Still, if I could have been part of all that without dressing up like a duck, that would have been better. I wish I could have won Mexico by answering questions or solving puzzles or guessing prices. Something like that. I’m very good at all those things. Just last week I did several things that no one else could do — I identified Jeremy Brett as playing both Sherlock Holmes on public television and Freddy in the movie “My Fair Lady” and I read the phrase “Desperation Tactics” even without any vowels and I knew that a KitchenAid dishwasher and a year’s supply of Toast ‘Ems cost between six hundred fifty and seven hundred dollars. But you have to try out for these shows and they stay away from people who have an accent. I put the words of English together as well as most Americans, but you can hear my foreignness in my pronunciation.
And only once did I get as far as the tryout anyway. I finally had sense enough to turn my name around and leave out the middle two. I turned Tr
n Nam Thanh Gabrielle into Gabrielle Tran. My parents had given me a French name because they had always admired the French, for their food and for their riding club in Saigon, mostly. But arranging my name like Gabrielle Tran won me a tryout — I guess the producers thought I might be like Nancy Kwan, the actress who I enjoy on the old movies and who can speak English very clearly when she wants to.
I was very good at doing what they asked when exciting things happened in the game. You’d think that they’d have long ago gotten used to asking for this. But the man with the headphones and a clipboard seemed almost shy when he got around to it. Like we were on a date and he was asking for something sexual and a little strange. There were three of us trying out at once, three women, and he said, “When something very good happens, could you. .” And he stammered around for a bit and then said, “Could you show it physically. That is, could you kind of, you know, bounce up and down? Jiggle around.” So we all laughed at this, but then we did it and I did it very well. He even stopped us and put his hand on my shoulder and said to the others, “Yes. Like this. Watch Mrs. Tran.”
I was very good, you see. And it was natural to me. I was having fun. But then when they started talking to us, asking our names and where we lived and such, I could see the little squinting that went on when I spoke. They asked questions and I got them right and I bounced up and down, but I knew I wasn’t going to make it. And I think I probably talked a little too much, as well. I even kidded the host — I won’t mention his name — about the kiss he gave his hostess during a break. They had both disappeared while the director walked around setting cameras, and when they returned, they did it without looking at each other at all and the host’s TV makeup was smudged around his lips. It’s not as if I said this on the air, but instantly I could tell that it wasn’t the thing to do.
My husband told me that it was all I should have expected. In America he is in the food-service business. Not restaurants. He thinks that’s like being a trained elephant in a circus, running a Vietnamese restaurant in America with paper lanterns and China soup bowls and all of that. He thinks it’s just putting on your foreignness and playing a part. Instead, he makes food for institutions that need meals-like hospitals, schools, airplanes, banquet facilities. He is a very good businessman. He appreciates America very much for being the sort of place where a man like him can succeed. But he has no use for the things I like about America. He said that I should have known the game shows would never take a woman who has my face or my voice.
But in a way I proved him wrong. The proof was that he and I were going up in the elevator at the five-star Fiesta Vallarta Hotel in beautiful Puerto Vallarta, where we would spend an exciting four days and three nights. The crowd at “Let’s Make a Deal” knew the value of this. They let out a long sigh of envy. I know they’d been asked to make this sound, just like the winners had been asked to jump up and down. And it’s true that I’d seen shows when the crowds made long sighs over an electric coffee maker or a lava lamp and they didn’t even laugh at themselves afterward. They were playing this wonderful game in this wonderful world where these things can make people happy. When your coffee drips through a filter in the morning and it tastes so good, you sigh. Or you turn off the lights, all but your lava lamp, and these wondrous shapes rise beside your bed and you turn to your husband and say, Look how beautiful. And you say, I won that. We got that for free. Well, the trip was really worth a Sigh, and I won that.
So my husband and I went up to the tenth floor and we entered our room and the glass doors in the far wall were open and the filmy white curtains were fluttering and we stepped through them, out onto the balcony, and there was a wonderful view, the sharp ocean horizon, Banderas Bay a jade green out far, and to the left was the curve of the shore, the hotels all nestled there and also the distant city with its red-tiled roofs and palms and the mountains rising behind, thick with trees. It was very nice. I had seen but I did not look at the band of brown water, maybe seventy-five meters wide, stretching along the beach. I supposed it was the tide-drifted water from the mountain river I’d seen coming in, water full of mud and leaves from the jungle. Sort of romantic, if you think about it, jungle water hugging our shore. But of course my husband’s eyes went straight for this stain on the bay and he didn’t see any romance in it. He just shook his head.
“Look,” I said and I pointed to half a dozen pelicans flying past at our tenth-floor level, very close, their necks curled back and their wonderful flappy lower jaws somehow tucked in. We could see their eyes and I said, “Look, Vinh,” and they wheeled around for me and passed by again.
We live in Louisiana, in New Orleans. Pelicans are the state bird, but we never see pelicans in Louisiana. Here were six of them almost at arm’s length. But Vinh only nodded and he leaned on the rail of the balcony, his arms stiff, and I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder. I see many things, and I knew that somewhere inside, part of him was unhappy that the businessman could not stop running his mind. How do I know this? Because this sigh he made was not just in exasperation that these businessmen had not done better in Puerto Vallarta. A neater airport, better roads, a nicer corridor of elegance to get us to the hotels, a beach with perfect white sand and green water. What were those things to my husband that they should make him sigh? Even though I knew that these were the thoughts on the surface of his mind. He even said, as his elbows stayed locked, “They should do better with this place.”