But these were the conditions his mother suffered under when she arrived here, and she cried herself to sleep every night for two weeks. And it isn’t too hard to understand why, when she began receiving letters from Yul, a man she’d never met but whose mother knew her mother—it isn’t too difficult to see why Umee found comfort with a Korean man also studying in the U.S., a man who had also been married. He had a baby son whom he had shipped off to Korea. His ex-wife abandoned both him and her baby boy, and Yul was lonely and depressed.
His letters to her were affectionate, even loving. He had learned about her from his mother, and both mothers were conspiring to bring them together. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to be married again. He would take care of her, he promised. They would be a happy family.
Rumors about Yul’s marriage worked its way to Umee, as a woman abandoning a newborn baby was gossip that moved swiftly through the small ex-pat Korean community. Umee had even known about the ex-wife when she was a student in Korea—they had gone to the same high school, just two grades apart.
However, Umee didn’t know the extent of the violence, the abuse, the drinking.
All she knew was that she was alone in a frightening foreign country, and the soothing words of the man in New York gave her hope.
5
Both of Lenny’s parents work fulltime, his father a computer programmer and his mother a small-business owner. Lenny’s mother runs a candy store. You would think a kid with a mother who owns a candy store would be something wonderful, but really, the strongest memory Lenny has about the store is her getting robbed.
It happens around the same time Lenny learns about free collect calls. In fact, he probably learns about the robbery after coming home from the train station with more flattened coins. He wants to make something out of them, possibly a necklace for his mother. He adds the new coins to his jam jar and then prepares for his martial arts training. He has an old tae kwon do manual that’s written in Korean, but the photos and drawings are all he needs. He also has Kung-fu books, and tries to combine the kicks of tae kwon do with the hand and fist styles of Kung-fu. He brings his books out into the back yard and starts his stretches. He practices the forms—prescribed sequences of punches and kicks that he memorized from the books—and then works on the various kicks and hand strikes.
They have two large trees in the back yard—a tall oak and a young maple—and he uses the young maple trunk as a target, attacking it with various kicking and punching combinations, though being careful not to cut his knuckles. He tries to emulate some of the sound effects from the Saturday afternoon kung-fu movies on channel 5. He loves these poorly dubbed Shaw Brothers imports so much that he records them on an audio cassette and listens to them when he goes to bed, imagining the scenes that correspond with the dialogue. The sound effects, with the thwacks and crashes amidst the yelling and grunting, help him envision the movie again.
After Lenny hits the tree until his knuckles and feet hurt, he does push-ups, jumping jacks, and sit-ups. By the time he walks into the house he finds his father sitting in his lounge chair with the TV news on. Yul still has on his dress slacks and button-down shirt, the collar open and the sleeves rolled up.
“Where is your mother?” he asks Lenny.
Lenny says he doesn’t know.
“Is she at the store?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
Lenny pauses. “She’s usually home by now.”
His father grunts and pulls himself up, walking to the kitchen telephone. Lenny hears the rotary dial clicking, and after a moment his father speaks in Korean. The conversation is brief, and he hangs up quickly. He rushes to the closet to get his coat and tells Lenny to watch his sister.
“What happened?”
“Where is your brother?” Yul asks.
“I don’t know.”
“We will be back later.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“The store was robbed. Make your sister dinner. We will be late.”
He leaves through the front door, which is surprising. They always use the back door, and as Lenny wonders about this anomaly, the news settles in. Robbed.
6
Sweets ‘N Gifts, the small candy store, is in Bellmore, the next town over. This was Yul’s idea, setting up a business for his wife to run now that all the kids go to school. Both believe in the American dream of owning their own business, and Yul was especially eager for his wife to start a store that would make them self-sufficient. Instead of a grocery or liquor store, the usual Korean immigrant start-ups, they decided on a candy and small gift store that dealt not in the prepackaged, mass-produced candy the supermarkets sold, but in the old-fashioned loose variety that Umee sold out of large jars with shiny tin covers, weighing and bagging whatever the customer pointed to: rock candies, licorice sticks, lemon drops, and Swedish fish.
The store is in a small commercial strip mall next to a large hardware warehouse, and never has customers. They are losing a lot of money, and it’s making their already embattled marriage worse, since Umee blames Yul for the bad idea, and Yul blames Umee for the poor execution.
When Ed comes home for dinner and finds that their parents aren’t here he tells Lenny that he’s going back out.
Lenny says, “Mom was robbed.”
Ed stops. “Is she okay?” He’s getting even more muscular, his biceps and chest stretching his old, thin T-shirt. His head looks oddly small. He once told Lenny that he started lifting weights a few years ago to be able to take on their father.
“I don’t know,” Lenny replies.
“I’ll be back later.” Ed then disappears through the garage. Lenny has only had glimpses of his brother like this for the past couple of years, and he once heard Ed tell his friends that he was going to get as far away from this house as he could after high school. Their father has always been hard on him, and when they all sat together for dinner he lectured and berated Ed for not being a better student.
Mira appears in the living room as soon as Ed leaves and asks what’s happening. When Lenny tells her she asks, “Was Mom killed?”
“No! Are you crazy?” But then Lenny isn’t so sure.
“I wrote a book. Look.” She shows him a book titled Me that she had typed and stapled in between cardboard covers. An “About the Author” section is on the back, with her photo. Lenny is impressed, but also distracted. He tells her, “If Mom is dead, you’re going to an orphanage.”
She blinks, taking this in.
“Back to the orphanage,” he adds. “You know you were adopted, right?”
“What?”
As soon as he sees that she considers this a possibility, he spins a story about how their mother couldn’t have another baby, so they all went to the orphanage to choose a new one. “You were still a baby, crying and everything. We picked you because you look sort of like me and Mom. Maybe you should write a book about that.”
Mira takes her book and wanders back to her room, considering this. Lenny thinks of more ways to torment her, but then wonders if their mother really is dead.
When their parents return home a few hours later, his mother is pale and shaky. Her usually neat hair is disheveled, tufts sticking out. She sits unsteadily at the kitchen table while his father pours them both a drink—whiskey on ice—and she remains subdued. Yul explains that someone came in at closing with a gun and took all the money. The police were there for a while, taking the report.
None of this feels real until Lenny’s mother cries for a moment, just a quick sniffle, her face crumpling, and then she shakes this off and sips her drink, the ice clinking. Their father is already on his second glass, this one with no ice, and says something to her in Korean, which makes her face flush. She retorts something harsh, and he stares at her coldly, then mutters something. He takes his glass and the bottle to the living room.
She looks at Lenny and says, “I’m okay.”
“What happened?”
S
he waits a moment, then tells him that a young man, possibly a teenager, with large sunglasses, came in, pulled out a gun and ordered her to give him all her cash. She had eighty dollars in the register. He then told her to get into the back closet, and he shoved a chair under the door handle. She waited a few minutes then broke out and called the police.
“That’s all?” Lenny asks.
“He could’ve shot me,” she says.
“Oh.”
“We will install a special alarm tomorrow.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
She sighs. “I don’t know. Go to bed, Lenny.”
He returns to his room, passing his father, who stares angrily at the TV news. The smoldering expression on his face means that he’s not finished with his wife, and Lenny prepares for a fight.
It begins with low, sharp murmurs in Korean, their voices modulated because they are aware of their children in the house, but as the fight escalates, with the see-sawing dynamic of Yul retreating to the living room and Umee following him and arguing, and then Umee running into the kitchen with Yul following, they soon forget about the kids and yell at each other in their loudest voices.
Lenny isn’t sure what they’re saying. Their parents never taught him Korean, and because of speech problems from his cleft palate, a speech pathologist recommended that they speak only English to him. Korean, then, became the language of fighting.
The argument goes on for another forty minutes, and it sounds as if Yul blames Umee for not trying to fight to keep the money. Lenny hears English words sprinkled in, and infers meanings from their tones. Umee accuses him of wanting her dead. The fight quiets down, and then kicks up again a couple of hours later as Yul becomes more drunk. They shift from arguing about money to venting and cursing. Lenny recognizes the Korean curses, the “shangs” and the “michin nyuns” spat at each other. Then he hears his father hitting his mother – a slap, a cry of pain, more yelling, and crying.
His father chases his mother through the house, their steps heavy, his mother wheezing in fear. The floor and walls shake with their steps, and his mother’s lighter, quicker footsteps run down the hall and toward his room. She leaps in and locks the door. His father crashes into the door, bellowing in Korean, and bangs his fists for a minute, but, exhausted, he eventually retreats to the living room. They hear glass clinking, the TV going off, and the stereo turning on.
Lenny sits up in his bed. His mother stands in the middle of the room, her fists pressed against her stomach. He smells the familiar mixture of her sweat and his father’s alcohol. She sees him in the darkness and tells him to go back to sleep, but his heart beats quickly and he remembers how once his father had once almost crashed through the door. His mother tells him again to go to sleep. He lies down, and reaches under his pillow, holding onto his favorite pair of nunchucks. He made these from an old broomstick, fish-eye screws and a chain from the hardware store. The feeling of them in his hands is reassuring, and he hears his mother lower herself to the floor, waiting until his father passes out. After a few minutes his heartbeat slows and he relaxes into his pillow. He hears his mother sighing.
Lenny falls asleep with the sounds of classical music floating in from the living room.
7
Lenny has Speech Therapy every Thursday afternoon. He and three other kids from different grades show up at a small office near the Janitor’s room where they sit at a tiny table with a young speech therapist, Ms. Feinberg, whose perky and enthusiastic demeanor helps yank them out of their post-lunch torpor. She has shelves of toys and devices, including a blue bubble head-piece that funnels their voices directly to their ears, so that they can hear their voices acutely, but Lenny doesn’t like what he hears. He has a nasal, high-pitched voice that embarrasses him, and Ms. Feinberg tries to teach him to block off the airflow to his nose when he speaks. It’s difficult. The cleft palate he was been born with had been minor—only the soft palate had been split—but it had been enough to render that muscle useless, so he has a lot of “leakage.” Hard consonants come out soft. Sometimes he sounds better when he has a cold and his nose is stuffed up.
The other kids have different problems, lisps and stutters, but they are all similarly frustrated with the exercises and lessons. They are also similarly embarrassed by their disabilities, and they rarely talk to each other. They certainly don’t acknowledge each other outside of this room. Once, when Ms. Feinberg was late, they stood outside the door silently, not even looking at each other.
This session Ms. Feinberg rips up small pieces of tissue, places them on a piece of cardboard, and holds this up to Lenny’s nose. She tells him to say, “Sally sells seashells by the seashore.” He does this, and the air from his nose moves the tissue pieces. Ms. Feinberg instructs him to practice this now without moving the tissues. “Don’t let air out through your nose.”
Lenny tries, but the leakage keeps fluttering the tissue pieces. She gives the others different tasks. One of the kids, the stutterer, has to recite the same line but with a wooden tongue depressor in his mouth. He stutters over the line and almost gags. The two lispers also repeat the line, but with the bubble head-piece on, the light blue plastic making them look like astronauts. All of them now recite the line, out of sync, in monotones, and it has the chanting quality of Lenny’s mother’s bible study group.
After school Lenny waits patiently for Mira, because he promised he’d walk home with her. She appears at the entrance with an armload of books, her blue sweater buttoned crookedly, and he tells her that it’s a long way with all those books. “You should take the bus.”
“But it left already!”
Lenny loads half of the books into his back pack, and starts walking. She hurries after him, asking him to wait up.
Lenny has already explored the neighborhoods during his roaming lunch periods, when he’d eat the cold leftovers his mother packed for him, and he’d wander farther and farther from the school grounds. Sometimes the crows would see him, and he’d throw them pieces of Korean barbecued beef, the fat congealed white and cold. They’d swarm down and fight for it. Then they’d follow him, flying from telephone pole to telephone pole, watching and waiting.
As Mira and Lenny walk along side streets he spots someone from his grade, Frankie, a hulking overweight slob who picks on the younger kids. He munches a bag of Doritos while walking, and when he sees them he holds the bag in his mouth and pulls his eyes slanted. He yells with the bag still in his teeth, “Ching chong chinaman!”
Mira turns to Lenny, who shakes his head and continues walking. Frankie yells it again, but this time drops his bag of Doritos, the chips spreading across the sidewalk, and he curses. Mira laughes. Frankie looks up venomously.
Lenny whispers to his sister to shut up and keep walking.
Frankie yells to Lenny, “You’re gonna pay for that!”
Mira looks confused. “Why do you have to pay for that?”
Lenny yanks her along, saying, “You just got me in trouble.”
“Oh.”
“Now he’s going to pick on me.”
“I didn’t know!” she cries.
“Come on.”
She follows him home contritely.
Lenny practices saying, “Sally sells seashells at the seashore,” muttering to himself while trying to keep the leakage down.
“What?” Mira asks.
He repeats it quietly.
“Who’s Sally? What are you talking about?”
He looks directly at her and says, “Sally sells seashells at the seashore.”
Mira sighs. “You’re weird.”
8
Sweets ‘N Gifts is on Merrick Road, a busy highway with no bike lane, so Lenny has to ride on the sidewalk. A mix of storefronts and office buildings line the street, and he weaves around annoyed pedestrians. Twenty minutes later he approaches his mother’s store, which looks very out of place nestled between the Emerald Bar and Carpets for Less. A large hardware depot looms nearby, and most of the other bu
sinesses here—a linoleum and flooring outlet, a mattress store—are connected to home and building supplies.
Lenny drops his bicycle in front of the store and walks in, a small bell ringing. His mother leans on the front counter, reading a large annotated bible. She looks up, startled. “Lenny?” she asks. “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting.”
“You rode all the way here?”
He nods and looks around. She has added more jewelry in the front display cases, silver and jade earrings and necklaces and small jewelry boxes sit on shelves next to silver seagull mobiles and figurines. The collection is eclectic and puzzling to Lenny, since the jars of candy lined up behind the counter have nothing to do with jewelry, and customers who want one wouldn’t really want the other. He stares at the mobiles hanging near the front. The afternoon sun shines through the tinted front window and hits the sparkling stars.
“Do you want some candy?” she asks.
Strangely enough he doesn’t. When the store first opened, Lenny tried the different varieties, but he preferred sour candies, which she doesn’t carry. His brother and sister like the myriad of chocolates, but Lenny doesn’t seem to have the same sweet tooth. He takes a sweet rock candy just because he might regret later not having something.
She shows him the alarm button, just a doorbell button under the counter that buzzes the carpet store next door in case of an emergency. Without thinking, Lenny presses it. Lenny’s mother yells, “Don’t!” and he jumps away. She turns to the door, waiting. She explains that the owner is supposed to come here to help her if she buzzes.
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