FOR TUTOR FAITH
edgar73
saving_sourdi.docx“Saving Sourdi” by May-Lee Chai
Page 81-96
In making distinctions between at and round characters, you must
understand that an author’s use of a at character — even as a protagonist —
does not necessarily represent an artistic aw. Moreover, both at and round
characters can be either dynamic or static. Each plot can be made most effec-
tive by its own special kind of characterization. Terms such as round and fat
are helpful tools to use to determine what we know about a character, but
they are not an infallible measurement of the quality of a story.
The next three stories — May-lee Chai’s “Saving Sourdi,” Junot Díaz’s
“How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Hale,” and Herman
Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” — offer character studies worthy of
close analysis. As you read them, notice the methods of characterization
used to bring each to life.
May-lee Chai
May-lee Chai, the rst of her family
to be born in the United States, is a
San Francisco author and graduate of
Yale University. Chai has worked as a
reporter for the Associated Press and
taught creative writing at San Fran-
cisco State University, the University
of Wyoming, and Amherst College.
She is the author of seven books,
including My Lucky Face (2001), Glam-
orous Asians: Short Stories and Essays (2004), and Hapa Girl: A Memoir (2007);
and coauthor, with her father, Winberg Chai, of The Girl rom Purple Moun-
tain (2002). Her novels Dragon Chica (2010) and Tiger Girl (2013) are about
the characters in “Saving Sourdi.”
Saving Sourdi 2001
Once, when my older sister, Sourdi, and I were working alone in our fam-
ily’s restaurant, just the two of us and the elderly cook, some men got
drunk and I stabbed one of them. I was eleven.
I don’t remember where Ma had gone that night. But I remember we
were tired and it was late. We were one of the only restaurants that stayed
open past nine in those days. The men had been growing louder, until
they were our only customers, and, nally, one of them staggered up andput his arm across Sourdi’s shoulders. He called her his “China doll,”
and his friends hooted at this.
Sourdi looked distressed and tried to remove his arm, but he held
her tighter. She said, “Please,” in her incense-sweet voice, and he smiled
and said, “Say it again nice and I might just have to give you a kiss.”
That summer we’d just moved to South Dakota. After all the
crummy jobs Ma had had to take in Texas, where we’d rst come to the
U.S., where our sponsors lived, we were so proud to be working in our
own restaurant. When we moved to South Dakota, I thought we’d nd
the real America, the one where we were supposed to be, not the hot
sweaty America where we lived packed together in an apartment with
bars on the windows on a street where angry boys in cars played loud
music and shot guns at each other in the night. The summer we moved
to join my uncle’s family to run the Silver Palace, I was certain we would
at last nd the life we deserved.
Now I was panicked. I wanted Ma to be there. Ma would know what
to do. She always did. I stood there, chewing my nails, wishing I could
make them go away. The men’s voices were so loud in my ears, I was
drowning in the sound.
I ran into the kitchen. I had this idea to get the cook and the cleaver, but
the rst thing that caught my eye was this little paring knife on the counter
next to a bowl of oranges. I grabbed the knife and ran back out to Sourdi.
“Get away from my sister!” I shouted, waving the paring knife.
The men were silent for about three seconds, then they burst into
laughter.
I charged and stabbed the man in the sleeve.
In a movie or a television show this kind of scene always unfolds in
slow motion, but everything happened so fast. I stabbed the man, Sourdi
jumped free, Ma came rushing in the front door waving her arms. “Omi-
god! What happen?”
“Jesus Christ!” The man shook his arm as though it were on re, but
the paring knife was stuck in the fabric of his jeans jacket.
I thought Ma would take care of everything now. And I was right,
she did, but not the way I had imagined. She started apologizing to the
man, and she helped him take off his jacket. She made Sourdi get the
rst-aid kit from the bathroom, “Quick! Quick!” Ma even tried to put
some ointment on his cut, but he just shrugged her off.
I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to take the knife back and stab myself.
That’s how I felt when I heard her say, “No charge, on the house,” for
their dinner, despite the $50-worth of pitchers they’d had.
Ma grabbed me by the shoulders. “Say you sorry. Say it.” I pressed
my lips rmly together and hung my head. Then she slapped me.
I didn’t start crying until after the men had left. “But, Ma,” I said,
“he was hurting Sourdi!”
“Then why Sourdi not do something?” Ma twisted my ear. “You not
thinking. That your problem. You always not think!” Afterwards, Sourdi said I was lucky. The knife had only grazed the
man’s skin. They could have sued us. They could have pressed charges.
“I don’t care!” I hissed then. “I shoulda killed him! I shoulda killed
that sucker!”
Sourdi’s face changed. I’d never seen my sister look like that. Not
ever. Especially not at me. I was her favorite. But she looked then the way
I felt inside. Like a big bomb was ticking behind her eyes.
We were sitting together in the bathroom. It was late at night, and
everyone else was asleep. Sometimes we locked ourselves in the bath-
room then, just the two of us, so we could talk about things like boys at
school or who was the cutest actor on television shows we liked or how
we felt when our family fought, when Uncle and Auntie yelled at each
other, or when Ma grew depressed and smoked too much and looked at
us as though she wished we’d never been born.
This night, however, Sourdi looked at me grimly. “Oh, no, Nea.
Don’t ever say that. Don’t ever talk like that.”
I was going to smile and shrug and say something like “I was just kid-
ding,” but something inside me couldn’t lie tonight. I crossed my arms
over my at chest, and I stuck out my lower lip, like I’d seen the tough
girls at school do. “Anyone mess like that with me, I’m gonna kill him!”
Sourdi took me by the shoulders then and shook me so hard I
thought she was going to shake my head right off my body. She wouldn’t
stop even after I started to cry.
“Stop, stop!” I begged. “I’ll be good! I promise, I’ll be good!”
Finally, she pushed me away from her and sat on the toilet, with her
head in her hands. Although she’d been the one hurting me, she looked
as though she’d been beaten up, the way she sat like that, her shoul-
ders hunched over her lap, as though she were trying to make herself
disappear.
“I was trying to protect you,” I said through my tears. “I was trying
to save you. You’re so stupid! I should just let that man diss you!”
Sourdi’s head shot up and I could see that she had no patience left.
Her eyes were red and her nostrils ared. She stood up and I took a step
back quickly. I thought she was going to grab me and shake me again,
but this time she just put her hand on my arm. “They could take you
away. The police, they could put you in a foster home. All of us.”
A chill ran through my whole body, like a live current. We all knew
about foster homes. Rudy Gutierrez in third grade was taken away from
his parents after the teacher noticed some bruises on his back. He’d tried
to shoplift some PayDays from the 7-Eleven and got caught. When his
dad got home that weekend, he let him have it. But after the school nurse
took a look at him, Rudy was taken away from his parents and sent to
live in a foster home. His parents couldn’t speak English so good and
didn’t know what was happening until too late. Anyway, what kind of
lawyer could they afford? We heard later from his cousin in Mrs. Chang’s
homeroom that Rudy’s foster-dad had molested him. The cousin said Rudy ran away from that home, but he got caught. At any rate, none of
us ever saw him again.
“You want to go to a foster home?” Sourdi asked me.
“No,” I whispered.
“Then don’t be so stupid!”
I started crying again, because I realized Sourdi was right. She
kissed me on the top of my head and hugged me to her. I leaned my head
against her soft breasts that had only recently emerged from her chest
and pretended that I was a good girl and that I would always obey her.
What I didn’t tell Sourdi was that I was still a wicked girl. I was glad I’d
stabbed that man. I was crying only because life was so unfair.
We used to say that we’d run away, Sourdi and me. When we were older.
After she graduated. She’d be my legal guardian. We’d go to California
to see the stars. Paris. London. Cambodia even, to light incense for the
bones of our father. We’d earn money working in Chinese restaurants in
every country we visited. We had enough experience; it had to be worth
something.
We’d lie awake all night whispering back and forth. I’d climb into
Sourdi’s bed, claiming that I couldn’t sleep, curling into a ball beside
my older sister, the smell of her like salt and garlic and a sweet scent
that emanated directly from her skin. Sometimes I’d stroke Sourdi’s slick
hair, which she plaited into a thick wet braid so that it would be wavy in
the morning. I would stay awake all night, pinching the inside of Sour-
di’s arm, the soft esh of her thigh, to keep my sister from falling asleep
and leaving me alone.
When she rst started seeing Duke, I used to think of him as some-
thing like a bookmark, just holding a certain space in her life until it was
time for her to move on. I never thought of him as a fork in the road,
dividing my life with Sourdi from Sourdi’s life with men.
In those days, I didn’t understand anything.
Ma had hired Duke to wash dishes at the Palace that rst summer. At
rst, we paid him no mind. He was just this funny-looking white kid,
hair that stuck up straight from his head when he wasn’t wearing his
silly baseball cap backwards, skinny as a stalk of bamboo, long legs and
long arms that seemed to move in opposition to each other. Chopstick-
boy I called him, just to be mean. He took it as a compliment.
I could see why he fell in love with Sourdi. My sister was beautiful.
Really beautiful, not like the girls in magazines with their pale, pinched
faces, pink and powdery, brittle girls. Sourdi looked like a statue that
had been rescued from the sea. She was smooth where I had angles and
soft where I was bone. Sourdi’s face was round, her nose low and wide,
her eyes crescent-shaped like the quarter moon, her hair sleek as seaweed.
Her skin was a burnished cinnamon color. Looking at Sourdi, I could
pretend I was beautiful, too. She had so much to spare. At rst, Duke and Sourdi only talked behind the Palace, pretending
to take a break from the heat of the kitchen. I caught them looking at
the stars together.
The rst time they kissed, I was there, too. Duke was giving us a ride
after school in his pickup. He had the music on loud and the windows
were open. It was a hot day for October, and the wind felt like a warm
ocean that we could swim in forever. He was going to drop us off at the
Palace, but then Duke said he had something to show us, and we circled
around the outskirts of town, taking the gravel road that led to the open
elds, beyond the highway where the cattle ranches lay. Finally, he pulled
off the gravel road and parked.
“You want us to look at cows?” I asked impatiently, crossing my arms.
He laughed at me then and took Sourdi by the hand. We hiked
through a ditch to the edge of an empty corneld long since harvested,
the stubble of cornstalks poking up from the black soil, pale and bone-
like. The eld was laced with a barbed-wire fence to keep the cattle in,
though I couldn’t see any cows at all. The whole place gave me the creeps.
Duke held the strands of barbed wire apart for Sourdi and me and
told us to crawl under the fence.
“Just trust me,” he said.
We followed him to a spot in the middle of the eld. “It’s the center
of the world,” Duke said. “Look.” And he pointed back to where we’d
come from, and suddenly I realized the rest of the world had disappeared.
The ground had appeared level, but we must have walked into a tiny hol-
low in the plains, because from where we stood there was only sky and
eld for as far as our eyes could see. We could no longer see the road or
Duke’s pickup, our town, or even the green smudge of cottonwoods that
grew along the Yankton River or the distant hills of Nebraska. There was
nothing overhead, either; the sky was unbroken by clouds, smooth as an
empty rice bowl. “It’s just us here,” Duke said. “We’re alone in the whole
universe.”
All at once, Sourdi began to breathe funny. Her face grew pinched,
and she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“What’s wrong?” Duke asked stupidly.
Then Sourdi was running wildly. She took off like an animal startled
by a gunshot. She was trying to head back to the road, but she tripped
over the cornstalks and fell onto her knees. She started crying for real.
I caught up to her rst — I’ve always been a fast runner. As Duke
approached, I put my arms around Sourdi.
“I thought you’d like it,” Duke said.
“We’re city girls,” I said, glaring at him. “Why would we like this hick
stuff ?”
“I’m sorry,” Sourdi whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“What are you sorry for? It’s his fault!” I pointed out.
Now Duke was kneeling next to Sourdi. He tried to put his arm
over her shoulder, too. I was going to push him away, when Sourdi did something very surprising. She put both her arms around his neck and
leaned against him, while Duke said soft, dumb-sounding things that I
couldn’t quite hear. Then they were kissing.
I was so surprised, I stared at them before I forced myself to look
away. Then I was the one who felt like running, screaming, for the
road.
On the way back to the Palace, Duke and Sourdi didn’t talk, but they
held hands. The worst part was I was sitting between them.
Ma didn’t seem to notice anything for a while, but then with Ma
it was always hard to know what she was thinking, what she knew and
what she didn’t. Sometimes she seemed to go through her days like she
was made of stone. Sometimes she erupted like a volcano.
Uncle red Duke a few weeks later. He said it was because Duke had
dropped a tray of dishes. It was during the Saturday lunch rush when
Sourdi and I weren’t working and couldn’t witness what had happened.
“He’s a clumsy boy,” Ma agreed after work that night, when we all
sat around in the back booths and ate our dinner.
Sourdi didn’t say anything. She knew Ma knew.
She kept seeing Duke, of course. They were both juniors, and there
was only one high school in town. Now when I crept into Sourdi’s bed at
night, when she talked about running away, she meant Duke and her. I
was the one who had to pipe up that I was coming with them, too. What
we didn’t know was that Ma was making plans as well.
Uncle rst introduced his friend Mr. Chhay in the winter. I’d had a
strange dream the night before. I hadn’t remembered it at all until
Mr. Chhay walked into the Palace, with his hangdog face and his suit
like a salesman’s. He sat in a corner booth with Uncle and, while they
talked, he shredded a napkin, then took the scraps of paper and rolled
them between his thumb and index nger into a hundred tiny red balls.
He left them in the ashtray, like a mountain of sh eggs. Seeing them,
I remembered my dream.
I was swimming in the ocean. I was just a small child, but I wasn’t
afraid at all. The sea was liquid turquoise, the sunlight yellow as gold
against my skin. Fish were swimming alongside me. I could see through
the clear water to the bottom of the sea. The sh were schooling around
me and below me, and they brushed against my feet when I kicked the
water. Their scales felt like bones scraping my toes. I tried to push them
away, but the schools grew more dense, until I was swimming amongst
them under the waves.
The sh began to spawn around me and soon the water was cloudy
with eggs. I tried to break through the lm, but the eggs clung to my
skin. The water darkened as we entered a sea of kelp. I pushed against the
dark slippery strands like Sourdi’s hair. I realized I was pushing against
my sister, wrapped in the kelp, suspended just below the surface of the
water. Then I woke up. I thought about that dream seeing that old guy Mr. Chhay with
Uncle and I knew they were up to no good. I wanted to warn Sourdi, but
she seemed to understand without my having to tell her anything.
Uncle called over to her and introduced her to his friend. But Sourdi
wouldn’t even look at Mr. Chhay. She kept her eyes lowered, though he tried
to smile and talk to her. She whispered so low in reply that no one could
understand a word she said. I could tell the man was disappointed when he
left. His shoulders seemed barely able to support the weight of his jacket.
Mr. Chhay wrote letters to Uncle, to Ma. He thanked them for their
hospitality and enclosed pictures of his business and his house, plus a
formal portrait of himself looking ridiculous in another suit, standing
in front of some potted plants, his hair combed over the bald spot in the
middle of his head.
The next time he came to visit the Palace, he brought gifts. A giant
Chinese vase for Ma, Barbie dolls for my younger sisters and cousin, a
Chr istian music cassette tape for me, and a bright red leather purse for
Sourdi.
Ma made Sourdi tell him thank you.
And that was all she said to him.
But this old guy was persistent. He took us all out to eat at a steak-
house once. He said he wanted to pay back Uncle for some good deed
he’d done a long time ago when they both rst came to America. I could
have told him, Sourdi hated this kind of food. She preferred Mexican,
tacos, not this Midwest cowboy stuff. But Ma made us all thank him.
“Thank you, Mr. Chhay,” we said dutifully. He’d smiled so all his
yellow teeth showed at once. “Oh, please, call me Older Brother,” he said.
It was the beginning of the end. I should have fought harder then. I
should have stabbed this man, too.
I saw Duke at Sourdi’s wedding. She invited him for the ceremony proper,
the reception, too, but he didn’t show up until the end. I almost didn’t
see him at all. He was slouching through the parking lot of St. Agnes,
wearing his best hightops and the navy-blue suit that his mother had
insisted upon buying for graduation. I wasn’t used to him looking like
a teenage undertaker, but I recognized his loping gait immediately. That
afternoon of Sourdi’s wedding, he was holding a brown bag awkwardly
behind his back, as if trying to conceal the fact that he was drinking as
conspicuously as possible.
I was standing inside the bingo hall, before the row of squat windows,
my back turned to the festivities, the exploding ash capturing the tipsy
toasts, the in-laws singing off-key to the rented karaoke machine.
Then it really became too much to bear, and I had to escape the ter-
rible heat, the ickering uorescent lights. I slipped from the church
into the ferocious March wind and gave it my best shot, running across
the hard lawn, but the too-tight heels pinched my toes and the stiff
taffeta bodice of the cotton-candy-pink bridesmaid’s dress might as well have been a vise around my rib cage. I had intended to make it off
church property, run to the empty eld that stretched low and dark all
the way to the horizon, but I only made it to the end of the walk near
the rectory before vomiting into Sister Kevin’s over-tended tulip patch.
Duke came over and sat on his haunches beside me, while I puked. I
let him hold back my hair, while the wedding cake and wine cooler that
I’d tried poured from my mouth.
Finally, I spat a few times to clear my mouth, then sat back on my
rear end.
After a few minutes, I could take a sip from Duke’s beer.
We didn’t talk.
I took out the pack of cigarettes I’d stolen from Ma’s purse and lit
one. It took ve puffs before I could mask the taste of bile and sugar.
The wind was blowing ercely from the northwest, whipping my
hair about my face like a widow’s veil, throwing dust from the parking
lot around us like wedding rice.
After a long while, Duke stood up and walked back down the side-
walk lined with yellow daffodils. He walked bow-legged, like all the boys
in our town, farmers’ sons, no matter how cool Duke tried to be. I bur-
ied my head in my arms and watched him from under one polyester-
covered armpit as he climbed back into his pickup and pulled away with
a screech. As he left the parking lot, he tossed the brown bag with the
empty bottle of Bud out the window. It fell into the street, where it rolled
and rolled until it disappeared into a ditch.
Ma liked Sourdi’s husband. He had a steady job, a house. She didn’t
mind he was so old and Sourdi just eighteen when they married. In
her eyes, eighteen was a good age to start a family. “I was younger than
Sourdi when I get married,” Ma liked to say.
When Sourdi sent pictures home for the holidays, Ma ooohed and
aaahed as though they were winning lottery tickets. My sister and her old
husband in front of a listing Christmas tree, a pile of presents at their
feet. Then, the red-faced baby sprawled on a pink blanket on the living
room carpet, drooling in its shiny high chair, slumped in its Snugli like a
rock around Sourdi’s neck.
“Look. Sony,” Ma pointed at the big-screen television in the back-
ground of the New Year’s pictures. “Sourdi say they got all new washer/
dryer, too. Maytag.”
When I looked at my sister’s pictures, I could see that she looked tired.
Sourdi always said that Ma used to be a very brave woman. She also
said that Ma used to be a beautiful woman who liked to have her hair
xed in salons, who wore pretty dresses and knew how to dance in all
the fashionable styles. I don’t remember this mother. I remember the
mother who worked two jobs for us.
I might never have seen Duke again if it were not for Sourdi’s strange
phone call one Saturday evening nearly two years after her wedding. I was
fourteen and a half. At rst, I hadn’t recognized my older sister’s voice.
“Who is this?” I demanded, thinking: heavy breathing, prank caller.
“Who d’you think?” Sourdi was crying, a tiny crimped sound that
barely crept out of the receiver. Then her voice steadied with anger and
grew familiar. “Is Ma there?”
“What’s the matter? What happened?”
“Just let me speak to Ma, O.K.?” There was a pause, as Sourdi blew
her nose. “Tell her it’s important.”
I lured Ma from the TV room without alerting my younger sisters.
Ma paced back and forth in the kitchen between the refrigerator and the
stove, nodding and muttering, “Mmm, mmm, uh-hmm.” I could just
hear the tinny squeak of Sourdi’s panicked voice.
I sat on the oor, hugging my knees, in the doorway to the hall, just
out of Ma’s line of sight.
Finally, Ma said, in the tone normally reserved for refusing service to
the unruly or arguing with a customer who had a complaint, “It’s always
like this. Every marriage is hard. Sometimes there is nothing you can
do — ”
Then Ma stopped pacing. “Just minute,” she said and she took the
phone with her into the bathroom, shutting the door rmly behind her.
When she came out again, twenty-two minutes later, she ignored me
completely. She set the phone back on the counter without saying a word.
“So?” I prompted.
“I’m tired.” Ma rubbed her neck with one hand. “Just let me rest. You
girls, it’s always something. Don’t let your old mother rest.”
She yawned extravagantly. She claimed she was too tired to watch
any more TV. She had to go to bed, her eyes just wouldn’t stay open.
I tried calling Sourdi, but the phone only rang and rang.
The next morning, Sunday, I called rst thing, but then he picked
up, my sister’s husband.
“Oh, is this Nea?” he said, so cheerfully it was obvious he was hiding
something.
“Yes, I’d like to speak to my sister.”
“I’m sorry, Little Sister.” I just hated when he called me that. “My wife
is out right now. But I’ll tell her you called. She’ll be sorry she missed you.”
It was eight o’clock in the morning, for Chrissake.
“Oh, thank you,” I said, sweet as pie. “How’s the baby?”
“So well!” Then he launched into a long explanation about his
daughter’s eating habits, her rather average attempts to crawl, the simple
words she was trying to say. For all I knew, Sourdi could have been right
there, xing his breakfast, washing his clothes, cleaning up his messes.
I thought of my sister’s voice in my ear, the tiny sound like something
breaking.
It was all I could do to disguise the disdain in my voice. “Be sure to
tell Sourdi to call back. Ma found that recipe she wanted. That special
delicious recipe she was looking for. I can’t tell you what it is, Ma’s secret
recipe, but you’ll really be surprised.” “Oh, boy,” the jerk said. “I didn’t know about any secret recipe.”
“That’s why it’s a secret.” I hung up. I couldn’t breathe. My chest
hurt. I could feel my swollen heart pressing against my ribs.
The next afternoon, I tried calling back three more times, but no one
answered.
At work that evening, Ma was irritable. She wouldn’t look me in the
eyes when I tried to get her attention. Some little kid spilled his Coke into a
perfectly good plate of House Special Prawns and his parents insisted they
be given a new order — and a new Coke — on the house. There was a minor
grease re around quarter to nine — the smoke alarms all went off at the
same time — and then the customers started complaining about the cold,
too, once we had opened all the doors and windows to clear the air. Fairly
average as far as disasters went, but they put Ma in a sour mood.
Ma was taking a cigarette break out back by the dumpsters, smoke
curling from her nostrils, before I could corner her. She wasn’t in the
mood to talk, but after the nicotine x took hold, she didn’t tell me to
get back to work, either.
I asked Ma if I could have a smoke. She didn’t get angry. She smiled
in her tired way, the edges of her mouth twitching upwards just a little,
and said, “Smoking will kill you.” Then she handed me her pack.
“Maybe Sourdi should come back home for a while,” I suggested.
“She’s a married woman. She has her own family now.”
“She’s still part of our family.”
Ma didn’t say anything, just tilted her head back and blew smoke at
the stars, so I continued, “Well, don’t you think she might be in trouble?
She was crying, you know. It’s not like Sourdi.” My voice must have
slipped a tad, just enough to sound disrespectful, because Ma jerked
upright, took the cigarette out of her mouth and glared at me.
“What you think? You so smart? You gonna tell me what’s what?”
Ma threw her cigarette onto the asphalt. “You not like your sister. Your
sister know how to bear things!”
She stormed back into the kitchen, and Ma ignored me for the rest
of the evening.
I called Sourdi one more time, after Ma and my sisters had gone to bed
and I nally had the kitchen to myself, the moon spilling from the window
onto the oor in a big, blue puddle. I didn’t dare turn on the lights.
This time, my sister answered. “Mmm. . . . Hello?”
“Sourdi?”
“What time is it?”
“Sssh.” My heart beat so loudly, I couldn’t hear my own voice. “How
are you doing?”
“Oh, we’re ne. The baby, she’s doing real good. She’s starting to
talk — ”
“No, no, no. I mean, what happened the other night?”
“What?” Another voice now, low, a man’s voice, just beneath the snow on the
line. Then suddenly a shriek.
“Uh-oh. I just woke her up.” Sourdi’s voice grew fainter as she spoke
to him: “Honey, can you check the baby’s diaper?” Then she said to me, “I
have to go. The baby, she’s hungry, you know.”
“Let him handle it. I have to talk to you a minute, O.K.? Just don’t
go, Sourdi. What’s going on? What did you say to Ma?”
Sourdi sighed, like a balloon losing its air. “Oh . . . nothing. Look, I
really have to go. Talk to you later, Nea.” She hung up.
I called back in twenty minutes, surely long enough to change a dia-
per, but the phone only rang forlornly, ignored.
I considered taking Ma’s car, but then Ma wouldn’t be able to get to work
and I wasn’t sure how long I needed to be gone. Then I thought of Duke.
Even though it was far too late in the night, I called Duke. He was
still in town, two years after graduation. I’d heard he was working as
a mechanic at the Standard station. I found his number in the phone
book.
“It’s Nea. Pick up your phone, Duke,” I hissed into his machine. “It’s
an emergency!”
“Nea?!” He was yawning. “My God. What time is it?”
“Duke! It’s important! It’s Sourdi, she’s in trouble.”
There was a pause while I let him absorb all this.
“You have to drive me to Des Moines. We have to get her.”
“What happened?”
“Look, I don’t have time to explain. We have to go tonight. It’s an
emergency. A matter of life and death.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Don’t be stupid. Sourdi would never call the cops. She loves that
jerk.”
“What?” Duke whispered, “Her husband, he beat her up?”
“Duke, I told you, I can’t say anything right now. But you have to
help me.”
He agreed to meet me at the corner, where there’d be no chance Ma
could hear his truck. I’d be waiting.
It was freezing. The wind stung my cheeks, which wasn’t a good sign.
Could be rain coming, or worse, snow. Even when the roads were clear, it
was a good six-hour drive. I didn’t want to think how long it would take
if we ran into a late-season blizzard.
There was the roar of a souped-up engine and then a spray of gravel.
Snoop Doggy Dogg growled over the wind.
“Duke! What took you?”
He put his hand over the door, barring me from climbing up. “You
want me to help or not?”
“Don’t joke.” I pulled myself inside and then made Duke back up rather than run
in front of the house. Just in case Ma woke up.
“How come your Ma didn’t want to come?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“Sourdi didn’t want to worry her?”
“Mmm.” There was no point trying to shout above Snoop Dogg.
He was obviously tired. When Duke was tired, he turned his music
up even louder than normal. I’d forgotten that. Now the bass under-
neath the rap was vibrating in my bones. But at least he did as I asked
and took off toward the highway.
Soon the squat buildings of town, the used-car lots on the route
in from the interstate with their apping colored ags, and the metal
storage units of the Sav-U-Lot passed from view, and there was nothing
before us but the black sky and the highway and the patches of snow on
the shoulders glowing briey in the wake of the headlights.
I must have fallen asleep, though I don’t remember feeling tired. I was
standing on the deck of a boat in an inky ocean, trying to read the stars,
but every time I found one constellation, the stars began to blink and
fade. I squinted at them, but the stars would not stay in place. Then my
head snapped forward as the pickup careened off the shoulder.
The pickup landed in a ditch. Metal glittered in the headlights; the
elds on this side of the highway were strung with barbed wire.
We got out by sacricing our jackets, stufng them under the back
tires until we had enough traction to slide back onto the pavement.
I insisted upon driving. “I got my license,” I lied. “And I’m not tired
at all.”
Duke settled into the passenger seat, his arms folded across his
chest, his head tilted back, preparing to go to sleep again.
“D’ya think she’ll be happy to see me?” he said out of the blue.
“Sourdi sent me a Christmas card with a picture of the baby. Looks just
like. . . . But I didn’t write back or nothing. She probably thought I was
angry. She mad at me, you think?”
“Sourdi’s never mad at anybody.”
“She must be mad at her husband if she wants you to come get her.”
“She doesn’t know we’re coming.”
“What!”
“I didn’t have time to explain to her.”
“You’re not running away from home, are you?” Duke’s eyes narrowed
and his voice grew slow as if he thought he was suddenly being clever.
“Yeah, I’m running away to Des Moines.”
Once upon a time, in another world, a place almost unimaginable to me
sitting in the pickup with Madonna singing “Lucky Star” on the radio,
Sourdi had walked across a mineeld, carrying me on her back. She was nine and I was four. Because she’d told me, I could see it all clearly, better
than if I actually remembered: the startled faces of people who’d tripped
a mine, their limbs in new arrangements, the bones peeking through the
earth. Sourdi had said it was safest to step on the bodies; that way you
knew a mine was no longer there.
This was nothing I would ever tell Duke. It was our own personal
story, just for Sourdi and me to share. Nobody’s business but ours.
I would walk on bones for my sister, I vowed. I would put my bare
feet on rotting esh. I would save Sourdi.
We found the house in West Des Moines after circling for nearly an hour
through the identical streets with their neat lawns and boxy houses and
chain link fences. I refused to allow Duke to ask for directions from
any of the joggers or the van that sputtered by, delivering the Register.
He gured people in the neighborhood would know, just ask where the
Oriental family lived. I told him to go to hell. Then we didn’t talk for a
while.
But as soon as we found Locust Street, I recognized the house. I
knew it was Sourdi’s even though it had been painted a different color
since the last set of pictures. The lace undercurtains before the cheerful
owered draperies, the ourishing plants in the windows, next to little
trinkets, gurines in glass that caught the light. Every space crammed
with something sweet.
The heater in Duke’s truck began to make a high-pitched, sick-cat
whine as we waited, parked across the street, staring at Sourdi’s house.
“So, are we going to just sit here?”
“Shh,” I said irritably. “Just wait a minute.” Somehow I had imag-
ined that Sourdi would sense our presence, the curtains would stir, and
I’d only have to wait a moment for my sister to come running out the
front door. But we sat patiently, shivering, staring at Sourdi’s house.
Nothing moved.
“Her husband’s home,” I said stupidly. “He hasn’t gone to work yet.”
“He wouldn’t dare try anything. Not with the both of us here. We
should just go and knock.”
“They’re probably still asleep.”
“Nea, what’s the matter with you? What are you afraid of all of a
sudden?”
I’d had it with Duke. He just didn’t understand anything. I
hopped out of the truck and ran through the icy air, my arms wrapped
around my body. The sidewalk was slick beneath my sneakers, still
damp from the ditch, and I slid onto my knees on the driveway. My
right hand broke the fall. A sharp jagged pain shot up to my elbow
and stayed there, throbbing. I picked myself up and ran limping to the
door and rang.
No one answered for a minute, and then it was him. “What on earth? Nea!” Sourdi’s husband was dressed for work, but
he hadn’t shaved yet. He looked even older than I remembered, his thin-
ning hair at across his skull, his bloodshot eyes and swollen lids still
heavy from sleep. He might have been handsome once, decades ago, but
I saw no evidence of it now. He held the door open and I slipped into the
warmth without even removing my shoes rst. “How did you get here? Is
your mother coming, too?”
My eyes started to water, the transition from cold to heat. Slowly the
room came into focus. It was a mess. Baby toys on the carpet, shoes in a
pile by the door, old newspapers scattered on an end table anchored by
a bowl of peanut shells. The TV was blaring somewhere, and a baby was
crying.
Sourdi emerged from the kitchen, dressed in a bright pink sweatsuit
emblazoned with the head of Minnie Mouse, pink slippers over her feet,
the baby on her hip. She had a bruise across her cheekbone and the purple
remains of a black eye. Sourdi didn’t say anything for a few seconds as she
stared at me, blinking, her mouth falling open. “Where’s Ma?”
“Home.”
“Oh, no.” Sourdi’s face crumpled. “Is everything all right?”
I couldn’t believe how dense my sister had become. We used to be
able to communicate without words. “Everything’s ne . . . at home. Of
course.” I tried to give her a look so that she’d understand that I had
come to rescue her, but Sourdi stood rigidly in place in the doorway to
the kitchen, her mouth twitching, puzzled.
“Please, Little Sister, sit down,” her husband said. “Let me make you
some tea.”
Someone banged on the front door, three times. Before I could
begin to feel annoyed that Duke couldn’t even wait ve minutes, that he
just had to ruin everything, my sister’s husband opened the door again. I
didn’t bother to turn, instead I watched Sourdi’s eyes widen and her wide
mouth pucker into an O as she gasped, “Duke!”
“What’s goin’ on?” Duke said.
Then everyone stared at me with such identical expressions of non-
comprehension that I had to laugh. Then I couldn’t stop, because I
hadn’t slept and it was so cold and my nose was running and I didn’t
have any Kleenex.
“I said, what the hell is going on?” Duke repeated.
Sourdi’s husband approached Duke. He smiled. “You must be
Nea’s — ”
But by now, Duke had seen Sourdi’s bruises. His mouth twisted
into a sneer. “You bastard! I oughtta — ” He punched Sourdi’s husband
in the nose. Sourdi screamed, her husband bent over double. Duke drew
back his st again, but Sourdi ran forward and grabbed him. She was
punching him on the chest, “Out! Out! You! I’ll call the police!” She
tried to claw him with her nails, but Duke threw his arms up around
his head. Sourdi’s husband stood up. Blood gushed from his nose all over his
white shirt and tie.
“Come on!” I said stupidly. “Come on, Sourdi, let’s go!”
But it was pretty obvious that she didn’t want to leave.
The baby began shrieking.
I started crying, too.
After everyone had calmed down, Duke went down the street to the
7-Eleven to get a bag of ice for Mr. Chhay, who kept saying “I’m ne,
don’t worry,” even though his nose had turned a deep scarlet and was
starting to swell.
It turned out Sourdi’s husband hadn’t beaten her up. An economy-
size box of baby wipes had fallen off the closet shelf and struck her full
in the eye.
While Mr. Chhay went into the bedroom to change his clothes, I sat
with Sourdi in the kitchen as she tried to get the squawling baby to eat
its breakfast.
“Nea, what’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me? Don’t you get it? I was trying to help
you!”
Sourdi sighed as the baby spat a spoonful of the glop onto the table.
“I’m a married woman. I’m not just some girl anymore. I have my own
family. You understand that?”
“You were crying.” I squinted at my sister. “I heard you.”
“I’m gonna have another baby, you know. That’s a big step. That’s a
big thing.” She said this as though it explained everything.
“You sound like an old lady. You’re only twenty, for Chrissake.
You don’t have to live like this. Ma is wrong. You can be anything,
Sourdi.”
Sourdi pinched her nose between two ngers. “Everything’s gonna
be ne. We just had a little argument, but it’s O.K. We had a good talk.
He understands now. I’m still gonna go to school. I haven’t changed my
mind. After the baby gets a little bigger, I mean, both babies. Maybe when
they start preschool.”
Just then her husband came back into the kitchen. He had to use the
phone to call work. His face looked like a gargoyle’s.
Sourdi looked at me then, so disappointed. I knew what she was
thinking. She had grown up, and I had merely grown unworthy of her
love.
After Duke got back with the ice, he and Sourdi’s husband shook
hands. Duke kept saying, “Gosh, I’m so sorry,” and Mr. Chhay kept
repeating, “No problem, don’t worry.”
Then Sourdi’s husband had to go. We followed him to the driveway.
My sister kissed him before he climbed into his Buick. He rolled down
the window, and she leaned in and kissed him again.
I turned away. I watched Duke standing in the doorway, holding the
baby in his arms, cooing at its face. In his tough wannabe clothes, the super-wide jeans and his fancy sneakers and the chain from his wallet to
his belt loops, he looked surprisingly young.
Sourdi lent us some blankets and matching his-and-hers Donald and
Daisy Duck sweatshirts for the trip back, since our coats were still wet
and worthless.
“Don’t tell Ma I was here, O.K.?” I begged Sourdi. “We’ll be home by
afternoon. She’ll just think I’m with friends or something. She doesn’t
have to know, O.K.?”
Sourdi pressed her full lips together into a thin line and nodded in a
way that seemed as though she were answering a different question. And
I knew that I couldn’t trust my sister to take my side anymore.
As we pulled away from Sourdi’s house, the rst icy snowakes
began to fall across the windshield.
Sourdi stood in the driveway with the baby on her hip. She waved to
us as the snow swirled around her like ashes.
She had made her choice, and she hadn’t chosen me.
Sourdi told me a story once about a magic serpent, the Naga, with a
mouth so large, it could swallow people whole. Our ancestors carved
Naga into the stones of Angkor Wat to scare away demons. Sourdi said
people used to believe they could come alive in times of great evil and
protect the temples. They could eat armies.
I wished I was a Naga. I would have swallowed the whole world in
one gulp.
But I have no magic powers. None whatsoever.
