Lucy and Linh (17 page)

Of course, I thought. Who else?

“Fortunately, she was also rather poor at home economics, which meant that, more often than not, her pies were the ones dropped on the floor. So she had good reason to pull a prank like that. Also, she was going to have to leave the school at the end of the year anyway. We just helped hurry her along.” Mrs. Newberry pondered. “As I recall, they were even both in the hospital at the same time—Gracey to have her first baby, and the old bat recovering from her hip surgery.”

This was shocking to me. I thought that women like this, especially in houses like this, would sit and discuss art history or antiques or literature, Linh. Like my father, I had believed that educated people were gentler and kinder than the uncouth and unlearned masses—but now I wasn't so sure.

At two-thirty on the dot, the doorbell rang, and I knew it was my father. I followed Mrs. Leslie to the front door.

Dad was standing there in his work uniform, a frayed shirt and navy overalls with “Victory Carpet” printed across the pocket. “Thank you for letting Lucy come over to study,” he told Mrs. Leslie. “We very much appreciate it.”

“Study? Oh, no!” laughed Mrs. Leslie. “Oh, no, no, no! Lucy's been having a little fun. She's been teaching us how to make your wife's delicious rice-paper rolls. Come and join us, Mr. Lam?”

“No, thank you,” replied my father, looking through to the dining area of the open-plan house, where everything was white and beige. “No, I have to be heading back to work.”

“On a Saturday?” asked Mrs. Leslie, incredulous.

“Yes.” My father did not explain that he was not heading back to the factory, but home to help my mother sew. He did not want to admit this because sewing was not a manly pursuit.

“We could drop Lucy off,” said Mrs. Leslie. “She is welcome to stay here as long as she likes.”

“No,” I said. “It's very kind of you to invite me to stay, Mrs. Leslie, but I really have to get home.”

“But wait—don't go yet. I have something for you!” She went back into the house. I thought she was going to pack me a Tupperware container of leftover rolls to take home, but instead she emerged with a monumental bunch of flowers, bigger than my torso, wrapped in tasteful bark and brown paper and tied with twine. All the flowers were native plants with furry, bulbous heads and pointy leaves.

“Wow, thank you, Mrs. Leslie—these are beautiful,” I lied.

“All Australian stock,” she laughed, as the others came to bid me goodbye.

In Dad's car, I had to sit in the back because the front seat did not fit both me and the flowers. I couldn't leave them in the back because they would roll around and smear yellow pollen all over the seats where my father sometimes placed completed rush orders for Sokkha.

“So, no study today, huh?” my father asked, and I was glad to be in the back where I could not see his face.

“No, Dad. She insisted I come over and teach them how to make rice-paper rolls.”

“That's a good thing.” My father still had the ability to surprise me. “Those girls like and respect you a lot. They probably also can't cook!”

The latter was true; definitely not the former. Oh, my father, he was still in love with the idea of me joining the Three Graces, just as Mrs. Leslie was. It was as if they were trying to arrange a marriage.

“But what will we tell Mum?” I asked.

“Don't worry, we'll all work late tonight because tomorrow is Sunday. As if she will ask you about what you've been studying, eh!”

I looked down at the flowers and noticed a card. I pulled it out and opened it, and as I did, I saw fifty dollars nestled in the fold. I looked at the front mirror. Dad still had his eyes on the road. I put the note back in the envelope, and put it in my pocket. I would deal with it later.

I came home, and that was when we had our big fight, Linh. You and me, that evening, after my visit to Amber's house.

I needed to tell you all about Mrs. Leslie and Amber and my time at their tense estate.

So, that's what's been up with you,
you muttered, sitting on the bed in my room.
I waited for you.
You had the Lamb in your lap.

I didn't know you were going to come, I replied, because really, I didn't. You had a habit of dropping in when I least expected. And every time you did this when my dad was around, he'd get pissed off. Luckily for you, Mum could stand you.

You write me these long, god-awful letters, but never see me anymore.

I've been busy lately. And my letters aren't awful.

For months your letters have been filled with wankery like “bulging arsenal of multilingual profanities,” “sordid liaisons” and—my favorite—“flippantly audacious.”

So that was what this was about.

I couldn't help it if I was trying to practice another language, I wanted to yell, because that was what this amounted to. You were just trying to mock my efforts because you thought it wasn't “me.” And don't blame me for “flippantly audacious”—that was Brodie!

But you didn't even give me a chance to explain, to tell you about my terrible afternoon, to turn it into a funny anecdote, to show you what I thought of those ladies and their daughters. You just let loose.

Oh my God,
you said,
those girls are worse than Katie. What are you doing with them? If they were at Christ Our Savior, we'd put them in their place. But you do nothing. I know you're avoiding me because you're ashamed of the ugliness inside you. So you just sit there sipping their little Italian soft drinks and enjoying their “culture” because they accept it.

They don't accept me, I protested. The Cabinet puts up with me because of Mrs. Leslie.

I didn't say they accepted you,
you told me in no uncertain terms.
I said they accepted the ugliness inside you.

You always told me the truth. By now you were leaving, but before you did, you had to have one last stab:
By the way, your mother thinks those flowers are ugly.

Get out now!

When you left, I wasn't sure I ever wanted to see you again.

A few days later, after school, I took the Lamb to the Sunray Shopping Center. We stayed away from the basement level, which was where all the people my age hung out, because I didn't want to run into you. I fed the Lamb a small tub of potatoes and gravy from KFC; a quarter of it spilled down the front of his overalls and got caught in the buttons. He chuckled with glee, the little snot, and stuck a finger in his buttonhole.

Then I took him to the Postman Pat carousel, which had three seats—one shaped like Pat's mailbag, one like his mail van and one like his black-and-white cat. You had to put a coin in a slot to make the seats move up and down for two minutes, but Mum would never let us operate it—she said you might as well throw away money. Luckily, the Lamb thought that sitting on one of the special seats
was
the ride.

I placed him on the black-and-white cat, even though he wanted to sit on the mailbag, because there was already another kid there, a little girl with a tutu and fairy wings over her pink tracksuit.

“Git lost—we was here first.”

I looked up and saw a dinner-plate-sized version of the little girl's face, massive and scowling. Her mother.

“Have you got a dollar?” Before I had a chance to reply, she said, “Coz I'm not putting in a dollar for you too.”

To her, people like us existed to supply people like her with the cheap and lurid-colored Chinese takeout food they loved so much, or the two-dollar T-shirts they bought from Kmart every few months. In fact, the Postman Pat carousel had probably been made by people who looked like me. Maybe that's why the seats were so small—to hold pert little bums like the Lamb's, not the wide load of her poor junk-food-fed pup.

And it was then that I understood my attachment to Laurinda. I was wearing my uniform, and this woman—who lived on welfare and fast food—would never be part of that world. She thought that people like us were going to steal her kid's job in the future, just as she thought we were trying to steal a free ride now.

It was cowardice that made me leave the carousel, not contempt—the contempt came later. In that moment there was only a flash of anger. I knew what you would have done, Linh, what you would have said. But you weren't there. So I could only do what I could do. I took the Lamb off the carousel, and he started to grizzle, and then cry.

In the past, stuff like this would have got me all wounded and teary, but now it didn't matter. Now I felt better than them, the whole lot of them in Stanley. You may not have minded being stuck there, but I was different. Now I could see a future where I didn't have to fight such petty battles all the time.

As I felt the woman's power over me shrink, I also felt something expanding in me—not empathy, but condescension. Before, I had accorded any adult automatic respect because that was the way I was brought up. But Laurinda had shown me that just because a person was an adult, it didn't necessarily mean you had to respect them.

Now I understood that these people were lower class, and being lower class was not a point of pride. It was disgusting, in a squint-faced, cement-mixer-voiced way, that a grown woman would buy herself cigarettes from Safeway and a moment later decide to deprive her child of a ride on a Postman Pat carousel just because another kid was also sitting on it. That was the kind of petty mentality they had, the sense that everyone else had it better.

“Don't worry, Mr. Lamby,” I said. “We'll find you something more fun!”

I took him to Toys“R”Us and let him ride on all the scooters and three-wheeled tots' bikes they had. I bought him a Push Pop. I gave him a spin through the air as we walked toward the bus stop. He was so tired he rested his head on my shoulder, drooling on my blazer, but I didn't care.

On the train back, some blond girl was using her boyfriend's lap like an armchair and his chest like a pillow. Remember how we used to look down on girls like that, Linh? The skanks who got with the first St. Andrew's boy who looked at them?

This boy was all angles, and he had an Adam's apple like an origami corner, but his hair was dyed the color of salted caramel and he had warm brown eyes. The girl's hands were clutching the sleeves of his denim jacket, her face burrowed in his shirt the same way a sick person would burrow their face in their bedding.

From the back, you'd think she came from the warmest, sandiest beaches of Bondi. She lifted her face from her boyfriend's chest to get some air. Her eyes were swimming-pool blue and rimmed with black kohl. They layered down at my uniform and settled on my droopy socks with their overstretched cheap nylon hems, then quickly rose up again. Then she flashed me a smile.

She had spotted me straightaway, but it took me a while to recognize her beneath the peroxide and contacts. “Tully?” I tentatively asked.

“Hi!” she exclaimed, and introduced me to her boyfriend. “This is Alonzo.”

“Hi,” I said to him.

“Hi.”

She smiled up at Alonzo. “This is my friend I was telling you about—the really smart one who got into Laurinda.”

“Oh, Tully, don't be stupid. You're the really smart one.” I was aware of how ridiculous that sentence sounded only after it came out.

“But you're the one who got in! Alonzo, I swear this girl was one of the smartest girls in our school.”

“Tully is going to be valedictorian of her school,” I told Alonzo. “I'm mediocre. I'm just going to fade away.”

“Dux of a shitty school,” murmured Tully. “And only get into a crappy uni through a financial aid scholarship where they bump up your score out of charity.”

“Aw, come on, Tully.”

“You know it's true!”

Since Alonzo was there, I couldn't offer Tully any polite consolation, or express my guilt about getting the scholarship, or even praise her Filipino boyfriend's cuteness. I wasn't sure how much she had revealed about herself, or even what kind of person she wanted to be with him, and I didn't want to blow it for her by mentioning her studious ways if he thought she really was the bad girl she was pretending to be.

But in the space of a few moments, we had assessed each other and understood just how different our lives were going to be. Tully had resigned herself to getting her diploma at Christ Our Savior, with the Spanish girls whose parents would cheer at their beauty school hairdressing graduations and the Vietnamese girls whose mums and dads wanted them to marry the young accountants in Sunray. The moment she didn't get the Laurinda scholarship was the moment Tully felt her chance had passed. Smart people won things, and went places, and got out of Sunray. And she was still here.

Everyone thought that I was headed for bigger things, but I wasn't trying to make Tully feel better when I told her that I was mediocre. At Laurinda I was average, at best. I had no outstanding talents.

She shifted about on Alonzo's knee so that she would be more comfortable, although she was so thin that she was probably sitting on bone. Tully had always been skinny, but now she looked like she'd just stepped off the boat. And I could not stop staring at her creepy electric-blue eyes.

“How are Yvonne and Ivy?” I asked.

“Good. Ming's out on parole and trying to stay clean. I think the family sent him back to Vietnam so he could be away from the wrong crowd.”

“I heard that.”

She looked a little surprised. “So you still keep in touch?”

“Yes,” I lied.

The truth was, I didn't know much about how my old friends were doing, beyond the occasional talk with you, Linh. And I wasn't sure whether those talks would be happening anymore. This conversation was making me feel very uncomfortable, and there was still twenty minutes to go before we reached Stanley.

“Hey, nice trousers,” I said to her, and meant it.

That was one of my greatest achievements at Christ Our Savior. I had a real connection to that uniform, even though the crest on the blazer pocket was just Velcroed on. In my Laurinda blazer, with its embroidered and immutable crest, I felt like an imposter.