Love Love

by Sung J. Woo

  For a while, she tried to make him like her. In preparation for one Father’s Day, she spent two months weaving a sweater, a difficult project for an adult, let alone a ten-year-old, and even though he’d held it up against his chest and thanked her, she never saw him wear it once. Which was fitting, because it wasn’t what he did or said that telegraphed his feelings, but their very lack.

  More than thirty years had passed since that day at the airport, and yet the emotional laceration was ready to bleed. Had she been born with such thin skin, or was this a by-product of her father’s withholding? It was like the chicken or the egg, which came first. Judy picked up a piece of charcoal from her tray, aligned the sketch paper on the desk, and started with his eyes. Thick circles and curvatures, black and bottomless as a well, these were the disapproving pupils that stared at her when she wore her ratty Salvation Army jacket, her silver nose ring, black stockings with Swiss cheese holes, the rebellious accoutrements she embraced in her adolescence because he never embraced her.

  She flicked the charcoal to create a pair of prickly eyebrows, then drew a shadow of a nose, and finally, filled in a straight bar for a mouth, completing his default facial mode, which was somewhere between exasperation and annoyance. After she left for college, things got better between them, mostly because they didn’t see each other as often, though there was a massive blowout when she suggested he talk to a psychologist about his past trauma. As a senior psych major, Judy had thought that she now possessed the right to speak to her father about his horror of running over that mother and child in his train back in Korea. She’d even taken Korean that semester to better communicate with him, but when she returned that Thanksgiving and attempted to reach out to him, what she received was a literal slap in the face, his open palm smacking her so fast that she thought some foreign object had flown out of nowhere and struck her. Her mother, after making sure Judy was all right, followed her husband to the den.

  “I don’t think he knew that you knew that story,” Kevin had told her.

  “So that gives him the right to hit me?” Judy asked.

  “Of course not,” he said, helping her into a chair. “It’s just a bad situation.”

  For the rest of the long weekend, Judy waited for the apology that never came. Her brother and her mother did what they could to salvage the holiday, making sure that one of them was always around when Judy and her father were in the same room, but that felt like a tacit acceptance of the violence that had occurred. What Judy wanted was to leave and never come back home, but she knew she wasn’t that strong. She needed her mother. She needed her brother. Without them, she was alone.

  “Knock knock.”

  Egg salad and pickle on a plate, served by Roger.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she took a bite of the sandwich. There was a hint of curry this time, a slight change of pace that was welcome to her palate.

  He glanced at her sketch. “Angry.”

  “My father,” she said. “What he looked like when he slapped me.”

  Roger furrowed his eyebrows. “How often did he hit you?”

  “That one time.”

  “Oh.”

  “What does that mean? That it’s okay if it’s just once?”

  “My parents didn’t spare the rod, so you’re probably talking to the wrong person.”

  Roger ate the other half of the sandwich while Judy summarized the incident for him. She didn’t want to sound like a whiner, which probably meant she did.

  “My dad was like yours. Even with my issue, he wouldn’t have been pleased that I saw a shrink. He was from a different generation, where only crazy people went for help.”

  “We just never jibed, he and I. Never saw eye to eye on anything.”

  “Are you sure you want to take him to the doctor yourself? You don’t think I can help?”

  Judy shook her head. “That’s not it. I’d rather just do this alone. Maybe I don’t want you to see the ugliest side of me. My father is dying, and I’m sort of glad. I’m a shitty daughter.”

  “You are who you are, and that’s fine with me,” he said.

  Roger left after finishing the sandwich, and she was once again alone. Next to her father’s face, she quickly sketched her mother’s, then her brother’s and hers as kids. In her opinion, her family had never been a cohesive unit, but this was as close as it got, her parents in their early forties, the kids in elementary school. Until Kevin started to play tennis seriously and attended junior camp, they summered at the Jersey shore, renting a two-bedroom cottage in Long Branch. It couldn’t have been any more than a few years that they went to that white house by the beach, but they were memorable ones. One evening they drove up to the carnival that had ridden into town. She watched her parents share a cotton candy, ride the Ferris wheel, toss rings at a hundred cola bottles. Judy understood how they fit together, how only she and Kevin could belong to this exclusive permutation of people. It might have been a momentary illusion, but at the time, it felt as real as Kevin’s hand she was holding.

  A week from now, she would be standing next to Claudia X. People would watch her, scrutinize her works. Judy wasn’t ready for any of it. She wanted to have a few more drawings for Claudia, but her mind was a blank. Staring at the eyes of her father, she wanted to blame him for her shortcomings, but that wasn’t going to do her any good. She’d have to work, to produce, to make something of herself. She flipped the sketch board over to a fresh sheet of white, picked up her Sharpie, and drew a line.

  22

  Unlike Claudia, Denise was a model driver, signaling when she changed lanes, her eyes on the road at all times. Once again, Kevin was being chauffeured around by a woman he hardly knew. Back home, the passenger seat of his car remained vacant, a spot that had been occupied by Alice because whenever they went anywhere, she preferred that he drove. He’d loved it when she wore a skirt, the short, clingy black one with silky black stockings. On the street, her beauty was available to everyone, but inside his car, the view of her legs, together and leaning slightly to her right like a piece of human sculpture, had been exclusive to him.

  Except now it was exclusive to someone else, probably that douche bag in the background photo of her work computer. Kevin sat up straighter, trying to get himself back to the here and now. He forced himself to watch the buildings to his right blur by as they left the city and drove down to Oakland on I-980, racing toward the wide open sky.

  “Should we be talking about ourselves or something?” he asked.

  “Since we’re sister and brother,” she said, “and we have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Don’t you think?”

  Denise drummed the steering wheel with her fingers to some beat in her head, seemingly mulling over his request as she ramped off the highway and got on another.

  “You know, there’s just so much,” she said. “Even if we were to live together in the same house for the next ten years, it wouldn’t be possible for you to know who I’ve been, and vice versa.”

  “Time only moves forward.”

  “I’m glad it only goes in one direction. Whatever I’ve done, good or bad, that’s it, no do-overs.”

  “No regrets.”

  “A waste of time, or maybe not exactly a waste but a rerun, a repeat. Who wants to watch a rerun of a TV show?”

  “Unless it was a really good episode,” Kevin countered.

  “But is it as good the second time around?”

  They drove up Thirteenth Avenue in Oakland, in what Kevin assumed to be a less affluent part of town, houses with paint so chipped they looked as if they were shedding, rusted chain-link fences surrounding browned-out yards. Denise parked in front of a large beige house with black shutters, perhaps the best maintained structure on the block. A small wooden sign ran down the mailbox post: A. W. SANCTUARY. It almost looked like a name of a person.

  As soon as Denise opened her car door, two young kids ran out from the backyard, a boy and a girl.

  “Auntie D!” t
hey screamed in their high-pitched voices, their identical blond curls so gold they looked manufactured. When she bent down to embrace them in each arm, Denise gave herself wholly to the children, folding into herself, disappearing.

  “Who are you?” the boy asked.

  “A friend,” Denise said. “His name is Kevin.”

  “That’s my name!” he said, and he looked at Kevin with great curiosity. “You must be cool.”

  “As cool as you,” Kevin said.

  “This is Betty, Kevin’s sister,” Denise said. The girl waved without meeting his eyes. She slinked behind one of Denise’s legs and hugged it like a tree.

  “Nice to meet you, Betty.”

  The kids led the way to the back. Denise slipped out of her heels and walked barefoot, and Kevin followed them. She looked professional today, a white blouse and a navy-blue skirt, and her face was still perfectly porcelain. The fenced-in yard was big enough for a set of swings, a verdant vegetable garden that wrapped around the perimeter, and what looked like a crude maze created with football-size stones laid in concentric circles. The kids ran to the swing and jumped into their seats, launching themselves into the air instantly.

  “I didn’t want to tell them you’re my brother because they get very attached.”

  “I understand.” It felt like an excuse, but he let it go. “Who are they?”

  “Technically, they belong to Amy, but she’s gone, so right now, they sort of belong to the house.”

  “Gone?”

  “She’ll be back. She’s done this before, just takes off for a couple of weeks without telling anybody.”

  “And you guys take care of the kids until she returns.”

  “It must sound crazy to you, but the kids have been coming here for years.”

  “It seems like Amy could use some professional help. I don’t think a mother is supposed to abandon her children, do you?”

  Denise took his arm and walked toward the starting point of the maze, a cedar garden arbor with ivy climbing over and around the lattice and the arch. “This must not sit well with you, considering what you’ve recently discovered about your own past history.”

  He watched the kids in their swing, their limbs dangling in the air, and listened to the chime of their laughter. They were so little.

  “Have you ever walked a labyrinth?” Denise asked.

  She stood in front of the arch and shook her arms loose, raised and lowered her shoulders like a runner. In the distance, a church bell rang, and a neighbor was probably doing the laundry, as Kevin caught a whiff of artificial freshness in the air.

  “There’s no right or wrong way to do this, but the point is to follow the path, get to the center, then follow the path back out. First thing is to focus at the entrance, to become quiet and centered. I like to bow, to give acknowledgment to what the structure offers us.”

  “I’m not much of a spiritual person,” he said.

  “Neither am I.” She curled and uncurled her toes in the grass. “Every time I come here, I do this. It clears my head, sets me straight. You don’t have to do it, but either way, you’ll have to wait.”

  He shrugged and removed his sneakers and socks. The grass here was more like the St. Augustine variety, harsh and stiff, but it still felt nice to be free of his shoes, closer to the earth.

  Denise bowed, and Kevin stood behind her and did likewise.

  “Remember, just walk. That’s all you have to do. Some people ask a question before they start.”

  “Do they hear a response?”

  “If they’re lucky,” she said, and she walked under the arch and over to the other side.

  With the sun out in full, her silk blouse turned iridescent, glowing as if powered by electricity. He’d been so involved with his own situation that he hadn’t even asked her how she felt about him coming into her life. Had she even known that he’d existed, or did Norman keep the knowledge of Kevin away from her until he was found? As he followed her slow, methodical steps around the curves of the stone-lined pathway, he chided himself for not being more empathetic, for being selfish. Oh, that word—his favorite word for Alice. Whenever there was something he wanted to do and she didn’t, he’d accuse her of selfishness, while she’d counter with a call for mutual independence. Wasn’t it better if they both got what they wanted instead of one person bending toward the will of the other, for the sake of forced togetherness? Shopping had been a frequent battleground, him wanting them to walk the aisles together like a normal couple, while she wanted to break away and do her own thing. Museums, too, where Alice preferred to take in the gallery at her own pace, encountering the works of art by herself instead of waiting for Kevin to finish.

  Looking back, it seemed so incredibly stupid that they’d even argued about such inanity. But these evidences of their incompatibilities had a way of accruing. Even after it had been fully established that his threshold for mess was much lower than hers, ultimately, she never got neater for his penchant for order and he never became more accepting of her entropic inclinations. Neither was able to compromise, and it was just a matter of time until friction burned them.

  But he loved her, still. How was that possible? It was more than just wanting her body, though he did want it, every inch of it, the firm curves of her breasts, the tensile sinews of her thighs, the soft sweetness of what lay in between. He loved to make love to her on a weekend morning, right after waking up, spooning leading to a lazy, slow sex that felt so right for both of them, riding the crests of their pleasures until they fit inside each other like an infinite set of Russian nesting dolls.

  Then they would talk, just ordinary stuff like what was going on with the world, some annoying part of their jobs, the goofy TV show they watched the night before. Lying naked with his wife, chatting about the mundane: It was the epitome of comfort to discuss the leaky faucet in the kitchen or recaulking the tub in the upstairs bathroom. They were supposed to take care of each other, grow old together. Maybe it would’ve helped if they had children like everybody else, but who really knew. He remembered the horror Judy went through with her miscarriage, how it had cast a shadow over her relationship with Brian from the get-go. No matter what, life was a minefield of failures and regrets.

  Denise put out her hand to stop him from running into a bronze statue. He hadn’t realized that he was in the eye of the labyrinth. It wasn’t much to look at, a couple of shrubs in various states of struggle, a gray ceramic pot with a lid.

  “Deep in thought, were we?” Denise asked.

  “The labyrinth is doing its job.”

  “Good. His name is Fred, by the way,” she said.

  It was a happy, fat ceramic Buddha, sitting down with one knee up, a bunch of tots climbing all over him. He was fairly large, his shiny bald head coming up to Kevin’s waist. “I didn’t know Buddha had a first name. What’s in the pot?”

  Denise knelt down, lifted the lid, and removed a small notepad and a pen sitting on a bedding of folded pieces of paper.

  “Some people jot down a secret. It could be something you want, something you’re hoping for, almost like a wish list. Or maybe something you want to kick out of your life.” She offered the pad and pen to Kevin. “If you feel like it. I’m going to just stand here for a bit and pray with Fred.”

  There were two large, flat stones flanking Fred, and Denise sat on one and Kevin on the other. The notepad was spiral-bound and opened from the top, like something reporters used in old movies. About half the sheets were gone, saw-toothed remnants of the ripped-out papers stuck in the tunnel of wire, evidence of the hopes and dreams and mysteries and pains of the people who came before him, who walked the same path he had just walked. It seemed like a useless thing to do, something that felt more like magic than logic, but at the same time, what was the harm in it? At the very worst, he’d be throwing his particular ideas into an anonymous pot, and that would be the end of it. He uncapped the pen and wrote:

  I wish for happiness.

  He read it ove
r and instantly felt like a loser, and seeing the words in his own handwriting made it worse. How many others in that pot asked for the same sad wish? Kevin was tempted to shove his hand in there and read a bunch, but instead he crossed it out and tried again.

  I want to lead a meaningful life.

  I want Alice.

  But I can’t have Alice.

  I want to stop thinking about Alice.

  I don’t want to be who I am.

  I don’t want to live where I live.

  I wish my mother were still alive.

  I wish both of my moms were still alive.

  I hope my father finds a kidney before it’s too late.

  I hope Judy is happy with her new relationship.

  There seems to be so much wrong with my life right now, I don’t know where to begin.

  What am I doing here in this strange city, with these strange people? I’m nowhere closer to understanding anything, but I don’t want to go home because

  He flipped over the sheet.

  there’s nothing there for me, except my dog. I miss Snaps. I envy her. I envy my dog, probably too much and too often.

  Everybody dies, everything ends. I’m forty years old. I’m at the halfway point, a place when most people have direction and stability. They have kids, families, jobs they can tolerate. I don’t have any of those things, and I’m scared.

  I’m fucking terrified.

  And I don’t know what to do about any of it.

  How did I get here? And how do I get out?

  Kevin was about to go over to the next sheet, but he stopped himself. He ripped it out of the notepad and savored the zip of tearing. He folded the paper twice to make a thin long piece, then folded the two ends in opposite directions and brought them together to lock them in a knot. He tossed it onto the pile in the pot, then closed the lid with the pen and pad inside.