Secondhand World Read online

  Proof

  My father wore a green badge clipped to the pocket of his lab coat. To measure radioactivity, he told me, something you couldn't see or smell, but that could make you sick. It had a small photo on the front and looked like a regular ID card, except thicker. I liked to clip it to my collar and pretend I was a grown-up with a dangerous job, some glamorous, dimly understood version of my father's. I imagined the green badge suddenly glowing red, the invisible something that could make you sick overflowing its small boundary, the concerned faces of doctors blurring in and out of focus as I fell stricken to the floor.

  Though I had a few friends around the neighborhood, I spent most of my time before Stephen was born alone, reading, writing an episodic novel about an Englishwoman who had seventeen children, and inventing games that revolved around giant pipe cleaners, stuffed animals, and a collapsible wooden laundry rack.

  On Sunday mornings I wandered through the neighborhood, knowing that all my friends were in church. Ginny Townsend's mother had invited me to go, and I wanted to very much. Church seemed like a club everyone belonged to except me. I imagined something important happening there, exclusionary rites of goodness and celebration.

  “Ignorance and fear,” my father said. “That's why people need religion. They're afraid of the unknown.” My father sat up straight, his expression making it clear that he was not afraid.

  “Why?” I asked.

  My father shrugged. “They're afraid of death, what comes after life. They cannot imagine it. So they make up things.”

  “Is that why we don't go to church?”

  “Ye-es,” my father said uncertainly. He glanced at the kitchen where my mother had her back turned, stirring spaghetti sauce on the stove. “Your mother is Buddhist,” he said. “But Buddhism is not really a religion, more like philosophy.”

  “They believe in reincarnation. Mom says if I don't behave, I'll come back as a bug.”

  My father chuckled. “I don't know about that,” he said.

  He seldom spoke to me so expansively, conversing almost as though I were an adult, and I was determined to engage him for as long as possible.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  He pursed his lips and scratched the corner of one eye, just under his glasses. “I am a scientist, Myung Hee,” he said, “and scientists require evidence. They observe and record what they see. In science, we look for proof. When I die, I will find out. If there is a God, I will see with my own eyes.”

  “Ginny's mom says God exists.”

  “How does she know?”

  “Because …” I hesitated. “Because she believes it.”

  My father looked triumphant. “Belief and knowledge,” he said. “Completely different.”

  The night Stephen died, I woke to the sound of my father's footsteps on the stairs. I listened to the freezer door open and shut, and ice cubes rattle against glass. Lying in bed, I pictured him sitting at the table in his pajamas, cradling the whiskey to his chest. Before I went downstairs, I slipped into Stephen's room and glanced at the bed. His stuffed animals crouched on their haunches in the dark; a scattering of books lay across the floor. The only thing missing was the small shape of the boy in the bed, his tousled black hair on the pillow with the race cars, a bare heel peeking out from the tangle of blue bedcovers.

  Stephen was in heaven, Mrs. Williamson had told me earlier that day, though it already seemed years ago. Heaven. For some reason I had an image of a doctor's waiting room crammed with old people reading magazines, staring at brown carpet. I saw Stephen in the corner, where the children's toys were kept—the Fisher-Price farm, the wooden balls strung on metal wires, the colored plastic rings that were chewed at the edges.

  In the kitchen my father sat almost exactly as I had imagined him. He did not lift his head as I came into the room.

  “Where's Mom?” I asked in a voice higher than my own.

  “In the hospital,” he said. “Her hand.”

  “Is it broken?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think Stephen is in heaven?”

  I watched as my father took a sip of his drink and put the glass down very deliberately on the table. He put his hand to his eyes and rubbed the lids.

  “Myung Hee,” he said wearily, “I don't know. Maybe … maybe he is. Why not?”

  He was not in the least convincing. His voice could not conceal his impatience, but in his eyes, when he released them from beneath his hand, there was something I had never seen before— a look of uncertainty, of blinding loss—that conveyed to me, simultaneously and profoundly, his skepticism and his longing.

  Fluency

  Around the time Stephen died I started reading the dictionary. I read it like a novel, page by page, not for the express purpose of memorizing words and definitions, but for the feel of words rolling around in my head, like those air-blown balls featured in the Pick 4 lottery game that came on before the news. They seemed to float in my brain, words—lovely and sinuous, devious and clever—surprising me with their specificity, their shadings, and their oddness. I would underline the words I didn't know, in Jane Eyre or The Scarlet Letter, saving them to look up all at once in a feeding frenzy of new vocabulary. I began to put certain words I loved on three-by-five cards, with their definitions on the back; words like “calliope” and “meager,” “tergiversate” and “lacuna.”

  My father was initially excited by my virtuosity, but despite the fact that my grades in English were consistently my highest, I didn't always score well on individual papers or literature exams.

  “Why did you get B on this paper?” my father would demand, going over my assignments. “You're always reading.”

  I'd shrug, unable to explain that it was not for sharing, this passion of mine, not for pandering to teachers or showing off. It was something I did for myself, hoarding words like “cat's-eye marbles,” “Indian-head nickels,” or other such childhood treasure.

  It was fluency I was after, and it was enough that I possessed it. I was secretly ashamed of my parents’ accents, the way they were sometimes stared at in public, incomprehensibly, as though they were idiots or otherwise afflicted. Even though I looked the same as they did, with my narrow eyes and yellow skin, I knew that all I had to do was open my mouth and I'd establish absolutely that I was one of them—the gum-chewing waitress with her wide eyes and chapped lips, the cashier in the grocery store with the goatee and the acne-cratered scars across his cheeks. I wanted to dissociate myself as much as possible from my parents, from what I had come to see as their sad immigrant isolation, their outside-looking-in. I would not be the straight-A student, the geisha, or the coolie.

  In school I studied the cool kids, the cheerleaders with their long hair and blank, bored faces, the football players with their hands stuck in the back pockets of their jeans. I observed the posture of idle prerogative: weight resting on the back foot, one hip stuck out, a hand held loosely at the waist. I copied as best I could their slow, minimal movements, as though an economy of energy were essential in staking an inalienable claim to birthright.

  Double Box

  When I was alone in the house, I snooped. In the night-stand by my father's side of the bed I found a Playboy magazine, a copy of The Joy of Sex, and The Kama Sutra. All were illustrated, and the images made me uneasy. I was dumbfounded by the women in Playboy, with their pink nipples and huge, globular breasts, and perplexed by the illustrations in The Kama Sutra, the pairing of monkey women and elephant men.

  I tried to open my mother's red mother-of-pearl jewelry box, but it was locked. In the side drawer I found her birth-control pills—a foil clock with little white pills around the face. They were labeled with the days of the week; the empty slot with the last pill taken was six days before.

  But these, treasures though they were, were not what I was after. I had a mission. I had already searched the downstairs, looking in the coat closet and the kitchen cabinets, in
the Buddhist medicine chest in the living room, and behind the couch.

  In the back of my father's closet, I found it. A square cardboard box sitting atop the highest shelf. I could reach it only by getting up on the chair in the corner and leaning over as far as I could, almost falling as I managed to ease the box down. I sat down on the floor and opened the box to reveal another box, white with white binding tape. Someone had sliced through with two crisscross lines so thin and straight they must have used a razor. I pulled the folds open revealing a nest of shredded paper; it felt strangely like opening a Christmas present. Underneath the paper, which I lifted out as carefully as I could, was a metal urn that looked like the bowl on my mother's bedside altar, only this bowl had a lid and, hard as I tried, I could not open it. I lifted the urn partway from the box and shook it. I felt the shifting weight of sand, heard the sound an hourglass makes, with a few clicks and pings, like small pebbles hitting the sides.

  Stephen was in there. I tried to imagine his small body transformed into this metal container—not the container but its unseen contents—a few handfuls of beach sand and shell. My parents did not want him interred because they didn't know where they would end up. My father talked about taking the ashes to Korea, to the mountain where Sohns had been buried dating back generations, but my mother wanted him close, and so they had kept him, shoved away in my father's closet like a shoe box.

  I put the box back and took it down sometimes when my parents went out. Depending on my mood, it made me glad that Stephen was still with me in some real way, or it made me so extravagantly sad that I would cry, the double box wobbling on my knees.

  Last Try

  My parents’ hopes for a son, or for any more children at all, for that matter, ended the year after Stephen was killed. In the midst of what I now realize was a series of nervous breakdowns—or one extended breakdown in gradual escalation—my mother had an ectopic pregnancy, which resulted in her having her tubes tied.

  I remember my father shaking me roughly by the shoulder in the middle of the night. He already had his coat on. I could feel the itch of wool on my neck. “Myung Hee-ya,” he said, “your mother is ill. I'm taking her to emergency room. Mrs. Williamson will come in the morning to help you go to school. Myung Hee-ya, do you hear me?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said sleepily. My mother had been in and out of the hospital so often that year that the news did not alarm me.

  Later my mother explained. Instead of developing inside her uterus, the embryo had lodged in her Fallopian tube, which did not have the berth to accommodate it. She made it sound like a wayward child, wandering away from safety at the start.

  I hardly saw my father the week my mother was in the hospital. Mrs. Park, Pastor Parks wife, came to stay with me, feeding me enormous bowls of miyeok-guk, seaweed soup, with rice and children's kimchi. She was a tiny woman with no hips or bosom, on thick, stocky legs, like tree trunks holding up a twig. Her English consisted of “please,” “more,” “wash,” and “bed,” lending themselves to combinations. “Wash, please,” she would say, indicating with her hands in front of her face. “Bed, please,” she would say, pointing at the clock. “More, please?” she would ask, with a paddle full of rice ready to dump on my plate.

  When I finally got to see my mother, Mrs. Park took me to the hospital. She drove her husband's ivory Cadillac like it was a vehicle from God, forcing other cars to the side of the road as she sped fearlessly up their backsides. Her expression was neutral, even as drivers gave vent to their displeasure, and when we arrived at the hospital parking lot, she almost took out the mechanical gate before it had time to raise itself. I was indignant that my parents had allowed me to be so clearly endangered, and I lagged behind Mrs. Park going in the main entrance of the hospital, trying to make it obvious that I was no relation to this odd, haphazard woman.

  At the doorway of my mother's room, Mrs. Park came to a standstill and I was forced to stand beside her, looking in. My mother was lying in bed, her face turned away from the door. My father was leaning toward her, half on the bed, half off, his face close to hers, her hand clasped in his own. He was crying, or at least his cheeks were wet with tears, and this I had never seen before. Even when Stephen died, my father had put his face in his hands for a long time, but when he'd looked up, his eyes had been dry.

  Now, his eyes gleaming, my father pressed himself closer to my mother, his head next to hers, resting for a moment on her pillow. They did not speak, and for several moments they did not move.

  Mrs. Park finally cleared her throat and entered the room. “Aegi-watseoyo,” she said. The child has arrived.

  Eyelids

  When I was very young, my mother made me wear a clothespin at night to encourage my nose to form a salient bridge, instead of disappearing into the front of my face and emerging like a mushroom at the end of it.

  “Please, God, give me a new nose, give me a new nose” was the nasal prayer I intoned, clothespin astride my face, feeling the futility and the force of my mother's optimism at one and the same time.

  As my mother recovered from Stephen's death—the clothespin long since abandoned and my nose no less flat than before— she turned to new projects concerning my appearance. The chief objective was, of course, to render me beautiful.

  My father made it clear what he thought of our efforts.

  Once, when I was thirteen, he came in as my mother and I were discussing training bras. My chest was still as flat as Kansas, but I wanted to be ready just in case.

  “I can make a bra for you, Myung Hee,” my father said. “Two Dixie cups and a piece of string.”

  My mother gave him a withering look, but he persisted.

  “How about peanut shells?”

  “Yeobo!” my mother scolded, chasing him out of the room, trying to hide the smile that was edging the corners of her mouth.

  Shopping with my mother was a type of sorority scavenger hunt. She had a genius for honing in on a bargain. She'd rifle through the racks at Macy's or Sears, pulling out garment after garment, which I would try on in the dressing room and trot out for her evaluation.

  The clothes she chose for me were never things I would've picked for myself: black velveteen stretch pants with stirrups, a hot-pink-and-green-striped go-go dress with a pink vinyl belt, a gold paisley two-piece with bell-bottoms and a smocked baby-doll top. “Turn around,” she'd say, doing a clockwise twirl with her finger. “Perfect,” she'd pronounce, as I came back around to face her, nodding as though she'd achieved something monumental.

  Though she seemed in most external ways to have recovered from my brother's death, there was something breathless about my mother's endeavors, a gleam in her eye that was close to a tear, a smile contorted into a look of agitation. She attached huge importance to insignificant things. Once when we were shopping, she pulled a skirt out of another woman's hands and refused to give it back. “I saw it first,” she repeated, and bought it without even trying it on. Another time, when we lost one of our shopping bags, my mother insisted that we comb the mall for hours, retracing our steps and interrogating every salesclerk until, exhausted and embarrassed, I begged for mercy.

  I began to pity my mother, and pity must mark an end to adulation. I saw her as smaller, reduced, no longer a goddess but a creature battered by tragedy. The story of her accident, the crucible of her destiny, took on new meaning. Instead of marking her for special fortune, it seemed a harbinger of a calamitous life.

  On the second anniversary of Stephen's death, my mother spent all morning in her room. I worried when she did this because it often meant she was grieving; she would come out of the darkened bedroom with puffy eyes and pink nostrils, and when she spoke it would be with a slight stuffiness.

  That afternoon, though, she emerged cheerful, her wigless head tied in a fabulous red chiffon scarf. She looked like a gypsy, with thick gold clip-on earrings and painted lips. She beckoned for me to sit beside her at the dresser and watch as she rimmed her eyes in black and smeared brown a
cross the lids.

  Unlike most Asians, my mother had eyelids; when she applied shadow, part of it would fold prettily inward. The effect was subtle but beguiling, a peekaboo of color in a crescent accent following the arc of her eyeline. My Mongolian fold was the bane of this effect. It was a stubbornly flat expanse of skin that hooded the eye, evolved to keep flying sand from blinding the Mongol horsemen, my impetuous, nomadic ancestors, but no good at all for the more sedentary art of feminine beautification.

  My mother finished her eyes, squinting into the mirror with a satisfied assessment, and turned to me. Poised with the black kohl eyeliner in her hand, she looked into my face and sighed.

  “Aigo, Isa,” she said. “Eyes so small. You need operation like my friend Yeon Ja. Look much better. They make like this.” She pinched the bottom of my eyelid and dragged it upward to demonstrate. “Just small procedure. Not a problem.”

  It was the first I'd heard her speak of this type of eye surgery, which many Asians were getting to give their faces that Western look. I stared at myself in the mirror, took both my eyelids and cinched them upward, trying to imagine what I would look like, what I would be like, if I gained that tiny indentation across the eye fold. I wondered if I would see more through these altered eyes, as though they were louvered blinds hoisted up to admit the view. I wondered if I would be beautiful.

  That day my mother made up my eyes in extravagant Cleopatra black with long, sweeping curves at the outer edges, but when she painted across my hooded eyelids in “Fawn,” the color just sat there in indiscreet patches, with none of the seductive shimmer and mirage of her own eyes.