Em's Awful Good Fortune

by Marcie Maxfield

  “Earth to Em,” she said, splashing water at me.

  I’m not going home, I was thinking, weightless and floating, the backs of my calves resting on the edge of the hot tub. Let him be the dad for a while. Let him not dawdle for one minute, not go out for drinks with the guys, not have a moment to himself. Let him be a hamster on a treadmill for a whole year. Correction: eleven months. You exaggerate, Gee always says, as if the linguistic jump from months to years, the calendar callout, is the issue. Or perhaps if he can catch me on a technicality, he can discredit my perception of this past year, the year of our living apart. He can paint me as the hyperbolic bitch.

  “Can I move in with you, An?” I asked. There were magazines and takeout containers, wet towels and dirty ashtrays strewn around the Jacuzzi. The place was a total mess, and small, but there had to be a guest room somewhere.

  “Em, I’m house-sitting for my boss! He’s coming home in two days. And he’s going to go ballistic if I don’t clean this place up.” She laughed.

  I’m going to go ballistic as soon as I stop being weepy, I thought. But I’m not ready to stop crying.

  “Maybe I’ll take the baby and move back home with my mom.”

  “Nobody loves you like your mother,” Andra said.

  It’s one of our universal truths. Unconditionally. But also without boundaries, so that’s kind of a double-edged sword. Why would I want anyone to love me like my mother does, always judging me, telling me to fix my face—and “Emma, can’t you do anything with your hair?” Like my hair is from outer space or something, like I’m the only person in the world to have curly hair. But, come to think of it, I am the only one in my family with this hair. Maybe the mailman had curls. And that’s why Mom has always loved me best.

  “Nobody loves you like your mother,” I replied.

  “That’s why you gotta go home,” Andra said. “For Ruby.”

  When I walked in the door, there was Gee, on a ladder, in the middle of the living room, changing the damn lightbulbs.

  Everyone said it didn’t mean anything—and I told a lot of people. I wasn’t keeping this thing a secret, holding it close, or sweeping it under a rug, like my mother-in-law wished I had the common decency to do. It was out there, bleeding and belching and vomiting all over anyone who would listen. Here’s what everyone said: It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.

  Have you ever noticed how people speak in double negatives when they want to obscure some obvious truth? What they meant was, it didn’t mean anything to him. The whole episode was refracted through the prism of male perspective. What mattered most to everyone was how Gee felt when he was screwing the girl who was not me. Turns out it mattered more how I felt.

  It was a sea change, a seismic betrayal. It was the end of the beginning, my married-lady fantasy where everything bad was good because we were in it together. Just scraping by was okay because we were scrimping together; renting was okay because we were sharing a bedroom; not having a new couch was okay as long as our legs were in a cozy jumble on the old one; being the one who dropped off and picked up the baby from daycare was okay because we didn’t add it up or break it down like that, who did what or how much. The part of me that was willing to overlook all that shit just shut down, not because Gee had dipped into someone else’s honey, but because he left me alone to do everything while he was living large in a hotel with laundry and maid service, blowing his per diem at karaoke bars while back home his wife had become the family workhorse, a burro, a nagging bitch with a full-time job and a baby.

  Things were not okay with us for a very long time—so long I gave it a name, called it the Decade of Hate. Maybe I should have taken the baby and made a run for it, though not because he’s a bad guy. He’s a good guy. I know that now. But I know me better too. I’m not a person who forgives—I’m a person who keeps score, who makes lists, who hits replay in her head and ruminates for months, sometimes years. I’m a person who remembers details and holds a grudge. This is perhaps not the greatest quality to have in a marriage.

  “It was a mistake,” Gee told the marriage counselor, adding, “It didn’t mean anything.” He said he felt terrible and it would never happen again. Said it like there was nothing else to discuss, like my feelings were my problem and not his bother, and he never came to another session. The next week, I went by myself.

  “Where’s your husband?” Wayne asked.

  “In London, on business,” I told him. Which was true. But the next time, the third visit, when Gee was a no-show and Wayne asked where he was, I said, “He’s not coming back.” Then I asked, “Can’t we do this marriage-counseling thing without him?”

  Wayne was a no-bullshit kind of therapist. “Emma,” he said, “My practice is filled with couples like you and your husband. I’m going to save you a lot of money. I’m going to tell you exactly what I’d tell you after a year of counseling: This is who you married, and he’s not going to change. He’s a road guy. This is Hollywood—half of this town is some variation on Gee: location scouts, directors, actors, musicians, people whose lives are defined by their careers and whose careers are defined by travel. You have two choices,” he said. “Either you accept this lifestyle or you get a divorce.”

  And then Wayne broke up with me.

  “I only work with couples,” he said.

  Wayne was wrong, though. There was a third option: real estate. Gee and I bought a house in Glassell Park, a downscale piece of LA that we just barely squeaked into. It was on a hill (not in the hills), a treeshrouded hideaway with concrete floors before that style became popular as an industrial-chic design statement. It was a cabin, really. This was the house that Osaka bought. Not just Gee’s bonus for completing the gig—that wasn’t nearly enough cash for a down payment. No, Gee’s family kicked in for that house. I told him—after he came home stinking of “Whatever Her Name Was”—that we needed to buy a house. It was my brother who gave me the idea; he’s a personal injury lawyer. And if your husband screwing Japanese girls isn’t a personal injury, what is? So I called my brother and asked what I’d get in a divorce.

  “What do you have, Em?” he asked. Meaning investments and real estate.

  We were renting a duplex on Tica Drive at the time; we had a toddler and some credit card debt.

  “You’ll get half of that,” he joked.

  Only it wasn’t funny. “I’ve been thinking maybe I should take the baby and come home to Detroit,” I said.

  That’s when my brother got all lawyerly and started talking about crossing state lines, kidnapping, courts, and visitation rights. Just having that conversation hurt my head, so I decided to give Gee another chance, but this time with a real estate insurance policy. I know this might sound cold and calculating, but I made Gee call up his dad, tell him what a shit excuse for a husband he was, and ask for the money.

  “Don’t call your mom,” I said. “She’s never liked me.”

  I remember Gee’s aunt, the one with the red hair, once telling me that Gee’s mom cried when she heard we were getting married. She blubbered on about how Gee was not going to marry “that woman.” Like I was poor white trash, only worse—Midwestern and middle class, from a family of suits—when Gee’s family were all artists. Reverse snobs. Making me feel soiled because my family had some sense of a spreadsheet. I always got the feeling his mother would rather Gee be gay than marry me; being gay had more cachet than a girl from Detroit. That’s how much I didn’t fit into Gee’s family. Or maybe that’s how much Gee loved me, depending on how you look at it, him being willing to defy his mom and all.

  My side of the family loved Gee from the start. “He’s a keeper,” they said, and not because he had financial potential. He showed up for our wedding with a blue ponytail and no steady employment, not exactly the picture of marriage material, but he charmed them. My dad thought Gee was a straight-up guy underneath the blue hair, and my mom, well, she was just happy that her baby was getting married. And she liked how I let Gee get close to me, let
him drape his arm around my shoulder or rest his hand on my thigh. That I smiled at him like he lit up my world.

  Ortheia Barnes sang “You Are My Friend” at our wedding. Ortheia was Detroit soul royalty, big and bluesy. Andra and I used to hang out at a nightclub where she worked, sit in the powder room with her on breaks between sets and gab. “If I ever find the right guy,” I’d tell her, “that’s the song I’m gonna play at my wedding.”

  “Girl, if you ever find that guy, I’ll come and sing it at your wedding.”

  And she did. Belted out “You Are My Friend” a capella in my parents’ living room like Patti Labelle was in the house. The in-laws were standing there, all East Coast, pretentious classical connoisseurs, Pachelbel’s Canon in D, so pale I thought they were gonna pass the fuck out. And this was before they saw the outrageous tower of fruit my mother ordered from the caterer. The fruit sculpture was her response to Gee’s and my request that she keep things simple—just a small wedding at home, fresh berries for dessert, nothing fancy.

  Gotta wonder why the redhead told me that story in the first place, about my mother-in-law bawling and calling me “that woman.” That hurt more than I let on. I never trusted her after that, either of them, Milly or the redhead. Anyway, Gee’s parents sent us a bundle. It was a save-the-marriage loan. His aunt chipped in too; all of a sudden, everyone was trying to make this marriage work. Andra called that house the love shack, and it was a shack, but it was never about love—this was the “hell hath no fury” house. The neighbors had a Doberman pinscher that growled and stalked the chain-link fence. An angry, territorial bitch. I was afraid of that dog almost as much as I was afraid of becoming her. I did not want to live there alone.

  My mother always told me being alone was the worst thing in the world. Unsurvivable. Worse than being broke, which can be temporary. “Fortunes change,” she said, “but love lasts forever. Being alone …” she said, her voice tapering off, and then she just shook her head like there were no words to describe it. What she didn’t tell me was that it was possible to be alone in a marriage, that marriage can actually feed loneliness.

  All I knew was that working full-time and being a mom without a partner can turn a person mean and angry fast. I felt like I had my back up against competing hells. Maybe I took the easy way out, or maybe I threw in with love, but my job—although it was in the music industry and I had negotiated a pretty sweet work-from-home deal, with flexible hours and an expense account—was just a job. And even though I was comped on guest lists for live shows up and down Sunset Strip and got paid to do what I loved, even though I was passionate about music and made as much money as Gee, still, like my mama told me, fortunes come and go. I figured it would be easier to replace that job than find a new husband. And I knew our marriage wouldn’t survive another overseas separation. So when Gee was offered a gig in Korea, this time, me and Ruby—and the baby—all tagged along.

  MONSOON SEASON

  The first thing I noticed when we landed at Gimpo airport was the smell of garlic. Not fresh garlic, but garlic regurgitated through sweat and seeping from pores. After a while, it didn’t bother me, probably because that’s how I smelled too. It’s definitely how Gee smelled. He sweated a lot at work and came home stinky. And still I was happy to see him. A person can adapt to just about anything, I mused, smiling to myself, stirring glass noodles. Even living in Daejeon, South Korea.

  Every morning, I took the kids to the park. They’d swing and slide and play contentedly in the sandbox. That would last for about half an hour before they tugged at my sleeve, complaining, “Mommy, I’m bored.” Me, too, I’d think, glancing at my watch. Ten o’clock, and I have nothing planned for the rest of the day. This was it, our big outing, a trip to the park. My mommy bag of tricks was empty.

  Somehow I got my hands on an English-language book called Korean Cookery, by Lee Wade, and learned to make chap chae from scratch. It took forever. You have to julienne all the vegetables—carrots, onions, scallions, four different kinds of mushrooms (p’yogo, mogi, nutari, and sogi)—stir-fry each one separately, sauté the spinach and garlic, boil the noodles, and cook the meat. Last thing is the dressing: soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, sugar; then you combine it all in one big pot. So many ingredients, two trips to the market, carting food on my back—it took hours; it took all afternoon with the kids in tow. Who has the time to do this, I wondered?

  I did, obviously.

  I was a stay-at-home mom making chap chae from scratch. Before moving to Korea, I was the number one salesperson at a rock magazine, I had an expense account, and took record execs to fancy restaurants. Now I smelled like garlic and my hair was sticky with sesame oil. I didn’t even like to cook—or, rather, I liked to cook with Gee, not for him. This made me want to scream. This feeling, this shriek that wanted to explode all over my life, it sat there in my throat, burning a hole, because I didn’t want to wake Ruby and Rio. Never wake sleeping children. Instead, I took a nap. I was sleeping night and day. Gee was working around the clock.

  After dinner, I fed and bathed the kids, read them a book about wild things, and told them a bedtime story about Rubina and Rioli, a princess and prince who found themselves alone in a strange land. Their mother, the queen, who was not without powers, had been taken hostage by a great and mighty force.

  “What’s it look like, Mommy?”

  “It looks like love, sweetie.”

  Gee came home from work and found me in bed, not even dozed off on the couch with a book; couldn’t even pretend to have just nodded off for a minute. I had nap-all-day foggy brain.

  “What did you do today?” he grilled me.

  “What time is it?” I replied, wiping my eyes, rubbing my tongue along my teeth. Better brush them, I thought. My mouth tasted bitter. Kimchee. I liked Korean food, but it made my breath smell like a fire-breathing dragon. I wanted to say, “I didn’t sign up for this,” but I sort of did when I quit my job and agreed to follow Gee to Korea—like a bad 1950s pop song, “I Will Follow Him.” Still, no one told me that we’d be the only English-speaking family in town. No Mommy and Me, no chardonnay playdates. It was precisely because there was nothing in Daejeon—just farmland, marshes, and cranes flying low, with elegant necks and wingspans—that they could build an expo and employ Gee in this backwoods part of South Korea.

  “Why can’t you find something interesting to do here?” Gee wanted to know. He sounded disappointed in me, not as a wife and mother, but as a person. As if I lacked the adventure gene.

  “I made chap chae,” I told him.

  “Wow,” he said. “Really, that’s so cool.”

  He had no idea how angry I was that he had brought us here. Brought me here and tried to pass it off as an adventure. It was monsoon season. The clothesline on our balcony no longer seemed so charmingly Third World–y as dark spots spread across the baby’s onesies and my damp-for-days jeans grew rank with mildew, the air so muggy my hair looked like it belonged on a cartoon character with her finger stuck in a wall socket. A sea of almond eyes framed by inky black, stick-straight hair stared at me: this frazzled and frizzy Western woman with two kids in tow. Sometimes they giggled and tried to pet Ruby’s hair. I said, “Aniyo!” and politely shooed away their hands.

  Daejeon was a town in transition, on the verge of becoming a science center, a government hub, but back then, there was no expat community. No tagalongs. There was only one supermarket, located in the community center, along with a bowling alley and a movie theater that showed American films dubbed into Korean. In the basement was a brand-new food court, bright and clean, where they sold fifty different types of tofu, freshly sliced—try pitching that to a pair of American toddlers.

  Look, kids, the tofu lady!

  That’s where I first met the Christian missionary. I was having a bowl of rice at the food counter; she had stringy hair and a herd of messy kids, white and pasty, with runny noses. She was the only other Western woman I had ever seen in this city.

  “Do yo
u need an oven?” she asked.

  “I could use a dryer,” I told her.

  “Oh, golly. Dryers are hard to find. Come to Bible study,” she suggested, pressing her card into my hand. I didn’t need religion; what I needed was clean, dry sheets.

  But I took her card anyway, thinking never in a million years would I call this woman. After that, every time I ran into her and her kids, five of them, she dangled an oven in front of me like a carrot and I described how my kids’ clothes were crawling with mildew. It became a sort of comedy routine, her offering me something I didn’t want, me needing something she couldn’t give me. It would have been funnier if it hadn’t been such a spot-on mirror of my marriage: Gee offering me an overseas adventure. When what I needed was to be home, networking, moving my career forward in Los Angeles.

  Sometimes I fantasized about Gee dying in a fluke work-related accident. It could happen. He wore a hard hat. He had a collection of hard hats with his name on them, from every job site he’d ever worked on. Gee. Mr. Gee. Gee-san. There was this one incident he told me about when he came home from work late, pissed off. He had been standing in a fountain that was drained for repairs, working on faulty electrical wires or something, when someone in the control booth turned the water on and Gee got soaked. Gee doesn’t get mad often, but when he does, watch out—telephones fly. He stormed into the control booth, dripping wet, and did a strip show in front of all of the Korean workers. Took off every stitch of clothing, even his choners—that’s his word—item by item, wringing them out on the floor, slapping the desk with them, like his shirt was a locker-room towel. Then he stood there, a dripping wet, buck naked, big dick, angry American man.

  “They’ll never do that again.” Gee laughed, slamming his beer on the table.