Dr. Nice Day

In real life, we never choose our mothers. My father had at least three: the one who bore him and died after the birth of his youngest brother; his stepmother, my Oma, who sold their furniture for potatoes during the poverty of World War ii Germany; and Tante Bella, the aunt who practiced medicine in Alabama. Tante Bella sent him a steamship ticket to come to America when she found out that he, twenty-one and restless, was failing out of Frankfurt University.

My own mother is just as generous and formidable as these women were. After sewing, baking bread, knitting, and even sugaring the neighborhood maple trees for syrup for her four children’s pancakes, she has launched a political career in the Vermont legislature. She writes to me in free moments on Statehouse stationery. I also had a mother in Thailand, where I volunteered in my own twenty-first year to teach English at a small college. I loved her as one loves a strict grade-school teacher: first out of obligation, later from memory and with respect. I never would have chosen her. Her name was Dr. Nice Day.

After dinner we would stretch back from the small table, her nieces busily clearing the dishes away, whisking the wood clean with an old rag before they disappeared. She would take her perch on a polished, cushionless teak couch, as hard and comfortless as the floor, where I lounged. It would have been the perfect time to smoke or drink tea, but Thai women don’t smoke unless they are prostitutes and she never offered tea. Staring at the green tv set, she might question me about English, or I might ask her about her country, or the nieces might come in shrieking with a baby gecko they’d captured on the garage wall. Flailing in a plastic bag, head too large for its ugly body, it was doomed to be squashed by a brick in the driveway.

It was traditional to kill those particular geckos, called too-kays for the two-syllable noise they made at night while claiming their territory. Heavy eyed, blue-green or orange-brown, depending on the color of the wall they climbed, they ate the smaller lizards, left shiny turds everywhere, and were rumored to inflict painful bites. She kept dogs to hunt them. The dogs’ names were Good and White, and she treated them with more care than most families did, allowing them to sleep in the garage at night, promising Good every time she got pregnant with another litter that she would spay her.

In return, they loved her, wiggling in timid ecstasy when she returned from the market: two mutts the color of the land bleached from exposure to the sun. At times, I felt like them, unsure of my position, wagging my way in the door night after night. Dr. Saowanee, whose Thai name translates in English as “Dr. Nice Day,” had adopted me for the year I lived at Ramphaipanni Teacher’s College. She invited me to eat with her family, which included the nieces who stayed with her so they could go to schools better than the ones in their hometowns. O and May were chubby adolescents, O distinctive for her high-pitched and frequent giggle, May for her sullen sighs. Mon, the eldest, was a student in business at Ramphaipanni and showed up every evening at six on her yellow Suzuki Love to pick me up. Climbing on back, I would speed with her up to Dr. Saowanee’s house, Mon’s shower-damp, long, black hair whipping my face.

The first time we arrived at the house, I noticed the long, thin trees out back: strange, sickly poles dripping fat orange tears. These melancholy trees bore papaya, a sweet, heady fruit I learned to like and, later, to hate. Masked by a guava tree, the front of the house was shabby from withstanding so many rainy seasons. All human residences in Thailand, including my own rust-stained, concrete dormitory, paled in comparison to the bright jungle that encroached on them. It was as if...