A week after the accident, when the nurse at the hospital desk gave me the plastic bag of his clothes, I found the coin in the back flap pocket of his shorts. The coin was warm—the bag must have been left near a window—and I wondered how long the shiny metal could hold in a heat, if it could remember something like the press of flesh.
He loved the old man, adored him. Whenever you looked, Mitt was scaling the wide bow of that paternal back, or swinging from his shoulders, or standing on the tops of his feet so that they walked in tandem, with ponderous, doubled soles.
There were certain concordances. In profile, you saw the same blunt line descend the back of their necks, those high, flat ears, but then little else because Lelia—or maybe her father—had endowed Mitt with that other, potent sprawl of limbs, those round, vigilant eyes, the upturned ancestral nose (like a scrivener’s, in my imagination), his boy’s form already so beautifully jumbled and subversive and historic. No one, I thought, had ever looked like that.
The kids in my father’s neighborhood gave him trouble that first summer. One afternoon Mitt tugged at my pant leg and called me innocently, in succession, a chink, a jap, a gook. I couldn’t immediately respond and so he said them again, this time adding, in singsong, “Charlie Chan, face as flat as a pan.”
They’re just words, I then told him firmly, confidently—in the way a father believes he should—but mostly because I didn’t know what else to say. And after the same kids saw Lelia and me play with him in the front yard they started in with other things, teaching him words like mutt, mongrel, half-breed, banana, twinkie. One day Mitt came home with his clothes soiled and said that they had pushed him down to the ground and put dirt in his mouth. He proudly told my father that he hadn’t cried. Lelia, who up to now had been liberal and assured, started shrieking angrily about suburbia, America, the brand of culture we had to live in, and packed Mitt up the stairs to scrub his muddy face, telling him all the while how wonderful he was.
That evening my father and I went around the neighborhood to talk to the parents. We walked stiffly in silence on those manicured streets, and it seemed a repetition of a moment from many years before, when an older boy named Clay had taken away my cap pistol. I remembered how my father had spoken to Clay’s mother in a halting, polite English and how he had excused her son for taking advantage of my timidity and misunderstandings.
“My son,” he explained, “is no good for friends.” The woman hardly understood what he said, and Clay—grinning to himself behind her and looking more menacing than ever—only temporarily handed over my toy gun.
Now, as the first front door opened, I spoke calmly and severely, explaining the situation as one of gravity but not crisis. But then, at the sight of the offending boy, the old man behind me inexplicably exploded, chopping the air with his worn fingers, cursing red-faced like a cheated peasant in our throaty mother tongue until the bewildered child began to cry. His mother protested meekly (you could tell she knew my father) and I, too, wanted him to stop yelling, to shut up and let me speak. Instead I allowed myself to sacrifice this boy and his mother, perhaps even myself, and let the old man yell this one bloody murder, if only for Mitt.
I know this: a child doesn’t forgive or forget—he works it out.
By that last summer Mitt was thick with them all. Friends for life, or so it must have seemed. I knew their names once, could place them with their well-fed faces. After he died they all seemed to get hidden away somewhere, like sets of precious china, and eventually I forgot everything about them.
But for a long time the little arms and legs and voices were part of my nightly ritual before sleep. Like a cinematic mantra, a mystical trailer of memory, I replayed the scene of all those boys standing in the grass about the spontaneous crèche of his death. Lelia knew I did this with the night. She would grasp my hand until she couldn’t wait any longer for me to say something, and finally she would fall asleep. When her hand went limp, I would let myself wander over the ground of what happened. I could only see it when she slumbered. I needed her right next to me, I thought, bodied up, but off in another world.
I was just coming back from the store with more soda and candy for the birthday party. A boy came running out toward the car, leaping and waving his hands. He was sick-looking, half-smiling and jumping. As I turned the car into the driveway I heard nervous, confused shouts echoing from the backyard through the tops of the trees. I ran around the side of the house without turning off the ignition. All the boys were standing there lock-kneed. In the middle of them was Lelia, sitting on the grass, cradling his dead blue head in her arms and lap and rocking on her knees. She was wailing nothing I could understand or remember now, and she sounded like someone else, an anybody on the street. A boy to my side was crying fitfully and telling me between gasps how they didn’t mean to stay on him as long as they did. It was just a stupid dog pile, he kept shouting, it was just a stupid dog pile. And then my father came out from the sliding porch door and saw me, a cordless phone in his hand, and he yelled in Korean that the ambulance was coming. But before he made it to us his legs seemed to fold under him and he sat back unnaturally on the matted lawn, his face so small-looking, arrested, so short of breath.
I bent down and started blowing into Mitt’s mouth. Lelia cried that she’d tried already. She kept screaming about it and I had to tell her to shut up. I didn’t know what I was doing. I pulled open his mouth and blew anyway, a dozen times, a hundred, pumping down on his chest with all my weight, eventually pounding on him as if he were solid ground. I shudder to think that I might have injured him, hurt his delicate breastbone or his ribs, or worse, that his last thought was to ask why his father was harming him. I’ve read the dying feel no pain but sense everything that goes on around them. They view the scene from a brief distance above and no matter who they are or how old, they gain a wisdom from that last vista. But we are the living, remaining on the ground, and what we know is the narrow and the broken. Here, we are strewn about in the lengthy expanse of an archipelago, too far to call one another, too far to see.
During certain nights, I pulled a half-sleeping Lelia back onto my body, right onto my chest, and breathed as barely as I could without falling faint. I could see her wake, flutter a moment, look for my eyes. She let herself balance on me until she was no longer touching the bed. She knew what to do, what to do to me, that I was Mitt, that then she was Mitt, our pile of two as heavy as the balance of all those boys who had now grown up. We nearly pressed each other to death, our swollen lips and eyes, wishing upon ourselves the fall of tears, that great free anger, that great obese heft of melancholy, enough of it piling on at once so that sometimes whether we wanted to or not we made love so hard and gritty we had to say fuck to be telling the very first part of the truth. In the bed, in the space between us, it was about the sad way of all flesh, alive or dead or caught in between, it was about what must happen between people who lose forever the truest moment of their union. Flesh, the pressure, the rhymes of gasps. This was all we could find in each other, this the novel language of our life.
Mornings brought sober hope, then the usual imperatives. Look for Lelia (she was most often gone before I woke, already off somewhere in the city working with students). Now, keep thinking. Think for keeps. Then, isolate the wonderments, the curiosities of his death; they will help you to see. Shed sentimentality. Stop this falling in love with fate. Reside, if you can, in the last place of the dead.
Maybe this way:
A crush. You pale little boys are crushing him, your adoring mob of hands and feet, your necks and heads, your nostrils and knees, your still-sweet sweat and teeth and grunts. Too thick anyway, to breathe. How pale his face, his chest. Blanket his eyes. Listen, now. You can hear the attempt of his breath, that unlost voice, calling us from the bottom of the world.
* * *
Lelia and Mitt used to play around with a tape recorder I sometimes brought home from the office.
It was a palm-sized model, voice-activated, that I used in the beginning for making notes to myself about work. I didn’t need to use it much later on. Mitt especially liked the microcassettes the machine used. He would peer at their miniature opaque housings, twist them around in the light, and he was always holding them up to his ear and shaking them, as if trying to rattle loose their secrets. He said to me once that these little ones could hear you even when you whispered, so that you had to be extra careful of what you said.
I knew he sometimes watched me speak into the machine. Later I saw him mimicking me; he would recline on the sofa with his little legs propped on pillows, speaking intermittently into the recorder as though he were taking drags on a cigarette. He’d talk about imaginary people in an aimless, child’s way. After a while he expertly put in another tape, pretending to mark the old one with a name or note. When he was a little older, he would actually make recordings of himself and sometimes of us, the machine being small enough that he could hide it easily. Of course I feared his perceptiveness, what he might have seen of me, or even possibly thought in his young mind.
But I knew, too, that he got the notion of being careful of what you said mostly from being with us, his father and his mother, how we were beginning to speak to one another during the course of a day with more waiting and quiet than any real noise or talk. I remember him playing in the park one weekend when he was five, tumbling as he would on the black rubber beneath the playground ladders and nets, with Lelia and me sitting on a bench a few feet away. We were arguing quietly, or at least I was. I kept looking around to make sure that the other parents couldn’t hear us. Lelia didn’t seem to care. She wasn’t yelling but her voice was clear enough that when she raised it in the crisp autumn air I thought all of downtown could hear our trouble.
We were discussing the question of another child. I knew Lelia herself wasn’t fully sold on the idea, but she kept making the argument that for her it was getting to be now or never. I told her we could have one in a few years, that she’d only be thirty-three. She argued that things can happen after a certain age. Complications. We’ll be careful, I said. And wiser, as well. Then why not wait until I’m forty, she said. We’ll be absolutely brilliant when I’m forty-five. At sixty we’ll be goddamn geniuses. I asked her not to make a scene of it, and I could see that she was about to shout out but then just as quickly she quelled herself—a trick perhaps that she had gleaned from me—and whispered sharply that if I wanted to wait I had better be willing to talk about adoption again.
Of course she knew my feelings. Adoption, I know, is a noble and mostly happy practice. No doubt an advancement for a culture. And yet for me, the prerogative is that you should still bestow your blood whenever able. You grow your own. For although your offerings of unconditional love and respect and devotion will make good of most any child, what you cannot give or else substitute is that tie unspoken and unseen, the belief in blood, that unbreakable connection telling your boy or girl that hers will never be a truly solitary life.
Mitt then shouted and ran to us, thrusting himself face first into Lelia’s chest and arms. She opened her wool coat and wrapped him up. She kissed his head. His rosy face just now untucked itself, the whole moment marsupial, strangely wondrous that way, and I thought if I had tasted a family hunger all my life that this should be my daily bread. What else is there to behold? I watched her kiss him again. But I said coldly to her anyway, “You know there’s really no chance for that.”
She didn’t say or do anything that might disturb Mitt. She was always too protective that way. She wouldn’t look at me. She just kept combing his hair with her fingers, kissing it in the spots where it was irritated with the psoriasis he often had. Sometimes he even got little patches of baldness on the back of his head, and she checked for them now, sifting through his dark brown strands with slow method. When she found one she made a tight face, touching the bare skin softly with her thumb.
“It’s not possible,” I said again.
“We’ll talk about this later,” she answered stiffly, still examining him.
“You wanted to talk before,” I pointed out to her.
“I changed my mind.”
“Well, too late.”
“Henry,” she said weakly. “Stop this now.”
Mitt had slipped back down into her coat, out of sight. There was some struggling inside. She unzipped her front and he bolted away immediately. He found his friends again near the concrete monkey barrels and started playing with them like he hadn’t missed a beat. Normally this would have been when Lelia started something, shook up the embers, but sitting there on the end of the bench she looked all frozen and chipped. No chance of fire. Then I didn’t know what I wanted. I got up to walk around the playground. I thought to look at all the children, the many colors of them, listen to the shouting music of their mixed-up voice, inflections of a hundred home languages. As I came back around I looked all over for Mitt. I didn’t see him. Lelia was still sitting on the bench, and this panicked me, made me angry that she wasn’t keeping a close eye on him. I felt angry with myself. Then I heard his voice among the others. I bent down to look in one of the concrete barrels on its side, and inside were Mitt and two other boys, the three of them crouched like commandos around the micro-recorder. I stepped back a little. They were too busy to notice me. He was showing them how it worked, that you turn it on and just talk, you press this button and wait and then listen. They tried this back and forth, taking turns saying things, making gun sounds, fart sounds, their yabba-dabbas, and when he rewound the tape and played it back our voices spoke instead from the hollow barrel, the tight grim interchange. Mitt said he didn’t want to play and skipped out the other end. I watched as he picked up speed and ran toward his mother, who saw him and opened wide her arms.
Now that Lelia was back from the islands for a few weeks I called her at Molly’s and I asked if I could have the tapes for a while. She took them whenever she settled somewhere semipermanently. I said I wanted to hear his voice. She was quiet and then told me she would leave them with the super downstairs. She said it was a long time since we had seen each other and that there was no sense in doing anything before the meeting we had already planned. I wondered if she realized that it was her voice, too, that I wished to hear. Her responses to our son, their laughter, the simple, ambient noise of that time. Back at the apartment I rigged the micro-recorder up to our stereo.
“Hey,” I listened to her say on a tape, “what happened to the dinosaurs Daddy gave you? You had so many in that box.”
“I think they died,” he answered. Mitt must have been three.
“How?”
“I dunno,” he said. “See my Gobot, laser guns come out of his chest and shoot. See? Pht-pht. Pht-pht-pht.”
“Swell.”
“Too bad you don’t have guns there, too, then you could shoot dumb Alex.”
“I thought Alex was your friend.”
“Nope,” Mitt answered.
“Did something happen when he came to play? You were playing, weren’t you, with the dinosaurs?”
“Uh-huh. He wanted to see them. He said dinosaurs were dumb. He said they were no-brains.”
“Well, to be honest, they weren’t very bright.”
Mitt made the shooting sound again. “Alex said they were dumb. He said his Godzilla was smart and my T-rex was dumb and had no brains so he took my bat and smashed its head.”
“That wasn’t very considerate of him,” she said.
“He was right.”
“What do you mean?”
“No-brains. We smashed the other ones, too. All of them. They’re under my bed. Nothing in them. He was right.”
“They’re just plastic toys, sweetie. Real dinosaurs had brains, very small ones, but they did have them.” Pause. “I wish you hadn’t broken them like that.”
“Alex said that’s why they’re a-stink. Dum
b-dumbs.”
“That’s not necessarily true. And the word is ex-tinct. When an animal completely dies off, every last one of its kind, then you say it’s extinct.”
“Will people get a-stink?”
“Extinct. We can, if we’re not careful.”
“Will you and Daddy?”
“That’s different, but no, sweetie, I hope not, not us. We’ll try our best.”
“Good,” Mitt said.
I went through and listened to the whole box of tapes. It was only the second time I was hearing them, and I noticed again how much care Lelia took while talking with him, not just with the words, but with her manner, so unstudied, calm. I thought how lucky he was to have had a woman like her directing his life. It struck me, too, how she spoke to him as though they had all the time in the world.
She did get angry with him on some of the later tapes, when he was older and his own quick temper (an inheritance from my father) overcame him. On one he called her a “jerkface,” and she must have hit him hard on the ass because there was a pause and he said it didn’t hurt but then he began to cry. Lelia cried a little with him. Sometimes they seemed to forget about the tape recorder, especially Lelia, who had a habit of talking to herself if she was short on cigarettes. One entire tape was Mitt saying every bad word he knew. I had to wonder about his expensive private-school yard. The worst bad word, he whispered, was “motherfucker.” Some tapes had them singing Christmas carols, singing Michael Jackson, singing the teapot song. The last one I listened to was an extended birthday card to me. Mitt said I love you four times. Lelia, three.
I compared these to some of the other moments that I remembered her saying it, the night we decided to live together, the morning after Mitt was born, the time drunk in a bar when she thought I had been sleeping with another woman.
Native Speaker Page 11