She wanted me to tell you that, and so I have, but between you & me, Mish, I’m bloody terrified. I wish you were here & that you were terrified too. Then I could force myself to be the big sister & in comforting you I might manage to comfort myself.
Will keep you updated.
M xx
round the turn of the century, Mel, like many middle-class over-educated Westerners, discovered Buddhism. For a few months she tried to convert Margi and me by emailing long, horribly written passages from her Journey into Buddhism class notes. Margi replied with point-by-point rebuttals citing everything from the New Scientist to the scripture lessons of our childhood. I was, as so often back then, a silent observer. I read every word of Mel’s exhortations and Margi’s demolitions of them and never formed an opinion about either. Reading their exchange aroused in me the same feeling that looking at photos of my sisters and their families did: a vague wonder that these interesting, clever women with full, happy, always-progressing lives could have anything to do with me.
By the time I arrived in Vietnam, Mel had stopped calling herself a Buddhist or trying to convert others, but she was still committed to daily meditation. When I called her on my third day in Hanoi, she cooed soothingly until I had exhausted my sobbing and then gently suggested I seek out a Buddhist temple. ‘You don’t need to pray or anything,’ she said. ‘Just sit and be quiet for a little while. Breathe out the negativity and breathe in the peace.’
The only temple marked on my tourist map was the Temple of Literature and, as I’ve said, I did find it a place of peace and healing. It was months before I discovered that the stacks of votive paper and incense on the shrine at the back were offerings to Confucius not Buddha. ‘Same thing, I suppose,’ I said to Mel, who assured me, with an exasperated sigh, that they really weren’t and that if I was going to live amongst followers of both, then I should take the trouble to learn the difference.
So I dutifully read up on the history and present condition of each. I learnt which of the many temples and pagodas in the city were Confucian and which Buddhist and began to understand which aspects of Vietnamese culture emanated from one and which the other. I took part in vegetarian feasts prepared by Buddhist monks and celebrated Confucius’s birthday surrounded by children stuffing cake into their laughing mouths. I edited a book on the religious traditions of North Vietnam and developed a decent grasp of Taoism and the traditional animist religious beliefs. On an excursion to the south I visited the Cao Holy See and learnt all about Caodaism, the indigenous mash-up of Buddhist, Taoist and Confucianist philosophy stacked into a Roman Catholic structure. I took scores of photos of the brightly painted frescoes featuring the religion’s guiding spirits and saints: the sixteenth-century Vietnamese poet Nguyen Binh Kiêm, the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and the French writer Victor Hugo, Confucius, the Buddhist Goddess Quan m, Jesus. I sat through a midday mass and because watching the rows and rows of expressionless white-robed monks made me anxious, I looked up instead and studied the painted dragons and unicorns and phoenixes and tortoises and the many large, open eyes watching me from the pastel-coloured walls.
For a non-religious, sceptical westerner it was fascinating, but beyond providing quiet, sheltered places to sit and breathe, none of the religious traditions, beliefs or philosophies I came across did anything for me on a spiritual level. I doubt, actually, that I have a spiritual level.
Nevertheless, as I read Mel’s email I began to pray and my prayer was one word: please. I walked downstairs and through to the kitchen and stood at the window and prayed please to the dark bulk of the church. If I’d had a household altar I would’ve piled fruit and rice wine in front of it. If I’d had incense I would have lit it. I stood at the window sweating and praying please as the panic frothed.
I don’t want to go back, I thought, and my panic was replaced with shame.
When Cal come over the following night I considered telling him that my sister had bladder cancer. Instead, I tied him to my bed and bucked and ground my mind blank.
I was catching my breath, returning to myself, when he asked what it was that I liked about him. I laughed and he pouted.
‘I’m serious.’
I untied his wrists and collapsed by his side. ‘I like that you ask serious questions immediately after sex.’
‘Come on. Really.’
At that moment, what I liked was that his pecs were so high and hard that when I tried to rest my head on his chest I slid down until my face was nestled under his arm and I could inhale his football locker-room scent. If I told him that, he would think I was mocking him.
‘I like everything about you. Honestly. I can’t pick out a single thing.’
‘Lame.’ He roughed up my hair with the palm of his hand. ‘You know what I like about you?’
‘What?’
‘Your tits.’
‘They are nice.’
‘And I love the way you never take things the wrong way. You’re so chilled out, not always looking to be offended or prove a point like most of the girls I’ve been with.’
‘Perhaps they were intimidated by being with someone so close to perfect. They might have felt they needed to find some tiny flaw or fault to make them feel worthy.’
‘I never said I was perfect.’
‘I wasn’t being sarcastic.’ I breathed him in. ‘You’re divine, Cal. You have no idea. You’re gorgeous and funny and adorably thoughtful and – hmm, now I think of it, this is exactly why no girl your own age could possibly know how amazing you are – you treat women like human beings and you don’t do it because you want to look good or get laid, you do it because it’s never occurred to you not to. I’ve never met a man who does that. Never. Oh, some of them try and they get points for that. It’s certainly better than not bothering at all. But you’re for real.’ I propped my head on my elbow and looked up at his heart-squeezingly earnest face. ‘You know, now that I think of it, it’s what makes you such an amazing fuck. You don’t have any of that virgin-whore bullshit. You take a woman at her word.’
‘I don’t think that’s so unusual.’
‘It is for men of my generation, believe me.’
He screwed up his face. ‘Don’t say that. It makes you sound like someone’s grandmother.’
‘As long as I don’t sound like yours. That would really kill the mood.’
‘I don’t know what my grandmothers sound like. One of them died in a Malaysian refugee camp, leaving my grandpa alone with three daughters under ten. The other one didn’t want to know about her nip grandson. She’s dead now too.’
‘Shit. Sorry.’ I flopped onto my back.
‘Yeah. Talk about a mood killer.’
‘Do you know much about her – your Vietnamese grandma, I mean?’
‘Nah. It’s this weird thing with my mum and aunties – they don’t talk about life before they came to Australia. Not just that they won’t talk about the bad stuff that happened; they won’t talk about anything – their school, what games they played, what they did for holidays – nothing. Grandpa does sometimes, but not if the girls are around, because they shout at him. Everything I know I know from him, but it’s not much. She ran a fabric shop, was a good businesswoman, she looked like my Aunty Sue but had a temper like Aunty Dee. She was thirty-seven when she died.’
I sat up and drained the water glass by my bed.
Cal stroked my lower back. ‘You okay?’
‘Thirsty.’
‘Mish.’ He kept stroking me.
‘Sorry. It’s just . . . My mum died when she was thirty-seven, too.’
‘Shit. I didn’t know your mum was dead.’
‘Both of my parents. Same accident. He was a little older than her, though. Forty-two. I was eleven.’
His arms went around my neck and he kissed the top of my spine. ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me this?’
‘It didn’t come up. This is strange, the weird coincidence of it. Thirty-seven, three young daughters. My mum and your gra
ndma.’
‘Sometimes grief catches you off guard – that’s what Grandpa says. He’ll be going about his day, everything fine and then bam he’s curled up in bed, can’t even speak. When he gets like that, I take my homework in and do it on the floor of his room just so he won’t be alone.’
I pressed his linked hands to my lips. ‘He’s lucky to have you.’
‘He doesn’t right now.’
‘No. Right now, I’m lucky to have you.’
My phone rang then and Cal said leave it and so I did. When I checked later there was no message. The missed call number was Mel’s, but it was far too late to call back.
Amanda’s sister Jill came to visit and the three of us went to lunch at a Buddhist restaurant halfway between Amanda’s university and my office. Jill was an editor – a real one – back in New York. I entertained her with stories from the VietVoice editing desk and her honking laugh made our fellow diners stare. I cringed at first, but then noticed how Amanda glowed every time her sister honked and so I ramped up my performance and left lunch feeling foolishly virtuous.
I tried to imagine my sisters in Hanoi. Mel, I could see, with her floaty muslin skirts and bright silk scarves. Her everyday inner-city hippy look screamed tourist here and she would be overcome by street vendors from whom she would buy one of everything offered. She would try to speak to everyone she met, taking one or two words of English as encouragement. She would visit the Buddhist temples and pray, spend far more than necessary in the streets of the Old Quarter. She would deal with every squat toilet and skinned animal cheerfully. She would be curious and naive and positive.
Margi, I had trouble picturing. Last time I’d seen her she wore her school-run uniform of track-pants and an oversized t-shirt. The most recent photo I’d seen of her was a family portrait shot in a mall studio. She wore a high-necked white blouse and gold earrings. I couldn’t imagine what she would wear here. It’s trivial, I know, but that’s the point. I couldn’t see her. Not her clothes or jewellery or hairstyle. The face in the family portrait didn’t match the one I remembered from my brief visit six years ago and that one didn’t match the one I’d held in my mind all the years before that. She’d been a girl when I left home, though the baby on her hip and the frown-lines on her forehead disguised the fact.
I hadn’t seen any more of Mel than Margi in the past fifteen years, so why was one so vivid and the other so ghostly? I spent the afternoon imagining Mel and failing to imagine Margi in my office, on the back of a , at the fruit market, making coffee in a phin. Of course I considered that my subconscious had assumed Margi’s cancer was fatal and erased her already. This I dismissed as nonsense. The dead I could see, though they refused to be transplanted to my chosen city. But they were there the second I summoned them: my father in sailing-boat printed pyjama pants carefully sliding a freshly cracked egg into a pot of boiling water. My mother in a short cotton nightie calling for Margi to come eat some breakfast. The two of them at the kitchen table giggling harder and harder as the three daughters become more and more annoyed at being left out of the joke.
The dead were vividly in their place and Margi was not among them.
I called her when I got home and we spoke for a few minutes. I wanted to ask her what she was wearing and how her hair looked and what books she had read lately. Instead I asked how she was and she told me about the pain she experienced on urinating and the difficulty of remaining cheerful for the children and the brilliance of her doctor and the toughness and pragmatism of Mel. I expressed surprise at this and she expressed surprise at me not recalling how Mel had always been the one to step up in a crisis. When Joel was sick, when Brad had that car accident, when I was retrenched, when Lucy broke her leg – and I did not remember any of these events and so I only said, hmmm, but she went on – and when you came home, Mischa – that terrible night when we finally saw what that man had . . . It was Mel who calmed us all down, re-booked your flights so you’d have more time with us. Even when we were kids it was Mel with her system of envelopes and that bloody calendar, making sure the bills were paid and dentist appointments kept.
Oh, yes, of course, you’re right, I said. After we hung up I scrolled through old emails and photos, dug out my childhood photo album and re-read birthday cards. I couldn’t make any of it cohere. Mel was not the flaky sweetheart of my memory but nor could I accept her as the hero of Margi’s telling. And Margi had become in my mind a distant, loving but firm mother-figure and I knew this was unfair and inaccurate but I had nothing with which to replace it.
How did they think of me, my sisters? I couldn’t guess. I had spent so long as a ghost, insubstantial even to myself. With a thrilling jolt, I realised this was no longer true. I had become interested in my own life.
very year for Henry’s birthday we went to dinner at the Indian restaurant near the American Embassy. I was so anxious about seeing Cal and my friends together that I almost cancelled. But I had avoided Cal all week and knew that if I skipped the dinner party he would assume there was something wrong, which there was, of course, but not with him. We’d been together only half a dozen times, but already there had been hints of drama. He would search out meaning in every facial expression, read rejection into an unanswered text message. I had years of practice in pre-empting reactions and so fell into the habit easily. Of course, with Glen, the consequences of mismanaged communication could be broken bones; with Cal, I knew the worst that could happen was sexual withdrawal.
I was unintentionally late to the party. When I arrived I stood in the doorway a moment and watched Cal nodding enthusiastically at something the pretty Vietnamese girl beside him was saying. I checked my reflection in a bejewelled wall mirror and when I turned back to the table he was looking right at me.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ I kissed Henry and Matthew, Amanda and Kerry, Collins and then, because it would be strange not to, Cal. ‘The cab driver mistook me for a tourist, circled the bloody lake, meter ticking away.’
‘When are you going to suck it up and get a bike, Mish?’ Henry asked, his cheeks already flushed with booze.
‘It’s pouring out there. Don’t tell me you didn’t cab it here?’
‘We did,’ Cal said. ‘The old man insisted.’
‘I didn’t want to risk destroying that hair-do you spent an hour sculpting.’
The Vietnamese girl giggled and Cal threw her a flirtatiously hurt look.
I sat in the empty chair across from her and introduced myself. She was Mai, a friend of Henry’s. ‘She speaks three languages,’ Cal said.
‘My English is not so good,’ she said. ‘My German is better. My Vietnamese is, I think it is not immodest to say, excellent.’
‘Your English sounds bloody good to me.’
‘That is because you are Australian and a teenager and so do not speak it properly.’
‘Ha!’ Henry kissed her cheek, leaving a shiny smear of chutney. ‘Mai works at the Goethe Institute,’ he said to me. ‘We sponsored a thingummy there and Mai was the translator.’
‘Great job she did, too.’ Collins leant into the conversation, his torso crossing mine. He smelt like fresh mint, which annoyed me because I loved it so. ‘Having said that, I wonder if anyone there – me included – actually knows that to be true. I mean, no one there was bi- let alone tri-lingual. You could’ve been making it all up. As long as you sound confident, we all just nod along.’
‘It’s true. Translators have great power. I could say anything, and you would believe me.’
‘You have something on your cheek.’ I held up a napkin. ‘Would you like me to . . . ?’
‘I’ve got it.’ Cal cupped her chin in his hand and turned the right side of her face towards him. He took the napkin from me without looking away from Mai. He wiped her cheek with a great deal of care.
I had intended to stay sober so as to manage Cal and his affections, but this now seemed unnecessary. I ordered a beer and a whisky and knocked back the latter before the waiter had finished ope
ning the former. I ordered more of both.
I nodded along to encourage Collins’s monologue about, I think, his time in India, while I listened in on Cal and Mai’s conversation. He was telling her about his grandfather. A chemist, apparently, who spent the last twenty years of his working life on the production line at Sydney’s Homebush abattoir. He had never told me this, but then I had never asked.
‘The thing that bothered him the most, he said, was how empty the streets were. He said it was like a movie he’d watched where some bloke woke up and everyone else was gone. Sometimes when he was walking to the train station early in the morning, he had what he calls “dizzy breathing attacks”. He said it was like there was only him in the whole world and even nature itself had abandoned him.’
‘I understand,’ Mai said. ‘When I was in Berlin I was, at first, afraid to go out on my own. I felt very small, very lonely. I became used to it and when I returned to Hanoi, at first, I felt too crowded! Has your grandfather returned to Vietnam? He may find it too busy for him now.’
Cal’s response was too soft for me to hear. I wished Collins would stop talking for ten seconds or that Amanda and Kerry would stop cackling or that the restaurant’s agonisingly incongruent Euro-electronica would stop playing. Cal and Mai were huddled together now, practically whispering into each other’s mouth.
‘Anyone would think they were a couple.’
‘What?’
Collins pointed his chin across the table. ‘The two young-uns. An adorable couple, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, no. She’s far too old for him.’ It came out more caustically than I had intended and I realised I was quite drunk. There was a great deal of food on the table, but it seemed no one was eating. I ate a piece of oily naan and two cold samosas, and then ordered another beer.