Secondhand World Page 5

  “Isa,” she said, and held up one index finger, as though I'd meant to leave. I watched as she reached across the dresser and unlocked the top of the red mother-of-pearl jewelry box she'd brought with her from Korea. Inside were little pouches of colorful striped satin that contained her most precious objects— brooches of green jade carved in fortuitous Chinese characters; an opal and sapphire ring set in eighteen-karat gold; a Mikimoto pearl necklace with a diamond clasp. She would take them out for me periodically, one by one, laying them lovingly across her wrist, or modeling them upon her hand, affording me an advance peek at my inheritance.

  Now from deep inside this drawer, she took out a long envelope and counted out four crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. The multiple face of Benjamin Franklin, paunchy and good-humored, stared up at me from the fan they made among the bottles and jars on the tabletop.

  “Don't tell your father,” my mother said, pushing the money toward me. He was away in California, on the first of a series of collaborations with researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. “Save for operation now, Isa. This makes good start.”

  She patted my hand and smiled. “You'll be beautiful, Isa,” she said. “You'll see.”

  So, as some kids saved up for cars or college educations, I began to save for eye surgery. Whenever I got money for babysitting, for birthdays or Christmas, I'd add it to the four Ben Franklins in the toe of a navy kneesock at the bottom of my underwear drawer. I'd look at myself in the mirror at night and imagine my eyes bigger, the veil drawn back, framed by expert shadings of purple, brown, blue, or silver, the world suddenly revealed to me with greater clarity and focus—as though by peeling back my eyelids I would gain genius sight, an amplification of vision like some superhero's power.

  My mother would whisper to me about this transformation. It was a conversation behind my father's back, dreamy and perpetual. I sometimes had nightmares about the scalpel slipping, my eye slit in two like a boiled egg, and I'd be on the verge of telling my mother that I'd changed my mind; I didn't care that my eyes were small and creaseless, that I saw only the narrow view from beneath unadorned lids. But I never said anything. It seemed too important to her, some further dream of America she had fastened onto—an investment in the dream for the next generation—laying down roots to gain desperate purchase in pale, inhospitable soil.

  Rachel's

  Imet Rachel in eleventh-grade science. We teamed up over Bunsen burners and pipettes, fudging the data and botching experiments, causing Mrs. Hendricks fits.

  Rachel was brown-haired and hazel-eyed, with large breasts and a womanly figure. She lived with her mother and stepfather, two older stepsisters, a stepbrother, three ancient cats, and a Dalmatian puppy named Domino, in a house that looked like ground zero of the apocalypse but that I came to see as paradise. The first time I went to her house, I was stopped in the foyer by her stepfather, Jerry. I knew he was some bigwig administrator at the Department of Higher Education, but he looked like a pot farmer. He was a thinner, older version of Jerry Garcia, with granny glasses, curly hair, graying beard, and the kindest face of any man I'd ever seen.

  He was making bread in huge plastic bins. The first thing you saw when you entered the house was trash cans full of dough that strained over the rims, knocking the tops off. He was elbow-deep, kneading, throwing his whole body into it, as though he were rowing a boat.

  “Hey you must be Isa,” he said in a booming voice that startled me. “Welcome!” He pulled an arm out of the muck and made to shake my hand. I hesitated. He threw back his head and laughed.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “Get a little dirty! Give it a try. Here, stick your hands in. Punch and pull, like this.”

  I put my hands on the dough and gave it a few halfhearted pats.

  “No, no, no!” Jerry objected. “You've got to get right down in there. Here.” Beneath the dough I felt my hands being tugged under. “Like this,” he said, manipulating my arms with his own. We moved for a moment together like pistons on a train; the dough was warm and yielding, and I was conscious of his hands attached to my own.

  “That's better,” he said, releasing me. He winked. “We'll make a baker of you yet.”

  Rachel's mother, Louise, ran a day-care center from an attached wing of the house, and there was a line of high chairs and a stack of plastic booster seats in the kitchen, along with counters of Gerber instant rice cereal, lunch boxes, rows of baby bottles with rubber nipples on paper towels, and plastic bags drying on the wooden spokes of a strange umbrella-like contraption by the sink.

  At dinner everyone talked over everyone else, reaching across the table to help themselves to food, Domino going from place to place begging scraps.

  “This is gross,” said Gary, Rachel's nine-year-old stepbrother, sticking his fork upright in what appeared to be a bean-and-lentil casserole.

  “Dad made it,” said Adrienne.

  “Which means it's extremely healthful,” her father said, cutting himself a piece of one of his misshapen loaves of bread. “Lentils keep you regular,” he said, and to emphasize his point, he farted.

  “Dad, cut it out. You're disgusting!” said Audrey.

  “This is a free-farting atmosphere, is it not?” Jerry demanded. He looked at me. “Isa, you're not uptight about passing a little gas, are you?” he asked.

  I reddened and gave Rachel an anxious look.

  “Isa's family doesn't behave like a pack of wild animals,” Rachel said.

  “Isa's family probably doesn't have grass and gravel for supper, either,” Adrienne said.

  “God, you stink!” said Gary to his father, waving his hand in front of his face.

  “/don't stink. It's my farts that stink,” he said.

  Louise leaned toward me protectively. She was a small woman, but solidly built, with blond hair and red, pouting lips. She seemed to rise serenely above the chaos around her. “What's Korean cooking like, Isa?” she asked me. “I've never tried it.”

  “Remember the time when Dad confused the cat food for tuna fish?” Gary said. “That was so gross!”

  Rachel rolled her eyes at me, and, though our plates were still half full, she got up. “Can we be excused?” she asked, and, without waiting for a reply, motioned for me to follow her downstairs.

  The basement was one damp cement room outfitted with a stereo, black lights that made your teeth look purple, and a smelly green couch with most of its stuffing leaking out. Most important, it had a tiny black-and-white Zenith television with a rabbit-ear antenna.

  I wasn't allowed to watch much television at home, so I was mesmerized by the flickering images that were almost always present at Rachel's. We were zealous devotees of Dark Shadows, the campy vampire soap that was on right after we came home from school. Barnabas Collins figured heavily in our fantasies, that dark, dashing figure of the undead. We watched Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch, The Price Is Right and Let's Make a Deal. We talked about Uncle Fester and Illya Kuryakin as though they were real people, and invented voice-over dialogue for the actors.

  “Come here, you little crumpet, Alice,” we had Mr. Brady say.

  “I am wet with longing for you, Mr. Brady,” she would respond, wielding a feather duster.

  I was more intoxicated by TV than I was by the marijuana cigarettes that Rachel or her stepsisters, Audrey and Adrienne, would roll in the basement. The first time this happened we were watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. while Rachel, who was a prolific artist, drew strange buxom women with outsized lower lips and voluptuous hair in different-colored felt-tip markers. I pretended not to be shocked as Adrienne lit up a joint and passed it to me.

  “Aren't your parents home?” I asked, trying to sound like this didn't worry me so much as I was concerned on their behalf.

  Adrienne, who was a sleepy-eyed brunette with the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen, shrugged, exhaling smoke through her nose. “Why should they care?” she said. “It's not theirs.”

  I took a tentative puff on the
joint and tried to hold the smoke down in my lungs without coughing; it felt harsh and hot. I handed it to Rachel, who put down her pen and took a long hit.

  Napoleon Solo was strapped to a conveyor belt, moving closer and closer to a rotating blade that would saw him in half from the testicles up.

  “Isa's not used to this,” Rachel said to Audrey, holding her breath to keep in the pot.

  “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?”

  Rachel looked at me. “Freedom,” she said, exhaling, and we both giggled.

  What I remember most is laughing, laughing stupidly— from the pot and the freedom and the relief of being there— laughing until my stomach hurt and tears fell, with my head thrown back and my feet kicking in the air. We laughed until we had to pee, until some pee squeezed out and we cracked up about that, throwing pillows at each other and pretending to be grossed out.

  I told Rachel and her stepsisters stories about my parents, making them funny, skewing their peculiarities into easy caricature, trading on their foreignness, their accents and their immigrant smells. “Remember, Myung Hee, don't stay out too late! Study hard. Behave with dignity. You are Korean girl!” I would mimic my father cruelly, exaggerating the /'s instead of r's, leaving out articles, making him sound like some dim-witted M*A*S*H extra. I betrayed the secret of my mother's wig. The purple scar fascinated Rachel; she wanted me to give her its precise dimensions, a detailed description of its texture and shape.

  Rachel started calling them “the Professor and the Diva.” We created their own television show. “StaaarrringTae Mun Sohn as the Professor,” we would say. “And the lovely Hae Kyoung Chung as the Diva!” We would roll all over ourselves laughing at the inanities of the scenes we made up: my mother attacking everyone she encountered with a makeup brush; my father fussily pushing numbers on a calculator. We staged mock versions of Family Feud, with my Confucian forebears on one team and Rachel's Puritan ancestors on the other. “Which is worse, guilt or shame? Survey says… !”

  Oh, it was terrible, what we did. My laughter was studded with guilt, pricked with shame. I watched Rachel laugh and could hate her for a moment, even as I laughed too, knowing that I was pandering to her racism, that my betrayal cost her nothing, that she was aware of no truth about my parents beyond what I told her. It made the laughter more pungent, more bracing. It made it necessary.

  The first night I had dinner at Rachel's house was like a revelation to me. I pretended to scorn her family, as she seemed to, but I'd fallen in love with them all, especially Jerry with his salt-and-pepper beard and yeasty smell, his unseen hands clasping my wrists.

  “My family doesn't even have bodily functions,” I declared, making them all laugh. “I've never even heard my mother fart!”

  “I want to come live at your house,” Audrey said. “It sounds much more civilized.”

  “No, you don't,” I said with sudden vehemence. “It's like they're embalmed or something! Like those sofas that people cover in vinyl so they won't get used.”

  Rachel and Audrey exchanged a look, and there was an awkward silence.

  “Wow,” Rachel said, after a time. “What a cool image!” She drew a picture of a couch with two people on it, a man and a woman, all of it encased in plastic wrapping, like cellophane. From beneath the covering, the couple looked out unsmiling, and underneath, Rachel scrawled, “Absence of Bodily Functions.”

  I took it home and taped it to my wall.

  My Albino

  At school they called him the Rabbit Boy. His real name was. Herold Christopher Pettijean. But I called him Hero.

  The most immediately striking thing about him was his albinism. He looked like Johnny Winter, with his long white hair and pale eyes. Because of his sensitivity to light, he almost always wore sunglasses, the aviator kind, which made him look even more like a rock star; in fact, he wanted to be one. He made a guitar in shop class, slightly boxy with a shortish neck. I heard him strumming it in a corner of the cafeteria. It sounded a little hollow, the sound reverberating inside like a penny in a dryer, but I found it impressive that he'd managed to make the thing.

  He was exotic in an almost botanical way, like some rare orchid requiring careful monitoring of climate and temperature.

  Teachers tended to fuss over him, students stared and made stupid remarks, but Hero didn't register any of it. He acted like he didn't realize there was anything different about him, as if it was the rest of us who were strange, with our inconsistencies of pigmentation, our unrestricted gazes.

  Hero was almost six feet tall and whippet thin, with sinewy arms and large, strong-looking hands. He always wore black, a jean jacket, cowboy boots, and a black slouch hat that he wore indoors and that nobody ever told him to take off. He sat in the front of the room, where he could see the board, his long legs stretched into the aisle, translucent white wrists visible above where his hands were thrust into his pockets.

  He whistled “Bell Bottom Blues” or “Lay, Lady, Lay” in the hallways between classes, and sometimes under his breath during exams. He was a virtuoso whistler. I would often linger at my locker just to listen to the end of a song.

  Rachel and I mooned over him, though she acknowledged that he was mine. She already had a boyfriend—Dusty Jenkins, a varsity linebacker with a gold GTO.

  “He's looking at you,” Rachel would whisper in French class.

  “How can you tell?” I'd say. “He has his sunglasses on.”

  “I can tell,” she'd say. “He's looking over the tops. Ooo, trés formidable!”

  We would laugh, but my heart pounded so hard I feared it would come unmoored. In Hero's presence I felt my ordinariness, the awkward mortal geekishness that was beyond redemption, beyond cure. He was like a flash of quicksilver, a burst of sun too bright to look upon. He dazzled me.

  I worked at the circulation desk in the school library during study halls. I was there one day, going through a stack of books that had just been returned. It was my job to find the cards on file and stick them into their back jacket pockets before they could be reshelved. I was also supposed to check out books for people. My hair was long and I wore it like a curtain in front of my face, peering out at the world from backstage.

  Blume, Judy. Zindel, Paul. It was hard for me to resist reading the books I took from the wooden bin, pausing over the open pages and letting my eyes take in the words. It was an occupational hazard and one reason why the job appealed to me, that I could so easily lose myself in the middle of stories I might never finish.

  “How do you see through all that hair?”

  I looked up from my book and saw Hero standing there. It was something my father was always asking, and I felt a reflex indignation at the question, which I didn't associate with Hero's having asked it.

  “How do you see with sunglasses on?”

  He laughed. “I can't,” he said. “But then, I can't anyway.”

  “You mean you're blind?” I said, stricken.

  He smiled again and shook his head. He put his book up on the desk.

  “Legally,” he said, shrugging. “But I can see you.”

  I felt the heat come into my face, like a blast from a furnace, and I picked up his book to shield myself.

  “ The Son of the Wolf, by Jack London,” I read. “He's good, isn't he?”

  “My favorite,” he said.

  “I haven't read this.” I took the card from the back of the book and found the rubber stamp with the due date. I pushed it into the ink pad.

  “You should,” he said.

  My hand was shaking as I stabbed the stamp onto the card, and when I took it away I could see that the date was blurred and ghostly. I stabbed the same way at the back of his book and pushed it toward him. He was looking at me from behind his sunglasses; I could see my face reflected in the dark mirrors of the lenses.

  “My name's Herold,” he said, leaving his book between us on the desk.

  “I know,” I said, and immediately blushed.

  “And you are?”

>   “Isa,” I said.

  “Isa,” he said, reaching for his book. “Thanks, Isa.”

  “Good-bye,” I whispered. “Good-bye, Hero.”

  Breadmaking

  Jerry and Louise became like adopted parents. I helped Louise with her after-school kids—taking them to the bathroom, feeding them graham crackers and juice. Rachel would be down in the basement with Dusty, and I'd be sitting on the orange rug in the day-care center, showing kids how to make origami frogs out of shiny colored paper.

  I made bread with Jerry, kneading the dough like an expert, my arms submerged to the elbows in the trash cans. We broke off huge hunks, tucking them into oval loaves on aluminum sheets, and burning our mouths sampling straight from the oven.

  “Why do you encourage him?” Rachel asked me. “I'm sick of his stupid bread. He's always sticking twigs and seeds and shit in it.

  “It's not that bad,” I said.

  “Yes, it is. He's out of control!”

  I didn't say anything. I couldn't admit how much I liked spending time with her stepfather.

  “You know, Isa,” he told me once, “the Papadakis men have been bakers for generations. They used to make this black bread that looked like bowler hats. You'd sink your teeth into a slice and they'd never come out again! You could play soccer with them.”

  His T-shirt was striped with sweat, his beard flecked with dough, the lenses of his glasses flour-dusted. “Isa, come here,” he said. He crooked a finger. “You've got something right…” He leaned over to wipe my cheek.

  “Hey!” I pulled away, laughing. He'd smeared dough across my face. I flung a glob at his beard, where it hung and fell.

  “Why, you little …” he said, and patted my cheeks with two fully laden palms.

  He would send me home with a loaf or two—pumpernickel or rye, anadama or caraway seed—but my parents preferred store-bought white bread for their breakfast toast and rice every night for dinner.