she had been meticulously aging some pots into a semblance of twelfth-century Sawankhalok ware. “All this chatter disturbs my work.” “Yes, klun mae," the three of them chorused back respectfully. My Elder Mother hissed, “ But watch out, my dear husband. I read a story in Siam Rath about a woman who castrated her unfaithful husband and fed his eggs to the ducks!” My father sucked in his breath and took a comforting gulp of whiskey as I went to the front to answer a customer. She was one of those archaeologists or anthropologists or something. She was tall and smelly, as all farangs are (they have very active sweat glands); she wore a sort of safari outfit, and she had long hair, stringy from her digging and the humidity. She was scrutinizing the spaceship mobile my grandmother had made ten years ago—it still had not sold, and we had kept it as a memento of hard times—and muttering to herself words that sounded like, “Warp factor five!” My brother and I know some English, and I was preparing to embarrass myself by exercising that ungrateful, toneless tongue, when she addressed me in Thai. “Greetings to you, honored sir,” she said, and brought her palms together in a clumsy but heartfelt wai. I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “Why, didn’t I do that right?” she demanded. “You did it remarkable well,” I said. “ But you shouldn’t go to such lengths. I’m only a shopkeeper, and you’re not supposed to wai first. But I suppose I should give you ‘E for effort’ I said this phrase in her language, having learned it from another archaeologist the previous year— “ since few would even try as hard as you.” “Oh, but I’m doing my Ph.D. in Southeast Asian aesthetics at UCLA,” she said. “ By all means, correct me.” She started to pull out a notebook. I had never, as we say, “ arrived” in America, though my sexual adventures had recently included an aging, overwhelmingly odoriferous Frenchwoman and the daughter of the Indian babu who sold cloth in the next town, and the prospect suddenly seemed rather inviting. Emboldened, I said, “ But to really study ' our culture, you might consider—” and eyed her with undisguised interest. She laughed. Farang women are exceptional, in that one need not make overtures to them subtly, but may approach the matter in a non-nonsense fashion, as a plumber might regard a sewage pipe. “Jesus,” she said in English, “ I think he’s asking me for a date!” “ I understood that,” I said. “Where will we go?” she said in Thai, giggling. “ I’ve got the day off. And the night, I might add. Oh that’s not correct, is it? You should send a go-between to my father, or something.” “Only if the liaison is intended to be permanent,” I said quickly, lest anthropology get the better of lust. “Well, we could go to a movie.” “What’s showing?” she said. “Why, this is just like back home, and me a teenager again.” She bent down, anxious to please, and started to deliver a sloppy kiss to my forehead. I recoiled. “ Oh, I forgot,” she said. “ You people frown on public displays.” “Star Wars,” I said. “Oh, but I’ve seen that twenty times.” “ Oh, but have you seen it—dubbed live, in a provincial Thai theater without air conditioning? Think of the glorious field notes you could write.” “You Thai men are all alike,” she said, intimating that she had had a vast experience of them. “Very well. What time? By the way, my name is Mary, Mary Mason.” I / I / e were an hour late getting |r V the show started, which was pretty normal, and the audience was getting so restless that some of them had started an impromptu bawdy-rhyming contest in the front rows. My brother and I had manned the booth and were studying the script. He would do all the main characters, and I would do such meaty roles as the Second Storm Trooper. “ Let’s begin,” Phii Lek said. “ She won’t come anyway.” Mary turned up just as we were lowering the house lights. She had bathed (my brother sniffed appreciatingly as she entered the dubbing booth) and wore a clean sarong, which did not look too bad on her. “Can I do Princess Leia?” she said, waf-ing to Phii Lek, as though she were already his younger sibling by virtue of her as-yet-unconsummated association I knew the days of live movie dubbing were numbered. Maybe I could go to Bangkok and get a job with Channel Seven, dubbing Leave it to Beaver and Charlie’s Angels. with me. “You can read Thai?” Phii Lek said in astonishment. “ I have my master’s in Siamese from Michigan U,” she said huffily, “ and studied under Bill Gedney.” We shrugged. “ Yes, but you can’t improvise,” my brother said. She agreed, pulled out her notebook, and sat down in a corner. My brother started to put on a wild performance, while I ran hither and thither putting on records and creating sound effects out of my box of props. We began the opening chase scene with Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto, which kept skipping; at last the* needle got stuck and I turned the volume down hastily just as my brother (in the tones of the heroic Princess Leia) was supposed to murmur, “ Help me, Obiwan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.” Instead, he began to moan like a harlot in heat, screeching out, “Oh, I need a man, I do, I do! These robots are no good in bed!” At that point Mary became hysterical with laughter. She fell out of her chair and collided with the shoe rack. I hastened to rescue her from the indignity of having her face next to a stack of filthy flipflops, and could not prevent myself from grabbing her. She put her arms around my waist and indecorously refused to let go, while my brother, warming to the audience reaction, began to ad-lib ever more outrageously. It was only after the movie, when I had put on the 45 of the Royal Anthem and everyone had stood up to pay homage to the Sacred Majesty of the King, that I noticed some thing wrong w ith my brother. For one thing, he did not rise in respect, even though he was ordinarily the most devout of people. He sat bunched up in a corner of the dubbing booth, with his eyes darting from side to side like window wipers. I watched him anxiously but dared not move un til the Royal Anthem had finished playing. Then, tentatively, I tapped him on the shoulder. “ Phii Lek,” I said, “ it’s time we went home.” He turned on me and snarled. . .then he fell on the floor and began dragging himself forward in a very strange manner, propelling himself with his chin and elbows along the woven-rush matting at our feet. Mary said, “ Is that something worth reporting on?” and began scribbling wildly in her notebook. “ Phii Lek,” I said to my brother in terms of utmost respect, for I thought he might be punishing me for some imagined grievance, “ are you ill?” Suddenly, I thought I had it figured out. “ If you’ re playing ‘putting on the anthropologists,’ Elder Sibling, I don’t think this one’s going to be taken in.” “You are part of a rebel alliance, and a tra ito r!” my brother intoned—in English—in a harsh, unearthly voice. “Take her away!” “That’s . . .my God, that’s James Earl Jones’s voice,” Mary said, forgetting in her confusion to speak Thai. “That’s from the movie we just saw.” “What are we going to do?” I said, panicking. My older brother was crawling around at my feet, making me feel distinctly uncomfortable, because of the elevation of my head over the head of a person of higher status, so I dropped down on my hands and knees so as to maintain my head at the properly respectful level. Meanwhile, he was wriggling around on his belly. Amid all this, Mary’s notebook and pens clattered to the floor and she began to scream. At that fnoment, my grandmother entered the booth and stared about wildly. I attempted, from my prone position, to perform the appropriate wai, but Phii Lek was rolling around and making peculiar hissing noises. Mary started to stutter, “Khunyaai, I don’t know what happened, they just suddenly started acting this way—” “ Don’t you khun yaai me,” my grandmother snapped. “ I’m no kin to any foreigners, thank you!” She surveyed the spectacle before her with mounting horror. “Oh, my terrible karma!” she cried. “ Demons have transformed my grandsons into dogs!” On the street, there were crowds everywhere. I could hear people babbling about mysterious lights in the sky. . .- portents and celestial signs. Someone said something about the spectacle outside being more impressive than the Star Wars effects inside the theater. Apparently, the main pagoda of the temple had seemed on fire for a few minutes and they’d called in a.fire-fighting squad from the next town. -“Who’d have thought of it?” my grandmother was complaining. “ A demon v is its P rasongburi—and makes straight for my own grandson!” When we got to the shop—Mary still tagging behind and furiously taking notes on our social customs—the situation was even worse. The skirmish between my father and mothers had cre- scendoed to an all-out war. “ That’s why I came to fetch you, children,” my grandmother said. “ Maybe you can referee this boxing match.” A he fty ce ladon pot came w h is tling through the air and shattered on the overhead electric fan. We scurried for cover, all except my brother, who obliviously crawled about on his hands and knees, occasionally spouting lines from Star Wars. Shrieking, Mary ran after the potshards. “ My god, that thing’s eight hundred years old—” “ Bah! I faked it last week,” my grandmother said, forcing the farang woman to gape in mingled horror and admiration. “All right, all right,” my father said, fleeing from the back room with my mothers in hot pursuit. “ I won’t marry her- . . . but I want a little more kindness out of the two of you. . . oh, my terrible karma.” He tripped over my brother and went sprawling to the floor. “What’s wrong with him?” deavu* _ deca, Muueau, . the. tteUr^ue! 11-5 Uut. chance 8025 S.E. 17th Avenue 235-9419 Open Mon.-Sat. 10-6 Marv Jane Haake (503) 224-8416 jet, O l d Se lLuM od 7738 SC 13th 230-0418 1017 SW Morrison Suite 205 Portland, OR 97205 LIDA CARR O LLB KU R T ZB E N E R GYBTRANS FORMATIO N B 5 0 3 B 2 8 7 ■ 1 7 2 0 READINGS C LA S S E S 18 Clinton St. Quarterly
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