door to listen for that familiar snort. Silence. She inches open the door and sees the dog had stepped on the man’s dissipating puddle, wet paw prints patterning the floor. Still on hands and knees, she backs into the en-suite to get towels to clean the floor.

“En-suite,” her children had chided. “It sounds French,” she explained. They rolled their eyes. “Always the colonizer,” her daughter said. Whatever that meant. She was always complaining about everything, especially towels: I don’t want to share one with you. It smells too much like you. I only like yellow ones. None of the floral patterns you like. But the bright light colors her daughter liked showed her bloodstains and so she’d thrown them away. “Phật Bà wants our house to be clean,” she’d explained, to no response. Their words and silences had made her all these things that she wasn’t before.

The dog comes to lick her hands, and she bats him away to mop at the puddles.

*

A few days later, she still hasn’t seen her brother reappear. Covered from head to foot, she hammers the concrete in her small backyard. She’d had the grass razed years ago when the kids were still young so that gardeners would stop coming to the door to ask if she needed lawn service. “The ‘amigos’,” she said, “always trying to get in and steal.” Her daughter had fallen and busted her lip on the concrete, but otherwise the children did not spend time out there anyway. They didn’t appreciate it like they should have.

The concrete chips away and she claws at the dirt until it is dark and rich. She sprinkles the seeds, dried on one of her paper plates that KFC had given her. “That’s stealing,” her kids used to complain. “Never say that word again,” she replied. “I paid for chicken. They owe me.”

In the evening, before Wheel, she watches the garden, leaves blowing at the same angle of the falling rain. A sudden push of wind flashes skin and gold. It is her grandmother’s neck. Unmistakable. Another gust of wind blows the old woman’s long hair to expose her balding crown. The skin is white and smooth.

She rushes out to the garden with a towel and wraps the old woman’s body. She kneels in front of her and pushes wet hair out of her face. “Ngoại?” Her grandmother yells over the slanting rain, “Who else?” And her eyes smile as they did when she instructed her to take the meanness as love.

As she pulls her grandmother’s familiar scent into the house, her slippered feet drag trails of water onto the tiles. The dog licks at the water and then whimpers away.

Cưng, the old woman looks up and recognizes her. Darling.

*

The following dawn, she brushes her grandmother’s long, fragile hair into a bun, the way she used to wear it in Viet Nam. She lifts the waist-length hair above her hunched shoulders and twists it against the flat back of her head. They didn’t pick me up enough when I was a baby, she says, as always. “That’s why you wear a bun,” she answers, almost as if their call and response had not been interrupted by war and immigration and years and years and spiritual parting. She smoothes some stray hairs into the bun, and traces the bulging disks on her grandmother’s neck. She questions her memory. By the time her grandmother’s spine had so curved, her grandfather was already dead by his mistress’s hand and, in the tradition of mourning, her grandmother had shaved her decades-long hair, shearing it to stubble with the same kitchen knife with which she cooked every meal.

The anachronism is interrupted by the old woman’s distended belly grumbling. “Bà Ngoại,” she says carefully, “would you like something to eat?”

What have you learned to make in the past forty years? Anything good?

“I can make fried rice. I use peanut butter and--”

Her grandmother clicks her tongue and looks away. This is the woman who taught her how to clean banana leaves and wrap them around blocks of rice and meat to steam into bánh chưng for the Tết Lunar New Year celebration. This is the woman who showed her how to roast crickets during Viet Cong quarantine.

“Um, well, maybe some stir fry.”

My first time in America and you want to toss some vegetables in a pan? The fire does all the work.

“I got a good deal,” she said, knowing that this would always impress her grandmother. “A dozen mangoes for seven dollars.” She waited. “At a place called Costco. It’s huge and you can get so much for so--”

Her grandmother batted her with a makeshift cane she’d made from a fallen branch in the backyard. That’s as American as your hair and your walk. Let’s go buy a dish from Vietnamese who know how to cook.

“We can’t go to Little Saigon.” She thought for a second and looked at her grandmother’s translucent skin, still seeming to seep water. “I’ll get sick. And you’ll...”

You sound like one of these Americans. Like an American, you’ll have to be taught from the beginning.

She followed her grandmother’s damp footsteps into the backyard. Over night, butter lettuce had sprouted, lush and crisp leaves flowering out from the dirt. Tomatoes, too, had ripened on the upper vines. The old woman used her cane to lift the vine of plump yellow tomatoes, then the lower vines peppered with small green buds.

Do you remember, con? Vietnamese uses the same word for “remember” and “miss,” so for a moment she thought her grandmother was asking if she missed her. Before she could nod, she catches herself with the realization her grandmother is talking about the tomato plant. Remember to prune the ones that are already ready to give up. Make room for the sunshine of others.

She feels raindrops begin to pop and bleed down her scalp. A rhythmic hush first sounds like rainfall, but the ground remains only slightly spotted. The shuffle amplifies and she turns to see her brother approaching. He looks younger than he had the other night, like the teenager he was when they’d last seen each other in Viet Nam. Instinctively, she steps behind her grandmother and clutches her knit sweater, her fingers slipping through the holes and digging into the old woman’s skin that feels like wet dough. “Ngoại, ơi,” she pleads to her grandmother. “I’m scared. Why is he back? Get him out of here.”

The old woman clicks her tongue and shrugs off her granddaughter’s grip. Scared of what? That’s your brother. Her brother smiles and water spills from the corners of his mouth. She backs away as mist begins to fall between them. Their grandmother pulls a handkerchief from her pyjama pocket and wipes his chin. Have you forgotten how to welcome someone home?

*

She rinses the tomatoes in a pink plastic colander, halving them for bún riêu, her grandmother’s favorite soup. The old woman hovers over her shoulder, aimlessly pressing buttons on the stove. Grind the shrimp up more finely, she instructed. Whip the egg faster. It’s got to hold the shrimp together.

“Ngoại,” she pleaded. “Ngoại làm con stress.”

Stuh-ress? What is that you say to me?

She tries to remember her place. “Thank you for trying to help, but--”

Her grandmother waves away her words. If you don’t want to do it right, then just remember that ceremony makes a home.

The old woman sat on the couch, occasionally yelling, I can smell that you need more pepper. More fish sauce. Stir more slowly. Then she hummed and swayed. A returning tide.

Two hours of slow stewing later, she serves her family members bún riêu. They sit at the counter and eat silently, save for the slurps of tomatoey broth. She stands across the counter from them and watches as the hot broth seeps from the holes where teeth used to be. The more they eat, the more their lips melt away, dripping in with the globules of fat in the broth. By the time her brother’s soup spoon clinks at the bottom of his empty bowl, his jawbone is exposed, his molars displaying their brown spots of decay.

*

She starts eating less. She still cooks for them but tries to stick with cool dishes--spring rolls, sweet rice. She no longer stands across the counter from them. Instead, she sits at the table, alone, licking at freezer-burned mung bean popsicles from about a year ago when her daughter had brought the grandchild to visit. It was a distinct kind of heartbreak when your children did not enjoy the flavor of one of your happiest childhood memories.

She still cooks for the dog. He always likes her food. She shreds boiled chicken with chopsticks and serves it to him on top of rice. She hopes that this will settle his stomach that has been all diarrhea and gurgling since he was chili peppered.

Her brother is messing with the pile of damp Costco boxes at the backdoor. He uses a pocketknife to cut and assemble the boxes into a doghouse. Inside, her grandmother clicks her tongue. Like nothing ever happened, she says disapprovingly, but with a smile.

She opens the door for the dog to run to his new cardboard home, and he yips excitedly, jumping on her brother. She can see his saturated clothes spray the dog with every paw push. She takes a picture just as the dog enters the house. She is about to text the photo to the kids and then realizes that her brother is in it. They’d of course never met him. They’d never been to Viet Nam, and he’d died when they were young. She wasn’t sure if he lived for them in her stories. She presses “send” anyway.

Her brother limps in chase of the dog who is yipping and barking in excitement for this first play in months. She hasn’t seen her brother like this since he was a kid, plucking her hairs so that he could agitate crickets to fight, jumping over market tables with stolen lychees puffing up his cheeks. Even her grandmother is smiling.

Let’s go out, the grandmother tells her. I’ve been in America for how many days and all I’ve seen is your house. Show me this place they won’t shut up about.

“It’s not safe, Ngoại.”

Meh, the old woman dismisses. I’ve been through worse. If you get sick, I can cao gio for you.

“I don’t think eucalyptus oil and a spoon can cure this virus. The news said 80,000 are dead. Just in America.”

Her grandmother shrugs.

“Unchained Melody” rings from her phone, and her grandmother hums along. She sees it is her daughter calling. Her chest clenches but before she can answer, suddenly, “Shut that dog up or I’ll come do it myself!” She peers out the backdoor and sees her neighbor’s head above the dividing wall. The dog, of course, is barking at him.

“You!” the neighbor yells at her brother. “Shut that fucking dog up. And why aren’t you wearing a mask?!” Her brother shrugs at the man and looks back at her to translate. She waves him in and whistles to the dog. The neighbor begins throwing rocks. The dog and her brother dodge. The dog barks again, and she sees her brother reach in his pocket.

“No,” she yells, running to grab her brother’s arm before he can flick open the blade. She picks up the dog. “Sorry, sorry,” she bows to the neighbor.

“You goddamn chinks bring this virus here, force us inside and make being at home miserable. Shut that fucking dog up, you dirty Chinese.”

Her brother understands the last word and wrestles his arm from her. As he jumps up on a planter to meet the man face to face, her grandmother comes running and yelling from behind. Hurt my grandson and I’ll kill you, you motherfucker. With both frail arms she thrusts the pot of water the chicken had just boiled in. The still steaming water arcs toward the wall, showering her and her brother. The dog’s claws skitter away on the concrete.

Her brother’s skin bubbles and, as it begins to disintegrate, she pulls the scarf from her face and drapes it over his skull. She wrenches him inside. Maybe she can save him this time. Her grandmother hurls more obscenities over the wall.

“Ling ting tong, bitch!” the neighbor yells back and then disappears behind his wall.

She wets two cloths with cold water and presses it to the burns on the back of her neck and hands. She offers the other one to her brother, but he just stands there, trembling. The dog rubs its body against his calves.

When the grandmother enters, she asks her, “Why did you do that, Ngoại?”

Why did you apologize to that idiot? You left because you were already soft and America’s made you even softer. All these hollow words you vomit. Saying things just to say them because you think they’ll keep you safe. Our ancestors would be so embarrassed that you’ve learned nothing from where you come from. The old woman clicks her tongue and mumbles, Cos. Co. She shakes her head and raises her cane to unveil her grandson’s face.

Where the boiling water splashed on him, the skin had melted and the exposed bone looked chalky, like a shell that had been abandoned by its crustacean on the beach a long time ago. The old woman presses her seeping face to his jutting cheekbone and inhales the way she kissed him when he was a baby. They hobble to the bathroom together, arm in arm. The tenderness between them makes her furious. He was the one who was weak, she thought. She had been strong enough to leave and survive. She was surviving. That, now this. No one appreciates what I’ve done. Not her. Not the children.

The last time she’d stood up to her grandmother was in middle school back in Viet Nam. She didn’t remember what she’d said, just that her grandmother, still old then, moved quickly to pull the knife on her. And she never spoke back to her again. But they weren’t in Viet Nam anymore. She’d had enough. She wanted her house and her silence back.

But the words catch in her throat when she opens the bathroom door and finds her grandmother giving her brother a bath. The same bathtub where she’d bathed her children, and, when they were older, told them not to waste so much water.

The sink is running cold water too. The bathroom air cools and her brother’s skin creeps back toward his gaping eye socket.

The grandmother looks over her shoulder. Lichen fuzzes across the old woman’s forehead. Her lips glisten algael but her words are clear: Get the fuck out, whore.

*

“We’re going out,” she says when they finally emerge from the bathroom--regenerated, saturated, teeming.

They sit in the backseat holding the roof handles as she drives to the beach. Her face is covered with a mask and big sunglasses that fog up when she breathes. She doesn’t take it off, though, because she sees people walking the streets with no masks on. Even children riding their bikes.

She hadn’t driven in weeks because of the quarantine, and she didn’t drive that much before that. She couldn’t remember when she’d last visited her daughter. Maybe when her granddaughter was a baby. They’d fought about that, she remembered. She didn’t understand why she, the grandmother, had to leave her house to visit a baby. The baby was supposed to be brought to her.

Yet, she manages to find her way back to the ocean, getting lost only once. The thrum of memories drown out her grandmother’s criticism of her driving from the backseat. In the rearview mirror, she can see her brother’s face, dripping more viscously the closer they get to the shore, but staring silently out the window. At the beach, the trails are closed and while turning into the parking lot she accidentally knocks down a sign that warns people that the beaches are closed to flatten the curve of the virus. She parks next to an RV with windows covered in aluminum foil. Her daughter won’t be able to see her car from the house.

Leaving them in the backseat, she walks toward the sand and kicks her sandals off. She digs her toes into the cold sand and removes the mask to feel the ocean spray, the taste of salt. “It never changes,” her daughter once taught her while looking up from one of her schoolbooks.

Behind her, she hears her grandmother yell in exasperation, “Ai-ya!” and a smack before the car door opens. Her brother and the woman who raised them join her on the sand. They follow her gaze and see through a large window the daughter and granddaughter who they’ve never met before--the first and most recently born across the ocean from their ancestral home.

“She feeds them too much fruit,” she says. “Too many seeds.”

The grandmother clicks her tongue in response and looks away, toward the pier.

“I mean, fruit is good,” she concedes. “For Buddha, then us. But too much is not good.”

The wind blows her hat off and she feels cool air on her scalp. She forgets her mind and her already-aching joints, momentarily. Just her scalp.

She has always been suspicious of her daughter’s husband for telling her so often, and in front of the family, that she is beautiful, for loving the features she inherited from her. But looking at her daughter through the window now, and feeling the air on her skin, she understands. Inheritance can be new again.

Her brother puts a sandcrab onto her foot. She brushes it away.

“She doesn’t understand that this could all go away. And then she’d be looking for bugs to feed those kids like we used to.”

Her brother smiles and looks back out at the ocean, raising his fingers to his lips as if taking a drag from the cigarettes he used to smoke.

“Why are you smiling? What do you know?”

Her brother exhales.

“Are you making fun of me?” His silence makes her angry.

“You know, the baby has a birthmark. Like liquid, trickling down her whole leg. A waterfall. Is that from you? Is that you?”

The brother squints.

“Huh? Answer me. What you did to yourself did that to her skin, didn’t it? All that dope you shot up and now you get rewarded with so many lives. You’ve been here all along. You’ve been having it good. Being with her. In that house.”

He leans over to sniff her damp cheek. His lips part near her ear and, from beneath the sound of rushing water or blood, she hears his voice say, “Cưng.” He presses his palms into the sand to push himself up. He offers a hand to lift their grandmother.

Remember that you’re here because of us, she says. Nhưng, she paused and patted her shoulder like a dog, tương lai của con ở đây. The old woman takes his elbow and they walk toward the Pacific.

“Wait,” she yearned. This is how everything had been: fleeting. The jobs. The friends. Divorces, deaths. Her children clutching her leg, calling her “Mẹ.” “Take me with you,” she calls to them.

She looks to the ocean that had brought her here and the bubbles crowning her brother and grandmother’s immersing heads. She looks then to the window of her daughter’s home but they’re not there. She sees them on the porch. And her daughter’s recognition, her grandchild clinging to her mother’s leg. She worries that her granddaughter won’t recognize her from the weight loss and all the gray hair, like a ghost. She looks back to the water.

She knows she has to let go of fear. She only wonders who will feed the dog.

About the Author

Jade Hidle is the proud daughter of Vietnamese refugees, and a first-generation American, college graduate, and professor. Her book, The Return to Viet Nam, was published by Transcurrent Press in 2016, and her work has also been featured in The Columbia Journal, New Delta Review, Word River, Spot Literary Magazine, The Ethnic Studies Review, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s diacritics.org, the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s series, Memory Transferred.