Free The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction by Violet Kupersmith Page A

window. She didn’t reply, just tore at the sandwich with her teeth.
    The vendor watched her chew for a moment and then began cleaning her knife with her checkered cloth. “Why do you think your mother never cooks Vietnamese food?” she asked Thuy softly, without looking up.
    “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” said Thuy with her mouth full. A fat black fly buzzed near her face and she swatted at it but missed.
    “Don’t be like that,
con
. Think about it.”
    Thuy swallowed and then shrugged. “I guess … to protect us. No, I don’t know … I don’t know why I said that. I don’t understand my mother.” She stuffed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth.
    “Haven’t you noticed that you never talk about her?”
    The fly was back and three more had joined it. Thuy waved them away with her hand before saying through her crumbs, “I don’t really think about her here; she’s just so far away.”
    To her surprise, the vendor burst out laughing, and it wasnot the light ripple that Thuy had become accustomed to but a high, brittle chuckle that lasted a little too long. Thuy plucked a couple of bread crumbs from her collar and popped them into her mouth, and tried to ignore the growing sense of unease that had started somewhere at the base of her stomach and was prickling through the rest of her body. It didn’t work. And when the vendor finally stopped laughing and spoke, her words caused a chill to run through Thuy despite the heat. “She
is
far away, isn’t she? In another world, you could say. And there are many, many worlds within this one. Worlds alongside each other, worlds that overlap each other; you might not even know if you wandered into one that wasn’t your own.” With horror, Thuy noticed that more and more flies were gathering. Several had landed on the vendor’s yellow kerchief, where they buzzed and crawled in dizzy patterns across the fabric, but the woman would not stop speaking. “You never talk about your mother, and your mother never talks about her life in Vietnam. She never has. But which world does she really live in, Thuy? Vietnam or America? And you, Thuy, which world do you belong to now?”
    The woman covered in flies walked out from behind her stall, and Thuy recoiled when she saw that she was still holding her long knife. The woman chuckled and the flies buzzed along with her.
    “Did you think I was going to hurt you?”
    Thuy began to back away slowly.
    “Don’t you know who I am? Haven’t you ever wondered why I can speak to you? Haven’t you wondered why there arenever any other customers here? Haven’t you wondered what you’ve been smelling this entire time?” Then she laughed and laughed and kept laughing as Thuy sprinted away without looking back once.
    After a couple of minutes Thuy slowed to a jog because she was out of breath. Then she stopped completely and looked at her surroundings. With a terrible, sinking feeling, she realized that for the first time in her life she had no idea where she was. She was as lost in this city as she would have been if she had been dropped blindfolded into the middle of a jungle. The sun had passed its zenith, and people were beginning to filter back into the streets, back to their markets and gambling corners and motorbikes. Without her grandmother there, Thuy could feel their eyes on her, mocking her, the lost girl, the fat girl, the girl who didn’t belong.
    She walked down alleys that seemed to coil and rearrange themselves like a knot of serpents. Her feet did not lead her home as they had done before; her nose had nothing to follow now. The streets became wider and Thuy laughed bitterly when she saw that she had ended up in front of the church from her mother’s photograph. A skinny young couple in a Western wedding dress and tuxedo were posing on the steps for their own pictures. Thuy caught the bride staring at her as she passed. The streets turned narrow again and Thuy accidentally wandered into a strange