Secondhand World Read online

  I put Stephen to bed, reading him a chapter of Paddington. It was his favorite; he'd taken to asking for marmalade sandwiches and saying he was from Peru. I wasn't paying much attention to what I was reading, straining as I was to hear what was going on in our parents’ bedroom.

  “Why is Mommy sad?” Stephen asked, after my reading had slowed to a stop.

  “‘Cause she wants a dishwasher,” I said.

  “Like the one in the store?”

  “Yes.”

  My brother considered. My parents’ voices were muffled now, murmurs behind the wall. “I want one, too, Isa,” he said. Don t you?

  “Shh, go to sleep now,” I said. I heard the bedroom door opening. I tucked the covers in around Stephen, kissed him good night, and went back downstairs. My mother was alone in the kitchen. When she turned to smile at me, she was flushed and puffy-eyed.

  “Got your brother to bed?”

  I nodded.

  “Thank you, Isa,” she said. “Oh, Isa, your father said yes! We're going to get a dishwasher! On layaway plan!” She did a little pirouette in her slippered feet, took my hand and twirled beneath it.

  “Great!” I said, though I didn't know what a layaway plan was.

  She laughed and leaned toward me, tears in her eyes. “I have to teach you,” she whispered. “Something every woman should know—how to get man to give in. Even difficult man like your father!” She threw her head back and laughed until I could see the fillings in the back of her mouth. The salesman had been right—who could deny her anything? I picked up the dish towel, and we worked together until all the dishes were washed and dried.

  “Not much longer,” my mother vowed, “and I'll never have to wash dishes by hand again!”

  Delivery

  Three weeks after my mother's triumph over my father, two men in a van came to deliver our new dishwasher. Seventh grade had started for me a month earlier; it was the end of October and the days were getting shorter, with the premonition of winter in the clear air of late afternoons.

  We were studying insects in science class. We each had a killing jar containing cotton balls saturated with ammonia, and we got to roam the woods beyond the school grounds looking for specimens. I had two ants, some kind of beetle that I'd captured in the corner of the cafeteria doorway, and a green spider that Mrs. Cranston said wasn't an insect. Theresa Graves and I had been lifting up logs and uncovering crawling loot—mostly ants and grubs. She got mad when I let go too soon and scraped her hand.

  “Isa, you need to be more careful,” Mrs. Cranston said. “Theresa, you may go in and see the nurse.”

  Mrs. Cranston had it in for me. I'd forgotten to turn in a worksheet at the beginning of the year and she was always complaining that my handwriting was sloppy, but I knew the real reason she didn't like me. She'd told me that her daughter-in-law was Korean, and she hadn't sounded pleased.

  “My son's over there now,” she'd said, looking at me as though I were responsible. “In the army. That's how they met.”

  And once when we were dissecting fetal pigs, she'd come over to me and said, “You people eat things like this over there, don't you?”

  After Theresa had gone to the nurse's office, I sat down on a log. I put the jar up to my face and watched an unidentified green bug—an aphid?—stagger drunkenly across the poison cotton bed. It seemed cruel what we were doing, killing insects and mounting them on pins in the name of science. Still, there was something compelling in the cruelty; I had never before watched a thing die.

  The bug fell over on its back and wiggled its legs in the air. It looked slapstick, like a Charlie Chaplin routine. One moment I was watching it, the next I felt a stab of fear. My head snapped back. It was like the bracing ammonia shock to attention, as if the boundary line that separated me from the bug inside the glass had momentarily dissolved, and all our atoms had slopped together before reassembling in their proper configurations.

  I unscrewed the top of the jar and dumped the bug out. It was too late; he lay motionless on the ground. Still the fear did not abate. I was panicked; I was either going to pass out or get sick. My impulse was to run away from the woods, to keep running and running until I'd outdistanced the terror. I tried to stand but my legs gave way.

  Some of my classmates noticed me squatting on the ground, the contents of my killing jar scattered around me. I was shaking. Someone told Mrs. Cranston and she came over. “What's going on here, Isa?” she said. “What have you done?”

  I slumped to the ground, sobbing, my whole body shivering uncontrollably among the dirt and leaves, while my stunned teacher and classmates looked on.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon in the nurse's office, lying on a cot with my teeth chattering. I had no temperature, and the nurse, Miss Verrill, could find nothing the matter with me.

  “Killing insects can disturb a child with a sensitive disposition,” Miss Verrill told Mrs. Cranston.

  “They're bugs,” Mrs. Cranston said. “She's just being hysterical.”

  They tried calling my mother to pick me up, but there was no answer, so they sent me home on the bus as usual. I felt a bit better by then, a little weak and shivery but not violently so. I sat toward the front with my face pressed against the bus window, looking out at the passing landscape; the white line on the side of the road; the half-barren, half-bright trees in red and orange; the houses with raked front lawns, children hurrying inside with their satchels and lunch boxes. I thought if I could catalog everything I saw and identify it correctly, I'd be all right, leaping from item to item as though they were stepping-stones across dangerously swift water. Tree. House. People.

  “Hey Chinky whatsamatter? You got ants in your pants?” Paul Weaver yelled from the back of the bus.

  “Yeah, you swallow Chinese jumping beans or what?” said Tom Kerry. “Was that supposed to be some kinda sneaky Viet-cong trick?”

  I closed my eyes. I could hear the kids around me snickering.

  “Spaz! She's such a spaz! She was having a spaz attack!”

  “See her eat dirt?”

  “Gooks gotta eat dirt; otherwise they starve.”

  “And bugs, too. She probably got sick from eating too many bugs!”

  It was the first time the bus bullies had picked on me this year. Until now they had chosen to concentrate their attentions on a shy, delicate boy named Bobby Silski. With my eyes closed I could see their faces—pale and freckled, pink-cheeked and pinched, with hair the color of wheat or barley; their eyes big and blue, narrowed and greenish. There were no black faces, no faces of the Iroquois or Mohawk that we had studied in sixth grade; no brown faces like the ones in my report on the country of Honduras; and there were no faces like the ones I saw on the news at night, the ones in the sloping hats with their loose clothing, expressionless on the receiving end of guns and cameras— the faces that looked most like mine.

  A sharp feeling of nausea rose in me, which was only partly the nausea of the bus in motion and the closed-in smell of sweat and breath. If I didn't open my eyes, I'd be fine, I thought. If I could just lean forever against the glass, my forehead glued along the smooth surface.

  Something was wrong with me. I was terribly sick. It seemed natural to me somehow that Mrs. Cranston and the kids on the bus could tell that this was so—could see it in the slant of my eyes and the sallowness of my skin. The illness I felt in my gut was only an inward sign of an external strangeness. It wasn't a secret that could be hidden; it was on the surface. All you had to do was look. “One of these things is not like the others,” they sang on Sesame Street, which Stephen watched every afternoon. And it was evident that I was that unlike thing, the forever Other. Triangle among circles. Apple among pears.

  It was the beginning of the realization that I did not belong, like the cowbird's egg hatched in the robin's nest. How strange that it should come on this particular afternoon, with my head spinning and my heart rattling inside my chest. It was an unmooring, my sense of self adrift, and though I couldn't
have articulated it at the time, I felt such a devastating sense of loneliness that I knew it would never entirely leave me. I felt I was, in some permanent, unconditional way, alone.

  As I got off the bus, my knees almost buckled beneath me.

  “You okay?” asked Rudy the bus driver.

  I managed a nod.

  “Take it easy now,” he called after me.

  I walked slowly toward my house, ignoring the knocking on the bus windows, the muffled laughter and pointing fingers. I felt like an old woman, stooped and aching, leaden feet shuffling unsteadily through dead leaves.

  I wasn't surprised when Mrs. Williamson, our next-door neighbor, met me at my front door. After the trauma of the afternoon, nothing would have seemed strange to me. Even as she gathered me to her bosom and wept, I couldn't process anything beyond my own emptiness and fear. She smelled like cake, powdery and sweet, and I wept right along with her. We cried that way for a while, wrapped in each other's arms, as though we always greeted one another this way, as though our relationship were predicated on more than a few dozen words shouted across driveways and a jaunty wave of a hand out the car window.

  I don't remember what words Mrs. Williamson used, when she finally did use words. I don't remember much more of that day, or the days that followed. It was as if the attack I'd had in the woods had precipitated some kind of fugue state. I felt as though I were moving through syrup, as if time had simultaneously slowed and sped up, and I was another organism entirely, pushing up from the earth to full grown in mere seconds.

  The deliverymen had come to install my mother's dishwasher that afternoon. They demonstrated the whole procedure for her—the way you loaded the soap in the little tray and pushed it closed on its spring-loaded jaws, the way you could select from various options, hot water or cold rinse, regular or heavy-duty wash.

  Stephen wasn't at nursery school that day because he was getting over a cold, but after lunch he'd felt so much better that my mother had shooed him out into the front yard. (He wasn't allowed to go past the low hedge in the front of the house, or beyond the big maple to the right, or Isatree to the left.) He was gathering acorns and twigs to set up obstacle courses for his Matchbox cars.

  The only place the cars would glide was on the driveway. I'd spent countless hours out there with him, conducting races with five or six cars at once, starting them at the part of the pavement with the steepest grade and letting them cruise to the finish line about four feet away. Stephen had a favorite car—purple with orange interior—that almost always won. He liked it best, not because it was fast but because he said it was lucky.

  The deliverymen, having finished the job they were hired to do, got back into their van. Perhaps they were late for their next delivery; perhaps it was time for an afternoon break. In any case, they backed out in a hurry. They didn't see my brother squatting just behind them, racing his tiny cars down the smoothly tarred slope.

  My mother stood at the window above the kitchen sink, looking out onto the side of the driveway. She saw the van, the men inside it; she scanned the yard but could not find Stephen. It would've taken a moment to process. She saw my brother's toy cars whizzing down the driveway, and Stephen crouched a foot away from the van's right tire. She screamed and screamed. She banged on the window so hard she went right through it, fracturing a bone on the side of her hand. By the time she ran out the door, it was too late. Stephen's body was lying on the driveway, and the workmen were getting out of the van confused, thinking they'd caught a tree branch. My mother knelt beside her son, took his head in her lap, while the deliverymen ran inside for a phone.

  Passage

  M father would always say that there were sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day. He used to say this in response to my complaints that a car trip was too long, when I was impatient to go to a friend's house, or if I'd been promised a treat. “Sixty seconds in a minute,” he'd say. “No more, no less.”

  And though he was, as usual, entirely accurate, I was irritated by the way he could completely discount the experience of time passing, which was fitful and malingering. A moment elongated to filament like saltwater taffy, sped up and fell over itself like a strobe-light sequence in a silent movie. I resented the way he tried to make everything seem simpler than it was, adhering to facts when facts were so clearly beside the point.

  For about three years after Stephen's death, my sense of time was skewed both ways—individual moments seeming to come to a standstill, a whole year disappearing into ether. What is left are snapshots, pinpoints of illumination against a background of darkness.

  Moment: I sit in a wooden pew, in a black dress with a lace collar, listening to Pastor Park talk about Stephen. His thin lips draw up against an uncertain smile. He speaks about our family's terrible misfortune, my brother's innocence, the mercy of God, as though he were speaking of the weather, or of the ivory-colored Cadillac he drives to and from church.

  “He's gone to a better place,” he says in English, and then in Korean, and I stare at the white coffin with the lilies on top and think of how Stephen would've hated that small space, the stillness and the dark. My mother is still in the hospital. I wonder what she's doing there on the day that her son is being eulogized. In my hand is Paddington Bear. I'd planned to give it to the undertaker to place beside Stephen in the casket, but for some reason I haven't, and it's still here, its floppy yellow hat and scruffy fur mashed against the hem of my dress.

  Moment: A neighbor comes by with a homemade casserole. Mrs. Williamson has them on a rolling schedule. I can't remember if it's Mrs. Sanderson or Mrs. Benoit—the one with the stiff gray upsweep of hair and orange makeup like a mask. It's clear she's feeling uncomfortable and doesn't want to stay. My mother's upstairs sleeping and my father's at work. “The directions are right on there, hon. Just heat the oven to three seventy-five and put it in for forty-five minutes. Take the foil off the last ten. I'll come back for my pan.”

  She turns back toward the door.

  “My mother broke her hand,” I say. “Banging on the window.”

  The woman's face freezes. She twitches to arrange it back inside her orange mask. “Sweetheart, I'm so sorry. It's a terrible tragedy. Terrible. But you know God's going to take good care of your brother up in heaven, don't you? He's a little angel now.” She looks at me hopefully.

  “Want to play Parcheesi?” I ask her.

  Moment: My mother's head bent over a card table in the living room. On the table, a jigsaw puzzle. She sits with her back to me, in her blue terry-cloth robe, fingering a piece in her delicate hands as though it were a jewel. The puzzle has thousands of pieces, with geometric patterns and repeating colors: three different shades of red, four different textures of green; sky indistinguishable from ocean; bird beaks facing right, bird beaks facing left. She isn't wearing her wig, and I am startled by the purple scar at the back of her head, like the wounded eye of a Cyclops. As I get closer, she turns and smiles, but it's a muscular exercise only, a ghost gesture, the remembrance of smiling. The tears in her eyes seem permanently lodged there, like tiny embedded diamonds.

  She goes back to the hospital three times that year. Each time my father explains that she needs more rest. She returns red-eyed and flinching, her back and shoulders hunched like a crone's.

  One day I come home from school to find her in Stephen's room cutting up his OshKosh overalls with oversized pinking shears. “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Oh, Isa, making rags,” she says, her face flushed with exertion. She raises the scissors toward me, and for a moment I am frightened. I take a step back. “Otherwise, what's the use?” she says, getting back to work.

  I begin to feel like a girl in a fairy story. Around our split-level, a tangle of briars rises up, thorny and thick, my mother dwelling in enchanted sleep, the king distracted. And the princess in the tower, growing her hair, dreaming of escape.

  I think my parents believed that the nature of Stephen's death
exposed them for the careless foreigners they were, unable to keep their young from harm in this complex country of dishwashers and delivery vans. I think they felt it set them apart. Even as my mother got better and things returned to an approximation of normal, this pervading sense of separation remained. My mother had no real friends; she seldom went out. My father worked too hard and stayed at the office too long. I didn't bring friends home—not because it was explicitly forbidden but because I couldn't see them there, in that space that housed my parents’ grief, couldn't imagine what we would do surrounded by the strange smells of kimchi and fish chig'ge, among the celadon vases and hanging scrolls of Chinese poetry in feathered black brushstrokes.

  Eventually my mother returned to putting on her wig and getting dressed each day, making out grocery lists and cooking my favorite dishes. My father started coming home to eat the meals, scolding me for spilling my milk, demanding to check my math homework. But my brother, by his absence, remained the strongest presence in our house. Even as my parents spoke to me in the old familiar ways, I could feel their distraction. I began to feel insubstantial, a transparency that hung like a scrim between them and the child they had lost. It was in the monotone of their voices as they talked to me without listening to themselves, in the momentary confusion as they scanned my face for features that weren't there.

  Even at the height of her recovery, my mother never used the avocado dishwasher that had been her most fevered consumer dream. She continued to wash our dishes by hand, in yellow Playtex gloves, with an extravagance of soapy water. My father, raking leaves in the backyard, would stand beside the swing set he'd never dismantled, sometimes sitting gingerly on one side of the teeter-totter, as though waiting for Stephen to take his place on the other side.

  I'd stare at the photograph of my parents’ wedding and feel the weight of my mother's hope like a medicine ball to the chest. Why had she smiled? It was so clearly a son they should have secured for their firstborn. Stephen Myung Hwan Sohn. Son and heir. They didn't have to tell me. Somehow I just knew, knew in the way that children know. Who is loved and who is merely borne.