works by william pham, 2005-present
Two sisters drinking coffee in a diner
She walked into the diner alone, expecting fanfare, fireworks, parades -- the works. After all, this was a rare thing, meeting her sister like this. They were estranged; they had not seen each other for some time now.
What was the original argument about? The cataclysmic event that split apart bonds of blood, and friendship, over all those years? She was thirty-six now, but she pretended she was thirty-two, and in those four imagined years she discarded all of the pieces of herself that she did not want. Four years gone in a question: "How old are you?"
Her friends from work varied in how many years they threw away. The honest ones, the ones who appropriated their actual age, were the loneliest ones of them all. Spinsters, drinking coffee and talking shit and hiding behind The New Yorker and Salon.com and their fucking blogs. This was the new spinster, the intellectual and connected spinster, hip to the trends of fast-moving disposable culture. Every once in a while, they would meet with a commenter, a fellow blogger, some lonely kid in his twenties, and they would have lonely sex, seeing their futures splayed out across glass tables from IKEA in the folds of WIRED and The Village Voice while their asses made rubbing noises against the leather couch.
That was the worst.
She sat down in an empty booth and ordered coffee.
She sipped at her coffee when it arrived, hot, scathingly hot, and it tasted vaguely of cardboard. But she tolerated it. Cardboard coffee, cardboard furniture, cardboard apartment, cardboard life. She was lonely, too, and she knew this, and she drank her coffee while thinking about how lonely she was. Probably everyone was at least a little lonely. Like garbage satellites orbiting the earth and the sun, their purpose long-served; people were just floating around, staring out of thick glass windows at the world around them.
She wasn't like this when she was younger. Fifteen years ago, she wanted to be a writer. The next great writer of the next great American novel. But what was left to write about? She wrapped her long fingers around the coffee cup until it hurt, and then buried them in her lap. She still shopped at Urban Outfitters. She was just like the others, except she lied more, and spent less time on the Internet.
Her sister, her younger sister, walked into the diner alone with just as little spectacle as when she had entered, which is to say none at all. Her beautiful face, scarred, the same as the last time she'd seen her. How long ago was it? Years, years thrown away like the lies about her age.
"Hey, Thao," her younger sister said in a quiet voice.
"Hey, Sandy," she said in a quiet voice.
Thao Trang, the older sister, and Sandy, the younger. The two had been born only a year apart, but there was an undeniable divide between them which had only grown larger since the day Sandy was born. It started with their names, one distinctly Vietnamese, and the other English; their mother thought it would be clever to name her Sandy when Nha Trang, the city sharing their last name, was a beach town. It probably had made for some great parlor jokes when their parents moved in their San Jose social circles, mahjongg tiles clicking in an infinite chorus, colored Vietnamese by the rapid-fire dissonance of Vietnamese conversation.
Sandy, so beautiful; the most beautiful little girl, all the women had exclaimed, and then the napalm, and the scars, and shouts: a cacophony of tears as a mother realizes her beautiful daughter would never be so beautiful ever again. Thao held her sister's hand in the hospital, for days, weeks. Thao held her sister's hand in Saigon, in Germany, in New York, and now, in a diner in Santa Monica.
"How are you?" Thao asked. She was trying very hard to be brave, instead of lonely. This instinct to be brave did not come out of any sense of altruism, or sisterly love. She was trying to be brave because her parents taught her to be brave. She could not be weak, or afraid; she was not allowed to be weak, or afraid, when her sister was covered in gelatinous fire that seeped and burned and destroyed so much.
"I'm okay," Sandy replied.
The waitress reappeared. Sandy ordered coffee, and when it arrived, she drank it black; cardboard sisters drinking cardboard coffee together in a diner.
Thao wondered at what was happening. All those years, and this was all? This was the entirety of what should, according to directives instilled by Vietnamese soap-opera, sentimental Hollywood films, and trashy pop novels about the new femininity, be a tremendous hurricane of emotion followed by a tearful reconciliation?
Two sisters drinking coffee in a diner, one with scars and one without, and they, the both of them, were very lonely after all.
"I wish I had your scars," Thao said.
copyright (c) 2006 by william pham