Prologue, Wild Dances by William Lee Adams by Astra Publishing House

PROLOGUE

I’m going to be an hour late to my father’s funeral. My sister, Suzanne, is sitting behind the wheel of her Porsche SUV weaving through cars on Georgia 400, the road that connects Atlanta’s wealthy northern suburbs to the city. Whenever traffic grinds to a halt, which is often, she lavishes mascara on her eyebrows or smears on red lippie, simultaneously spilling expletives at fellow drivers. At times her hostility seems directed at the universe.

“Jesus,” she says. “How is this happening?”

I’m leaning against the window in the back seat, which Suzanne, seven years my senior, uses as a repository for yoga mats, dumbbells, bags of cat litter, twelve-packs of Diet Coke, and, on this day, a stack of white wicker baskets she’d bought simply because they were on sale. My British husband, Ben, who flew in from our home in London last night, looks back from the front passenger seat and asks for some water. A selection of sparkling or still, lime flavored or lemon, rests beneath my feet.

I try to breathe amid the clutter and the honking and the gnawing anxiety about seeing so many of my dad’s relatives, most of whom I haven’t spent time with since I was a kid. Their Facebook profiles prominently feature

quotes like, “God is good and so is the Second Amendment,” and, “If you don’t believe in the right to bear arms, shut up and be a good little victim.” One of them recently posted a meme of President Barack Obama’s face along with the words: “Does this ass make my car look big?”

As a kid I’d fall silent around them, embarrassed by my slight lisp and high-pitched voice, and I tried my hardest to hold my wrists straight, afraid of what the persistent bend and flop might signal. None of my dad’s relatives— who call on their “prayer warriors” in times of crisis and who take Fox News as doctrine—have met my husband. They may not even know I have one. The last they heard, I’d boarded a plane for Harvard, which my dad called “one of those liberal schools up north,” and never came back. When they see me for the first time after all these years—with a man by my side, to boot— they’ll no doubt think I clawed out of the rubble of Sodom to parade my sin right in front of my dead daddy.

I scroll through an article on my phone that says good funerals should help families begin to heal. If punctuality or stress levels are any measure, we’re off to a terrible start.

From its outskirts, Atlanta looks like a city rising from giant heads of broccoli. As we grind southward, the endless pine trees and kudzu along the interstate blend into a wall of green, and in the blur I picture the last call I had with my dad a few weeks ago. He’d suffered a series of heart attacks and strokes over the past five years. The restricted blood flow had starved his brain of oxygen, pulling him deeper into dementia. He’d recently been hospitalized, at the age of eighty-one, after punching my mother in the face twice and telling police that she’d been poisoning him. Mom told me that when the sun went down his mind slipped further off the edge. He’d buzz the nurses to tell them they were bitches and whores.

I phoned when it was still light out across the ocean in Atlanta. He had a hazy recollection of who I was.

“Where are you?” he asked, his voice wheezy, his speech slow, and the long vowels of his Southern drawl as familiar as ever. “Boston?”

I reminded him that I was no longer a college student, and that I’d lived in London for nine years.

2 WILD DANCES

“How is the queen today?” he asked, not in a joking way, but brimming with the childish curiosity and glee of someone who really wanted to know. “Are y’all on a first-name basis?”

I didn’t have time to share the less glamorous reality: I haven’t worked full-time in three years and spend most of my free time blogging about the Eurovision Song Contest, an all-consuming hobby that has left me with £100 in the bank, £55 of which I need to pay for my next therapy session. I feel like a professional failure who hasn’t reached my potential and I’m not sure how to pull myself out of the morass. He told his nurse I was having tea with Her Majesty and hung up the phone.

My father’s mind and heart had repeatedly failed him. It seems appropriate that this main artery into the city is choking as well.

Eventually we make it to the funeral home in Jonesboro, fifteen miles south of Atlanta, and just a few towns over from where we grew up. Jonesboro and the surrounding area are the real-world inspiration for the mythical Tara—the plantation in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett O’Hara lived with her family and their many slaves. Five minutes down the road, at the Patrick R. Cleburne Confederate Cemetery, locals still stab the ground with the red-and-blue Dixie flag—that odious symbol of white supremacy that my father found so beautiful he hung it outside our house.”

Suzanne and I throw open the white doors of the funeral home. In her shrill voice, she shouts, “We’re here!” Ben, wary of the sound and the fury likely to shoot from my mother, trails a few paces behind, prudently using us as a shield. We walk briskly through the building, which follows the mortuary blueprint: generic burgundy carpet with golden trellis motif, antique yellow walls with watercolor paintings of nature, cherry-stained wood furniture everywhere. It’s meant to feel like a home, but it reminds me of a hospital—the halls are so wide you could wheel in several stretchers side by side. My cousin Eloise waves as we rush past. She has three children, from three men of different races. It gives me hope that she’s more open-minded than the other relatives on Dad’s side.

We turn left into the viewing room. My father’s corpse rests in a casket blocked from view by the “Asian rodeo”— Suzanne’s phrase for our

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 3

Vietnamese aunts and uncles and their partners. My mother left Saigon in 1973, in the final years of the Vietnam War, and her brother and three of her sisters followed over the subsequent decades. They’d had children and some of their children had had children, and they spread across Georgia—from Dacula in the north to Dublin farther down south— opening nail salons, beauty parlors, and bridal stores. No matter how far they had to drive, they’d all managed to arrive at the funeral home on time.

My uncle Bao breezes past us on his way to the chapel for the delayed service, turning with a laugh that sounds like a warning.

“Your mom, she gonna kill you.”

As if on cue, the mob disperses like a school of fish. Their parting reveals my mother, dressed in a black pantsuit that matches her freshly dyed, jet-black hair. She turns away from my father’s casket, its head panel open and its foot panel draped in an American flag. Her lips are tense and pushed forward and her mouth isn’t fully closed, like a rottweiler caught mid-chew. By the time we reach her at the casket, the whites of her eyes have swollen to the size of Ping-Pong balls.

“Where the hell you been?” she asks.

My mother’s name is Tuyế t—pronounced tweet. In Vietnamese that means “snow,” an apt description given that she freezes people out over the slightest of slights. (Once, when I’d tipped a waitress 20 percent of the bill, Mom told me she hadn’t raised me to be wasteful. She wouldn’t speak to me for a week). She’s petite, with a flat, fat nose that looks like a chicken’s foot— the two outer talons give it shape; the central talon marks the bridge between her prominent nostrils. She’s in her midsixties but looks at least ten years younger. There’s a liver spot above her right cheekbone. It always looks larger when she’s angry.

Over the past week, she looked as pale as I’ve ever seen her. She kept a round-the-clock vigil at the hospice, holding my father’s large, freckled hand, at times crawling into his bed to whisper, “Daddy, I love you.” She’s not quite five feet tall, but for five years she had single-handedly bathed, fed, and cared for Dad, a man who stood six foot four in his prime. Theirs

4 WILD DANCES

was a love story I never saw with full clarity until the past week, when her devotion and sorrow pushed the more troubled memories of my childhood from my mind. In the end, Mom had become his entire world, keeping him fed and clean even when he no longer seemed to care. She’d earned her redemption. Now my sister and I are ruining the closing act.

“We got stuck in traffic,” Suzanne says, ignoring that we were up several hours early and could have easily made it on time, even if the tires of every car in Atlanta had been dipped in molasses and left to dry on asphalt. The truth is that grief has us in a chokehold and we forgot what time we were supposed to leave my sister’s house, affording ourselves just fifteen minutes for what is an hour-long journey.

Suzanne’s sluggishness is understandable. She’d spent months carting my parents to and from the hospital. She’d attended medical appointments to help break down English medical terms that my mother couldn’t grasp: vascular dementia, intravenous feeding, distention of the belly, motility of the bowels, antipsychotics to relieve delirium.

On top of that, she recently ended a troubled seventeen-year relationship with someone my mother refers to simply as “Ugly Old Man.” He is in his sixties and has a billion-dollar business, flies on private jets, likes to fish in the Caribbean, and often slept with women who aren’t my sister. Observing from a distance, it always seemed that their relationship was based largely on him being rich and my sister being hot, something my mom had latched on to. “You don’t love him—you love the houses, the boat,” she commented recently. Whatever the reality, Suzanne isn’t grieving one man but two.

I’m not guiltless in our late arrival myself. I spent the morning at the kitchen table editing and writing blog posts. I got lost, as I so often do, in a cloud of Eurotrash pop. The clubby rhythms and digital clangs helped distract me from my guilt— of having largely missed my father’s long descent into illness while I traveled around Europe interviewing wedding singers and reality show contestants. I hadn’t attended any medical appointments or carted anyone anywhere.

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 5

I was often on foreign jaunts with my friend Deban. I first saw him during the semifinals of Eurovision 2011 in Düsseldorf. He was hunched over in his seat taking notes as Dana International, the world’s most famous transgender singer, performed “Ding Dong.” It was like Deban was worried he might forget his emotions in the thrill of the moment. As a gay man born in Nigeria, proudly wearing his dreadlocks and clothing that blinds with its bold colors, he stands out even in the Technicolor world of Eurovision.

In my professional downward spiral, website clicks and YouTube views buttress my self-esteem—positive comments and social media follows function for me like crack for a junkie. This morning I was busy watching a video from Deban, who’d just interviewed a Ukrainian singer named Eduard Romanyuta at a music festival in Portugal. A few months ago, at Eurovision in Vienna, I watched Eduard, all long, flowing locks and cheekbones, stand on a metal platform screaming, “You got what I want,” while the camera zoomed in on a policewoman’s leather-clad bottom. On this day, the fledgling star, who’d actually represented Moldova at the contest, since Ukraine wouldn’t take him, stared through the computer screen and into my eyes: “I wish you to be loved, to be free with your emotions and just enjoy your living.”

Good advice, I thought. It was only when Ben asked if we should be leaving that any of us realized how very late we were.

Delaying the chapel service isn’t a problem. My mother’s anger stems from what comes afterward, a few miles away at the veterans’ cemetery where we’ll lay Dad to rest. A rifle party from the air force is waiting to fire volleys and a lone bugler is warming up to play “Taps”—rites afforded to any veteran given an honorable discharge. The servicemen have to leave within forty-five minutes of our agreed schedule for another funeral.

“They gonna go and no salute,” Ma says, exasperated. “Lord have mercy.”

Her liver spot looks enormous.

“Dad’s trying to sleep, so let’s just be nice,” I say, trying to squeeze from her some of the goodwill reserved for the youngest child. It does the trick.

6 WILD DANCES

“Say goodbye your daddy and let go,” she says. She means “let’s go,” but it still works. Suzanne leans over the casket and adjusts a stack of photos we’d placed in Dad’s cold, bony hands last night. The one on top shows my parents at their wedding in his sister’s living room more than forty years ago. Ma is dressed in white and holding a tea cup to his lips. He has to lean down to reach it, his bottle-rim glasses sliding down his nose. He looks strong and happy and blissfully ignorant of the very long road ahead. I kiss his forehead, saying I’ll see him later.

On our walk to the chapel, my mother radiates a silent anger—a force so strong it sucks the sound and energy out of the corridor and somehow makes time stand still. It’s an energy so dark and enveloping it makes it impossible for me to speak.

We pass a table with a bronze figurine of Jesus slouching on the cross. Lord have mercy, I think. In our family, forgiveness has never come easy.

My parents grew up twelve time zones apart, literally on the other side of the world from each other. During the Vietnam War, as casualties mounted and helicopters fell from the sky, circumstances sent them into each other’s orbit. Fate was determined and perhaps a little cruel.

Neither of my parents were ever forthcoming about their pasts. Their shared secrecy, whether born of shame or unspoken traumas, blocked any line of inquiry. Dad could talk at length, whether you were listening or not, but laughed off basic questions—like where he finished high school; what his parents, who’d died decades before I was born, were like; or how he courted my mother without sharing a common language. When I’d prod him on that last predicament, he’d start singing the lyrics to songs by Elvis Presley or Fats Domino, or spout obscure facts about the Civil War, which he, like so many older Southerners, preferred to call the War of Northern Aggression. My mother, with her more limited vocabulary, shot down queries without any of the pleasantries.

“Willy, why you so nosy?” she would ask. “You shut up.”

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 7

✦

In that silence they tucked away so many memories I wondered if they’d lived their own lives at all. Perhaps forgetting who they once were made it easier for them to accept who they’d become. Much of what I know comes from snippets of overheard conversations, details leaked from aunts and uncles and cousins, and public records that have slowly come online.

My dad’s father, Adolphus Didimus Adams, was born in 1892 and hailed from Vidalia—a town in southern Georgia known for the sweet onion that bears its name. A.D., as he was known, enlisted in the army during World War I and was shipped off to Fort Caswell in North Carolina, where he met and married my grandmother Isabelle. Their marriage certificate, signed by a minister and witnessed by her father in his own home, shows that A.D. was twenty-five and Isabelle eighteen. But the dates on her death certificate and gravestone suggest her age at marriage had been doctored. In reality she was just twelve. Her family wasn’t well-off and A.D. had promised to take care of her three brothers and sisters. They found his commitment so noble it overrode any question of age or agency.

By 1934, they’d settled on the south side of Atlanta, where A.D. worked as a supervisor at a power company. They had two sons—Adolphus Didimus, Junior, and my dad, Robert Jack—and two daughters, named Nellie Grace and Mary Louise. Isabelle went blind when Dad was nine years old, but she could still thread a needle and even sewed the family curtains. She made cooking look easy, like an angel hovered just behind her, arms wrapped around her slight body, gliding her hands safely over boiling water and guarding her fingers as she chopped carrots and those sweet Vidalias.

Dad came of age in the 1940s; he attended whites-only schools and used whites-only public restrooms. He joined the air force when he was seventeen, mostly because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. He kept busy, so much so that his mother once wrote a letter to his captain insisting that he order Bobby to write home. Other women wanted to hear from him too. He was good-looking—tall and lean with auburn hair that burned red in the sun. He had a boyish face, which freckled in the summer months, and the gentlest blue-green eyes.

8 WILD DANCES

Black-and-white photos show him at bars and restaurants with other cadets and sergeants, often with a woman leaning on or against him. Their smiles are large and his is cheeky—you can almost hear the jukebox playing behind them. Later in life he’d sing a parody of the Hank Williams song “Hey, Good Lookin’,” which recounted the many women he met as he moved from training sites and military installations: Alice in Augusta, Shirley in Savannah, Wendy in Warner Robins. There seemed to be a lady for every letter. Despite the frivolity there was never a drink. He’d inherited his parents’ Puritan perception that alcohol flowed from the veins of the devil.

By 1960, when Dad turned twenty-six, both of his parents were dead. With the Cold War heating up, the military relocated him to the recently opened Minot Air Force Base—part of America’s bolstered defenses in case of an aerial attack from the north. But Georgia was never out of mind. Whenever his older brother, Junior, needed to sober up, their sister Louise would put him on a bus to North Dakota, where, isolated in the cold and surrounded by the troops, he might just straighten up and drink some water. By now Dad had a steady longtime girlfriend named Karen. They met at Minot State University, where he studied part-time. She’d won the university beauty pageant and, owing to the school’s mascot, would forever be known as Miss Beaver. They were engaged when he got the call to head to Vietnam in 1968. She’d wait for his tour of duty to end and they’d start a family.

My mother can’t remember when she first heard of the United States, which the Vietnamese call nước Mỹ—“beautiful country.” Her life began on a small plot of land in Vĩ nh Long province, about a hundred miles south of Saigon. Drawing on the rich waters of the Mekong Delta, her father grew lychees and bananas, and would catch giant catfish in the muddy waters that seemed to run in every direction. There were no paved roads, and people navigated by natural landmarks, like giant trees and bends in the water. Her father built the family home himself, weaving chutes of bamboo together for the walls and binding thatch together for the roof. My mother, the third of seven children, took her first steps on the smooth dirt floor, where

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 9

scratchy mats would break her inevitable falls. The toilet was a pair of logs that ran over a stream.

Her parents moved to Saigon in search of work when she was eight. The family lived in Chợ Vườ n Chuối—Banana Garden Market—a sprawling series of alleyways, where narrow houses adjoined endlessly, one after the other, forming an urban labyrinth. Some people traded from their doorsteps— snails, mangosteen, freshly made noodles—while others walked down to the chaotic market, where live fish swam in wooden barrels and fresh meat swung from ropes overhead. Old women would squat on the street, blocking the sun in their conical rice hats, as they cooked food in large metal woks.

I don’t know my grandparents’ names—Mom never mentioned them. In Vietnamese, kinship takes priority. Family members call one another by their birth order— Sister Two, Brother Three, Aunt Four, Uncle Five— constantly reiterating everyone’s place within the family. At times names can seem like an afterthought. My grandfather was simply the generic Ông ngoạ i, and my grandmother Bà ngoạ i.

Ông ngoạ i worked as a welder for the Saigon train company and later ran a shop that made bike parts. Money was coming in, but it didn’t stay very long. His great vice was gambling. At the dog races he’d blow a week’s earnings and sometimes the family’s bananas that were still growing in Vĩ nh Long. Bà ngoạ i kicked him out of the house and made sure he took the three oldest children, including my mother, with him. Surely they could take care of him, even if he couldn’t take care of himself.

My mom stopped going to school when she was nine. She took on a series of jobs to help bring in money and flitted between her parents’ houses, which were just a mile apart. She’d carry buckets of water, hanging from a long stick crossing her shoulders, from the city well to people’s houses; the lack of indoor plumbing made her a vital worker. She’d later claim the work had, for a time, made her shoulders uneven. Her mother would make delicious spring rolls and bánh cuốn, thin rice paper pancakes stuffed with herbs and minced pork. But Mom and her siblings were rarely allowed to

10 WILD DANCES

eat any of it. Every morsel had to be sold. She had the indignity of delivering these delicacies to better-off families, having to breathe in the pleasant aromas all the way to their doors, only to return home to a bland bowl of white rice. She knew she was poor because the flavors and textures weren’t balanced. “No chicken, no banana, nothing,” she once told me. “We didn’t even have vinegar to mix in the fish sauce.”

Decades later, Ma remembers the bland taste of nước m ắ m without the acidity. Yet her memory has a blind spot so big that it has for decades wiped out one very important recollection: the life of her first husband. In the late 1960s, she’d acquiesced to a marriage, arranged by her mother, to a man from a “good family”—that is to say, a family of greater means than her own, one where the loss of a few bananas didn’t matter. In 1969 they had a son, whom they called Hai, but whom I’d later know as John. In my mother’s version of events, her husband, whose name she dared not speak, soon set sail with the navy of South Vietnam and drowned during a skirmish in the South China Sea. My father is said to have landed in the country ten days later.

Once, when I was a teenager, I sensed a moment of generosity and bucked up the courage to ask her what her first husband was like. His demise, it would seem, had raised her spirits. “I don’t like him,” she said, her face scrunched up like she was smelling a whole vat of rancid fish sauce without the vinegar. “He always want me dress up and wear makeup.” She didn’t elaborate, but she never wore lipstick or blushed her cheeks again.

A week before Dad dies, my sister has picked me up from the airport, just like Dad used to when I’d fly home for visits during college. I’d always phone beforehand and suggest that I just take MARTA, the metro Atlanta railway line, to the northern suburbs, so he could pick me up at a shopping mall near his house. I thought it mutually convenient: He could avoid traffic; I could avoid spending thirty minutes searching for the car since he always forgot where he parked. He’d protest, saying someone might stab or shoot

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 11

✦

me, or covertly slip cocaine into my bookbag if a cop suddenly hopped onboard the train to do a drug sweep. This seemed inevitable, he thought, because the line passed through high-crime areas on the south side of town like College Park and East Point.

“MARTA is for Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta,” he’d say, knowing that decades-old racist quip would get a rise out of me.

“Well, Dad, it can move this Asian rapidly through Atlanta too.”

“Have you looked in the mirror?” he once asked, referencing the genetic fallout that had left me with his round eyes and freckles, and dark brown hair with reddish highlights. “You’re as white as I am.”

My sister and I pull into Halcyon Hospice, where Dad is going to die. From the street you might mistake it for a family home. It’s nestled among pine trees and has white siding and black shutters, and a patio with a white picket fence. A stone garden fixture rests by the main door. My sister thinks it’s Cupid, but it’s more likely a reference to Halcyon, the Greek goddess who threw herself into the sea when she learned that her mortal husband had drowned in a violent storm. The gods took pity on her, transforming them both into glorious seabirds, commonly thought to be the European kingfisher. Halcyon, who nested at sea, had the power to calm the dark and stormy Aegean waters for fourteen days so she could brood her eggs. This sustained peace gave rise to the phrase “halcyon days,” which trickled from the ancients into our vocabularies to conjure past days of joy and contentment. It’s a brilliant marketing ploy, though one I suspect is lost on people in the throes of grief.

“Did the nurses tell you how long people typically stay here?” I ask my sister as we walk down a long corridor toward Dad’s room.

“It’s got to be less than two weeks,” she says, pointing out that a few rooms, empty today, were filled with patients and visiting families only yesterday. The all-too-obvious starts to sink in. Everyone enters this place alive. Only staff and visitors leave that way.

I am short of breath and agitated. I have been awake for twenty hours and I haven’t eaten. I really just want to be alone. But judging from the chat-

12 WILD DANCES

ter in Vietnamese I can hear coming from down the hall, things are about to get very claustrophobic.

I enter Dad’s room, where several members of our Vietnamese family have already convened. Everyone goes silent. My hands shoot together as if in prayer and I start bowing my head to each of them in quick succession, like greeting a row of monks.

Winnie, one of my cousins, is standing at the foot of my father’s bed. She’s the daughter of one of my mom’s older sisters and an unknown American GI, and she sort of looks like me. Technically she’s my sister—my father adopted her to help secure her safe passage out of Vietnam in the early eighties. But by the time I was a toddler she’d already moved out of our house.

“Go talk to Dad,” she says.

My mother, curled up in a leather reclining chair on the opposite side of the bed, is staring at me. As is one of my aunts—her real name is Cai, but she goes by Kathy—and her husband and daughter. I start sweating, knowing they are waiting for me to say something or to break down and start beating my chest.

I barely muster a hello and just freeze in position as my eyes scan the scene. Dad’s mouth is open and his eyes shut. His right arm is raised, clutching the metallic bed frame behind him. He looks like he is in free fall, holding on for dear life. His elevated arm has a massive purple bruise where there used to be a bicep, and his forearm is a patchwork of bandages. A series of tubes snakes from his body and out of the bed. One leads to a Respironics Millennium M10 breathing machine, another to a McKesson disposable urinary drainage bag with anti-reflux chamber. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I see that it can hold two liters and is filled with brown urine—a sign his kidneys are shutting down. The room is still except for the irritating reverberations of the air conditioner and the heartbeat-like pump of the respirator.

Dad starts murmuring, “Mama,” to which my mother replies, “I’m right here, Papa. William is here. You wanna say something?”

“Mama. Mama.”

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 13

I feel numb and awkward and my hands are wedged deep in the pockets of my peach-colored shorts. I don’t know what else to do with them. Someone—I don’t know who— grabs my left arm and moves my hand to his. I manage to whisper a “Hello, Dad.” A drop of sweat rolls off my chin and onto the floor. I tell them I need to use the bathroom, but really I just want to get out of this airless room so I can breathe.

I step out, only to bump into Winnie’s twenty-something daughter, Lindsey, seated in a chair next to her fiancé in the hallway. The last time I saw her we were both in Vietnam. I was in my twenties and taking a language course at a local university. She must have been ten or eleven. She came into my aunt’s kitchen, smeared Laughing Cow cheese on two slices of white bread, and then poured sugar on top before plopping it in the microwave.

“It’s like dessert, but healthier,” she’d said, her accent so Southern and her concept of healthy eating so misinformed, you’d think her mother was Paula Deen.

I say hello to her and her large fiancé, who, I’d seen online, likes to drive big trucks and hunt deer in camouflage. She is talking a mile a minute and moving her hands in a fanning motion like she’s about to faint.

“Oh, I’m so nervous for Uncle Bobby,” she says. “What if he dies right before our eyes?”

I could probably count the times she’s actually met my father on one hand, and I want to tell her that if she leaves she won’t have to endure anything at all. But she’s sweet and sincere and, I gather, easily excitable. I bite my lip and thank her for coming—I know it was a long drive.

They leave for the shopping mall, but others soon arrive. The hallway becomes a waiting room for Buddhist pilgrims. One visitor I’m happy to see is my aunt Vân, who lives across the street from my mom and who has a habit of magically appearing with a plastic bag filled with fried rice, beef noodle soup, and spring rolls. Vân has a big mouth and a sharp tongue, and in Saigon was known for causing a scene. Once, while delivering Ông ngoạ i’s lychees and bananas to market, a vendor grabbed her arm demand-

14 WILD DANCES

ing money. She retaliated by reaching into his underwear and squeezing his testicles so hard that he went blue in the face. She refused to let go even when his mother and a crowd of men circled them, begging her to stop.

“You don’t touch me, I’m okay—very nice girl,” she once explained to me. “You touch me, I bite you. That how I am in Vietnam.”

Her sisters had encouraged her to move to the United States after the Communist takeover out of a fear she’d cross one of the many police officers and members of the government cadre who patrolled the market. So in the early eighties Vân arrived in Georgia with Winnie. She soon adopted the name Tina, after hearing songs like “Private Dancer” and “Break Every Rule.”

Vân is in her fifties, though parts of her face, like her eyebrows and lipstick, both permanently tattooed on, are several decades younger. She runs a bridal shop on Buford Highway, a six-mile stretch of road that’s home to Vietnamese sandwich shops, Korean massage parlors, and strip clubs like the Pink Pony and Follies. The area is gritty, a concrete wasteland built through strip-mall sprawl. Her customers come to find beauty. Vietnamese women sift through traditional wedding dresses. Mexican teenagers planning their quinceañeras come to buy the fifteen piñatas they’ll smash on their big day and to search for their ultima muñeca—their final dolls, which, stacked by the dozens on Vân’s shelves, look more sinister than sweet. Vân knows several strippers who come to buy lace and fake jewelry, and the cleaners who have to wipe down their poles. (“One customer she go in there cleaning at eleven a.m. In the morning she already finding condoms on the floor, tables, everywhere.”) All of this happens beneath a large, heavily airbrushed portrait of my aunt wearing a wedding dress.

Vân is the raw, unguarded foil to my more cautious mother. When she whispers words about my dad, I know she means them.

“Yo daddy, he good man,” she tells me. “Never hurt nobody.”

Mourning is ultimately a private affair, something you do in your head and your heart. I had hoped to go through this without anyone peering over my shoulder. But by the time I have a sandwich from the waiting room, I

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 15

can see how communal the process is too. Family, many of whom haven’t been in touch for years, have come to support my mother. Driven by Buddhist belief, they hope to calm the spirit of my father as it moves from this life to whatever comes next.

I’ve always thought of Dad in narrow terms—what he means to me, what he did or didn’t do for me, how I did or didn’t fail him. But with each cousin or aunt or distant relation arriving at the hospice, I see how so many others see him as a link in their own chain, often an early one that had tethered them to the United States. His relationship with my mother was a massive domino. When it fell, it paved the way out of Vietnam, which led to jobs, which in turn led to remittances that helped those who had stayed behind and their children and, later, their grandchildren. Nearly everyone who visits says thank you.

My uncle Bao arrives with his wife. He served in the South Vietnamese army, and at the end of the war, he was briefly arrested amid purges led by the ascendant Communist government. One day in the late seventies, he traveled from Saigon to the port city of Vũ ng Tàu. Then, under cover of night, he took a small boat to a larger boat, which set sail for Malaysia with seventy-two people. “If they caught you, they shoot you,” he whispers to me at my dad’s bedside. Eventually a Malaysian ship rescued them, taking him to a notorious refugee island, where he’d spend a year living among tiny huts made from the scraps of wrecked ships and plastic sheets. “You lie down and there no space,” he recalls. “You like a fish.”

Dad arranged his paperwork to come to the United States to live with us. He would drop Bao off at an English school when he went to work at the hospital and then pick him up after his shift, teaching Bao how to drive a car at night. Eventually Bao drove himself to his first job, as a busboy at a burger joint. Chatting in the hospice, he shows me photos of a second house he’s just bought. It has four garages—one for each acre of his land.

“Papa, Papa,” my mom says. “Bao come see you. You want to get up, Papa? You want say something, Papa?”

“Uncle Bobby, you hear me?” Bao asks, sobbing as he rubs my father’s cold, swollen feet. “It’s Bao, Uncle Bobby. I’m here.”

16 WILD DANCES

My father’s blood relations pull up to the hospice too. Later, when Suzanne and I are finally alone with Dad, our fifty-something cousin Greg steps into the room, Bible in hand. Suzanne tells me that Greg, one of Nellie Grace’s two sons and a pastor at a Methodist church, has been turning up whenever he hears God whisper that he needs to pray for his uncle. This happens often—and sometimes in the middle of the night. A few weeks ago that voice had compelled him to drive to my mother’s house—unannounced— on the very afternoon Dad punched through a window and made his allegations of poisoning to police. Greg had insisted Mom call an ambulance, which ultimately led to Dad’s admission here.

I don’t know Greg at all. We met once at a wedding when I was thirteen, and he’d asked me what cartoons I liked, mistaking me, like so many others, for a rather tall nine-year-old. My father is one of his last living relatives on his mother’s side and he speaks about Dad with an affection that almost makes me jealous. The man he knew was vigorous and alive.

“He was such a star in my family when I was growing up,” he says. “If Uncle Bobby’s coming, that meant fun in our house. He always had stories— about Vietnam, North Dakota, or wherever else he was coming from.”

Greg is warm, with round spectacles and gray hair that he brushes back. He has an avuncular Mr. Rogers air to him and talks endlessly as only a Southern pastor can—and in sentences so long you need a spare barrel of commas. Over the course of four hours I learn that he survived a car accident in which everyone thought he would die—he broke his radius and his ulna—and that he’s been interested in brain injuries ever since. Coyotes live near his small home in Calhoun, about seventy miles north of Atlanta, and his cat wisely stays inside, though he once hid under his blue Volvo. His wife runs a magazine for missionaries and he says he has “an obsessivecompulsive disorder when it comes to avoiding sin.” He loves women’s tennis and once went to Wimbledon when visiting England for a religious conference. He asks me which words don’t translate across the ocean besides “biscuit” and “soccer.”

Before I even open my mouth, I know my accent will suddenly get very Southern. It’s a reflex that happens whenever I’m around Georgians I

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 17

perceive as deeply religious. I hope the code-switching will help them see me as one of them, if not an extra straight out of Deliverance.

“Well,” I say, emphasizing the vowel so long the word now sounds like whale. “In America ‘fanny’ means your rear, but in England it’s slang for vagina.”

“Gosh golly,” he says. “I’ve got to remember to leave my fanny pack at home if I ever make it out there again!”

He asks me why I live in England. I avoid the topic of being married to a British man; his sister used to ask Suzanne if I was “still gay,” as if my sexual orientation were a passing phase, like being an emo or a One Direction fan. I explain that I had spent five years as a reporter at the London bureau of Time magazine. My life is there now and it’d be too complicated to come home.

Eventually he asks for our permission to pray. I find it all strangely intimate, especially since we’ve only just met properly, but I can’t very well say no. I close my eyes and bow my head.

“Dear Lord, take him with you and accept his passing from this world,” he says. “Uncle Bobby, the Lord envelops you in love. It’s okay to go with him.”

I can feel someone watching me, so open my right eye expecting to lock eyes with Suzanne. But her eyes are shut. It’s Dad who is staring. His eyes look watery. Before I can deduce if he’s crying or just having an allergic reaction to his medication—the more rational explanation—they’ve shut again.

“And Uncle Bobby, I just want to remind you that you are the beloved of God and that our Lord loves you like crazy,” Greg says. “You shared some of that love with the people in this room. I just thank you.”

The grieving process can start before a loved one is actually dead. It’s not hard to see that my mother is fumbling through stage one— denial.

A week before I came to Atlanta, my father experienced a surge in energy. For days he’d drunk only spoonfuls of water and eaten only apple-

18 WILD DANCES

✦

sauce laced with medicine. But one night, when he was still speaking in sentences, he’d asked for a McDonald’s hamburger and a milkshake. He ate all of it. My mother, convinced he was on the mend, rushed out to buy new pillows and fresh sheets, since, she thought, she’d be taking him home soon enough.

When I arrive at the hospice, I watch her get giddy like a schoolgirl when Dad’s actions play into her illusions. One morning she’s holding his hand and brushing his hair and telling him how handsome he is. Out of nowhere he mumbles, “Love you.”

“Oh I do love you,” she says. “If I don’t love you, I don’t be here.”

Dad grunts something unintelligible. It may well just be a cough.

“He say, ‘Kiss me,’ ” she says, grabbing his hand and smiling. “He go back to his old self.”

A nurse comes into the room to see how we’re doing. Mom asks if it’s possible for her to take Dad home yet.

“Mrs. Adams, your husband isn’t going to get well enough to go home again,” the nurse says gently. “Let’s just do our best to make him comfortable, however much time is left.”

Like trackers stalking death, the hospice nurses have a sharpened sense of what’s unfolding—they watch people die every day. They know that his recent surge in appetite wasn’t about getting better, but about the body needing fuel as it prepares to shut down. The body, soon to be an empty shell, had experienced a brief and passing jolt.

What Dad can hear and respond to is up for debate too. Mom frequently says “squeeze my hand” and, even though he appears to be asleep, he does it. In other moments, she curls up next to him, hoping if she gets close enough to his ear, her desperate words will reach him. “I’m sorry I was controlling,” she says, her face contorted as if she’s screaming. “You were the best husband ever. I love you. I’m a mean woman.”

Suzanne, convinced he’s still absorbing every word, spends a lot of time sitting in the leather chair next to his bed reading aloud from The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, a memoir by Jefferson Davis. Davis was the former

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 19

president of the Confederate States of America, a Mississippi man who owned more than a hundred slaves. Dad constantly had that book on hand from the time I was a kid, reading it out loud, as if those bombastic rambles might suddenly turn me into a Southern patriot who respected what Davis called the “struggle of the Southern states to maintain their existence and their rights.”

“Do you really have to read that garbage?” I ask.

I doubt that Suzanne grasps that it portrays Confederate leaders as just and heroic in wanting to defend the Southern “homeland,” all the while obscuring the evils of slavery. Suzanne doesn’t read it out of any sense of sympathy or conviction, but simply because Dad would have liked to hear it. Men on death row get to choose their final meal no matter their sins. She seems to think that she’s nourishing his soul, according to his preferences.

“Whatever,” she barks. “This was his favorite book. He can hear me. He’s listening. I’m putting this in his casket. You know that, right?”

“Great idea,” I say. “The more of it underground the better.”

I have other reading material on my mind. The nurses often refer to “the little blue book,” a small pamphlet they distribute to friends and family, who inevitably have more questions than the nurses have time to answer. It details the symptoms and behaviors that can occur in the final days and weeks of life, from clamminess to picking at the bedsheets for no reason.

The change that grips me the most is “talking with the unseen.” For days Dad seemed to be having conversations with his mother and siblings, all of whom were dead. The repetition of “Mama” would be interrupted by a, “Junior, what are you doing here?” or “Mary Louise, open the door.” The hospice nurses describe them as hallucinations, and tell me they’re giving him an antipsychotic called Haldol to slow down racing thoughts and a second drug called Ativan to treat the anxiety that stems from those hallucinations.

I’ve never been particularly spiritual. But the idea of silencing whatever voices he’s hearing makes me uneasy. Are they administering the pills to ease his agitation or is it more for those of us looking on? The Internet is

20 WILD DANCES

awash with stories—from nurses and doctors and family members—who overhear these types of conversations, which can vary in complexity and clarity. Some suggest that the voices and visions are the souls of deceased loved ones, coming to extend a hand and echo the words of my cousin Greg that “it’s okay to go.” I worry those meds are blocking the message and stopping him from moving on.

Dad has never been alone during the ten days he’s been in hospice. Tonight it’s my turn to stay with him overnight—on my own. Before Mom leaves around midnight, she tells me that I can push a large red button attached to the bed if I need help.

The booklet says his focus on sleep means he’s processing his life and how he engaged with it. I decide not to interrupt or contradict any of his chatter, but to lean into the conversation, helping draw out whatever yarn he’s spinning.

“Mama,” he says. “Twelve.”

“Twelve what?” I ask.

“Mama, twelve,” he repeats.

I wonder if he’s reliving a childhood memory, perhaps a time he helped his mom cooking in the kitchen, telling her there are twelve eggs in the cupboard, enough to bake an angel food cake or vanilla sponge. Or maybe he’s bought her twelve roses, which she can smell even if she can’t see them. Perhaps he’s phoned to say his bus from the air force base will get him in at twelve o’clock. I like the thought of their reunion.

This repetition of the number twelve goes on for nearly an hour. I frantically search Google for clues. Twelve months in the year, twelve numbers on a clock face. Twelve signs of the zodiac. The twelve major gods of Greek mythology. The twelve names in the Bible that are spelled with only two letters, including Ai, Pe, and Ur. The twelve apostles— one for each tribe of Israel—whom Jesus chose to spread his gospel. I imagine that Dad’s ascended to a heavenly city flanked by twelve pearl gates, the city said to have the radiance of a rare jewel, where streets are made of pure gold that’s as transparent as glass.

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 21

But without warning he’s moved on.

“Please take my toothpaste away,” he says. “Help. Please take my toothpaste.”

I rub his lips and teeth with a Q-tip and tell him the toothpaste is gone, but he grows more frantic.

“Help, Mama, help,” he says, this time more anguished. “Take the toothpaste away.”

I wipe his mouth with a napkin and then a washcloth and eventually my bare fingers, each time telling him there’s no more toothpaste.

“Mama, please help me,” he says, almost crying. “Take the toothpaste away.”

The cycle eventually breaks and he calms down.

“Open it,” he says. “Mama, open it.”

I place my fist in his palm, as big and smooth and soft as I remember it to be, and tell him it’s open—whatever “it” may be.

“It’s here, in your hand,” I say.

As if by reflex, his hand closes around mine. The memories stored in his touch set off fireworks in my brain— going trick-or-treating and being too terrified to let go of him, walking around an amusement park with an orange Push-Up ice cream in one hand, clutching him with the other.

I break out in a sweat as I remember going to bed with an awful fever one night when I was thirteen. He’d come home from work around 1:00 a.m., as he so often did, and sneaked into my bedroom. Thinking I was asleep, he felt my head, only to return a few minutes later with a washcloth he’d soaked in cold water. “I sure do wish you felt better,” he whispered. I kept my eyes closed, but let out a whimper to let him know I’d heard him. He rested his hand on the washcloth until I fell asleep.

The last thing I hear him say in hospice that night is, “It’s getting smaller, smaller.” To fill the silence I pull up a YouTube video of the Swedish singer Kristin Amparo competing in Melodifestivalen, her country’s national competition to choose its Eurovision act, from a few months ago. She’s singing a cinematic, confessional ballad called “I See You.” It starts in

22 WILD DANCES

almost total darkness with her in profile, a spotlight illuminating her from the side.

Singing a cappella, she apologizes for any pain she’s caused. A piano comes in and soon the strings. She stares into the camera, which circles in the black expanse, and admits through her deep and resonant tones that she’s taken love for granted. She begs for forgiveness and a fresh start, but in the void she no longer knows if she can reach the person she hurt.

When the climax of the song hits, I’m a blubbering, snotty mess. Horns blare and the stage bursts with white lights. My tears, trapped behind my contact lenses, make the whole room go blurry. My hand is still in Dad’s when Kristin finishes her melisma arpeggios on the final phrase, “I see you forever.”

I thank him for my saxophone and music lessons and debate camp, and for driving me to school.

The next morning Mom is in the mood to pick a fight. As luck would have it, Suzanne waltzes through the doors of the hospice, just in time to absorb my mother’s displaced grief. She wears thigh-skimming white shorts and a zebra-print tank top with hot pink lining. There is an image of a woman with oversized sunglasses and lush red lips imprinted across her chest. The sensual cartoon character holds a martini.

Watching them spar in the hospice has become something of a guilty pleasure. They speak completely different languages, literally and across every other dimension—from frugality to fashion. Mom shops mostly at Goodwill and calls the manager at Walmart when her out-of-date coupons aren’t accepted. She lines her purse with plastic before going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and will happily enjoy the spoils for days. Suzanne, meanwhile, has turned her garage into a graveyard for Gucci, Prada, and Burberry—big-ticket items worn once and then banished from her closet. The common ground between them is so thin, someone inevitably falls over.

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 23

✦

Suzanne is spicy and has a flair for the dramatic. For years she carried a jar of cayenne pepper in her purse because when she eats out—which is every meal— she likes her mouth to burn. When waiters ask her if she needs anything else, she can rattle off a list of sauces— sambal, sriracha, wasabi. She calls herself “yogic,” but once threatened to sue a yoga school when she failed to attend the requisite classes to complete her accreditation. She lives in a gated community and, for added protection, has taken classes at a firing range. She has a concealed firearms license too. At times she’s stored her Glock in a gold lamé clutch.

Suzanne can tolerate lots of Tabasco. And my mother, like so many Vietnamese women before her, sucks on chilis for a snack and she doesn’t wince.

“Why don’t you wear something inside your clothes, rather than show everything?” Mom asks, looking my sister up and down and making no effort to wipe the disgust smeared across her face.

“Don’t complain about what I’m wearing, Mother. Who’s been here with you every day? Who stays with Dad at night? Who runs to the store and gets him a Coke when he asks for one?”

My sister has an MBA, a six-figure salary, and two houses. She hasn’t been serving wings at Hooters for a decade. But Mom won’t let go of her former life. For her, provocative clothing, or, rather, anything that isn’t a sweater, functions like kindling over gasoline.

“Sooner or later you get away from Hooters,” she says. “The hooter for when you were young. But when you get older, nobody give you a tip.”

Before I can point out to Suzanne that Mom has moved on to stage two, anger, Suzanne’s phone rings. It’s Debbie, her ex’s elderly mother, phoning to say hello. Suzanne calls her sweetie and treats her with a tenderness you’d be hard-pressed to find in the Adams household.

“I just called to tell you, there’s a chair waiting for him in heaven,” Debbie says to my mom on speakerphone. She sounds like Blanche from The Golden Girls. “I talked to God tonight and he told me he had a special chair for Bob Adams and he’s going to have one next to it for me, so we’re gonna be together. How ’bout that? You think his wife will get mad?”

24 WILD DANCES

My mom smiles and says no. Suzanne tells Debbie she loves her and hangs up the phone.

There is an awkwardness to the entire exchange—and not merely because Suzanne treats Debbie like she’s the understanding mother she’s always wanted but never had.

“Mom, she may be your in-law one day,” Suzanne says. “I have a feeling he is going to be part of our family.”

“Come on, Suzanne, don’t be an airhead,” Mom says. “You wanna be somebody doormat forever? Be careful, honey. That day when Daddy punch me in my eye and my face I say, ‘How can anybody deal with that for years and years and years?’ ”

Suzanne says Ugly Old Man will be visiting Dad in the hospice. She asks Mom if there is a time when she’ll be gone when he can stop by.

“Gimme a break, Suzanne,” Mom says. “Say, ‘My mama here all the time. She don’t want to see you.’ ”

A visitor my mother would like to see is my older brother Bobby Lee, who, at thirty-seven, still lives in her basement. We all agree that his continued absence has forced Dad to linger. Unfinished business, the little blue book says, determines how strongly we will resist death.

Bob has not set foot in the hospice once. This morning, my cousin Winnie drove to Mom’s house to offer him a ride, but he slammed the door in her face.

“If he so violent and angry, is it safe for Mom to live there?” Winnie asked afterward. “She can only die one time.”

Bob never finished high school and now packages ice cream at a factory. His temper manifests in ugly ways: He’s ripped off all the cabinets in my parents’ kitchen, and since he smashed all their dishes against the walls or floor, they now eat exclusively off paper plates. I’ve managed to avoid seeing him for several years—my sexuality triggers him and I don’t want to be subjected to his rage.

Bob—he who walks around the house in a pair of ratty boxers, chest puffed out like a rooster, head shaved like a skinhead—remains my father’s preferred child.

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 25

Suzanne phones him, saying he “should probably come say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” he asks, so loud the phone reverberates. “That’s a pretty word, ain’t it? You make that up yourself?”

He hangs up the phone.

“I think Bob just said goodbye, Dad.”

“That’s okay,” Mom says, her voice cracking. “He clean your father bottom. He change his diaper when I not there. He doesn’t know how to react.”

A week later, I’m escorting my mother down the aisle of the funeral home chapel. We take our seat in the front row— Suzanne closest to the aisle, followed by Mom, me, and Ben. Aunt Vân and her husband, Brandon, round out the pew.

Greg officiates the proceedings and recounts how grateful he feels to have spent time with his uncle in his final moments.

“I am just so thankful that Sue called me,” he says. “I told myself, ‘I better get my fanny down there’—that’s fanny, not in the English sense, but the American sense.”

My mother hasn’t spoken since we took our seats. She emits a jittery anger as she worries about the air force servicemen potentially leaving before the burial finishes—and before Dad gets his military salute.

When the time comes for Suzanne to deliver her eulogy, Mom digs her nails into Suzanne’s arms, making her wince.

“Keep it short,” she growls.

Suzanne wears a form-fitting black-and-white gingham dress that stops just above her knees. The neckline plunges toward her cleavage, but her shoulders are covered by a black jacket. She sips on a can of La Croix sparkling water as she struts, in heels, to the pulpit. I can tell it’s the pamplemousse flavor from the bright can, a garish swirl of grapefruit and blood orange hues.

“She not supposed to drink that,” Mom whispers through clenched teeth. “She look like a whore.”

26 WILD DANCES

✦

Mom bows her head as if she can’t stand to look at her.

Eulogies consist of brief personal histories and favorite memories. They praise the dead, but also console the living. My sister’s narrative shows they’re careful edits that can smooth out wrinkles and the unknown.

“So my parents met on my mother’s birthday in 1969—the eleventh of October,” she says. “Daddy was perusing a market in Saigon when he unexpectedly ran across the little gem he would treasure for the rest of his life— my mother. Sooner than either one of them would have liked, Daddy was transferred back to America.

“My aunt Louise immediately began filing the necessary paperwork for Dad to bring Mother to the States. Many letters were sent back and forth, and my dad, every opportunity he could, would hop in the back of a cargo plane—illegally— so he could return to see my mother. Finally the paperwork was approved and my mother journeyed to America in May of 1973.”

The condensed version neatly glosses over the messier aspects of their romance. A more complete version would include the following details.

Dad, engaged to Karen, his girlfriend of ten years, stumbles into the market where he meets my mother, who helps her older sister sell fabric. Dad had stopped to buy Karen material for a dress—perhaps the one she would wear when they walked down the aisle after his tour of duty. Mom, slender and lean, with long black hair and a tiny waist, initially rejects his advances. She’s a recent widow. What would it look like for her to be seen cavorting with a lustful foreigner? Her sister already has a baby with an unknown GI. Can the family handle another?

Dad returns, sometimes in the day, sometimes at night, often after sewing up wounded soldiers and removing bullets from their bones. He shows kindness to the family and her one-year-old son, Hai, placing him on his shoulders and sitting with him on the tops of buildings as they watch explosions and helicopters in the distance, well beyond the Saigon skyline. He’s in love with her, the other woman, and along the way he’s fallen for her son too.

When he returns to the air force base in North Dakota, Mom, with the

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 27

help of her better-educated sisters, mails him a black-and-white portrait with the words “forget-me-not” scrawled on the back. Dad only tells Karen about Mom on the day he starts packing his things to move out of their apartment. Karen, surprisingly sympathetic to this Asian woman and her child, starts mailing clothes to Mom and her family. The response from family in Georgia—and to this gold digger from the East—is not as generous.

That May, Mom doesn’t just leave Vietnam. She also leaves Hai, then three years old. Her family warns her against taking a child overseas. Hai can come later, they say, after my mother learns English and the ways of her soon-to-be husband. Her eldest sister, Trinh, a market trader who has never left Banana Garden Market, tells her to phone or write if Dad turns out to be a drunk who beats her. She’ll start saving money every day in case she needs airfare back to Saigon. Trinh will also burn the letters, stored in a small suitcase, that Dad has written to Mom over the years. If the Communists win the war, the family doesn’t want any evidence of its daughter’s dalliance with the enemy.

Suzanne doesn’t have time to mention any of that. She can’t wonder aloud how my mother had the courage to board a plane and travel across the world for a man she couldn’t possibly have known, and she can’t question how Mom knew their intimacy—born of secrecy and betrayal—would outlast the conflict that brought them together.

Instead, she cues “I Walk the Line,” by Johnny Cash, chosen by my mother in lieu of a hymn. Dad had played it for her on an old cassette player during the war and left it with her when he returned to the States.

The moment Cash hums in his deep baritone, Mom starts to pant. She leans forward, her back almost parallel with her knees, her head hanging limp. Her body swells and contracts rapidly, as if her heart might explode.

Her reaction to those rockabilly chords starts to fill some of the gaps and ellipses in their story. I can picture them dancing on those Saigon rooftops as Cash speaks, his words and the boom-chicka rhythm of the snare drum giving them a common language and the gumption to upend both of their worlds.

28 WILD DANCES

My sister and I wrap our arms around her. Like a stone cast in a stream, she finally starts to soften.

We drive to the veterans’ cemetery. It spreads out over a series of hills with ash trees encircling the perimeter. From the entrance, the ground slopes upward, creating the illusion of one endless hill that disappears into the sky. The only clue to a world beyond is a blue water tower that peeps over the horizon. Headstones aren’t allowed, so the dead rest beneath flat bronze military plaques, most of which list where they served—Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, Vietnam—and matching urns filled with bright flowers. The grounds sit beneath the flight path to and from Hartsfield–Jackson, the world’s busiest airport, and every few minutes planes whir and cast a shadow overhead. I remember how Dad used to joke that whether you’re going to heaven or hell, you have to switch planes in Atlanta.

By the time we get out of the car, six air force guardsmen are standing at attention behind the black hearse. They wear their blue dress coats and trousers with a silver stripe down each leg, and blue service caps with the air force insignia—a silver star with wings. Everyone remains silent as they unload the casket, American flag draped on top. They march it slowly downhill to the burial plot.

Mom can barely stand on the slope, so Suzanne and I lock arms on either side of her and guide her down to the funeral tent, the sun blazing overhead. There are only ten chairs, so everyone waits for Mom to arrive before deciding whether to sit. Ben, not sure of where he fits in this mass of cousins and aunts and uncles, waits awkwardly at the side. Winnie takes his hand and guides him to a chair at the front, next to me.

A bugler plays “Taps” as Mom stares at the casket. She’s not blinking. The six guardsmen, standing in two parallel rows of three, start folding the flag. Their movements are sharp and precise, and they seem to follow a practiced cadence as they carefully flatten the creases, their white gloves reflecting a blinding light with each tuck or pleat. Passed between them, the flag becomes a perfect triangle in thirteen folds— one for each of the original colonies. The result shows only the blue union field and white

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS 29

stars. Five cadets march away, while the remaining guard lowers himself on one knee and places the flag on my mother’s lap. Her eyes are shut as he speaks.

“On behalf of the president of the United States, Barack Obama, the department of the air force, and a grateful nation, we offer this flag for the faithful and dedicated service of Robert Jack Adams. God bless you and this family, and God bless the United States of America.”

People disperse across the hills and toward their cars. The funeral home director asks Mom if she wants to wait while his crew fills the plot. She does. As the men shovel dirt from the bed of a white pickup truck, we hear it crash against the casket and take in the smell of earth.

“I’m glad he bury next to his cousin, so he not alone,” she says, her arms crossed and pressing the American flag to her chest. “This what he would have want.”

Mom keeps talking. But the roar of a plane, destination unknown, is all I can hear.

30 WILD DANCES

Prologue, Wild Dances by William Lee Adams

WILD DANCES

WILD DANCES

My Queer and Curious Journey to Eurovision

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS

WILD DANCES

PROLOGUE