Knuckles tapped on her bedroom door.
“Yes?” she asked in Korean, sitting up, careful not to crush the map by her side.
“Hello.” An unfamiliar woman’s voice, husky yet clear.
Mina smoothed her hair down with her hands and opened the door, where a woman, perhaps a few years older than her, with a long face, curly hair, and high cheekbones, smiled generously.
“I live next door.” She pointed down the hall. “You just came today?”
“Yes.”
“You must be tired.”
“Yes, very.”
“I’m cooking dinner. Do you want to join me?”
“Oh, no.” Her stomach growled. “That’s okay.”
“Please join me. I have some rice and soup.”
Mina’s head throbbed between her brows and on the sides of her skull. She wanted to jump back into bed, but she knew that the food would help her, and she had nothing of her own to eat. She didn’t know how to get to the grocery store either.
“I have plenty to share,” the woman said.
Mina followed the woman to the galley kitchen where in a small dining nook, she had set out banchan—kimchi and seasoned spinach and soybean sprouts—as well as two sets of paper napkins, chopsticks, and spoons. Staring at the objects neatly arranged, Mina realized how little she possessed, and how vulnerable, how small that made her feel. She’d have to buy all those things—utensils, bowls, at least one pot and pan.
“Please have a seat.”
Sliding herself onto the dining nook bench, she could see how the kitchen hadn’t been renovated or repaired in years. The greasy wallpaper, a pattern of tiny periwinkle flowers, peeled off the walls. Several of the cabinet doors didn’t close completely, or hung askew, as if on the edge of falling.
The woman said, “It’s very hot,” while placing two bowls of rice and kimchi jjigae with tofu and mushrooms on the table. With the steam from the dish rising in front of her, Mina realized it had been close to twenty-four hours since her last full meal. She wanted to dive into the food but waited out of politeness in front of the stranger.
“Where are you from? Please go ahead.” The woman gestured toward the bowl in front of Mina.
Mina blew on the soup before tasting what was the most tremendous thing on earth. The brininess of the doenjang on her tongue replenished her body while springtime bloomed like purple wildflowers in her head. It reminded her of the feeling of that first bite of food after losing her parents, when she had been found on the side of a dirt road by an older man, a villager, who had taken her to his house and fed her a single meal of doenjang jjigae before he had to let her go on her own. She remembered how she had cried for her mother as she ate, tears falling into the soup, and how the man with half of his teeth missing tried to comfort her, patting her on the back. Of course, he probably wanted to help her, but what could anyone do during a war, when a child had been another mouth to feed, a liability, when children losing their parents or parents watching their children blown to bits had been the norm?
“I’m from Seoul,” Mina said.
“Me, too. Well, not too far from there.”
“Oh.”
They ate in silence for the rest of the meal. Outside, crickets sang.
They were two women by themselves, living in this house without husbands, and apparently without children, too. Boarders. Too many questions might lead to too much information, too much in common, too much pain.
* * *
She dreamed of nothing that night. A purple surrender, the best sleep she had had in months without pills, without drinking, without even prayer.
In the morning, she went to the bathroom that she now shared with the woman down the hall. She unpacked her toiletry bag, laying out her toothpaste and soap at a corner of the vanity without disturbing the other woman’s belongings—a folded pink washcloth, a slimy bar of soap, a toothbrush in a bright green plastic cup. In the mirror, her black hair fell to her shoulders in a tangled bird’s nest. She couldn’t find her brush, so she used her fingers to rake through the mess, discarding stray hairs in the wastebasket.
After a long shower, she lay down in bed again, clean and relaxed, on the edge of forgetting the world for a few more hours. A sweet bird chirped close to her window while a weed whacker, a few houses down, shredded and whirred.
A knock on the door startled her. She rose to answer it.
“Do you need anything?” the landlady asked. Her face was soft and gentle, with a hint of pink lipstick.
“Oh.” Mina propped up the towel, slipping from her wet hair.
“I’m going to the store. Do you want to get some groceries with me?”
“Yes, yes. Let me get dressed.” Despite the heat, she picked out a long pin-striped skirt, a tan blouse. She applied liquid eyeliner and rose-colored lipstick carefully, as if painting her lips like art. Worried about the wad of cash hidden in a sock under the mattress, she locked the door with a padlock behind her.
In the landlady’s car with the windows down and the fan vents blasting air in their faces, they drove for about five minutes through a dusty white light, eyes squinting. The neighborhood was mostly concrete and treeless except for the battered-looking palms with thorny ribs, the tired and curled-leaf citrus trees, and hibiscus plants, with their plate-size blooms and ashy jungle-colored foliage in the dry summer heat.
“Did your friend Mrs. Shin tell you about rent?” the landlady asked.
“Yes, $200, right? I can pay you when we get home.”
“Do you know where you’re going to work yet?”
“No, not yet.” Mina scanned the storefronts, the brightly colored signs in Korean—Drugstore, Books, Piano Lessons. “My friend mentioned some people she knows at a restaurant. She thought I could wait tables or cook. What do you do?”
“I own a clothing store. It’s small, but I get by.”
“Clothing? What kind?”
“Women’s.”
“I used to design clothing.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, I worked for a small clothing company in Seoul.”
“Hmm.” She sped up, changing lanes. “I wish I could hire you to help me. I need some help. But business has been pretty bad.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, ever since my husband left, I’ve been struggling.” She pulled into a large lot outside of a freestanding Korean supermarket buzzing with the movements of ordinary life, a kaleidoscope of social statuses (shiny Mercedes Benzes, beat-up Buicks, Ford trucks), mothers with children in tow loading bags of groceries into their cars, working men on break, smoking cigarettes in silence.
“Idiot,” the landlady yelled at a car beating her to a spot.
Once they had finally parked, Mina followed the landlady, who, in an automatic gesture, grabbed a shopping cart. The entire place had signs in Korean, too, which comforted her. Everything was Korean, the brands, the language on boxes and packaging.
She picked out some produce for herself—a small watermelon, two oranges, spinach, and a bag of onions—and went down the aisles for staples—rice, ramen, doenjang, and gochujang. Everything seemed surprisingly affordable, even more affordable in some instances than in Seoul.
At the checkout, Mina pulled $20 from her wallet uncertainly, new to the foreign currency. The cashier—who looked in his midthirties, younger than Mina, with a bit of gray at the temples of his thick black hair—lowered his eyes as if to protect her from any sense of scrutiny that might arouse embarrassment. His arms were smooth and lean. She became aware of her chest rising and falling, a fire in the pit of her stomach.
After the bagger had loaded their cart, Mina and the landlady passed a large cork bulletin board by the sliding doors. Among a riot of advertisements for various home and car repair services, banks and churches, a pink flyer spelled in large Korean letters: HELP WANT
ED.
She looked back toward the checkout where the same man who had rung up her groceries met her eyes this time and smiled. She felt his gaze on her as she turned to leave. She thought of the cold hard coins, the change he had dropped into her hand. Was it the very edges of his fingertips, a flower unfurling, that grazed her open palm? Or had she imagined that detail, that feeling?
Her heart raced. She replayed in her mind the unmistakable curve of his lip, his soft brown gaze, unblinking.
Margot
Fall 2014
AFTER SHE COLLECTED the death certificate downtown, Margot drove beneath the gunmetal morning light and weeping palm trees to the brand-new police station. She had never been to a police station before, and for whatever reason had imagined them to be as grubby as her elementary school, which smelled of chemical cleaners, chalk dust, and rubber. In the waiting area, people of all ages appeared anxious or tired. A grandfather, red polo shirt and gold bracelets, crossed his arms in front of his chest, eyes downcast. A mother, strands rising from coppery hair tied in a bun, observed two children thumb wrestling.
Bleary-eyed and weak, Margot had not slept the past two nights—haunted by visions of her mother, that careful bob of hair, that soft extension of her one arm as if reaching for something, or perhaps just an attempt to break her fall, the instinct to create some final grace, some final comfort for herself.
After she had discovered her mother’s body, she and Miguel had found a hotel on the outskirts of Hollywood near Vermont Avenue—a nondescript, three-story beige structure—one of many hotels in the area of questionable cleanliness and ornate bedspreads that would not show stains.
She spent most of the next day with the maroon-colored curtains closed. Her chest ached like a bowl made of stone, a mortar in which the pestle of her mind ground down the images of her mother in that living room, their living room, a tableau of ordinary life gone awry, the objects that witnessed her final breath—a broken one-foot-tall figurine of the Virgin Mary, a bowl of nuts knocked over, tour brochures for excursions to national parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon) on the coffee table. The smell, that putrid smell, the rot.
When was the last time she had seen her mother? Was it a year ago, last Christmas? The days spent at her mother’s store, full of holiday string lights. Margot hung clothes on rounders and racks that glided into place on casters, swept the industrial gray carpet, rang up and bagged purchases at the counter, or helped customers choose the perfect gifts—a crimson sweater embroidered with bells, a pair of bootcut jeans, a slinky dress for New Year’s Eve.
Every night, except on Christmas when they’d treat themselves at the local soondubu restaurant, Margot and her mother had dinner at home—the usual stews, a variety of banchan, grilled mackerel or gulbi. They’d sit together in silence underneath the dust-filled overhead light, eating from the jumble of plates and bowls accumulated over the years—romantic and rose-bordered, pastel blue-and-white-checkered, stamped with 1970s brown butterflies and flowers. Their apartment was a testament to the accretion that could happen in a family’s life—not through intention but necessity. Objects were acquired while on sale or in thrift stores or as gifts, like flotsam and jetsam as if they had been stranded on an island. Nothing could be thrown away or denied.
But Margot would incinerate it all if she could. She decorated her life in Seattle with austerity and care, leaning toward neutral colors and patternless designs perhaps as a rebellion against her mother, against all that her mother represented to her—poverty, tastelessness, foreignness, uncleanliness, a lack of control.
“Are you going to stay in Seattle?” her mother had asked. The tidy bob, graying at the temples, had been tucked behind her pink ears, revealing the two gold hoops that glinted like metal lures. Her eyes remained downcast as she bit the mak kimchi, tart and scarlet, that she always made at home.
“Yes, I like it there,” Margot said in English. She sipped the last of the miyeok guk—anchovy-flavored and lightly briny, beaded with sesame oil—from her spoon.
“But it rains all the time.”
“It’s not so bad. I’m used to it.” That was a lie. She hated the rain. She missed Los Angeles but didn’t know how she’d live there. She already had a decent job in Seattle and could afford her own apartment in a quiet residential neighborhood that smelled year-round of spruce and pine. (The only needles she had ever found dropped from trees.) In LA, she would have to move back in with her mother at least temporarily. But she didn’t know how to explain this to her, not in Korean, not in English, not in any language.
“Do you have a boyfriend there?” It was a question that her mother had asked more frequently than Margot had liked. Sometimes the inquiry seemed casual, hopeful; her daughter might meet someone responsible and kind, settle down, start a family. But other times the question was carved by a fear that her daughter would do the exact opposite—drink late into the night, meet men who would be reckless with her feelings, her future, her life, end up pregnant and alone—which in a way could’ve happened at that time.
It had been a month since Margot had begun seeing Jonathan, a much older coworker, a job counselor for people with disabilities. The first time they had kissed, their mouths touched gently, narrow columns of sunlight pressing on the office walls around them. The wet earth from his afternoon cigar, entangled with something else, a clean citrus—a bright decay. His sonorous vintage radio voice saying her name: Margot.
But she couldn’t tell her mother about any of this. How could her mother understand a relationship that made no sense to Margot nor her friends? The only explanation was one that she could never articulate out loud—that she was lonely and bored and she found him to be thrilling. He was a coworker. He was over twenty years older than her. He was blind. He was a widower. His life was ripe with so much experience, and she could get lost in being around him. He shrank her. He whittled her down. He made her small, so small that she and what she wanted—a more creative life, a more individual sense of accomplishment, of meaning—could evaporate, disappear.
But she couldn’t explain this to her mother. Even if she spoke enough Korean, how would her mother understand this—hunger? It wasn’t a desire to die, but a need to hide, to delete herself. She wanted to be an artist, and that was dangerous. How could she afford the time and money to have more art in her life? How could she ever be an artist if she had to worry about not only taking care of herself but also her mother one day? All they had was each other in the end. And since she denied herself so much, why not dive into being with Jonathan, who always told her what a wonderful person she was, how smart, how thoughtful, how kind? Jonathan made her feel like the most important person in the world because she erased herself with him. She listened. She supported. She approved. She was like the mother she had always wanted.
So again, she lied. “No, I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m too busy with work.”
Her mother stood to clear their empty bowls and plates. Not a grain of rice remained.
“I wish you would live near me,” she said softly, before turning away toward the kitchen sink where she blasted the hot water to soak the empty pots and pans.
Margot experienced a sense of lightness, relief that topic of conversation had been extinguished for now, yet she could feel the burn of regret for her lies, her ingratitude toward a mother who had sacrificed so much for their survival, her lack of commitment toward learning Korean, even if only to speak to her mother—rising, rising toward her tongue and eyes. They were tears, ones she had hidden from her mother.
That was almost a year ago. In the end, her relationship with Jonathan was only two months long, culminating in the most predictable and uneventful heartbreak. And now her mother was dead.
She had always counted on one more hour, one more day, one more year to explain herself to her mother, to tell her that she loved her more than anyone in the world but could never live around her, never l
ive under the same roof with her again.
Now Margot would never have the chance to help her understand. To help them both understand.
“Margot?” Someone was calling her name. In the waiting room, she looked up at Officer Choi who had been at the apartment two days ago when Margot had found her mother’s body. He was young, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties at most. His hair glistened like black enamel as if he had recently showered or left the gym for work. But the heavy gun and uniform made her nervous, uptight. She couldn’t quite meet his eyes. A white mug steamed in his hand. “Would you like some coffee or water?”
“No,” she said, standing to follow him.
They passed closed doors down a bright long corridor that smelled of floor wax to reach a shared office, which had a tall bookshelf filled with legal books and manuals. An open file rested on the desk with muted multicolored sheets of paper and a lined notepad.
Margot seated herself across from him. Behind his head, the vertical blinds were half-closed and tilted in a way so that she could still see his face—diamond-shaped with heavy eyebrows and high cheekbones. She realized then that he was handsome, which made her even more anxious, her thoughts pacing like an animal in a cage.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” Officer Choi asked.
“Not that I know of,” Margot said. “I haven’t lived in LA for years.”
“Where’d you go to high school?”
“Fairfax.”
“Ah, that’s it.”
“Really?” He wasn’t familiar at all. Actually, she hardly remembered any Korean kids there except herself. Most of her friends had been Mexican, Salvadoran, Filipino.
“Yeah. I think you were a few years before me.” He smiled. “Small world.”
Was she that out of it in high school? She had been too busy experimenting with drugs, a half tab of acid on her tongue, spending her free time charcoaling still lifes of fruit or hiding in the muted red glow of a darkroom. She was artistic and antisocial. He had probably been popular, a jock.
The Last Story of Mina Lee Page 3