Waxing Moon

by H. S. Kim

  “I don’t know about you, but I need to rest my eyes for a moment,” Mrs. Wang said, sitting down. Her stomach growled, but for some reason she didn’t feel like eating.

  “May I stay with you, Mrs. Wang?” Nani asked, looking distressed.

  “I’d like to rest if you don’t mind.” Mrs. Wang lay on the mat and closed her eyes.

  Nani dragged her feet out of the room and closed the door. When she tried to put on her shoes, her feet didn’t fit. They were swollen and felt like logs when she finally forced them into her shoes. On the way to her room, she suddenly looked up at the night sky and wished for her mother.

  From the kitchen, giggles leaked out. Nani stood beside the door and peeked in. Bok and Soonyi were playing pick-up-stone. Nani stepped inside the kitchen and yelled, raising her eyebrows, “What on earth are you doing? Don’t you know our lady is in critical condition? And you are here giggling away, playing like a couple of children?”

  “Big Sister, I was waiting for you. Bok kept me company because I was scared,” Soonyi explained and rolled her eyes.

  “Bok, go now. It’s late. You need to go and sleep,” Nani said.

  Bok left, yawning. Soonyi picked up the stones and dropped them in a box. Nani and Soonyi washed up and scrubbed their teeth with salt.

  Lying side by side on their mats, Nani advised Soonyi, “Among aristocrats, seven is the age you stop being alone with the other sex until marriage. Being a maid doesn’t mean you can roll about like a common stone in whichever direction you get kicked. Reserve yourself until you know what you are doing.” Soonyi was already fast asleep when Nani was done with her lecture. Sometime later, Nani fell asleep only to be woken up again when Mirae rushed in to look for Mrs. Wang, for Mistress Yee was having a contraction.

  23

  Before she reached home at noon, Mrs. Wang heard her dog howl. She stopped on the path, treaded mostly by her alone for many years. Her dog never cried like that. Mrs. Wang hurried home and pushed the gate open forcefully.

  Her wimpy dog, Tiger, stood in the middle of the yard, howling worriedly as he watched the unexpected stranger on the wooden bench.

  Mrs. Wang patted Tiger. Min sat there, staring at his feet.

  Mrs. Wang tapped him on the shoulder, and he raised his head wearily. He looked drowned in exhaustion. “Go feed my stove with the logs behind the house.” She unlatched the cage and let the chickens out as she walked to the kitchen to find some food for Tiger. In a minute, Min carried a bundle of split wood to the stove in the kitchen. Mrs. Wang left the kitchen with a day-old barley soup in a bowl. As soon as she poured it into his bowl, Tiger gulped it down noisily.

  Mrs. Wang went back to the kitchen and put water in a pot. She dropped a few cornhusks into the water and let it boil. She also soaked rice in water for lunch.

  “When you are done, wash your hands and come on in,” Mrs. Wang said.

  She went into her room and pulled her journal out of a drawer.

  Twice blown by fate, Mr. O howled like a dog, she began. She wrote the details of the birth, and she finished with a sentence, I hope I need never return to Mr. O’s.

  When she put her brush down, she realized that Min was lingering behind the latticed door on the open wooden floor. Mrs. Wang clucked her tongue, pitying him for being utterly inadequate. Opening the door, she motioned to him to come in.

  Min came in like a cautious, shy cat and sat near the door.

  “Find a warmer spot to sit or, even better, lie down so that the heat will soothe your aching muscles,” Mrs. Wang said, getting up to go back to the kitchen.

  She brought in the food and the cornhusk tea on a tray. When she entered, Min was asleep. She decided that sleep was a better remedy for him than food at the moment. She covered one bowl of rice for Min, and she began to eat the other bowl of rice.

  As she was eating, she couldn’t help but examine Min’s face, his long legs, and his ragged outfit. Something about him reminded her of someone she knew. She held her chopsticks in midair and thought for a moment. The shape of his chin, angular and awkward; there is another person who has that chin. The lips, full and shapely.

  But when she was done eating, she had to go to her drawer and pull out her old journals. Once in a while, she reread them. She had to dig deeply. The pages of those books at the bottom were brownish yellow and frayed. She was thinking, eighteen years perhaps, appraising Min.

  The book was bound with bamboo sticks and waxed cotton threads used for kite fighting. She had done it herself. Nowadays, there were blank books she could buy at the marketplace, but back then she had to cut the papers and starch them to give the pages stiffness and longevity. She flipped through the pages, recognizing some names. Some of the babies from that time were having their own babies now. Dubak was one of them.

  She couldn’t find the journal entry with Min’s name at first, but then there was a record of a baby boy, born in a hut by the Snake River in the neighboring village, which she had no recollection of. But it said a woman named Hong, pregnant out of wedlock, apparently had tried to kill herself (it didn’t say how), but she survived. Mrs. Wang looked closely.

  She appeared to be no more than seventeen and was extremely shy. During her labor, she made no peep, enduring her pain like a cow. In fact, her eyes resembled those of a cow. A handsome baby boy was born, and I knew I wouldn’t see her again. So I asked her what she intended to call her son. She didn’t seem to have thought of a name for him yet. She just wrote O on my palm, which I presumed was his last name. Then I realized she couldn’t talk. She was mute. How silly I was, not to have recognized that from the beginning! Had I been a little more sensitive, I wouldn’t have interrogated her with all my questions. As I was leaving her hut, she tried to offer me a few copper coins, but I didn’t have the heart to take them. I pulled a silver coin from my pocket and left it before the entrance. I didn’t have a good feeling about this woman. She carried a smell of loneliness. In fact, no one showed up to cook kelp soup for her. But I had to tell myself that her private life was none of my business. I wish her all the best.

  Mrs. Wang read the journal entry once more and sighed. Min groaned in his sleep, twitching his lips. She looked at him once again. She shook her head.

  Her floor was getting warm now and it felt good. She lay down and closed her eyes, trying to recall the woman in question, but she could not remember anything about her. Her eyelids were getting heavy and her limbs were softening. The previous night she had hardly slept, and she could feel the effect of it in her joints. She fell deeply asleep and had various dreams, none of which she could recall when she awoke to her dog’s wild barking.

  She sat up, feeling dazed. She was also extremely thirsty. But first she had to check on why her dog was barking so fiercely. She stepped out of her room. Beyond her bamboos spread a crimson sheet of the sunset. Her lungs expanded as she breathed in the fresh air. Each time she saw the sunset, she was happy that she had settled up on the hill, remote from anyone else. Down in the valley, where the land was more expensive because of conveniences, such as the proximity to water and the market, it was now getting overpopulated. Unlike other people, Mrs. Wang often needed time alone.

  Her dog was barking toward the wooden gate and jumped around happily to see Mrs. Wang. Then he went to the gate to bark again.

  “What’s behind the gate?” she asked Tiger, examining her wooden gate, loosely put together and the upper hinge still out of order.

  He stared at her innocently.

  Mrs. Wang gathered her chickens and coaxed them into the cage. Suddenly, she remembered that Min had slept in the room with her. She turned around to check for his shoes, but they were gone. She hurried to her room and realized that she had been reading her old journal before going to bed. A few books were out on the low table, and the one she was reading was placed now near the latticed door. Obvious
ly, Min had removed it from the low table to read it by the light near the door. Mrs. Wang lit her candle and sat to check on the open book. It was the page about a baby boy of Hong being born in a hut by the Snake River. But he couldn’t have deduced anything from that page—unless, of course, he had other relevant information about his birth.

  Her stomach growled. She put her journals back into a drawer and went to the kitchen. The cornhusk brew had been removed from the stove. She had planned to give it to Min for the swelling. A few things were missing, she realized. Dried meat that had been hanging from the ceiling, along with the garlic, was gone. A bottle of ginseng wine, which she had received as a gift, was also gone. She went to her room and checked her money jar. Untouched.

  24

  Mansong turned one. So did Jaya’s firstborn. But the winter was a bad time to celebrate a birthday because food was scarce, and the cold, dreary weather kept people inside, all bundled up. Jaya had waited for the occasion to strike a deal with Mr. O: she wanted a piece of land for being Mansong’s permanent caregiver. She was practically the mother in every sense of the term, everyone professed. But the funereal atmosphere at their landlord’s suspended her ingenious plan. In the meantime, she went around grumbling to her fellow peasants about how much it cost her to have another mouth—not just a mouth, but an upper-class mouth—to feed. The sheets of ice on the road, however, kept her inside because her belly began to obstruct the view of her steps when walking. Behind her back, village women gossiped about how enormous she had gotten; she seemed about to give birth to triplets. Mr. O must have provided generously for Dubak’s family when everyone else was feeding on cabbage soup with barley. That was the conclusion they drew in the end, and they felt resentful.

  Indeed, that winter Mr. O’s household was in a somber mood. No laughter broke out; no word was spoken without restraint; everyone whispered or gestured. When the ice in the creek melted, even though the water was still flesh-cutting cold, the maids from Mr. O’s household rushed to it with the laundry. They met up with two other village women, part-time employees for Mr. O from time to time. The water gushed down the creek impressively, accompanied by a pleasantly deafening sound, and they had to shout to one another to be heard, and it felt really good to shout after the long, silent, repressive winter at Mr. O’s house.

  “So cold!” Nani said, dipping her hands in the water cautiously.

  “It is!” a woman nicknamed Quince—literally, Ugly Fruit—said.

  “Hand me the sheets,” the other woman, nicknamed Cliff due to her flat chest, said.

  “It was the coldest winter that I can remember,” Soonyi said.

  “As long as you remember?” Quince guffawed.

  “How many winters have you lived?” Cliff teased her.

  Soonyi blushed. “I hear that this has been the coldest winter in a decade,” she said, pulling back the loose strands of her hair.

  “Soonyi, stomp on the laundry. This is too bulky,” Nani said.

  “She weighs as much as a feather. What’s the point of Soonyi stomping on it?” Cliff laughed, getting up to do the job herself. She slapped Soonyi’s buttocks and said, “You need to put on some meat there if you ever want to be eligible.” Her plump behind swayed as she stomped rhythmically on the pile of sheets.

  “There’s a new maid at Mr. O’s, I hear,” Quince said. “Good looking, I hear,” she added. And she winked at Cliff. The two village women laughed until tears squeezed out, but Nani scowled. She never understood why some of the women talked that way when marriage hadn’t brought them a better life. In fact, the husbands of both of these women were scumbags, lazybones, good-for-nothing drunken bums. That was why they had to come out early in the morning to wash someone else’s laundry: to feed their husbands, who had not earned decent wages in years!

  “Tell us about the new maid,” Quince said, smirking.

  Nani ignored them, pretending that she couldn’t hear anything, and she kept beating the laundry with a bat, splashing water in all directions.

  Quince pinched Nani on her bottom from behind which made her jump. The other three burst out laughing, and Nani said, “Stop it! You are acting like children.” And she shot a warning glance at Soonyi. The other two laughed, crying, panting, and sniffling.

  “I am going to have you both fired,” Nani threatened, but realized immediately that was not the right thing to say. She had no authority over these women.

  There was a brief moment of sulking silence. Quince broke out belligerently, “What makes you think you can talk to us like that?”

  Nani said nothing.

  “You could be my daughter,” Quince said, and Cliff nodded hard in condemning Nani for disrespect.

  “Thank the gods I’m not your daughter. What gives you the right to pinch me on my bottom? My own mother would have never done that,” Nani said sharply, surprising herself.

  “Listen to you! Is that how your mother taught you to speak to your elders?” Quince roared.

  “No, she didn’t teach me that. She taught me to respect the elders who deserve respect!” Nani cried.

  “You little smartass!” Quince got up as if to strike her.

  “Calm down.” Cliff also got up. “Look, Nani, you owe her an apology. Say you’re sorry and that’ll be the end of this,” she said.

  “She owes me an apology,” Nani said.

  “Listen to her. That’s what happens when you eat rice from the same pot as the aristocrats. They despise their own kind. They think they are floating on the clouds, way above us,” Quince said sarcastically. She was actually a little afraid that Nani might report the incident to Mr. O, and she might end up with no employment. She couldn’t afford to hang around at home all day until the farming season started.

  Nani did her laundry. Tears trickled down her cheeks. On the contrary, she felt she was at the bottom of a pit, not knowing how to escape. There was no way to divorce herself from her servile status: born a maid she was going to die one. Just like her mother.

  “No need to cry. It’s all a joke,” Cliff said.

  Nani wiped her eyes. She didn’t want to deal with the women anymore. She beat the laundry as hard as she could.

  Quince began to complain about her husband, who stayed out late at night, drinking, and the gods only knew what else he was doing. The other night, she had to carry him home when he was found passed out on the street. She found out about it because her dog barked like crazy. She went out to find him lying unconscious. Once on her back, he threw up all over her. Oh, the foul smell! She said she wasn’t going to fetch him again; she was going to let him freeze and die on the road.

  Only Cliff was listening with her ears pricked up, for she had spent that night with Quince’s husband. He had fed her sweet words she had never heard before. He pouted, saying his wife was no fun. He would do anything, he said, to go back in time so that he could marry Cliff, not Quince. Every time he came to visit her, he flattered her not only with words but also with little gifts.

  Nani’s purple hands were becoming numb from cold, and the tip of her nose felt frozen. After the arrival of Buwon, Mr. O’s son, the amount of laundry seemed to have quadrupled. Some days, she felt all she did was laundry. The baby produced at least twenty diapers a day, among other things, and those weren’t just to be washed. She had to boil them to really clean them, and then they also needed to be ironed. Mistress Yee also produced a lot more laundry than ever before: whatever her son drooled on had to be washed immediately, be it her cushion or her skirt or her pillow.

  The women wrung out, folded, and packed the cleaned laundry into four bamboo baskets to carry it back. Quince and Cliff followed Nani and Soonyi; each had a basket on her head. At the back entrance to Mr. O’s, Quince wanted to know if she and Cliff should follow in and help with hanging the laundry. Nani said no, she and Soonyi could take care of it easily.
/>   In the backyard, Nani told Soonyi to hang the laundry. She needed to go to the kitchen to prepare lunch. The kitchen maid who had been on leave because of her dying mother had finally been dismissed. After her mother’s death, her father fell senile and she had eleven siblings to take care of. Naturally, Nani took over her job.

  There was now another maid, even though she was only taking care of Buwon. When he was born prematurely, he could not latch onto his mother’s nipple. Mistress Yee noticed part of his upper lip was missing, and she dropped him on the floor, screaming, “Take him away!” That wasn’t the only thing about his appearance that scared her. He had a rather large, misshapen head, and one leg was slightly longer than the other. She and Mr. O argued about that. She insisted that one was longer and Mr. O denied it. And this argument went on for some time, until Dr. Choi confirmed Mistress Yee’s view.

  When Nani arrived in the kitchen, she found Chunshim drinking water like a thirsty horse. Mistress Yee had wanted Min to marry Chunshim, but he wasn’t around to be married off. Chunshim greeted Nani, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. Nani ignored her and took out the chopping board and began to slice dried green peppers. Chunshim stood there thoughtfully and then she exited the kitchen. Nani lifted her head and clenched her teeth. But a second later, Chunshim poked her head into the kitchen and said, “I know you’re angry at me. But it’s just a misunderstanding.”

  Nani dropped her knife on the chopping board and got up. She didn’t know what she was going to say.

  “Look, I know you think I am engaged to your guy. But I am not,” Chunshim said, quietly.

  “I am not concerned about that at all.” Nani flushed.

  “Oh,” Chunshim said, genuinely surprised. “That’s not what I hear.”

  “Whatever you hear, it doesn’t concern me,” Nani replied sharply.