The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction by Violet Kupersmith Page B

smoke. “I know that’s not what you wanted. And there’s two of them.”
    Vu came over and sat on the edge of the bed, carefullyavoiding the soils from the birth on the sheets. The babies were awake and blinking their eyes—blue eyes in dark faces. Milky blue eyes, like those of Siamese cats. Outside, the distant rainstorm rumbled. Vu shuddered.
    He named the girls Vi and Nhi.
    U NLIKE OTHER CHILDREN ’ S , Nhi’s and Vi’s eyes never changed to brown. People whispered that it was from the French blood on their mother’s side, and that there was a strain of the French madness in them, too. They were such strange children, strange and quiet. As infants they rarely cried, and when relatives and well-wishers came by to congratulate Vu and Huong, they didn’t like to linger too long after they met the girls. There was something deeply unsettling about their identical, silent blue stares.
    Even as they grew older they never really spoke to anyone except each other. Huong took to locking herself in the bedroom most days with a bottle of rice spirits or occasionally one of her lovers, and Vu, resigned to the fact that he had lost his wife, devoted himself to his job as a civil servant. The twins were left to themselves. They would play in the forest, around the ruins on the hill, or go down to the beach and catch and torture crabs. Sometimes they fought with each other, kicking and biting savagely, not out of anger but boredom. They would alternate which one of them would win.
    They began to disappear for days at a time, returning to the yellow house hungry and dirty and with secrets. If they encounteredtheir mother on one of her rare excursions from the bedroom, she would immediately stick them both into the bath.
    “
Chim con
—my baby birds,” she would mutter. “Chim, why can’t you be
good
?” Then she would go off to find soap and leave them in the tub for hours, and when she remembered them they were gone again.
    O NE SUNNY AFTERNOON , Vi went looking for Mrs. Dang. She found her out in the chicken pen holding a brown clay jar in one hand.
    “Which one are you?” said Mrs. Dang, narrowing her beady black eyes at Vi.
    “Nhi,” lied Vi.
    “Eh,” said Mrs. Dang, and took a swig from the jar. “I knew it—you’re the skinnier one. How old are you now?”
    “Eight.” This was true.
    “Ai-ya! How time flies! What is it you want, precious?” In addition to being the local midwife and chicken breeder, Mrs. Dang peddled home remedies and medicine she got at half price from a relative in the Saigon black market.
    “Huong is having the same sickness as last time.” They never called her “mother.”
    “Again, eh? Take a bottle of my special tea from the counter in the kitchen. But first, watch how I get my dinner.” With a serpentine strike of her hand, Mrs. Dang caught a chicken by the neck and shoved its beak into the jar, forcing it to drink.After a minute it stopped struggling. “It’s drunk,” Mrs. Dang said, placing the chicken on the ground and then taking a quick swig for herself from the jar. The creature staggered sideways. “So it won’t feel a thing.” She stroked its head and then, with practiced swiftness, wrung its neck.
    Vi left when Mrs. Dang began plucking it. She took a brown glass bottle of dark liquid from inside and walked back toward the dirt road. Nhi was waiting for her by the gate and wordlessly joined her. They took turns holding the bottle on the way home.
    Huong was curled up on the bedroom floor, smoking, with the curtains drawn. There was a broken vase next to her, and a bloody clump of black hair was stuck to the wall. When Nhi and Vi opened the door to the room they recoiled at the sight. Their mother’s face was obscured by the clouds of cigarette smoke, and her bathrobe had fallen open.
    “Chim? Is that you?” She struggled to sit up and tuck her breasts inside the robe. The room stank. “Bring that here, Chim con. Your
mẹ
’s head hurts very much.” There