“Try and keep still, Madam,” Yolanda grimaced, attempting to line up a syringe with the swollen blue vein that snaked down the inside of her arm.
“I can’t keep her down much longer,” I grunted, feeling her body, a cyclone of clammy flesh, move and twist beneath mine.
A moment later, Yolanda sank the needle into Honey’s arm and depressed the plunger. She stared up at us, hazy and unfocused, her hair a crackling frizz around the washed-out, weary teardrop of her face. I had never seen her without makeup on before and was surprised to see faint freckles, not too dissimilar from my own, spattered across her cheeks and nose. Tiny wrinkles frilled the edges of her mouth; dark circles rimmed the hollows under her eyes. Her lids, bruised with blue, dropped down like a curtain, and when she raised them again, she seemed present in her body once more, as if suddenly waking from a fainting spell or a hypnotic interlude.
“Lisa?” she murmured.
“Honey,” I replied, stroking a cheek, the skin gelid to the touch. “You gave Yoyo and me a scare.”
“Lisa,” she repeated, staring up at my face as I overhung her like a doting lover. “You called me ‘Mom’ just now.”
Had I? I looked questioningly at Yolanda, who nodded that I had. Tugging at the hem of her silk-and-lace nightgown, which had ridden up to bare the desiccated stalks of her thighs, I murmured, “I guess I did.”
“Will you say it again?” She gazed up at me, eyes limpid as a mountain stream.
“All right,” I said, my breath still coming in ragged gasps from wrestling with her. “Mom.” And as I said it, I meant it. For as I gazed down at her, I saw me in her, or her in me, nose or no nose. She was the abyss that I had long tried to fill with pills, drown with alcohol, and paper over with good times. Here, finally, was the link between us that I had been searching for all this time.
“Say you love me, baby,” she whispered, the cold radiating from her body cooling the sweat from mine. “Tell your mama you love her.”
I didn’t love her, but I recognized her, as familiar to me as my own self. She was not a monster, not entirely; she was a human being, with flaws that were all too intimate. By saying it, I was telling myself as well: “I love you.”
“Just remember, I love you,” my father said, hugging me close as I buried my face into the crook of his neck and took in the familiar scent of Nivea shaving cream, my cheek against his weathered skin.
He was on his way home from a business trip in Indonesia, and we met in Osaka. Now that I was older, the biannual reunions of my childhood and adolescence had slackened, and we hadn’t seen each other in more than a year. Since the overdose, something had changed in our relationship; he was more tentative toward me, as if I were something worrisome and fragile, something to feel guilty about. Dedicated to bettering the far-flung lives of those less fortunate than he was, I suspected that he felt guilty for failing to help his own damaged daughter. In turn, I tried too hard to show him how “normal” I was, and both of us knew that we were hiding a part of ourselves from the other in order not to strain our relationship further.
In Osaka, we stayed at a capsule hotel, toured the sights, visited some onsen, and ate in cramped, proletarian restaurants under train tracks. He liked to do as the natives did when he traveled, so for his last night, I took him to a dingy izakaya that seemed to cater mostly to university students, where we both drank too much, which was par for the course for me but unusual for my father. As I refilled his sake cup, dribbling a path between his cup and mine, I said, “I’ve re-upped for a third year in the JET Programme, but I already regret it. My life is pretty good here, but the job is a joke.”
“Life’s too short for regrets,” he asserted, a smile wobbling on his lips. “Regrets are for losers.”
“I guess I’m a bit of a loser then, because I have quite a few regrets,” I bantered back.
But he took it the wrong way. Slapping a hand to his forehead, he groaned, “Oh god, Lisa, I’m sorry. What a stupid thing for me to say. Of course, we all have regrets. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.”
There was a reply ready on my lips, but I hesitated, second-guessing myself, wondering if he would see it as a rebuke or a cry for help. In the meantime, he started to speak slowly, staring into the bottom of his sake cup.
“For instance, my biggest regret is never talking to you about the divorce. I often go back to that abrupt announcement we made just before dumping you off at Korean Kamp and wonder if things would have turned out differently if we hadn’t handled it so badly.”
I shifted uncomfortably on my haunches. Was he actually agreeing that I was a loser? All of a sudden I didn’t want to go down this conversational path that I had started us on, but he had already set off, and there was no turning him back.
“Your mom and I thought it was the best way to tell you, at the time. I always meant to discuss it with you later, but time passed, things kept getting in the way, and then it seemed too late. I didn’t want to dwell in the past with you, especially since we get so little time together.”
“It’s OK, Dad,” I said jocularly. “It wasn’t the divorce that messed me up; it’s just the way I’m wired.”
He grimaced, tugging at his ear as he struggled to articulate his thoughts. “I know some kids of divorce blame themselves, and I just want you to know that your mother and I did not break up because of you.”
“Dad, you really don’t have to…” I murmured.
But apparently he did. “It was just, over time, our goals changed. She wanted to build the catering business at home, and I wanted, no needed, to get out and work abroad.”
He leaned heavily against the wall, unfolding his crossed legs to stick them straight out under the table, polishing off his cup of sake in one gulp, as if it were rotgut instead of the most expensive drink on the menu. I scooched back against the wall too so that he wouldn’t be talking to my back, which he didn’t notice he was doing because he was gazing down soddenly toward his own navel.
“It was almost like a drug, and I got hooked on this idea that I was spreading enlightenment and prosperity to the underprivileged peoples of the world. I pictured you running barefoot and scabby kneed, chasing crickets and making mud pies with your local friends in some untouched paradise.” With a shaky sigh, he brought the sake cup up to his mouth, only to find it was empty. I signaled at the waitress for another. “It was not a dream that your mother shared. She envisioned a childhood of ballet and riding lessons, trips to the mall for back-to-school clothes, cones at Baskin-Robbins, sleepaway camps. Of course, I didn’t want to leave you behind, but it was only natural that you live with your mother. Only later did I realize that you might have considered that I had abandoned you, especially after I married Esther and settled in Gaborone for good…”
The waitress excused herself with a “Shitsurei shimasu” as she slid a full flask of sake onto our table, thankfully interrupting my father from his exasperating prattle.
“More sake.” He chuckled. “Oh, Lisa, I don’t know if I should.”
“Come on, Dad,” I cajoled, lifting a cup in salute to him and feeling a perverse pleasure watching him gulp his cup dry. “You’re living like a local.”
I waved my hand at a neighboring table—where a young man slumped facedown, drool puddled under his open mouth, while the party raged on around him—and tried to change the subject by explaining the intricacies and different stages of the Japanese enkai, or drinking party.
“A change from Indonesia, I can tell you that!” Dad said, and laughed. Then, to my dismay, he returned to his soliloquy, not quite slurring his words but sloshing them together. “Of course, the irony of it all is that the light that I thought I had brought to the darker corners of the world just sputtered out. Pssh!” He pinched the air as if he were snuffing out a candle. “Here we are, a quarter of a century later, and I’m still going to the same countries with the same projects, and some people are benefiting from it, but it isn’t the downtrodden.”
The
drink had relaxed his neck muscles, and his head lolled forward, and I noticed that his widow’s peak had now eroded into a monk’s tonsure. His head continued to nod forward, and my first thought was he had fallen asleep, and I felt embarrassed for him and somewhat ashamed of myself for urging the sake on him only because I wanted to drink more, but then I was horrified to realize that he was crying, a thin stream of tears rolling down the eroded gullies of his cheeks to drip off the flaccid flesh of his jawline. Was he crying for me, or the fact that the benighted peoples of the world were not getting the help they needed? Was it all one confused jumble in his mind, me and the benighted peoples and his inability to help any of us? Whatever the answer, he had succeeded in communicating one thing quite clearly: my father had regrets, and I was one of them.
At the Kansai Airport the next day, he suggested we should make a date to meet every year to explore an unknown city together, given all the fun we had had in Osaka. This seemed to me like something that old friends or clandestine lovers would do, not a normal father-daughter interaction. I muttered weakly that it was a brilliant plan, painfully aware I had done that—I had made our relationship strained and false—him so unsure of how to relate to me that he drank himself stupid because that was really the only connection that I offered him. It made me sad, and as he was hypersensitive to my moods, that made him sad, so we said good-bye with sadness, not at our parting, but at the tentative nature of our relationship.
“I love you too,” I whispered into his neck. Looking back on it, if those were the last words I ever said to him, that was at least one thing in my life that I would not regret.
From the windows of Honey’s inner sanctum, I had watched the autumn come and go, the foliage kindling into sparks of color before bursting into a fiery conflagration, spangling the air as the leaves drifted down to festoon the rock garden, curling and desiccating and eventually blowing away, but since the indoor temperature never strayed from that of a soft spring day, it was easy to regard the change of the seasons as something fake, like Muzak playing in the background or a Yule log on TV, and I was shocked when Honey started to discuss Thanksgiving plans. While the thought of Thanksgiving invigorated Honey, who bounced back like a rubber ball from the strange episode in her bedroom, it depressed me, as I thought about home: my mother’s moist chestnut stuffing and green bean casserole crackling with fried onions, the table crowded with out-of-town relatives and guests who were far away from their own families, the traditional after-dinner walk along the Little Falls Park trail before returning home for mulled wine and pumpkin whoopie pie.
The Gang arrived in high spirits, filling up the empty space of the cavernous rooms with noise, laughter, and commotion. Resplendent in a bead-encrusted, long-sleeved, floor-length gown that hid her gaunt frame, Honey looked like her old self. Dr. Panzov had arrived early to inject her lips with filler, and maybe he pumped something into her face as well, for it looked firmer, juicier, lambent. And she was up to her old wicked ways, announcing a game of strip Scrabble after our sumptuous turkey dinner. From the start, it was clear that the point of the game was for Lahela, the only non-native English speaker among us, to get naked. It was, for no apparent reason, her turn to be humiliated. Once the game was over, Lahela was not allowed to put her clothes back on, huddling in on herself with arms crossed in an X to shield as much of her nudity as possible.
“Oh, Lahela, now I’m going to have to get rid of that chair you’re sitting on!” Honey complained, and I felt ashamed for her, for the broken person that was my mother.
“What if she gets up and moves?” Patience grumbled. “I do not want to accidentally sit on her pussy sweat.” The others hooted with laughter, though I did not, surprised and disheartened at Patience’s treachery toward Lahela before understanding it was a ploy to get Lahela back in her clothes when she added, “Better let her put her knickers back on. You don’t know what diseases we could catch.”
“Hey!” Wendell interjected, a look of slow comprehension dawning across his stupefied features. “Thass my wife you’re talkin’ about! She has no diseases.”
Irritated, I studied him. Wendell had not gone through his usual eye-rolling, head-jerking routine to indicate that he wanted a private chat, and now he was getting too drunk to be coherent. If I too had been drinking, I wouldn’t have minded so much, but tonight my instinct told me to stay sober. That my instinct would tell me to stay sober was in itself unprecedented, but what was even more remarkable was that I heeded it.
“You know, you’re right, Patience,” Honey marveled, tipping her lipstick-smudged wineglass in Patience’s direction. “It’s really not often that you have a thought that is worth listening to, but you’ve brought up a good point here. Give Lahela back her panties, Yolanda.”
Yolanda held them up, old-lady nylon underpants with little worms of elastic wriggling from the waistband, the seat saggy and worn to transparency. “Really, Lahela, did you rob these off your grandmother? Surely Wendell gives you enough pocket money to let you buy decent underwear at the Paradise.” She made a great show of turning the underwear inside out, luffing it around like it was a sail. “Eww, Lahela, the crotch looks like a mattress in a brothel in Hillbrow, man. So dirty!” She showed us the faint ghosts of menstruations past that stained the crotch before tossing the underwear. It parachuted through the air like a giant spore, landing about five feet away from where Lahela was huddled.
Hoping to distract the onlookers, especially the leering Dr. Panzov, who followed Lahela’s every move as she scrambled back into her underpants, I suggested, “Karaoke?” The more noise, the easier it would be for me to exchange a few private words with Wendell.
“Oh,” Honey groaned, “I’m so bored of karaoke!”
Oh god, I thought, please don’t let her choose charades.
Probably all of us were thinking the same thing, Harvey going on the offense by braying, “I tell you what I used to enjoy on a Saturday night as a young buck in Norfolk: dancing.”
“Dancing!” Honey cooed breathlessly in her baby-doll voice, a sure sign that she was captivated by the idea. “What do you think of that, Lilo?”
“I think it’s just what we need to shake off the tryptophans,” I exclaimed.
Everyone was ordered to clear the floor of furniture except for Wendell, who was dispatched to fetch the CD player and CDs, with me quickly offering to assist him. His absurdly long legs carried him in a spidery scurry down the corridor, forcing me into a trot to keep up.
“Where’s my money, Wendell?” I asked as soon as we were out of earshot.
He didn’t answer, striding ever faster, his gangling body striking a praying mantis–like shadow up the dimly lit walls.
“Come on, Wendell, how much have I earned so far?” I persisted, breaking into a gallop to catch up with him, pressing a hand against the stitch that had developed in my food-swollen side.
“You’re not passing along anything of value, Lisa,” Wendell said. “You’ve only earned about thirteen dollars.”
“Thirteen dollars?!” I spat. “That mascara was Chanel, which retails for, like, thirty dollars, and those tights were Wolford, which sell for fifty dollars online!”
“This isn’t online,” he said. “This is North Korea. And no one here gives a shit about Wolford, or mascara, or silk scarves, or designer perfume, or any of that other shit you’ve been sending me. They care about sparkly things, shiny things, things that they can see cost a lot of money. Like your watch.”
“You really want my watch, don’t you?” I laughed bitterly as we came to a stop in front of a door.
“I don’t want it. It’s what they want. I can’t force them to buy things they don’t want.”
The door released after Wendell punched a code into the keypad, revealing a room crammed with all manner of electronics: big-screen TVs, video game consoles, microphones, a portable karaoke machine, a treadmill, a rowing machine, a keyboard piano.
“God, this compound is a never-ending rabbit hol
e of stuff!” I marveled.
“Exactly,” he exclaimed, rapping his knuckles on an unopened Xbox 360. “There’s stuff all around here, tons and tons of stuff that never gets used and no one will ever miss. Have Cookie show you the storage room full of china and silverware sometime. She’s got settings there that she’s never even taken out of their packaging. Oh, and try and get into the linen closet. Towels are in high demand in Pyongyang, the thicker the better. Also there’s a rumor that she has a medical supply closet chock-full of drugs. You should check that out. Of course, the best thing would be for you to get access privileges to more rooms. You should really do your best to make that happen.”
“So basically you want me to do your stealing for you. Coward,” I sneered.
Pulling at his tie—the same black knit tie he always wore, the weave stretched and saggy at the knot—he remonstrated, “Maybe you haven’t heard, but we’re transitioning to a market economy. I’m merely fulfilling the time-honored role of middleman. Think of me as an offshore account, cleaning up the money and giving it back to you. Oh, and by the way, my friend is asking for fifteen thousand dollars for access to the internet.”
“Fifteen thousand dollars?! Are you fucking nuts?”
“Lisa!” His moist lips twitched with the gravity of what he was telling me. “This man is putting his very life on the line for you. If he’s caught, instant death is the best he could hope for. Life is cheap in Asia but not that cheap.”
“You know what I think, Wendell?” I snarled, poking an angry finger at his pigeon-breasted chest. “I think you see me as your golden goose, and you never want me to leave. If I go, who will do your stealing for you?”
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