by Nami Mun
He scooted his chair back as far as it would go. “Can I see them?” he asked, peering under the table. “I did look up your mom for you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
He took off his glasses and cleaned them with his tie. “I can probably get the judge to give you credit for time served.”
CTS sounded good. It meant I could leave after sentencing. I looked past him and at the small, wire-caged window on the door. “In the parking lot, after my release,” I said. “And I want a Big Mac. With fries this time.”
“Of course,” he said, grabbing his briefcase. “I can’t wait to see them.”
This was what the holding tank was like.
A television bolted high up in the corner said: I didn’t know you were alive!
“Aw, yes you did, you a liar!” a woman shouted up at the screen, her voice husky from smoke and drink. “She’s all acting like she never heard of amnesia.”
I remember everything, the television said.
“Shit. You’re in for it now, and she ain’t gonna forget to kick your ass this time,” the woman said. She was one of the lucky ones. She had a spot on the bench. I stood in the back corner, next to a girl who was talking on the pay phone, her free hand clutching the short metal cord. The cell was crowded. I counted the heads around me, length times width. There were sixty of us. Some on the floor, some on the bench, and some shared a mattress by the front, under the blaring TV. Heads bobbed to stay awake or to stay asleep. Most of the women worked the streets and the cell smelled like coconut tanning lotion. I thought about my mother. What she would think if she could see me here, if she could smell on me the failures of sixty women. She was dead now. Her nose was filled with dirt. I felt something in my chest for her but I kept the feeling small. Jail wasn’t the place to have a breakdown. I needed a cave. I needed a long subway ride.
The girl next to me was now hollering into the pay phone. She had orange hair with only half of it cornrowed. The other half shot up from her head as she screamed at the pay phone’s rotary dial like it was the face of her enemy. “You better shake a leg, Leo, ’cause check this out—I don’t appreciate your little white-piece-of-trash-ass bitch telling my son that she’s his stepmommy. You tell that white dirty bitch that she ain’t shit to my motherfucking son, and the bitch better stay in her motherfucking place before I catch that bitch and beat the fuck outta her. You get me?”
“Somebody shut her up!” the husky voice said. She stretched her neck toward the television set.
“. . . and you better check that bitch and tell her she ain’t shit to my motherfucking son, and if I ever hear my son saying a word about that bitch, I’m gonna get you and that bitch, you dumb ass nigga.” The girl slammed the phone down. Then she slammed it down again and again, and maybe six more times after that.
I was in jail for shoplifting baby food, those tiny jars of Gerber carrots, Gerber peas, and two tubs of Enfamil I’d lumped under a blanket in my stroller. The owner of the fruit and vegetable store, a Korean man in a pink polo shirt, grabbed my arm in the middle of the sidewalk. He jerked me around, pushed me along with one hand, the stroller with the other, back into the store and down the fruit aisle, where shoppers watched me with tight eyes. By the pyramid of oranges I turned on the drama. I cried that I was trying to be a good mother, trying to feed my little baby girl, and you can’t blame me for wanting to feed my baby. It felt good to be a tragic hero. I was not one for making scenes but I played for the crowd, all of five ladies, because it was my only chance at being let go. The owner yanked me hard and put his face close enough to remind me of my father’s anger. He asked what the baby’s name was and I guess I stuttered a second too long. “That’s what I thought,” he said, and then in Hanguk he asked: “Are you Korean?”
I looked into his eyes, those angry black bugs, and pretended he was talking gibberish. “What? Speak English, man!” I shouted, and turned to my audience. “You’re in America now.”
And for that I deserved time. I knew it even then.
I stole the baby food for Benny. He repackaged the jars into boxes and sold them back to the grocery store owners.
While standing in the back of the cell, waiting for arraignment, I pictured my mother in that grocery store. I imagined my really having a baby and having to steal food, not only for my child but for all abandoned children in the state of New York. And then I imagined my mother hugging me, being proud of me for having sacrificed myself for the good of the children. In another version, my mother and I both stole—we were both tragic heroes.
A guard walked up to the cell and called my name. “It’s showtime!” he shouted, without looking up from his clipboard. I made my way to the front, put my hands on the bars so he could cuff me while I was still inside. His fingers were cold.
“Sayonara,” somebody said as I stepped out.
With his hand choking the back of my arm, he guided me down a long hallway, not saying much, not doing much, until we came upon a door. He let go of me to open the door with a key and then gripped me again as we went down another hallway. Trophies encased in glass. Slick photos of police chiefs. Plaques with names engraved on small, golden plates. He nodded or gave clipboard-salutes to people who passed us, and the key ring looped to his belt jangled against his hips. The rhythm bugged me. It was too constant. Too military. The inside of his ear was too polished, and his face was too rigid. I thought I could see nuts and bolts on the corners of his jawline. I hadn’t thought to be bothered by his looks, but now, while walking down what felt like a maze of offices, I felt weak next to him. We turned another corner, and then another, that led us along beige-colored walls lined with photos of Rikers Island.
“You’re taking me to the judge, right?”
“Something like that,” he said, and kept his focus ahead of him.
We reached the end of the hall and walked into a stairwell that smelled like rust. His keys echoed. It was dark in there. The soles of his shoes squealed on the metal steps as we walked down two flights. It felt like we were underground.
I asked him where we were headed.
He laughed a little. “We aren’t headed anywhere,” he said, tightening his grip on my arm.
I didn’t like his voice. It had the flat tone of someone wanting to teach me a lesson. At the bottom of the stairs we walked through a steely door, which spit us out into the loudest sound I’d ever heard. The noise was like the workings of a thousand heating vents. Cardboard boxes, some stacked three high, clogged our path. Black pipes ran along the ceiling, spewing out steam, leaking on us as we walked past upturned chairs and drawerless desks cluttered with telephones and extension cords. My sneakers slipped on a soggy file folder stuck to the floor. “Where is this?” I shouted. The cop didn’t hear or he ignored me. He wouldn’t even look my way. The light switches had been gutted out, office doors lay sideways on the ground, and the walls looked to be dripping oil. No framed pictures, no trophies, no police chiefs. We were alone. “Where are we?” I asked again but knew it was useless. He would kill me and no one would hear me die. No one would find me. I wanted to scream but instead I jerked free from his grip and took a step back. I didn’t bother running. “Please,” I said, but I couldn’t hear my own voice. He grabbed ahold of my cuffs and yanked me toward him, shouting, “Where do you think you’re going?” He opened a door and tossed me into an office.
The light was too bright. It felt as though we had stepped inside a bulb. I squinted and shaded my eyes with my wrists, as a group of girls, handcuffed together and sitting in a circle, slowly came into focus.
“Welcome! You must be Joon-Mee?” a woman said, getting up from her chair. I looked at the guard. “Go on,” he said, and nudged me toward the woman. She had on jeans, a tight cable-knit sweater, and a name tag that read: Hello. My name is Trish. She offered me her hand for a handshake. I raised my cuffs.
“Oh, right. Sorry. I’m new at this,” she said, and motioned for me to take a seat. The guard plugged me into the circle
, cuffing me to girls on my left and right, and told the counselor woman that he’d be right out in the hall. It took me a while to readjust my thinking of him, to stop seeing him as a rapist killer.
“Maybe you’d like to say something about yourself?” the counselor asked.
I shook my head.
It ended up being one of those outreach programs, where they selected girls who looked as if they might have a chance at changing the course of their lives. Some of them talked. I knew better.
“He’s my man and I’m gonna stand by him no matter what,” a girl said.
The counselor tilted her head. “Even if that lands you in prison?”
“Prison don’t scare me.”
“Just so we’re clear . . .” The counselor pointed to the floor. Her nails were painted pink. “This isn’t prison. This is jail and it is nothing compared to prison.”
“What the fuck you know?” another girl said.
The guard tapped the door. “Don’t make me come in there.”
The session went on. One girl cried. Other girls listened by rolling their eyes. I listened, too. They sounded stupid to me, and the more they talked, the more I turned the volume down and zoomed in on the details of our circle—the dried scabs on the knees of a girl across from me, her dirty shoes, our dirty shoes, the stained hems of our jeans, our greasy hair. I tried to look for the best-dressed girl in the room but it was like trying to find dirt in mud. I couldn’t tell me from them. Not in this room.
“My mom writes letters all the time now,” another girl said, “but that’s ’cause she’s locked up and she’s clean. Soon as she’s out, I never hear from her. That’s how she is. I hope they never let her out.”
Hearing this, I decided that my mother being dead was a good thing. Good for her. Now she would never know about this, about how I had turned out. Eighteen and in jail. I had run away for my sake, but maybe a part of me had stayed away for hers. I did talk to her once, at a coffee shop. Benny had said we needed money. He wanted us to go to California and start fresh there. In Los Angeles. So I called her up and she agreed to meet me. Her voice sounded too rational, and calm, as if confirming an appointment with her dentist. I hadn’t seen her in a while, since the night behind the bushes at her hospital. I recognized her right away, though. When she entered the coffee shop, she pulled out a tissue from her purse, placed three dabs across her forehead, two dabs against each nostril, a dab each for the corners of her lips. I watched from a table in the back. Even from that distance I could tell how much she had changed. She was too thin. Her collarbone looked more like a hanger for the dress she had on, the hem of which barely flowed as she walked toward me, taking tiny, composed steps like she used to down the church aisle, looking for space along the pews. All life had been scooped out of her once-full cheeks, and her hands, which had trouble pulling out the chair across from me, were nothing more than bundles of kindling.
“Hi, Mom.”
She sat down. No makeup, no jewelry. Her eyes were dark tunnels. Once in a while they shifted within the frames of her thinning lashes, a glance at the waitress taking an order, a look at the cigarette vending machine, a blank stare at the two women holding hands across the aisle.
“Mom,” I said, louder this time.
She turned to me, perhaps noticing me for the first time. Her eyes welled up.
“Your father’s missing,” she said, strangling the tissue in her hand.
I asked her what she was talking about.
“He’s gone.” She looked lost. Or like she had lost something she shouldn’t have. “He’s missing,” she said again.
I wanted to shove a napkin in her mouth to stop her from saying it. Without raising my voice I informed her that he had left us years ago.
“Do you know where he is?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“In Staten Island. Living with some woman from our church.”
“He’s not missing if you know where he is.” As soon as I said this, I realized that it wasn’t true. My mother had been missing for a very long time, even when we lived together, and she was missing now, even sitting just across from me.
“I want you to go see him. Today.” She pinched her nose with the tissue. “I want you to bring him back. You’re good at that.”
“I haven’t done that in a long time.”
“You have to do this for me,” she whispered. “You have to.”
The look in her eyes, so wanting and frightened and tired, like someone on a hunger strike, holding out for something that’ll never happen.
“I love him,” she said.
I replaced him with you.
“I want him to come back,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“He loves my cooking.”
She never cooked when he wasn’t around. A few times I had found her late at night, standing by the kitchen counter in her pajamas, chopping things—carrots, onions, meat—only to slide them off the cutting board and into the trash can.
“So you’ll do this for me?” she asked. “You’ll go see him?”
I wondered if she had ever thought of me as missing, or if she saw how thin I looked, the knots in my hair, my scraped-up hands. Or Benny sitting at the counter, slurping soup, bouncing his knees, watching all of this with only his agenda in mind. Los Angeles. Sunny Angeles.
In the end, I told her that I’d go see him, my father. I lied for the money.
She dumped her purse upside down and opened up, not her wallet, but her compact. As she powdered her nose with hummingbird hands I realized she was preparing for my father, as if I might pull him out from my pocket any minute. “I can’t have him see me like this,” she said, and smeared on a dark shade of rouge. The longer she saw herself in the mirror, the more she seemed on the verge of tears. “I look terrible, don’t I?”
Her lips were now bruised and crooked. “You look beautiful,” I said, to a small brown stain trapped in the plastic of the table. My throat carried the weight of all the times I had been asked to tell her this.
“Your father used to say that,” she said, and smiled a distant smile.
I nodded in agreement and then asked for money.
“Oh,” she said, snapping back to the moment, and opened her wallet. I could see Benny behind my mother, standing up to try to see how much I would get. She handed me a five. Benny snuck up close enough to see the bill, at which point he shoved both thumbs toward the ceiling to show he wanted more. But my mother said that was all she had. I believed her.
When I said goodbye I knew I wouldn’t see her again. Maybe she knew it, too. When she got up, she took a step toward me and for a second it seemed as though we might hug. My shoulders stiffened. We never hugged. That was something we didn’t do. She looked right at me—me in my jeans and T-shirt I’d been wearing for maybe a week—and after a good look, she simply gave me her hand. It felt like a warm dying bird.
While daisy-chained to the circle of girls at the detention complex, I pictured my mother again, lying completely still in that garden. I know what you did to me, she had said back then. I still didn’t know what that meant. But this I understood: although she had me and all those vegetables around her, she only wanted my father’s love.
“That’s all the money she had,” I said to Benny that day, but soon realized that I had actually said these very words out loud to the circle of handcuffed girls, who were all now staring at me.
“I’m sorry, Joon? Did you say something?” the counselor asked.
“That’s all she had,” I said, the words feeling pebbly in my throat.
“That’s all who had?”
That was all she had and she did her best. That was the truth. That was what the counselor would’ve said if I had opened up. Here was another truth: my mother was all I had. And now she was dead and I was alone to wonder if I had done my best.
When the session was over, the guard took my arm again, gentler this time, and walked me back to the holding tank.
> “So, what’d you think?” he asked.
I didn’t feel like talking. “You really scared me back there,” I said, giving him a sideways glance, noticing for the first time a small medallion, the size of a quarter, next to his badge. I couldn’t read much of it except the years 1950-1953.
“What you should be scared about is what you heard in the circle.”
“It didn’t sound all that bad.”
He shook his head, as if I’d disappointed him.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.
He yanked me aside. “I’m just curious. You notice anything strange about your holding tank?”
I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, and that the only thing I saw was a woman talking to a television and a girl chewing her man out on the pay phone.
“Think again,” he said, and pushed down on my cuffs so I couldn’t lift my hands.
I told him he was hurting me.
“Listen,” he whispered, and scanned the hallway. “A lot of those women, in your cell, they’re supposed to be there. They grew up in shit holes worse than anything we got here. I understand that. I get it. They don’t know any better. But you . . .” His voice trailed off. “Where are you from?”
“The Bronx,” I said.
“No. I’m asking you, what are you?”
I knew where this was going but I told him anyway. “I’m Korean.”
“Korea. That’s what I thought,” he said. “Do you know what percentage of prisoners are Korean?”
“A hundred percent,” I said. “In Korea.”
“Forget it.” He pushed me to start walking. “I’d like to see you be so funny when they drop you at Rikers.”
“I know what you’re doing,” I told him.