Free Food for Millionaires

by Min Jin Lee

  Leah opened her eyes. The living room was clean and light: The fabric-upholstered furniture looked fresh, and a collection of jade plants of varying sizes in ceramic pots rested on the wide windowsill. A big kitchen was visible through the pass-through window. On the white marble kitchen counter, there were brand-new appliances Leah had seen advertised in the Macy’s Cellar circulars and different-shaped cutting boards stacked neatly against the tea green tile backsplash, a hickory block holding knives with black matching handles, and a row of cookbooks on a wall shelf. Leah, who’d never cared much for accumulating things, felt a prick of envy, but not for herself. She could never give the same things to her own daughters, who deserved these items no less than Ella.

  Leah reminded herself that this child had no mother. “I didn’t want to bother you, but is she here?”

  “No.”

  Leah covered her face with her hands.

  “I’m sorry.” Ella bit her lip.

  “Then can you tell me where my daughter is? I haven’t seen her in six months.”

  Ella shook her head no again. Casey wouldn’t have wanted Ella to tell her. Even Casey’s sister wasn’t allowed to tell. She glanced down at her own stocking feet.

  Casey’s father had hit her and thrown her out. She had not gone into the details. It had never occurred to Ella that there might be a plausible reason, or that her parents could be sorry and want her back, and since Ella had grown up without a mother of her own, she had somehow forgotten about Deaconess Cho. Casey never talked about her. Ella had not considered Leah’s suffering. It was then that Ella realized she had no mother who’d search for her in this way. She was surprised by how bitterly she felt this lack—for a contingency that would never occur.

  The bright, sun-filled apartment grew quiet and strained. The two women sat in mutual silence. The girl’s refusal to tell her where her daughter was staying made Leah feel spurned by God Himself. Somewhere nearby, her daughter was hiding from her. She was well, as far as she knew, but somehow that made it worse. Her own child did not want her. When Casey was born, Leah remembered looking down at the wet, red face and thinking, I would die for you, and the fierce attachment that followed in being a mother had frightened her. Her love for her husband would never equal what she felt for her children. But how could this impossibly lucky girl Ella know what it was like to love that way? Ella didn’t have a mother, and she had no children. Her apparent sympathy and kindness did not equal true experience, did it? Leah’s sobs were low and blocked—she was ashamed to cry like this when a mother should be collected and determined in the face of life’s crises. But life, for Leah, was overwhelming and terrifying—in every corner lurked greater dangers. It wasn’t possible to plan or be safe: Life would not let you alone.

  The mums and the red berries remained on the coffee table, with no one getting up to put them in water. Ella glided the box of tissues toward Casey’s mother.

  “Why?” Leah sniffled. “Why doesn’t she call me?”

  Ella couldn’t answer her.

  “What won’t you girls tell me? Is there more I need to know? I’m her mother. I have the right to know.” Leah was crying and shouting. The humiliation was unbearable. “Do you know what that means? I’m her mother.”

  How was she supposed to know? Ella didn’t even have a mother. As a girl, she used to study Casey and her mother on Sundays during coffee hour. Ted had taught her that everyone fell under the categories of the Myers-Briggs personality test: Casey was an obvious Extravert, and Leah was an Introvert. Casey’s younger sister, Tina, resembled her mother in her prettiness; their faces were arranged in a similar pattern. But Casey and her mother cried the same way—with a kind of elegiac heartbreak.

  Could anyone see her own connection with her dead mother? Ella wondered. Her father never spoke of her mother anymore. In the third grade, when she learned the story of the birth of Athena, Ella had wanted to believe that she, too, had sprung forth from her father’s head. That was a child’s magical thought, but in the presence of Casey’s mother, Ella felt her mother’s loss far more profoundly than she’d thought possible.

  Leah took a tissue, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose loudly. She smiled bravely for Ella’s sake. None of this was the child’s fault. She was being loyal to her friend. In a way, that was admirable.

  “Would you give Casey something for me?”

  “Of course.” Ella wanted to be useful somehow.

  Leah opened her Bible, and from the middle of the book, she pulled out a fat white envelope—the dry-cleaning store address printed on its upper left corner. Every month, along with eleven other women from her church choir, Leah put two hundred dollars into the geh pot. Each month, the pot rotated among them. Last month had finally been her turn. Leah had put the entire two thousand four hundred dollars in the envelope for Casey. Leah slid the envelope toward Ella. “Here. Please give this to her. Tell her that Mommy wants her to call. When she can—” Leah’s voice broke again.

  Ella tried not to cry herself.

  “Your father said you’re marrying. . . Ted. A nice boy who helped Casey get a job.”

  Ella nodded, proud of Ted’s act of kindness, never having believed that he was as selfish as others saw him.

  “I hope you will be blessed. With Ted. And in your life together.” Leah smiled. Such a pretty girl, she thought, without question the prettiest girl at church, and so ladylike. She moved like a girl who had come from the best family—it showed in the way she walked, how she spoke, the way she looked at you. Wealth didn’t make you proper, Leah thought, having seen so much evidence to the contrary, but once in a while, there was proof that there was a kind of proper breeding. Everything about Ella revealed her yangban home. But even in this beautiful apartment with expensive furniture with everything already paid for, Leah could see the child’s loneliness, and she felt a kind of ache for her.

  Leah smiled, and this time she spoke in English, even though her words were limited. “You’re a good daughter to your father. Ella, try and be happy. With all your fortune—” And Leah shook her head at herself, knowing that fortune didn’t have the same meaning in English that it did in Korean. “You have so much blessing.”

  Ella smiled at her, having been told this many times before (the word Casey’s mother was searching for in Korean was bok—a kind of luck and blessing rolled up into one), and it did not occur to her to argue with these kinds of well-wishers that she would’ve given up nearly everything if her mother could have been alive. No one wanted to see how she might be missing something, too—that if Ella were to run away, she had no mother who’d search for her.

  Ella fingered the white envelope, then found herself moving it near the tissue box. “Casey works in midtown. You know that already.” She looked into Leah’s eyes, making sure that she hadn’t been the one who’d told her this.

  “Your father said she works with Ted. At Kearn Davis. Nor far from me. At the store. I have a customer there,” Leah said, recalling Mr. Perell, a customer who was someone important at that company, and how he liked to have his shirts hand-pressed and got very angry if the collars got smashed flat during delivery.

  “Would you like to go visit her at the office?” Ella asked her, realizing the absurdity of her own question. It was hardly possible to imagine Leah—a slight Korean woman with a crown of white hair, wearing a dark woolen home-sewn coat—in the vast marble lobby of the investment bank. Even in her living room, Casey’s mother looked out of place and out of time.

  “During the week, I. . . ,” Leah stammered. “My husband doesn’t know I’m here. He thinks I’m getting a haircut. On Saturday mornings, he can work without me for a while, so I can run errands,” she explained hurriedly in Korean, thinking that a young American girl like Ella couldn’t possibly understand the details that made up her life: sorting dirty shirts, darning missing buttons, and taking up hems of designer jeans for teenage customers whom she addressed as “miss”; trying to find the best cut of meat that was on special at
the Key Food for dinner, scrubbing toilets on Saturday nights, cooking her husband’s dinner at a set hour and making sure there was always enough beer and whiskey in the house for him; and lastly, all the places a woman like her didn’t enter.

  Leah looked lost. Ella felt terrible for not helping her.

  “She’s staying with a friend. Three blocks from here,” Ella said. She got up from her seat almost mechanically, as if she were unconscious of her movements, and went to retrieve the pad and pencil kept by the phone. She jotted down the address.

  Casey would be home at this hour. It was the first Saturday of January, and it was only nine in the morning. Jay would probably be asleep, and Casey would be smoking her Marlboro Lights in the living room, reading the papers or a novel. On her second cup of black coffee. Those were Casey’s weekend habits; Ella had not forgotten them.

  Leah stared at Ella, not knowing if this was some sort of test. She couldn’t speak. She took the piece of paper and the envelope and tucked them into her Bible.

  After Leah left the apartment, the only evidence of her visit was the dark red berries and the white flowers with their thin, curving petals resting on the coffee table, still wrapped in their clear cellophane. Ella went to get a vase and some water.

  13 RECOGNITION

  CASEY HAD GOTTEN UP AT FIVE O’CLOCK on a Saturday, because it had become habit for her to do so. They were living together now, and it was only mildly different from when she’d stay with him during the weekends when she was still in school. She had more or less agreed to marry him; this life was practice. While Jay slept in, she’d dashed through her daily Bible study and verse selection, and now she was finishing up the head size for her third attempt at the gathered beret assignment. With a cigarette hanging off her lips, she pick-stitched the belting ribbon into her homework hat.

  “Shit,” she said, her sewing thread having knotted up again. Once again, she’d forgotten to lick the length of it, as her teacher had instructed. With Jay never home, her workday ending at six, and her weekends free, for the first time in her life, Casey had the luxury of a hobby—she was learning how to make hats. Her first FIT classes in dressmaking, taken two summers ago, had not been as pleasurable, because the courses had been more demanding than any she’d taken at Princeton and because her efforts were scarcely reflected in her final product. Making clothes was difficult. Also, she’d been outdistanced by her peers, many of whom had been sewing clothes since they were little girls. Leah, a resourceful housewife and talented seamstress, had never wanted Casey and Tina to cook, sew, or clean. Being an ace student in reading, writing, and arithmetic, however, had almost zero value in terms of drafting an accurate skirt pattern. After getting a pair of C’s, she’d decided to buy her clothes rather than create them.

  But millinery was something else. Making hats was no less difficult than Dressmaking I and II; again, the majority of her FIT peers in millinery were technically superior, but Casey felt she understood instinctively the aesthetics of hats and why women wanted them. It was her intention to take all four classes and get the certificate—the night class schedule was convenient, and her deskmates were hilarious. In her few months on the trading floor, Casey felt occasionally exhausted by the dick-swinging quality of Kearn Davis, and it was a relief to spend time with women who were not mainly focused on beating one another.

  As a millinery student, Casey was mediocre. Her hand stitches were crooked, her machine sewing zigzag, and her early attempts at machine welting her brims had been a disaster. Last week, the millinery sewing machine chewed up two thirty-dollar beaver hat bodies. The running joke—with her deskmates, Polly, Susan, and Roni, a police officer, accountant, and gourmet cheese seller, respectively—was: “So what was it that you’d studied at Princeton?” The name Princeton was almost shouted. Two of them had gone to community college, and Roni had gone to SUNY Binghamton. In the company of these vibrant women, Casey felt less lonely in the world. Virginia wrote letters every week, but her stay in Italy was indefinite; Ella and Ted were more and more of a package deal, and Tina was back at school and in the thrall of sleeping with Chul.

  Privately, Casey thought it was remarkable to see a flat square of fabric become a baseball hat and a leftover piece of felt grow into a rosette. The fact that she struggled at millinery—compared with her ease at writing term papers, taking exams, selling hairpins, making hotel arrangements for brokers, and scheduling equity sales conferences—humbled her, but not in a bad way. Frieda, her millinery teacher, murmured reluctantly that although her construction grade was a C+, her design grade was a B+. “I see improvement,” Frieda said. That comment prompted Casey to buy a round for her friends after class that night.

  For four years, Casey had sold hats at Sabine’s with price tags ranging from fifty dollars to one that actually cost twelve hundred dollars (Elizabeth Taylor’s dresser had bought it for her to wear to Ascot). The prices had appalled her, but now, after spending twelve hours hand-sewing a homely denim chef’s hat, which included pulling out all the uneven gathering stitches and starting again, Casey wondered how anyone ever made any money. On the first day of class, Frieda had warned all the millinery hopefuls that hats were not a growing industry—its heyday had long passed; in America, only eccentrics and religious women wore them.

  The phone rang, and Casey picked up right away, not wanting it to wake Jay.

  It was Ella.

  “You did what? What the fuck?” Casey shouted. “Damn it.” Ella was apologizing, but that was irrelevant. “Bye.” Casey hung up.

  She shook Jay awake. He protested, rubbing his eyes with one hand, fumbling with the other in search of his eyeglasses on the bedside. The clock-radio’s green LCD letters read 9:15—the first day he’d had off in months.

  “My mother is on her way. Can you please stay in the bedroom and not come out until she’s gone?” She sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes wide open.

  “Baby”—Jay stretched his neck out from under the quilt like a turtle—“I’m not hiding in my own house.”

  “Have it your way.” Casey covered her mouth with her hand. If she waited in the lobby, pretending that she was heading out, she might be able to overtake her mother. Talk at the coffee shop on Second Avenue. Though naturally her mother would wonder why she couldn’t come up.

  Jay studied Casey’s anguished expression. He felt sorry for her.

  “What do you expect me to do? Hide in a closet? Sit out on the fire escape? It’s freezing outside.” He dropped his face in the pillow, then looked up, having thought of something else to say. “For God’s sake, Casey, grow up. You just turned twenty-three years old. You’re still going to lie to your mother about me?”

  But Casey didn’t say anything, unable to express the pain she felt. Her lips whitened at the pressure of her jaw clenching. How could he possibly understand what it would mean for her mother to find her here? She suddenly hated him for being an American and herself for feeling so foreign when she was with him. She hated his ideals of rugged individualism, self-determination—this vain idea that life was what you made of it—as if it were some sort of paint-by-numbers kit. Only the most selfish person on earth could live that way. Casey was selfish, she knew that, but she had no wish to hurt anyone. If her rotten choices hurt her, well then, she’d be willing to take that wager, but it was hard to think of letting her parents down again and again. But her choices were always hurting her parents, or so they said. Yet Casey was an American, too—she had a strong desire to be happy and to have love, and she’d never considered such wishes to be Korean ones.

  She went to get her coat. Jay sank his head in the pillow. Then he sprang up and pulled on a white T-shirt and the pair of sweatpants that had been draped over the armchair. He needed coffee.

  “Ten minutes. I will remain in the kitchen obscured from view for ten minutes. Then I demand a proper introduction,” Jay said, adding, “I will do this because I love you.”

  “Thank you,” Casey said, accepting his offer gratef
ully. The buzzer rang, and she flew to the intercom. Her mother’s warbling voice rose to her—its sound broken up by the rushing wind from the street.

  “It’s Umma,” Leah said, and Casey buzzed her in.

  When she opened the front door, Casey found it difficult to accept that her mother was standing in that narrow foyer. She wore the navy wool three-button coat that she’d made last winter when she and Tina were home for Christmas break. The day Leah found its Vogue pattern, she’d asked the girls if they’d like matching ones. As usual, Casey said no, and Leah made one for Tina in a sturdy black wool.

  Leah looked disoriented as she glanced about the living room. Casey saw her mother’s disapproval. To her, the leather sofa would look vinyl, the hand-painted flea market table would show its price of fifteen dollars, and the new gray carpet that the landlord had just tacked down was pilling too much. None of this had bothered Casey before. But her mother had just come from Ella’s—with cherrywood Ethan Allen furniture and upholstery in blues and creams.

  Leah stood in her coat, her cheeks reddened from the cold, her hands clutched with worry. She studied the apartment sharply, trying to learn something about her own daughter.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Casey asked her mother, her voice gentle and tentative.

  Leah didn’t budge. “I didn’t know where you were.”

  Her dark eyes were full of hurt. As far back as Casey could remember, her mother was terrified of travel and entering new spaces.

  “How long have you been here?” Leah asked. The apartment didn’t seem like her daughter’s. The space felt sterile, like an office. Coffee was brewing in the kitchen; the machine sputtered loudly. There was some sewing and blue cotton on the wooden table near the window. Who was sewing? she wondered. “Why didn’t you come home?”