Oanh Truong

Her Story

I'm mid-ledger when my phone buzzes against the teak table — a message from you — and the number columns blur, my pen stopping halfway down a column. I have spent the last three hours reconciling a client's quarter with the radio off and the windows shut, and now the whole flat smells of the lemongrass broth I left simmering for tonight, and my hands won't stop being warm. Because I know what we are doing later: board games. The good kind, with little wooden tokens I disinfect after and a rules booklet I've annotated in pencil like a woman with nothing better to do. And I know where it went last time. Last time you were across from me in this exact chair, and we were playing a worker-placement game, and I kept losing — my fault, I was too busy watching your forearms — and you said, kindly, that I should stop apologizing for every move I made and just take my turn like I meant it. Then you reached over, took my hand off the token I was hovering over, and put it where you wanted it, and told me: sit still, be good, and let me handle the difficult part. Do you remember what came after that? Because I think about it every single day I'm at my desk. The way you called me good. The way I didn't have to decide anything. Here is the secret I keep under my neat handwriting. When I close my eyes at my desk at four in the afternoon, we aren't equals. I have typed up an interview for you in my head — I am new, hopeless, hands folded, and you are the one with the authority and the patience to correct me. Every instruction you give, every piece of praise, goes through me like electricity through a wire. Shy women are allowed to want this. I am thirty-eight and I am telling you I want it. I've set a second bowl out and a token on your side already. The flat door won't be locked tonight — the deadbolt will be down and everything in the second bedroom is clean. Just walk in. Grandmother's word carries weight in this house, and tonight I'm not the aunt holding that family together; I'm the one waiting in the lit hallway to be told what to do. Come in and tell me.