Secondhand World Read online

  The artificiality of high school drama, combined with the woeful dearth of talent, made me feel like slitting my wrists with a dull butter knife. We butchered Chekhov; we annihilated Synge. Mr. Smallwood, the drama coach, had ambitions, but he couldn't turn a bunch of teenagers into anything like actors, and to be associated with such a lack of quality demoralized him, making him ill-tempered and weary.

  I had a small part as the maid in Washington Square, and Mr. Smallwood became so agitated by one line he felt I was saying wrong that he actually tore up his script.

  “No, no, no, no!” he yelled, tossing the rent script into the air, where it fluttered in pieces across the stage. “Good God, no!”

  I tried the creative writing club, which put out the school's literary magazine, but dropped out after I got into an argument with one of the editors about a story she thought we should publish—a sentimental O. Henry—ish tale about a boy breaking up with his girlfriend, only to discover that she was dying of leukemia.

  “It's terrible,” I said. “It's badly written, it's melodramatic, it's completely unoriginal. It's mawkish!”

  “Mawkish?” the editor said.

  “I liked it,” said another girl.

  “Philistines,” I muttered, and walked out.

  A guy from my Euro class, Tommy Maiden, asked me out. He was a soccer player, not handsome but pleasant-looking, with moppy brown hair and a slow smile. I couldn't figure him out, or why he wanted to date me, but I was grateful to walk down the halls hand in hand with him, and to make out with him at my locker before first bell.

  I'd vowed never again to let myself be vulnerable after Hero, so I was surprised when after only a few torrid make-out sessions in the woods, Tommy reached over to stroke my cheek and said, “I love you, Isa.” Etiquette required a reciprocal declaration, but I knew, number one, that I didn't even remotely love him, and number two, that I'd promised myself never to use those words again. So I just smiled and kissed him.

  My parents eventually let up their vigilance, sensing in me an apathy that they mistook for compliance. They even kind of approved of Tommy, who was sufficiently polite and deferential to pass as a good Confucian boy.

  It was a shadow time, this period between coming back from Utah and the events leading to my parents’ deaths. When I think of it I feel a cloudy numbness in my mind, a kind of partial amnesia.

  Life, as they say, went on.

  Unenhanced

  I‘d spent a lot of the money I had saved for eye surgery, so I was surprised when my mother brought up the subject again. I caught her staring at my face at breakfast one day, scrutinizing me as she used to, with a frank, appraising expression.

  “Isa, I take you to surgeon,” she said. “Dr. Cheon. He does eyes for many Korean women.”

  “I'm not sure I want to anymore,” I said. My mother shrugged. “No harm in appointment anyway. Talk to him. See what he has to say.”

  Perhaps I would have been less persuaded if it hadn't been for a casual remark Tommy had made a few weeks earlier. We had just finished having sex on the floor of his family room, and he was looking at me with that far-off look of sated desire, his head propped on an elbow above me. Sex with Tommy was somewhat of a letdown after my gymnastic performances with Hero, our virginity-ousting education in variety and excess. Tommy was a serious sort, considerate and tender in his own spartan way but not very imaginative in his sex technique. I tried to teach him a few things, but stopped when he pulled my head from his lap and, with a look of alarm on his face, said, “You don't have to swallow, Isa.”

  He liked straight-up missionary position, moving with the steady efficiency of a disciplined athlete. He had a nice, tight body, with finely developed calf muscles and a firm, square ass. Sex with him was pleasant, like a soothing bath; it generally had a soporific effect on us both.

  We were lying quietly on the couch, the itch of the material impressing itself on my back, Tommy staring at me with a dopey expression. “What are you thinking?” I said, trying to sound more caring than accusatory.

  He didn't answer right away, but caressed the side of my cheek with one finger. I expected some endearment, something appropriate to the moment, like how beautiful he thought I was, or how happy I made him—things he'd said before, awkwardly but in earnest. Instead he said, “Wow, your eyes are small. I mean, it's like your eyelids cover half your eyeball. How can you see?”

  He spoke with a child's trusting candor, and I knew he hadn't meant to offend, but I was thrown into a rage. I sat up and started dressing, pulling on my socks as though I would go right through them.

  “What's the matter, Isa?” Tommy said. “I-I'm sorry … I just meant, I mean, I think your eyes are beautiful, you know that… it's just…”

  I buttoned my shirt crooked and didn't bother to fix it. “It's okay Tommy,” I said. “I know what you meant. I've gotta go, that's all.”

  I followed this with a week of the silent treatment. I didn't avoid him; I just wouldn't speak to him. He knew I was mad, but I wouldn't admit it.

  I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the heavy-lidded eyes of a foreigner. Slant-eye. Squint-eye. Chiney, Chiney. I saw now that the reason I'd fallen in love with Hero was because he was a fellow freak, the only other person in school who could make me feel more ordinary. The bluish white of his skin, which I had once thought so lovely, called to mind a nest of maggots I'd once uncovered in a trash can, ghostly white and writhing. His pink eyes were often uncontrollable. They leapt and quivered and shook within their sockets, spastic organs sheathed in dark lenses.

  I knew even as I thought these things that I did not believe them. I loved him still, and his beauty had been ethereal, almost sacred to me. I hadn't known why he'd wanted to be with me— that was the problem—and when he no longer wanted to, I could only wonder how it had lasted so long. I did not understand Tommy either, his quiet devotion. He'd meant no harm, I knew, with his remark about my eyes, but it had brought me back to childhood taunts, the teasing, my mother's patient explications of the Mongolian fold and its cosmetic pitfalls.

  Eyes that looked out into the world, that took in so cleverly light, shape, and movement—why should it be important what they themselves looked like? The thing is that it was. Not what we see, but how we are seen.

  Dr. Cheon was a walking advertisement for his business. The skin on his face was as taut as a drum; the folds of skin along his neck looked like they'd been pushed up behind his ears. I found the look a bit Dorian Gray, but it was remarkable how smooth and wrinkle-free his face was, like a mask of flesh more than flesh itself. He was also quite cheerful, smiling, I assumed, out of genuine good nature, and not because there, too, he had tucked and stitched an up-pointed curve of lip.

  “Let's take a look,” he said, holding my chin delicately between his thumb and forefinger. He turned my head this way and that. He nodded as he manipulated my eyelids, tracing a line horizontally from the bridge of my nose on each side, pulling them up to expose the hidden portion of my eyeballs.

  “Very nice,” he said. “I think we can do very easily.” He paused and gave me a benevolent smile. “The procedure will not erase evidence of your ethnic heritage.” He said this as though he had said it many times, and I wondered if he meant it as reassurance or caution.

  “I will add an upper eyelid crease here and here,” he said. A plastic head stood on his desk, with dotted lines drawn across its sightless painted eyes. He indicated with the fingertip of his smallest finger. “The incisions are tiny and any scarring is nearly invisible.”

  On the wall beside him were some before and after photos of women who had had the procedure. Dr. Cheon called it the “procedure,” as though the fact that he was slitting your face open with a scalpel was incidental. The women's eyes stared out at me. They did look pretty good afterward, with a wide, direct gaze, eyelids pleated upward, their eyes larger-looking, more confident. Of course, he would put up pictures only of the successes. No botched jobs, women coming out looking
like Cyclops, no wild, sightless horrors.

  Dr. Cheon looked at me expectantly. His smile was beginning to unnerve me. “Shall we call your mother in now?” he asked.

  Next to the photographs of women with before-eyes— hooded and sleepy-looking—and women with after-eyes— rounded with creased eyelids—hung framed diplomas. Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University medical schools. Board Certified American Board of Plastic Surgery, Board Certified Surgery of the Hand, American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, Inc., Lipoplasty Society of North America. “Sook Ki Cheon” in thick Gothic lettering across the creamy pages.

  “Miss Sohn? Shall we call your mother in now?” Dr. Cheon repeated.

  I looked at the plastic head with its androgynous features. Its eyes looked like it had been made up by a drunk, its staggered lines crisscrossing the lids. Dr. Cheon was smiling patiently, his face like stretched canvas; his eyes, as yet unenhanced, were veiled and did not seem as though they were smiling.

  I shook my head. “Thank you, Dr. Cheon,” I said, “but I've changed my mind. I don't want to go through with it after all.”

  Dr. Cheon looked confused. “But your mother—”

  “She's not the one who'd be getting the procedure’,’ I said. “I changed my mind. I'm sorry.”

  The smile returned to the doctor's face. “Well, certainly, if that's your decision,” he said, ushering me to the door. “Goodbye.”

  My mother was leafing through an old issue of Good Housekeeping. She looked up as I entered the waiting room. “How'd it go?” she asked. “I thought Cheon euisa-seonsaengnim said he would come get me.”

  “I'm not going through with it,” I said.

  “Isa, why not?” My mother looked crestfallen, as if I had suddenly declared I was dropping out of high school.

  I shrugged. “I'm just not.”

  “But—”

  “I'm not going to do it, Mom. I won't.”

  My mother smacked her magazine down on the table. The woman across from us looked up. “Waste of time,” my mother muttered, as I followed her out.

  That night I stared into the mirror above my dresser and looked at my eyes, first opening them wide and then squinting them to slits. I wondered what it would be like to look out at the world with Caucasian eyes. Would I catch things out of my peripheral vision, in the margins where my eyelids had formerly existed? If eyes were the window to the soul, as some poet had written, then what did it mean if you altered them? Would someone looking in be able to detect a different essence peering out?

  On top of my dresser lay a few plastic rounds of colored eye shadows and some pencil-shaped eyeliners that my mother had given me, samples from cosmetics counters or shades she'd grown tired of. I had often practiced what my mother had taught me: how to create the illusion of an eyelid crease by putting a darker shade close to the eye and lighter shades underneath the brow. I had traced the outer curve of my lids with black kohl, smudging them slightly, looking, I always thought, like a baby raccoon. I gathered all these things into a heap now and swept them into the trash can.

  Earlier that evening my mother had come into my room and sat down on the bed. “It's your decision, of course, Isa,” she had said. “I just think you would look more attractive—”

  “What's wrong with the way I look now?” I'd said, staring hard into the windows to her own soul.

  My mother flushed and smiled. “Nothing,” she said. “You are pretty girl, Isa. I just… It is always good to improve oneself.”

  What I had seen in her eyes disturbed me. She was lying. I realized that she was always lying. To me, to my father, to herself most of all. And it seemed to me at that moment that silence was the biggest lie.

  “I'm not pretty, Mom,” I said slowly. “You are, and I'm sorry if it disappoints you, but I don't want to change the way I look.”

  My mother seemed to consider this. She stared vacantly at a spot on the bed beside her, but she couldn't sustain it, couldn't take what I tried to offer. She got up from the bed and brushed the place where she'd been sitting, smoothing out the wrinkles.

  “Of course you are pretty, Isa,” she said. “Don't be ridiculous.”

  I broke up with Tommy. “I'm not interested in being in a relationship right now,” I said to him. “I like you, but we don't have anything in common, and I don't think it's fair to keep pretending this is going anywhere.”

  Tommy seemed to consider this. As usual, I couldn't read his expression. He was quiet for a long time, looking somewhere in the vicinity of my chest. “It's all right,” he said. “I was going to break up with you anyway. Don't take this wrong, Isa, but you're kind of spooky.”

  Poetic License

  My mother was passionate about poetry, voracious about verse, rapt about rhyme. She came back from class flushed and fluttering, talking about William Carlos Williams, William Blake, and William Butler Yeats. Her poetry professor, Professor Moulten, was also a William, though my mother said he insisted his students call him Bill. This was such taboo for any former Korean schoolchild that my mother giggled when she tried it, and my father shook his head disapprovingly. “Professors cannot be too friendly,” he said. “Lose respect.”

  “Professor—Bill—he wears blue jeans,” my mother said. “For class.”

  My father frowned. “What kind of a professor is this?” he said. He wore a suit and tie to class every day, with shiny black leather dress shoes.

  “Oh, he's very good,” she said. “And he's a poet, too. Look!” She showed us a dusty gray chapbook with a line drawing of a naked woman on the front. Unspeakable Acts was its title, brandished in slanted script across the top. “He wrote this book. He gave us each a copy.”

  My father made no move, so I took it. Inside, the poems were typed like on a normal typewriter. I flipped to one, “The Picnic.” Its first lines: “My heart suspended in aspic / like your just dessert.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Today we discussed the famous poem by Robert Frost. You know it, Isa, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’” she said. “We talked about how it is really about death.”

  I nodded. All I could think of was that Hero had once taught me to sing the words to the tango tune of “Hernando's Hideaway,” from The Pajama Game. “Whose woods these are/I do not know …”

  My father sniffed. “Poetry,” he said. “No substance. Anybody can write a poem. It's just words.”

  “That's not true, yeobo” my mother said.

  “Well, it is if you don't care about the quality,” I said.

  “Quality?” my father scoffed. “Who can measure this quality?”

  My mother sighed, took the chapbook back from me, and put it on top of her thick pile of books. The Norton Introduction to Poetry. The Complete Poems of William Butler Yeats. The Poems of Emily Dickinson.

  “Your father doesn't like what he can't understand,” she said to me, as though my father weren't in the room.

  To my surprise my father smiled. “That's not true, yeobo” he said, mimicking my mother's words of a moment ago. “I like you, and I don't understand you.” There was something uncharacteristically tender in the way he said this. My mother lowered her eyes, pleased, and I felt as though I should leave the room.

  Miscegenation

  My father received a National Science Foundation grant for his UC-Berkeley project. I'd never been able to figure out what it was he actually did—something involving huge football field—sized machinery that cost billions of dollars, calibrating physical reactions to eighty-five decimal places. He tried explaining it to me a few times, but he would just start and my mind would recede into a cave, his voice echoing off the walls like the flapping of bats.

  When the California team came to New York, my mother was required to host frequent dinner parties. There were various professors, graduate students, and post-docs, usually from places like Korea or Taiwan, who spoke little English and who were so appreciative of my mother's hospitality that they were literally d
umbstruck.

  My mother claimed to dread these occasions, complaining as she furiously cooked and cleaned that she wished my father would just take them to a restaurant. “So much less work,” she would say, “and they don't know the difference!”

  “Dad likes to show you off,” I said. “He's proud of you.”

  My mother colored with pleasure. “Too much work,” she insisted. “These post-docs especially,” she said. “Eat like horses!”

  Once they showed up, however, and my mother had changed from her apron and bathrobe into a simple black dress, she would radiate hospitality, basking in the attentions of the multi-aged men, juggling their needs, and coaxing even the shyest, most acne-scarred graduate student into a smile and a word of conversation. My father would beam from across the room with a tight-lipped expression of pride.

  One night, during one of these functions, I found myself engaged in earnest conversation with a baby-faced post-doc from Korea. He had a broad, intense face, despite its smoothness and its youth, and eyes that burned with some inner vision. His hair was a little too long in front; he kept sweeping it out of his eyes only to have it slide down again a moment later.

  “You like this writer, D. H. Lawrence?” he asked me, as I reached past him to refill my plate of chapchae.

  It was such an out-of-context question, in such an out-of-place spot, that I didn't register what he'd said for a few seconds. He must have interpreted my lack of response as a result of his pronunciation, because he repeated, more carefully, “You have read this writer, D. H. Larrrrence?”

  “Oh!” I nodded. “Have you?”

  “In Korean,” he said apologetically, pushing his hair back. “Very difficult in English. I like Women in Love. Rupert Birkin. And Sons and Lovers. Very good.”