How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,32
high above everything. But the job didn’t go through the winter months, and in this country, there were so many winter months. That anything grows here at all feels like a miracle. She had to find something else to do once the cold set in.
What she found was carrots. At the farm, where the processing took place, the carrots arrived from warmer climates and sometimes came in unusual shapes. She had to discard those. No grocery store was going to buy something that looked like a balled-up fist and call it a carrot. Carrots have unique growths and bumps on their skin. No machine could handle peeling each and every one. The blades would get jammed and they’d have to shut everything down until a mechanic could come out to fix it. It was just cheaper to get somebody to peel the carrots by hand. When you work on a farm, you’re just a body. You have to be there on time and do the work. Bending, kneeling, lifting, picking, pulling. And you have to do it for at least eight hours, sometimes twelve to beat the weather. You work around the weather all the time.
At first, the physical demands made her body ache—her knees and especially the bottoms of her feet. They don’t hurt while you’re working, when you’re too busy thinking of what needs to be done and getting it done. It was at night, after a shower, when the pain would arrive.
When it happened, she didn’t know she was having a stroke. She’d been tired and couldn’t get out of bed for three days. It was only once she’d managed to get up to wash her face that she saw the right side of her face drooping in the mirror. When she got to the hospital, they said since she drove there herself, she was functional, and they couldn’t do anything for her beyond keeping her under observation. So they sent her home. And she did go home, but the right side of her face kept sagging, and then her ear started acting up, like she was underwater. She drove herself back to the hospital, and this time they kept her for two months. How she was able to drive herself back and forth like that, she couldn’t explain. But she had been lucky. When you live alone, it can take a while for someone to discover you’ve died. You know, the insides go first. That’s what people smell when they smell a dead body. It’s the insides.
ALMOST TWENTY YEARS ago now. It had rained then too. And she had been waiting in her car just like this, outside that school. Her daughter was a creature of habit. She always left the school at about four. When she had yet to appear at the doors, the woman got out of the car. She stopped the first student she saw. “I’m looking for Chantakad?” The student said, “Oh, you mean Celine?” and pointed. And there she was, standing by a locker, throwing books into her knapsack. On the inside of the locker door was a small mirror, sticky notes, magnets shaped like hearts.
When her daughter saw her mother standing there, the girl quickly slammed the locker shut and shoved at the lock. Then she ran up to her, ushered her out the door. “What are you doing here?” she said, urging her mother to walk faster.
“I came to pick you up,” she said. “It’s raining.”
“Don’t go in there again. Wait for me in the car.”
“What if something happened to you? I was worried.”
“Just don’t, okay?”
They crossed a parking lot. The prickly cold of the rain was surprising, hitting hard at them, and there was no way to protect themselves except to run through it and get into the car as soon as possible.
“And will you stop calling me that name!” her daughter went on. “Everyone calls me Celine now.” Her seat belt clicked in the back seat.
“Celine? How do you get Celine out of Chantakad?”
“That’s who I am now. I’m Celine. And can you not talk to my friends, please? You are so embarrassing.”
And how old was her daughter then—was it thirteen? Thirteen and so sure of everything. What was it about her, the woman wondered, that was so embarrassing? Was it the perm? She hadn’t looked at the instructions on the package and had left the formula in for too long, so her hair now curled tight to the scalp. Was it her blue jeans, bought at