familiar. As she passed along a row of shops, a cool, mint green bedspread in a store window caught her eye. The smooth fabric glowed in the dimness of the store. Helen was sure that if she touched it, it would be as cool as stepping onto a dewy lawn in the quiet of early morning back home. She went inside to ask the price.
The woman behind the counter barely looked up from her bookkeeping. Dark blond hair coiled into a bun with two weaponlike black lacquered sticks to hold it in place. Her face was pale and dry and powdered, painted crimson lips. For a moment, the store was so quiet Helen could hear the buzzing of a fly at the window and forgot if she had asked for the price or not. Then the woman spoke with a French accent. “That is expensive. Hand-embroidered silk from Hong Kong.”
Again she dismissed Helen’s presence, scratching at her ink-splotched columns of figures with an antique fountain pen. After a moment, she reached under her desk and brought out a large flyswatter that she snapped at the window behind her. Then the store fell into utter silence.
Helen turned and was startled by the sight of two Vietnamese women sitting in high-backed, rush-bottomed chairs. Neither of them looked up at her, not slowing down or missing a single stitch in their sewing.
Although they both had deeply lined faces, their hair, identically done up in tight buns, shone jet black. They wore matching black silk dresses, perfectly fitted from a fashion in vogue in Paris forty years back, consisting of tight bodices and long, flowing skirts. Heads bent down, they embroidered with the tiniest, most delicate stitch on silk cloth. So intent, so silent, Helen had not noticed their presence on first entering the store, their chairs on either side of the door to the supply room like bookends in a museum.
As Helen turned away, one of them, the older woman it appeared, began to murmur under her breath in French to the other. Helen could understand them no better than if they had spoken in Vietnamese. What new event could possibly have occurred to prompt conversation in this tomb except her entrance?
She turned back to the Frenchwoman, challenged now by her dismissal. “I’ll take it.”
The woman looked up, penciled eyebrows arched. “Lovely, I’ll wrap it with a large bow. I’m the owner, Annick.”
Helen leaned against the counter, dizzy from the heat and her lack of breakfast. The seamstresses, self-contained as sphinxes, were oblivious to her distress. She looked down and saw that her blouse had half-moons of sweat under the arms, and she was even more depressed by her water-ruined shoes. The Frenchwoman had undoubtedly noticed all this; probably that was the subject of the seamstresses’ conversation also. As she turned, she felt a warm stickiness between her legs, and realized that she had forgotten her time of the month. Simply too much to bear, and in frustration, to her horror, she began to cry.
“I need to use your bathroom. I have a problem.”
Annick sized her up, determining if she passed some test. The two women could just as easily have become adversaries, but something had swayed her to be Helen’s friend. “Come, let’s take care of you.”
When Helen returned to the showroom, she was sheepish.
“Have a seat. I’ll get you some water,” Annick said.
“The heat…” Helen mumbled as she accepted the glass.
Annick was as impeccably dressed as if in a store on the Champs d’Elysees. Helen stared at her dress-a soft peach-colored silk, with a Mandarin collar. Annick looked at Helen’s slacks, decided something, and smiled. “I have a black skirt in your size. Borrow it. It’s much lighter than what you have on.”
“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “Where did you get that dress? I don’t have the right things…”
“The unexpected social whirl, yes? The dress is made here.”
“I brought all the wrong things.” She felt humbled, broken, by the last days. “I mean, it’s a war zone.”
“There are tricks to living in the tropics.”
“Really?” Helen was flooded with relief to have another woman to talk to.
“Watch the Vietnamese.” Annick nodded her head toward the two seamstresses. “They move slowly. As do the French. When you walk down the street, you can always spot the Americans because they are hurrying.”
“I didn’t notice.”
One of the Vietnamese women dropped a spool of thread, and it rolled out of reach under her chair. Carefully she laid down the cloth she was working on and stood up, gathering her skirt in one hand, the fabric rustling. Helen saw she was wearing dainty black boots with buttons going up the ankle like the kind worn at the turn of the century. The cloth she was working on was a silk hanging of a bacchanalia: figures sitting at a table with naked dancers swirling around it. Detail so fine that red thread formed the rubies in the dancers ears.
Annick laughed. “It’s true. You’ll never survive here otherwise. The place will wear you down. I’ve been here fifteen years. Very few Western women last. It’s an art to master. But they never ask for help.”
“I’m a mess, so I’m begging.”
Annick was attractive in the Vietnamese way: simple attire, pulled-back hair, sparing makeup. Painstaking work to look so natural.
“Lesson number one: Move slowly. Lesson two: Bargain for everything. You paid double what that bedspread is worth. You didn’t even find out the price. The difference will buy you a dress like mine. What do you do, Helen?”
“I’m a photographer. Freelance.”
Annick frowned. “Lesson three: Vietnam is a man’s world. We have to make our own rules, but always the obstacle here is the men.”
Helen closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the disaster of Darrow. “I’ve been here two weeks and made every mistake.”
“And it’s only noon. What you need is a nice lunch.”
Annick took her to a favorite place, painted metal bistro tables and chairs on pea gravel in a courtyard garden. The heavy air was trapped against the walls of the building, the perfume of the fleshy, tropical flowers around them making Helen light-headed. She hid under the shade of a banana tree and drank down glass after glass of chilled white wine as pale as water.
During the main course of sauteed sole and julienned vegetables, they discussed the logistics of surviving as a Western woman in Saigon-how to find feminine products and the chronic shortage of hair spray, where to have one’s hair styled, where to buy clothes, where it was safe to go alone, what kind of culture there was, how to handle the number of soldiers all around.
Demitasses of espresso and sliced mango with sticky rice were served, and Helen asked about the two seamstresses. “Do they work for you full-time?”
“Madame Tuan and Madame Nhu are sisters. They worked for a French couple who owned a plantation north of Saigon in the thirties and forties. The sisters made all of Madame’s clothing so well that her friends requested dresses. The sisters put silk on the backs of all the colons during that time.
“It was the time before my husband and I arrived. The couple was returning from a party at a neighboring plantation when they were killed by the Viet Minh. They weren’t politically important, just unlucky.”
Just as Darrow had warned, better not to ask what had happened to someone. “How horrible. What a tragedy.”
“Actually… quite common. Anyway, the sisters wanted to keep sewing but didn’t want to open their own shop. Didn’t want to deal with the foreigners directly so much. We met shortly after that.”
“So how old-”
Annick giggled. “The madames? They are timeless. The great fat old chats perched on their chairs. They know everything going on in the city and yet never leave the shop, hardly talk. They knew all about you.”
Annick lit a cigarette and watched a Vietnamese man in his late twenties, dressed in an expensive suit, pass their table, then she blew smoke out through her lips. “That suit is so fine it must have just arrived from Paris.” Her eyes narrowed as she studied the man’s retreating figure. “These wealthy Vietnamese around town. Him, the son of an important SVA general. You will never see such opulence and such corruption together. They can’t help themselves. They made their fortunes with the help of the French, on the blood of their people. They’re cursed.”
