Drifting House Page 13

  “Don’t listen to what they say about you,” Eunkang said, her voice vehement as if “they” were specific people they both knew. “They’re usually wrong about everything.”

  Mina smiled, brightly this time. “It’s a clear night tonight,” she said, her hands to the windowpane. “You’ll be safe driving home.”

  Eunkang allowed herself one last slow gaze, memorizing, before she shut the door behind her.

  She drove rapidly home without decelerating, only stopping once when between two mountain peaks, a view of the moon, the vast rice fields, and the shadowy mountains stilled her with their imponderable gaze. She walked gingerly down the neat aisles of rice shoots and murky water up to her ankles and listened to the music of groaning frogs that made her feel erotic, sexy. This was her, finally listening to her body whisper its needs; she heard the woman she had imagined herself being. She took off her blouse and bra, tied them around her waist, and let the moonlight and the wind caress her chest and hard, cold nipples. With her eyes closed, her face upturned, she relived the persimmon splitting against teeth and smelled Mina’s room in her hair. Someone might see her; she did not care.

  Seongwon met Eunkang at the gate. He said nothing of the lateness of the hour and did not comment on her muddy beaded slippers and shirt, which only now she realized she had put back on backward. Instead he said, “Have you had rice?”

  She shook her head, no longer pretending she had visited her family.

  After a few minutes he reappeared from the kitchen with a low table heavy with rice, soybean paste soup, beef ribs marinated in honey and soy sauce, and pickled vegetables. There was her favorite banchan: ­beef-stuffed chili peppers and candied lotus flower roots. Men rarely entered the kitchen; the ­store-bought banchan arranged on small plates was his usual plea for forgiveness.

  “I made dinner for you,” he said.

  As she sat on the floor and ate his lie, he watched, delighted. He kissed her on the throat, the earlobe, the mouth, until she said, “That’s enough.”

  He kneeled on the bamboo mat beside her. “I’m a foolish, weak man.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to be the universe for you.”

  She tapped the thin fuzz on his scalp with the fat end of the chopstick. “That’s impossible.”

  She thought of Seoul, the city that she loved a new city now, with no more enforced curfews and now with young women talking too loudly in orange drinking tents with the men. The tear gas that had fogged the streets for the last decade was the past, democracy was theirs, and the riot police were now restationed as sentries by serious embassy gates and the presidential compound. The hundreds of thousands of protesters had nothing left to risk and nowhere to go but back to their own lives. They had returned to the disorientation of light conversation, weighing the watermelon per milligram at the market, waiting in traffic, enduring living and loving, like Seongwon, like her. So how could Seongwon be an entire universe when he could not even be a stone?

  She blew air into his serious, devoted face, making him blink.

  “It’s hardly fair to place the universe on your shoulders.” She felt wonderful, weightless. “You’re so earnest. You take life so seriously.”

  “Have I disappointed you?” He looked worried. “I am disappointing, aren’t I?”

  “Silly man that I adore,” she said, and kissed his baldness.

  “What if a woman does what she wants and they call her a bad mother, a whore?” She pulled her blouse up to her rib cage and twirled her finger around her naval. “I like the word whore.”

  She said the word whore out loud again and enjoyed Seongwon’s fright.

  “The carp,” she cried. “They’ll look so beautiful in the moon!”

  She scrambled up. He followed her out the door, determined and sincere. The carp now flashed an archaic beauty that reminded her of the traveling pansori singers and the medicine men of her youth who had all but disappeared. When she dipped her fingers in the pond, a large orange carp nibbled on her fingertips. Goodbye, she thought, to all the beauty around her. Tomorrow, she decided, they would return to Seoul, to home, and she would find out what other kind of life she could live in the city.

  “I see Sagittarius.” Seongwon squatted behind her, his lips to her ear. His voice dipped anxiously. “Oh, and there’s the rabbit on the moon. What do you see?”

  “Me?”

  She broke away from him. She turned squarely and saw the man she loved, a man incapable of change. But she could.

  “Seongwon,” she said. “Wait and see.”

  THE BELIEVER

  FOR JENNY, G was always for God. God was there, God was everywhere. She saw Him in the penumbra of her father’s doubt and her mother’s anger plummeting out rust red. She saw Him in the vast, ululating dreams of all the people she met, and the nebulae that she sometimes woke ecstatically to, a monster gliding along the sea’s black floor, traveling tirelessly despite the weight of human catastrophe, its prehistoric face the face of all time, the face of God.

  Then one day God was nowhere. That day, she had come home from the seminary that she attended despite her father’s desire for a doctor or lawyer in the family. She remembered hearing the gurgle of the yellowed refrigerator that they had bought used, and feeling thirsty. After slipping out of her sneakers, she went to pour herself a glass of orange juice. She hoped that her mother remembered to buy the pulpy kind, though most likely she wouldn’t have. That was when Jenny saw an arm in the sink, the small hand outstretched like a mast. A friendship bracelet circled the wrist. She saw the torso of a Chinese American boy she knew, a fifth grader in the neighborhood, protruding from the ­industrial-size waste bin. The Transformers T–shirt. The boy’s ­pinkish-blue eyelids pinched shut, as if they had been forced closed, his dark lashes fanning out against his cheeks.

  She closed her eyes for a time. It was the creation of her mother’s mad rabble, one of her fits, Jenny told herself, but when she opened her eyes, the boy was still there. It was so humid the windows were steamed up with condensation, but she shivered. Only then she noticed her mother squatting in the corner, still holding a bloody saw that she must have found in the toolbox; she looked frightened, bewildered. Jenny felt a sudden hatred for this woman, but she was her ­mother—and how could you hate your own mother? She heard moaning and realized that it was her own sounds.

  “Calm yourself,” she whispered. “Calm. Yourself.”

  The sound of her breath was an underwater sound. Only the thought that the boy had a mother and a father who loved him kept her from running. Her feet moved millimeters at a time. They were so heavy, she thought, this is how prisoners’ feet must feel. Finally she pulled the boy out of the bin, and, while her mother watched, cradled him in her arms. The top of his head touched her chin; she buried her nose in his hair’s minty shampoo and sweat to suffocate the other smell, as she dragged him into a triangle of light and laid him across the tile. Blood now streaked her white T–shirt, her skin of milky pear. She stripped off her clothes, trying to feel clean as each garment dropped away from her. She wiped the blood rising from his severed arm with her blouse. Slowly she ran it down his shoulder’s length and his pale, stained chest. The sun beat down on them through the narrow kitchen windows. Her nipples stood erect as if it were cold. She arranged the dimpled corners near the boy’s lips with her ­still-clean pinkie so he almost looked peaceful. With her long skirt, she shrouded him. Naked, she kneeled in the pooling blood and, for the last time, prayed.

  Her father refused to talk about what happened. Once her mother was institutionalized, the media uproar about “the Korean killer” quieted, and the hate mail from the local community had dropped off, he reopened a clothing store near South Williamsburg in the winter of ’86. They moved away from Flushing. In their new neighborhood of Flatbush, he jogged block after block be­­tween cars while listening to vocabulary tapes; he remembered his customers’ birthdays, even the ones who stole from the store, then tried to resell him t
he very same items the next day.

  But there were small betrayals: his tidy professorial look gave way to hair like tangled grapevines that Bacchus would have envied; his teeth browned from forgetting to brush.

  Thirsty for somewhere else, he began spending his free time watching Korean soap operas and playing a screeching music he called pansori, whose words Jenny could not understand. He began telling Jenny they never should have left. On the day of his twentieth wedding anniversary, she caught him lying in a mountain of her mother’s lingerie, his nose in the 34B cup of a bra, his hand folded around the crotch of a lace panty.

  “You look so much like your mother,” he said as he gazed at her waifish figure.

  As for Jenny, she felt like an intruder in the home she had found in the church. Where had God been that day? she asked herself. What had they done to be so punished? She quit the seminary she had just entered; with her family’s new notoriety, her presence seemed hypocritical. But then her father would politely ask, “How was church? How was school?” She did not want to worry him, so she did not correct his assumptions.

  Instead she furiously walked the city in dresses resembling togas, for she did not approve of many modern practices, including painted-on jeans and fitted T–shirts. Still, men ogled her skin that burned at the slightest sun, her straight black hair under a sun hat as wide as an extravagant sombrero. That day a man with the crotch of his jeans to his knees tugged at himself and said, “Babe, you can suck my blood anytime.” She gave him the finger, giving herself a small thrill, and walked faster. Canal Street. Chinatown. Midtown. She stalled at the entrance of a church, but was too afraid to go in. Most days she forgot to eat. She returned home exhausted to her father sitting on the sofa waiting up for her, the way he had done for her mother. Once, when she returned home, he put his bare feet up on the table by his dinner: caramel popcorn straight from the microwavable bag, a plate of spicy radish kimchi, apple juice. She watched him from across the room; they might as well have been as distant as Flatbush and Seoul. He made room for her in front of an evening soap opera, and for the first time since her childhood, she smelled­ the acrid undertone of rice whiskey on him.

  “My lovely daughter.”

  He made two pigtails with her hair and tickled her cheeks with their bushy ends.

  “Appa,” she said, “how can I help you?”

  She wanted so much to help him.

  “How lovely it is to have a daughter,” he said.

  As she used his shoulder as her pillow, Jenny wished she could pray and make their lives intact again, but when she closed her eyes, she saw the boy. Then she could not pray. Her father, who had prayed only for her mother’s sake, pretended not to notice. All the while, she felt God leave the orifices of her body. The being who had been her life force now kept her at a distance, so she regressed into the person she had been before His grace: a battered sliver of weed in the chaos of the universe.

  A year went by. It passed like a silent movie. It felt like a long sleep.

  One day in August her father showed up at breakfast, his ashy color restored to peach. He twirled a round fish cake between his fingers like a cigar.

  “Pack a bag,” he told Jenny. “Today’s a special day.”

  “Where’s there to go?” she asked.

  He said, “Good daughters don’t ask questions to their parents, they listen.”

  “Then I’m not a good daughter,” she said. But she was happy to be anywhere with him.

  Within an hour in the Daewoo sedan, shouting over ­low-flying airplanes, he told her that they were driving to see her mother.

  “You tricked me,” she said, which was not exactly true.

  “It was a surprise.” His forehead creased up the way it did when he was annoyed. “Don’t you want to see Omma?”

  She sat erect in the passenger seat. She did not want to see her mother, changed as she was.

  She said, “Of course I do.”

  “You can’t pretend you were born out of a hat,” he said. He reached out to ruffle her hair, then stopped.

  The rows of maple trees blurred as the car accelerated. Green highway signs for Trenton flashed below an awning of clouds. She could see it now, the careful planning. In the suitcase, dried squid strips, her mother’s fuzzy sleeping socks and eye mask, the waterfall music on CD she refused to travel without. As if they, mere mortals, could waltz in and rescue her. As if a visit could restore her father’s stolen happiness.

  The ward for the criminally insane was as sad as plastic Jesus souvenirs. No matter how festive the more enterprising guards tried to make ­it—doilies of turkeys across the window sash, a headdressed Pocahontas taped to the door from last year’s holiday ­season—it was a prison for the afflicted. Jenny walked closely behind her father, avoiding the corners of the waiting room that were round and soft, like a used bar of soap. Even the front desk officer had a wandering eye that made her look as if she had been around sickness for too long and had become infected.

  Her mother, called Helen Nam in English, Heeyoung in Korean, and now case 6479274 in the ward, was sitting ­cross-legged behind the bars like a lady. Her chin dragged in the air as it lifted, a beautiful, broken motion. Her mother’s eyes wandered shyly to her and looked at ­her—really looked at her. It almost made her mother human to Jenny, but then her mother’s face shifted away as if embarrassed to be seen. That was it. Her mother disappeared, unable to bear herself anymore, and began rattling an invisible tin tray, smacking her lips as if sucking off a bone. She became again the woman with blood on her sinner’s hands.

  Behind a window of Plexiglas opposite them, overlooking the small room, a nurse yawned.

  Her father’s gray eyes were narrow, fierce with longing. His hands gripped the bars as if he were about to rip them out. No one else was in the room, for him.

  “Dangshin…how’s my gonju?” he said.

  Behind the concrete wall, Heeyoung’s head dropped and revealed her black hair growing in bluish white, then she haughtily lifted her nose in greeting.

  “Hi, Omma,” Jenny said, but she choked on the word for mother.

  “Jenny–ah.” Her voice was as light as spring rain. “It’s Jenny, right? It’s been too long, I almost forgot. How long have I been here?”

  “A while, Omma.”

  Her mother collapsed back into her seat. She rocked precariously on the chair’s edge, her eyes black splinters that absorbed the light around her. She was there but not, Jenny realized, as if ­murder had changed her and made it impossible for her to return.

  Tugging at her hair, her mother seemed exhausted by speaking. Once again the meds had fogged up her world. She spoke slowly, each word a strain on her ­slowed-down brain. The air, cleared of the din of dim voices, must have become a void of depressing silence.

  “Say it,” her mother said. “You’re laughing at ­my—my ballroom ruins.”

  “Omma….”

  Her mother’s hands made figure eights in the air.

  “I have visited heaven. Yes, I have been with the Lord. My dear, what am I saying?” She struggled, trying to concentrate on Jenny. “You are going to church, aren’t you?”

  “Every Sunday,” Jenny lied.

  “Make sure you take Daddy with you, or he’ll go to hell,” she said.

  “Yes, Omma.”

  “Remember when I took you to museums?”

  Jenny nodded in encouragement. Her father pushed her away and pressed his face against the bars.

  “What can I do for you?” he said. “Anything, anything,” he said, as if this were possible.

  Her mother touched the bars between them. They looked hungrily at each other.

  The guards and nurse averted their eyes. Jenny thought of the boy in her arms and gagged. A boy who had knocked on their door selling newspaper subscriptions and had been mistaken as the devil. Her chair fell back when she stood up.

  “Geejee–be!” her mother screamed at her, banging her wrists against the bars, bird wrists th
at looked incapable of harm. “How can you wear my face? You stole my face!”

  Her father picked up the chair, scraping it upright. He began cajoling her mother through the bars as if she were a child. “No one’s sick in this house,” he had said when she used to sob in bed all morning. “Your mother is not sick!” he had said until he couldn’t.

  He turned to Jenny. “Careful,” he said.

  “I have to go,” Jenny could only say. First Corinthians 13:13. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. But now there was a dead boy. There was her mother, a murderer, and Jenny, incapable of mercy and love.

  “Don’t go,” her mother said. Her hands made gauzy gestures in the air. “Come back, uri baby. I’ll be better, I promise.”

  “We can make her better,” her father said, and hit the wall with his palm so hard it trembled. “They’ve made her crazy, crazier here. Just listen to her.”

  “I’m listening,” her mother said, and a trickle of frightened laughter escaped her. “But I never hear anyone but me, singing.”

  Jenny and her father took turns driving past tract homes as ugly as soggy toast, stretches of strip malls with parking lots big enough for a dozen cemeteries, then empty northern roads. They drove as though they were being chased by the story of their lives. As if they were afraid of their dreams, they did not stop for any sustained sleep. He had begged her, please. He never begged, so they were returning to Las Vegas, where the family had spent their first year in America, husband and wife working at a swap meet, as if they could start over again. But two days later in Colorado, just beyond mountains that made the Appalachians look like molehills, he finally parked at a bar cockily called The Bar. A deer and her fawn stared at them, then picked their way up rocks and disappeared in the fog.