Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen

Author:Beth Nguyen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

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That moment in the parking lot with my sister and our mother? The three of us haven’t been together in the same space since then. A couple of years later, Anh had a baby. A year after that, I had a baby, too. About a decade would pass before either of us would visit our mother again.

When I brought my first son to Boston, when he was a year old, I had wanted Anh and her child to come along, too, so we could introduce our kids together. She didn’t want to go. That was her explanation. A tired sigh: I don’t want to. Later, when I admitted that our mother hadn’t shown up, she had said, See what I mean?

When you have a sister, and are lucky enough to get along with her, even through teen years of stealing each other’s clothes and vaguely resenting whomever the other is becoming, you hone a language of weathering and understanding that no one else can know. When we were in elementary school and she saw someone being mean to me, she would threaten to beat them up, and would have done it. When she was in college and out of money, too far from her next paycheck, she called me instead of our parents. We don’t tell each other all of our secrets and confessions—we are sisters, not best friends—but we share an intimacy of space that, as the years go on, seems almost sacred to me. I am comfortable around my sister, can say things with my sister, in a way that I’ve never been, or will be, with anyone else in the world.

When we were growing up we almost never spoke about our mother, following the unspoken dictate of our household. As we have gotten older, as we’ve had children of our own, we bring up the subject of our mother more often, more easily. As in, How long has it been since you talked to her? Do you think you’ll visit her at some point? Should we go see her in Boston? Slowly, we have brought a once-forbidden topic out into such greater light that now it almost feels normal, almost natural. Hey, we might say, when’s the last time you talked to our mother?

Once, I asked Anh why she didn’t feel any differently about our mother, now that she knew what it was to be a mother, too. Yeah, she said, I do know. That’s why I think she should call us. She never makes any effort. What kind of mother is that? This was when our kids were little, at a Christmas get-together at the cottage-like house in Michigan. Anh and I were alone in the kitchen, taking a break from the music in the party room that our dad had built and renovated, and where everyone was hanging out. Anh was looking in the refrigerator, reorganizing the plastic tubs of leftovers. I was thinking about how we had both left this tucked-away house to go to college and had never lived here again.

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