She wanted to explain to him, to make him feel better, that she wasn’t strong enough to do this job, but both of them knew that was not the truth. The truth was something that would make them both uncomfortable and sad. This was already his expectation. This was already his experience. So she said nothing until the end of her shift.
“Hasta luego.” She tried to smile.
“Hasta luego,” he said, without quite meeting her eyes.
ON MONDAY, MINA met Mr. Kim, the same man who occasionally greeted her in the aisles, for training. He was indeed a few years younger than her, with his smooth dark skin, square face, high cheekbones, a shy smile that was slightly lopsided on the right. He was not tall, about the same height as Mina, so when he spoke to her, he looked her straight in the eyes, which made her feel self-conscious. She felt dowdy in her slacks and pink polo shirt, her worn tennis shoes.
As he showed her the buttons on the register and the form to fill out for the reports, recording the exact change in the register at the beginning and end of her shifts, she couldn’t help but stare at his arms—thin but muscular, covered in a pale down. She always liked arms. And it gave her something to look at besides his face.
On her first day at the register, she was a little slow with the cash, and the customers grew impatient, eyeing her, too busy with their own lives, their own worries to recognize that she was new and trying to learn as quickly as possible.
“That’s a twenty. Give me back $3.15.”
“Okay.”
“No, here. Let me make this easier for you. I have exact change.”
She was still getting used to the dollar, the denominations, the feel of it, the way each bill appeared the same but different, the sizes of the coins. Fortunately, the bagger whom she worked with, Mario, with his spiky hair but soft demeanor, was patient. He helped her with the breakdown of the cash or smiled and apologized in Korean to the customers as she stood there, perplexed, having to use a part of the brain that had grown rusty over the years with disuse. He spent his time between customers helping Mr. Kim or the other cashiers lift large sacks of rice or boxes of produce onto carts.
After a few hours, she understood the subtleties of the bar-code scanner. She memorized some of the codes for the more popular produce. She received and doled out money automatically.
Although the job was less physically demanding, the presence of all the customers waiting in line for her to do her job quickly while being friendly exhausted her. All those eyes. The nervousness she experienced as a customer watched her scan each item, ensuring that she was charging them correctly. Sure, she would get used to it. Eventually, the customers would become like the bottles of soy sauce that she stocked on the shelves, just another component of the repetitive, ultimately unfeeling nature of her job.
Spinach. Doenjang. Thin rice noodles. Large sack of rice. Garlic. Bean-flavored popsicles. Two oranges. A bag of ginger.
A six-pack of Hite. A bag of potato chips. A bundle of green onion.
At the end of the shift, Mr. Kim, harried and rushed, came by to check in on her. Sweat ran down the sides of his face. Nonetheless, he tried to be as generous and gentle with her as possible. He asked her if she had any questions, checking the remaining cash in her register up against what she had logged in her binder. He wiped his forehead with his bare arm. She handed him a paper napkin she had in her pocket.
“Thank you,” he said in English, smiling.
“No...problem?” She laughed, realizing she still couldn’t pronounce the letter L.
“Good job today.”
“Thank you!” Their eyes met, and she returned his smile.
On the way home, she sat at the front of the bus, staring into space, transfixed, her mind numb. She wanted to go home, shower, and close her eyes. She wished she had a television to distract herself from the sadness that she felt rising within her. Had she made a mistake? Would she be able to survive the glares, the impatience of the customers? Would she be able to handle the steady flow of interaction when all she wanted to do was to be left alone, to not think or feel, with only the physical pain of work transcending to numbness like a drug?
She understood how delicious and easy it was to become an addict. A few times, she had drunk herself unconscious after her husband and daughter died. After burying them, she wanted to throw herself in that same ground. She would drink and end up with a splitting headache the next day, crawling to the bathroom and vomiting.
But she couldn’t have gone on that way. The most important thing now was to be good, to work hard, to make it to heaven, where she would be reunited with them someday. That was all that mattered now. Not even Mr. Park, his words like hands lingering too long, could stop her.
Sitting at the front of the bus, swaying with its movement, she told herself that she’d be fine. She’d get used to the registers, the cash, the people, and if not, she could always ask to move back to stocking shelves, or she could go somewhere else. She could find another job. And once she felt a bit more stable financially, she could find a lawyer that would help her stay in the country permanently. Thinking of the darkness of her days in Seoul, that apartment, the streets her husband and daughter once walked upon, she could never go back to Korea.
The place had become a graveyard.
She looked up at the bus driver, a Black woman about her age with a short bob curled inward. This woman had spent her hours within the confines of the bus, trying to do her job, navigating through traffic, yet also having to respond to the steady needs of riders on the bus, who could be either kind and friendly or harried and rude. The woman had the responsibility of driving all these people to their homes or jobs every day.
The driver glanced back at Mina.
“You doin’ all right?”
“Me?”
“You all right?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Mina wanted to say something else. But she didn’t know what or how.
Should she ask how she was doing? No, that would be awkward.
Was the bus driver concerned about her? Or had Mina been staring too long at her, making her uncomfortable?
Mina got off the bus as quickly as possible and walked less than half a block to the house. Inside, she unlocked her room where she gathered her pajamas and a towel so that she could shower, rinse the day off (all that currency, the counting, the impatient customers, Mr. Kim’s English thank you, his smile). She needed to clear her head, relax.
As she touched the knob to open her door, she overheard the landlady say, “Mrs. Baek,” down the hall toward the other renter’s room.
That was unnie’s name.
Margot
Fall 2014
ACROSS FROM HER mother’s gated-up shop was the children’s clothing store of her mother’s friend Alma—likely one of the last people to have seen her mother. Perhaps Alma had noticed something or someone suspicious at that time.
Margot and Miguel stepped into Alma’s booth, empty of people. Baby and children’s clothes hung from fixtures along the walls and on rounders and racks. Little superhero sweater sets for boys, and princess and pony ones for girls.
“Maybe she’s in the bathroom.” Margot exited the shop, ducking beneath a tiny white dress wrapped in plastic. Miguel followed.
“Should we wait a little?” he asked.
“Let’s open my mom’s store and see if we can find anything there. We’ll be able to see if she comes back.”
Margot’s mother worked in a swap meet called Mercado de la Raza, an old warehouse with a tin roof, high ceilings, and concrete floors filled to the brim with stores. It was located southeast of LA—a dusty landscape of dilapidated factories and fruit vendors gripping bags of oranges on street corners—where a mostly working-class Latino population flourished, carving a community for themselves among the ruins of the defense and manufacturing industries.
Locals gathered on the weekends at swap meets that bumped banda and norteño music. Men with face and neck tattoos roamed the walkways in peace with their children. Families and churches rented a covered corner of the parking lot of the swap meet as a staging area for performances, religious gatherings, quinceañeras.
In this topography intersected by railroad tracks, where garbage and large objects (mattresses, used furniture, broken shopping carts) once destined for landfills disintegrated, Margot’s mother, Mina, and other Korean Americans made a living because of the relatively cheap rent for their stores. Even Koreatown proved too competitive and too expensive, so they found themselves adrift in South Central or Bell or Huntington Park, working long hours, sometimes seven days per week, behind counters in places that felt continentally far from both literal and figurative homes.
Margot had detested following her mother to the store on the weekends and weekdays during summer and winter breaks when she imagined children all over the world enjoying their middle-class vacations, tumbling in white sand or green grass. Instead, she had spent her days off from school in the store among plastic hangers and clothing smelling of the factories from which they came, while her mother, in her exhaustion, sometimes even yelled at customers.
Amiga! Amiga! she would holler in her Korean accent to shoppers after they had perused some of the items on the racks and walked away. That image and sound had been seared into Margot’s memory—the sight of women’s backs in departure while her mother tried to speak in their language. Amiga! Amiga! I show you something. The sadness, no, maybe the courage of the unheard. Amiga! Amiga! To women who didn’t need another friend. The pitch and tone of her mother’s voice, during some of their most desperate moments, when her mother hadn’t been sure if she could pay the rent or buy groceries, resembled that of a woman thrown overboard, treading water, calling out to other women who drifted by on rowboats.
As Margot navigated the swap meet now, the dirtiness of the surroundings settled into her. She was terrified that Miguel—someone from her middle-class life in Seattle of dishwashers, fleece, and stainless steel water bottles—would finally see this other side of her life, how she grew up. She had been ashamed for so long of her home, her mother’s work, her life. But why?
Perhaps sprawling lawns and shopping malls were one version of the American dream, but this was another. She could see that now. Maybe it was not mainstream, maybe it was not seen with any compassion or complexity on television or in the movies, because it represented all that middle-and upper-class people, including Margot, feared and therefore despised: a seemingly inescapable, cyclical poverty. But in actuality this was the American dream for which people toiled day and night. People had left their homelands to be here, to build and grow what they loved—family, friendship, community, a sense of belonging. This was their version of the dream.
Margot unlocked the rusted accordion gate with the lump of keys she had found in her mother’s purse, jerking it open enough for them to slide inside—a women’s version of Alma’s store, jam-packed with clothing. Slinky cocktail dresses, tight tops with shoulder cutouts, and conservative, embroidered blouses for older women hung on display from the walls, along with jeans that had safety-pinned signs, handmade from colored construction paper and permanent marker: sale $20.
On the dusty glass counter, a ceramic Virgin Mary, a twin to the fractured one in her mother’s living room, stood by the cash register. Its drawer was empty and open—the sad broken lip. Her mother had always left the machine ajar to ward off thieves, as if to say, Nothing here. Please go away.
Margot searched her mother’s usual hiding spot for the cash change she kept, underneath a bunch of free holiday calendars in one of her display cases for costume jewelry—rhinestone necklace and earring sets, large beaded hoops, plastic bangles—accessories that she hoped customers would buy to go with the clothing they had purchased. Margot found a roll of ones, fives, and tens rubber-banded together.
“Well, the money’s all here,” she said, standing up from behind the display case, only to see that Miguel hadn’t followed her into the shop.
In the center of the walkway between stores, Miguel was speaking to Alma, who was crying and blotting her eyes with a wad of tissue. Margot stashed the cash in her cross-body purse and joined them. Alma reached out her arms for a hug, and Margot fell into them.
She had known Alma for about twenty years, since after the LA riots—all that shattered glass and black smoke—that had destroyed her mother’s first store, a couple miles away in another, much tidier swap meet, where the individual shops each had proper walls and rollup steel gates. Alma had watched Margot grow up across the aisle between their stores—an aisle both narrow with the merchandise racks that overflowed, and immeasurably wide because of the different languages and cultures between them, oceanic in distance. Alma’s round face and plump skin hardly seemed to age as Margot went through each awkward stage of her own development—a shy only child with pigtails or a neat bob, a preteen who bleached and dyed her hair navy blue in the middle of the night and smoked cigarettes after school, and a much more conservative college student who understood that getting a degree might be the only way of escaping this life.
Tears spilled from Margot’s eyes. Alma pulled away and put her hands on Margot’s cheeks and said, “Pobrecita,” hugging her again.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Miguel asked in Spanish.
“The last time I saw her was...about two weeks ago,” Alma said as they parted. “Before Thanksgiving. Maybe the weekend before Thanksgiving.”
Wiping her eyes, Margot could understand most of the Spanish in a casual context, but as with her Korean, she struggled with putting words together on the spot. Her fear of sounding silly or being misunderstood acted as a sieve through which all language had to pass. Any speaking, even in English, often proved difficult for this reason, but foreign languages had a more gelatinous texture in her mind, flowing even more slowly to and from her mouth.
“She took the entire weekend off?” Margot asked in English to herself. “That doesn’t make sense.” Margot’s mother worked on every holiday, including Thanksgiving and Christmas, when she closed the store a few hours earlier than usual. On Thanksgiving Day, they’d sometimes order chicken from KFC—extra crispy drumsticks and thighs that they’d dip in hot sauce. And Wednesday was the only day that the entire swap meet closed on a regular basis. This meant that Alma must’ve seen her mother last on the Tuesday before the Saturday or Sunday when her mother died.
“Did you notice anything strange or different about her?” Miguel asked.
“She did seem sad these past couple months,” Alma said. “Very sad.”
“Do you know why?” Margot asked.
“At first, I thought maybe something happened to you, but when I asked her, she said you were fine, that you had a good job, you liked Seattle a lot.” She blew her nose. “Then I thought maybe...she was having some kind of emergency, like a family emergency or a death, in Korea, and that’s why she’s been gone so long.” She motioned for Margot and Miguel to wait as she grabbed a box of tissues from her store. “I thought she was in Korea this whole time. Maybe someone in her family had died, or someone was sick. I could tell that she was very sad about something or someone.”
The obituary that Margot had found last night: cancer, supermarket, wife, Calabasas, church. Seeing the photograph, tiny and black-and-white, was like staring at a ghost of herself. She could feel herself sinking under the waves, the salt of the seawater in her mouth. It was all too much—first, her mother’s death, an accident; then, a potential murder; and now, a possible father gone forever. Was her mother grieving him? Was he the same boyfriend, the visitor with the fancy car, the Mercedes that the landlord had mentioned to Margot? Why else would she have saved his obituary? He had to be important to her mother. But if he had died in October, at whom had her mother been yelling?
Was her mother’s death really an accident?
In the walkway made narrow by the amount of merchandise displayed by each store, a woman who sold champurrado from a wheeled cart squeezed behind Margot, Miguel, and Alma, leaving a trail of hot chocolate, cinnamon, and masa in the air.
“Did she have any visitors?” Miguel asked.
“No, not that I know of.” Alma paused, reaching for Margot’s hand. “Do you want some water?”
“No, no, thank you.”
“She talked a lot with the Korean lady over there.” Alma gestured to a store somewhere behind hers. “Do you know her? The one with the sock shop?”
“The sock shop?”
“Yes, socks, underwear, pajamas, stuff like that.” She blew her nose again. “She’s kind of new, opened her store earlier this year. They became friends fast, or they seemed to be friends already, very close.”
Margot asked Alma if she could keep an eye on her mother’s unlocked store as they left to find the sock shop owner. Around the corner, in the maze of mostly makeshift stalls, each store blasted its own genre of Spanish-language music (pop, bachata, banda), punctuated by the distant cry of a caged pet-shop bird or a section of lullabies emitting from plastic toys. At the sight of tiered displays on wheels with stacks of white socks sold in bundles forming half of the perimeter of a store, Margot and Miguel paused.
“This must be the place,” she said.
Seductive lingerie hung above the entryways, lacy corsets and nightgowns filled with the breasts of wire-framed hangers shaped into the torsos of women. One pair of scarlet panties, which came with a matching teddy, had a cartoon elephant face and snout at the crotch.
Under the brash fluorescent light, the store owner stood leaning on a glass display case with rows of conservative, pastel cotton panties stacked inside. With her head bowed and a ballpoint pen in hand, she studied the classifieds of the Korean newspaper. She looked up as Margot and Miguel walked into her shop.
The Last Story of Mina Lee Page 7