Love Love

by Sung J. Woo

  “You talk with him, too?” he asked.

  “Wednesdays at three.”

  “So he’s good at what he does.”

  “We talk, we look, we meditate,” she said. “I don’t always feel like spinning cartwheels after our sessions, but I learn something. So yeah, I’d say he’s very, very good at what he does. I’ve seen shrinks with degrees from Harvard and Berkeley, but dealing with people is an instinctive art, you know? You’re born with it.”

  Up above, Amy was no longer standing but sitting next to Norman. She talked with her hands, throwing them up and slicing the air, and Norman nodded and listened. Bits of Amy’s voice, high-pitched like a young girl’s, shot down like stray bullets: trespass, motherfucker, hopeless. Norman offered his hand, and she placed it over her heart.

  “You’re pissed at him,” Angeles said. “About the whole Denise half-sister thing.”

  “You know about that?”

  “We all live in this house. Nothing stays a secret for long around here.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a pretty strange thing to do?”

  “I’d agree with you on that. But I’m sure he had his reasons.”

  “So this doesn’t change anything for you. You’d still listen to him.”

  Amy was off the roof’s edge and headed for the steps of the fire escape, with Norman close behind her. Angeles stretched out her arms, yawned, then tightened the belt around her robe.

  “What the man does with his own life has little to do with his talents. Unless his own failings bleed into his counseling, I have no problems with him. Sorry. But you can discuss this with your fake half-sister.” She pointed at the car pulling into the lot.

  “Very funny.”

  “I try,” Angeles said. She ran up to Denise, and they walked back together arm in arm to where Kevin was standing. In a pink hoodie and a pair of well-worn jeans and with her hair tied back in a ponytail, his nonsister looked collegiate. All Denise needed was a book bag slung over a shoulder to complete the illusion.

  “He’s still mad at you,” Angeles said. “If you need me so we can gang up on him, you know where to find me.” She blew Kevin a kiss, and then she was gone, too, and now it was just the two of them, Kevin and Denise. Fat clouds the color of steel wool floated across the sky, blotting the sun with their puffiness.

  “I got here as soon as I heard. Everything’s okay?”

  Kevin zipped up his windbreaker against the rising wind. It felt as if a rainstorm was coming. “Norman worked his usual miracle, apparently.”

  “He often does,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  “Listen,” she said. “Would you at least give me a chance to tell you my side of the story? You were too mad last night to hear me out, but I was hoping that you’d be more open after a good night’s sleep.”

  “You’re going to lecture me on reason?”

  “I know you want to light into Norman, but please don’t, at least not until lunchtime. I’ve scheduled him for three sessions this morning, and all of these people need him at his best.”

  “So I’m supposed to wait my turn to tell him how nuts he is.”

  She took him by the arm and led him to the back door and into the kitchen of the Sanctuary. According to the clock on the wall, it was almost eight, prime time for breakfast, but it was deserted.

  “They’re all fasting today,” Denise said, rooting through the bottom cabinets until she found what she wanted, a cast-iron skillet that looked heavy enough to have its own gravitational pull. “Have a seat. I’ll make us some breakfast.”

  The ruckus had woken him up, so he hadn’t had a chance to wash up or even brush his teeth, but Denise waved off his complaints. From one fridge she got out a carton of eggs and a block of butter, and from the other fridge, a carton of milk and a jug of orange juice, both of which she opened and sniffed approvingly.

  She pointed at the stool by the island with her spatula, and Kevin sat. Denise slid him a glass of orange juice and took a long, satisfying drink from her own.

  “I don’t like to talk about myself,” she said, “so it helps if I do something.” She turned on the oven. “First, I’ll make the batter, and then I’ll make us some eggs. How do you like yours?”

  “Scrambled.”

  Denise lifted a tub of flour onto the counter; a puff of white dust announced its arrival. “Remember me telling you last night that you’re a real sweet guy? See, this is why. I know you don’t really care to eat breakfast now. I also know that you’d like nothing more than to tell Norman off. But you’re here, sitting with me, humoring me, even.”

  “You might be mistaking sweetness with stupidity.”

  “I just complimented you,” she said. “Don’t turn it into the opposite.”

  It was words like those that made him like her, her straightforwardness. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s a surprise. What I can tell you is that it’s easy to make, easy on the eyes, and tastes as good as it looks. It’s the only thing left from my childhood that’s worth remembering.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” Kevin said, surprising himself as he said it.

  “The hell I don’t.”

  “To take a page out of Claudia’s book, tell me whatever you plan to tell me only if it’ll give you pleasure. Not because you feel guilty and you want to appease me in some way.”

  Denise dumped eggs into a large bowl and sliced a third from a stick of butter.

  “I can’t lie, of course.”

  “Not in the Sanctuary.”

  “It may not give me pleasure to say what I have to say, but I believe it will give me satisfaction. Is that enough?”

  “Probably,” he said. “It’s not like I’m an expert in living selfishly.”

  Denise stayed silent during this final part of the preparation, adding milk, nutmeg, and vanilla to the bowl, but Kevin could see she was figuring out what she wanted to say and how. She set the timer on the oven for nineteen minutes.

  “That’s pretty exact, nineteen,” Kevin said. “You’ve done this before.”

  She pulled up the empty stool next to Kevin. “I was gonna make some omelets for us while we waited.”

  “To further distract yourself.”

  “Even with Norman, when I have my sessions with him, I’m doing jigsaw puzzles, knitting, anything to keep me from feeling the feelings I should be feeling.”

  “And how does that make you feel?”

  She smiled, and it was a thing of beauty. Kevin hadn’t known that all the smiles preceding this one had been guarded, careful. He wished he could see her without her makeup, the way she looked right after she woke up.

  “If you don’t mind, just listen, okay? Until I’m done.”

  They were interrupted by Kevin’s ringing cell phone. Area code 617—it was an unfamiliar number. He sent it to voicemail and swtiched it to silent mode.

  “I’m ready,” he said, and Denise spoke.

  “The reason why I agreed to play along with this ruse of Norman’s, Kevin, was because you and I share something that most people are fortunate enough not to experience. Like yourself, I, too, am an adoptee, but unlike you, I was aware of my situation as soon as I was old enough to question why my face looked nothing like the faces of my parents.

  “I was adopted when I was four months old. I don’t know who my birth mother is, and I don’t care to know. From what Kay, my adoptive mother, told me, I was no different than most of the kids who get abandoned in Korea, cast out from a single mother who did not want to bear the stigma of having a bastard child. This was in the late ’70s, and the country was nowhere as rich as it is now, but here’s a statistic that might disturb you: One in two hundred children who are born in Korea, today, are still sent overseas. Considering that our mother country has twice the gross domestic product as Switzerland, why is it that children are still sent from there for adoption every year? Right now, South Korea has the l
owest birth rate of any developed nation, and yet Koreans decline to adopt one of their own due to societal pressures. Because back there, it’s all about the bloodline.

  “I can rail on about this forever—the way single mothers are ostracized, the lack of government-sponsored programs to help them, et cetera. It wasn’t that long ago that the country refused to consider orphans legal citizens, if you can believe that. Changing the viewpoints of a culture is always slow. There was a time when I thought I could make a difference, volunteering for transnational adoptee support groups to hold meetings, put up flyers, make cold calls, but you really can’t help others if you can’t help yourself first, and I had my own demons to beat out of me.

  “So it was Kay and Robert, my adoptive parents, and my sister, Jenny, and me, in the flat little town of Skillen, Illinois, where I was one of only three nonwhite kids in my elementary school. I went through the usual troubles transnational adoptees go through, feelings of abandonment, the inability to fit in anywhere because I wasn’t blue-eyed and blond-haired like my family, nor was I Korean, since I didn’t speak the language and wouldn’t have known kimchi if it hit me in the face. I felt inadequate most of the time, that there was something wrong with me. It all comes back to the inescapable fact that I shouldn’t have been born. I know that sounds cruel, but it’s the hard truth for anyone who’s an adoptee. Yes, your mother chose to have you instead of aborting you, but that’s because she didn’t have the guts. You and I, Kevin, are the products of fear and regret.

  “Kids made fun of me, of course, as kids do. Running up to me with fingers pulled at the corners of their eyes, telling me my hair looked like a dirty mop. Big sister Jenny did her job, protecting me as much as she could, but she couldn’t always be there, and soon she had her own problems to deal with.

  “I don’t want to tell you what I’m about to tell you. I just don’t. It’s what I’ll be working on for the rest of my life, to move beyond this, though really, it isn’t possible. Because you can’t unsee what you’ve seen, you can’t unhear what you’ve heard. When Jenny turned twelve, her father, our father, started touching her inappropriately. It was subtle, the way it began—a hand that lingered on her shoulder, then down lower to her back, a hug that felt a little too close. It might be unkind to call our mother an idiot, but that’s what she was. A homemaker who only saw goodness in people, she never saw her husband as anything but the most perfect human being. They’d met at some sort of Jesus camp, and they were devout Christians. My father was a salesman for a tool company, and he was extremely good at his job. The few times I’ve revealed this part of my life to people, they’ve all asked the same question: How is it that someone like him could qualify to be an adoptive parent? The screening process has become more rigorous since the ’70s, but I still think no agency today has a chance against the charms of my father. I never did understand why he ended up with my mother, when he could’ve talked any woman into marrying him. Maybe it was that she adored him so completely. Or maybe it was because he knew with her, he could get away with anything.

  “He started coming into our room at night. Jenny and I shared a large bedroom, but even if it had been the size of a football field, it wouldn’t have been big enough for me not to know what was going on. Neither of them uttered a single word, which amplified all the terrifying sounds of sex: the top bed sheet sliding off, wet kisses my father would plant on my sister’s body, the squeaking of the mattress springs as he violated her again and again. I squeezed my eyes shut and pretended to sleep, and I’m positive that my father knew that I was pretending. Not that I had anything to worry about, as he never laid a hand on me, not once, not ever. Not that he didn’t want to—as I hit puberty, I could feel him, his hunger. And yet on the nights he sneaked into our room, it was for Jenny and never me. Why was that? Was it because I was adopted, that I wasn’t actually his daughter? Shouldn’t that have made me an easier target? At some point, I convinced myself that he’d made a deal with himself, that if he could keep away from me, he was saving himself in some small way.

  “Is it wrong for me to wish that he did touch me? Because that’s the truth. That’s the hideous truth that I’ve kept locked away from myself until I was finally able to face it. Norman says it’s a variant of Stockholm syndrome, where the kidnapped eventually comes to love the kidnapper. I wanted my father to fuck me. I wanted him to want me the way he wanted my sister. It’s sick, and now it must be clear to you why I ended up in the sex industry. So many girls I’ve met in this business are damaged, and I’m no different. Why would any woman with a normal upbringing want to lead a life where she gets fucked by strange men, having her cunt filled with foreign cocks, foreign objects, while other men direct cameras and boom mikes to record the close-ups of her penetrations, to capture the sounds of smacking flesh and the ridiculous screams of fake orgasms? Sex is natural, but pornography is not. In order for us to make the sexual fantasy come alive on the screen, we have to be dead inside. There is something deeply wrong with me, and there always will be.

  “Life is strong. You can go on, you can forget about the night when it’s morning. After a while, things fall into a pattern, and getting raped by your father is just something else that happens. Jenny and I brushed our teeth and took our showers and ate breakfast before we went off to school, until one day, my sister didn’t come home.

  “There’s a walking bridge in our town, one that doesn’t rise above a rushing river but rather a cavernous crevasse. It hangs over what used to be a limestone quarry, and it’s one of the quietest places I’ve been. There’s one part, not the deepest point but near it, that’s pitch black except for two minutes each summer, when the sun is at a certain height and angle to make it shine like a bed of stars. Jenny and I had been there many times on cloudless days, waiting and watching for that brief moment when there was light in that darkness.

  “That’s where the police found my sister’s mangled body the next morning. She left no note, though it was obvious to me why she’d climbed the six-foot railing and thrown herself into the abyss. A day after the funeral, I packed up a suitcase and hopped on a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles and haven’t been back home since. Once a year, I call my parents, though I don’t speak to them. I don’t know why I do this. Almost always it’s my mother who answers, and occasionally it’s my father, but in either case, I just listen to their repeated hellos until the eventual hang-up. Once, just once, he’d guessed right. This was a long time ago, just a couple of years after I’d left. He said he was sorry that Jenny died and that I was gone and that he wanted to make things right, but no matter how much he begged and cried into the phone, I said nothing.

  “Maybe I’m waiting for the number to be disconnected, or for someone other than my parents to answer. Maybe I want them dead, because then I can move on for good, though it’s not like I pay them any mind. Maybe I miss them, and this is the best way for me to deal with what’s happened to my life. I don’t blame my father entirely for the path I’ve chosen. There are women who are sexually abused at an early age, who don’t turn into strippers or whores or porn actresses—all the jobs I’ve held to survive in this world. I don’t know why I wasn’t strong enough to build a regular life for myself. This is my life, and I have to find ways to accept it. To accept what is, because in the end, that’s all that we ever have.

  “The oven timer’s about to ring, and the dish we’re about to have is best served hot. I just want to tell you one more thing, not about me but you. Kevin, I know you’re very hurt that you just found out about your adoptive past, but I hope you can also see how fortunate you were by not knowing. I see it as a gift from your parents, not a sin they’ve committed. With me, it wasn’t a possibility for me not to know, but your adoptive parents saved you from what every adopted kid feels at one point or another: that they don’t belong. No matter how much love they may be showered with by their adoptive family, that core sense of abandonment never leaves. What you sense now is betrayal, which isn’t exactly a cakewal
k, either, but oh, Kevin, what I would give to feel what you feel instead of the hollowness that has lived inside me since I was a little girl.

  “Obviously my view of your situation is biased. It may even be wrong. But it’s the way I feel and I wanted you to know. And now, let’s eat.”

  Denise called it “the big pancake,” though if it were up to Kevin, he would’ve named it a “walled pancake.” The batter had climbed and risen above the rim of the iron skillet, forming a brown buttery crust that was flaky and light. The pancake itself was thin and moist, and after she had squeezed half a lemon and sprinkled powdered sugar over it, it was sweet and sour perfection.

  “This is extraordinarily good,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And I’m so sorry about—about everything. You haven’t had an easy life.”

  “There are people worse off,” she said, neatly cutting off a small triangle of the pancake. She picked it up like a miniature pizza and nibbled on its pointed end. “But thank you. I’m not one of those people who get angry at pity, so if you feel like pitying me, go right ahead. I can always use all the good wishes I can get.”

  “I find it heartening that you’ve survived and that you keep on surviving,” Kevin said.

  “Now if you call me a hero, that—that might piss me off.”

  “Then I’ll be sure never to call you one.”

  It was entirely too delicious, especially when she brought out a jug of maple syrup.

  “Now that’s just not fair,” Kevin said.

  If it took Denise half an hour to make the pancake, it was gone in five minutes.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” she said. “There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing someone eat your food. I’m fairly certain it’s a basic mothering instinct that kicks in.”

  “Have you ever thought about having one? A kid?”