Marcel asked, “Are you sad, Mama?”
She put her pointing finger over her lips and then tip-toed down the hallway. She feared waking her brother and sister-in-law and their three sons until she remembered that the boys were spending the night with their “cool uncle Tri” and felt a pang of guilt for not having encouraged Marcel to go along too. Here she was reading him love letters, crying, and turning him into a mama’s boy instead.
At the end of the corridor, Kim saw the couple’s door slightly ajar. She reached to shut it, unprepared for the silhouette of Trang’s torso against the starkness of the full moon. Trang straddled Lam, allowing him to support her tremendous mass. The bun her sister-in-law wore by day now cascaded free and flowing down her back. Kim didn’t want to watch, but her feet were anchored, and the motion was intoxicating. They thrashed and swayed, and it appeared to her like a visual symphony. The momentum increased until it became an urgent rhythmic staccato and then the headboard pounded into the wall, a final crescendo. She heard Lam saying, “Quiet,” trying to restrain his wife’s reckless cries.
In the bathroom, Kim broke down and cried, resenting what she had witnessed, this flaunting of what fate and destiny had taken from her. She reread Duc’s letter again. I miss your smooth skin and soft touch. A man always missed the warmth and softness of a woman. She yearned for the opposite, for his firmness, the rigid angles, the span of his back that stretched like endless steppes and the emerald fields of home.
Kim had been a virgin on her wedding night. As the baby girl of the family, she received a lot of frantically whispered advice. Lan, her oldest sister, (the one who insisted in staying in Vietnam) had told her to lie still. If she wiggled too much, her husband might not believe she was a virgin. Huong, her middle sister, the aspiring actress, told her to wiggle a little, and sigh, sounds were sexy. They went on about things being too big or too tight, or small and dry, not to mention the pain. When her new husband climbed on top of her, Kim was confused, unclear if she should lay stiff as a board or pounce around. Before he had even entered her, she began making noises. After nine long months of anticipation, Duc flopped on his back and said to the ceiling, “Please tell me this is a joke, God.” Kim confessed, revealing her sisters’ secrets. Together they laughed, picturing Lan lying like a sack of potatoes and Huong wiggling around like a fish. Kim didn’t mind not consummating her marriage on her wedding night because her young husband caressed her, kissed her in places that had never known the lushness of a kiss, gave her new secrets all for herself.
For their honeymoon, they picked the Da Lat countryside for its scenic waterfalls and oceans of wildflowers. On the first day, caught in a shower, they ran for cover and happened onto a hidden grove of trees, a black-green canopy of pines. Kim was drenched, and Duc said, matter-of-factly, looking at her in her traditional white tunic, “I love your dark nipples.” Against the trunk of a grand old pine, standing up, her husband made love to her for the first time. She held her palms flat against the cracked bark. Big great drops splattered on top of her head, the leaves clapped the applause of an audience a stadium away, and the winds howled feverish approval. Kim felt more alive than she’d ever felt and yet vulnerable, animal-like. Their lovemaking was as natural as breathing or sleeping. It imitated hunger. She promised herself, on the spot, that she would never belong to anyone else.