“It’s not working,” I said aloud to the sky, to Mila.
“Mommy?”
I was alone, talking to my three-year-old daughter. Unable to cry or control the workings of my own body.
“What you doing?”
I looked at Mila, my little baby, and hungered for my mother. The woman I’d resented my whole adult life because she too had been molded by her time. Mother had suffered for me when I was too shortsighted to see beyond my own anger. She was a woman who knew how to survive in the world without breaking, the way I seemed to at every turn. She would have known what to do.
“Mommy?” Mila cocked her head. “I tired.”
I sighed.
I raised myself up. “All right. Let’s go.”
She kissed my hand. “Carry me?”
Soon, I would show. I wouldn’t be able to hold Mila above my bulging stomach. It didn’t matter whether or not it was Kyunghwan’s. Our summer would no longer be mine to hoard and hate and love and long for whenever I wanted. I would always have this reminder.
“That bastard.” I picked up Mila. Her weight made my arms shake. I twirled her around until she laughed.
Solee and Jieun ran to us with their arms out, ready to embrace, their little orange shorts flapping in the wind. Jieun’s thick eyebrows rose in alarm, and I realized how late it was, that I’d forgotten to pick her up from school.
“Mommy!” she cried. “We went searching for you!”
“We looked at the orphanage.” Solee cocked her freckled face. “Where did you go?”
Jieun draped her arms around my hips. “You’re so dirty!”
I kissed their heads. “Mommy’s so sorry she forgot.”
“We went to mountain!” Mila thrust flowers at her sisters. “We got many!”
“Which mountain?” Solee asked. “Whul-ae?”
“I wish we could have come.” Jieun squashed a large bloom in her shirt pocket. “Stupid school. Why’d you go without us?”
“Can we join next time?” Solee caught a flower as it fell from Mila’s hair.
“This weekend, we’ll go. We’ll picnic by the river and pick all the plants we can find,” I said.
The girls danced, cheered. They forgave me so easily.
“How about we cook something delicious? What do my girls want?” I led them into the house.
“Hotteoks!” Jieun twirled her thin wrists. “We can make them together.”
“But maybe you should wash first?” Solee pinched my sleeve. “You’re dirtier than us.”
“I’ll wash quickly.” I wrapped my arms around my little trio. “Let’s make some of Mommy’s sweet, delicious hotteoks.”
In the outdoor kitchen, we poured flour, sugar, yeast, and salt into a bowl. The girls sifted the softness between their fingers. Mila drew white, powdery circles on Solee’s and Jieun’s cheeks. When I added water, they squealed and pushed their knuckles in to knead. The girls smacked their sticky hands together until the dough rose on their palms in small, triangular peaks.
“Look, Mommy. Look at the shapes,” Mila said.
The wonder my girls had for the world. For something as simple as flour turning into food. These girls were their own beings, bright, and curious. As I watched, they no longer reminded me of my life with Jisoo. I only saw the childlike pleasure of discovery.
I rubbed the stickiness off their palms with a wet rag. “Let’s sit outside while the dough rises. I missed my daughters today.”
We dragged heavy blankets into the backyard. We lay on the grass in a half circle, our heads touching, our loosened hair a shiny black river, a pond. I forgot, sometimes, how much I loved them. I had been selfish all fall, wound up in my own grief, and yet they went on loving me, their faces turning to mine as if I were their sun.
The yellowing leaves above our heads rippled with the wind. Shifting between the shadow and light, I felt relief for the first time all day. I was glad I hadn’t found any plants. No, I had chosen not to find any plants. I had chosen to get pregnant.
“Want to know a secret?” I pulled my hanbok tight across my stomach and placed their hands on me. Their tiny fingers pressed cloth and skin, forming stars on my belly. Hands I had created inside my own body. “Do you feel anything?”
“Grumbling!” Jieun laughed.
“Are you pregnant?” Solee asked.
I smiled. My smart one.
“I have a squash growing inside me,” I said. “Big and green and round. I went up the mountain to find it.”
I ballooned my hands up around my stomach and they laughed.
“Maybe it’ll turn into a baby,” I said. “Would you like that?”
Solee nodded shyly. Jieun and Mila rubbed their hands up and down, from belly to breasts and back.
“In here?” Jieun asked. She patted her own small belly. “Squashes turn into babies in here?”
* * *
I chose to remember.
When Kyunghwan returned to me, all I had wanted was to touch him. As the girls clambered over his lap, I longed to reach across their heads to graze the scar on his cheek. To feel the raised skin and understand all that had happened to him.
He ignored me whenever Jisoo was in the room. The distance he slipped between us was like tissue paper, filmy and delicate, but still a barrier. I watched his blurred form from the other side. He laughed with Jisoo and acted as if he’d returned only to make amends with his cousin. He is not even your real cousin, I wanted to say. Your fathers were cousins, so what does that make you? Nothing but orphans clinging for family like everyone else.
He wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t stop looking at him. At his high, narrow cheeks and straight nose, his new scar. I wanted to know him again.
One morning after Jisoo had left, Kyunghwan turned to me. He brushed his thumb against my lips. A touch so quick I could have imagined it. We sat across from each other with the table between us. Solee and Jieun were getting ready for school. Mila slept in the corner.
My gaze went straight to the girls. Perceptive Solee, who always seemed to know too much, and Jieun, who was too feisty to be anything but Jisoo’s favorite. They crouched over their shoes.
“You have beautiful girls.” Kyunghwan smiled at them. They fluttered under his attention. He’d always been a flirt.
As the girls bowed goodbye, blowing kisses at their uncle, I touched my mouth, where I could still feel the pressure of him, how he’d grazed me.
“Have a great day at school, little missies.”
“See you later!”
How he exposed me. How I wanted him to expose me.
I stood, moving away, moving toward him, unable to decide. “You haven’t looked at me once,” I said.
“I have.”
“Kyunghwan.”
“I’ve been looking, Haemi.” His eyes never leaving mine, he raised my hand and licked a burn along my wrist bone. His mouth found the spot immediately. His tongue searing the heated blur of my skin.
I wore a Western dress that morning, my only one. Striped white and green with a row of buttons down the front. Desperate. Absurd with the desire to make him see me. When he released my wrist, I undid one button and another. He leaned down and kissed my breasts through the thin fabric of my slip. For the first time, I wanted my milk to return so he could taste every part of me. His slight hands tugged at my underwear. Then I felt his warm mouth.
When Mila stirred in the corner, he pulled back, gasping. For a moment, I wondered if she would wake and see this—her mother standing naked, in pleasure, before a man on his knees. His mouth between her legs as if she were all there was to want in the world.
* * *
The girls watched as I pressed brown sugar and walnuts into the dough. I let them pet my stomach. “Squashy,” they sang. “Little Squashy likes hotteoks, too.”
We plated hot, fried, syrupy hotteoks and ate outside with our propped knees as tables. The brown sugar oozed with each bite. I would eat only sweets, I decided. Rice cakes and red bean
shaved ice. I would look only at beauty, at my girls, and I would be hopeful. Whoever came out of me would be better than her mother and these circumstances. This time, the pregnancy wouldn’t blanch my mind. I would be a woman who survived, who joyed in the act.
“Hotteoks are the best!” Jieun cried, her mouth crusted with sugar.
We heard Jisoo call from the gate, “Where are my little ladies?”
“Here, Daddy! In the back!” Mila yelled, licking her palms.
He found us outside. “What are you eating? Hotteoks?”
“We saved some for you,” Solee said.
“Squashy ate some!” Mila cried.
Jisoo frowned at me. “Why are they eating this now? How’re they going to eat dinner?” He unbuttoned the top of his shirt. My husband, so easily rankled, so easily hurt. The one who had stayed.
I picked up a hotteok. “We made them especially for you. Our sweet daddy.” I raised one to his lips. “Eat.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Come on,” I teased. “Eat for your wife.”
“Yeah, come on, Daddy!” Jieun said. “Eat for your beautiful squashy wife!”
I wafted the hotteok around his head until the girls laughed. He smiled, grudgingly, and took a bite.
* * *
I had licked the freckles along Kyunghwan’s right arm, that ocean’s wave. I had wanted to swim with him—me, a woman who feared the ocean. I’d wanted to sink into the waters if it meant we could stay together. I didn’t care that we weren’t alone, that Solee, Jieun, and Mila slept in the same house. That Jisoo could wake from his drunken sleep at any moment. Kyunghwan loved me and I wanted only him, the press of him inside me.
* * *
My husband carried Jieun on his shoulders through the halls of our home. Jisoo roared and she squealed. At each door, she raised her arms to kiss the frame. Jieun licked her thumb and pressed it to the wood above our heads. Solee and Mila followed them, quiet and smiling.
I watched my family and pressed a hand to my stomach. I would sear this image into me so I could conjure it when needed. If I had to have another child, this was the world it would enter.
They played a game naming as many fruits as they could think of.
“Pears!”
“Peaches!”
“Green plums!”
Yellow melons. Apples. Figs.
I left them and walked to the kitchen. In a wicker basket, I found the fruit Jisoo had brought home a few days earlier—ripe orange persimmons. I pulled off a green cap and sucked on its sweet, fibrous flesh. I would make Jisoo tea with the leaves. I would dry the fruit and stir up punch for the girls. If I couldn’t visit Hyunki, swollen with pregnancy, I could at least pour the drink into jars and send it to him as an apology.
I would be happy for this birth. A good, round woman.
Kyunghwan
1964
She was beautiful and his. She hated that—the phrasing and the truth of it.
I had returned to her in the summer.
I saw the child first. The girl’s round cheeks, how she played beside her mother in the yard. Beyond them, the house rested on a large, open space bordered by a stone wall. A single tree stood guarding the corner. From the look of the property, I knew right away. He was rich, a landowner. Haemi bent over a jar of soybean paste until the girl’s chattering made her turn.
She wore a traditional dress. A hanbok the color of celadon with her hair pulled into a bun. I had never seen her that way. Like the earth, the sky. The cleared neck, her sharp ears in full view.
I gestured to myself. “I came like you said.”
She stood there in the morning heat with the tree’s shadows streaking her face. The face, I recognized. Bare. Wide and pale. Dark eyes searching mine.
Haemi. The face I had known all my life.
I stepped forward. “What will you do now?”
Before she could respond, the call of my name, deep and happy, and too soon. I turned. Jisoo ran toward us, one arm in a high wave, a smile slathered across his ignorant face.
* * *
Twelve years had passed. At first, Haemi avoided being alone with me. When we were, even for snatches of a moment, we were exposed. The children were always there. Or Jisoo. Even so, I didn’t want to leave her alone. It seemed she would float into the ether if I turned my back. She laughed in a way that made her pulse. The frenzy buzzed through her, and the girls looked at her like she was an unknown creature. She was unhappy. I wanted her to know that I knew.
“I’m happy,” she said, the effort squeezing her face.
She wore expensive-looking dresses. They were impractical in the heat and country. I knew she wore them to show off, to prove to me she was fine.
“That’s not what you wrote,” I said.
“I changed my mind.”
“Why did you ask me to come then?”
“I don’t know.” Haemi carved the skin off a pear. “To see if you would.”
The girls sat around us with their homemade toys. She handed them the ragged, wet slices. We were in the backyard again, surrounded by the tree’s shade. I had no interest in the girls that day. Only Haemi. Her sharp beauty. Her refusal to give. I bent to the ground and touched the hem of her pale green hanbok, my fingers following the stitched flowers. I assumed she was punishing me for the lost years, for my foolish, teenage pride. I would make her see me.
* * *
Now, I was the one who saw her. Haemi’s image followed me everywhere. Summer was coming again to Seoul, the rainy season with its unceasing dampness. I saw her in the thickness of the air, her arms raised, pulling at the strings of her top. Fully clothed, shadowed beneath a tree. Happy. Unhappy. As a Japanese woman, stiff and haughty, pouring tea for a group of diplomats. As a street performer I came across in the night. Even as an American with red hair and milky, freckled skin. It was an uneasy sort of infatuation, one that left me desperate to erase her. Haemi wasn’t good for me anymore.
I drove my work truck with the window down and hoped the heavy wind would scatter my thoughts. It was lunchtime and I yelled at the pretty women. “Support the Republic of Korea! Buy domestic beauty products!” Their gazes hung on my face and swept to the truck’s bold blue lettering. Manager Kim should have paid me more for that sort of salesmanship.
I bought a coffee for him, a hot tea for me. Manager Kim came out of the front doors as I parked the truck. The building was small, more of a large store than a real factory. We worked in products that appealed to women’s vanities. “We’re going to make it,” he said each morning. I believed him. He had a college degree and had worked in Japan. He taught us how to track revenue, net sales, and gross profit during our weekly meetings.
I jumped from the truck. “The mechanic fixed the back wheels and pumped the front ones.”
He drummed his fingers against the pay-phone booth in front of the building. “How much did he charge?”
“Free. He’s an uncle I used to work with.”
“Good.” He sipped the coffee I’d handed him. “Someone called for you. I told you this booth is for emergencies.”
“For me? Did the operator leave a number?” I asked.
“He left a Seoul address. Said you needed to check in on a boardinghouse.” The pay phone rang just then. Manager Kim sighed. “It’ll be for you.”
Inside the booth, I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Working hard, cousin?”
Jisoo. I hadn’t spoken to him since the previous summer, when I’d left without saying goodbye. The letters we’d exchanged for the New Year had been brief and stilted with reserve. That was the last I’d heard from any of them. I didn’t know if he knew. I didn’t care. There was no affection between us any longer.
“You can’t call here,” I said. “I’m at work.”
“This is how you greet your elder?” He exhaled in a slow, deliberate way. “We haven’t heard from you in a long time.”
“My boss needs the telephone.”
“Well, I need you to check on Hyunki. We heard about the new protests, and he hasn’t been writing. Visit him for us.”
“Why should I?” Petulance rose in me. I couldn’t help it. We were no longer teenagers in a refugee village, yet still he treated me as his lesser. And I, in turn, acted like one.
Jisoo shifted. The phone muffled with his movements, a deep-throated sigh. “If he’s protesting, he could get in trouble. You know that.”
I imagined Haemi hovering near him, perhaps laughing at me, or worse, pitying me. Outside the booth, Manager Kim clapped his hands and signaled at the work I had to do inside. I nodded. We would get our own telephone soon. He would be able to make his calls in an office, and I wouldn’t have to deal with anyone from my old life.
“Make sure he’s not getting mixed up in that political shit,” Jisoo said.
“You think the students are wrong?” I asked.
“I think Park Chung-hee’s going to fix this country.” He laughed. “You need me to explain this to you, little cousin?”
“The Third Republic’s just as corrupt as the others. If you were here, you’d know.”
He grunted. “You never cared about politics.”
“I don’t have the leisure to care like you.” I opened the door to the booth and poured my tea on the ground. The liquid puddled on a patch of dirt like a beached jellyfish. Specks of dust swirled on the surface. I prodded the curve with my toe, watched the liquid burst.
I gave up and asked what I’d wanted to from the beginning. “How did you know where I worked?”
A fist sliding on wood, a cough. “Who do you think? Do this for us, Kyunghwan.”
“Don’t call here again.” I hung up the phone and relished the sound of the plastic receiver hitting metal.
I wouldn’t have been able to find Hyunki even if I’d wanted to. There were more than two and a half million people in Seoul now, and Hyunki was in college. Boys with protest signs and loud, educated voices were everywhere. In the train stations, on public squares, marching the streets. They tried to teach people like me about President Park’s censorship, about the government’s new proposal to reopen diplomatic ties with Japan. They burned effigies of imperialists and mourned the death of democracy as if we’d ever been one. I had better things to do.
If You Leave Me Page 23