Secondhand World Page 7

  I fumbled with the key in the lock, and spent a long time taking off my shoes and hanging up my jacket in the hall closet.

  “Myung Hee-ya!”

  I climbed the five steps to the living room, where my father was sitting on the couch in his pajamas, his bare feet propped on the coffee table. He had a Korean magazine in his lap, which he let fall to the floor as soon as he saw me.

  “Do you know what time it is?” His eyebrows formed a tight V in the middle of his forehead.

  I shook my head.

  “Where have you been?”

  I stared at his feet, at his thick yellow toenails.

  “Myung Hee-ya! Tell the truth!”

  “I'm sorry I'm late, Dad,” I said. “Mr. Shipley couldn't drive us home until all the guests left and—”

  My father leapt out of his chair. He stopped in front of me, one fist raised.

  “Your mother called your friend's house,” he said. “The mother answered the phone. Babo-jasiga! She said you had gone out with some boys. She knew nothing about Fourth of July party!”

  I heard my mother's voice calling from the top of the stairs. “Yeobo, geureojima!” Don't.

  “You lied to us,” my father said. “Where have you been?” His face was crimson and his hands trembled.

  “I was at a concert,” I mumbled. “I didn't tell you because I knew you wouldn't let me go.”

  “Stupid girl!” my father shouted. “Disobedient!” He flexed the fingers of his right hand.

  I had the sweetness of Hero's breath on me still, and the vestiges of a high, and the thought that emboldened me was that this part of my life, the stifled, unhappy part that revolved around my parents and this house, was not the part that mattered any longer. Was not, in fact, a part of me at all.

  “You never let me do anything, Dad. You think you're still in Korea, and you treat me like I'm eight years old! I'm almost an adult and this is America, in case you haven't noticed!”

  “You're my daughter,” my father said. He sounded out of breath. His words were deliberate, carefully chosen. “As long as you live in this house, you will do as I say.”

  “I don't want to live in your fucking house, then,” I said.

  “Isa!” My mother stood at the top of the stairs, clutching her bathrobe at the neck. I looked up at her and heard a crunch of bone to bone. My head snapped back to my neck and I saw yellow stars—it was just like in Sunday-morning cartoons when someone gets hit with a frying pan, yellow stars flickering and spinning, bursting behind my eyelids like firecrackers.

  I staggered backward and fell to the floor. I felt a buzzing in my nose, and blood started gushing onto the pristine carpet.

  “Yeobo!” My mother came running down the stairs and grabbed me by the shoulders. She started screaming at my father, all the while trying to maneuver my head back to stanch the flow. My father stood stunned in the middle of the room, fists clenched at his sides.

  “What are you doing?” my mother yelled at him. “Are you trying to kill her? What is the matter with you?”

  My father's face was the color of ashes. He looked shrunken, in his blue pajamas with the white piping, his chest concave. My mother screamed at him to get some paper towels and he meekly obeyed her, retreating to the kitchen and returning with the entire roll. She grabbed it from him, pulling off sheet after sheet to press against my nose, then got down on her hands and knees and started to daub the bloodstains from the carpet.

  I was more stunned than hurt. My father's violence felt like victory to me somehow. No matter what he does to me from now on, I thought, he can no longer reach me. I felt myself floating far out beyond his command.

  Sometime during my mother's ministrations, my father slipped out. We heard the garage door go up and the sound of the car whirring in reverse down our ill-fated driveway.

  “You shouldn't talk to your father that way,” my mother chided me gently. “He was worried about you.”

  She'd gotten a bucket of water and some rags and was working more seriously at the stains on the carpet. I was lying where I'd fallen, holding a mound of paper towel to my nose, swallowing thick, syrupy mouthfuls of blood.

  I was looking up at the high ceiling, with its three wooden beams and the dark fan with cobwebs hanging from its blades. It occurred to me that it was the one place my mother could not get at to clean. The white painted surface was darkened in spots by soot from the fireplace, and there was a crack in the plaster that ran from the ceiling fan to the side of one beam, the ragged edges of which flaked and cracked like a raku glaze.

  I'd lost a lot of blood and was feeling light-headed. Earlier that night I had lain on a blanket with Hero, looking up at stars. I could feel the dried blood stiff between my legs, and the dried blood on my face, sticking to the paper towel. Something about the crack in the ceiling seemed pitiful to me, hopeless, an irredeemable rift that penetrated deep through our house, and through our lives within it. I couldn't understand why we hadn't moved when Stephen died, why we hadn't fled this house with its visible fissure, its spreading wound.

  “I'm sorry, Mom,” I said, in a nasal, blood-thickened voice I did not recognize as my own. What I was apologizing for exactly I wasn't sure, but it seemed to encompass all I had done and all that I was to do, to cause her pain.

  “Gwaenchana” she said softly, brushing my forehead with a damp finger. It's all right, I got up, washed my face, and went to bed. My mother gave me a hug in the doorway of my room. Sometime in the middle of the night I heard my father return, his footsteps chastened as they crept up the basement steps. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed that the crack in our ceiling had widened and split, becoming a dark scar that traveled the length of the earth, a deep and ominous flaw reaching to the center of the world.

  Candy Bar

  The morning after my father hit me, I came down to find a Heath bar on the kitchen table.

  “For you,” my mother said. My father had already left for work.

  I looked at it.

  “It's his way of apologizing,” she said.

  “Well, whoop-di-do,” I said, sitting down with my glass of orange juice and staring at the brown wrapper as though it were an encrypted message. Eat this and all is forgiven. I still felt the reckless mood of the previous night, the sense that I had passed irrevocably across a barrier that separated me from my former self.

  My mother sat down across from me with both hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. It was a mug I'd made for her in fourth grade, lumpy and blue-glazed with MOMin scratched-out letters.

  “Your father has bad temper—“ she said.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “But what you did was wrong, Isa,” she continued. “You must always tell us where you are. Your father was so worried. We need to know you are safe.”

  “I was perfectly safe,” I said curtly.

  “You are our only child, Isa,” she said, looking at me sadly. “So many bad things can happen. …”

  The spirit of my dead brother, thus invoked, hovered between us like Exhibit A. It seemed to weight the air heavily, displacing oxygen. In my impatience, I envied his immunity.

  “We only want to keep you safe,” my mother said now. Her tone of voice was dreamy, her look unfocused, and I was filled with unaccountable fury. It was too much to take, this pocketful of stones she carried—the rounded stones of guilt and worry, the pointed stones of grief—the accumulated pile of which was more oppressive than the weight of my father's fists.

  “You couldn't keep Stephen safe!” I shouted. “Even when he was right here at home, under your own nose. You couldn't keep him from being run over in your own driveway, could you?”

  “Isa!” My mother's face blanched. Her hands shook as she held my mug to her chest. I felt winded, exhilarated and ashamed. I hadn't known myself capable of such cruelty.

  Silence. My mother put the mug down on the table. She stood up. I noticed for the first time the fanlike lines in the corners of her eyes, the slackness of flesh.
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  I tried to keep hold of my anger, which had buoyed me with a helium indignation, but already it was slipping. I felt sick. The awareness of the pain I'd caused my mother could not be repudiated; it seeped in despite my resistance, like noxious gas.

  “I'm sorry,” I murmured, but my mother only shook her head and left the room.

  Self-improvement

  My mother didn't speak to me for two weeks. She would enter any room I was in and look deliberately away, pursing her lips to leave no doubt that she meant to slight me. When I said something, she would sigh and shake her head, as though she couldn't quite hear. I tried to apologize in a number of ways: by cleaning my room, by not biting my nails, by offering, unbidden, to help with dinner. “Mom, I'm sorry,” I said again after a few days. I was standing beside her while she stir-fried beef in a wok. “I didn't mean it.”

  She would not take her eyes from what she was doing, using wooden chopsticks like an eggbeater to turn the meat. Her posture was unforgiving. I waited her out. Finally she picked up the pan and shook the meat onto the platter with the vegetables and the noodles.

  “Isa,” she said, “call your father.”

  Around this time my mother started taking classes at Battrick Community College. She'd decided to finish her B.A. after all these years. Textbooks were piled on the kitchen counter, with different-colored spiral notebooks, mechanical pencils, and yellow highlighters. She pored over the academic catalog, circling courses titled “Literature of the Holocaust” and “Music Appreciation,” soliciting my father's advice about “Science for Non-Scientists” or “Basic Chemistry.” She even bought a BCC sweatshirt with the school logo embossed in orange.

  My father was supportive of this new venture, favoring her getting out of the house and putting her energies into something constructive, though he wasn't happy about the prospect of her working outside the home.

  “I could get a job as librarian,” she said once. “Or doing research for professors. It would help with Isa's college.”

  My father put his hand out like a traffic cop. “Just take it one step at a time, Hae Kyoung,” he said. “You don't want to tire yourself out.”

  One night I came down from my room to find my mother weeping in the living room, a copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles on her lap.

  “What's the matter?” I asked, wary of a rebuff. But my mother looked up at me eagerly.

  “Oh, Isa, it's so sad,” she said.

  I nodded. In her BCC sweatshirt over her nightgown and white ankle socks cuffed with lace, she could have been a sorority girl. She turned her shining face to me, and her expression, despite the tears, was far from sad.

  “So beautiful,” she said.

  From then on it was literature that possessed her. The same scene repeated itself, only the book would be Les Miserables or Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina or Pride and Prejudice. Each time my mother would look up, lost and blinking upon my entrance, and announce the disposition of the characters to me as though they'd only just left the room.

  “Mr. Darcy has just told Elizabeth he loves her,” she'd say. “Cathy's married Edgar.”

  It made me uneasy, this new passion of my mother's; it had, after all, been my passion first. It was especially the quality of her passion, the precise ways in which it differed from my own, that made me balky. Whereas for me it was the language that transported: reading, a passion of the intellect, hovering above the page, my eyes on the words like an eagle's on prey—for my mother it was the purer passion of the dreamer passing through a dream, words banished altogether by the pulsing blood and the stirring of wind through scented trees.

  Perhaps it was inevitable, given such a temperament, that my mother should soon turn from prose to poetry. I would come home to a recitation: “Because I could not stop for death …” or “I went out to the hazel wood …” She committed to memory the poems she loved best, stumbling over words and asking my help. “Is it ‘Coole’ like ‘cool,’ or like ‘coolie’?” she'd ask me. “What does he mean by ‘Echoing Greene’ ?”

  She started to write poetry of her own, in bound notebooks that had BATTRICK COMMUNITY COLLEGE embossed in orange letters on the covers. She wrote so faintly, in mechanical pencil, that her words were hardly legible, as though she could barely stand to pin them down. “I stared at beauty in the wood/a reflection in a pool/and then one day it went away /and the wind blew cool” is a verse I remember, with the word “warm” crossed out before “wind” with three trembling horizontal lines.

  She left the notebooks around the house, with a pencil clipped to the cover in readiness, and she sometimes read a poem to me out loud, with a shy kind of pride, and I would encourage her, or make some small suggestion. It seemed to me that my mother had a feel for lyric, though all her work had that quality—slightly generic images and subject matter—that suggested imitation. She grew particularly fond of Edna St. Vincent Mil-lay, and wrote these lines on a three-by-five card that she wedged into the corner of her mirror: “My candle burns at both ends /It will not last the night/But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/It gives a lovely light!”

  One night after dinner, when my father and I were in the living room and my mother was downstairs finishing the dishes, my father suddenly grabbed one of my mother's notebooks and opened it with a mirthful expression. “ Yeobor he called down to her. He held the notebook close to his face.

  “Dad,” I said. I reached for the notebook, but my father twisted away from me.

  You whose lips I've kissed in summer/Think not that this is much/Such nectar from the flower/is what any bee may touch/ Kisses in the snow/Mingled with the white of breath/These imprints linger longer/To keep until your death.’” My father read loudly, the intonation in all the wrong places, and when he'd finished, he gave a little laugh. “ Yeobo, did you write this?”

  My mother, who'd come quickly up the stairs, tried to take the notebook from him. Her face was flushed, and she wore rubber kitchen gloves that were dripping on the carpet. “ Yeobo’,’ she said, “give it back.”

  My father ignored her. He skimmed a few pages and started to read again. “‘ The dancing women leapt and turned, and flickered on the wall/Their movements seemed to claim my soul and make me heed their call/1 watched the light that streamed through space/the shadows falling late/And then a bang, a scream, a flame/and fire became my fate.’”

  ”Yeobo!” My mother grabbed at the notebook, but my father held her off.

  “This isn't bad, Hae Kyoung,” he said, one arm outstretched, reading to himself. He had a strange expression on his face, part mockery, part admiration.

  My mother lunged and finally caught the notebook from him. “You don't know anything about it!” she said. Her hands trembled as she held the book to her chest. “Leave it alone!”

  As she went back downstairs, my father tried to give me a conspiring look, but I returned a cold gaze.

  Afternoons

  Hero came to the house when my mother was in class. (I'd been grounded since the Who concert and wasn't allowed out.) I dug up my parents’ copies of The Joy of Sex and The Kama Sutra to share with him. We giggled at the drawings of couples, impassive, naked, their bodies braided and supple. Finally we'd jump each other in my narrow twin bed, causing the headrest to rattle so violently against the wall that it left a stuttering of grayish scuff marks. We tried all the different positions, eager as Scouts to earn every merit badge—fellatio, cunnilingus, 69, standing up, kneeling, from the back, me on top, from the side, sitting in my desk chair, on the hardwood floor, even sodomy, which was not successful—I tore and he felt sorry, and I couldn't sit down for a week without pain.

  I loved to watch him move his slim hips above me, his eyes closed in fervent concentration, the tip of his tongue poking from his mouth. His skin was the color of moonstone, with a subterranean sheen that seemed to make him glow. I imagined him inside me, his milky radiance chasing after the darkest corners, filling me with fulgent light.

  We came to ourselves slowly
afterward, dressing, straightening the bedsheets. He would whistle or sing silly songs like “Tie me kangaroo down, sport,” or “I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay,” while we remade the bed. My favorite was “I don't care if it rains or freezes/ ‘ Long as I got my plastic Jesus/riding on the dashboard of my car …”

  Hero was my plastic Jesus; his love made me feel invincible. We were opposites in many ways—he was Catholic, French Canadian, from a working-class family—but there was something deeply familiar about him to me. When I first met his parents (he called them “the Unit”)—his mother a mousy brunette with a worn face and moist eyes, his father affable and large, a dark mustache and shaggy hair adding to his look of doglike devotion—I felt I recognized them. The way his mother fussed over him—“Wear a heavier coat, Herold, you'll catch a cold!” The way his father piled food onto his plate—“Come on, now, Herold, you're skin and bones.”

  We were different from those around us, treated like hothouse flowers. Our parents were overly solicitous, fearful, completely ignorant of what we needed—which was not necessarily one another, perhaps, but some approximate parole.

  • • •

  Hero was a reader, too, and a lover of language. I learned from him the words “oculocutaneous albinism,” “Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome,” “nystagmus,” “esotropia,” and “hypopigmentation.” He taught me about the two Jacks—London and Kerouac—and forced me to stick with Moby-Dick, a book I found bizarre and ponderous, until I was finally caught by the mad beauty of it.

  “Do you know what Moby-Dick is about?” he quizzed me after I'd finished it.

  “Let me take a wild guess. Whales?”

  He shook his head.

  “Vengeance and undoing?” I said. “A guy with a grudge? Men on boats together way too long?”