The Flowered Curtain Between Two Beds, and the Eleven O'Clock Call

The curtain between the two beds in my rented room is cream cotton printed with little clusters of blue flowers. Nhi and I bought it at the fabric stall at the top of the market on the second day after we moved in, and split the cost. The woman at the stall cut us an extra length and said we could make a pillowcase out of it. Nobody has made the pillowcase yet.

We hung the curtain on a piece of wire stretched from a nail on one wall to the window latch on the other, held up with seven plastic clothespins, three red and four green, because that's all we had. The curtain doesn't reach the floor. There's a gap of about a hand's width at the bottom, so lying on my side I can see the legs of the other bed and Nhi's flip-flops.

In the daytime the curtain is nothing much. At night it turns into a projection screen.

At eleven at night, Nhi's phone lights up. A blue-white glow comes through the fabric from the other side and makes the little flowers light up, as if someone had put a lamp behind each one. Then Nhi's voice, very small.

"Mm… mm, I'm listening… Oh, come on…"

I lay on my side watching the flowers brighten and dim as her phone tilted back and forth. The clock on my phone said seven minutes past eleven. I had to be up at a quarter past four to cycle to the bakery and knead the first batch of dough.

I sighed loudly so she'd hear, and she only got quieter

The first week I said nothing. I figured she'd just moved away from home and would call for a few days and stop. I pulled my pillow over my ear and lay like that until my neck ached.

By the second week she was still calling, every night, always around eleven, some nights until nearly midnight. I started doing things that embarrass me now. I sighed, loudly. I turned over so the iron bed creaked. One night I coughed twice, the kind of cough that isn't a cough.

On the other side, Nhi dropped her voice. Quieter, and quieter, until it was a whisper.

And a whisper is worse than talking. When people talk normally, my ears hear sentences, get bored, and drift off. A whisper is just hissing, air through teeth, and my ears had to strain to guess the words. I lay there guessing: was that "miss" or "this"? "Home" or "phone"? Every guess woke me up a little more.

Lying there, I rehearsed a speech. Tomorrow I'll say: Nhi, I work early, go out in the hallway if you want to call. No, too blunt. Nhi, I know you miss home, but… No, that sounds like a lecture. I drafted five or six versions and every one sounded wrong. In the morning I'd run into her brushing her teeth at the shared sink in the hallway, she'd smile and say "Morning!", I'd say morning back, and not say any version at all.

Once I read online about counting your breaths to fall asleep: breathe in and count one, breathe out and count two, and start over at ten. That night I counted. I got to three, Nhi giggled on the other side, and I lost my place. Started again. At five I heard her say "I'll send it tomorrow," and started wondering what she was sending, and to whom. I could never get past seven. When I noticed I was no longer counting to fall asleep but to prove I could count, I got up and went for a drink of water.

I even bought a pair of foam earplugs at the pharmacy. With them in, Nhi's voice really did vanish. But instead I heard my own heartbeat in my ears, thudding, and then my own swallowing, loud as a gulp in a water jar. After about twenty minutes my ears itched and I started to worry. With them sealed like that, would I even hear my alarm at a quarter past four? If I was late for the first batch, the boss would grumble all day. I took the earplugs out, put them back in the box, and never used them again.

That morning it was her turn to complain about my alarm

One Sunday morning I had the day off and slept in. Nhi was sitting on her bed with the curtain pushed aside, brushing her hair. She spoke in an ordinary voice, not angry.

"Hey, you know your alarm goes off three times?"

"I've got work."

"Four fifteen, four twenty, four twenty-five. I jump every time. The third time I thought the building was on fire."

"The bakery opens at half five."

"I'm not telling you not to go to work. I'm saying it goes off three times."

I was furious. My face went hot. I thought: you're on the phone until midnight and now you're complaining about my alarm. I had my mouth open to say it. But before I could, Nhi got up and went off to shower, humming a song on the way.

I sat alone on the bed, fuming for a while, then picked up my phone and looked. There really were three alarms. Four fifteen, four twenty, four twenty-five. I'd set them when I first started the job, afraid of oversleeping, and then forgotten I'd set them at all. Every morning I'd switch off the first one, doze five more minutes, switch off the second, and only really get up at the third. Three rings, and the only one who got up was me. The one who jumped three times was Nhi.

I thought about that for a long time. For weeks I'd been lying on my side of the curtain counting up Nhi's offences, and on the other side of it someone had been counting mine, counting fewer, and saying it much more gently than I would have.

I deleted the last two alarms and kept one. I switched it to vibrate and put the phone under my pillow. The first few days I was afraid I wouldn't wake up, and in the middle of the night I'd wake two or three times and feel under the pillow to check the phone was still there. By the next week I was used to it. The phone buzzed against my cheek, I opened my eyes and got straight up, because I knew there was no second or third one to doze through.

That much I could fix. Nhi's phone calls, I still had no idea what to do about.

Eleven o'clock was her mother's break

My cousin Diễm rents a room two alleys over. I went to see her one Saturday night and told her about the curtain. She was folding laundry, and when I finished she asked a question.

"Who's she calling every night?"

"How would I know. Her boyfriend, probably."

"You've lived with her three months and you don't know who she calls?"

"Do you have a plastic bag I can have?"

"Has she ever yelled at you, or done anything that scared you?"

"No. She's sweet."

"Then ask her. If she ever yells at you, or does anything that frightens you, that's different. That's not something to put up with. You tell the landlord, or you call me over."

I cycled home thinking about her question. Three months together, I'd heard Nhi's whisper a hundred times, and I had never known who was on the other end. All I knew was that it kept me awake.

That night at eleven Nhi's phone lit up. This time I didn't put the pillow over my ear. I lay on my back and listened, not guessing at words, only listening to how she was speaking.

"Are your feet sore, Má?… Sit down… Yes, I know… The back gate?… Go on, go back in, it's half eleven."

It was her mother on the other end.

The next morning I asked. Not from any of my five or six drafts, just while we were both standing waiting for the electric kettle.

"Is it your mom you call?"

"Yeah. You can hear?"

"I can. Why so late?"

"My mom works the night shift as a security guard at a garment factory back home. At eleven she gets a fifteen-minute break. Outside of that she can't hold her phone, the company doesn't allow it."

"So when does your mom sleep?"

"Get your water first, it's boiling."

I poured my water. She poured hers, then opened her phone and showed me a photo of her mother in a blue guard's uniform, standing by an iron gate, smiling with her eyes squeezed shut against the sun. She said her mother had worked nights for six years, and couldn't sleep well in the daytime either because the house is right by the market and motorbikes go in and out all day. I stood there holding my glass of hot water. Fifteen minutes. In a whole day, Nhi's mother had those fifteen minutes to hear her daughter's voice. And for weeks I had been lying on the other side of the curtain, sighing at those fifteen minutes.

I told Nhi I was sorry about the sighing. She said she hadn't really noticed, and then said she was sorry too, she'd thought whispering would be quieter. I said whispering is harder to listen to, just talk softly like normal, don't whisper. She laughed and said that's weird. Then we fixed the curtain together, moving the three red clothespins toward the window by the head of her bed and pinning the fabric in a double fold there, so less of her phone light came through.

I practised hearing her voice without hearing the words

Things were clear now, but my ears hadn't caught up. The first night after our talk, at eleven, the moment Nhi's voice started my neck went stiff and my shoulders rose. My head knew it was her mother, knew it was only fifteen minutes. My back lay there tense as it had for weeks.

I didn't go back to counting breaths, because last time the counting had turned into a contest. I tried something else. I lay on my back, eyes closed, and let Nhi's voice come into my ears without catching each word. I listened to it the way I'd listen to traffic in the alley or the tap dripping out in the hallway: a sound, high, low, stopping. Each time I caught myself guessing words again, I moved my attention down to my stomach and felt it rise and fall under the thin blanket, once or twice, and then let my ears go back to listening.

Something happened I hadn't expected. Listening that way, I noticed every one of Nhi's calls had the same shape. At the start her voice was high and she asked lots of questions. In the middle she mostly listened, just "mm," "yes." And near the end she said almost the same sentence every night: "Go on, go back in." Once that sentence came, there were a minute or two left.

I started waiting for that sentence, but differently from before. Before, I'd waited for her to hang up the way you wait for a punishment to end. Now I waited for "go on, go back in" the way you wait for the school bell. When I heard it, I let my shoulders drop, every time, as if someone had unpinned two clothespins from them.

It didn't work every night. One night Nhi was talking to her mother about money to send home, and her voice shook, and I could tell she was crying, and the whole business of hearing-without-the-words flew out the window. That night I listened to every word and lay awake until one, worried for her rather than annoyed. In the morning I brought her a loaf from the bakery, didn't say anything, and left it on her bed.

One night it was my turn to be the caller. That day at the bakery I'd burned a whole tray, and the boss said some harsh things in front of customers. I came home, showered, lay down, and my whole body felt hot. At half past ten I called my mother. I thought I was talking quietly. I told her about the tray, about the boss, and then about not being able to send money home yet this month, and the more I told the louder I got. It was nearly eleven when I hung up.

On the other side of the curtain it was silent. Then Nhi's phone lit up, right on her mother's time. She kept it shorter than usual that night, less than five minutes, and I heard her say, "I'm sleepy, Má."

In the morning I asked why her call was so short.

"You were louder than me," she said, and laughed. "But it's fine, you were upset."

"I wasn't loud."

"You told the tray story three times."

"Have you seen one of my red clothespins? One's gone missing."

She pointed under the bed, where the clothespin lay next to her flip-flops, and didn't bring it up again. I bent down to pick it up and remembered my sighing back in the second week. She had lain there listening to me tell the tray story three times and hadn't sighed once.

There was a week I slept badly several nights running, not because of Nhi but because the bakery was busy and I'd come home with my arms and legs still buzzing. My mother called, heard my hoarse voice, and asked. I told her. She said something I think is worth writing down: "A few nights is nothing. But if you can't sleep for weeks on end, go and see a doctor, don't just push through it." I said yes. My mother knows nothing about meditation, but on that point she was right.

The nights Nhi didn't call

Last month Nhi's mother got three days off to go home for a nephew's wedding. On those nights Nhi didn't call, because her mother was at home and could talk in the daytime.

The first night, Nhi turned the light off at ten, watched a film for a bit, and fell asleep. The room was dead quiet. No flowers lit up on the curtain. I lay on my side, waiting for the quiet to carry me off.

At eleven I was still awake. At half past eleven, still awake. My ears had been keeping her mother's hours for so long that when the time came they pricked up on their own, waiting for "mm… mm, I'm listening." No sound came, and they still wouldn't settle. I turned one way and the other, the iron bed creaked, and this time it wasn't for anyone's benefit.

I got up, had a sip of water, and went out to stand in the hallway for a minute. All the other rooms had their lights off. At the bottom of the stairs the landlord's yellow bulb was still on, with a few moths flying around it. I went back in feeling my way along the wall, because the room was dark and Nhi's washing basin was right in the path.

I laughed to myself. A few weeks earlier I'd have given anything for this quiet, and now that I had it I was lying there waiting for the whisper.

I did what I'd got used to doing over those weeks: lay on my back, closed my eyes, and put my attention down in my stomach. Without Nhi's voice I heard other things. The mini fridge in the next room humming, then clicking off. A cargo tricycle carrying ice rattling past the end of the alley. Nhi turning over, breathing evenly. After a while of listening, I no longer knew what I was waiting for.

The next morning the phone buzzed under my pillow at a quarter past four. I got up and found I had slept, I couldn't say since when.

Nhi's mother went back to work the following week. At eleven the phone on the other side lit up, and the blue flowers on the curtain lit up with it, dimmer than before because the fabric there was folded double now. Nhi spoke softly, not whispering: "You're back, Má?… Was the wedding fun?"

I lay on my side facing the curtain. The red clothespin in the middle of the wire had slipped, and the edge of the curtain had opened a crack. I reached over and pinned it back, then rolled onto my back, put a hand on my stomach, and waited for "go on, go back in."