I suddenly sounded to myself like a crazy person. Mr. Cohen would think I was lazy and crazy both. I stopped speaking and I looked out the window. A jogger went by in the street, a man in shorts and a T-shirt, and his body glistened with sweat. I felt beads of sweat on my own forehead like little insects crouching there and I kept my eyes outside, wishing now that Mr. Cohen would go away.
“Why did it terrify you?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said, though this wasn’t really true. I’d thought about it now and then, and though I’d never spoken them, I could imagine reasons.
Mr. Cohen said, “Snow frightened me, too, when I was a child. I’d seen it all my life, but it still frightened me.”
I turned to him and now he was looking out the window.
“Why did it frighten you?” I asked, expecting no answer.
But he turned from the window and looked at me and smiled just a little bit, like he was saying that since he had asked this question of me, I could ask him, too. He answered, “It’s rather a long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” I said. Of course I did.
“It was far away from here,” he said. “My first home and my second one. Poland and then England. My father was a professor in Warsaw. It was early in 1939. I was eight years old and my father knew something was going wrong. All the talk about the corridor to the sea was just the beginning. He had ears. He knew. So he sent me and my mother to England. He had good friends there. I left that February and there was snow everywhere and I had my own instincts, even at eight. I cried in the courtyard of our apartment building. I threw myself into the snow there and I would not move. I cried like he was sending us away from him forever. He and my mother said it was only for some months, but I didn’t believe it. And I was right. They had to lift me bodily and carry me to the taxi. But the snow was in my clothes and as we pulled away and I scrambled up to look out the back window at my father, the snow was melting against my skin and I began to shake. It was as much from my fear as from the cold. The snow was telling me he would die. And he did. He waved at me in the street and he grew smaller and we turned a corner and that was the last I saw of him.”
Maybe it was foolish of me, but I thought not so much of Mr. Cohen losing his father. I had lost a father, too, and I knew that it was something that a child lives through. In Vietnam we believe that our ancestors are always dose to us, and I could tell that about Mr. Cohen, that his father was still dose to him. But what I thought about was Mr. Cohen going to another place, another country, and living with his mother. I live with my mother, just like that. Even still.
He said, “So the snow was something I was afraid of. Every time it snowed in England I knew that my father was dead. It took a few years for us to learn this from others, but I knew it whenever it snowed.”
“You lived with your mother?” I said.
“Yes. In England until after the war and then we came to America. The others from Poland and Hungary and Russia that we traveled with all came in through New York City and stayed there. My mother loved trains and she’d read a book once about New Orleans, and so we stayed on the train and we came to the South. I was glad to be in a place where it almost never snowed.”
I was thinking how he was a foreigner, too. Not an American, really. But all the talk about the snow made this little chill behind my thoughts. Maybe I was ready to talk about that. Mr. Cohen had spoken many words to me about his childhood and I didn’t want him to think I was a girl who takes things without giving something back. He was looking out the window again, and his lips pinched together so that his mouth disappeared in his beard. He seemed sad to me. So I said, “You know why the snow scared me in St. Louis?”
He turned at once with a little humph sound and a crease on his forehead between his eyes and then a very strong voice saying, “Tell me,” and it felt like he was scolding himself inside for not paying attention to me. I am not a vain girl, always thinking that men pay such serious attention to me that they get mad at themselves for ignoring me even for a few moments. This is what it really felt like and it surprised me. If I was a vain girl, it wouldn’t have surprised me. He said it again: “Tell me why it scared you.”
I said, “I think it’s because the snow came so quietly and everything was underneath it, like this white surface was the real earth and everything had died — all the trees and the grass and the streets and the houses — everything had died and was buried. It was all lost. I knew there was snow above me, on the roof, and I was dead, too.”
“Your own country was very different,” Mr. Cohen said.
It pleased me that he thought just the way I once did. You could tell that he wished there was an easy way to make me feel better, make the dream go away. But I said to him, “This is what I also thought. If I could just go to a warm climate, more like home. So I came down to New Orleans, with my mother, just like you, and then we came over to Lake Charles. And it is something like Vietnam here. The rice fields and the heat and the way the storms come in. But it makes no difference. There’s no snow to scare me here, but I still sit alone in this chair in the middle of the afternoon and I sleep and I listen to the grandfather over there ticking.”
I stopped talking and I felt like I was making no sense at all, so I said, “I should check on your order.”
Mr. Cohen’s hand came out over the table. “May I ask your name?”
“I’m Miss Giàu,” I said.
“Miss Giau?” he asked, and when he did that, he made a different word, since Vietnamese words change with the way your voice sings them.
I laughed. “My name is Giàu, with the voice falling. It means ‘wealthy’ in Vietnamese. When you say the word like a question, you say something very different. You say I am Miss Pout.”
Mr. Cohen laughed and there was something in the laugh that made me shiver just a little, like a nice little thing, like maybe stepping into the shower when you are covered with dust and feeling the water expose you. But in the back of my mind was his carry-out and there was a bad little feeling there, something I wasn’t thinking about, but it made me go off now with heavy feet to the kitchen. I got the bag and it was feeling different as I carried it back to the front of the restaurant. I went behind the counter and I put it down and I wished I’d done this a few moments before, but even with his eyes on me, I looked into the bag. There was one main dish and one portion of soup.
Then Mr. Cohen said, “Is this a giau I see on your face?” And he pronounced the word exactly right, with the curling tone that made it “pout.”
I looked up at him and I wanted to smile at how good he said the word, but even wanting to do that made the pout worse. I said, “I was just thinking that your wife must be sick. She is not eating tonight.”
He could have laughed at this. But he did not. He laid his hand for a moment on his beard, he smoothed it down. He said, “The second dinner on Christmas Eve was for my son passing through town. My wife died some years ago and I am not remarried.”
I am not a hard-hearted girl because I knew that a child gets over the loss of a father and because I also knew that a man gets over the loss of a wife. I am a good girl, but I did not feel sad for Mr. Cohen. I felt very happy. Because he laid his hand on mine and he asked if he could call me. I said yes, and as it turns out, New Year’s Eve seems to be a Jewish holiday. The Vietnamese New Year comes at a different time, but people in Vietnam know to celebrate whatever holiday comes along. So tonight Mr. Cohen and I will go to some restaurant that is not Chinese, and all I have to do now is sit here and listen very carefully to Grandfather as he talks to me about time.