World and Town Read Online Free PDF Page A

white. Assorted dish towels, too, for the heaps of peels. All of which helps perk up the otherwise bleak scene, like her shocking-pink jacket, which she generally leaves open.
    Today, though, it’s zipped shut like Hattie’s fleece—Hattie having moved her painting table onto the back porch for fun, only to find some winter teeth left in the early-spring air. She’s had to warm up her red hands several times—tucking them into a spot under her breasts, right in the fold there, as she likes to do. It’s a private pleasure. For though she is mostly an old lady with an old lady’s epithelial cells, that part of her body, if she may boast, is still soft and new. Of course, if she had gone out running in her underwear the way the girls do these days, well, who knows. But never mind. The girl’s jacket is zipped up, is the thing, half on account of the cold, and half because the baby is with her, and zipped up in it. Hattie watches the bouncing going on in the girl’s lap—a live pink jiggling—the baby poking its head out every now and then so that its face is right in front of the girl’s. It pats her face and pulls her hair; that’s when it doesn’t look to be trying to eat her. And has she ducked into her jacket now, too? All Hattie can see is squirming—the hood flapping up and down and the two armless sleeves flying around like a scarecrow’s. How loud the girl and baby squeal! Hattie couldn’t block them out if she wanted to.
    But here comes Chhung, now, opening the door. He looms in the doorway over them and, just like that, the squealing lets up. The girl’s head pops out from the neck of her jacket; her hands pop out from the sleeves. The torso does keep on heaving, but now with a loud, frustrated wail as the girl leans awkwardly forward to pick up a carrot. She peels away with something half kitchen knife, half machete—an enormous, curved blade that glows in the late-day sun like something just forged for a mountain king.
    Chhung closes the door shut behind him.
    A brown truck rumbles up the road. Never mind that it’s mud season, with vehicles stuck all over town, this thing heads unhesitatingly down the mire of the Chhungs’ drive. There’s a ratcheting up of the hand brake; then a loud bong as a deliveryman appears. He’s dressed all in brown, to go with his truck. The girl jabs her bright knife into the ground, jumps up from the crate, and shouts; she’s bundling up her peels, stacking up her bowls, unzipping her jacket so the baby can see—the baby holding close but leaning out, too, and affording Hattie, as it does, a good glimpse of its thick black hair (something she would probably never have noticed, had she never come to the States and found the babies bald as melons). A woman appears briefly in the door—younger than Chhung, by the looks of her; or maybe she just dyes her hair, which is soot-black, like the girl’s and baby’s. Anyway, she’s tiny and lithe. And there’s Chhung, and the boy Chhung mentioned—a hair-dyer for sure, with a low, blond ponytail. He runs to help the deliveryman wheel a box down the truck ramp. A gargantuan box, this is—so big the men have to unpack it outside the trailer. They strew around an ungodly amount of Styrofoam as they do, the enormous chunks multiplying like the calves of an iceberg; their lively white bobs in the brown of the caked-mud sea. And what’s this screened thing emerging from it all like a weird rectangular sea monster? A TV, Hattie would say, except that this is so much bigger than any TV she’s ever seen. If there were another one like it, the town would have to build a bar to put it in, for ball games. It is hard to imagine the thing fitting into the Chhungs’ living room.
    And sure enough, when a little later Hattie sees—cannot help but see—one part of the screen shining through the window, it does look to take up the better part of a wall. She hesitates, but finally goes to fetch her binoculars from inside. Is that a