Free World and Town by Gish Jen Page A

abides within , Hattie’s mother would say. A tiny woman—even Hattie dwarfs her. They exchange smiles as, between raisins, the baby goes back to drinking something that looks a lot like cola: some dark brown liquid, anyway, with lines of bubbles running up the length of the bottle. The girl is plain beautiful. She has her mother’s smooth skin and hoop cheekbones, and her mother’s high, wide forehead, too—a windshield of a forehead—but with lovely lifting brows of her own, and a decided lilt to her full mouth. She looks as though she were not born, originally, but somehow blown, still soft, down into the world through a tube. And then what life was blown into her! Her brows lift and fall, her nose wrinkles and smooths, her lips purse and pop wide. And behind those gestures something more flickers—wariness, interest, boredom, confusion—a liveliness of response Hattie remembers from her teaching days. How she’s missed this, she realizes—how she’s missed young people in general. So many little gunning planes , as Joe used to say, on such highly interesting runways .
    “You’re welcome!” the girl says now, even as she shrugs her shoulders and ducks her head—embarrassed to have been effusive. Hattie introduces herself. And, suddenly forthright, the girl introduces herself in return: So-PEE her name is. People call her Sophie all the time, because her name is spelled S-o-p-h-y, but actually her name is So-PEE, meaning “hard worker”—not exactly what she would have picked herself, but anyway. The woman is Mum.
    “Which really is her whole name.” The baby takes another raisin from Sophy’s hand. “She’s from the country, where they have names like that. Not like a real name. It just means like grown-up or something. Mature. Like, nothing.”
    Chhung retires to the trailer, swinging his arms; he has the air of an overseer headed to his desk. Sophy accepts some more raisins.
    “I think I get what you’re saying,” Hattie says. “It’s like ‘Ma’am.’ ”
    Sophy considers. “Yeah, like ‘Ma’am.’ It’s a little like ‘Ma’am.’ Not exactly, but sort of. It’s hard to explain.”
    “I think I get it,” Hattie says again. She turns to Mum. “And where in Cambodia are you from?”
    Mum tightens her arms around the baby and shakes her head.
    “She doesn’t speak English,” Sophy explains. “And she doesn’t read or write Khmer, either.”
    Kh-mai , she says, Hattie notices. Not Kh-mer , but Kh-mai .
    “She’s, what’s that word?”
    “Illiterate?”
    “Illiterate. Yeah, that’s it. She’s illiterate . But she works hard, she knows you’ve got to work hard in America because, like, nothing grows on trees.”
    Mum says something then, holding the baby with one hand, and smoothing her shirt with the other. The shirt’s close-fitting in a way you don’t see much around here—a matter of tucks and darts. It doesn’t move, the way Sophy’s T-shirt does; it’s formal. Both shirts, though, show their wearer’s long waist and modest bust to advantage. Sophy tugs on hers with one hand behind each hip, as if adjusting a bustle.
    “She says do you know anyone looking for a house cleaner, because, like, she can clean. And she does factory work, too. Like, if anyone around here is making electronics or medical equipment. Anything like that.” Though Sophy shoos at the air with her raisinless hand, Mum, mysteriously, does not have to swat; the flies, for some reason, leave her alone. “She can do anything, she’s really good, you should see.”
    “No medical equipment,” answers Hattie. “But a lot of people do bake things.”
    Sophy translates. Looking in the air, thinking, speaking, looking in the air again. She gestures, swatting some more. Mum nods.
    Hattie nods back.
    And everyone smiles in the gray air—happy. In some basic, reasonless way, happy. A speckled pool of light—who knows where it’s from, it must have bounced off something, somewhere—flickers at