But I’m so full of rage, a kind I’ve never felt before, and I want to take a swing at him and I want to hug him as my brother. But I know that I’m going to take him for everything he’s got. It’s the things that were mine, and he got them double. He’s got my mother and my father and my two sisters. He’s got the world in front of him. He’s got the store, and we’re in the store when the World Cup match between Korea and Italy is playing. And he’s got happiness like the people outside in the street when the Korean redhead scores the goal that beats Italy. He’s got everything.
I look at the crowd outside and I say to myself, How come, how come this can’t be me? And I say to myself, Quy, it is you.
We have another sister, and she’s harder to convince. The minute I hear her voice, I know she’s no pussy. So I listen close to what she says, and I decide there’s no need to play her, the rest of them will work it out fine. She wants them to be happy, she wants me to be happy. So I make her know I’m standing in the room, watching her, waiting for her to decide whether to kill everything again. And it is as if I’m standing in the bay, about to follow someone onto the Dong Khoi. And suddenly she turns around, recognizes me, and says she’s sorry, and I feel lifted up by my father or my mother. The crowd is outside the store window again. This time the Koreans are playing the machine, Germany. They won’t win, but they’re there. They’re on the pitch in the semi-final. Everything comes together. “Du-ma-may!” I scream, “Du-ma-may!”
So now I’m here in the car, waiting to go meet them. Little brother will come to get me. He and my little sister are preparing them for the shock, and I’m sitting here in the Beamer, and I’m thinking, People disappear all the time into cities. Why not me, eh? Why not me? I could run a store like Binh. What do people need? Movies, video games, yes, I could do that, sell videos, I could become close with my little sister, me and my older sisters will remember games we played. My brother and I will go to the strip clubs together. My mother will cry and my father too. They’ll forgive themselves now. I’ll marry someone, I’ll have a kid or two, and just like that man I’ll sit outside, I’ll find someone to tell this story to, and I’ll laugh because all my predictions and interpretations were wrong. So I’m waiting, I’m going to rest my head here and wait.
TWENTY-FIVE
CARLA DIDN’T RIDE into the Amazon. She rode through the city, now feeling free. Free of Jamal, free of Derek and Nadine. She would never be free of Angie. She didn’t want to be free of her. She only wanted the memory to lose its pain, not its intensity. Derek had bailed Jamal out. Jamal was going to live with him. Whether that lasted or not now was up to them. She wasn’t free of Jamal, really, and she didn’t want to be—she only wanted to be free of his pain. And of her protectiveness toward him. This was a step then, that it wasn’t she who had bailed him out, that Derek had taken the responsibility, and however that had come about she didn’t need to know, nor did she care.
She rode up the Bathurst Street hill just for the taste of lactic acid in her thighs, then down under the bridge and back, then along St. Clair Avenue. She stopped in Little Italy, secured her bike, and sat down at the Eden Trattoria and ordered an espresso. Carla imagined Angie growing up just off this avenue when times were different and when Angie was a rebel.
There used to be a black club above Chiarelli’s Espresso Bar on this street. Angie used to work downstairs nights serving espresso to old men from Calabria playing cards and talking, while people dressed to the nines went upstairs on the weekends to dance. It was on the sidewalk outside the espresso bar that she’d met Derek. After weeks of listening to the pumping disco music upstairs and feeling a deep thrill from the cool hip bodies laughing and wheeling by the window, Angie had volunteered to close up that night. She wanted to go upstairs, to be enveloped in the smell of perfume and the taste of Southern Comfort, the heat and dark of the dance floor, and that laughing that seemed somehow to her not light at all but knowledgeable and dangerous. She didn’t listen to the gnarled old men talk, over their cigarettes and espressos, about the “monkeys” upstairs. She didn’t hear the absolute proscription laid down there in those curses plain and ugly as anything. She only saw the easy way Derek smiled and the way that smile said she was gorgeous and young and sexy and that they both
