A hot flush spiked over my skin, and I blinked fast to clear away a sudden prickling of angry tears, hating Candy Bronson, hating Margaret. “She’s just jealous! You got a standing ovation! Anyway, Natalie Wood was white! Why does that make her any more believable as a Puerto Rican?”
“Unfortunately, Lisa”—Margaret tilted her head sympathetically, grimacing at the painful news she had to deliver—“the acting business isn’t very welcoming to Asians. It’s just not realistic to think that Mindy could support herself as an actor. There are no roles for Asian Americans, except for Miss Saigon, and only one girl can play her at a time. And there would be so much rejection, so many hurtful comments, much worse than what Candy said.”
Angry at Mindy for sitting there like a cipher, furious at the blond goddess Margaret for broaching the topic of race, and sick of Howard and the dumb, meaningless smile that creased his big marshmallow face, I stabbed my fork accusingly in Margaret’s direction. “You’re being racist by telling Mindy she can’t be an actress. You’ve always been obsessed with Mindy’s race, so worried about how it was going to affect her life, affect her future prospects. You should have adopted a white baby instead.”
Gasping, Margaret clapped both hands over her mouth, tears glittering like diamond chips on the lush ledges of her lower lashes.
“I think you owe Mrs. Stamwell an apology,” Howard intoned sternly, sandy eyebrows drawn in consternation, white peaks of skin ridging his furrowed brow. Mindy studiously rearranged the ravioli on her plate, hiding behind her poufed-up Maria hair.
I didn’t believe Margaret’s tears. Margaret was hard as nuts, CEO of Stormraker, which profited handsomely from dispatching guns-for-hire to terrorize brown people in blighted, war-ravaged countries. I had seen her bully any number of people, from sales clerks to other parents—some to tears—to get her way. She had Mindy’s future gridded out when Mindy was but an application to an adoption agency, and she would stop at nothing to ensure that her daughter was the success that her parents deserved, ruthlessly taking down those who got in her way.
Nevertheless, I apologized, mostly to put Mindy, who was nervously slicing a ravioli into tiny little pieces, out of her misery. Margaret wasn’t above a gloating smile, which she tried to cloak as a gracious acknowledgment of my apology.
Then Mindy muttered, “I still might be a theater major.”
Margaret’s satisfied smile shriveled into a tight scowl as she directed the angry glare that was meant for her daughter at me. Perhaps it was at that very moment that Margaret decided to get me out of her daughter’s life for good, waiting patiently all these years for the perfect opportunity, which finally presented itself with this trip to Korea. With her security connections, Margaret could easily hire someone like Ji Hoon to kidnap me and arrange a safe house in which to hide me while paying some doctor of fortune to keep me sedated and, presumably, alive. After Mindy was safely back in America, they would release me. I had to hand it to them, it was a brilliant plan, guaranteed to succeed precisely because it was so bold. It would be my word against theirs if I accused them of kidnapping me, and Mindy would never believe her parents capable of such malfeasance. It would cause a rift between us that could not be bridged. They’d finally be rid of me.
The worst part of the whole sad scenario was not that my best friend’s parents hated me so much they would go to such extreme measures to separate me from their daughter; it was that I had played my own part so well, behaving just as badly as they expected me to, walking right into their trap.
The following morning, Ting brought me a breakfast of real food: two soft-boiled eggs, toast, a tiny pitcher of cream, a little pot of jam, a ramekin of butter. A French press awaited plunging. At least Margaret and Howard weren’t going to let me starve to death. As I fell upon the food, Ting laid out on my bed fresh underwear, a pair of stockings, and a wrap-around jersey knit dress, placing a pair of open-toed spectator pumps with precipitously high heels next to the floor-length mirror. She handed me a note written in loopy cursive on thick, creamy paper.
Dear Lisa,
Please put these clothes on. Don’t worry about doing your hair or makeup—that is up to me.
Yours,
[incomprehensible squiggles]
The signature didn’t look like Margaret’s and the handwriting wasn’t hers, but I presumed Margaret was a pro who would never write a note in her own handwriting that could later be used as evidence against her.
The dress looked like something that Margaret would pick, and no surprise that it fit me perfectly, for throughout the years Margaret had given me Christmas and birthday gifts of the fashionable, preppy clothes—fuzzy cashmere sweaters, pleated tartan miniskirts, pastel linen blazers—that she wished I’d wear when I came over to their house.
I waited impatiently in my new dress for my mysterious correspondent to come. At last, the door opened, and in slipped a slim figure impeccably attired in a form-fitted tweed suit and patent leather stilettos.
“Lisa, I am so pleased to meet you. My name is Yolanda,” she declared, strutting toward me with a hand extended. Strawberry-blond hair smoothly coiled into a French twist. Skin so pale, it was almost translucent, and a face so strikingly strange that I at first looked away, as one does from the stump of an amputee or a hideously disfiguring scar, not wanting to seem rude by gawking. She gave a very limp handshake while slowly running her eyes up and down my body, taking care not to miss a detail.
“Where’s Ji Hoon?” I demanded. “I must speak to him.”
“All your questions will be answered in just a moment,” she murmured, stepping to the side to view my profile. “Mmm, yes,” she commented approvingly. Her eyes were unnaturally angled, one tighter and more slanted than the other, the glassy irises a weird yellow-green color. “Didn’t Ting bring the stockings? Why aren’t you wearing them? Don’t tell me the shoes didn’t fit! They are just your size.” Her vowels pulled long and sticky like taffy. Australian?
“They’re here.” I waved the stockings at her. “And of course the shoes fit, but Margaret already knows that I don’t like high heels.”
“You will wear them and the stockings as well, yeah?” she pronounced severely, the question at the end menacing.
“Does this mean they are sending me home?” I sat down on the bed, folding my arms and crossing my legs to show her I meant business. “I’m not going anywhere until I get an apology from Margaret. I’m pretty sure that getting someone to go on a trip under false pretenses and then drugging and locking them up against their will is illegal. Ji Hoon’s going to be in a lot of trouble too, and MotherFinders…” I faltered as I followed the logic of what I was saying. Would MotherFinders have collaborated with the Stamwells? Would the Stamwells really put themselves in legal jeopardy for me?
We stared defiantly at each other for a few moments, but she had the distinct advantage of her weird face. The more I looked at it, the more unsettling it became. Incredibly prominent cheeks, the skin stretched taut and shiny over the swollen ridges. Wide mouth creeping upward in a perpetual half smile. The mismatched crookedness of her eyes. It must have been a pretty horrific accident to require so much face work. Finally, I looked away to grab the stockings and work them onto my feet, pulling them up my legs, parting the fabric of the wrap-around dress to bring the waistband over my hips, her eyes closely following my every movement.
Shoving my feet into the shoes, I teetered over to her. “There, voilà! Now, do I get to leave?”
“Not yet, we’ve got to do something about your face.”
Taking my hand, she led me to the bathroom. As she ran a soft sponge saturated with foundation over my cheeks, she said, “I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot, Lisa. I want you to remember that I am here to help you. You can trust me.” I opened my mouth to speak, but she hushed me. “Wait until I’m done, you don’t want to spoil your face.” Coming from her, it was a funny line, but I obeyed. “You are a lucky girl.” The sponge passed delicately over
the bridge of my nose, and then again, and then again. “Somebody loved you enough to find you and bring you here. You’ll have a lovely life here. You’ll learn the rules soon enough. There aren’t that many of them really. The most important one is to always obey her.” She patted gently at my face with a fist-sized powder puff.
This charade of Margaret’s was going a little far. “Always obey her?! What has Margaret been smoking?”
“Uh-uh! Don’t move!” she admonished me, daubing at my cheekbones.
Despite myself, I watched the transformation of my face, mesmerized. When she slicked on the mascara, it tickled. “Mascara doesn’t work on me,” I warned her. “My lashes are too stubby or my eyelids too chubby, but the black just ends up getting smudged onto my skin.”
“I was afraid of that.” Yolanda sighed. “This is special smudge-proof, so let’s cross our fingers. We might have to resort to falsies.”
Then she went to work on my mouth, first drawing an outline with a fat pencil and then filling it in with a bloodred lipstick that she daubed onto the end of her index finger. “Make an O with your mouth,” she had to remind me more than once. Finally, she ran her fingers through my hair with a sigh, head cocked to one side. “She’ll have to decide what needs to be done with your hair, but in the meantime, I’ll just put some sparkly combs in it.”
As she pulled and fussed with my hair, I stared at the stranger in the mirror. My eyes looked bigger and more dramatic, my cheekbones sharper, my lips more delicate, freckles and moles and big pores smoothed into oblivion by a drywall of foundation and powder.
“Here, put these on,” Yolanda instructed, handing me a pair of dangly turquoise earrings. “Then take your necklace off, and this will complete your look.” She held up a chunky silver-and-turquoise necklace.
“I’ll put that necklace on, but I won’t take this one off,” I said, hooking in an earring.
“She won’t like it. You’ll have to take it off,” Yolanda insisted.
I shook my head so that the earrings jangled. “I know what Margaret is doing, and it won’t work.” My fingers closed protectively around the yin-yang pendant. “She knows I haven’t taken this off since Mindy gave it to me.”
“Lisa!” Her voice curdled into a harsh growl. “I don’t know who this Margaret person is you keep talking about, but whoever she is, forget her. You’re not here for her, you’re here for Honey, and Honey wants that necklace off!”
“Honey?” I laughed scornfully in her fun-house mirror face. “Is that what she told you her name was? Her name is Margaret Stamwell, and you have made yourself an accomplice to kidnapping.”
Wiping a fleck of my spittle from the swollen blister of a cheekbone, Yolanda said, “Her name is Honey LeBaron, and the charge of kidnapping is absurd.”
“Honey LeBaron?” I sneered in disbelief. “Who the hell is Honey LeBaron?”
“Honey,” Yolanda said, the tight bow of her lips bending ever upward until I was afraid that her whole face would crack, “is your mother.”
Chapter 6
“But only the skin’s different. The heart is no different…”
–Lily Chin, mother of Vincent
As I followed Yolanda down a long, dark, twisting hallway, I wondered in confusion if MotherFinders had located my mother after all. But surely this was not its usual method of managing a reunion. Maybe Mindy, worried that I would refuse to meet my birth mother, had set up this surprise first encounter with her. But that didn’t make any sense either. She was too busy getting through residency, planning her wedding, and meeting her own birth mother to think up such an elaborate, melodramatic ruse. Besides, she knew I hated surprises.
We entered a room that was straight out of Garden & Gun: gleaming wood-paneled walls crowded with mounted animal heads, a scattering of overstuffed brown leather club chairs, a mammoth slate fireplace, a glass coffee table supported by curving tusks of ivory, the floor a patchwork of animal skins, most strikingly a tiger with black markings like long, sad eyes, head rearing up openmouthed to show fangs lacquered to gleam as if wet. A woman in a peach peignoir of lace and satin lay recumbent upon a cowhide sofa absently paging through a copy of Vogue, looking like a 1930s screen goddess waiting for the director to call “Action!” She did not in the least fit any scenario that I had conceived, and all thoughts of Margaret or Mindy orchestrating this meeting vanished.
Yolanda knelt down to whisper something in her ear. The young and stunningly beautiful woman’s burnt-butter-blond hair was swept into an updo with stray wisps hanging in delicate corkscrews about her diamond-shaped face: wide forehead, chiseled cheekbones, thin but widely curving lips, and a sweet, diminutive elfin chin, all dominated by enormous eyes of electric blue. She glowed as if spotlighted, her eyes shimmering as they flicked up and down the length of me.
“Come closer,” she commanded with a breathy, Marilyn Monroe–like sigh.
I took a tentative step toward her. Yolanda, who was standing respectfully to one side, waved me forward with a spastic yet subtle clenching of her hand. I traversed the tiger skin and stepped onto a thick fox pelt that lay directly in front of the couch.
“There must be some mistake,” my putative mother murmured, narrowing her bush baby eyes. “There is nothing me about her!”
“Wait, Madam, wait!” Yolanda reassured her soothingly. “May I turn on the light?”
The woman gave a slight, enervated nod.
Yolanda strode across the cavernous room and adjusted a switch so that light blazed from the central chandelier, intricately fashioned from interlocking pronged antelope horns. The woman put a hand up to her eyes with a wince, squinted at me, and softly groaned, “Doesn’t help.”
“One moment, Madam,” Yolanda cooed as she skirted the tiger’s jutting head. “All right now, here we go.” Directing my chin with an insistent finger, she swiveled my head so I was looking away from the woman.
I heard a sharp intake of breath. A long silence, and then, “Has it ever been broken?”
“Dr. Panzov says not. It’s the nose she was born with.”
“All right, Yolanda. Bring her something to sit on.” Her voice had changed from bored and cold into a sudden softness. She gave me a warm smile. “Yolanda has told you who I am?”
“Not really. I mean, other than the fact that your name is Honey.”
“Nothing else?”
Yolanda placed a snakeskin ottoman flush to the sofa and forcefully nudged me down onto it. “She made the absurd claim that you were my mother.”
“Absurd?” the woman echoed, as if the word were unfamiliar to her. “Why absurd?”
I laughed harshly. “My mother is Korean. You are clearly not Korean. And as you just so astutely pointed out, we look nothing alike.” I looked at Yolanda for agreement on this obvious fact, but she was only staring with rapt adoration at the woman.
“How do you know your mother is Korean?” she asked, a finger placed artfully on her chin as she struck a pose of disinterested inquiry.
“I was born in Seoul. The adoption agency said my mother was Korean. Look at my eyes, my face. It doesn’t take a genius. So, please. Clearly MotherFinders made a mistake and I am not the person you are looking for. Please just let me go and I won’t say anything to anyone about this, I swear.” I zipped my mouth shut and turned an imaginary key.
“All right, Lisa,” she drawled in her breathy little-girl voice. “It is Lisa, isn’t it? Let me just show you one thing, and then you can decide for yourself what you want to do. Does that sound reasonable to you?”
“I already know what I want to do, I want to go home,” I retorted.
Yolanda clamped my shoulder with a distinctly threatening grip, while the woman ate me up with her neon eyes.
“OK, go ahead. Let me see what you got.”
But all she did was look away from me toward the same spot that Yolanda had forced me to look, at the yawning pit of the stone fireplace. I saw it instantly and felt as if someone had punched me in the gut, kno
cking the wind out of me. Her nose was the very replica of mine: long, thin, with a high bridge that swelled out like a knuckle and then plunged downward to end with a hint of an undercurl.
“You see, Lisa, don’t you?” she said with triumphant glee, opening her arms wide, bell sleeves softly shimmering like bird plumage. “Come give your mother a hug.”
When foundational myths crumble and history is rewritten before your eyes, it takes more than a single moment to understand what is happening, and I stared in stunned incomprehension at her.
“Come now, baby, I’ve been waiting so long to hug you,” the golden-haired stranger wheedled, reaching for me. “Come to mama.”
Despite myself, I rose up from the ottoman and leaned down toward her. She turned her cheek to me, I suppose for a kiss. And I kissed it, god help me, I did, leaving the waxy imprint of my mouth on her smooth, marmoreal cheek. Then her arms closed around me and, bringing me down to my knees, she pulled me to her lacy bosom, her breasts a generous pillow to my spinning head. I heard Yolanda sigh happily, murmuring, “Oh, Madam!” And then her arms slipped away and she shimmied me off her chest.
“We have a lot of catching up to do, Lisa.” For a moment, a lacquered nail touched the yin-yang pendant that was cupped in the notch of my collarbone. “Yolanda will take you back to your room for now, so you can rest up and get refreshed for lunch.”
In a stupor, I rose from my knees. “Maybe Ji Hoon can explain this to me,” I said slowly, ripping at the inside of my lip with my teeth as I tried to make sense of things. “Can I speak to Ji Hoon, please?”
“Who’s Ji Hoon?” the woman asked, glancing at Yolanda for an answer.
“I don’t know, Madam, but she has been talking about him and someone called Margaret. I think she must still be confused from the sedatives.”
“Yes, it’s been an awful shock,” the woman commiserated as she languidly reclaimed her magazine. “Rest now, Lisa. We’ve got the rest of our lives to catch up.”
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