Drifting House Read online

  She reknotted her scarf and jiggled her facial muscles loose with her knuckles. Look humbled, look wrong, she told herself, and turned back to his office.

  She waited. Between Detective Pak’s rare updates, Mrs. Shin fabricated a paperwork life for the marriage interview and adhered to a punishing productivity. She took brutal hour-long runs at five in the morning, then attacked the house with an artillery of vacuums, mops, and toothpicks; she negotiated an under-the-table sales job at a Koreatown boutique, which soon enjoyed a twenty percent sales increase. Twirling her ivory sun parasol above her head, she sought out strangers to practice English on, including Jehovah’s Witnesses that Mr. Rhee said were “reliable company.” She charged at her new life, but without hope, because hope was painful, dangerous.

  As they amplified their story of marital bliss with new photographs, she learned that Mr. Rhee chewed green tea leaves to clean his teeth and that his nervous hand motions were usually practice swings for upcoming tournaments. That he donated extravagant sums he could not afford to the Los Angeles Mission, that he was intimidated by his English-speaking children attending East Coast universities. He was the retiring type but could not abide the abuse of women or children, which he said was as common as the flu in the immigrant community. Once, when Mr. Rhee stopped a man from spanking his child, the man smashed Mr. Rhee’s eye and might have knocked out his teeth next if Mrs. Shin hadn’t clubbed the man with her Bottega Veneta handbag. He was lonely and wanted her friendship, her company, and more, but she pretended not to notice.

  One evening after work, she caught a random bus out of Koreatown, hungry to break up the routine of the days, and finally disembarked in an area called San Julian Park. It was the other America that had Mr. Rhee trembling, but she stepped off the bus so bored, she welcomed disaster. She strolled around the perimeter of the park, wanting the terrible to happen, but a trolling group of teenage boys merely stared at her and left her alone. A few homeless men crawled out of their cardboard tents and asked her for change, glue, anything you got, they said, their hands patiently held out for the token kindness they did not seem to expect. She tripped over a man with a Jesus beard lying on the grass, his blue eyes wasted, a bloody needle jammed into his emaciated thigh. Only one black boy on a tricycle briskly slapped her buttocks as he blitzed by, giving her a tiny thrill. But that was it.

  She wandered until she saw a gas station phone booth lit by a dim streetlight. The foreign, starless sky oppressed her. A woman wearing only white sports socks and a torn trench coat limped across the street without looking left or right as if she no longer valued her life.

  Mrs. Shin called after her, “Where am I?”

  The woman cackled. “Don’t you know?” And she went on.

  She didn’t know what else to do. She called Mr. Rhee.

  “Pearl Express!” Mr. Rhee’s foggy voice crackled. “How can I help you?”

  “It’s Mrs. Shin.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I must have had a little nap—I have a mat, you see. Saesang-heh! It’s nine-thirty! It’s the Sealy mattress, a very comfortable mat.”

  Mr. Rhee would spring up from a creaky mattress with his nervous energy. The smells around him would be the clean, honest smells of chemicals and stale coffee grounds, and this comforted her somehow.

  “Did you have rice?” she asked, which always meant, Did you eat?

  “I had a sandwich,” he said, and they both knew that this meant that he had not truly eaten.

  “I’m somewhere near Julian Park—”

  “Skid row! Where exactly was the accident?” There were the sounds of panicked preparation. “Don’t move! I’ll find you soon.”

  She said, “Ani, I’m safe, I think. It’s just that—” She was mortified to find herself crying.

  “Our poor Okja!” With genteel, outdated gallantry, he said her name for the first time. “Saesang-heh! What has befallen us?”

  “Mr. Rhee.” Her body sagged against the cold glass of the telephone booth. She laid her head against the sticky surface left by hundreds of hands, and into the receiver, she whispered, “I lost my daughter. Her name is Yuri.”

  Mr. Rhee insisted on visiting Detective Pak on his own, and by the week’s end, Mrs. Shin consented. It was four months into her time in America. Friday after work, time dragged even more than usual while she cleaned. She scoured the immaculate kitchen and bathroom tiles; she furiously dusted the shelves sinking with books. She kept her eyes off the clock. While she polished the plaques that served as bookends, she noticed the engraved names: his name, Moonhyung Rhee, and underneath, Kyunghee Rhee. Doubles in the 1996 Koreatown League Championships. They moved her, those worthless monuments.

  Now that the house shone like a trophy, there was nothing to distract her. She flipped through the movie channels, but make-believe stories did not interest her. She paced back and forth, clapping her hands together repeatedly to improve her circulation. Finally, after she had paced through all corners of the house available to her, she entered Mr. Rhee’s bedroom. She strolled around the Ping-Pong table. Before bed he would place his eyeglasses on the wooden crate printed with FLORIDA ORANGES. In the fractured moonlight he would crawl under the table that he and his Mrs. Rhee had prized, unfurl the yo, and sleep, and in sleep, return to a past that never quite ended for anyone. She contemplated Mrs. Rhee’s photograph, her salty smile, the brown smudge of a mole on the woman’s chin.

  Within a half hour, she rifled through the closet’s woolly sweaters, telling herself that she must help this hopeless man coordinate, though she knew what she wanted. She pushed to the back of the closet and found what had been left behind: churchy floral dresses, ruffled blouses. And though it was inappropriate—no, invasive—she tried on one of the polyester washing-machine-safe dresses. She pinned her hair to the right and smoothed it into place until the mirror gratified her. Finally, she was freed from herself.

  The new Mrs. Shin set the robot at a low level, and thrust the paddle at the table. The balls came at her like a relentless argument. She missed, missed, struck. The dress soon cleaved to her like plastic kitchen wrap. After a time the machine spawned only gurgling sounds. Sweat bubbled on her upper lip and hair fused to her cheekbones. Tired but refreshed, she tossed the paddle across the table. It collided with the net.

  She traced the table’s crude divisions, one of the good, simple things left from a life that had gone wrong. She, too, understood escape.

  “Sleeping under the table,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

  Her hand was feeling across her back for the zipper when the bedroom door clicked open. He had returned earlier than he had said he would.

  “You didn’t go to practice,” she said.

  “How, how devious,” he stuttered. “How dare you insult me?”

  “I had no right to….” With her head bowed, she fell to her knees, one at a time.

  He said, “Please, Mrs. Shin. This isn’t the theater….” He walked past, then swiveled back, his fingers twitching. “You wanted to play, let’s play.”

  She remained on her knees. “You should slap me,” she said. She offered him her body.

  “I would never hurt a woman.”

  He wanted to hit her, she could tell; his hands were balled into bony fists.

  “You’re angry.” Her entire body was prepared. She leaned toward him. “You’ll feel better, after.”

  Instead he punched the wall, wincing even as he did it.

  “Mr. Rhee!”

  He wiggled the hand in the air, still shaking. “Don’t ever, ever speak like that again, please.”

  “You were so angry.” She stood, slowly. “I only asked for what I deserved.”

  After they iced and wrapped the modest spectacle of his swelling hand, and he washed off what must have been the day’s humiliations, he opened a bottle of rice wine. They sank into the sofa by a stack of jigsaw puzzles and a checkered baduk board—hobbies of a solitary person.

  The thimble-size soju glass clattered as
Mr. Rhee set it down. The paper lampshade above them swung, then rocked to a stop. She did not remove his hand when he laid it on hers.

  After Mr. Rhee’s visit, the detective made regular reports to Mrs. Shin. He told her of his own difficulties immigrating eight years ago when he had abruptly decided to leave accountancy and leave Seoul. “I opened a store and before the first year was over, I had a bullet in me.” His left hand became a gun that jabbed at his right shoulder. “And my—boy, he almost dropped out in his first semester at university.” He looked excited, almost wistful, as he recalled those years of hardship, and she thought it must be possible for the past to someday be rendered harmless. It ended happily, he assured her, as it will for you. The detective’s overtures of friendliness surprised her almost as much as the Ping-Pong lessons Mr. Rhee insisted on, and she could only wonder at how unknowable man was. As for her Ping-Pong game, it improved rapidly. Mr. Rhee trained her to use a pimple-surfaced rubber paddle, then a sponge-covered one for topspin, and even monitored her practice hours. They went on a picnic where they were surrounded by geese the size of her daughter; they held hands and rode a creaking roller coaster on the Santa Monica promenade, facing the setting sun while holding hands and laughing, as if they were a young couple with a long, hopeful future ahead of them. Sometimes she woke up under the Ping-Pong table with her hair in the thicket of his pubic hair, though she insisted they still shower separately, like civilized people. Her own attempt at updating Mr. Rhee’s wardrobe was a quiet failure.

  Each pleasant, uneventful night passed much like the next. It was as if another her was married again with an actual future ahead, as if there was the possibility of love. Except that none of it felt real until she stepped outside of the house for a walk and saw the tidy suburban landscape sprawled out in front of her, and heard a nation of people of all colors speaking a language that wasn’t hers.

  In November, Detective Pak called.

  “I’ve located your daughter,” he said.

  She couldn’t speak. She had to remind herself to breathe, one, two, as she imagined her daughter’s sleeping face. The memory was frozen, a photograph that had replaced her actual daughter’s face as unpredictable as the flight pattern of a moth; and though she willed the image to move and become alive for her again, the image dominated and the sleeping face remained slightly puzzled, with eyebrows raised as if the face had never experienced another expression. That was the last time Mrs. Shin had seen her daughter.

  After a swallow of coffee, in the same unhurried voice, Detective Pak told her Yuri’s home address in Beverly Hills, three blocks from the school she attended.

  She traced the scribbled address with her index finger, not quite believing it to be real. More than four years had passed since she had touched her daughter, four years that had taken away her child, and her husband, from her. Those four years—they were not real to her, either. She began wondering what to wear—the navy skirt suit or the forest green wraparound dress?—already anxious. She had faith in appearances.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you.”

  “Well,” he said, “you’re only getting what you deserve.”

  She drew back from the phone. “You’re quite right, yes.”

  Softer this time, he said, “I also lost my children…It was a terrible choice to have to make, a necessary loss.”

  Startled, she waited for him to continue. But he wished her the best, then there was the click of the receiver.

  Children dressed in clothes as colorful as marbles spilled out across the yard. Through the aluminum fence built so high she could not touch its top, she watched her daughter’s life: the queue of American children waiting to play (Queuing! Children!), the jungle gym made for larger bodies, these harsh, glottal syllables, the few Asian faces, boys and girls, that belonged to bodies moving with an ease that she had thought belonged only to men.

  She had dressed up for her daughter as if for an interview. But despite her navy pin-striped suit and her supple leather shoes and purse, the horizontal lines of the fence now imprinted on her face made her look unhinged. Its hot metal pricked her skin. The crowds thinned as parents picked up their children. She continued looking.

  Then there was Yuri. Mrs. Shin held herself; she began rocking back and forth, the pressure of feeling in her heart, her feet, her stomach, so strong her body would explode if she did not contain it. Yuri was clustered with other second grade girls, two formidable fists on the hips of designer jeans that Mrs. Shin recognized by the detailing on the pockets. Her face was still round, pumpkin-shaped like Mrs. Shin’s, and her darkly alert eyes were her father’s, but her hair had lightened to a nutty brown. She was so adult, not the same girl who had promenaded each of her toys for guests. When her friends began a round of hopscotch, Yuri sighed as she joined in, as if surrendering to their nonsense.

  Her daughter’s deportment was a reprimand. Yuri had not stopped for time. The girl that Mrs. Shin had expected was changed, anchored by confidence, by friends, by a gaze that took in the playground as if she owned it—her father’s gaze. Somehow she had stopped being the girl who looked for her mother everywhere, and somehow, while some other woman had taken care of her, she had grown. Mrs. Shin’s explanations—the years it took to cobble a life together and hoard the money to return to Yuri—all of it became excuses that might no longer be relevant.

  Still, she called out her daughter’s name; Yuri only continued to look periodically from the hopscotch to the parking lot. Only when Mrs. Shin tossed a pebble her way did her daughter look up and look around. She saw her mother.

  Yuri had been three when her parents separated; she shyly regarded her mother as if she were a distant relation.

  “Yuri,” she said.

  “My American name is Grace,” said Yuri. She rocked on her heels, excited and afraid, then Mrs. Shin saw that she was still a child.

  “You were Yuri first,” she said, her voice weighted, despite herself, with reproach.

  “I know who I am,” Yuri said. “I’m called Grace most of the time.”

  Her face was ugly with a stubbornness Mrs. Shin knew as her own, and she felt great pity and love for her daughter; the years ahead would work to undo her girlish certainty.

  “Come to your mother,” Mrs. Shin said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “Hurt me?” Yuri looked as if she had not considered this a possibility.

  Mrs. Shin had enough of talking. She saw her daughter moving farther and farther from her, so far that soon enough she would be untouchable, moored to this foreign land of perennial drought and swimming pools.

  She jogged to the corner of the fence, then turned, her arms out to her daughter, but Yuri ran, ran away—toward the parking lot. Mrs. Shin followed, first trotting in her heels, then running. What lies had they told her daughter?

  Yuri rapped on a black sedan’s tinted window with her fists. The door clicked open and Yuri’s terrified face disappeared behind it, but Mrs. Shin caught the door. One acrylic nail ripped off, her wrist bent backward, but the door swung open, and forestalled her exile.

  In the rearview mirror, her ex–husband’s gaze stabbed into her. She sank into the leather seat and crossed her legs, ready to negotiate.

  His nose flared. “What are you doing? Where did you find her?”

  “It’s not my fault,” Yuri said. She recoiled from her mother, demonstrating where her loyalties lay.

  Mrs. Shin’s eyes shifted from him to her daughter, her world suddenly unclear. It was too much for her—her husband, her daughter, the car a reliquary of their failings. She reached into her purse, snapped a bamboo fan open, and cooled herself.

  “Still living on your family’s money, are you?” she said. “You never could take care of yourself.”

  “Why don’t you wait outside, mushroom,” Yuri’s father said. “Go play with your friends. We’ll pick up Mother from the doctor’s soon enough.”

  Yuri opened the door and retreated. She sat primly within a few
feet of the car. She leaned over as if practicing for an earthquake drill, her eyes riveted to the spokes of the tires. She seemed too afraid to blink.

  “Sheebal.” He cursed, spraying spit onto the mirror. “Yuri finally gets used to her new mother and here you come with your desires and disturb everything.”

  “After four years a mother finds her kidnapped daughter.” Her hands gripped the handle of the door as she watched her daughter outside. “How disturbed is that?”

  “Still acting up, acting out.” But there was a lubricant heat to his voice, as if some latch had loosened. “Kidnapped? All we did was move.”

  Mrs. Shin’s eyes dragged from Yuri back to the mirror.

  “Do you beat her?”

  “You know I wouldn’t touch Yuri.”

  She twisted the silk fan until the wooden frame snapped in two. She shuddered at herself in the mirror, a woman with eyes aflame. She had come to see her daughter; she had. She had not left Korea to be this other woman again.

  “I mean, do you beat her?”

  He studied Mrs. Shin. “That’s not for you to know.”

  “You must help me.” She couldn’t stop herself. “You made me the way I am.”

  “No one made you but God.”

  “When we first met, you said—”

  “We were an earthquake for each other.”