THERE WERE SO MANY COCKTAIL PARTIES in those days. And when they were held in the afternoon we called them garden parties, but they were cocktail parties nonetheless.
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
Most days, I would bathe in the morning and then stay in my housecoat until lunch, reading, writing letters home—those fragile, pale blue airmail letters with their complex folds; evidence, I think now, of how exotic distance itself once seemed.
I’d do my nails, compose the charming bread-and-butter notes we were always exchanging—wedding stationery with my still-new initials, real ink, and cunning turns of phrase, bits of French, exclamation marks galore. The fan moving overhead and the heat encroaching even through the slatted blinds of the shaded room, the spice of sandalwood from the joss stick on the dresser.
Out for a luncheon or a lecture or a visit to the crowded market, and then another bath when I woke from my afternoon nap, damp hair on my neck as I removed the shower cap, a haze of talcum. Still wrapped in the towel, I could feel the perspiration prick my skin. Face powder, rouge, lipstick. And then the high-waisted cotton underpants (I hope you’re laughing), the formidable cotton bra, the panty girdle with the shining diamond of brighter elastic at its center. The click of the garters. Stockings slipped over the hand and held up to the light, reinforced toe and heel and top.
We were careful to secure the garter just so. Too close to the nylon risked a run.
You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent (to her husband’s career, even to his affections), ready to go home.
Slip, then sheath—small white dress shields pinned under each arm with tiny gold safety pins—then shoes, jewelry, a spray of perfume. I’d be faint with the heat in my column of clothes by the time I came downstairs. Peter, my husband, waiting, newly shaved, handsome in his tropical-weight suit, white shirt, and thin tie, having a first drink and looking a little wilted himself.
And the girls we passed on the street or who met us at the door, or who only moved across my inner eye by then in their white ao dais, were like pale leaves stirring in the humid stillness, sunstruck indications of some unseen breeze: cool, weightless, beautiful.
It was at a garden party on a Sunday afternoon, early in our first month in Saigon. The party was in the elegant courtyard of a villa not far from the Basilica. A lovely street lined with tamarind trees. We’d only been there a few minutes ourselves when I turned to see a young family paused at the entrance, posed as if for a pretty picture beneath a swag of scarlet bougainvillea. Baby boy in the arms of the slim mother, daughter at her side, tall father in a pale suit—another engineer, I learned later. It was much later still, decades later, that I suddenly wondered, laughing to think about it, why so many engineers were needed.
I was twenty-three then, with a bachelor’s from Marymount. For a year before my marriage, I’d taught kindergarten at a parish school in Harlem, but my real vocation in those days, my aspiration, was to be a helpmeet for my husband.
That was the word I used. It was, in fact, the word my own father had used, taking both my gloved hands in his as we waited for the wedding guests to file into our church in Yonkers. This was in the bride’s waiting room, a small chamber well off the vestibule. I recall a tiny stained-glass window, a kneeling bench (for last-minute prayer, I suppose), a box of tissues (for last-minute tears) on a shelf under an ornate mirror, and the two brocade chairs where we sat. The cool odor of old stone and the fresh flowers in my bouquet. My father took both my hands and held them together on the wide tulle skirt of my wedding dress, which even in the dim light of the tiny room was winking with seed pearls.
He said, “Be a helpmeet to your husband. Be the jewel in his crown.”
I said, “I will.”
* * *
THE LITTLE GIRL WHO POSED so prettily with her parents and her baby brother was you.
She was about seven or eight, in her Sunday best like the rest of us: a crisp yellow dress, nearly gold, with pleats at the bodice, scalloped collar and sleeves. She held a Barbie doll in the crook of her arm, like a scepter. It must have been the first Barbie doll I’d ever seen.
After the family was introduced—my husband knew the husband, had already met the wife as well—I leaned down to ask her about the doll, as you do with children. To tell the truth, I was happy to give her my attention, pretending to be a kindly adult.
I hadn’t yet lost the shyness that plagued me then; I had only managed to put it aside—to steady my hands before I extended them and to breathe deeply before I spoke. I wanted to be a helpmeet to my husband, and these gatherings, cocktail parties and garden parties and dinners with embassy people and military people and corporate people and advisors of all kinds, were, as my husband put it, how things got done in Saigon.
The little girl spoke softly, with the manners—she said, “Yes, ma’am”—that were taken for granted in children, in those days. Seen but not heard. Nearly whispering, she touched the doll’s little shoes—open-toed high heels—and the pretty floral dress she wore, explaining that the doll arrived wearing only a bathing suit, but that any number of outfits could be purchased: cocktail dresses, uniforms—nurse or stewardess—even a wedding gown that cost, and here she grew breathless with the astonishment of it, five dollars.
From the small purse on her arm she withdrew a tiny booklet, illustrated with all the outfits the doll might wear.
Two men had joined the adult conversation that was just above our heads, blocking me, or so I saw it, from their circle. I didn’t want to straighten up and turn away from the child—she was so earnest. Nor did I want to linger on the periphery of these grown-ups, waiting to be invited back in. So I took the little girl aside a bit, to a wicker settee just beyond the trellis of flowers. Together we turned the pages of the catalogue, and she told me which outfits she already owned and which she was “asking for.” Many of these she had already marked with a careful X.
There was an aunt in New York City, she explained. A businesswoman who was the regular source for these gifts. Who, in fact, the child told me, sometimes wore a tweed suit with a matching pillbox hat exactly like the one pictured in the catalogue, an outfit called “Career Girl.”
Well, it was all charming to me. I had grown up with broad-faced baby dolls that came with only a party dress or a coat and a bonnet, and my playtime consisted of pushing a doll carriage up and down the sidewalk, or holding to the doll’s rosebud mouth a plastic baby spoon of imaginary food. But here was a doll that did not require naps or airings or pretend feedings. A doll meant for a thousand different games: nurse, stewardess, plantation belle, sorority girl, night club singer in a sultry gown (“très chic,” I said to my little friend), bride.
The girl’s mother soon joined us, her plump baby boy in her arms.
Charlene was young and freckled, with thick strawberry blond hair that she wore pushed back with a small headband. Her nose was pert, her darting eyes a deep hazel. There was something both regal and feral about the way the straight line of her scalp met her tanned forehead. I recognized her type from my days at Marymount: she had the healthy, athletic, genetic—as I thought of it—confidence of one born to wealth. The first thing she asked me, in fact, was if I played tennis; she was looking for a partner. I did not.
Then she leaned across her daughter, holding out the baby, offering him to me.
“Would you mind taking him for a sec?” she asked, giving me no option, really. Had I not reached up, she seemed ready to let him roll to the ground. “I have got to go tinkle,” she whispered.
I’d noticed this before, among girls of her tribe: they knew an easy mark, a girl of lesser means who would be reflexively—genetically—disposed to do for her whatever she asked.
“I’d love to,” I said, and meant it. I took the baby from her, a big, warm bundle in his pale blue romper. He was now wide-eyed. She straightened up—“only a sec,” she said—and had no sooner gone into the house when his little mouth crumpled and he began to whimper. I lifted him to my chest, held him under my chin. I patted his back to soothe him. He quieted nicely.
We were hoping to start a family of our own—any month now, was how I’d come to think of it—and I felt a surge of confidence. I would be a marvelous mother.
Then the baby hiccuped once or twice, and I felt the warmth of his spit-up on my bare throat. A second later, just as I tried to ease him from my breast, he began to vomit, effortlessly, copiously, as babies do. I felt it running down my dress. That bland, wheaty odor of baby formula—no more awful, really, in that it was regurgitated. I felt it pool warmly in my bra.
There was nothing to be done. I moved the child to my lap, bouncing him a bit, rubbing his back, wiping his little mouth and chin with my thumb. He hiccuped a few times more, seemed to settle, seemed to change his mind—a flailing of his little arms, a sudden stiffening—and then he began to wail. His sister beside me said, “Oh, no,” and put her face into her hands as if to withdraw from the scene. “Your pretty dress,” she said into her palms. I assured her it was fine, fine, but with the crying child in my lap I couldn’t open my purse for a tissue to blot up the mess.
I felt the other partygoers turn to me, pausing in that second in which they remained well-dressed, neat, adult while I became the humiliated child. I saw how the men among them averted their eyes as if I’d just begun to publicly menstruate, while a trio of wives rushed forward with a solicitude that in my embarrassment felt to me like scorn. Some of them brought linen cocktail napkins that they swatted gently at my front, but the material was too delicate to do much good. One woman took the baby from my arms—I felt somehow that this was an indication of my ineptitude—and another, our hostess, put her hand under my elbow.
“Come along, dear,” she said. She was a middle-aged woman with short gray hair. Another corporate wife. She put a large pink dinner napkin to my chest, as if my clothes had gone transparent. “We’ll get you cleaned up,” she said.
We made our way through the increasing crowd of partygoers in the courtyard. I was aware of how they stepped aside as we passed, silent and appraising. I supposed some of them thought I was the sick one. Perhaps they thought pregnant, or drunk. I tried to say something about this to my escort, but she merely hushed me soothingly, and gently pressed the big napkin to my breasts as if I were a dumb thing, about to babble.
* * *
INSIDE, THE LIVING ROOM was wide, cool, nicely furnished. An impression of pink and green silk cushions and rattan chairs. A wide, polished tile floor, fans turning overhead. A house girl appeared from the far end and moved soundlessly toward us.
“Poor Mrs. Kelly here,” my companion said—I was surprised she knew my name, although I had learned enough about corporate wives by then to know I shouldn’t have been—“has had an encounter with a colicky baby. Poor dear. Let’s help her clean up.”
And then she gave some soft-spoken instructions in French. I didn’t have the wherewithal at that moment to translate the words for myself, though I suspected she was merely repeating what she had already said, for my sake, in English.
The girl nodded sympathetically as my hostess handed my forearm over to her, along with the pink napkin she’d been pressing to my chest. I was led outside and then through the small kitchen, where two more girls were working at a narrow counter, and a burly man all in white, the chef, I supposed, was speaking in a harsh stream. We slid past them and across another courtyard, into an even smaller room, a sewing room, whose walls, on my first impression, seemed to waver, like the inside of a tent. There was that kind of canvas-filtered light. It made the dark bulk of the Singer a silhouette against the one wide window. There was an ironing board with a small black iron, a square, pressed-wood cutting table, bolts of pale fabric here and there. Even with the baby formula spilled down my dress, I caught a scent of starch and newly ironed linen and thought of my mother.
A trifold screen was angled into one corner, a lovely raw-silk cocktail dress in a beautiful shade of green—slim bodice, tulip skirt—was hanging from one of its folds, as if for display.
The girl indicated that I should step behind the screen, nodding and unbuttoning an imaginary dress to show that I should step behind the screen and take off my clothes. I nodded, too, and smiled and thanked her. In my humiliation, I was thanking everyone. There was a small bench behind the screen, a pair of peau de soie heels, water-stained, beneath it. A white ao dai hung from a plush satin hanger, as if in charming counterpoint to the very Western cocktail dress on the other side.
I took off my pearls first. Peter had bought them in Hong Kong, his first trip east, just after we became engaged. I sniffed them, wondering if the odor of baby formula would linger on the thread. I kicked off my shoes and unzipped my dress—it was a narrow sheath in pale blue linen with a silk lining. Very Jackie, I’d thought when I found it at Woodward & Lothrop. Most of what the baby had thrown up was on the inside, all along the scalloped neckline. Ruined, I was certain. I stepped out of the dress. At the armpits, the two white dress shields were like a pair of rolled-back eyes, wildly oblivious.
I wondered just how much I was meant to take off. The lace bodice of my slip was also wet; my bra had caught and held what seemed to me a sloshing ounce of pale vomit.
I was still standing there, all uncertain, when the girl returned with a basin and two white towels. She placed them on the bench and then, as if this were a ritual we had performed together many times, she lifted my slip up over my head, and went behind me to unhook my bra.
I would have been grateful for that big pink napkin then, but she gently eased me to the bench and, after placing one of the towels on my lap—I was wearing only my panty girdle and stockings—she stirred the warm water, the scent of lavender rising out of it, and squeezed out a thick cloth. Then she slowly wiped my neck and my chest, between my breasts, touching them gently. She was a plain, round-faced girl, not one of the beautiful Vietnamese women; there was a plumpness about her cheeks, a broadness to her mouth; her complexion was not perfect; but there was that benign smile, and a sweet, pleasant odor to her warm breath. She patted my skin dry with the other towel and then unfurled a pink silk kimono, on loan from our hostess, I assumed.
“Put on this,” she said, whispering. She tossed my dress and slip and bra over her arm, lifted the towels and the basin of water. She smiled at me. Although I think we were about the same age, I felt entirely mothered. “All will be well,” she said.
I sat for a few moments behind the screen, not sure what to do next. For the first time, I thought of my husband: if he would be looking for me across the party, if someone had asked him, Was that your wife who was led away? Or if our hostess had whispered to him the whole story of what had occurred, which seemed most likely.
Once again, I felt the utter shame of my situation, knowing it was nothing to be ashamed of, but feeling it all the same. It was a kind of humiliation—worse, a kind of incompetence. Would another woman, a mother, have known how to hold the child to avoid such a mess? Would another woman have anticipated in the baby’s twisting lips a coming explosion? I was an only child; my mother was forty when I was born and fifty-seven when she died. My experience with babies was narrow—it was one of the things I worried about as we planned for our own.
I was good with children. I had, I sometimes joked, majored in children. I’d spent the year before my wedding at the kindergarten in Harlem, loving every day of it, because the children were adorable and my competence with them so reassuring—I would be a great mother, I was certain—but infants worried me, babies who, like something rabid or drunk or insane, could not be charmed or cajoled or distracted from their woes with a cookie or a story or a game.
Babies who might pour eight ounces of regurgitated formula right down the front of your favorite dress at a garden party full of diplomats and engineers, economists and generals.
I had a sudden notion—sitting there in the corner behind the folded screen, like a banished child myself—that the baby’s mother, the sunny tennis player born to wealth, knew exactly what she was doing when she handed me her child. Tinkle, my eye, I thought. She knew the baby was about to erupt, and she handed him off to me just in time.
I knew her type. I’d met enough girls like her at school. They all had that ability—some kind of noblesse oblige—to enlist the help of strangers without ever seeming helpless themselves. They got other people to take care of them, to lend them a scarf, or ten dollars, or an umbrella, to hail them a cab or pick up their dry cleaning, and then they made their gratitude seem facetious, as if they had merely accepted your favors in order to allay your anxiety to bestow them.
I wrapped myself in the thick silk of my hostess’s kimono. It was nice to have the cool material on my bare skin. The little room’s odor of starch and fabric had made me remember home—I thought of my mother ironing in her bedroom in our narrow house, the late afternoon light, the tufts of thread on the chenille bedspread where I would lie, watching her—but the silk, and something of the lingering scent of the herbed water on my skin, made me want to reject homesickness and love this place instead.
To love the distance I had traveled and all the strangeness—some of it beautiful, some of it startling—that, up until now, I thought, I’d been seeing as if from the corner of my eye.
I looked again at the lovely ao dai hanging on the screen. So simple and elegant, and sensible, too—no need for panty girdle and garters when you dressed like this. No need either for face powder and lipstick, rollers and hair spray, when you had the smooth skin and beautiful hair of the Vietnamese girls.
No need for the gloved handshake, breath held to convey a steady confidence, when you can instead, more authentically, simply bow your head and lower your eyes.
No taking control of any mishap at your party with a jaunty napkin flourish; no sunburned athleticism that can make a question like “Do you play tennis?” seem the beginning of a moral assessment, if you can whisper, simply, “All will be well” and then move out of the room like a pale leaf stirred by a breeze.
I had worked myself into a good state of anti-Americanism when I heard my tennis-playing nemesis enter the room, asking, “Is she here?”
I stood, pulled the kimono firmly closed, and stepped from behind the screen.
There she was. She let out a laugh when she saw me—a kind of surprised guffaw that she then pretended to smother—and quickly replaced her amusement at the sight of me with contrition.
“I am so sorry,” she said. The little girl with the Barbie doll was in her wake. “Truly. How awful. I hope your dress isn’t ruined.”
I saw her glance through the window behind the sewing machine and turned to see, through the open blinds, that my dress and my slip and my bra were hanging in the bright sun in the drying yard just outside the window. I felt at some further disadvantage that this woman, this Charlene, had seen these things first, before I even knew where they’d gone.
“I hope you’ll let me buy you a new one if it’s stained. Or better yet”—she turned, just as the house girl came back into the room, a small tray with a glass of lemonade in her hands—“we’ll get Lily here to make another one for you. An exact replica. She’s a marvelous seamstress.”
Copyright © 2023 by Alice McDermott
