The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  Does that bother you?

  What, hearing his voice? Come on. We're on the phone two or three times a week anyway. He's a pretty involved father. Or at least he talks a good game. The divorce was amicable in the end, I guess. We used a mediator. No betrayals, no infidelities. Not that I know of, anyway. Just pain. Ordinary, exhausting, unglamorous pain. We married too young; we got tired. You know the one about the wooden peg in the table?

  You mean the round peg in the square hole.

  No, no. Say you've got a wooden peg stuck in a table and you want to get it out. The only way is to bang in another peg. You're always back where you started, in other words.

  So you throw away the table.

  Something like that. I was never good at analogies.

  And the girls?

  The girls are over there having a grand old time. Takeout sushi and movies on cable till three A.M. if they want. He lets them watch Sex and the City and they come home talking about cocaine and anal sex. The only rule is they can't leave the apartment. Stan's a paranoid old New Yorker. Still won't walk through Central Park at night.

  He'll have a hard time when they get older.

  They are older. Samantha's having her bat mitzvah in October.

  Is that right, he says. Trying to connect the word with a particular age. Is it like confirmation, he wonders, or like a sweet sixteen. Or neither.

  I converted before we were married. Not that we ever went to synagogue. But the bat mitzvah's nonnegotiable. His parents are footing the bill.

  Underneath her cardigan is a flimsy silk tank top, almost the top of a nightgown. Off comes the sweater, wadded up in her lap. He's surprised by the broadness of her shoulders. Not unlike Renée's, in truth. On a long thin chain she wears a flat gold disk the size of a nickel, polished, catching the light. He reaches and turns it between his fingers. No markings on either side. Like a slug for busting old Coke machines, a penny on the railroad tracks, burned smooth.

  That a piece of yours?

  She swallows the last of her wine and pours another glass.

  We could sit here and ask each other questions all night, she says. We could get to know each other incredibly well in a couple of hours. Is that what you want?

  But there is one more story, the one he tells her in the smearing blue light of six-thirty, before his shift begins and he becomes her employee again. Renée's last day in the apartment. He was just home from work, and heard her moving around in the bedroom, talking on the phone, so he'd think it was her mother and would pick up the line in the kitchen. That was their strange habit, these party-line calls, because Shirley loved him—more than her own daughter, Renée always claimed—and would always be clamoring for him to get on the phone. She lived in South Carolina, a good place to raise children, she always reminded them, better than the snowy wastes of Hollis.

  It wasn't Shirley, of course. It was a man's voice, grinning at her across the line, making her giggle. Baby, I know you want me to get it out! it said. I know you can't stand waiting another minute! But I'm gonna make you wait! He dropped the receiver into its cradle as if it was white smoking iron and stared straight ahead. A head of cabbage, an ice tray left out on the counter to melt. His own keys, left casually in the bowl next to the door. The simplest objects had a way of betraying you: all the unpredictable meanings they took on. He stared at each one, each thing, making an inventory, before walking out the door.

  Only later did he realize he was waiting for her to come out of the bedroom and explain.

  They run into each other now, every so often, when he's back visiting a friend in the neighborhood. She held on to the apartment but not the man, Rodney or Rudolph or Randolph, even after she bore him the son he claimed he wanted more than anything, more than a winning lottery ticket or a house in Barbados. A daughter and two sons. Her mother lives across the street now, he's heard. Whenever he sees her he feels as if they're meeting in a garden, a lawn hedged with bright flowers, or a patio with a fountain in the middle. An absolute and unshakeable peace. As if one pain canceled out another.

  There's a special place in hell reserved for people like that, Hyunjee says, rolling onto her back and dropping her fingers lightly against his thigh. Betrayal by telephone is in a category all by itself.

  I stopped blaming her a long time ago.

  Cosmic retribution, though. That you can hope for.

  No, he says, that's not my life. That's not a way to live.

  If it had been me I would've been cured of sex for good.

  Maybe I am.

  Don't say things like that, she says. I hate repartee. It's boring. Not when I can still feel you inside me. You haven't been cured of anything. Thank god.

  All right, then. Have it your way.

  I would have wanted those years of my life back. Presumably that's why I'm still alone. My capacity for forgiveness is too low.

  Is that a warning?

  Immediately he wishes he'd stopped up his mouth, sucked in a wad of cotton, a roll of toilet paper. Even a brick would've done, in a pinch.

  It might be, she says. Would you like it to be?

  She's beginning to refuse food. When Hyunjee lifts the lid and re-leases the smell of kalbi into the room her eyes pucker in alertness and fear. My teeth hurt, she says. My teeth are falling out. Though they show no signs of looseness, no dark spots, no obvious cavities. He calls down a request for a dental consult. Forty-eight hours, they tell him. They're all away at a convention at Foxwoods.

  Let her get hungry, Hyunjee says. She'll eat when she's hungry.

  She isn't a three-year-old. Though, he might say, of course, on most days there isn't that much of a difference.

  Well, what, then? IV nutrition?

  Not now.

  So what? We just let her stay like this?

  That's what the expression means, he thinks: to suck the air out of a room. They circle each other like wary lions. When she crosses the room to get a new bottle of moisturizer he moves around the far side of the bed, pretending, for the fifth time, to check the catheter bag. The room is stifling; she hasn't unbuttoned her sweater. At every opportunity she backs against a wall with her arms crossed. If he brushed her arm, let alone slid a palm against her waist, what would she do? Swat the offending appendage like a fly? He's tempted to find out. It's been four days, and he hasn't fully regained the use of his lower body; he still suffers from the occasional bolt of pure liquid joy.

  The idea is to encourage them to make choices, he says. You know that. Choice is higher-level cognitive function.

  It'll all go to waste.

  You ought to make less, you know. You don't eat it.

  She shoots him a nasty look. Fine. You try, then. See if she'll listen to you.

  He pulls up a stool at the edge of the bed and pries open the lid of the smallest container. Kimchi. He can't eat it, though Hyunjee has offered many times: the smell makes his eyes water, but it's the image that gets him: the bulbous Napa roots, the rubbery leaves leaking bloody juices, like little hearts, scraps of human tissue, packed in a surgical basin.

  Mama, he says loudly, and immediately, with no hesitation, she reaches out for the chopsticks, lifts a strand of cabbage out with great delicacy, and guides it to her mouth.

  When we moved here, Hyunjee says, in '71, there wasn't a single other Korean family in Kew Gardens. Maybe fifty total in all of Queens. You couldn't buy a Napa cabbage in the whole borough, let alone the right kind of rice or kochichang. My aunt who lived in L.A. sent big boxes of supplies through the mail. When anyone flew back from Korea they would bring a suitcase full of sheets of nori. There was so little that after a while she stopped forcing me to eat it. She cooked for her and Dad and let me boil hot dogs and eat macaroni and cheese. In public she let me speak back to her in English, but at home she insisted on Korean. Thank god. I wanted out of the whole thing, right from the get-go. I was eleven, for Christ's sake.

  Mrs. Kang digs out a hunk of rice and lifts it to her lips, her fingers tremb
ling with the effort. As she chews her face takes on a puzzled, faraway look.

  Seriously. Try to imagine it. You're a little girl, and someone pushes you down on the asphalt at recess, and you've got a skinned knee and your pants are torn, and you're crying and wishing your mother was there and not wishing your mother was there and wanting to speak Korean and not wanting to speak it. And nobody else knows what the difference is between you and Connie Choy in the seventh grade, nobody knows what a Korean is, or cares, aren't those places just all the same anyway? What matters is you're here. Nobody gives a shit about the Japanese invasion or President Rhee or two thousand years of this dynasty and that dynasty. You learn to hate your own inconvenient self. And then before you know it you're in high school and you've forgotten all about it, you're just a good girl, a straight-A girl, you have your own little slot, and you ace the APs and the only boys you talk to are the Jewish boys you debate in history and kick the shit out of in calculus. And then one of them asks you to the prom, and you don't say no, you sneak out of the house through the basement window, and that's it, a quick sweaty fuck in the back of a rented limo. After that you're an American teenager for sure. Crying in the bathroom when your period's late.

  She puts down the chopsticks as if she's finished, then sticks in her fingers, picks another chunk of cabbage from the bowl, stares at it contemplatively, and tries to touch it to her lips. It winds around her finger, dribbling red juice down onto the knuckle.

  All I'm saying is I'm sick of complications. I envy her sometimes. One language. One place. One set of memories. Sick, right? Sometimes I think human beings just weren't meant to live this way.

  What way?

  Oh, you know. So fucking mixed up. Spring rolls and matzoh balls. Filipinos doing your nails and Koreans doing your laundry and Guatemalans bringing your Chinese food and Hasids handing you pamphlets every time you come out of the subway. There comes a point where it has to stop, doesn't it? The human mind can't contain so many contradictions. I'm not trying to sound like a racist. It isn't racism to love your own kind. Whoever said we had to do penance for all historical sins by living in such an upside-down world? I'm tired of it.

  Penance? he thinks. This is penance?

  You know what the latest thing is? Samantha had this bright idea of having her bat mitzvah reception at one of the Korean barbecue places on Thirty-second Street. She lives for that stuff. And of course Stan's parents—well, they've been once, they know what it's like. Plates and plates of raw bloody meat. It's not that they're kosher, I'd hardly even call them observant. They might even agree to it. But they'd be humiliated, of course. Devastated. So I'm the one who has to drop that particular bomb on her. And of course she pulls out the whole routine: I thought I could have anything I wanted. Am I supposed to, like, not be Korean, or something? And all I want to say to her is, Honey, you have no idea where this ends. I have no idea where it ends. And I'm tired of trying to explain it to them. You'd like to think they just accept it, because they don't know anything else. But they're not. They're climbing out of their bodies. It isn't natural. Like hell they'd ever be allowed to pray at the Wailing Wall.

  I thought only men prayed there.

  Oh, stop it. Don't quibble. You know what I mean.

  She reaches out and holds her mother's chin still while he wipes the juice from her lips. Bright blossoms on each cheek, her ears flushed pink, lurid growths, poisonous mushrooms. Not for the first time he marvels at the vivid effects of pale skin, a taxonomy of stifled feeling.

  I'm sorry, she says. I really should stop. I don't know what's taken hold of me. Maybe I'm coming down with something. I'm a little dizzy. Shit. She gives him an anxious passing look. He can't help but notice the ripples of skin around her eyes, and how they never seem to move as much as they should, as much as he wants them to. I've screwed everything up now, haven't I?

  He manages a dry chuckle, a little flourish of manly detachment. I know better than to think I know what to expect, he says.

  But your situation is completely different. Wouldn't you say? You belong here. Your parents both spoke English, for Christ's sake. Irish and Jamaican—that's like the American dream. That makes sense.

  Hyunjee, he says, be careful.

  What does that mean?

  When you're deciding what makes sense to you.

  You want to know the worst thing about me? She gives him a wild-eyed, beseeching look, but it's purely formal, a warning: what is he supposed to do, run down the hall for a straitjacket, wrap her mouth shut with gauze tape? They put up that huge new mosque on Ninety-sixth Street, she says, with the electric zipper sign on the fence. Twenty-four hours a day it says the same thing: There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. I pass it every time I drive out to Queens to go grocery shopping. And I always think, just for a second, I hate you. Every single time. I just want to stop the car and say, Go back to fucking Egypt, if you're so sure. Go back to Saudi Arabia. Sometimes I'm just so sick of having to be polite. I'm just so sick of pretending that coexistence is easy or natural. It's like I'm allergic to New York, but I am New York; it's an autoimmune thing. Sometimes you have to think, no wonder someone wanted to drop a bomb on this place and start over. I mean, we're all sitting around, acting as if it's going to make sense someday, but it never, never will.

  Well, he says, maybe you should go back to Korea and see what that's like. Leave the kids here. Leave them with what's-his-name. They'll do what kids always do. Survive. Adjust. You go back. If it means that much to you.

  Her hands, beautiful, large, uncreased, unlined hands, don't know what to do with themselves. While she stares at him, her mouth puckering into a little triangular divot, as if halted in the midst of formulating a response, they move up and down her thighs, rubbing her pants pockets, as if she's not sure if she remembered her keys.

  I don't get it, she finally says. Are you obtuse? You haven't been listening. Is that supposed to be funny?

  Her face, once again, frozen in midlook, eyebrows raised, as if surprised by any intensity, any feeling at all, even her own. Expecting to be hurt, he thinks, when he ought to be hurt, expecting it all to end badly.

  All right, forget it. It was rhetorical.

  You don't rhetorically tell someone to go back where they came from. I belong here. I paid my dues.

  No one's suggesting otherwise.

  And I'm not saying I'm a bad person either. I appreciate what you did. It was a very sweet —no, a very ... She waves a hand at the air, pinches the bridge of her nose, as if to let out the pressure of the thought.

  It was a gesture, he says. A somewhat disproportionate gesture.

  And I would love, believe me, I would love to respond in kind. But a life can only contain so much dissonance, don't you think? I'm just saying I'm tired.

  No one ever suggested a relationship, he says, keeping his face blank. If that's what you mean. Did we misunderstand each other?

  She shrugs and smoothes the sheet around her mother's legs.

  Because otherwise we would have to be very careful. Things could get awkward.

  Is that a threat?

  Of course not. It's an assessment. I'm not going anywhere until you say the word.

  Well, then, she says, you don't have anything to worry about.

  He's moved his bed to the far end of the room, away from the radiator, from the hot water pipes, underneath the window permanently propped open two inches with an old paperback copy of The Fountainhead. Never could sleep in heat of any kind. In the desert, when he was assigned the night shift and had to sleep in the glowing heat of the tent under the midday sun, he tore the liner out of his sleeping bag and soaked it with water out of his own precious supply. Like sleeping covered with wet paper towels. He's thought about moving his bed onto the roof, but not in Red Hook, not with six connected buildings on one block, and kids moving across them at all hours of the night with guns and yayo. On a good winter night the slipstream of cold air from the window keeps him happily unde
rneath a pile of blankets. He's so far away he barely hears the phone ringing on the most distant wall of the kitchen next to the stove. A railroad apartment, a run-to-the-phone apartment. His cell turned off and charging on his bedside table.

  It's too late to call, Hyunjee says. What time is it, anyway? Her voice is shaky, her breathing careless. I knew it was too late to call.

  Hang up, he says. I'll see you tomorrow.

  Oh, come on, she says. Don't sulk. I've been rehearsing this apology all night.

  He lowers himself into a chair and props his bare feet on the table next to a dirty juice glass. In the sallow wash of the streetlights they look pale and knobby, angular. A starving man's feet. A runner's feet.

  Listen, she says, those things I said, which I'm not going to repeat—

  I remember them.

  I was working something out. I was trying on a different frame of mind, and I'm sorry you had to be there to witness it. Sometimes I have to be the one person in the room who says what everybody else is thinking. Okay, okay, that's too presumptuous. What some people might be thinking. We're all so easily insulted these days, you know? Just quivering, waiting for someone to slip up so we can all take offense. It's just as tribal and parochial and dimwitted as the creationists in Kansas. Believe me, I should know. Offensive behavior is sending my kids to college.

  Hyunjee, he says, you know what your problem is? You're too good at this game. You know you can talk your way out of anything.

  So what, then? What's your solution? You were the one with all the questions the other night.

  I'm just saying there are some problems talking can't solve.

  Oh, she says. That old conundrum. Language is the sickness and the cure.

  No, he's thinking, that's not how I would have put it. And then he has the impulse to say, to fire right back, Love is the sickness and the cure. Shoot me now, he thinks, I've turned into a Hallmark card. And the worst of it is he's never believed any such thing. He would have said it without meaning it, to be clever, or provocative, to try it on for size. That's what you do around these people, he tells himself, you spatter words around like fingerpaint and call that a conversation, you say horrible things and take them back and say, that's a relationship, that's what I always wanted.