Drifting House Page 4

  “It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. You fight the termites, the rats, the ants, you pretend that with your uniform and goggles and respirator and chemicals you’re in control, though you know the entire time you’re going nowhere. It’s what we do every day, pretend we’re going somewhere.”

  His voice dipped so Mark could no longer hear his father muttering.

  Late each night Mark began getting up for a glass of milk. But each time he stole to the kitchen, hoping not to see his father, there he would be in the dark, his ear turned upward, listening to the silence.

  In June summer vacation began. His parents were at work and Mark was supposed to be at a math day camp funded by the Korean Presbyterian church his mother diligently attended. But after a boy aimed a softball to strike Mark in the eye, he worked out a deal with his parents and attended the academic morning classes and skipped the dreary afternoon activities like pottery and softball for dummies; he had told his mother a love-struck girl was stalking him, and for his safety, he had better stay off the field.

  She wrapped his entire head up the way he asked so he looked as sinister as an Egyptian mummy.

  Who is this girl?” she demanded. Her face was a black cumulonimbus cloud. “Do I know her mother?”

  He patted her leg. “I’m okeydokey,” he said in English, which always got her off his back. “It doesn’t hurt that much.”

  “Now it looks like you survived brain surgery,” she said.

  He liked that even better than being a mummy, so he allowed her to kiss his bandaged forehead.

  He watched for Chanhee. Their gauzy white curtains fluttered like ghosts. The neighborhood was so ­nature-unfriendly that there wasn’t a bird in sight, not even a pigeon. The grass was the color of cement. His mother was grateful, praising God for this neighborhood that was the grit of liquor stores and gang members signing the walls, lottery machines where people lined up as if for a concert, and a battalion of ­languages—battalion, one of his new favorite ­words—competing with one another. Even the telephone box was graffitied with THESE ARE THE UNDYING VOICES OF THE PEOPLE. YOUS THE BASTARDS OF THE WORLD. CHICA, ESTOY ENTIENDO. PROPAGANDA OF THE UNHEARD. Sometimes he wondered if the same lonely person was writing back and forth to himself. He watched cars growl past. The heartbreaking melody of the elusive ­ice-cream truck and the blur of pickup trucks loaded with swap meet goods, grandfathers squatting on the stoops of houses who told him they were waiting to die. He watched people trickle in and out of Chanhee’s house. Then as June became July, more people visited the neighbors’ home.

  “For people new to America,” his mother said, “they have a lot of friends.”

  His father picked up the paper and covered his face. “She’s a nice person,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  The sound of cymbals clanging next door crashed into their conversation.

  “We’re neighbors. A friendly talk here and ­there—what’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s not right, what they do. It’s not good for you to associate with them.” Her voice rose as she spoke, becoming shrill. “It’s bad memories, and there’s enough worries without them.”

  She persisted until his father threw the paper down.

  As usual Mark had to mediate their argument. Even though he knew the answer, he asked, “What’s a prostitute?” Which got them to behave themselves.

  The sun beat down. Chanhee wore a lot of red. Red T–shirts so old that the ironed–on letters were peeling off:ETTY OOP, MAR MONRO, always with red patent leather shoes. In his waiting he was getting a tan though he’d never even been to the Pacific Ocean, which was rumored to be very close, somewhere to the west. He was about to give up on Chanhee when she materialized and took away the Webster’s dictionary he was ­reading—he’d gotten up to M so ­far—and balanced it on her fingertips.

  She said, “It’s true. You don’t have any friends.”

  He scrutinized a spot of dirt under his fingernail and wished he had taken the dreaded bath the night before.

  “Well,” she added, “I don’t, either.”

  He lingered every day for her. When she emerged from her house, it was the best day since the Republicans left office; and when she was convinced that bacteria were devouring her intestines or that the sun would give her eye cancer, and she mournfully drew the curtains, it was the worst day since his favorite movie theater with ­three-dollar seats on Wednesdays raised prices on caramel popcorn, which his mother now refused to buy him. But Chanhee could touch her nose with her tongue, played a mean game of Starcraft, and best, she listened to him recite his favorite words from the dictionary and asked him how to use nascent and numinous in a sentence.

  The first time they kissed, Chanhee and Mark were in his room, Spartan clean the way he liked it. Library books (so he didn’t kill more trees) on one long shelf were organized by shape, color, subject. He allowed himself a few possessions. One puppet, one cape, one abacus, a ­life-size poster of all the U.S. presidents squeezed together, with the younger George Bush’s face whited out to make room for Mark’s head shot; one knapsack in case he ever had somewhere to go.

  “Why American presidents?” she asked. “You’re not American.”

  He said, “We live here.”

  She said gravely, “But will they let us stay?”

  “Someday,” he promised, “when I have a lot of hair on my chin, I’ll make lots of money, be made president, and I’ll marry you, and no one will ever make us leave.”

  She said, “What if you never grow hair?,” ungrateful for his generous gesture.

  “My father shaves twice a day,” he said. Which wasn’t entirely true.

  “You promise?” She puckered her lips and said fiercely, “Remember, you promised.”

  She was waiting for him to kiss her. The only girl he had ever kissed was his mother, and his mother was not a girl. He picked up his Burmese puppet and hugged it.

  She said, “Turn your face to me,” so he did.

  “Close your eyes, silly,” she said, so he did.

  A moment later, he felt her hair feathery against his lips full with the taste of blackberries, then he felt her lips. There was a summery dryness to them, as unsentimental and careful as she was.

  “Okeydokey!” he said, and wiped away the kiss.

  The day of their second kiss, it was August, the streets shimmered with heat, and being outside was a punishment. Chanhee’s house had a cool underground feeling, less like Los Angeles and more a ­long-lost world from the other side of the ocean. Her mother had brought that world with her in carved masks, silk scrolls of horned demons and men with titanic bellies, and celadon vases with tiny painted cranes, which made Mark want to get his markers and fill the vast white spaces that the artist had neglected. The incense snaking through the hall was familiar, as was the smell of Chanhee’s shampoo and the tinning of drums and wailing songs he’d gotten used to, now even enjoyed.

  Once in her room, all frills and bright cushions, she said, “Well, future husband, we have to practice.”

  So they did. He was dizzy. She said they had done a better job than the first time. She brought icy cans of Coke from the kitchen, and though the evil company had used slave labor in Nazi Germany and murdered trade union leaders, Mark pretended it was delicious.

  They became energetic.

  “Can you do this?”

  After jumping to his favorite K–pop CD that he’d brought, she slid into the splits.

  For Chanhee, he pushed his legs apart as far as they would go. Which was not very far. Chanhee was pulling one of his legs, and he was holding on to her bedpost and groaning, when he heard his father’s voice.

  Chanhee rushed to the door and blocked it with her arms and legs in an X shape. She said, “We shouldn’t.”

  “Why’s my appa here?”

  She looked nervous, guilty.

  “I’m staying here,” she said, “the way I’m supposed to when Omma’s working.”

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p; Mark tickled her until she balled up on the floor, then left. What was his father doing? He wanted to know and he didn’t want to know.

  He pushed the door open.

  There was the shaman pacing, her pale face shimmering with sweat. “We invite you to come and enter me,” she said, her face raised to the ceiling. “Your little brother, Choecheol Ra, misses you.” His father was listening so intently, he didn’t notice Mark. She jumped violently as if possessed, and her ramie hanbok and headdress trembled. The few people present were shadows. An altar was loaded with candles, and swords gleamed with their blades rising from a large vase, like flowers. There were plates of sliced pork, Asian pears, rice cakes, uncooked grain, a pig’s head on a platter, its eyes slit as if about to open. The pig looked alive. It scared Mark, and he wanted to touch it. In the middle of all this, there was his father, on his knees like a child being punished, and the shaman spitting chants onto his back. Mark touched his father’s thigh; he was pushed away. The shaman turned her ear up as if she were listening to the heavens.

  “I’m here, little brother,” she said in a young boy’s voice. “Don’t worry about me, I’m all right.” She slapped a folding fan against her palm.

  Mark slid to the floor. He said, “What are you doing to my appa?”

  She spun around his father, shaking her fan to the hourglass drum that a man sitting on the floor beat, left side then right, with a rod. A woman in a white hanbok clanged at a handheld gong. His father leaned forward as the shaman uttered scraps of ­old-fashioned words between a song and an incantation. “None of it was your fault,” she said, striking her father’s back with a fan. Mark felt seasick and afraid as she leaped across the room, and voice after voice seemed to enter his father and send him capsizing to the floor.

  It was getting dark. His father cried as he talked to his dead older brother, holding on to a branch with leaves in his hand and shaking it into a bowl of uncooked rice grains. There was more chanting as Mark sat at the door hugging his knees, worried that his mother would come back early from English class and never forgive his father, and they would not be a family anymore.

  When the shaman tried to take the ­branch—some kind of spirit ­wand—from his father, he wouldn’t let go. Instead he said, “Sarang haeyo,” his lips making a confession of love toward the ceiling. He was remote and lonely, again the ­late-night stranger in the kitchen. His father curled up on the floor, his knees to his chest, clutching at the wand with both hands. Mark wondered and feared at the world that filled his father with such trembling.

  “Sarang haeyo,” his father said again to an invisible person. I love you.

  His father had once untied Mark from a telephone pole on his way home and didn’t press him when Mark said, “You must never talk about today,” but the next time he got off the school bus, a Korean granny neighbor of theirs was waiting to escort him home. When he begged, his father had sponsored two sheep for him in Morocco and told his mother he had purchased one, and sometimes Mark woke up and saw his father watching over him, his hand feathering through his hair. Still, not once had his father ever said those words to him.

  Mark’s father could never keep a secret from his mother. The ninth commandment said, Thou shalt not lie. The Arabic saying was that lying and stealing are ­next-door neighbors to each other. Mark also favored honesty, but within reason. When his father decided to confess just where he had been that Monday afternoon when he should have been at work, the results were predictably disastrous. His mother withdrew his father’s rice bowl before he had begun eating breakfast. She cleared his utensils and pushed the dishes of pickled vegetables and mountain roots away from his side of the table.

  “You’ve chewed away a small fortune on a superstition. I know how much a kut costs!”

  His father’s chin dropped down to his neck. “My brother was ­there—”

  “I work and clean and cook so you can give away money to talk to the dead. Your brother’s not ­here—he’s dead! He’s no­­where!”

  Mark was shocked; he had assumed these were chores that she had enjoyed. His father put his head down on the table; in the August heat, his mother shivered.

  “This is our country now.” She jabbed at the tiled floor below her. “But it isn’t enough for you to live in the shadows. You have to bring my Myeongseok there with you.”

  “I felt him, my brother!” his father said. “For just a little while, I felt him there. I won’t pretend our lives didn’t ­happen—”

  His mother blasted through his words.

  “You think too much,” she said, louder now. “He’s dead. They’re all dead. Just don’t think!”

  She was crying. It was the first time Mark had ever seen her cry. She said she was not going to let her son be infected by his inability to live in the present. There was more.

  “Appa,” Mark finally said, “you said that Omma was your translator for the world.

  “And, Omma, you said Appa was the gentlest man you know. You said Appa knew what mattered.”

  In this way, he tried to remind them of their obligations.

  “Don’t protect him,” his mother said. “He’s not even your biological father.”

  His father’s hands went up, as if he’d been hit.

  “He’s my son, too. That’s what we agreed,” he said. “We made this family together….”

  But Mark didn’t have a real father. He had emerged from his mother’s life in China as mysteriously as the idea of immaculate conception. There was only this man who could study a single tweedy sparrow for hours and make a protruding monkey jaw face that made the real monkey look fake. A man who spoke in sharp Mandarin sentences learned from years living in hiding in China, a man who told stories about his life as if they had happened to someone else. This was his father.

  For a time his parents only spoke to each other through Mark. He didn’t like these people anymore as his father became more depressed, and his mother became angrier. They conspired to make his life miserable by filling the house with his father’s growing gloom and his mother’s continual diatribes; they were being so unreasonable. As if they didn’t have a growing child on their hands. As if he didn’t matter to them anymore.

  He was feeling rebellious. At dinner he tapped his glass and announced his engagement to Chanhee Roh.

  “That’s illegal at your age,” his mother said. “You won’t remember the girl’s name by sixteen.”

  He told her that was impossible. She said he should make some ­forward-looking friends.

  “From now on,” she said, “you’re not allowed to see Chanhee at all.”

  She lit up with relief at the prospect of Chanhee’s banishment. When Mark looked at his father for help, his father spooned vegetable curry into his mouth and chewed, his mouth moving in a circle like a cow. He felt betrayed. He couldn’t eat; he was heroic with worry. Romeo and Juliet. Chunyang and Mongryeong. He wasn’t the first to experience families conspiring to keep love apart. The next day he malingered in bed. He refused food.

  His mother sighed. “We didn’t have food, and he’s choosing to starve for a girl whose name he won’t remember in two months.”

  His father said, “Don’t forget you’re angry at me, not Myeongseok.”

  Mark crossed his arms across his chest. “I’m a person of principles.”

  She slapped him, her hand as light as a young palm leaf on his cheek so it wasn’t much of a slap, and told him to apologize.

  He straightened up in bed. “Did you know that even George ­Washington—”

  “I don’t know anyone like that,” his mother said.

  “—that even America’s first president was scared of his mother?”

  On Sunday his mother locked him in the car after he threatened to tell the pastor that she stole rolls of toilet paper from the church bathroom. He no longer made an effort to entertain and educate his parents. Sometimes he missed the toilet when peeing, there was still nothing for him to shave, and he had only a yellow belt i
n tae kwon do after two years of lessons, but someday, oh, some glorious day, he vowed, he would protect the one he loved.

  The calendar informed him that it had been one week since the world became different. It felt like a year. Around then his mother reserved a motel room near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim for a family trip. The Grand Canyon. One of those places his mother was always talking about. She practically sang those words as if it were going to save their lives. When Mark said he wouldn’t go without Chanhee, she lifted him ­one-handed out of his chair and deposited him in the backseat of the car. “You’re going,” she said. “And you’re going to enjoy yourself.”

  In the middle of a concrete motel room pretending to be a log cabin, Mark unpacked a blanket and folding chair to build a tent for himself. His mother unloaded the entire kitchen from the car, including a portable gas burner, sneaking in two grocery bags at a time so the motel manager wouldn’t catch her. As they rattled about unpacking, his mother and father pretended that they were no longer angry at each other. Chanhee wasn’t there, and the five days ahead looked long.

  He lay in the tent and folded his hands across his chest like a vampire. The North Rim was higher than the South Rim by eleven hundred feet, the Colorado River moved at four miles an hour, but there was no one to share all this with. He missed his quilt and firm mattress, he missed people to talk to. He didn’t like camping after all, so he crawled out of the tent. The clock said he had been cloistered for exactly eighteen minutes.

  “I’m not going anywhere special,” his father said.

  “So why can’t I go with you?” His mother looked upset. “Let cats be cats and dogs be ­dogs—I’m not the one dragging us back to where we began.”

  “Stop it. Now.”

  She nodded, her head slowly descending, ascending.

  I’m so afraid,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said firmly. “We’ll go hiking. We’ll have a good time tomorrow, our family.”

  He put on his brown jacket, brown socks, brown shoes. Hunched over, his father looked smaller than he was, and it was strange to think that in a year or two, Mark would be taller than his father.