Exhausted in America - Hong-My Basrai (first e reader txt) 📗

I have always assumed that Merry’s incessant chattiness was because she had lived for many years in almost isolation, in the coastal town of Caen, having for company only the querulous seagulls and the hardy descendants of the ferocious Normans.
Where she had taken residence before coming to California was once the fiefdom of William the Conqueror and his Viking relatives. She had given birth to her sons in a hospital that looked out to the desolate seacoast of Normandy; a fierce battle had been fought by the Allies, destroying most of Caen.
Her sons were the products of nature, not love. That much was shared immediately.
It was hard for me to piece together in one sitting all the information that Merry furnished. It did not help that Merry had a habit of rambling on, departing from one part of the narration to arrive in the middle of another episode altogether without a proper transition. I had to constantly probe, asking questions and receiving answers that, as Merry chattered, veered off in so many directions it was impossible to regroup and align them in any logical manner.
So I took in her story in whatever way she chose to disclose, her inspiration for speech prompted by the recent incidents of her current life, a passing cat, or the rustle of tree leaves in the park as we took walks together, following the pathway round the manicured lawn as if in the labyrinth of her memory.
With the years, I came to understand that her compulsive, rapturous way of speaking was to Merry a cathartic ritual. Without this she would collapse. She needed to let her thought out to find her ways through life and repair the damage it caused.
When she mentioned the accidents that brought her two sons a year apart, I asked, unconvinced, “Successively?”
Merry looked in the distance.
“But Merry, I understand that you cannot refuse a husband his right. However, you’re a pharmacist…don’t tell me you’re unfamiliar with contraceptive means.”
“The pill makes me sick. I cannot afford to get blue when I work. And I work twenty-four seven as pharmacienne de garde.”
I did not get the meaning.
She explained, “My customers can knock at the store at any time—midnight, Sunday afternoons, sometime at three in the morning.”
“Whoa!” I said. “And you’re there for them?”
“We live above the pharmacy,” said Merry.
My head bobbled like a doll head on spring. “No pill,” I murmured, trying hard to sympathize. “What about him? No glove too?”
Merry bit her lips and said, “Irregularly. He prefers the coitus interruptus method.”
“And you go with it?” I raised my voice.
Silence.
I refused to speak. Her next sentence floated long afterward like dust in the air, unable to settle. “I want to have a good marriage.”
It took a woman to decipher another one’s logic. I could relate to her motive. To many women, a good marriage—love— required the shares of butchered meat necessary in a sumptuous banquet. The only difference being the sacrificed animal.
But I did not want to accept the unspoken covenant. So I drilled on, “You think that he beds you for love?”
“Isn’t it why most people marry?” Merry’s words escaped her lips imperceptibly.
I sighed. I did not know about the rest of the world, but in Merry’s case, love was not what her husband sought.

2.

At one point in her life, Merry had been a fierce believer in the transforming power of love. A wall-sized poster of E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, in her bachelorette bedroom in Paris proclaimed her unprofessed faith. The picture of the misshaped alien with skin as thick as elephant’s and an oversized head with protruding eyes spoke for her: “I am ugly but loved.”
Tears came to her eyes each time she contemplated the possibility that she, too, would one day be in E.T.’s position, when someone would come and love her—Merry with a fat body and awkward manners and all else that was unlovable. Hung there by her single bed, the poster had given her hope and courage to seek love. One day, whoever will share a bed with her would do it because he had no other choice but to love her. Merry would be his ultimate “raison d'être”— her future husband would come to her like the waves towards shore. He would come to Merry like a firefly towards the only burning lantern, like ferric dust toward a magnet.
Poor Merry! She had been devouring too many cheap romance novels, attending too many operas where all a soprano heroine had to do was to put a hand to her heart and swoon for a dashingly handsome tenor to rush in and swoop her up, tragically crying out the torments of his heart.
Looking back, Merry realized that her unattractiveness was only the product of her own imagination. She had compared her body with those shown on the screen or Vogue’s cover page. She had mistaken her voluptuousness for portliness in comparison with her Vietnamese friends’ dipstick figures and had condemned herself to Vince, the first man to ever touch her in a way that set off her fancy.
Her heart had glowed like E.T.’s when at some point on the first visit, his hands had rested on her, lingering behind her back and electrifying a million sensations.
On the second encounter, he visited her at the drug store where she worked on Boulevard Bourdon in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Merry did not know the way of conversation with men and discussed pharmacology with him instead. He asked her about the salary range of pharmacists in France and talked to her about his engineering job in Berlin. A bespectacled intellect, he was half a head taller than her, possessed a pair of muscular arms and had dark hairs sticking out from the opening of his shirt, “So virile looking,” she remembered thinking.
And although he spoke French poorly and whatever he was able to say came out distorted by a heavy Vietnamese accent, she forgave him because… because he drove a decent Scirocco, wore an expensive cologne that only men of “certain family” had the taste to acquire, and, this was very important to Merry, he was bright enough to study abroad on a full scholarship.
Other things that indicated his miserly tendency Merry disregarded. Like when they ate out, somehow thinking it would be more proper for her to offer paying, Merry had picked up the tab hoping that he would object, but he did not, stating, “It is all the same, me or you,” behaving as if they were already intimate as husband and wife. She associated this gesture with feeling of love, and her heart warmed as if it was wrapped in wool.
At the red light, one night, his right hand strayed on her left thigh. She remembered the sides distinctly, for she thought he was fumbling for the stick shift and she was too close to it, had crossed her leg toward the window side to avoid for him a second embarrassing moment.
She waited for him to disappear, like other men had vanished from her after a meeting or two, or turned out seduced by her younger, charming sister, Agathe, the one who never hesitated to flirtingly pull inside any male visitor standing at the apartment door, and coquettishly straightened his collar before leaving him to call on Merry.
But Vince returned day after day for her. Then one autumn night, while waiting for the other cars to clear the intersection, he leaned over for a kiss, resting his palm on her trembling knee. She did not know what to do with his lips when his mouth brushed against hers. His exploring tongue alarmed Merry, perhaps the guy did not know how to properly kiss. Romantic kisses were lips to lips, not this vulgar tongue thrust, licking like a dog begging for affection.
The traffic came to a crawl and he proposed marriage. He waited patiently while she, too stunned to speak, endured the passing minutes and the angry honking from the stalled lane. All she could think in the way of answering was, “Please move your car.” But he sat waiting while the line of cars behind them started to split, swerving to the right and left of them, leaning on their horns while passing, screaming “T’ es con ou quoi?”—telling him he was dumb-assed.
She had to say yes. That night, she relived again the crazy moment and her heart danced a wild jubilee. He was definitely “in love” with her. She bolted up in the dark at the thought and sat straight on her bed with a beaming pride shining on her face. She had achieved love, the hardest to earn.

3.

The next morning Merry woke with a wonderful feeling. It was a drizzling Saturday and the April sun was still hidden behind rolls of dark clouds at seven. From her seventh-floor apartment window, Merry could only see the neighborhood below in a haze, yellow head lights sweeping along the Jordan Boulevard, drooping trees shaking off water at fitful intervals, black umbrellas like swooping bats amidst colorful ones no bigger than peonies scattering upside down.
“Agathe,” Merry called from her bed. “Do you mind going down to Boulangerie Jean for a baguette and a few croissants?”
Lazy bum, she thought as she did not hear any reply from the sofa bed, Agathe’s improvised bedroom. Shivering, Merry stepped away from her warm corner in front of the electric radiator to wake up her sister and to her consternation, found that the foldable bed had not been opened. And the horrible fact dawned on Merry. The only way that the sofa had stayed nicely plumped up with cushions was because no one had slept in it last night.
“Nom de dieu!” Merry’s mind started to race as it called out to God’s help. “The ruined girl,” she thought with a shiver not due to cold but fear. “Agathe has stayed back with her boyfriend. Doesn’t she know better? It’s not something a decent Vietnamese girl does even in the free Parisian society.”
She hurried into the bathroom to brush and change. There was no time to use the curling iron. But it was Saturday. There was no need to dash out for the metro, no need to be anywhere on time. She realized, then, that the sense of urgency came from the possibility for her to safeguard the family honor about to be forever lost. She had to bring Agathe home. But where from? Agathe had never told her the address of her late beau, and Merry had assumed that the fast blossoming courtship would quickly end like the ones before it. Agathe always had a handful of handsome and young university men at her disposal. The embarrass of choice was the only problem the girl had to face and indecisiveness being her shortcoming, she had opted to go out with all who came calling on her, granting each a week of two of pleasure and parting with them without losing a