Ben 1987

Most of Versailles was Catholic. There was one Buddhist family long ago,
but they’d moved away. Where do we belong? Ben’s mother would ask.
It happened after every Mardi Gras. After the streets were cleaned of
streamers, the king cake eaten, the tiny plastic baby tossed out with the trash
(though Ben always wanted to keep them), and the beads packed away for the
next year (a tangled mess no one would use again), Versailles became quieter,
calmer, more severe.
On Sundays, the neighbors—the Phạms, the Ngôs, the Nguyễns—dressed
up for church, the women in plain áo dàis and the men in button-ups tucked
into their pants. Are you going to Ash Wednesday service? they asked Ben’s
mother. What about Palm Sunday? What about fish dinners? Do you have any
new and exciting ways to cook fish? Fish on Fridays? His mother was
offended.
Leave me and my children alone, she seemed to say with her eyes, though
it would have been too rude to say it aloud. She learned a new phrase from
one of her customers at the nail salon: “Bless your heart,” which meant,
secretly, that they were dumb or lacking mental faculties or were otherwise
impaired, but there was not a thing to be done about it—how pitiful they
were, how one could pity them all day long until the cows came home. She
said it to them all the time: Bless your heart! Bless your heart! Bless, your,
heart!
From February to April, Ben’s mother tried not to talk to anyone in
Versailles if she could help it. After work she would walk to their apartment,
her breath held in, her posture rigid, her eyes down. A year without talking
about Easter or Lent was a successful year, she would say to the both of them, Ben and his brother. Their family was never one for ideologies, she would
say, and their father would have been against it all; Catholicism or
communism, it would have been all the same to him.
Ben never knew his father. He was killed, according to his mother, after
the war. The war, from what he had gleaned from books and TV, had been
between communism and non-Communists. The Americans came to help the
fight against the Communists. His own father was not a Communist. He was a
teacher and a freethinker who despised Communists, and because of this they
killed him. He died a hero. That’s the word his mother used, hero, whenever
Ben asked about him. Whatever else he knew of the man were echoes of
would haves, could haves. He would have thought this…he could have done
this, your father….Not a real-life father but a ghost of a father, an afterimage
of a father.
“That’s why we don’t live in Vietnam. We live in America,” she would
continue, “where we can think what we want and not get arrested.” Last year,
they became citizens—one of two families in the neighborhood so far—and it
was something she took pride in. Ben didn’t know what it meant, how their
lives would be different than before, but he knew it was something important,
momentous: that night they ate cake at Gambino’s.
The summer between third and fourth grade, as the sun was setting one
evening, a priest arrived in Versailles. He had a dark blue car with woodgrain panels. No one recognized it, and at first everyone stuck their heads out
their windows to have a look. When the priest stepped out, he carried a large
stack of door hangers. He began his journey door-to-door. Ben could hear his
fist on wood every few minutes, at first hard and vivacious, but as the night
continued it became softer, quieter. By the time he arrived at the last
apartment, their apartment, they didn’t hear his knock and knew he was there
only because they were expecting him.
He introduced himself as a priest who had come from Houston by way of
Saigon to set up a brand-new church in New Orleans. A very special church.
A Vietnamese church. It would also be a community center and safe place for
everyone. Imagine ping-pong tables, he was saying, and basketball courts.
And classrooms for catechism classes, English lessons for adults, and
Vietnamese lessons for the kids. The priest looked at Ben, who stood behind
his mother at the door. Ben smiled and he held his hands behind his back. His
mother didn’t look like she was paying attention.
“That’s the dream, anyway,” explained the priest, “the Almighty willing.
Right now, we rent a storefront off Chef Menteur. Next to a Winn-Dixie.”
“Ah, Winn-Dixie,” his mother said, as if, out of everything she was told,
this was the one thing she understood. She looked at one side of the door
hanger and flipped it to the other. But in the motion of it, the paper—thick
like cardboard, so it would stay put on all the doorknobs—sliced her finger.
In the next instant, the hanger flew out of her hands and dropped down off
their landing.
“Trời ơi,” she whispered as if she didn’t want anyone to hear. She turned
around and walked to the kitchen sink. Ben moved out of the way, so intent
she seemed to get there.
The priest came running after her. “I am so sorry, cô. So very sorry.”
Ben closed the door because he wanted to be helpful.
The priest was younger than Ben expected. On TV, when you saw a priest,
they were always chubby, old, pale men who mumbled when they spoke. But
this priest was skinny with golden brown skin and a thick head of black hair.
And, of course, he was Vietnamese. You never saw Vietnamese priests on
TV. You never saw Vietnamese anything. A Vietnamese priest in real life—
that was amazing!
His mother ran the water over her finger as the priest stood by. He kept on
apologizing, and his mother was obliged to keep on telling him, annoyed, it
was no one’s fault. She rummaged around the drawers for a bandage. They
kept their first aid in the last drawer, but she kept looking elsewhere in her
frenzied state.
“Let me help,” the priest said.
“No. Thank you,” his mother said when she found the box of bandages.
She emptied it onto the counter. They were all different sizes, so she had to
look through them before finding the right one.
The priest left after that, telling her she should consider joining their
congregation: Our Lady of Saigon. They could come to mass tomorrow or
Sunday. “Or anytime, really,” he said. “Our doors are always open. We’re
here to serve the community.”
His mother didn’t answer.
“We hope to see you,” the priest repeated, and she closed the door.
“Catholics,” she proclaimed after watching his car pull away, “they can
believe whatever they want, but that doesn’t mean they can go around telling
you what to think or do or believe!” She opened her eyes wide at him as if
she were about to say something important, a lesson he should learn and take
note of. “That’s why we left Vietnam, you see?”
“But you left Vietnam because of the Communists,” said Ben.
“We left,” she said, as if he should’ve remembered, “because people like
that are dangerous.” She peeked through the blinds. Ben wanted to know
what she meant by “dangerous.” “I can’t believe everyone is falling for it.
Bless their hearts. Bless all their hearts!” Suddenly she gasped and pulled
away from the blinds. She walked toward her bedroom, and Ben wondered if
the priest saw her spying.
“We’re Americans,” she said. “This is ridiculous!”
—
The next day, it was all he could talk about with Addy: the priest, his woodpaneled car, the door hanger that cut his mother. He showed it to Addy.
Addy lived out on Bullard Avenue, where all the families were from Haiti,
the same way all the families in Versailles were from Vietnam. But instead of
apartments, they were all in houses, small one-story buildings of whitewashed
wood that made them look old and fragile. Ben thought they looked like they
were made of paper.
In third grade, Addy had been the new girl in school. Ben’s previous best
friend, Shirley Daigle, had just moved away last summer (they promised to
keep in touch through letters, though they both knew it wouldn’t happen,
Shirley being an overall bad writer and Ben not knowing what to say in these
letters), and Ben’s ears had perked up when Mrs. Brownworth said they had a
new student. A counselor brought her in. She was a small black girl who wore her hair
in an afro. She wore jeans and a pink Minnie Mouse shirt, and her backpack
was a bright cherry red. The frames of her glasses were red, too, and so was
the plastic ring she wore on her pinkie, Ben would later notice.
Mrs. Brownworth introduced the new girl as Adelaide Toussaint and said that
she just moved to New Orleans from Miami.
The girl corrected her then—interrupting the bulky, scratchy-voiced
Mrs. Brownworth!—saying that she was actually called Addy and that they,
her family, were in Miami for a while, but they, her dad and her, were really
from Port-au-Prince in Haiti—did Mrs. Brownworth know where Haiti was?
—which is very far away from New Orleans, and the weather was nicer there
than it is in New Orleans, though she didn’t have much room to complain
because her daddy, she said, said complaining was the devil.
Mrs. Brownworth didn’t know what to say after the lengthy speech and no
one else did, either. Addy stood at the front of the class beside
Mrs. Brownworth. It was silent until two blond girls in the back, Shannon and
Ashley, started giggling, and soon the entire class was giggling, too, except
Ben, who didn’t see anything funny about anything. Addy stared at them all
and shook her head. “Timoun dyab,” she said, like an adult reprimanding a
school of children. No one knew what it meant and they kept laughing. Ben
knew, for reasons he did not understand, he wanted to be her friend.
At recess, as she sat alone under an oak tree watching other girls play
hopscotch, Ben approached her and sat by her side. They both watched the
girls skip across the chalk-drawn squares. There were five girls in all,
including Shannon and Ashley. The entire group had been through the
hopscotch once and were starting all over again when Ben said, “I have
marbles.”
Addy didn’t say anything back. He wasn’t even sure she’d heard him, so he
said it again: “I have marbles.” For good grades, Bà Giang had gifted him a
set of marbles, and Tuấn became infuriated because he said (in his broken
English that always made Ben cringe, though he would never admit that to
anyone) first grade was for babies and easy and it was all unfair. (He stomped
off to their shared room and their mother yelled back, “Well, life is unfair!”)
The marbles came in a mesh bag, but that didn’t keep up for too long so he
stored them in a Ziploc bag instead. He opened it and showed her. Each
marble was different. Ben often thought there were as many marbles as there
were people. This one, the first one he showed Addy, was white with
different-colored polka dots. It was the size of a grape, larger than all the
others. He held it in his palm and showed her another one, a clear one this
time with a brown swirl in it that reminded him of the Cinnamon Toast
Crunch they served for breakfast at school. He reached in again and took out
a handful. He jiggled them and they clattered against one another. (This is
what teeth sound like, he always told himself.)
Out on the hopscotch squares, it was Shannon’s turn. She wrapped her hair
in a scrunchie and was telling her friends, “I can do it backwards,” and they
were all saying, “No way. No way, Shan. You can’t do it! No way!”
“I bet,” she insisted, “with my eyes closed even.” Her hands were in the
air, already triumphant, celebrating. “Here I go,” she exclaimed, jumping into
the first square with one leg. She landed perfectly. She jumped again and
landed safely.
“Look,” Ben whispered when Shannon landed on the next jump, a pair of
squares side by side. He slid his fistful of marbles across the blacktop, aiming
for the chalk-drawn squares. Addy squinted her eyes. At this distance they
were so small he couldn’t even see them. Addy smiled.
Shannon stepped on a marble, then suddenly began losing her balance. She
let out a moan as she flapped her hands—her hands like birds trying to grab
on to something (a crumb of air, maybe) to keep from falling, but it was too
late. Within the next second, she flew across the hopscotch squares and
landed on her back on the ground at the edge of the blacktop, half her body
in the dirt. The boys playing basketball stopped and watched. A few laughed.
Shannon let out a long, wailing cry, not of pain, but of embarrassment, Ben
was sure. The other girls ran away.
Ben and Addy held in their own laughter, covering their mouths, under the
shade of the old oak tree.
“That was good for sure!” Addy said.
They became quick friends after that.
—
Addy studied the door hanger.
“Sai-gon,” she read.
Ben told her about the priest and the new church and how his mother
slammed the door on him. (This last part Ben made up to make the story
more exciting.) He said his mother didn’t like Catholics because they were
like the Communists.
Addy was not offended because she didn’t know anything about
Communists. She was Catholic; her father, too. What Catholic meant, Addy
didn’t really know, but she said this: “It’s like a club. A secret club. We have
to wake up early on Sundays and we go to this small, little building out in
Little Woods. They chant and we stand up and sit down. Sometimes we stand
on our knees.”
Ben pictured exercise videos on TV with women and men in neon pink
and green leotards jumping up and down to music. “And the adults eat
bread,” Addy added, “and sip wine. And the kids, we go have playtime in the
back, where there’s juice and animal crackers and music on a tape player.”
She thought for a moment. Addy’s father, inside the house, was cooking
joumou, and the smell of cooking beef wafted out into the sticky summer air.
It made Ben hungry. “It’s like a party,” Addy said. “Every week, a party.”
“Like Mardi Gras?” Ben asked.
“Exactly like Mardi Gras,” she said.
—
The priest returned to Versailles the next week. On Saturday morning, Ben
heard laughter outside by the bayou. He heard the sound of a rubber ball
bouncing against skin. He got dressed and ran out. And there they were: the
priest and the teenagers of Versailles. Ben ran down barefooted.
Two metal poles with a net in the middle were staked into the ground.
Five teenagers stood on one side of the net, four on the other. A volleyball
rallied back and forth, the teenagers jumping into the air to hit it with both
hands. The priest stood to the side watching. He was wearing the same
clothes he wore last time he visited, but this time a whistle, like the ones gym
teachers wore, hung from his neck. His forehead was slick with sweat and
glistened in the sun. Every few seconds, he wiped a paper towel across his
entire face. Other times, his head went back and forth, following the ball’s
trajectory in the sky. Ben did the same. Then a boy, one of the Nguyễns’ sons
(Ben remembered his name being Huy but everyone called him Joseph),
jumped right up close to the net and slammed the ball down. It bounced on
the dirt hard and ricocheted into the bayou. Water splashed the players but
didn’t reach Ben or the priest.
“Holy hell!” someone said.
“Why you gotta do that?” said someone else.
The priest blew into the whistle and held his hands in the air to signal a
time-out.
“Maybe we should break,” the priest said. “And Joe, get that ball, will
you?” Joseph shook his head with a grin and the teenagers dispersed, some
heading to a blue cooler off to the side and popping open cans of Coke.
“Is this what Catholics do?” Ben asked.
The priest took a quick breath as if he’d just noticed Ben was there. He
patted his head.
“Hương’s boy,” said the priest. “You scared Cha Hiệu.”
Cha meant father, Ben knew that much, so he asked, “Who’s Father
Hiệu?”
The priest laughed, a good belly laugh. “I’m Father Hiệu!” he said.
“Oh,” Ben replied, not able to think of anything else to say. Then “Whose
dad are you?” He scanned the teenagers.
“I’m not anyone’s dad,” the priest said. “They just call me that. It’s…we
take care of everyone. Like they’re our children. I’m a priest.”
Ben noted that he said “we,” and he imagined a whole sea of fathers,
wearing the same black jeans and black shirts with white squares on their
collars. They moved with synchronized movements like marines in a parade.
“My father died,” Ben said. It felt appropriate, while they were on the
subject of fathers.