by Mia Yun
All the way out to the damp alley, where winter mornings always smell like soot, Inah hangs on to Mommy’s coat sleeve until Grandma grabs her, firmly planting her by her side.
“Say good-bye quick to your mother and get inside,” Grandma says, all bundled up like a snowman. “It’s cold.” Inah pushes off the scratchy sleeve of Grandma’s gray wool sweater that smells like salted oily fish and turns up her bun face to Mommy and asks if she’s coming home early. Mommy assures her that she is. What time? Inah asks. At four o’clock maybe? Maybe. Promise? Mommy hooks her baby finger to Inah’s, but Inah still looks unsatisfied.
“Bye, Mommy,” Inah says finally, looking dejected.
“Bye,” Mommy says, pretending not to notice the tears brimming in Inah’s eyes. She pats us on the head, first Inah and then me. Resigned, Inah watches Mommy walk down the narrow alley in her long tea-colored winter coat as the sound of her shoe heels, soft clucking tongues, drift away like melodies of a slow song. Then, just as Mommy reaches the end of the alley, Inah, stretching all of her wispy four-year-old frame, belches out one more time, “Bye, Mommy!”
“Bye, Mommy!” I repeat after her, copying even her slightly aggressive tone.
Mommy turns, smiles and waves back with her hand in a black leather glove. And then she is gone, turning the corner. Suddenly, the sunless alley, hemmed in on both sides by the stone walls of the houses, feels empty and desolate. Inah, sad-faced and looking puzzled, stares at the gray space where Mommy has just disappeared. Then, even as she is being pulled away by Grandma’s cold and cracked hand, Inah looks over her shoulder just one more time, wistful.
For the rest of the day, Inah waits, and I watch her wait. When noon comes and passes and the sunlight that floods the house in the morning pulls out, leaving the old, dank Japanese house dark as a cave, time slows down, and the afternoon drags on interminably long as uneven hours and minutes accumulate and play tricks. Inah and I, confused with our still hazy sense of time and not comprehending the arbitrary nature of it, play, eat lunch and take a nap, and constantly ask Grandma how many hours before Mommy comes home and count and recount, folding and unfolding our small fingers. We never get tired of this daily repetition of waiting because of the sheer shiver of excitement that punctuates the end of it.
Then finally comes Saturday, and Daddy, a college art teacher, is back home for the weekend. How anxiously Inah and I wait for Saturdays. Sharing that aching thrill, and holding on to the memory of his warm voice and unique smell, so familiar, so recent but nonetheless fading. With none of the certainty that accompanies our daily waiting for Mommy. But with the fierce affection we reserve only for him. Every time he walks in through the door, Inah and I simply soar and fly to heaven. Ecstatic and breathless and momentarily shy and very much relieved, we rush and dive into his wide-open arms.
The next morning, even before sleep falls from our eyes, we rush to our parents’ room to wake him up so unceremoniously, pulling off the cover and shaking his arms. Jostling each other, Inah and I beg him to get up and play with us. Our hearts skip when he finally opens his blurry eyes, looking a little confused and sorry at the memory of sweet sleep, and massaging his sour morning stomach through his loose pajama top. But he’s ready to oblige us twins, who are climbing onto his lap, competing for his attention.
Soon, we get him on his hands and knees and climb up to his back and go on a horse ride. Out of the room, across the maroo, the slippery, varnished wooden floor, cold as ice in the winter, and then down the dank hallway splashed with morning sunlight. First in a halfhearted trot but soon in a full gallop, he goes carrying Inah and me on his back as we shout, “Iri-yah, ggil-ggil!” to get the Daddy-horse to hurry up even more. After a while, Daddy-horse gets angry and raises and tilts back his head and hisses and jumps up and down (we can see his splayed hair on the crown ripple like black waves), threatening to toss us up into the air. Inah and I shriek and scream, scared out of our wits, desperately clinging to his long, skinny back, wiggling and rolling.
Then, reaching the other end of the hallway, at the foot of the wooden staircase, Daddy-horse stops full and refuses to move. But we shrilly order him to climb up the steps and take us to the big, mildewy tatami-floored room upstairs, his painting studio, shut up for the winter. He pulls up his neck and cries for our mercy, but we shake our heads, laughing and giggling. He turns and asks us how we would like it if Daddy-horse grew wings on his shoulders and became a flying horse and carried Inah and Yunah to the sky over the river and mountains instead. No, no, no! We will be too scared! Just take us upstairs, Daddy-horse, we say. Crawling, he scales just a couple of steps before he collapses, out of breath. We scramble off his back fast, and bend down over Daddy-horse, sprawled on his back over the steps with his eyes shut tight and his long arms dangling at his sides. Terrified, we plead, “Apa! Apa!! Wake up! Open your eyes!” But he doesn’t wake up or open his eyes. Inah places her sticky thumb and forefinger on one of them and tries to pry the lid open, but it closes right back when she lets it go.
Now convinced Daddy is really dead, Inah and I are ready to burst out crying. That’s when he suddenly springs back to life. Opening his eyes wide, he bolts up, spreading out his arms and roaring over us, “Woo-waah!!” Inah and I jump up like two beans on a hot pan and run for our lives, screaming and squealing. Grandma looks in, loudly clucking her tongue, and says what a beautiful sight it is: an “old man” about to turn fifty in just a couple of days, horsing around with his two little girls. Fiercely protective of him, Inah hates Grandma so for that brief second, but Daddy just laughs.
By late afternoon on Sunday, though, Daddy is gone, and Inah and I start waiting and counting out loud for the next Saturday all over again. In our unerring conviction that the future holds only more fun and excitement.
TWO
It’s another Saturday, but Daddy still hasn’t come home when Inah and I change into our tutti-frutti pajamas. Mommy tucks us under the covers and reads us a story from the book of Korean folk tales; a story from long, long ago when “food grew on the Food Tree, and clothes grew on the Clothes Tree …” We know the story by heart.
After Mommy leaves, Inah and I lie in the dark with Grandma in the middle, tall as a haystack, all bundled up in her scratchy sweater and padded dungarees. I can’t see Yunah, Inah complains from the other side of her, and Grandma says just close your eyes and go to sleep. What’s there to see in the dark anyway. You saw Yunah all day and isn’t that enough. I can’t get out of my clothes yet because I will have to go out and open the door for your father, in case your mother falls asleep and doesn’t hear.
“Ha, he’ll like that,” Grandma says. “I don’t ever say one nice thing to him and always show him a scowling face. Ha, ha.”
“How come you don’t like Daddy, halmoni?” Inah asks.
“How come? How come! He stole my baby daughter. That’s how come. It wasn’t just any daughter. It was a daughter I got at forty-five years of age, already old as a witch. Whoever heard of a woman having a baby so old?! Certainly, I hadn’t. My first daughter I had at nineteen was already married by then. Your mother was a miracle baby. So what if it was a girl? I didn’t mind it a bit. It was your grandfather who minded it. He had left me years before for that fat concubine of his because I didn’t give him a son. That’s what he said, I didn’t give him a son. Like I was being spiteful to him. Well, he got his wish, for he got a son all right. Only he turns out to be dim-witted in the head. Then as a bargain, he gets three more daughters from her, one after another and another like it’s harvesting season. That should be the end of the story, you’d think. But no. One time he comes back, don’t ask me why, and plants me a baby. He then waits around hoping it will be a son, but should he be so lucky, it’s another girl. So he turns around and walks out for good. Huffing mad. He goes back to his fat concubine who’s now grown as big as a hippo. I said they deserved each other. But that’s another story. No one knows how I raised your mother. Alone. But I wouldn’t have given her up for all the ja
de and gold in the world. I did everything I could for her. Now, after all that, do you think I was planning to give her away to any man who came along? Certainly, not to an old bachelor, a dauber at that with nothing to his name. Now you know. It’s nothing personal. Your father certainly knows why I am so mean to him. Oh, to think that I used to be a number-one man-worshiper, too!” Inah and I giggle, covering our mouths. “What are you two giggling about? As if you understand a thing I am saying!”
Soon Grandma is snoring, blowing out a whistling noise through her parted lips. And trees whistle too in a thin voice outside. A beam of light slides in through the rice paper door and climbs to the ceiling. I hear Mommy in the next room. She’s still awake. On the other side of Grandma, Inah is wide awake, too. She tosses and turns. She’s thinking and thinking in her busy little head.
“Halmoni,“ Inah whispers in the dark after a long while.
“I thought you were sleeping,” Grandma says in her tired, scratchy voice.
“How come Daddy hasn’t come yet?”
“He should’ve been home a while ago. It must be the snow. If there’s a snowstorm, he won’t be coming with all those roads running through the mountains. Don’t stay up waiting. You can see him in the morning. Why aren’t you tired, anyway? You should be from gibbering all day like two noisy birds.”
But we’re not sleepy. We watch the ceiling where the beam of light is slithering across like a snake.
“Halmoni, tell us the story again, the time we were born,” Inah says, turning to Grandma.
“Yes, halmoni, tell us that story again,” I say.
“Don’t tell me you are awake, too,” Grandma says in her surprised voice. Inah and I giggle. “And haven’t you heard the story enough times?”
“But we want to hear it again. I was born first. Before Inah. Tell us how I popped out of Mommy’s belly button and cried and cried.”
“You weren’t just crying. You were all fussy, kicking your legs and screaming. All squished and red in the face. And then Inah followed. Very calm, not like Yunah. So your father thought, oh, she’s going to be the calm and patient one, and named her Inah, the Patient One. The first one he named Yunah, the Sparkling One. But if you ask me, I’d say it should have been the other way around. Because it turns out that Yunah is the quieter one of the two of you. And let me tell you, I don’t think there’s one patient bone in Inah.” Inah giggles proudly.
“Grandma, when we were born, Daddy cried. Right?”
“Sure he did. The first and last time I saw him cry. He was so happy. But all I could see was a hardship gate open wide in front of him. Now, go to sleep! It’s getting very late. And if you don’t, you know who might come for a visit.”
“The Japanese girl ghost?!” Inah and I whisper, listening for that psst, psst foot-padding sound the Japanese girl ghost makes as she wanders around at night, up and down the hall outside our room and the stairs. She’s lost and looking for her mother.
“That’s right. She will open the door to see who’s talking and talking in the room so late at night.” Shrieking, we cling to Grandma like two monkeys and bury our faces in her scratchy wool sweater. “Aggggh!” Grandma hisses and shakes when Inah’s cold hand slips in under her shirt, groping for her old hang-down breasts that are wrecked with wrinkles and have two dried jujubes for nipples. They are the same dried-up nipples Inah and I used to suck after Mommy painted her ninnies with iodine, and cry because no milk would come out. We were two years old. Too old for Mommy’s breast milk.
“Now go to sleep,” Grandma says. “Both of you.”
In sleep, I slip into Inah’s dream and together we fly on the back of Daddy-horse, who has grown big white wings on his shoulders. Up and away. Soaring and soaring into the sea-blue sky. Inah and I are so happy and excited, we raise our hands and shout and laugh.
THREE
Inah thought I should be able to see the snow-capped Alps as we approach Milan. But instead, it’s a sea of fog we fly into. It’s the kind of fog—white, opaque and dense as steam—that conceals everything from view. It closes in on us in a billowy wall as we descend blindly through the interminably gray space over Milan airport.
It’s barely six in the morning. The transit area where I wait for the connecting flight to Venice is all but deserted. The airport snack shop is just opening. At the service counter inside, two Italian men in crisp dark blue uniforms are chatting over their coffee in their scratchy morning voices. Outside the steel-framed glass wall, the somber sky hangs flat, like a hammered-out sheet of tin. The morning sun, unseen.
I read for a while and then give up, distracted by the new and old worries hatching like schools of tiny fish in my head. I notice the Italian man who sat next to me on the plane. He has taken refuge in the seat by the glass wall. (During the time it took to cross the Atlantic and change continents, we didn’t exchange a single word.) On the orange seat next to him sits his striped burlap bag. Like another person, a traveling companion. Mute and faithful. It’s the way he sits so still, slouched over, wrapping his big bent head with his thick, stubby, nicotine-stained fingers, he looks like a monk in penance. He isn’t a man good at waiting, but a man who is forced to the life of waiting. It never stops chipping away at him: waiting.
I wonder what he does, where he’s going, to whom, and who will be welcoming him back at the end of the flight. When we were kids, Inah and I would often wonder about these things. Especially riding in the back of the car. We would wonder aloud where all those people were going—those people inside the cars that flooded the roads in endless streams. The ceaseless motion of people. Where does it come from? This perpetual impetus to move.
Dad would always laugh at our philosophical waxing, tilting his head back. When he was a boy growing up in a small, mountain-locked village in Korea, he used to go up a hill every afternoon to watch the train that would pass by, once toward the north and once toward the south each day. In a long line of black steel cars. Leaving smoke blooms against the blue sky. It was while watching the train scissoring through the rice paddies from the hill that Dad nursed his unnameable yearning for places unknown to him. He knew that one day he would head somewhere, anywhere, aboard the same train. For it’s the dreaming that takes us to places. Trains, cars, buses, jets and our feet, they are just tools of our yearnings and dreams and desires.
The electronic clock now shows that it’s ten minutes to the departure time, but there is no sign of imminent boarding. Instead, a vague announcement comes on through crackling static; they are waiting for the arrival of the plane from Venice. The announcement instantly unhinges me. I get up and pace about. Growing nervous at the thought of Inah waiting at the Venice airport, glum-faced and grumbling.
The small plane I finally board for Venice looks Spartan and a little tattered at the edges. It takes off in a noisy drone, and sunlight floods in. Exhausted, I doze off right away.
In my dream, I am back at my parents’ house in Flushing, standing in the hallway upstairs outside the door of Inah’s room. For some reason, the door is varnished black like a coffin. It is open, so I slip inside. The room is empty with all the furniture gone: Inah’s old desk with nicks and scratches, the ugly bed Dad painted for her in buttercup yellow, and the baby blue dresser. And on the wall where the window used to be hangs a huge poster. I recognize it right away: It’s a blown-up cover of The Lost Steps, the Alejo Carpentier novel Inah once sent to me from college. The picture in iridescent silver overlapping blackish gray looks like a film negative of a Manhattan scape, with the steepled Chrysler and the UN jutting above and over the forest of buildings. It’s capped not by sky but by an aerial view of a gray-greenish forest, where a silver river or road snakes away below the patches of floating clouds.
What catches my eye is a pair of paper-cut emerald green butterflies that seem caught in the jungle of buildings. When I touch them, to my great surprise, the emerald wings instantly crumble and disintegrate into silver-flecked black dust and fall through my fingers.
/> I wake up from the dream with a long string of drool on my chin. The hot, sun-drenched plane is already descending. Below, dusted with gauzy veil-like golden sunlight, Venice lies flat, like a faded ancient map; intricately patterned with interlocking waterways and marshlands, all silver and ash. It’s the most surreal landscape I’ve ever seen.
The dream hangs in the back of my mind like a tendril when I step off the plane onto the hot steaming tarmac. It’s hazy, and the light is glaring. A bus ferries us to the airport building, which is surprisingly small and drab. I am the only Asian face in the immigration line. Unconsciously, I keep checking my American passport.
“Arrivederci!” the immigration officer booms when I present my passport. He’s handsome, like a young Clint Eastwood. At Kennedy, as I went through the metal detector, Mom called out to my back and warned, “Watch out for Itaeri (Italian) men!” As if she could just picture all these Italian men waiting for me with their mouths open like sharks. “From Korea, eh?!” he says, smiling when he returns my passport. (My American passport shows that I was born in Korea.)
I pick up my luggage and pass through customs and head for the door. To my great relief, I spot Inah right away. So it was another “dog dream.”
“Inah! Here!” In a fit of excitement, I shout and wave my passport over my head. Embarrassed by my exuberance, she barely acknowledges me. Closing the book she has been reading, she slings over, as slow as a slug. Without even a pretense of hurrying. Cool as ever. Her wardrobe hasn’t seen a change: the usual oversized white T-shirt, loose-fitting khaki jeans and beat-up sneakers. A dark blue “Kipling” backpack hangs all the way down to the small of her back. I wait, frozen. And as Inah gets closer, my heart sinks a little further. She looks awful. Thin and appallingly pale. Almost dingy. Her white T-shirt is grayish and wafer thin from too many washes. Her hair falls limply over her shoulder, and her bangs badly need a trim. And the burn scars on her face somehow look worse than I remember. But then they always do, and each time it’s a shock. I can’t explain the flash of anger. I guess I am disappointed. It’s just all too familiar. Nothing ever changes.