But two years ago, everything between us had been new, and with Solee’s birth, I became a mother. The first time she needed a wash, we filled a deep basin. Jisoo layered cold and hot water. He tried to find the perfect medium. I teased him for turning soft, for not treating me with the same gentleness. He smiled. He skimmed his wet finger down my forehead and paused at the end of my nose. I let him slip his finger into my mouth. He touched and turned until he knew every surface of my tongue, the textures of my roof, the ridges of my teeth. He marked me. Solee watched from the floor, blinking up at us with her small, slight eyes. We crowded into each other. We wanted to wash our firstborn daughter together. We counted, “One, two, go,” and lowered Solee into love-warmed water.
With each passing year, Jisoo wanted more ease, more rhythm.
“Solee’s still teething and Jieun’s not even six months. I need time,” I said as we walked to the market.
He was talking about a son.
“I’m getting old. How do you know I’ll be able to last much longer?” he asked.
I laughed. He was twenty-three. I was twenty-one. There were others our age with larger families, but we weren’t too far behind.
“Give me a year,” I said. “Then Jieun won’t need milk, and I’ll be ready.”
“We’ll try tonight.” Jisoo grinned. He walked with a surety that aroused me, even with his arm.
“I get to decide,” I said.
“I’ll seduce you. Maybe they’ll be selling popped corn.” He glanced over, cunning written on his face. “You’d love that, my USO girl.” He tugged at my sleeve.
I had pulled on a yellow-dyed sweater over my hanbok for the walk. It was American, with buttons down the front and green trim along the wrists. When he’d first brought it home, I danced around our room, pretending I was one of the Kim Sisters. He said I was even better than the USO ladies, all tarty, with their pale, coiffed curls. “The color of piss,” he’d joked.
I danced again for him, up the road and back. I fluffed my hair, took the jug, and used it as a partner. It was this part I liked best, when we laughed together without undressing. A bee stalked the air around me, and Jisoo swatted it.
“I’m the only one allowed to taste your honey,” he said, then turned away, embarrassed by the sentiment.
“A bee’s stinger only works once.”
“Not mine.”
“Dirty man.” I knocked him with the bottom of the jug. He held on and swung me closer. Over the jug’s open mouth, he kissed me. Right there on the road.
I leaned down to pluck a pink cosmos flower and stuck it in his top buttonhole. “I wish you’d walk with me more often.” I held his good arm so tight he laughed and asked if I thought he was going to run away.
We were almost at the open market’s entrance when Jisoo pointed to the ditch that ran along the roadside. “Look.” He slid down the slope and pulled out a bicycle with a crate fastened to its back fender.
It was rusted in all its bends. Clumps of old metal flaked onto Jisoo’s hands as he inspected the body. Palms stained orange. He toed the wheels until they spun. A bicycle, conjured up from the earth, from the air.
He whistled. “Ugly and dented but once expensive.” Checking the sturdiness of the crate and its lid, he said, “Sit and I’ll ride.”
I shook my head.
I hadn’t been on a bike in years, since Kyunghwan.
I didn’t even want to look at the thing—it tore the day open, flooded the good with memories I thought I had discarded. Even the scent of its rust overwhelmed me. It smelled too close to blood.
To distract myself, I filled my head with as many English phrases as I could. I’d been practicing, and the soldier who poured clean water knew my name. I knew his, too. Jonathan. He had mesmerizing hair—reddish brown, like dried jujube berries—and the fleshiest nose I’d ever seen on a human. It started out predictably, protruding with a high arch, like all Americans’, but then bulged in the middle and flattened at the nostrils into the shape of a leaky dumpling.
“Good morning, Haemi.” Jonathan stood on the bed of a white truck and poured water from a plastic container into our jug. “Is this your husband?”
“Yes,” I said. “His name is Yun Jisoo. He is a landowner.”
Jisoo stepped in front of me. “Hello. Good day.” He pointed to me and then at himself again. “She is my wife.”
Jonathan laughed and put his hands up by his ears. “I’m not trying.” He pulled a photograph from his shirt pocket. Within its white border, a pale, freckled girl with chin-length hair sat with a book in her hands. She wore a necklace with a J pendant. The round curve of the letter’s bottom rested at the hollow of her throat. “My sweetheart,” he explained.
When Jisoo turned away, satisfied, Jonathan winked at me. “Jealous husband.”
I understood enough to smile. “Thank you. Have a good day.”
“Let’s go,” Jisoo said.
I waved at Jonathan a beat longer than I needed, gave a slow “Goodbye.”
“Freckle-faced dogs.” Jisoo strode ahead with the jug, past the line of women waiting. When we were alone, he turned too fast, spilling the water. “And when did you learn all that English?”
I smoothed the cosmos flower in his buttonhole. One of the petals had torn. Its juice bled onto my fingers. “Didn’t you want me to be a USO girl?”
“Not for him.”
“I thought I get to decide.”
“You don’t.” He set down the jug and leaned close. From the red in his cheeks, I knew I’d pushed him too far.
But he didn’t yell at me. He didn’t throw anything. He walked to the corner shack and squatted to pull out the bicycle he’d hidden. “The Americans will steal it,” he’d said. Watching him stoop over, I was embarrassed for him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You carry your own water.”
He walked ahead with the bicycle.
“Do you know what men say about chatty women?” he asked once I caught up with him.
“I was only teasing.”
He shoved the jug into the crate. “Let’s go.”
I followed. We passed broken buildings overtaken by wild azaleas. Thick bunches of oranges, pinks, and reds poked their heads between slats and through empty windows. Wide swaths of dirt fields butted up against newly built homes. It was too warm, but I still wore his sweater, hoping another bee would unite us.
We stopped with every neighbor’s greeting. I was tired, and Jisoo took his time to spite me. I smiled politely at all his people. If he wanted my anger as validation, he wouldn’t get it.
It was the bicycle that felt like a punishment. He made me push it along the road. Sunlight threw wheel-shaped shadows across the dirt. I concentrated on the spokes, elongated and transformed in their silhouettes.
I didn’t want to think about him. His thin lips drawing from a rolled cigarette, the narrow cheeks sucked in. His tall body against the lamppost, his freckled arms. I didn’t want to wonder what had happened to his bicycle, if he even rode one anymore. What he was doing now, away from us. I didn’t want to remember all those years ago, how I’d sit on his handlebars and we’d cycle so hard the earth seemed to peel away, one dusty layer at a time.
“You,” Jisoo called to a boy carrying a load of grains. “Who do you work for?”
The boy hiked up his back carrier by the straps. “The Sungs, sir.”
“How much do they pay you?”
I kicked the wheel, hoping some of the dirt would land on Jisoo’s trousers. I blamed him—for picking up the bicycle from the ditch, for ruining a happy day with his jealousy, for being a man who couldn’t hold my whole attention.
Beyond the boy, Mun Soonhee and Son Jongho walked up with a jug of their own. I waved. “Son Jongho and his wife are coming,” I said to Jisoo. I needed a distraction, and Mun Soonhee, always flouncing around in her Western tops and skirts, would do.
“Hello, hello.” Soonhee tapped the leather seat and raised her ey
ebrows.
“He found it in a ditch.” I shrugged.
Jisoo dismissed the boy and accepted tobacco from Son Jongho. They walked away from us, talking about the election campaign with pipes in the corners of their mouths. I leaned toward them. Jisoo retreated in the evenings with his newspapers and radio. He didn’t speak to me about what was happening in our country, but I read his scribbled notes, the editorials he bunched into balls. “Take these to the outhouse,” he would say as he handed me the articles on President Rhee. “We can wipe our asses with his lies.”
Soonhee stepped into my view and placed her jug at our feet. “Eavesdropping?”
I smiled. “Listening. My husband never talks to me about politics.”
Soonhee shrugged. “The government shouldn’t be trusted. What else is there to say?”
“Do you think Rhee will win again, now that Shin’s dead?”
“Don’t ask me.” She placed her hands on her hips and looked me up and down. “You and your hanboks.”
I turned my gaze to her. “I know. I should be more like you.” I fell easily into the talk she liked—complimentary and mindless. “You’re so modern. Men like that.”
“If I had a perfect moon face like yours, I wouldn’t have to try so hard.” She covered her chin with a sleeve. It was true that it stuck out like a shovel.
As Soonhee talked, I caught a glimpse of Jisoo. He rested one leg on an abandoned box. From the way he leaned into Jongho, his face hard with pride, I knew he was retelling the story of his tenant victory. His left arm clutched his bad one at the elbow, in a stance of natural ease. He grinned at me for a brief moment. Jisoo was driven by his desire to appear whole. While other landowners granted more rights to their tenants, he’d increased the share of rice ours had to provide as rent. “Five seoks more,” he’d said. Jongho clapped a hand onto Jisoo’s shoulder. Only Jisoo and I noticed his bad arm anymore.
Soonhee waved at the smoke wafting toward us. “How’re the girls?” She widened her downturned eyes, glanced at my stomach. “Trying for a boy again?”
And just like that I was annoyed with her, with her shovel face and her mushrooming family, and her short, styled hair that curled around her neck. Soonhee wore American clothes, even bared her ankles and shoulders at times, but she was as wearisome as all the other women in this town with their talk of motherhood.
“It’s getting late.” I pushed the bicycle forward. “We should go.”
“Let me hold this. Sit down.” She grabbed the handlebars and clucked. “You look terrible. Have you been sleeping? That’s probably why you haven’t been able to, you know.” She glanced at my stomach again.
As I turned to respond, I realized why her face looked so strange. She’d cut her eyebrows into thin, curved lines. A ridiculous woman.
“It’s true! Rest and heat your stomach every night,” she said.
“Maybe you’re lucky.” Sitting on a boulder, free from the strain of balancing the bicycle and jug, I felt a pulsing pain spread through me. I leaned forward. Motherhood seemed to tilt the space around me, leaching the energy from my mind, even clenching my muscles into knots. I panted, touched the ground. “We should go, Jisoo.”
“Boys aren’t so wonderful,” Soonhee said. “Mine are always eating every last bit of rice. Look at me. Jongho says I’m getting too thin.” She turned to show me her slim waist and bent closer. “He’s trying to fatten me up. If I have another one, you can have him.” She clucked. “Poor Haemi.”
“Poor Soonhee,” I clucked back. “Trying so hard to please her husband with those new eyebrows.”
She opened her mouth. Then with an ugly, nose-flaring pout on her face, she turned to the men. “Jongho! Let’s go. Sharp-tongued woman, Jisoo. You need to watch your wife.”
“He knows,” I said.
As the men emptied their pipes, Soonhee fingered my sweater. “You and your yellow.”
I shrugged her off. “I prefer white.”
She leaned in. “Last time I saw your husband, he was buying a yellow dress. It looked expensive, like something you wouldn’t ever wear.” Before I could respond, she called to her husband. “Time for this lucky family to go.”
“Jisoo met Dumpling Nose today,” I said to Hyunki later that evening. We leaned against the tree in our backyard.
“So?” Hyunki passed me a circular slice of glass with smoothed edges. It was useless but beautiful, deeply blue with a swirl of gray. I liked to think the glass had come from a rouge case that an American girl had given to her sweetheart as a keepsake. Hyunki thought it had once been the lid on a soldier’s pocket watch.
“I was better than him at speaking English.” I smiled. Hyunki had been teaching me, even borrowing extra workbooks from school.
“I’m going to get a first in mathematics. I’ll know more than both of you soon.”
“So conceited.” I swatted him. “You have a few years before you catch up to Jisoo at least.”
Hyunki swung an arm around my shoulders. He was lengthening in all directions—his hands, legs, feet, the expanse of his chest. “Teacher Lee said I’m the best in class.” He smiled almost the way he used to, a slip of tongue showing between his teeth, pink gums bared. “He said if I keep it up, I could be good enough for a better high school. Maybe even in Seoul.”
“Seoul?”
“Can you imagine?”
I ran the glass along his arm, from palm to elbow. Seoul was too far. I needed him close to me. “I’m still the one who checks your homework,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”
I watched the swirl of gray balance on his elbow and let myself be jealous for a moment. When I was twelve, I studied in secret in the middle of fields. I sat with books scattered around me in a half-moon as Hyunki, three years old, toddled between the barley stalks. Mathematics had a thick black cover that smelled like moss. A boy strode through the stalks with a basket in his hand. “For Hyunki to play with. It’ll keep our little chaperone from bothering us,” he’d said with a grin, slick with slyness. Pacing in front of me, careful to step only on dirt and spare the barley, he had a thick, straight nose and a handsome face. Kyunghwan. He recited his homework problems, and I solved them as fast as I could.
I nudged Hyunki with my shoulder, as if that movement could push my thoughts away. I’d been happy this morning. I tried to recall that lightness—in the comforting weight of Jisoo’s good arm slung across my chest as he’d slept, the girls snoring beside us. How I had wakened early and imagined Hyunki studying in his room and Mother heating her first cup of tea in the back kitchen.
“I feel awful today,” I said.
“You’ve been saying that for months.” Hyunki pretended to be me, one hand squeezing his temples, the other pounding his back.
I smiled at his teasing. It wasn’t the exhaustion. Or even the sadness that sometimes flashed through me as I stared at my girls. I was unexpectedly jealous. Of Jisoo and what Mun Soonhee’s words might mean. He was my husband, after all.
Hyunki squeezed me into a hug. He liked it when he could take on the role of the older, wiser sibling—but only when it was easy.
I peered at the sky through the glass’s blue film. “Do you think Jisoo has other women?”
Hyunki caught his surprise in his mouth and shot a spit bubble into the weeds.
“It’s common enough. I’m just curious,” I said.
When I finally looked at him, he shrugged, his gaze on an object in the distance. “How should I know?”
“You’re a boy. You’re awake when he comes home, when he’s drunk. Does he say anything to you?”
Jisoo seemed to consume more alcohol with each passing season. Often when I woke in the night to tend Jieun or Solee, I’d find him gone. He said he had nightmares, that drinking helped, that for all he did for us, he could get drunk every night if he wanted to. But disfigured, bloodied bodies wormed into my dreams, too. I’d thought he was making excuses. But maybe there was more to it.
“Haemi-nuna?” Hyunki to
uched my arm.
I imagined Jisoo with another woman. I wondered if she’d felt the thick, raised scars that tracked his injured arm, if she’d pleasured with him.
Hyunki held my hand, called my name again.
I passed him the glass. “Jisoo bought a yellow dress,” I said. “An expensive one. For someone else.”
Hyunki rolled the glass between his fingers. “Maybe it’s a surprise?”
“Mun Soonhee told me, so who knows if it’s even true.”
“A surprise,” he said, nodding. “A present for you?”
“He didn’t even notice Soonhee telling me, he was too busy talking about himself.”
“It’s getting cold.” We turned to find Mother at the back door. She nodded to Hyunki. “You better go inside before you get sick.”
“The doctor told me that it’s fine if I’m careful,” Hyunki said.
“Inside, now,” Mother said.
Hyunki pressed the warmed glass into my palm. He scurried down the stone path that led from the tree to the back kitchen. Mother frowned as she slid the door closed behind him. Always fierce, she’d hardened with each war.
I walked to where she stood beneath the roof’s eaves. “We were talking about a dress,” I said.
“I heard. You are filling your brother’s head with badness.”
“The birds and rats are always listening.” I rolled the glass along my wrist. “Don’t spy on me in my own home, Mother.”
“There are wives who roll boiled eggs over their bruised faces every night. You’re lucky. If Jisoo has another woman, you pretend you don’t know.”
I turned away.
Mother was slowly dying. I could tell from the stench that roosted in her mouth. I concentrated on that smell and the way her skin hung loose around the curve of her ribs, how fragile she felt beneath my hands when I scrubbed her on wash day. It shamed me to wallow in these images, but it was the only way I could tamp down my growing resentment. I thought about her dying until I could forgive her enough to turn back around.
If You Leave Me Page 14