Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014

by Carmen Johnson

  “Do you want to go home?” he asked.

  His voice was glum. I caught a faint whiff of his cologne as he turned his head to let his bangs spill over his forehead. I got out at the nearest subway station. We both looked sullen, as if angry for no particular reason. I irritably yanked my sketchbook out of the car and shoved the pencils into my bag any which way. Then I slowly counted to ten before looking back. The bright, empty street was cool and dazzled my eyes like a glass of foamy beer.

  “Even though I’ve never been the type to cling to a guy, I can’t stop thinking about him after I get home from one of our dates. And then I sit around waiting for him to call.”

  When we were in college, my cousin, who lived in the neighborhood, used to come over to our house for dinner and whisper things like this to me in my room. She wore makeup and imported brand-name sweaters. The same age as me, she was the kind of coed the guys wanted to date; she was spending more and more time in front of the mirror with each passing day. The TV was turned up loud in my parents’ room, and my brother wasn’t home yet. Eun-gyeong was changing clothes, saying she had to eat and run to her art lessons. My cousin chatted nonstop about the medical student she had started dating. She said he was on the honor roll, was over five foot nine and handsome, and had a deep, intimate voice. I got into bed next to her, crawled under the blanket, and thought about a guy I’d never met. On her way out of the house, Eun-gyeong grabbed her bag and said, “I’m never going to obsess over boys the way you two do.” The sound of the TV show playing in my parents’ bedroom filled the small house: A beautiful girl meets the man of her dreams, but he’s married. The beautiful girl and the man’s wife fight over him, even though they’re both unhappy; meanwhile, all he does is smoke and drink. One night, while he’s drinking alone in the living room, his young daughter asks him, “Daddy, why do you drink so much?” He says, “I drink because life is hard. No one understands my pain. Don’t be like your mother when you grow up.” Though I’d never watched the show, I knew the whole story because their dialogue filled the house every weekend evening. When I went to class on Mondays, the other girls all talked about the show over paper cups of coffee.

  “I think I’d like to marry him,” my cousin said while painting clear polish onto her nails. “We haven’t been dating that long, but where else am I going to meet someone like him? I can tell my mom likes him, too. Whenever he calls, she hands me the phone right away, and last week she bought me a new dress. My dad said he doesn’t care who he is as long as he’s not one of those protesters.”

  Sure enough, my cousin shows up married to the guy. I say good-bye to her at the café and am walking back to the store when I realize that, at the same time that I am impressed by her, I also feel like she’s become a complete stranger to me. I feel suddenly afraid.

  Yuseon is with a male customer, showing him a green button-down shirt.

  “I’d prefer something plain,” the customer says.

  “Is this to wear to work? How about light pink? Or blue stripes?” In the end, the short, dark-skinned man buys two plain white shirts.

  Right after I left home and began working at the department store, I shared a room with my friend So-yeong, who went to high school with me. My share of the rent was only 50,000 won a month, which was nothing, but the apartment was old with a cracked, leaky ceiling and the steep metal staircase. The heater had been broken for I don’t know how many years. But it was close to the department store, so it didn’t seem so bad. So-yeong, who had been living on her own since high school, was a free spirit, but she never brought guys home. At night we could look down on the lights of downtown Seoul while cars rushing along the Bugak Skyway cleaved the darkness and breezed past our apartment. Even after I saved up some money and moved out, So-yeong and her boyfriend, Hyeong-jun, would come by to invite me along for a drive.

  One night, I am headed for bed, after drinking a cup of weak coffee, when So-yeong shows up at my door with a wool scarf wrapped around her face.

  “Get up. We’re going for a drive. Come with us.”

  “You mean in the truck? No way.”

  Hyeong-jun works at his older brother’s gas station and sometimes borrows his brother’s truck to take So-yeong for aimless drives on the freeway in the middle of the night. Their fervor for driving at high speeds on the fog-covered freeway and the uncomfortable bench seat that shakes mercilessly makes me nervous, so I tell her I would rather stay in and sleep.

  “We’re not taking the truck, dummy. We brought someone else. It’s more fun if you go, too.”

  Since I am wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, So-yeong covers me up with a big white cotton coat and takes me outside. Sleet is coming down, and it’s very cold. Making my way carefully down the path, I see an unfamiliar car waiting at the end of the alley. So-yeong’s boyfriend and a guy I don’t know are sitting in the front smoking cigarettes. So-yeong keeps giggling as if something is funny. She tells Hyeong-jun, “She didn’t want to come, so I had to drag her out.” The car takes off quickly, even before the hem of my large coat is fully inside. Since Hyeong-jun is just a college student working at his brother’s gas station and doesn’t have the means to buy an imported car, I assume the new-looking Sable belongs to the driver. The wind pushes the sleet into piles along the side of the road. In the backseat, So-yeong has her arms wrapped around Hyeong-jun’s neck. A gold bracelet he gave her sparkles on her wrist. He seems angry with her for some reason. Her cheerful laughter has no effect on him, and only the driver responds to her exaggerated chatter. Looking back on it now, she might have been a little drunk. “Where are we going? Isn’t this the freeway?” she asks the driver. I stare hard out the window at the snowy darkness but can’t tell where we are going.

  So-yeong rolls the window down and sticks her head out into the snow.

  “This road goes to Gugi-dong,” she says. “You’re not thinking of going into the mountains at this time of night, are you?”

  “Why not? Is there any reason we can’t hike to a mountain stream on a snowy winter night?”

  Hyeong-jun unwraps So-yeong’s arms from around his neck; he doesn’t sound like his usual friendly self. So-yeong looks deflated.

  “Remember that tall guy, Kim San-gyeong?” the driver says. “I told him we would meet him in Gugi-dong. He promised me a drink.” Then he addresses me for the first time since I got in the car. “Is that okay?”

  I nod, thinking I will be cold in just my short-sleeved T-shirt and cotton coat. So-yeong pouts and slouches down in her seat. The car seems to swim through the snow, which swirls in the wind, coming down like something in a painting. The driver keeps going, only the round yellow headlights of oncoming cars visible in the dark.

  No one is waiting for us in Gugi-dong. It’s the middle of the night and cold and snowing, so of course the trailhead is deserted.

  When we get out of the car, the driver introduces himself to me.

  “My name is Kim Shin-o,” he says. “Does everyone want some coffee? There’s a vending machine. Let’s go.”

  He takes me with him to get coffee. The wind is quiet, and I can hear water trickling somewhere. It’s too dark to see anything.

  “The machine is down there, at the end,” he says. He points to the other side of the road, which is lined with darkened shops. “So-yeong and Hyeong-jun were fighting the whole way to your place. She said you two used to live together. I think something’s wrong with her. Hyeong-jun is quiet and doesn’t talk much, but she’s erratic and boy crazy.”

  “I thought that’s why Hyeong-jun liked her in the first place,” I say.

  “Yeah, I suppose.” He brushes the snow off his shoulders and empties his pockets of coins.

  “But that’s how it is. Nothing ever ends the way it begins. How could it? She should know that. We went to the same middle school, so I’ve known her for a long time. She has issues. The boys were all crazy about her back then. But each one who tried to date her got tired of her and gave up. That happened too often f
or it to be the guys’ faults. But you . . .”

  He pauses to look at me in the light of the vending machine.

  “I heard you two are close, but you seem different. You’re not like her other friends, either. You work in a department store, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I heard you have a boyfriend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Nothing special. He works at a bank.” I don’t tell him that we just broke up.

  “Now you ask me something. That’s only fair.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes, she’s a year older than me. She goes to modeling school.”

  “Why didn’t she come tonight?”

  “She works the night shift at a convenience store.”

  “How long have you been dating?”

  “Around six months.”

  “What kind of things do you fight about?”

  “Hmm. I guess we fight about things like showing up late for dates, her borrowing my credit card and buying a suit from Anne Klein, or me staying out all night drinking with another girl. Nothing serious.”

  He lifts the paper cup and smiles, his white teeth visible in the dark. We see the headlights of another car coming up the mountain.

  “That’s San-gyeong. He said he was bringing his new girlfriend.” He gulps down his coffee. “San-gyeong’s a great guy. He loves places like this. Like forest trails on a winter night. He likes going places where no one else would think of going. He’s a cool guy.”

  The guy named San-gyeong is tall and wearing glasses. He looks like he might have been the star player on his high school basketball team. The girl he introduces as his new girlfriend has dyed, bobbed hair and wears boots and earrings, but she looks like a little kid.

  “She’s not in elementary school, is she? Where does he find them so young?” Hyeong-jun whispers to Shin-o.

  Sitting in the backseat with a sad look on her face, So-yeong takes a cup of coffee from Shin-o and mutters to me, “I think Hyeong-jun and I are going to break up. I don’t think he’s in love with me anymore. I should date my boss instead. This is no fun. I’m depressed.”

  So-yeong works as a clerk for a small trading company.

  “Want to go into the forest and have some drinks there?” San-gyeong asks, sticking his head in the car.

  “In this snow? No, not with the girls,” Shin-o objects.

  “Then maybe we can find something closer,” San-gyeong says, “where we can get out of the snow. I brought the alcohol. Isn’t this great? Drinking in the snow?”

  “If we go down to the parking lot, the buildings should give us some cover from the snow. But don’t you think it’ll be too cold?” Hyeong-jun sulks.

  I sip my coffee and think about the fact that if I didn’t have the day off tomorrow, I would tell So-yeong to take me home that instant. The quiet, snowy night reminds me of the story of the Little Match Girl. San-gyeong takes a bottle of Rémy Martin and a stack of paper cups out of the car.

  “What? You dragged us all the way out here in this weather just to drink that?” So-yeong, who’s been keeping quiet, pouts, and Hyeong-jun shrugs as if he’s sick of her and turns his back. I don’t know what San-gyeong’s young girlfriend is so happy about, but she keeps hanging on his arm and giggling.

  Shin-o warns her to keep it down. “People live here,” he says. “We can’t make too much noise.” The parking lot in front of the shuttered stores is empty, and the second floor of the buildings juts out, offering us some shelter. Shin-o finds a stack of newspapers and spreads them out. The snow is constant but turns to rain the moment it touches the asphalt. Up on the road, cars are speeding into a darkened tunnel.

  San-gyeong’s girlfriend reads the racing section of the Sunday sports paper that’s spread out on the ground. She doesn’t seem interested in anyone but San-gyeong. Each time she turns her head, her shiny hair gives off a clean smell like ice just pulled from the freezer. She leans against San-gyeong’s shoulder, plays with his hair, and stares at us in defiance. I’m just here, her eyes say. I’m just here and it’s none of your business. Stay away from me. Don’t even look at me.

  “What’s your name?” Shin-o asks her as he pours the Rémy Martin into the paper cups. Hyeong-jun eats some cold fried chicken he had wrapped in tinfoil.

  San-gyeong lights a bundle of the remaining newspapers with his lighter. The dry paper quickly catches fire. “Ah, that’s warm.”

  So-yeong takes her arm from around Hyeong-jun’s waist and holds her hands up to the flame. Now she really looks like the Little Match Girl. In the light of the burning newsprint, Hyeong-jun and So-yeong’s faces resemble a scene from a movie. Her long hair dips forward. She looks like she’s crying. Behind them, the falling snow is like a movie set.

  San-gyeong’s girlfriend takes the almost full cup of Rémy Martin that Shin-o pours for her and downs it like it’s Coca-Cola. “Autumn,” she says.

  “Your name is Autumn?”

  “Yeah. Kim Autumn.”

  “I guess your little sister must be named Spring.”

  “I don’t have a little sister.”

  “Are you in middle school?”

  “What’re you talking about? I’ll be done with high school in another year.”

  The newspaper burns all the way down. Dark ash blows around on the wind and dirties the clean-swept pavement in front of the ski shop. At ten in the morning, the first of the white-shirted employees to arrive will grumble, wet a mop, and come out to clean it up. He’ll sweep up the color ads and torn racing pages of the Sunday paper and throw away the empty Rémy Martin bottle and crumpled paper cups full of cigarette butts.

  So-yeong buries her head in her arms. San-gyeong gets cans of beer from the car. So-yeong seems drunk, so I drink the rest of the Rémy Martin in her cup. San-gyeong and Hyeong-jun talked about the horse races they went to last Sunday.

  “It was amazing,” Hyeong-jun says excitedly.

  “Yeah,” San-gyeong agrees, “Hundred and fifty to one. But mine came in last.” Shin-o offers Autumn another beer. She taps her feet and hums an old Engelbert Humperdinck song: Please release me, let me go. So-yeong’s tears fall onto her arms.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” So-yeong whispers. “It isn’t Hyeong-jun’s fault. He doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. He doesn’t make me sad, but he doesn’t make me happy, either. That’s how it started, and that’s how it’ll end.”

  I didn’t make Hyeong-jun sad or happy, either. But it also didn’t occur to me to tell him, “Let’s stop seeing each other. I can’t do this anymore. Not like this,” when I was pulling on my stockings in the window of a hotel room overlooking the banks of a river wet with dew. Instead, I said, “I’m lonely, and it hurts.” I told him, “I wanted so badly to be smothered with love that I thought I would go crazy.”

  “When was that?” he asked, while knotting his tie.

  “When I was six.”

  “Were you precocious? Or just pathetic?”

  “Both, probably.”

  “I wanted to have sex so badly, I thought I would go crazy.”

  “When was that?”

  “Second year of high school.”

  I stared at the back of his white dress shirt. The smell of wet grass in the morning drifted in through the open window. The fog was slowly lifting from the highway that led back to Seoul. He slipped on his shoes with one hand and fumbled with the other for the pack of cigarettes on the table littered with half-drunk glasses of flat beer, lipstick-stained cigarette butts, and crumpled napkins and put it in his pocket. The high school sophomore who thought he’d go crazy from lack of sex and the six-year-old girl who’d suffered from a terminal lack of affection walked hand in hand out of the hotel.

  Shin-o asks me to go with him to buy more beer.

  “We drank everything San-gyeong brought. There’s a convenience store a block that way. We can get something to eat, too.”

 
; I borrow So-yeong’s scarf and tie it around my head, then stick my hands in my coat pockets and walk beside Shin-o. Past a shuttered fast-food restaurant, a shop that sells pottery fired on-site in gas kilns, and a golf shop, we see the lights of the convenience store. The employee is setting a large black plastic trash bag on the curb. The snow is still falling, but everything looks damp and dreary. If anyone were to wake up at that moment and glance out their window to see the two of us walking down the street, they wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep and would have to have a smoke.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” I hold out my hand to Shin-o.

  “Here you go.” Shin-o lights up a cigarette, takes a drag, and passes it to me. I stop in the street to smoke. The snow is slowly turning to rain.

  “If the two of them break up,” Shin-o says, “I might never see So-yeong again. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  He pulls his jacket collar up around his neck and stuffs his hands into his jean pockets.

  “Why not? You went to school together.”

  “Yes, but we weren’t that close. Hyeong-jun’s my friend, and she’s his girlfriend. That’s it. He’s been tired of her for a while now. Lately they fight every time they see each other.”

  Shin-o lights another cigarette. In the headlights of an oncoming car, his profile is silhouetted like a black-and-white movie poster.

  “Were you ever interested in her?” I ask.

  “Briefly, in middle school. Everyone liked her back then.”

  It feels good to stand on a wet street late at night in a white cotton coat and smoke a cigarette while looking at the lights of a convenience store across the street. If only I could shake this anxiety about the fact that winter is coming. I can’t spend the rest of my life thinking only about seaside bungalows and fruit cocktail with sand in it and sunlight reflecting off sunglasses.

  “It was just a crush. By the way, I thought So-yeong was the one who needed a drink, but it looked like you were drinking more than her,” Shin-o says as we enter the convenience store.