by Kelly Link
“Where the air tastes sweet and the water is clear!” Kyunghwan sings.
Daddy grins, gulps down his tea as if it is makgeolli. “We said we’d never show the pond to any women. But today we’ll go!”
Jieun is already jumping and swinging Mila around. Mommy shakes her head, not at the girls but at Daddy and Kyunghwan, singing a song we do not know.
At the pond, my sisters and I pull off shirts and skirts, and run into the water in our panties. Mine are covered in apples, Jieun’s in cucumbers, and Mila’s in orange pumpkins.
When Kyunghwan sees, he sings, “My face like an apple, how pretty I am, with eyes bright, nose bright, lips bright. My face like a cucumber—”
“No more! Don’t sing the next part!” Jieun sprays water at Kyunghwan, but it doesn’t reach him. She doesn’t like her long face, even though we tell her it’s just a song. As we play, the adults bake themselves on boulders, squid laid out to dry.
Mommy wears a real bathing suit. It is black and shiny, with white trim. You can see the roundness of her breasts where the fabric stretches tight. I look down. I have two little nipples but no roundness. Little soybeans no one would want to look at.
“I’m going to catch a great big fish and fry it over a fire!” Daddy yells before jumping off his rock. One arm glued to his side and the good arm in an arch, pointing at the water. He makes a huge splash, and we whistle and whoop. Our voices echo off the rocks.
“Don’t forget who won the diving contest every year!” Kyung-hwan starts with his back against a tree and runs straight off his boulder. As he falls, he flails around like a panicked animal.
He sinks, screaming.
Mommy shrieks his name.
A silence stretches out in ripples.
“Kyunghwan?” Daddy yells. “Stop it!”
Kyunghwan’s head bobs up with a howl. He winks at me.
“He’s a Dokkaebi!” I yell.
He fills the pond with a laughter that floats. It is contagious, and soon we are all laughing, holding our stomachs and chucking our heads above the water to stop ourselves from drowning.
“That wasn’t funny.” Mommy stands above us all, her arms across her chest.
“Oh, come on,” Kyunghwan says.
She turns, and Daddy leaves the water to comfort her. Kyung-hwan shrugs, gulps air, and goes under.
When everyone is happy again, we cavalry fight. Jieun on Daddy’s shoulders, Mila on Mommy’s, and me on Kyunghwan’s. His hands push against my butt, nestling me until I am sitting with my legs draping his chest. His body is slick and I’m worried I’ll fall off. He lifts my arms, flaps them up and down until I feel it—I am high and soaring.
When the water weighs heavy in our bones and it becomes harder to float, we head to the hills above. Boulders crumble into pebbles. My skin smells like water and sun.
“This is where we’d fry fish,” Daddy whispers. He is so calm and peaceful, carrying sleepy Mila on his back. There is no fire pit anymore, but he describes one until I can almost see it: the logs burning and the fish skin crisping in the heat.
“Let’s get some wood,” Kyunghwan says. He and Daddy leave, their bodies hulking together into the forest.
We lie down around Mommy. She sings the apple-cucumber-pumpkin song, squeezing our noses at our parts. Jieun doesn’t mind so much now, and we hum along, rubbing Mila’s cheeks as Mommy sings, “Our funny round pumpkin.”
When Daddy and Kyunghwan come back, Mommy leaves us to sit with them. It is dark now, and Jieun draws a picture of our family into the sky, using the night’s stars to trace our crooked elbows and noses. Mila drools onto my shoulder. I try to stay awake.
On the first evening of Kyunghwan’s visit, the adults told stories when they thought we were asleep. Of the war that split our Korea, of a president who controls us, and of people who are dead. But they are quieter tonight. When Daddy goes to pee in the woods, Kyunghwan sits closer to Mommy. She looks over at me. I want to hear what they are saying, but their whispers twist together into streams.
The next day, Daddy is sick. I bring him his tea and he grumbles that his head is wound too tight.
“Come eat with us,” I say.
He wasn’t in the kitchen to see it, how Kyunghwan and Mommy smiled at each other. But Daddy gulps his tea and pushes the drained cup into my hand.
He leaves the house without saying good morning or goodbye. When he’s gone, Kyunghwan turns to me. “Solee, can you do your uncle a favor? Can you watch Jieun and Mila?”
“Where are you going?”
Mommy stares out the window, but there’s nothing there.
“Gasan. Haemi wants to collect more of those plants she loves. Can you be the lady of the house, Solee?”
“Can we go hiking tomorrow, just us?”
“Of course.” Kyunghwan squeezes my shoulder.
I smile at Mommy but she doesn’t see me. She touches my head, glances at the room where Jieun and Mila are still sleeping.
“Are you really going to Gasan?” I ask.
She bends down to me. She is pretty, with big eyes and pale, freckleless skin. “Where do you think I’d be going?”
I don’t know, but I know she’s lying.
“Don’t worry so much.” She smiles. “I’ll be back soon with an armful of plants for us.”
They don’t come home for dinner. Mila whines because I burn the rice, and Jieun says she wants oxtail soup, not dumplings. I give them two rice cakes and tell them they are brats, smacking my spoon against the table the way Mommy does when we misbehave. They cry, and everything is worse.
I don’t know where Daddy is. I want to tell him everything. How Kyunghwan and Mommy have gone to Gasan. How I am supposed to be the only one hiking with Kyunghwan.
“I miss Mommy,” Jieun says.
In bed, she asks for the goddess story. Even little Mila sighs happily when I begin.
“One day,” I say, “when the world was new, a goddess came down from the heavens. A man found her and fell in love with her beauty. Knees mucky from kneeling in the dirt before her, he asked her for her name. ‘Haemi,’ she said. The man snatched the name from the air and swallowed it. He wrapped her in a piece of silk, scooped her up, and brought her home. Mommy is truly a goddess from the heavens, and sometimes when she thinks of the sky, she fades away.”
“Again,” they mumble together. I stroke their heads and tell them the story again.
I fall asleep in the hallway, against Kyunghwan’s door. When I wake up, though, I am floating. “And who do I love?” I hear. It is Kyunghwan. He is holding me in his arms.
Mommy laughs. “Go to bed.”
I nestle my face farther into his shoulder so she can’t see my gloating. He loves me.
“Good night, Haemi.”
In the room, when he pulls the blanket over me, I open my eyes. “I love you, Kyunghwan.”
His laughter washes me with the sweet smell of alcohol. There has been so much laughing since he’s come, no shouting and stomping. He puts his mouth on my nose, just once and too quickly, and leaves.
I’m not sure what’s woken me up again. At first I think it is Kyunghwan coming back to me. But then I hear fighting, the deep snarl in Daddy’s voice. I try to go back to sleep.
This time it doesn’t end the normal way. There are louder yells, a thud. Mommy’s high pitch, though now Daddy is silent. It is shameful. Kyunghwan will hear.
I run into the hall to yell at them. How embarrassing! I will say. The way Teacher Han does when we get a question wrong in front of the principal. You are embarrassing yourselves!
What I see stops me. Mommy walking into Kyunghwan’s room, her face smudgy in the shadows. Glancing around like a thief. She closes the door behind her.
I check on Daddy. He lies on his back, his stomach bulging. One hand between hi
s legs and the other clasping a stick he uses against our calves and palms. How embarrassing! I want to yell. He doesn’t wake when I shove his shoulder.
“Mother is in Kyunghwan’s room,” I say loudly. I prod him again. He grunts, a mess of noise erupting out of his mouth. “Did you hear me? Wake up!”
The dead-asleep look on his face doesn’t change.
I sit cross-legged outside Kyunghwan’s door. I think I can hear them. It sounds like she is crying. It sounds so painful that I clutch my stomach. I want her to stop. They whisper each other’s names. I imagine they are kissing. That they are naked, with her round breasts and his hairy, musty armpits.
I clutch Kyunghwan’s handkerchief, still tied around my neck. I put it to my face. I kiss it. When I stick my tongue out, it tastes dirty, not like what I imagined.
I am wearing my best shorts, light blue with pink stitching. He will hike with me today, and I will tell him again that I love him. I set two cups of tea across from each other and place the kettle in the middle, just the way he does. I try to fold the napkin into a flower, but I give up. A simple square will have to do.
But instead of coming into the kitchen, he is leaving. I see him out the kitchen window.
I rush into the yard. “Where are you going? Aren’t we hiking?” I grab at him. He is petting Dokkaebi’s nose.
“I have something to do today. Sorry, Miss Solee.” He squeezes my hand. His eyes are doing what Mommy’s do. She has infected him. “I have to go.”
He is carrying his bag. He is heading to his motorcycle.
“Hiking tomorrow?”
He shakes his head.
“Are you mad at me?”
Kyunghwan unties the handkerchief from my neck and I think he’s going to take it back, that he is angry.
He only wipes my face.
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I’ll try to come back soon, Miss Solee.”
“You don’t love me,” I say.
When he hugs me, I thrust my face to him so he will kiss me, at least this once, but he shifts and pulls a white envelope out of his pocket instead. “Can you give this to Haemi? When Jisoo leaves for work?”
He shoves it into my closed hand.
He doesn’t kiss me goodbye.
Dokkaebi walks with him as he pushes his motorcycle all the way to the end of the road. He turns, a little speck waving. A dog thief. A bad man. I don’t wave back this time.
______________
Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in 2018. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation. Her novel was chosen as runner-up in the 2015 James Jones First Novel Fellowship Contest. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MS in education from Hunter College.
Editor’s note
When Grace Oluseyi’s “A Modern Marriage” came in as an unsolicited submission, its coolness was what first struck us: understated, unfussy, with a psychological core that burns like ice. The story’s protagonist, Anu, is afflicted with the self-awareness of those who suspect themselves to be always and uncharitably scrutinized. Her heightened introspection arises from her belief that she is ugly and slow-witted, but the reader suspects that the object of her affection, James, is similarly stricken, if for very different reasons. Head-turningly handsome, a Nigerian immigrant, a black man, bright enough to inspire the jealousy of his peers, he is cognizant of his precarious position in America, an anxiety he expresses as a need to prove others wrong about him. Each character possesses something the other wants. In the hands of a lesser talent, the story could easily have descended into clichéd tropes—of the tensions between first- and second-generation immigrants, of model minorities, of fraudulent green card schemes—but Oluseyi undercuts such stereotypes by keeping the reader’s attention fixed on the idiosyncratic dilemmas that face her characters. In particular, the story provokes the reader to wonder, between Anu and James, who is the more canny, and whether the emotionally deceptive still deserve love—for who among us is not, to some degree, numbered among their ranks?
Adam McGee, managing editor
Boston Review
A Modern Marriage
Grace Oluseyi
When the phone rang the night before Anu’s wedding, she was packing the last of her boxes for the move across the bridge to her fiancé’s two-bedroom apartment in Astoria. She was happy to leave her dirty little studio in the Bronx. James’s hipster enclave in Queens seemed like a veritable castle in comparison. Hardwood floors, original paneling. A prewar building, Gatsby era, he told her. A real piece of history.
She should have had the line disconnected days ago but had kept it for the international calls she could not make on her mobile. “Hello?”
“Anu, my darling? Bawo ni?” If the soft, accented voice hadn’t given it away, the crackling on the line certainly would have. Her cousin Tobi was in Nigeria and was not able to come for her wedding, but she had been calling Anu all week, teasing her about the wedding night and advising her on creams and lotions that would make her skin soft and supple and asking her about her bridal finery, the woven red and gold aso oke wrapper and blouse from Lagos that she would wear for her reception. Tobi was excited about this marriage. She had been praying for years for her cousin to meet someone.
“I am fine,” Anu replied, and sat on a sealed box.
“James?”
“Out with the bachelors.” They were going, James told her, to a boxing match in Brooklyn, and then out for drinks. Anu’s eyes flickered over the dingy white walls of her apartment. Just in the corner of vision, a cockroach scurried up toward one of the cracks in the ceiling. They normally weren’t this bold—perhaps they sensed she was moving out.
“Good.” Her cousin sounded relieved. “I have to. . . . I wanted to speak to you, it is very important.”
“Oh?” God, Tobi could be dramatic. “Go for it.”
“I have not even told your mother, not yet. I—well, I wanted you to know first.”
“Are you pregnant?” Anu joked, but when Tobi didn’t laugh, she sat up straight. “Tob. You’re not—?”
“No—hei! Olorun maje,” she swore. “No. I’m not.”
“Is someone sick?” Or dead? She could see them trying to hide it from her until after the wedding, not wanting to upset her, but Anu always did better when she knew things, saw them coming. “Or—”
“Anu, jo, just listen.” Tobi inhaled; she was probably smoking, Anu realized. She tended to do that when she was stressed. She pictured her cousin crossing one dark, plump leg over the other, touching her mouth the way she did when she was nervous about something.
Anu was quiet.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes, Tobi.”
Tobi’s next words came out in a rush, mixing and tumbling over themselves like grains from a bag of rice, landing in no particular order. Anu managed to piece together bits as she went along. James was married. Wife in Lagos. Two children, a boy and a girl, both in primary school. Married six years ago, before he left Nigeria to go to school in New York. It wasn’t a state marriage, not really, but he had paid her dowry and taken her from her father’s house. . . .
Anu listened. When Tobi was finished, her voice was both high and breathless.
“Anu? Anu? I spoke to his uncle this morning, Anu. He was very, very angry. The boy, he said, is just using you for a visa. His own application was denied. Anu!”
Anu hung up the phone.
Although she was over thirty, badly dressed, too thin, too broad-shouldered, and still possessed the oily, spotted skin of an afflicted teenager, the tall, broad-shouldered PhD student and lecturer James Adeola Adebisi proposed to Anu a scant six weeks after their first date. It was rather exciting.
It wasn’t because he was attracted to her. On the contrary, Anu knew that the man found her repulsive. She’d seen the flicker in his dark eyes the day she’d been brought to him by the dean of philosophical studies, who introduced her as the new office assistant and a “fellow West African.” The dean had been all enthusiasm: Americans love coincidences, and he milked this particular one for all it was worth. He beamed at the two of them; Anu imagined the corners of his mouth meeting in the back of his head. She mentioned that she is Nigerian in her interview, isn’t that something? Perhaps you come from the same area? Do you speak the same language?
During the interrogation, Professor Adebisi’s face resembled that of a martyr who feels in the eleventh hour that sainthood isn’t worth all the trouble. Anu was embarrassed for him, for them. The professor parried the dean’s questions with diplomatic skill, greeted her politely, showed her where his keys were, and gave her his office hours. He was dressed in trendy scholar-wear: wool trousers slung low on his hips, corduroy jacket, skinny tie, vintage denim shirt, brown loafers from some obscure Italian cobbler, Ray-Ban glasses, no socks. It made Anu self-conscious about the ill-fitting polyester suit she wore that day, although she didn’t own anything better, not really. It cost money, looking so effortlessly casual.
In those brief first minutes, the professor managed to convey through both manner and tone that he hoped their arrangement was temporary, that she would barely see him due to his schedule, and that his life’s happiness depended on the joyful hour of her departure. Anu minded little; she understood his position. Being reminded that you are different from your colleagues by the existence of decidedly unglamorous office help is unsettling, at the very least.
“I won’t bother you at all,” she said with her usual simplicity. He looked startled but didn’t respond.
Professor Adebisi fired off the typical questions during their first day together: Who are your parents? Were you born here or at home? Do you speak Yoruba? The answers tumbled from her lips with ease, as she’d answered them many times before, and the answers were nothing extraordinary. Her devout Christian parents were a nurse and a taxi driver. She’d been born in the States, and yes, she spoke a little Yoruba, but understood more than she could speak. In response, he grunted, as if something had been verified.