by Min Jin Lee
Ella laughed.
“Ella, I think it’s okay.”
“No.”
“Yes. Yes. I’ll do some research. But if I understand it, it’s like a tattoo.”
“I never thought about it that way,” she said.
“But all the research and facts won’t tell me how to feel. How would my feelings change because of this?” he said.
Ella looked at him, not knowing what to say. He was so kind.
“I think you should marry me if you love me,” he said.
Ella was surprised by his words. “I do love you,” she said. The words came out so quickly, and she wasn’t sorry.
“After the divorce is final. And the herpes. If I get it, and if it hurts, you’ll have to take care of me.” David crossed his arms.
“You’re serious.”
He nodded. “The marriage thing is serious. You don’t really have to be nice to me if I get herpes. I was kidding—”
“You really think it’s okay?”
“It’s not okay. It’s awful for you, and it must seem horribly unfair. But illness is like that, isn’t it? You don’t ask for it.” His mother was the gentlest woman, and her cancer was nothing less than brutal. “But doesn’t everyone have unfairness? You’ve had your fair share of that. But herpes—that doesn’t matter to us.”
“How?” Ella hadn’t expected him to say any of this. “Where did you come from?”
David put his arms around her. “Oh, you sweetheart. You sweetheart.”
Feeling the stiffness in her body break, Ella moved closer to his chest.
Ted had not expected the news of his father’s death, although it had been long in the coming. His father had hypertension and diabetes and had suffered two strokes. For the past ten years, he’d had chronic kidney problems and dialysis three days a week. He had not been well enough to travel to Ted’s Harvard College graduation, his Harvard Business School graduation, or his wedding. His sister had just phoned to tell him the news of their father’s death, saying that Mom said it was okay if he couldn’t make it to the funeral. His mother hadn’t spoken to him since she’d found out that Ted had left Ella and the baby. When Ted tried to reach her, she refused to pick up the call or return his messages.
“I don’t think I should go,” Delia said after he asked her to come with him. “Baby, I do want to be there for you. But you haven’t spoken to her yet, and you might want to be alone when you talk to her.”
Ted looked miserable sitting there by the beige cordless phone. His sister had been sobbing hysterically on the call, which had made him only stonier. “Do what you want,” he said.
The last time Ted and his mother spoke was after she had called the house in August last year and spoken to Ella before her overdose. The next day, his mother had phoned him at the office (this was something she had never done before) and told him that she wouldn’t speak to him again until he worked it out with Ella. At the hospital, after Ella had her stomach pumped, Ted had asked her to take him back, but she had refused. Ella had wanted the divorce. Ted told his mother this, but she still blamed him. His mother said that you can’t quit a marriage because you got a better offer. “People and promises are not like jobs,” she’d said, then hung up on him. He had tried to phone her a few times, but his mother wouldn’t relent, and eventually he had gotten tired of trying. His plan had been to take Irene to see his parents for the Fourth of July. But then his father died on him.
Ted took the large green throw pillow from the chair he was sitting on and put it over his gut. He crossed his arms, the pillow wedged between his arms and his torso. All he could picture was his father’s charcoal-colored face, the sad yellow eyes and small mouth. His father had loved him in his gruff, quiet way. Ted had been his favorite. Before Ted went to Phillips Academy, his father had taken him to the airport and given him a small white envelope. “Don’t let anybody tell you you’re nothing just because you’re poor and Oriental. They’re wrong, Teddy. You’re my son. But, Teddy, don’t come back to this stupid place. I’ll come to see you. I never want to see you living in Alaska.” Ted could almost feel the touch of his father’s grayish fingers—scarred from scaling fish, the tip of his right pinkie lopped off from a cannery accident. For all these years, he’d kept the yellowing bong-tu, after spending the five twenty-dollar bills, framed on his desk, because his father had written “Teddy” on it in his own hand.
“Baby, do you want me to go?” Delia asked, moving toward him.
Ted wanted her to read his mind. Normally, he would have tried to say something optimistic—to make something difficult sound better than it was. But he didn’t have the heart for it today.
Delia rubbed his neck. “Let me go with you. I’d like to meet your family.”
She then made the hotel reservations for the two of them, ordered the plane tickets and funeral wreaths, and arranged the car service to the airport. She wanted to make sure that Ted wouldn’t have to clutter his mind with these mundane details. Delia was determined to prove that she was a good ally. When he had asked her to marry him, he had said to her, “You and I are the same,” and Delia had taken that to mean that they had both grown up poor. But that wasn’t it. They were the same because they would survive anything. She wouldn’t let him survive this alone.
He drove them in the rental car to his parents’ house. From the end of the street, he pointed out the modest house covered in beige aluminum siding, no bigger than what Delia had grown up in with her mother and three brothers. Several cars were parked in the front. Ted slowed the car. Delia thought he looked different, as though he were frightened.
Ted had described his summer jobs at the cannery when he was home from prep school, how he used to do his SAT practice exams during his lunch break while the other guys were feeling up ugly girls in the employee locker room. They both had grown up with nothing, but Ted had climbed out of his hole by studying. Delia had hated school. Her dyslexia was diagnosed late in middle school, but she had always thought that she was just stupid. Her senior year, to graduate, she had slept with some of her teachers. She got a 98 in English without ever having gone to class, although she had let Mr. Shert play with her boobs and rubbed him off in his car behind the Benjamin’s Hardware store on Friday afternoons whenever he phoned. He was the only one who’d fooled around with her who thought it was wrong to have intercourse with a student, but everything else was okay. The biology teacher had no qualms at all about anything, including anal intercourse, which remained Delia’s least favorite sex act, being the most painful.
She had gotten decent grades in art, gym, and drama on the merits. But for all the other classes, it had been easier to barely pass or to put a grown man’s hand inside her blouse or to get on her knees rather than write about why Othello killed the woman he loved, when she had difficulty forming the sentences with her pen. Her high school transcript was uneven, but she graduated and did five semesters of college at St. John’s before hooking up with a Kearn Davis trader on a commuter train who encouraged her to apply for a sales assistant post. Delia had no wish to ever sleep with another man besides Ted for the rest of her life.
Ted parked the car and came round to open her door. They left their luggage inside the white Ford Taurus.
Mrs. Kim opened the door.
“You came,” she said in Korean. She didn’t look happy to see him. “But it’s right that you came.” She smiled weakly.
How odd it was to be home, Ted thought. To hear his mother’s Korean, which sounded so different from Ella’s father’s dialect. A dozen or so church people sat in the plainly furnished living room. A group of women peeped out at him and Delia from the kitchen. He couldn’t see his brother or sister.
Ted bowed in the direction of the seated Koreans, who nodded at him. They bowed back. This was Teddy, the son who’d gone to Harvard, made millions of dollars a year, bought his parents and brother and sister homes. He was married to the beautiful Korean girl whose pictures they’d seen. She was a doctor’s d
aughter who called her mother-in-law every Sunday night even when the son was too busy working. They had a baby daughter who must have been over a year old by now. The guests didn’t know what to make of the American woman standing next to him.
Mrs. Kim noticed Delia, too. “Mahp soh sah! You brought her to your father’s funeral?” She couldn’t help shaking her head. The girl looked like someone you’d see in a magazine—bright orange hair, shiny blue eyes, and red lipstick. She wore a tight black turtleneck and black pants. The girl had big breasts and a small waist, with none of Ella’s quiet loveliness. Teddy had thrown his life away to be with this sexy mi-gook girl. Now all three of her children were dating Americans.
“Do you have rocks for brains?”
Ted thought about turning around and leaving. “Mom,” he said plaintively.
“Ella sent that.” Mrs. Kim pointed to the enormous arrangement of white roses on the coffee table.
“How did she find out?”
“I speak to her every Sunday. She calls to tell me about Irene. I called her to tell her about Daddy.”
Ted nodded. He couldn’t imagine any soon-to-be ex-wife going to the trouble.
“I told her to come, but she said it wouldn’t be right since I hadn’t spoken to you yet. But I want to see Ella and the baby. I’m going to go to New York to see them in August.”
Ted nodded. It was worse than he had imagined it would be. He hated Ella all of a sudden. It wasn’t her intention, but Ella was perennially competing to be the better child, and there was simply no way to beat her. His father used to talk to her every time she phoned them, and he didn’t even like talking on the phone.
“I can’t believe you brought her here,” Mrs. Kim muttered in disbelief.
Delia smiled at Ted’s mother, trying to be brave. She didn’t know that Ella hadn’t told Mrs. Kim anything about them except that Ted had fallen in love with a woman from work and that the marriage was over.
“You brought her to your daddy’s funeral. How could you do such a thing to your daddy?”
Ted exhaled. “Can we talk somewhere else? Is my room empty?”
“Your bags?” Mrs. Kim didn’t know where Delia would sleep. There was no way she’d allow a married man and a single woman to sleep together in her home. “Where are your suitcases?”
“They’re in the car. We’re staying at a hotel.”
“Ho-tel?” she said in English. Family didn’t stay in hotels. Mrs. Kim looked hard at her son.
“Mom, let’s talk upstairs.” His Korean was awkward. The inflections didn’t match his adult voice, and he found that his words were slipping away. What was the word for divorce?
“A ho-tel?” Mrs. Kim asked again. The hotel was like a slap. “What kind of talk is that?”
Ted’s back straightened considerably. He didn’t feel like apologizing anymore. They were still standing in the entryway, and Delia stood about two feet away from him. He hadn’t introduced her yet. She had stopped trying to smile and was staring at the photographs on the wall. There were many of him and Ella. Delia couldn’t stop looking at Ella in her wedding dress. Casey had once said long ago, before she knew anything was up, that Ted’s wife resembled Gong Li, the Chinese actress, but Delia thought Ella’s features were even finer than hers.
Mrs. Kim saw Delia staring at the wedding photographs. Everyone who visited the house looked at them and told her how kind and beautiful Ella looked. How lucky Teddy was. It was too much, Mrs. Kim thought, to lose her husband and to watch her children divorce. Her daughter, Julie, was divorced, and now Teddy was divorcing such a nice girl. Her oldest, Michael, hadn’t married yet, and it didn’t seem that he ever would.
Mrs. Kim turned around and walked to the kitchen, which was a few steps away from the foyer. At her distraught expression at the new arrivals, the church women who’d been putting away the tea things in the kitchen nodded among themselves and shuffled away wordlessly to the living room, leaving the three of them alone.
Ted turned to Delia. “I’m sorry about this. She doesn’t like to speak English, but she understands everything.”
“Don’t worry about me, Ted,” Delia said. She smiled at Mrs. Kim again.
“This is Delia.” Ted looked at his mother. “She’s my fiancée. We are going to get married as soon as the divorce is over.”
Delia extended her hand. “Hello, Mrs. Kim. I’m so sorry about your husband. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.” This was what she had rehearsed by herself on the plane.
Mrs. Kim stared at the young woman’s face, trying to learn something about her. She didn’t like the girl’s sharp chin, the way her jawbones jutted out slightly. The girl had a bad pal-jah. How would this fate affect her son? Was the girl the fox who’d stolen from the henhouse? Or was she the hen that her Teddy had stolen? Her son was not so innocent. But they were old enough to know that it was wrong to be together when someone was married and the other person wasn’t.
Delia took back her unmet hand. She smiled somberly, focusing on the kitchen objects nearest to her: an old-fashioned toaster, the rice cooker, large empty Mason jars just washed and drying on the sink. The smells here were not unpleasant—pungent chili powder, soy sauce, and garlic. Delia didn’t cook much, and her kitchen smelled only of the Pine-Sol that she used to wash down her counters.
The church women who’d left the kitchen abruptly hadn’t finished clearing up the leftover food. Mrs. Kim picked up the Saran wrap and covered the cakes and doughnuts that hadn’t been touched. No one could eat all these things. It seemed like such a waste to throw away all this expensive food.
Mrs. Kim had her back turned to Ted and Delia. She wanted everyone to leave her house, to leave her alone. All her life, she had been a hardworking woman. For over forty years, she had canned salmon and mackerel at Lowry’s alongside her good husband. She had raised three children and had dinner made every night. For over ten years, she had taken her husband for his dialysis three nights a week. On Saturdays, she had cleaned the house, done the grocery shopping and the ironing. On Sundays, she had gone to church and made a meat dinner for her family, and now that her children were grown, she cooked for her grandsons. She had never asked anyone for a dollar or tried to do anyone harm. But something had still gone wrong. Michael, who had a steady job at the post office, was always threatening to quit. Her oldest also couldn’t keep a girlfriend for longer than a few months. And Julie, who had married that short high school boyfriend Craig Muller who’d beat her after he drank, had finally gotten rid of him but could barely afford to raise her two sons by herself. Craig was often late with the child support. And now Teddy had cheated on Ella, who was better than a daughter to her, and had left her for this person who was standing in her kitchen. Her only comfort was that her husband wasn’t alive to see this. Hadn’t he suffered enough?
“You left Ella for that girl? For that girl? You must be crazy,” Ted’s mother muttered to herself in Korean. “What did Ella do to you?”
“Nothing,” Ted said. “We just don’t love each other anymore.”
“No, Teddy. I know Ella loves you. She’s a good girl. She doesn’t stop loving you just because you did something bad. Nobody just stops loving. That’s the stupidest thing to say.”
“No, Mom. She doesn’t love me anymore. She wants the divorce.”
“She wants the divorce because she knows you don’t want to be married. If you wanted to be married, she would work things out.”
“Well, I don’t want to be married to her anymore. All right?” Ted clenched his fists.
“And what will you do when you don’t love this one anymore? Will you get rid of her like bad fish and find someone else? Why do people in America care so much about sex? Love isn’t sex,” she said.
Ted had never heard his mother ever say the word sex. She had to say the word in English. He put his arms behind his back the way he did before making a presentation. He towered over Mrs. Kim, who was not even five feet tall. Ted thought to say som
ething, then refrained. He would let her say these things to him, because he could not explain what had happened with Delia. What he felt for her was stronger than what he had ever felt for another person. Delia was like home to him. Ella was the house on the hill he’d dreamed of buying. But he could never relax in her presence. Also, he’d come to see her niceness and mildness as unattractive. She seemed to have no needs or desires of her own. At a Fly Garden party the spring of his senior year, a psych major had said to him, “The wife you choose will be your personal and social mirror. She is how you see yourself,” and he had held on to that through the years. When he met Ella, he felt he had to marry her because she was exactly the image he wanted reflected. She was well educated, well bred, and unimpeachably beautiful. But meeting Delia had changed what he wanted from a wife. Delia was a more accurate reflection, he realized. Ted loved her more honestly. He also didn’t want to grow old with someone he wasn’t in love with—to have a good-looking life with manners covering their lack of romantic feelings. This was what Ted had reasoned out in the time after he’d left his wife. And last, he could afford the divorce. Excluding stock options, his last bonus was close to three million dollars. His new job had a guaranteed contract with far better terms and a bigger upside if there were more deals. There seemed to be no limit on how much he could earn. All this would have been at best difficult to explain to a close friend in English, but it was impossible to say these things in this kitchen. Here, happiness, romance, and love were frivolous and worth sacrificing. So Ted stood there silently. As it had turned out, love was more important to him than he’d thought. He would let his mother yell all she wanted.
“Now Irene has to grow up without a daddy.”
Delia raised her head when she heard the baby’s name. She had no idea what they were talking about in Korean, but she could recognize some of the names. Mrs. Kim called Ted’s daughter “I-lene.”