When she returned to the administrative offices, Paul had still not materialized. The secretaries paged him with no result, finally dispatching a search party of sixth graders. A Malaysian girl found him locked in one of the basketball courts. “Like a labyrinth in there,” he muttered in the taxi home.
“I’m not in ninth grade now, am I?” Tooly asked.
“No, no — they’ll find space in fourth or fifth.”
“Fourth?” she exclaimed, looking at him. “Didn’t I do most of that already?”
“Let’s not make a fuss. There’s not a huge difference.”
But how could grades be compared? Each person you fought or befriended would be different, every teacher changed, your life unfolded in another way. Instead of escaping school after eight more years, she’d be sentenced to nine. An extra year of life wasted.
Being young was so unfair, and you couldn’t leave. That was the difference between childhood and adulthood: children couldn’t go; grown-ups could. Paul made them leave every year. Just packed up — another city. Whatever you hated disappeared.
She looked out the taxi window. “I only …”
He waited. “Finish your sentence, Tooly.”
“They named the tortoise.”
“What?”
“Tim,” she lied.
“That was your suggestion,” he said. “Good, Tooly.”
“You thought of it.”
“Well, it was our idea.” He reached over to shake her hand. “Let’s take it as a sign — this is the school for you.”
CLASSES DIDN’T START till the following Monday, so Tooly found herself confined to the apartment again, though the live-in maid had now arrived. Previous housekeepers had been beloved friends to Tooly, so she greeted this woman with much optimism. Shelly was a Lao speaker from the northeast with a slight hunchback, possessing every skill required to endear herself to a Western household: she ironed flawlessly, kept purified water in the fridge, knew how to make spaghetti bolognese and to fry eggs, kept the floors sparkling, the surfaces dustless. Yet she proved a less-than-calming presence. When Paul or Tooly entered a room, Shelly bowed her head, pressed her palms together in the wai praying gesture, and hurried away as if someone had stamped at her.
To avoid provoking this distressing reaction, Tooly hid in her bedroom much of that first week, bounced on her bed, and read. When she needed food, she listened until the sounds of Shelly — the slop and slurp of rags squeezed into the water bucket, the scuff of flip-flops, her surprisingly sweet singing — had passed before darting into the kitchen to eat pomelo segments. When Tooly returned, her bed had been made, dirty clothes removed from the floor, pencils lined up on the dresser table beside her sketchbook of noses.
Minutes after Paul returned from work each evening, Shelly tinkled a brass bell in the living room, calling “sir and madam” to dinner. Tooly bounded from her room, and the maid ran away into the kitchen. During the meal, Paul studied software manuals or lists of birds. Tooly tried to think of something to say.
He looked up. “A man from the embassy invited himself over. He’s considering a move around here and wants to see the building. I couldn’t get out of it. He’s here for dinner Wednesday.”
“I can’t come, can I?”
He shook his head.
But on the day of the dinner Paul tried to compensate by returning home early with a special treat for her, a videotape of WrestleMania III. Owing to a misapprehension, Paul believed her to be a pro-wrestling enthusiast. She was not. But Tooly couldn’t find a way to say otherwise without disappointing him. So they spent hours watching the TV spectacles together, always with the sound off, since he considered the commentary biased.
“Can you remind me,” he asked, slotting the tape into the VCR, “is George ‘the Animal’ Steele on André the Giant’s side?”
“He isn’t on anybody’s side,” she answered. “He’s part animal and helps whoever he wants.”
“Where’s he from, Tooly?”
“Parts unknown.”
They watched in silence, Paul wincing whenever a wrestler slammed a folding chair into the forehead of a rival. “It’s said to be fake,” he remarked. “What do you make of that whole controversy?”
“The whole what?”
“Do you think it’s fake?”
She shook her head, watching the screen.
After a few bouts, Paul consulted his watch, rose, and strode to the television, depressing the knob with his kneecap, a scene of walloping pandemonium sucked into the center of the screen, leaving a white mark for a second, then glassy gray. “Nice?”
She nodded, thanked him, went to her room. Tooly was supposed to stay out of sight if ever he had visitors, but she left her door slightly ajar to eavesdrop.
The guest was a sun-leathered former U.S. marine with a blond mustache. Bob Burdett had fallen for Thailand eighteen years earlier when sent from the Vietnamese battlefront for seven days of R & R (rest and recreation) or, as the troops called it, I & I (intoxication and intercourse). After the war, he’d stuck around rather than return to Arkansas, and sought work at the U.S. Embassy. But foreign-service postings were above his pay grade, and, anyhow, lasted only two to three years; if they went longer, the theory went, American personnel risked identifying with the natives, an ailment known as clientitis. Anyone determined to remain long-term could always apply for a local-hire gig, which was what Bob Burdett had done, ending up as head of the car pool, a position with low status and low pay that reinforced his distaste for the Ivy League diplomats who sailed in and out every few years. “Don’t suppose you got a beer for me?” he asked.
“Oh,” Paul responded, glancing at Shelly — when it came to drinks, they kept only Fanta, milk, and water in the house. She dashed downstairs, returning breathlessly with six bottles of Singha as Paul concluded his abbreviated tour of the apartment, bypassing Tooly’s room altogether.
Bob Burdett inquired into the building and its services, commented on the city and the characters at the embassy, mused on expatriate life in Bangkok. Most expats, he explained, fall prey to the three-year itch. “By which I mean hating the locals and bitching about the help — how you can’t find a good mechanic, how everything’s better back home, how people actually work stateside. Don’t matter how good-intentioned folks are on arrival, they turn mean within three years. In my opinion? People are the same all over God’s earth. Just the food is different.”
As if on cue, Shelly entered with dinner. Conversation stopped, only scratches of cutlery on plates, Bob Burdett’s beer bottle clunking on the table. “Might I ask that pretty maid of yours to kindly bring me another of them beers?” By dessert, he’d downed five, and either alcohol or tedium had turned his talk to politics. “Quite a situation back home, wouldn’t you say?”
Paul murmured agreement.
“My concern is that we backslide,” Bob Burdett continued. “We’re a strong, prideful nation under Reagan. Like he told Mr. Gorbachev, the most important revolution in the history of mankind began with three words: ‘We the people.’ Don’t need another Jimmy Carter apologizing for who we are. Without the United States of America, this world falls on dark times. The Europeans? They’d be talking German now, weren’t for what our daddies done. Am I right? Same for the Koreans.”
“The Koreans would be speaking German?”
“You drunk on Fanta, son? I’m saying that, without us, Korea would be nothing but a bad neighborhood of Red China today. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Okay, I see.”
“I’m a student of history, and I can tell you one thing about these Soviets. You look at the great powers in history, you find there’s only one way to defeat an evil empire: on the battlefield. The Spaniards and their empire? Brits knocked out the Armada, and that was it. Napoleon? Overextended in the Russia campaign. Ottomans? Beaten down in the Crimean War, finished off in the Balkans. Austro-Hungarians? Kaput because of the First World War. You eliminate evil through war, not peace. Trust me. I’m a marine, and nobody hates war more than a man who’s seen it. But it’s a fact. We overcome these Soviets with force. I’m telling you now, you’ll hear all manner of hooey at the embassy about perestroika and glasnost. By God, I hear a lot of it. But now is the time to act. You strike when your adversary is weakened. That’s right now. Can’t sit around and wait for the Communists to build back up. Goddamn term limits — what we need is Reagan for four more years. You with me?”