Three Flames. Alan Lightman

“for my grandchild.”

      “That is wonderful,” said Nita, smiling.

      “I made a diaper,” said Touch Pheng.

      “Yes, you did,” said Ryna, and she looked out the window just in time to see a white-breasted plover flying straight for the river.

       NITA

       (2009)

      Limheang. Channsophea. Savada. These are the names she’s considering for her daughter, still only a small bump in her belly. In another month, it will be time to announce the news. Neighbors will ride their bicycles and motos up the gravel road to the house to congratulate her and perhaps bring some cloth diapers. They’ll use the visit as an excuse to inspect the rooms and the beds, to surreptitiously gawk at the refrigerator, and to see if the rumored silk curtains from Phnom Penh are really made out of silk. It’s a village of farmers who can’t read and dingy shop owners. It’s a gossipy village. It’s a village where people make sly jokes and innuendos about who is in debt and who is cheating on their spouse and who might be sneaking over the Thai border to buy and sell cocaine. Despite that small trade, the village is dirt poor, like her own village, more than three hundred kilometers away. This is her husband’s family home. In her two years here, she’s never been welcome. The villagers treat her politely, in deference to her rich husband.

      Her face is round, with high cheeks, a strong chin, and eyebrows too inky and thick for a girl. Her teeth are good, and she has a silver star implanted on one of them, a beauty touch requested by her husband. Most of her hair has been cut short by her husband’s aunt. Too short. The remaining long strands she’s wrapped around her face in an imitation of the film stars she admires. Although she’s only eighteen, her skin is already worn, with creases beginning to form on her forehead. But on the whole she is an attractive young woman, not what anyone would call beautiful, but pleasant-looking. Her figure is slender, like her mother’s. And she has light in her eyes, an intelligence that some find appealing, and others just the opposite. At the moment, she’s taking a rest and sits in the kitchen holding an ice chunk against her face to fight off the sweltering heat. She can hear her auntie retching in the next room. She misses her mother and brother and sisters. She even misses her father, who forced her to come to this place. In her mind, she composes a letter to her mother: Dear Mae, I’m finally pregnant. I can hardly believe it. I’d given up. Nearly three months now. Next week, I’ll take the bus to Battambang City to look for baby clothes. I’ve learned to sew and am making something myself. A little girl is what I want. I’ve been a good wife, Mae. I have. I’ve kept the three flames.

      She has told her mother the truth, but not all of the truth. For a moment, a slight breeze wafts through the open window, a tiny relief. She touches her tummy and thinks of the future—not her future, but the future of the little one inside her.

      It was just before planting season when Pich decided that his daughter should drop out of school. They’d finished dinner, and Ryna was putting away the uneaten rice for breakfast the next morning. Nita was looking out the window; somebody’s cow had gotten loose and was wandering between the houses, and the rice fields beyond the village were turning purple in the dusk. Suddenly, Pich stood up from where he’d been sitting on the floor, with no shirt on, and said, “Kon, I want you in the fields with me tomorrow.”

      “Nita has school tomorrow, and Father knows it,” said Ryna.

      “Other girls help their fathers in the fields,” said Pich. “Sreynich, Dina, Veasna. Look at them.”

      “Our Nita is different,” said Ryna. “She’s very clever. All her teachers say so.”

      “Enough school,” said Pich. “Thida is gone. Sreypov is too little. Kamal and I need help.” He began waving his arms like he did when he was angry. Pich always looked bigger when he waved his arms. “Daughter Nita has no need of school,” he said. “In a year, she’s being married.” Ryna let her face go slack, as she always did when she had to be a good wife and do what Pich wanted.

      Nita thought to herself that she was not getting married anytime soon. Maybe when she was twenty-five. Kamal had told her that some women in Phnom Penh didn’t get married until they were twenty-five or thirty and earned four hundred dollars a month all by themselves. Nita ran behind the dangling sheet where she and her little sister slept, and she put her schoolbooks inside her mother’s old trunk where nobody would find them.

      Early the next morning, before her father and brother got up to load the oxcart, Nita crept down the ladder and went to hide at Lina’s house. It was still dark outside, so she took a kerosene lamp, but she knew the way. Lina and Nita had made many trips on the rutted road between their two houses, chatting and pretending not to notice the boys lolling under the acacia trees, doing nothing except sucking palm sugar juice out of plastic bags. “What’s up, little srey chhlat,” the boys would say to Nita. Smart cookie. Which was sweet, but maybe it wasn’t really so sweet. Nita figured they just wanted her to do their math homework for them. The boys paid the teacher to get the answers to the tests, but Nita got the answers on her own. Lina, they called sa’at. Beautiful. They never called Nita that. Lina could have had her pick of any boy in the village, but her parents wanted her to marry her cousin Hin Nhean, so that’s what she did. Then her husband left to get seasonal work in Malaysia, and the boys began looking at her again. Sometimes she looked back.

      Afternoons, after their household chores, Lina and Nita walked along the river to watch the wooden fishing boats dragging their white nets behind them. Lina usually wore her knockoff Diesel T-shirt and matching flip-flops. She once offered Nita her tight-fitting Diesel—one of the boys had given it to her, and she could get many more, she said—but Nita thought it provocative. Lina had plenty of friends, but she said she liked Nita the most because Nita didn’t judge her and didn’t jabber all the time.

      That morning, Nita hid in Lina’s storage shed. She had to share the space with Lina’s two cats, both strays that Lina had taken in. Nita’s family had owned a cat when she was a little girl, but she had beaten it badly with a broom after she saw her father beat her mother with the broom, and the cat ran away and never came back.

      All day Nita squatted in the shed, sweating in the heat. Lina brought Nita some rice and dried fish. To pass the time, they put pink polish on each other’s fingernails. “I thought you’d stay in that dumb school for the rest of your life,” whispered Lina. “I wish I could,” Nita said. “What are your plans, sister?” said Lina. She held Nita’s hand. “Why don’t you live in my house with me. It’s lonely when my parents go to Praek Khmau.”

      Live in her house with her? Lina always said a lot of silly things. She said that she’d been born to marry a rich man because she’d done a lot of good deeds in her previous life, but some crazy cosmic accident had occurred and she got stuck with her cousin Nhean. She also said that her father had seventeen girlfriends. Nita calculated that if Lina’s father spent only fifty dollars on each one, it would cost more than he made in a whole year in his fish stall at the market.

      Nita stayed in Lina’s shed until dark, then went back to her house. Pich had been outside drinking palm wine and could barely stand up. As soon as he staggered into the house, he picked up the broom as if he was about to beat his daughter. This time he changed his mind. He just touched Nita on the shoulder and said “Daughter” and lay down on his sleeping mat. It wasn’t late, but Ryna turned off the bulb dangling from the tin roof, and the house went dark.

      For a long time, Nita couldn’t sleep. She was thinking about how much she would miss school and learning things, especially math, and how she would never go to university now, which had been her dream, and then she began wondering about her older sister, Thida, and if she would ever see her again, and then she was thinking about the boys who looked at Lina and wondered whether they would ever look at her that