Wanting for Nothing
Winner of the 2023 Tobias Wolff Award
It was the eighties and we didn’t know better. We microwaved leftovers in plastic containers, pressing our faces against the radiating glass door, watching our meal spin glamorous circles beneath a warm amber glow. We ate hot dogs cold, straight from the package. We sprayed cheese from a can and our hair into feathery crisps. We breathed second hand smoke indoors and suffered asthma attacks. We soaked up the sun without SPF. We knew money talked. We bargained with god, suffering scarcity now so we could have a future rich in wanting for nothing.
We were three sisters, each a head shorter than the last, like Russian nesting dolls but Chinese-Vietnamese exiled to Faribault, Minnesota. We looked nearly identical then: hand-cut, slightly uneven bangs; enormous front teeth, wide, devilish grins. We shared the same clothes, handed down from biggest to smallest to our one-eyed stuffed animals. Holes and stains were our inheritance.
Lin was the eldest. She shouldered the responsibility of acquiring new clothes for the rest of us. She had to be pragmatic in her choices—nothing too trendy that couldn’t last beyond a season. No glitter or gaudy geometric shapes. Stripes were OK, horizontal not vertical. Polka dots as long as they weren’t grotesque in size. And not the Bobby McFerrin sweatshirt with Don’t Worry Be Happy in puffy, neon letters across the chest, even though we desperately wanted it.
We remembered the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurine we wanted last fall, on an afternoon of downtown window shopping with Lin. He was Raphael, the red one. Hotheaded and reckless, our favorite of the four ninja brothers. He did what he wanted and we wanted him for that. Wasn’t that what we wanted for ourselves? He was also grossly overpriced. Lin saw the way we kept handling him in the store, wishing we could afford to take him home.
“It’s too expensive,” she hissed before whisking us out the door. We heard these words so often, an automatic echo inside our heads. Anything beautiful, wonderful, or worthwhile was too expensive, prohibitively yanking us out of fantasy, firmly putting us back in our place.
But later that day, a dream come true: Raphael—the exact one from the shop—wonderfully, firmly perched in the center of our bedroom desk, a surprise gift from our sister. When or how she managed to nab him, we didn’t know. We never saw her approach the cash register or pull out her wallet to pay. Our gratitude required we keep lingering questions to ourselves, a seemingly small price to pay to own something so out of reach.
Out loud everyone agreed: Lin was resourceful, like a magician. She made new, shiny things appear out of thin air.
* * *
The first time Orville came to visit, Mai and I were home alone, still in pajamas eating breakfast. Captain Crunch cereal, a treasured, though infrequent treat. Its sharp, jagged edges made the roofs of our mouths bleed.
Our parents were away doing overtime shifts. Lin was shelving books at the library. She worked after school and on weekends, convincing the head librarians to give her the part-time job when she turned fourteen last year.
“Hell-o!” he sang, ringing our doorbell.
A Jehovah’s Witness? We peeked outside the living room window. Early spring in Minnesota meant everything looked aspirational. Soft teasing tendrils of sunlight against a smooth milky sky. Birds tittering. Naked branches lithe and stretching. We kept our eyes averted from the stubborn vestiges of winter below: the mangy, pockmarked lawn and grey clumps of snow like cigarette ash smoldering around the edges.
We jumped down the stairs, rattling banister and titanium feet, opening the door halfway. He greeted us with a shy smile. “So pleased to meet you. I’m Orville.” He wore delicate wire-rimmed glasses and had a slight slouch. His clothes tidy, taupe, and buttoned. Along the base of his head were Friar Tuck tufts of downy white hair, creeping across his ears and along his temples to form a cascading white beard. Like Santa Claus, we told our parents afterwards.
Later, when his visits became more frequent, we’d notice other details: how the top of his bald head was pinkish and speckled, resembling an oozing earthworm. His small teeth were stained yellow. Self-conscious, he wouldn’t open his mouth wide when he smiled, immediately wrapping his thin upper lip across his teeth to hide them.
On this Saturday morning he held a small bouquet of flowers. Daisies, chrysanthemums, baby’s breath. Our breath, we suddenly realized, tasted rancid. We hadn’t brushed our hair or teeth yet. Dried milk residue had collected in the corner of our mouths.
“You must be Mai.” He pointed the bouquet towards her forehead and the baby’s breath shivered. “You are Fran.” He winked. His voice was thin and nasal and matched his elfin appearance. We blinked back. He knew who we were, could tell us apart.
“I know your sister, Lin. From the library,” he continued. “I wanted to meet the two other beautiful Asian princesses in the family. This is what brought me here today.”
Ha! Slopping animal snorts erupted from the back of our throats.
“It’s true! Did you know you are god’s most beautiful creation? He will have his angels guard you in all your ways. Let god be the guiding light for you.” The blue of his eyes whirred, energized inside their sockets. “The bible says, search me, oh god, and know my heart! Do you know what that means? He lives inside our hearts. Inside you.”
We kept our hands firmly gripped on the doorknob in case we needed to slam it shut, snuck a side-eyed glance with the other. Was he a Jehovah’s Witness, or wasn’t he? There was wrestling on TV we were missing at that very moment. Honky Tonk Man and Brutus Beefcake. Oiled and slicked with endorphins, crashing on top of each other, wearing nothing but sequined underwear. We were young, but we knew, even then, WWF’s carnal violence was more comforting than this stranger standing on our doorstep.
He spoke some more—another psalm, another verse, maybe it was a song—we tuned it out. We watched the pink splotches on his neck metastasize in the morning sun. Finally we told him we had to go.
“Of course. Of course. I didn’t mean to keep you.” His smile unrelenting. He handed us the bouquet and a small, sealed envelope produced from his pocket. He said he hoped to see us again soon. We waved goodbye, as though shooing him from sight, double checked the door was locked behind us.
Up the stairs two at a time, buzzing with relief we were rid of him, we watched through the living room window as he crossed the street, slow and deliberate like he had bad hips or bunions. Grimacing, he settled inside his champagne-colored Buick. His hair, skin, clothes, and car were complementary shades of the same neutral palette, alabaster and impenetrable, blending seamlessly into the pallid Minnesota landscape.
It was only after we tore the envelope open and the money fell out that we felt a sudden rush of sympathy towards him. Twenty one-dollar bills. We took turns counting, just to be sure; fanned the bills across the table, staring, trying to make sense of what had just unfolded.
Maybe he was senile. Lonely. “He probably needs people to give his money to,” Mai reasoned. “Old people are like that.” She separated the money into two equal piles, one for each of us, counting the cash like a seasoned dealer at a high stakes casino.
Do we keep it? Of course we kept it. We’d just endured an insane person. We’d been called princesses. Asian princesses. We had to listen to him go on and on. We’d been chosen. God’s children, remember? We cackled at that, whooped across the living room floor. A fairy godmother, godfather, had been delivered to our doorstep, gave us the very thing we most desired.
* * *
Our father plucked feathers at the poultry factory in town. Our mother kept an eye out for broken computer chips on an assembly line. Paid by the hour, they saw time in terms of wages lost or earned, weekends a battle of determining their worth. Downtime seen as dollars gone down the drain.
They talked about quitting their jobs and opening a Chinese restaurant in town, serving food for undiscerning white folks: chicken wings, egg rolls, fried rice with frozen vegetables. We kids would work the front of the house. They would labor in the kitchen behind the scenes. The restaurant would be called Sisters’ Chinese Food, in honor of our unpaid child labor. We’d make a killing, they said. This conversation went on for years.
We drew practice menus at the dining table, folded sheets of paper into thirds, created a dollar sign and star rating system for the most expensive dishes, made-up inflated prices for the fun of it. Our logo was a hand-drawn illustration of our three faces with huge globular eyes: Lin in the center, Mai and me on either side, matching bangs and chin length hair etched in thick penciled lines.
We set aside money for Sisters’ Chinese Food too. A few dollars from our newspaper delivery and New Year’s red envelopes; a little bit each time we babysat neighborhood kids, sticky and covered in orange cracker crumbs. We stuffed this money inside our ceramic piggy bank in the back of the closet, next to the hidden stash of expired Halloween candy that would eventually be covered in ants.
Mai and I agreed to add half of our portions from Orville to the piggy bank as well. We figured it was the right thing to do, funneling this unearned cash towards the future family business.
The restaurant was the end goal, glorious, solid proof we’d arrived. Until then, we lived on a diet of restricted spending. We saved complimentary ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard packets in a kitchen drawer, never once bought these condiments from a store. We reused the same brown paper lunch bag, making it last an entire week, Monday through Friday. We kept the thermostat low in the winters, wore so many layers it made our movements shuffled and strained.
It was a semi-starvation regimen, cutting out unnecessary expenses. And like all diets, it made us even more obsessed: wheeling and dealing and money-making schemes. Paychecks, cash deposits, one and a half time pay, buy-one-get-one-free, and money-back guarantees. All a welcome distraction from the unhappy circumstances which had brought us to this money-hungry state in the first place.
* * *
We told Lin about Orville’s visit later that day. She laughed, nonplussed, like she’d been half-expecting a visit from him all along. She said he was a frequent visitor to the library; he sat in the oversized chairs in the periodical room, reading magazines and newspapers for hours. They chatted casually together. He asked questions about school, family, us. So she told him.
But did you have to tell him our names? How did he know our address? Why all the god talk? We can’t recall ever asking these questions in earnest. Our qualms, by then, reassuringly swept under the rug. “He’s nothing to worry about,” she said in our shared bedroom in the basement, maroon-carpeted and mildewed in the summers.
She’d already moved on, her attention focused on a new furry horse sweater she’d brought home that afternoon. She said she bought it at Perman’s, the overpriced, old lady department store downtown. It must have cost a fortune. The horse was white and made of mohair, standing in front of a knit pasture and barn. It seems hideous now, but back then it was majestic.
She held the sweater above our heads, admiring and taunting all at once. She wouldn’t let us touch it. “I’ll kill you,” she said. Carefully she folded the sweater into a neat origami square, mimicking what the silk-scarfed shopkeepers did at Perman’s. Then she stood on her tiptoes, laid it with slow-motion pageantry on the topmost shelf of the closet where it floated, pristine, above our crumpled mess of pilly sweatshirts and faded secondhand sweaters.
After she left, we dragged the paint-splattered step ladder from the garage, climbed up and took the sweater down, petted the horsie, then stretched it over our big heads to try on.
We loved the unspoken expensiveness of it—impractical and indulgent and what pretty white girls could afford to wear. We weren’t sure how much she paid for it. She might have said, but we didn’t trust whatever number she told us. She had the habit of exaggerating her savings, rounding up, and reporting a made up, discounted price to bolster her savvy, her ability to beat the system. We all did this. Wiliness was more valued than truth, where we came from.
We weren’t sure she had paid for it at all. There was no bag, tissue paper, or box. None of the swirling doubt and anxiety that should have accompanied such extravagance. Did we ever wonder if Orville was involved? Had he also given her money? Rafael, our beloved ninja turtle, kept watch from the desk. We knew better than to ask.
* * *
Orville showed up a month later in May, on Mai’s 13th birthday. Then again on my 9th birthday in July. And again in November for Lin’s 15th birthday. How did he know each of our birthdays? Lin must have told him. She shrugged when we asked, couldn’t give an answer without interrupting her own thoughts, flicking her hands in the air like we were flies hovering too close to her face.
Our parents were too tired to care, as distracted as Lin. “How much did he give you?” they yawned after each visit, their only question. They were sprawled on the sofa and the La-Z-Boy. The glow of the living room TV reflected on their faces; the volume cranked high, our voices barely perceptible above the noise. Their lids drooped slowly, steadily, until they fell asleep moments later. They hardly heard our answers.
They never came to the door with us when he visited, out of shyness or exhaustion, we never knew. Lin never seemed to be home when he called either. By default, we’d become our household’s Orville ambassadors, opening the door and smiling stupidly on the doorstep, waiting for the moment to pass like a bad smell.
His visits followed the same pattern: always in the morning, unexpected and unannounced. He no longer carried a bouquet of flowers. He kept the conversation minimal, as though he’d intuited our impatience from the first visit; decided upon a streamlined approach thereafter.
He put his biblical sermons in writing instead, handwritten psalms inside a store-bought card. “Holy crap,” Mai said, the first time she opened her card. His handwriting was calligraphic and overly dramatic. Cursive script that looked as though it had come from the 18th century, produced with quill and fountain ink. Grandiose flourishes with every letter, over-the-top lowercase loops; curls that swept uncontained across the page. Each message started the same: To my Beautiful Asian Princess on her Birthday! Rejoice!
The cards were fanciful and pink. Glossy baskets of embossed flowers; heartfelt messages across the top—Wishing You Love & Blessings; Each Day of Your Life is a Gift from God—intended for people you barely knew. They were sealed inside a matching pink envelope. We dreaded opening the seal with our fingers, knowing his tongue and saliva had touched this very same spot moments earlier.
But there was always money tucked inside. Not the twenty one-dollar bills, but our age on our birthday in one-dollar bills, in the exact amount. He always knew.
Still, we were never too worried. Lin and our parents showed no aversion so neither did we. We laughed at our own discomfort. Even his name—Orville—offbeat and weird, matched the absurdity of the entire situation. Any concerns were quelled by the cash, the thought of another visit, another envelope thick as a wallet, handed over to us without having to say or do anything. We’d take it.
* * *
What if we had refused Orville’s money all those years? Opened the door, torn the card into tiny pink shreds and thrown them into his unblinking, elfin face. Said: Eat shit. Or: How do you like the way this Asian princess talks? What if we had reported him to the cops? Would we have redeemed ourselves? Would we have finally taken control of money’s firm grip on our unspoken impulses? Our precarity? Our destiny?
We didn’t though. We laid all of our accrued earnings across the maroon floor—Orville’s gifts along with the rest—counted bills with furrowed brow, built towering stacks of coins, imagined pen and pad in hand as we took orders at Sisters’ Chinese Food. This was before we understood it was never going to happen.
Our dream of the restaurant deflated each time we saw our parents asleep in front of the TV; felt the hard callouses on the palm of their hands; observed the deep-set circles beneath their red-rimmed eyes, as if to say, How could we possibly? They were gradually sinking into acquiescence. What was meant to be liminal had turned long-term. They showed the malaise of their circumstances unchanged.
The last time we brought up the restaurant, our mother didn’t play along like before. Her eyes didn’t stir, glistening with excitement. Her permed hair, freshly crinkled and smelling of burnt popcorn, like a dark dandelion pouf on top of her head, bristled at our words.
We mentioned our money saved, something close to two-hundred dollars, with more on the way each week. She chortled. We asked how much more we’d need and she shot back, a tight clip to her voice. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s too much. It’s too expensive.” Her back was turned while she stirred something brown and liquid on the electric stove.
With those words, we knew.
Soon after that, Lin came home from the shopping mall with a fistful of cash—eighty dollars in all—money she claimed she found lying on the floor in front of the drinking fountain. Then Bonne Bell lip glosses appeared in the bathroom drawer, one in every soda flavor. Hypercolor shorts and a slap-on-the-wrist bracelet for each of us.
Christmas morning and a stockpile of gifts. A Lite Bright and Snoopy snow cone machine. Pentel art markers. A Kaboodle kit. Chanel No. 5 perfume for our mother; a plaid shirt from Perman’s for our father. All from Lin.
Photos from this day have us looking dumbstruck—wide-eyed and mouths agape, tearing through packages, gift wrap strewn across the floor. Bing Crosby singing of a white Christmas on the radio. Lin remained blurry in the background, seated on her knees and surveying the scene, a grown-up look of satisfaction spread across her face.
We returned to school after the holiday break feeling victorious, finally able to list new presents like prizes won, competing with other kids, for the first time, in that one-up I got game. Who needed a greasy restaurant anyways? Luck was on our side with Lin’s newfound things, things, things; things that let us forget what we didn’t have.
We never asked Lin how she got our gifts. Why would we? If we asked, then we were afraid this victorious feeling would come to an end.
Inside our bedroom that night: blinds drawn, windows sealed and saran wrapped from the cold; the moon’s slippery light peeked through the broken slats, illuminating the maroon-colored carpet, now a shade darker and redder.
We sang songs before falling asleep, a game we called Beep. We each took turns singing—anything you could think of. You didn’t need to know all the lyrics, just a verse or two, and usually the chorus. No one was allowed to interrupt. No one laughed meanly either. Once done, you had to say, Beep. Then it was the next person’s turn.
Mai sang Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” from the top of the bunk bed. Her voice reedy and sincere. I lay in the murky bottom, my body tucked tight and overwarm beneath the polyester-filled covers. Lin was alone on a narrow bed separate from us, floral pastels and lace trim pushed against the wall on the other side. We fell asleep to the song’s vibrations humming inside our heads.
My dream first appeared on that Christmas night when I was nine. It continued, recurring, for several more decades, stopping only a few years ago. Though, I can’t be certain it won’t return again someday.
It’s always the same frenetic scene. The three of us, Lin, Mai, and me, stand close together, pushing the front door closed with all our strength. Outside there’s a man trying to get in. He’s angry. The door wobbles in a heart-wrenching struggle between both sides.
Once he wore a top hat. Another time a furry Russian cap. We never know why he wants to get in, only that it’s bad. We need to prevent his entry or we will suffer. The consequences will be enormous and unspeakable.
That night when the dream first entered my consciousness, I woke before the man made it inside. But other nights I wasn’t so fortunate. He entered and we cowered and cried. We knew we were ruined somehow, even though nothing terrible ever really happened. It was just the act of knowing we had let him in. The defeat devastated us.
* * *
Orville’s visits occurred for several more years, then stopped just as suddenly as they started. We never mourned his absence. How could we? We’d never told anyone about his visits, hardly spoke about him amongst ourselves, as though we understood deeply and inherently there was something wrong with the entire exchange.
Secretly we wondered what we had done wrong to make him stop visiting. We had a feeling it had to do with us aging out of childhood, our preciousness passed; our value reduced to null.
Of course he was a sexual predator. I found this out during my senior year of high school.
Lunchtime in the cafeteria. I was seated across from a matronly girl named Abigail. She carried a leather shoulder bag, kept mints, band-aids, and pressed powder inside its numerous pockets. She talked about a man from her Lutheran church. I can’t recall why. These were the kind of conversations I was forced to endure back then, growing up in a small town in the rural Midwest.
“Orville,” she said.
“What? What did you say?” I perked up, suddenly interested.
He went to her church. He and his wife, Holly. He had a wife? They sang in the choir. White beard and glasses. Last name Berglund. Yes, that was him. He had asked for forgiveness from the church community. A situation or two of him assaulting a special needs girl several years ago. He also wrote poetry. He was quiet and friendly. She paused, her powdered face twitched. “Why? You don’t know him, do you?”
I lied and said no. Gross and godawful. The subject changed and I pretended to be preoccupied with a Velcro strap on my backpack. My sisters had moved out of our childhood home by then. Lin had been caught stealing at some point in high school, something to do with a forged paycheck while babysitting. She had to do community service and counseling. Our parents said it was the worst thing to ever happen to our family. Secretly I disagreed.
Now Lin lived alone in St. Paul. She’d become a devout Christian, attended church every Sunday, frequently said, I’ll pray for you for any minor grievance. Mai could barely remember Orville when I brought him up recently. She became a pharmaceutical sales rep in Kansas City, wore expensive grey pantsuits and carted a rolling black suitcase. She laughed at my detailed recollections when we last spoke, wondered if I wasn’t exaggerating, again, to hatch a good story. She couldn’t even remember his name. The worst part isn’t what happened. It’s the loneliness in my remembering.
Katie Quach is a writer living in Toronto. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Catapult, Chestnut Review, Hunger Mountain and Past Ten. Her story “Here Comes Trouble” was longlisted in CRAFT’s 2022 Creative Nonfiction Award. Katie serves as a fiction editor at The Rumpus. She is at work on her first book on second-generation Vietnamese diaspora living in Hanoi.
