Secondhand World Read online

  I packed a few books, and my journal, which I seldom wrote in but which I was now determined to fill with anecdotes and travel pieces to sell to The New Yorker and National Geographic. I had fondled words for so large a part of my life, I felt it was time to graduate to sentences.

  My good-bye letter was brief and banal.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I'm with some friends and we're going to be fine. Please

  don't try to find us. It's nothing you did, so don't blame

  yourselves. It's just me, that's all. I hope someday we may

  meet again under better circumstances.

  Your loving daughter,

  Isa/Myung Hee

  It struck me as I signed my double name that I was really two daughters, or—more accurately—half of one for each of my parents, and this made sense to me, adding to my conviction that my home life was irreparable, because I was only a half of something for each of them and could not become complete in the eyes of either.

  I left the letter on top of my desk, propped on my stack of schoolbooks and my homework binder. I wrote on the envelope in big block letters—MOM AND DAD.

  • • •

  Rachel wanted to bring all her art supplies, her Grumbacher pastels and spiral-bound sketch pads, watercolors, brushes, and wooden palettes.

  “How're you going to lug all that across the country?” I asked. It was laid out on her bedroom floor like a display in an art supply store.

  Rachel twisted the corners of her mouth and squinted down at the pile. She got out a mammoth suitcase, powder-blue plastic with shiny chrome clasps, and proceeded to put all her supplies into it. She closed it, picked it up by the handle and walked around the room. It was clear from the way she was leaning that it was heavy. She heaved the suitcase onto the bed, opened it up, and started pulling things out indiscriminately, then tossed in some underwear, socks, and a couple T-shirts.

  “Okay, done,” she said, and flopped down on the floor.

  Hero brought a backpack and one small nylon gym bag. “It'll be warm once we get there,” he said. “We won't need much.” He kissed me, and Rachel made a face.

  “Romeo and Juliet on the lam,” she said. “And I'm the loyal sidekick, Barney.”

  “Oh, come on, Rach,” Hero said. “We're the Three Musketeers.”

  “Right,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Only I'm the one not getting any.” She shook her head at us. “There better be some cute guys in California for me, or I'm going back to Dusty!”

  “Are you kidding? There will be gorgeous guys everywhere,” I said. “You'll forget all about Dusty.”

  “Dusty who?” Rachel said.

  • • •

  Audrey drove us to the bus station in Albany, hugged us goodbye, and waited on the platform while the driver put our stuff in the luggage compartment and we climbed into the bus. She was still standing there, waving, when the driver settled into his seat, adjusted his mirrors, and heaved the door closed. With a sigh of exhaust, the bus rumbled out of the station and into downtown traffic.

  It was crowded on the bus and we had to sit near the back, Hero and me together and Rachel one seat in front. It smelled of pee and sweat, the kind of odors you associate with desperation and basic human need, and I felt my heart sink with the realization that this was what freedom might smell like, more like fear than euphoria.

  A man in a green knit cap sat in a seat across and a couple rows back from us. He stared at Hero and frowned.

  “Here we go,” Hero said to me, squeezing my hand as the bus swung onto the interstate.

  The man nudged the woman sitting next to him, a large woman in a red-flowered dress. He whispered to her and she looked at us, then whispered back.

  “Some kind of hemophilia or something,” she said. “They don't have any skin color, Tillis. Now leave him be.”

  But the man craned to see over me. Hero sat with his sunglasses on and his hat pulled down low over his face. “Excuse me? Excuse me?” the man named Tillis called. I slumped down in my seat. Hero leaned forward.

  “Sorry to bother you, man,” Tillis said. He was smiling, but it wasn't a nice smile. His eyes were narrowed and his head, under the knit cap, was shaped like a bullet. “I've seen a lot of white people before, but I never seen a whiter person than you. Ain't that the truth? Heh, heh!”

  I'd heard plenty of jokes at school about Hero. They asked him if his pubic hair was white (which, of course, it was), and sometimes they left celery or carrots in front of his locker, but mostly they were used to him by now, and his coolness and musicianship were respected. Outside of school, people were always staring at him, or looking startled when he walked toward them in a crowd, but they seldom said anything, and I never once saw him react. So I wasn't sure what he would do now, ten minutes into a daylong bus ride with Tillis on his case.

  “Heh, heh, you're so white, you make most white folk look black,” Tillis continued, more to the woman than to Hero.

  “Shush, Tillis. You're going to hurt the boy's feelings,” the woman said.

  Hero smiled his slow smile. “That's okay, ma'am,” he said. “Most people have never seen an albino before and they need to get a good look.” Hero took off his sunglasses. “Go ahead, Tillis, knock yourself out.”

  “I apologize for my nephew,” the woman in the red dress said. “He's a little … you know.” She pointed discreetly to her temple.

  “What? What you saying about me?” Tillis demanded.

  “Nothing, Till,” the woman replied. “Just that you're special, that's all.”

  Tillis looked suspiciously from his aunt to Hero. “Don't be calling me stupid,” he said. “There's nothing wrong inside my head.” He made the same gesture his aunt had made, but less discreetly.

  “It's okay, really,” Hero said, putting his sunglasses back on. He turned back toward the window.

  I watched Hero in profile, staring out the bus window. I could see the pink of his eye, the delicate white of his lashes. I took his hand, but it felt lifeless.

  It was not an auspicious beginning. Every time I had to go to the bathroom I saw Tillis giving me the evil eye. He stuck his feet out into the aisle to make it difficult to get by and muttered under his breath to his aunt, who didn't seem to be paying attention.

  “China,” I heard him say. “Chinese. Got a bunch of freaks on this bus, we do,” he said. “Yellow and white. Got us a fried egg. Yes, sir, sunny-side up …”

  I looked out the window, at the backward-vanishing landscape, the capitulating cornfields and pine forests, and I felt a queasy sense of losing something with each mile. I thought of that Simon and Garfunkel song, “Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces … /They've all come to look for America …” Looking for America—what did that mean? I wondered. Where exactly did it reside? Had my parents found it, arriving not by Greyhound bus but by cargo ship and airplane? What was it I was looking for, or Tillis, or Hero?

  I didn't want to admit I was scared. Scared to be away from home—nothing certain, nothing known—scared of being tested alone with Hero. It was strange that it had never occurred to me before, that the one thing I sought for myself, the thing I had craved from the time I noticed my difference, was anonymity, the blankness of an American face, an American recognition. And what had I done? Fallen in love with an albino. Whiter than white, brighter than bright, as foreign a face as my own, really, though in reciprocal quality. Together, instead of neutralizing one another—my melanin making up for his paucity—we were a comedy team, a punch line to a Darwinian joke, Tillis's fried egg sunny-side up.

  We were somber on that bus. Rachel slept. Hero stared out the window long after the sun had set and the view dimmed. The sky filled with pigment, dark as Tillis and his aunt. Dark as, dark as … I tried to read, but the same paragraph seemed to repeat itself over and over—Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, which I was reading for Hero, who claimed it was a great book. Something dark there, too, even with the hijinks and the humor. Looking
for America. Looking at it. Looking toward it. Even as it eluded me, moving past, moving backward, nowhere to fix it, to find it, other than in my own mind's eye, the eye with or without the crease, the Orient, the oriented…. Looking but not finding. Finding but not keeping. Keeping but not possessing.

  I woke up as we were pulling into a station somewhere in western New York. Hero nudged me and I waited until Tillis and his aunt got off before I reached across and woke Rachel, whose head had flopped sideways as she slept.

  “I'm starved,” Hero said. “Let's get some food!” My neck and back were sore and I felt a jaggedness in my throat when I swallowed. Rachel groaned and opened her eyes wide to try to wake up. Only Hero seemed chipper. We got off the bus and bought a carton of milk and some Hostess apple pies, which we wolfed down in minutes. Hero kept the money, mostly in traveler's checks and twenty-dollar bills.

  “I'm still hungry,” Rachel said. “Let's get a burger.”

  “No time,” Hero said. “Here, I bought a bag of pretzels and a thing of Gatorade.”

  “I hate Gatorade,” Rachel said. “Tastes like piss.”

  Hero shrugged. “You can get something else,” he said. He gave her a couple dollars.

  Rachel salaamed and went off to the food counter.

  “Hero,” I said, “wouldn't it be easier if we each carried some money?”

  Hero looked at me for a moment. “You don't trust me?” he said.

  “Of course I trust you,” I said. “It's just… Forget it.”

  “Because you can have it all.” He reached into his pocket.

  “Forget it,” I said. “I don't want it. It's fine.”

  He stopped, his hand still deep in his pocket. “Okay,” he said. “You know you can just ask me whenever you want anything.” He put his arm around me and steered me back toward the bus.

  Pennsylvania. Ohio. Indiana. Illinois. Iowa. Nebraska. The geography of the country became mostly internal for me. It was the ache of sleeping upright, the cramps in my legs, rough nap of seat fabric against my cheek, taste of unbrushed teeth, the chattering of strangers, and the continuous rattle of the bus engine vibrating beneath my feet. Outside, it grew lighter and darker, mountainous and flat, with fields and forests, farms and skyscrapers. But it was always outside, this landscape, mere backdrop for this metal capsule that shot through whatever scenery happened to be visible from the highway, traveling always forward, away from the land, away from the people, away from what seemed vital and tangible and real.

  Intimacy

  Rachel and I insisted on staying in motels, though Hero wanted to save our money. The rooms we rented were cheap and shabby, but at least we could take hot showers and sleep in beds and watch TV while eating take-out pizza. I half expected to see our faces on the local news, to hear that a dragnet of police was swooping down on the Buckeye Motor Court even as we stood washing our underwear in the sink. I imagined weeping interviews with our parents, my father monosyllabic with grief, Hero's mom wringing her hands. “We wanted to send him away to school,” she'd say, “but we never expected him to take it this hard.” It was impossible to imagine that they weren't frantic with worry, and I tried not to picture the situation too closely from their perspective. Please don't try to find us was a pretty lame entreaty. As though they ever listened to me. And perhaps what I'd meant was the opposite. In a corner of my mind I felt this to be so, that I was making possible the means by which they might finally demonstrate, in some rousing, public fashion, that they really loved me. I imagined being reunited on The Phil Donahue Show, my father coming out from backstage with his arms wide open, tears streaming down his face.

  Since my brother's death I had felt my identity to be “not-Stephen,” a negative space, an absence, the living manifestation of my parents’ loss. In an anonymous motel room in the Midwest, I was at least present, laughing and squabbling with my two best friends, who saw me as I wanted to be seen, as one of them.

  We quarreled like siblings, especially Hero and Rachel, who were battling it out for Supreme Ruler of the Runaways. They fought about when to stop, what to spend money on, what bus route to take, what food to buy.

  “I want ice cream,” Rachel would say.

  “We can't afford ice cream,” Hero would reply.

  “Of course we can afford ice cream,” Rachel would say, enunciating slowly as though to a child. “It's only a buck.”

  Hero would shake his head. “It adds up,” he'd say. “Besides, the bus is leaving.”

  Hero and I would stick Rachel's underwear in some guy's hamper at the laundromat, bury bogus love notes from Dusty in the bottom of her suitcase. Rack—I love you and I promise I'll not only keep you on a long leash, but I'll feed you Alpo three times a day and take you on walks where you can pee on fire hydrants.

  Rachel would go up to people in bus stations—the biggest, most dangerous-looking guys around—and point to Hero. “My brother here says he can take you. I wouldn't try anything, though, because he's got this weird albino mojo.” She would tell elaborate stories to people on buses about how we were outlaw Mormons and she and I were Hero's wives. We were on our way to Utah, she'd say, to join a community where polygamy was sanctioned and where there were four other women waiting to marry him. “It's wonderful,” she'd say confidingly. “So much easier on us women!”

  On a leg from Nebraska to Colorado, Rachel sat next to a blond cowboy skier from Aspen. His name was Nick and he had the windburn tan of an outdoorsman, with deep, craggy lines that made him look handsome in a squinting, Redford way.

  “You should come to Aspen,” he told Rachel. “It's fabulous. There are a million jobs working at the resorts. You could make a ton of money as a cocktail waitress in one of the bars. You'd be a hit!”

  Rachel laughed. “What would I have to do to be a hit?” she asked.

  “Honey,” he said, “all you'd have to do is show up with a beer, wearing that smile!”

  During a lull in their flirtation, Rachel came back to where I was sitting and whispered, “Isa, I really think we should go with this guy. He says there's all these jobs in Aspen, and everyone is, like, our age and we could find cheap places to share, and ski on our off-time—”

  “You've only known the guy for five minutes, Rach,” I said. “What if he's wrong?”

  Rachel inclined her head toward where Hero was sitting. “What if he is?”

  I considered. “Well, at least we've known him more than five minutes,” I said.

  I didn't hear them talking that much after that, but when I got up to go to the bathroom, I saw them making out, the cowboy's leather jacket pulled over their laps.

  “Rachel's made a friend,” I said to Hero, when I got back to my seat.

  Hero shook his head. “He reminds me of that guy from Midnight Cowboy. You know, Jon Voigt? Not a lot upstairs.”

  “I don't think she's much interested in what's upstairs” I said.

  Hero frowned. “She's going to mess us up,” he said.

  “She's just lonely,” I said, rubbing my hand on his knee.

  “So you think we should just let her go off with Tex here?”

  “No, of course not!” The thought had never occurred to me. “But she needs to have a little fun.”

  Deep into the journey, Rach came back. “I think I've persuaded Nick to come to California with us. He's psyched about maybe learning to surf.”

  “Absolutely not,” Hero said. “He's not coming with us.”

  “Why not?” Rachel said. “You've got Isa. I want Nick. It's only fair.”

  “You don't even know this guy, Rachel. He could be an ax murderer.”

  “He's not an ax murderer,” said Rachel.

  “Okay, he's too stupid to be an ax murderer,” Hero said. “But he's not coming with us.”

  “Then I'm getting off with him in Colorado.”

  “Oh, Rachel, don't do that,” I said.

  “Why not? Why do we have to do everything he says? Why can't Nick come with us?”

 
“Because he's a dumb cowboy you just met and you'll be sick of him the second you've fucked him; you know you will, Rachel, and then you'll be stuck.”

  Rachel stared at Hero for a moment. She couldn't deny that what he said was true, but she wasn't about to admit it. “Fuck you, Pettijean. Since when can you tell the future?”

  “I'm an albino,” said Hero. “We've got special powers.”

  In the bus station in Denver, Nick took his ski equipment off our bus—a long carrying case for his skis, a smaller one for his boots, and a large canvas bag of gear—as well as a small portion of Rachel's heart. They kissed good-bye like longtime lovers, she with her legs wrapped around his waist, he with his hands on her ass.

  “You sure you aren't coming with me, darlin’?” he asked.

  Rachel hesitated, glancing at us. She bit her lip and shook her head sadly.

  “Well, I gave you my address, so look me up if you're ever passing through,” he said, but I thought he looked relieved as he walked off.

  There were tears in Rachel's eyes as she watched him get on the bus to Aspen. “He was so gorgeous,” she said. “God, those lips! And the way he talked. No one's ever called me ‘darlin” before!”

  “Well, darlin,” Hero said, “I'm sure there will be many more cowboys as we head into the sunset.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said, mesmerized by the lingering sight of Nick's skis being hoisted out of the luggage compartment. “He sure was yummy….” She shook herself out of it. “And I would have looked damn fine in one of those little cocktail waitress uniforms!”

  “Tits for tips,” Hero said, and made Rachel laugh.

  When we stopped at a motel, two of us would sign in and the third would sneak into the room later. Sometimes we had rooms with two beds, but more often there would just be one—queen-sized if we were lucky—and we'd pile in. Hero was frustrated that we couldn't have sex with Rachel around. He would wait until he thought she was asleep and then creep his hand along my belly, down along the inner curve of my thigh. I would grab his hand and reroute it upward, and he would caress my breasts.