The Vietnamese Girls from the Nail Shop down the Plaza

They gaggle into the pool hall trailing black feathers every Saturday after work, not really girls but women. But I am so old, women that young are still girls and my twenty-two-year-old coworker is Son, can you get me the broom. Don’t “Son” me! Javier says. What do I know? They arrive, the five of them in black jeans and shirts, their informal uniform, the serious ones, Duin and Sarah, with their hair tied back with tiny loops and strings, messy-updo can-sprayed to keep it out of their eyes. They lean like pros over the felt, blue mascara and tiny sequins on their cheeks catching the light as they play, all sporting nail extensions that somehow scimitar-curve without breaking or cutting the table. Gold-hoop earrings dangling as they turn and drink shots lined up five at the bar. Sarah is all-American princess: Born in Buffalo, she has a business degree from Penn State, her father the owner of the Pho restaurant and nail shops in town. Her father, Mr. Tran, plays billiards every Saturday. The wad of cash he bets, I wouldn’t bet against it. I seriously wonder whether he’s a gangster. The other four Nailists move back and forth between languages in the same sentence like my Salvadoran friends, speaking a new dialect every immigrant learns, reinventing English, piecing together what that means—like my great- grandmother from Hungary and her Yiddish slang bubbeleh for her son Yussel. The girls lean and sashay and clap like crazy when one makes a great shot. They are burning their tips. Two have black boyfriends. Duin wants to be a medical assistant. I have no idea how they know how to do nails. Every Vietnamese girl can do nails, Sarah teases. Her boyfriend, Rashid, has been coming here for years—maybe they met here? He goes to school for something with math but can’t beat me at pool. Put that trigonometry to use, I tell him. You mean geometry, he says. He calls me old head. I bank the eight in. He shakes his dreads. The other boyfriend goes by Jaivon. He’s always giving me a hard time about his sagging pants—leaning over the table with his polka-dotted drawers showing—I’m tired of this white motherfucker, he hisses under his breath. Yeah, I say, at least I have some sense not to walk around with my butt hanging out—what would your grandmother say? What would she say? Think of me as your grandmother. And this is my church. All I need is a church hat. Jaivon glares: You ain’t my grandmother. Rashid deflects: Can you bake a sweet potato pie? And they talk of pies as I walk away to clean a table. Sarah says, We don’t eat pie. The girls are talking rapturous about something called Chè ba màu. Duin cups her hands as if holding a mug, to show me it is a kind of dessert you drink. None of them know my father is black and old and kind, that his brother fought in Vietnam and wore those wounds for decades like a medal thrown in the Mekong River, that he worked forty years as a social worker, that my cousins cover a dozen nations, that still I carry my own ignorance out of the white lights—we cannot escape it. We are born into this infection. Jaivon carries a gun. But then who doesn’t these days. I almost banned him a dozen times, for ordering his girlfriend around. She swearing at him in Vietnamese, pushing him away. I honestly thought he was a piece of shit. Until one afternoon he showed up with his little light-skinned brother. His brother was eleven. He was wearing earmuffs like the ones my daughter wears at school so the screeching of a pencil won’t make her scream. With a stuttering and a fluttering of his autistic hands he asked, May I play some pool? And Jaivon said, We normally go to the park but it was raining and he heard me talking about here and now he wants to play pool—what the heck. I didn’t even know he knew what pool was! He let his brother carry the balls to the table. His brother, Ronny, took them out one by one and placed them in order—Jaivon showed him the pattern. It took Ronny five minutes to arrange them. But Jaivon never rushed him. He taught him how to hold the cue, to lean and aim. Jaivon still clapped at every miss and said, Nice try, little bro. Or You almost got that one. When Ronny almost had a meltdown, Jaivon pulled a pop from his jacket. His girlfriend, Duin, showed up in jeans and no makeup. She started speaking to Ronny in Vietnamese—and he spoke right back! He picks up things, Jaivon said. There was a tenderness and ease to them all that we don’t see in Jaivon and Duin on Friday nights when they are all outrage and posture under the eyes of their friends. Now every Saturday morning they hold mass. Now they breathe a kind of grace written between them like a choir humming through the church of this near-empty pool hall, cleansing the air like the dialysis Jaivon’s grandmother gets to cleanse her blood. They are cleansing her blood. Keeping her alive, he said. He said his grandmother loves his girlfriend. He said she never questioned a thing, unlike his mother, who doesn’t accept Duin. They want to get married, but his job loading trucks at Walmart pays crap. She’s smart, you know, but her English is bad so everyone thinks she’s dumb. We are always cleansing the blood. The constant infection. You never know someone except for a few letters of their name or the shape of their eyes or the names we mouth to erase one another till we learn the story. Once you learn the story, you cannot claim innocence. Jaivon, I am sorry, I am always sorry these days. We are the infected, we are getting better this early in a new and dangerous century, it is the same old epidemic since the first ship sailed. How we need to keep listening, to keep reaching: Like Duin now stretching across the pool table, asking for the bridge to help her hit a long hard shot. And the girls—no, the women: Vietnamese, American, slightly drunk and full of vodka and light. They are clapping and shouting. Their hands glint and flutter. How can they shoot, I wonder, with such long and dazzlingly painted nails?

Read more from Issue 16.1.