The Black Kids(47)

“You don’t want to know what I did?”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

A light floods the backyard, revealing a body in silhouette. Lana’s whole being tenses up beside me.

“Lana, babycakes! I made your favorite!” The man’s thick accent sounds like the swell and pop of blown bubbles. Upon hearing the sound, she relaxes, and with two bounces launches herself out of the trampoline.

“Ashley, this is Pham,” Lana says.

“Lana never has people over. You must be special girl.” Pham reaches for my hand. He’s compact but strong. His face is big and broad, the color of toasted almonds. His eyes smile, a deep dark to them.

“You must have dinner with us, new friend,” he says with a flourish. “I insist.”

I should maybe call Lucia and tell her where I am, but usually I’m at Kimberly’s on Fridays anyway. What difference does it make, really? Unless these people are murderers, but I doubt it. I watch too much Dateline with Lucia sometimes, so I know murderers are almost never who you’d expect, and somehow also exactly who you’d suspect. Even so, I’ll take my chances. I’d much rather stay here than go home just yet.



* * *




Brad and Pham move through their space in tandem, Pham finishing with a cutting board, Brad placing the used knife in the sink, Pham taking the silverware out and putting it on the counter, Brad picking it up and setting the table. Brad is balding; his hair is a silver donut in need of a trim. He’s got the body and carriage of a ballerina, gliding through space as though even setting the table is a reason to dance. His light balances Pham’s heavy footsteps.

Brad and Pham and Lana are a force together. They discuss art and the presidential race and Arthur Ashe and Magic Johnson and Chechnya. Brad and Pham ask what Lana and I think about all of it. It’s intoxicating, being around people who see the whole damn world as something to inhale.

“It’s very upsetting, what’s going on now,” Brad says, “but not unforeseen.”

“How do you feel about it, Ashley?” Pham asks.

“I don’t know how to feel,” I say. It’s the truth. How do I tell people I barely know that I’m angry and sad, but also embarrassed? That I feel that anger along my spine, holding up the very shape of me, and in my fingertips like a curled fist. That the sadness is like a dull ache, heavy in the muscles fighting to keep my head up. That I feel ashamed that black people are both the agents and the victims of this chaos, and I don’t want to be thought of like that. But I’m also ashamed of myself for thinking I’m somehow better. The shame I feel in my guts, pulsing, spiraling; but also everything feels very far away. I’m black, but my black is different from that of those rioters on TV.

“How did you two meet each other?” I ask between careful bites.

Pham and Brad look at each other.

“My parents were professors. The Khmer Rouge, they didn’t like anybody with education, you know? My mother very smart woman. My father too, though not like my mother. And we are Vietnamese in Cambodia, so even worse.”

He drifts over somewhere else, the way Lucia does sometimes when she talks about home. Brad takes over for him.

“My wife and I sponsored Pham and his sister,” Brad says. “My wife was very religious, and I was too, then. Or I tried to be, anyway.”

“So you, like, adopted them?” I say.

“Not quite. We paid for them to come to the United States. For their schooling here. We were kinda like their American family. There were so many people in need. My wife said we had to do something.”

“I had to lie about my age,” Pham says, “so they would take us both.”

“I just thought he was wise beyond his years,” Brad says. “In that way some kids are when they’ve been through a lot.…”

“But I was twenty-year-old!” Pham laughs. “I’m just…” He holds out a flattened hand and lowers it to the floor. Short.

“We would talk to practice his English,” Brad says. “Sometimes we would stay up for hours talking.”

“Even though my English was very bad then,” Pham says.

“And then Brad and Pham fell in love,” Lana interjects. “Messy, messy love.”

Messy, messy love. I think of Jo and Harrison singing their pretty song, and my mother’s sheer stocking in a ladder running up her heel as she and Jo both push against the door between them.

Brad laughs. It’s a forced laugh. He kisses Pham gently on his temple.

In middle school, I remember watching a TV movie on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color about a Cambodian refugee who won a spelling bee. I don’t remember much about it other than that it was supposed to be inspirational, and also that they didn’t know how to pee in American toilets. I’d never thought that maybe different people might pee differently before that. I wonder if this is something Pham and his sister had to relearn.

Pham looks up from his plate. “My sister doesn’t remember how I held her on my back when we ran. She spit at me when she found out about the two of us.”

Brad sighs and grabs his hand.

“She’ll come around,” Lana says, and pats Pham on the hand. “I mean, for god’s sake, it’s the nineties!”