Nancy? I say. From Nancy Reagan?
This is after almost four years of Ronald in the White House, 1986, the year the Astros finished ten games ahead in the Western Division and then lost to the Mets in the playoffs. Real bad luck. And the Mets go on and win the World Series that year only because a guy lets a slow, good-hop ground ball go through his legs, a ball he’s going to catch nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand. And because of that, the Red Sox don’t win the World Series, which they hadn’t for seventy years and they still haven’t, to this day. One chance in a thousand they lose in 1986 and that’s their luck.
So my sister says, Yes, I admire her.
I also, says my father, who wants this to go smoothly. That is a good choice, he says.
Then my dad says, Fred.
Is that you? I say.
That is me, he says.
Is that from Fred Flintstone? I say. Which is this cartoon character caveman.
And my father gets angry. You do not take this in the right spirit, he says to me. It is plenty hard already, all these things that happen to us. You are spoiled child. You are not Vietnamese at all.
He says this last thing like it’s going to hurt my feelings, like I’m going to get upset about it. But of course I’m not Vietnamese. I don’t want to be. I’m on another team now. The ball went through my father’s legs and that was that. Bad luck.
My mother is flipping through the name books and she can’t stand it, my father and me fighting, so she starts calling out names for herself, though she’s not being too choosy, which tells me she’s just trying to stop the two of us.
How about Hildegarde, she says.
My father’s head snaps in her direction at this.
But she’s going on before he can say anything. Maybe Hyacinth, she says.
It should go with Fred, my father says, but his voice is suddenly tiny like he just realized he missed the ball. It’s dribbling into right field and he’s blown it for everybody.
My mother looks up from the book and straight into his eyes. She thinks a moment and turns Fred over silently in her mouth, you can see her shaping it. It’s just a word, after all. Just a stupid word. It’s not going to change who either of them is. And then she says, Ethel.
And she’s serious.
I’d watched some episodes of that old TV show with the screwy whiney wife of the good-natured dodo of a Cuban band leader. Lucy and Desi. And they had these friends, an old miser and a sort of screwy whiney wife assistant. Fred and Ethel. Fred was a geezer. He looked to be about thirty years older than Ethel. They didn’t have any kids, and the only thing interesting to me about them was thinking he married her when he was probably forty-five and she was about fifteen and she’s been waiting decades for him to come through for her some night, but he never does. With that situation running unspoken under the surface, it made everything else really kind of interesting. But there I sit looking from my mother to my father and back again. From Ethel to Fred to Ethel. And I just keep my mouth shut about it.
But it turns out later that my father chose Fred from some big boss he’d never even spoken a word to at Pennzoil. My father is a computer expert there. He hates computers. And my mother chose Ethel from hearing somewhere that Fred and Ethel were some kind of couple, but she didn’t know anything else about them. So when my mother says, Ethel, my father goes, Good. My sister goes, Good, and she’s not even trying to keep from laughing or anything, though she knows the TV show as well as I do. It sounds like she really does believe those names are good, which is a pretty scary thing about my sister, if you stop and consider it.
And now they’re all three looking at me.
Not that I haven’t also given this a lot of thought already. So I say, Lucky.
My father says, Lucky? What kind of name is that, Lucky?
I’m ready for him. I say, It’s the English translation of my Vietnamese name.
And what I said was true. My Vietnamese given name was V
n. Of course, right away my mother and father know I’ve got them.
I say, I want to keep this connection to my beginnings in Vietnam. And I look over at my sister, Nancy Reagan Wynn, who’s supposed to be the one that appreciates our family’s roots, and she knows I got her, too.
That is very good, my mother says. I give you lucky name myself.
My father can’t quite make himself say the words, but he’s got no choice except to nod his approval, in spite of his suspicions about me.
My sister says, You sure it’s not from Lucky Luciano? Wasn’t he a gangster who got whacked in a barber chair?
I’m surprised at you, Nancy, I say, making my voice sound hurt. I even think she’s got that wrong. Lucky Luciano died of old age.
Or maybe Lucky Strikes, my sister says.
I’ve really gotten to her.
They’ll give you cancer, she says.
I even force a faint sob into my voice. I say to her, I thought you’d be the first to understand how I miss my real home.
Yes, my mother says to my sister, watch how you talk.
So I get what I want. I get my luck, right there in my name. And it’s even at the expense of the one perfect Vietnamese child in the family.
And I am lucky. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m making ninety grand a year in computers. I love computers. I’ve got a great girl, Mary Wynn — no relation, fortunately — and her original name was Hi
n, which means generous, and she is that, she’s a generous girl who loves me. And I get to go to the casino boats and do what I love the most, next to watching the Astros. Well, maybe even more than watching the Astros, because this is more like playing the game, not just watching it.
I play the slots. A lot of Vietnamese go to gamble. They even have a Vietnamese night once a month at one of the boats, with some Vietnamese singer or other whining out sorrowful tunes for a room full of exiles. They’re not so different from me, really. Except they’re most of them looking to get something back. They got unlucky once, in a big way. Drew one too many cards and lost a country. And it gave them a big dose of gambler’s logic: you lose that big and things have got to turn your way just as big, the great cosmic odds tables have got to work themselves out. Even better if it’s in a different currency. Lose a country, win a million bucks. But you got to be on the spot when the time for that adjustment comes or you just end up a big loser forever and you’ve done it to yourself.
I understand where they’re coming from. And they all love the card tables. Blackjack and baccarat and Pai Gow poker, which is pretty funny if you think about it, Vietnamese gamblers trying to win back their pasts playing a Chinese game. But like I say, it’s the slots for me. The megabucks dollar slots.
One on one, pitcher and batter, facing that next moment of your life. That’s what it is for me. I’m not trying to make up for anything. I don’t figure the universe is ready to even my score. It’s just me and the moment. And I always use the handle on the machine. No punching buttons. You punch a button, it’s like you’re entirely passive. You’re just saying, I’m ready. Show me what you’ve got. That’s okay as far as it goes. But with the handle, you’ve got a chance to play the moment. You know? You palm that black ball at the end and you curl your fingers around it and you wait. You can feel the time slipping along and you’re going to do this thing and you’re either going to lose or you’re going to win. But there’s a way to make it your own. I’m sure of it. Like thinking, Okay, he’s shown me his curveball low and outside twice, now he’s going to try to bust a fastball inside. I’m guessing fastball and I’m ready for it. There’s four clicks on the handle. You can hear them, and if there’s too much noise — that loud, steady, Saturday-night casino roar — then you can feel them in the palm of your hand. One click. Two. You’re doing this slow and counting them. Three. Four. And you pause, maybe. Or you don’t. However it is you’re feeling this thing at the moment. There’s this flow of time and if you jump in at one particular second you win and if you jump in at another second you lose. That’s the way things are. So you feel click number four, and you hold one beat, two — and the progressive is quietly counting away over your head, five million and something dollars and something cents, and it’s running up fast, busy storing up a fortune for you, and you wait for that third beat, and that’s it, you realize, a little waltz here, three-four time, and you take your swing.