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fists and silenced fury.

    cỏ

    lawn
    HồNG WORKED DAY AND NIGHT , weekdays and weekends. She hoped that her husband would do the same, that he would look for more clients, that he would cut the lawns of more houses. There were days, though, when the sky was so heavy it was impossible for him to get up. That was how she met Julie, because Hồng had replaced her husband behind the lawn mower once, twice, several times. The last time, Julie had come outside, offered her a glass of water and suggested to my husband that she could help me out in the restaurant.

    New York

    New York
    AT FIRST, HỒNG KEPT her distance. I only heard her moving around, efficient, extraordinary. Thanks to her, I was able to leave the kitchen and go to New York with Julie and spend two whole afternoons in a gigantic bookstore where hundreds of cookbooks opened in front of us. We had very little time, so Julie took me to one restaurant for an appetizer, to a second one for the meal, and to yet another for dessert. She wanted me to visit as many addresses as possible in forty-eight hours. Julie knew Manhattan and its warehouses, which held paintings and sculptures that made me dizzy. How had Richard Serra imagined that rust-covered steel was sensual? How does a person transport a work of art twenty times bigger than my kitchen? How does a person think so big?

    cắn

    bite
    JULIE SHOWED ME SOMETHING outside my everyday life to make me see the horizon, so that I would desire the horizon. She wanted me to learn to breathe deeply, no longer just sufficiently. A hundred times, she repeated the same message, in a hundred variations:
    â€œBite. Bite into the apple.”
    â€œBite the way the file bites metal.”
    â€œBite hard and make the most of life.”
    â€œBite! Bite! Bite!” she said, laughing hard, as she pulled my hand to cross the street or while she was braiding my hair. She educated me in languages, in gestures, in emotions. Julie talked as much with her hands as with her wrinkled nose, while I could barely maintain her gaze for the duration of a sentence. Several times, she stood me in front of a mirror, obliging me to talk with her while we looked at ourselves, so that I could observe the stillness of my body compared with hers.
    I was floored every time Julie repeated words in Vietnamese. She imitated accents with the flexibility of a gymnast and the precision of a musician. She pronounced the five versions of
la, là, lạ, lả, lã
, distinguishing the tones even if she didn’t understand the different definitions: to cry, to be, stranger, to faint, cool. The challenge I’d devised was much too easy for her, while the exercise she’d suggested in turn required an enormous effort from me. Learning songs by heart was not a demanding task in itself, butsinging them out loud took all my courage. Julie made the sounds come out by loosening my tongue.
    â€œStick out your tongue. Try to touch your chin. Turn towards the left … now, towards the right. And again.”
    She roared with laughter at the sight of me putting my hand a few centimetres from my mouth during those exercises, making me giggle every time. Julie’s laugh was tremendously warm, tremendously charming, but she would also shed abundant tears, unlike Vietnamese women, who cry as silently as possible. Only professional mourners hired for funerals could gesticulate and display pain on their features without being considered inelegant.

    ma

    ghost
    MY HUSBAND NEVER KNEW that on the nights I wrote to Maman, I cried. Or if he did know, he preferred to console me by always having booklets of stamps in the drawer. Maman didn’t reply very often. Maybe because she didn’t want to cry either. I heard the echo of her silence, though, and the burden of everything that couldn’t be heard. At night, when we used to share the same bed, the sound of Maman’s tears sometimes escaped the corners of her