A Cab Called Reliable

by Patti Kim

  On the closet doorknob hung my orange sweater. I tied it around my waist and left my room. I walked into my father in the hall. He had a white towel around his waist and a blue one covering his shoulders. A fine-toothed comb had smoothed back his hair. He smelled the way he did on Fridays, when he came home with enough money to take my mother, Min Joo, and me to a restaurant for grape sodas, hamburgers, and french fries.

  I stopped him and asked, “May I go to Boris’s? I have math homework, and I left my book in school.”

  As he brushed past me to enter his room, he told me to set my mind straight because in this country without a mind set straight, I would never be able to win first place. Loo Lah’s see-through white blouse was hanging on my chair. She was cubing bean curd in her T-shirt, which was way too small for her. She had plump white shoulders, and the pendant of her necklace was tucked into her cleavage. I asked her where she learned how to cook fish stew. She told me her mother, who was living on Cheju Island, used to be a diver and sold whatever she caught that morning at her own market stand. Oysters twice the size of her fist; clams, seaworms, conch. “She’s the one who taught me how to cook fish,” she said.

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “Still on the island, but she stopped diving because she was losing her hearing.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She works in a tangerine orchard.”

  I told her I loved tangerines, and leaning against the refrigerator, I told her the lightbulbs in my bedroom had burned out, and my father wanted her to give me two dollars to walk over to Pershing Market to buy new ones. I also wanted to tell her to turn the fan on and open the window because the neighbor didn’t like the smell of Korean food and the steam from the stove could set off the fire detector. I stopped myself.

  “Doesn’t your father have any cash?” she asked.

  “But he just got out of the shower,” I said.

  “Then wait for him,” she said, and slid the cubes into the pot of boiling water.

  “It’s only two dollars. You’ll get it back.”

  Pulling out three dollars from the back pocket of her jeans, she told me I had better be nice to her. “I need a new toothbrush. Mine is old. Could you do that for me?”

  “What color do you want?”

  “Blue, yellow, red, green, I don’t care,” she said, and stirred her stew.

  I thanked her, put on my shoes, and left. The hall of the apartment building was beginning to smell like fish and rotten beans. I ran down the stairs, pushed open the door, and skipped around Burning Rock Court two times playing duck-duck-goose with the parked cars. My father’s white Ford Fairlane was parked in front of Boris’s apartment building. I tried all four doors and found the last one on the driver’s side unlocked. I sat behind the steering wheel and pretended to turn on the ignition. I pumped the brakes, turned the front wheels, bounced on my father’s seat, and imagined myself driving up and down the Rocky Mountains from New Mexico to Alaska and back to New Mexico again, where Boris with two real legs was waiting for me on our magic tree with grape-flavored Popsicles growing on the branches. My mother’s cushion. Her cup holder and scented Christmas tree. Her eight-track tape of Lee Mi Ja, the Korean singer with large horse teeth, who sang sad love songs about crying in the pouring rain standing outside her lover’s locked door. Won’t you let me in? Won’t you let me in? My father’s ashtray was overfilled with crushed cigarette butts. My mother would have emptied it each week, tapping it on the pavement, instead of adding a half-smoked cigarette stained with lipstick to the heap.

  When I saw the figure of Boris’s mother in the lighted window, I ran outside, calling, “Boris, Boris!” Shielding her eyes, she came close to the window chewing food. When she saw me waving my arms, she opened the window and, puckering her lips, asked, “What is it, dear?”

  “I need to show Boris something. It won’t take long.”

  She turned her head, shouted something in Portuguese, and looked down at me, leaning her elbows on the windowsill.

  “Boris is coming. What is it you have?” she asked, looking up at the sky. Boris’s mother was out of her uniform and wearing a light blue robe, which made her look like an ordinary grandmother.

  “It’s a new bug for our collection. We have seven now.”

  “What’re you doing outside in the dark like that looking for bugs?”

  “I’m not looking for them. I just walked into it. My father wanted me to get his money from the car. See?” I held up the three dollars.

  She turned her head, again said something in Portuguese, then, looking down at me, said that Boris was getting dressed because he had just taken a bath and we’d better not do anything that got us dirty.

  Boris limped out the door of the building wearing a pair of jeans and a pajama top. His wet hair was matted down on his head, making it look like a soft potato. I wanted to hug him and smell the soap still in his ear and tell him I was sorry for kicking him and calling him retarded earlier in the day. Boris’s mother pointed her finger at the moon and told her son not to be long because it was late, the time wolves hunted children. I told Boris to close his eyes. Taking him by the arm, I pulled him toward my father’s car.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Where’re we going?” he asked with his eyes shut tight.

  “Almost there,” I said, opening the driver’s door to my father’s car. I got in first and crawled to my mother’s side. “Get in. Open your eyes. Get in. Sit down. Touch the wheel. See, turn it like this. Close the door.”

  I told Boris to pump the brakes, pump the brakes fast and hard. With both hands pressed firmly on his knee, he pushed down on the brakes, biting down his lower lip. When he pumped faster and faster, he grunted, then laughed out loud, showing me his gums and teeth.

  “Isn’t it fun?” I said, and sat the way my mother sat on Friday afternoons, when she was at peace with my father. Her arm was planted on the armrest between the two of them. Her legs were folded and tucked as if she was sitting on a floor; they were neatly covered by her skirt. Her slanted torso leaned toward my father, who never noticed any of it at all. I pressed down my shoulders, let my hand casually hang from the edge of the armrest, and sat close to Boris like a loving wife and mother.

  He put his right arm behind me, gripping my headrest, while the other hand held the wheel. Looking over his shoulder, he turned to check if the road was clear, then proceeded to back out of our driveway. He was a good driver, a good man, a good husband and father.

  “Boris, I love you,” I said.

  I lifted the armrest, pushed it back, rested my head on his thigh, and told him to pet my cheek. He petted my cheek and said he wanted to kiss me, and as I was telling him I didn’t want to sit up yet, I noticed the corner of a glossy, colorful picture sticking out from underneath my father’s seat. Reaching between Boris’s legs, I pulled it out halfway. An American woman with beautiful long hair had a finger between her parted lips. Her eyes were closed, her neck stretched out long, and there was a gentle breeze blowing her hair away from her face. As I pulled the whole picture out, I saw her shoulders and breasts, then her other hand, which was touching the private triangle between her opened legs. I quickly sat up and showed it to Boris, who placed it on his lap and stared. There were more pictures of naked women, colorful, neatly cut out and unwrinkled, underneath my father’s car seat. This was the hiding place for his most important things. As Boris and I handled the pictures, we kept them low on our laps so no one would see. The lighted windows seemed like eyes to me, and I sank deeper into my seat. Boris and I said nothing to each other. My stomach was full of hungry bugs, and the pictures made me want to go to the bathroom.

  I had never known these women were in the car with the four of us when we rode to the New Covenant Korean Church, to the dentist’s office, to cabbage farms and radish fields, to restaurants and liquor stores.…

  Boris’s mother called out from the window, and we looked up quickly. The pictures slid out of his
hands to the floor, and Boris left the car without saying good night to me. As I watched him limp back to his mother, I was certain he would never ask to kiss me again. I piled the pictures neatly one on top of the other, hid them under my father’s seat, and crawled to his side to let myself out. Then I walked into our building, sat down on the first step, and waited for my father to come out and call my name the way Boris’s mother did.

  Two moths were drawn to the hall’s light. One landed on the glass case and the other fluttered in circles. The sound of television music and children came from apartment A. There was also the smell of Salisbury steaks with gravy, carrots and peas, a glass of cold soda, and for dessert a slice of chocolate cake. I imagined there would be a baby behind the door being gently bounced to sleep on a mother’s hip, a rocking chair, opened coloring books scattered on the rug with uncapped Magic Markers and broken crayons.

  I was hungry for Loo Lah’s fish stew. Sucking the top button of my dress, I climbed the steps to our apartment and opened the door. The wraparound strings of her blue canvas sandals had fallen over, around, and underneath my father’s boots. I picked his boots up, shook off the dried dirt, tucked the laces, and placed them against the wall.

  On the dining table were two rice bowls, one empty and the other with two spoonfuls of rice left over. A pair of wooden chopsticks was balanced on the bowl’s rim. In the center was an unfinished pot of fish stew. I tilted it and found the head, fin, pieces of gray skin soaking in jelling orange liquid; chopped green onions, cubed bean curd, and dried red pepper flakes. On the corner of the table between the two rice bowls lay a pile of fish bones on a page torn out of the telephone book. My father and Loo Lah had sucked on the bones and spat them out together. There were plastic containers of side dishes: lotus roots in sugared soy sauce, fried and salted kelp chips, pickled perilla leaves, pickled fish guts, pickled dried radishes. The plastic lids were neatly stacked on the other end of the table. The labels read: $1.49 Arirang Market. $.55 Arirang Market. $1.15 Arirang Market. $2.39 Arirang Market. $.98 Arirang Market.

  Heavy breathing came from my father’s bedroom. His door had not been shut tight. I peeped through the crack. The blinds were pulled up. The moon nestled in the window’s upper-left corner. The calendar was still in the month of May. My eyes moved toward the left of the dresser, half its mirror cut off by the frame of the door. I saw only half of Loo Lah’s wave of a bare back growing out of the dresser top, her calf pasted to the back of her thigh. She sat like a frog about to jump off one lily pad onto another. I saw half of her permed head, which my father’s hand seemed to clutch and sway. One of his legs hung over the dresser. His foot rested inside an opened drawer. The metal handles clinked.

  I returned to the dining table. There were four fried kelp chips left over. The rice was drying in the bowls. They would be hard to wash later. I carried the two to the sink. After rinsing them in hot water, I returned to the table, sat in my father’s seat, and with one hand rattled the kelp chips in their plastic container and with the other traced the printed thank you on its label. I thought. I thought hard, and quietly told myself all this has got to change.

  6

  I hated Tuesdays because Boris had to go to Mrs. Chambers’s office during recess to recite over and over again something about a Peter Piper picking pecks of pickled peppers. After he finished telling her about Peter, he had to tell her about a Sally on the seashore with seashells, while I was left alone with no one to play with.

  I curled my fingers around the wire fence and shook it. It sounded like the noise I had heard monkeys make in their cages when our class visited the National Zoo. I had stared and stared at the mother monkey with her baby clinging to her back, wondering if she would ever hang upside down on a branch to get it off her back. I had decided their asses were red from all the spanking. I let go of the fence and walked toward the baseball field, where Max and Roger and Mark and Lucas and Linroy and Tyrone and a whole bunch of the boys from our class were chasing each other, trying to touch an arm or shoulder or neck or back before anyone made it to the end zone. I stopped, dug the right toe of my shoe into the grass, and thought about Boris sitting close to Mrs. Chambers, who had long blond hair, long legs, and long eyelashes that curled up to the heavens. Her knees would touch his. They would make funny shapes with their lips and catch each other’s spit. She would lean close to Boris and tell him to place the tip of his tongue on the edge of his teeth and say, “Thermometer.” I wanted Mrs. Chambers to disappear in her cool, dimly lit office, where the blue venetian blinds were always pulled down low, so that on Tuesdays during recess I would be the one to seesaw with Boris again and listen to his stories about Peter and Sally.

  On the seesaw, Torpedo Tits Tammy was laughing while holding poor Ruthie up in the air. It wouldn’t be too long until Tammy got off and Ruthie came crashing down. The Chinese girls played Chinese jump rope, chanting the days of the week in Chinese. I tried to join them once, but they told me they were already an even four, and it was impossible to play with a fifth. The black girls double-dutched to ma name ma name ma name ma name is Jolisa Jolisa ma boy ma boy ma boy ma boy is Lalarnie Lalarnie. After they sang their names and their boyfriends’ names, they broke into a chant about eating sardines with pork and beans. Eddie and Mitchell swung on the monkey bars all recess, trying to get blisters the size of silver dollars on their hands so they could show off and make money from the stupidheads who would pay a dime to touch the bubbles and a quarter from the dum-dums who wanted to pop them. Next to the monkey bars were the tetherball people, and next to them the four-square people, and the hopscotch people and the relay-race people, and the people who swung on swings and slid down slides.

  I watched them all and continued to dig the toe of my shoe deeper into the grass. When I saw that my shoe was turning green, I wiped the leather with my sweaty hand, walked back toward the school, and sat against the brick wall where Sun Joo, the new Korean girl, read her Korean comic books. When she first walked into our class two weeks ago, she was wearing the same white blouse, dark blue pleated skirt, and pink sneakers labeled “Star Runner,” and I was embarrassed to have been born in the same country. She had large teeth, which made her mouth stick out like a horse, and she smelled of soy sauce and fermented beans. When Mr. Albert told me to sit next to her and talk in Korean because she hardly spoke any English, I told him I was unable to help because I had forgotten all my Korean words. Sun Joo, Ahn Joo. We shared the same middle name, and the others asked if we were from the same family. When I told them my name was Ahn Joo, and she was a Moon Gentile, the smart ones understood my joke and laughed.

  In Korean I asked, “What’re you reading?”

  She looked up, startled. As she pushed her glasses back, she leaned against the brick wall and said, “Oh, so you do know how to speak Korean. And all along I had you for a dumb immigrant. How many years have you lived in America?”

  “Long enough to know that those are ugly sneakers you have on,” I said.

  As she gathered her comic books in her arms, she called me a deaf-mute and told me to go follow my American classmates around. She stood up, walked to the flagpole, sat near the daisies, opened her book on her lap, and laughed out loud. I wanted to stuff her open mouth with clumps of grass. I pulled some out and threw them in her direction.

  From around the corner of the building, I could hear the voice of Stephanie Fenno. She was telling Lisa, Debbie, and Melanie a really funny story.

  “Listen. Listen. There was this girl named Matilda. She was really fat. I mean really fat, and she was walking home from school. But these three boys, they were standing next to the flagpole, and they called her over. They said, ‘Hey Matti, come over here. We want to ask you something.’ Matilda went over to them because she thought one of the boys was cute. He told her he’d give her a quarter if she climbed the pole. So she climbed it halfway and shouted, ‘Is this high enough?’ And the boys said, ‘No, go higher. To the top.’ So she climbed to the top and got her quarter.r />
  “This happened for three days, and each time more boys came to watch Matilda climb the pole. When she went home and showed her mom the quarters, her mom got angry and told her to stop because the boys were only doing that to see her underwear.

  “But the next day, when the boys told her to climb the pole again, she climbed it anyway. She showed the quarter to her mother, and her mother slapped her. ‘I told you they only want to see your underwear!’ Then stupid Matilda said, ‘But Mom, I wasn’t wearing any this time.’”

  The girls broke into roars of laughter, and I imagined Debbie poking her elbow into Stephanie’s side and Lisa covering her pretty mouth with her pretty hand. I crawled into a cool shade so that the girls’ laughter sounded far away and Sun Joo could not see me. I pressed my knees together, wondering how the pole must have felt between Matilda’s legs. I slowly squeezed my forearm between my thighs and pulled it up close to my crotch. Matilda wasn’t so stupid. She knew what she was doing. I pressed my forearm harder against myself, but once I started to feel something down there, the bell rang.

  * * *

  “Ahn Joo, didn’t you hear me? I was calling you,” Boris shouted, looking up at me.

  “Nope.”

  “I called you pretty loud,” he said, but I didn’t answer him. Boris placed his hand on the twelve-foot pole in the center of Burning Rock Court. Trying to shake it, he called out, “Ahn Joo, what are you doing up there?”