Like Wind Against Rock: A Novel

by Nancy Kim

  I remember coming home from school one day—I must have been about seven or eight—tired of being the only one of my friends without a sibling. I wanted someone who would follow me around and play with me whenever I wanted. I imagined us opening presents together on Christmas morning and sitting in the back seat during long car rides.

  “I want a baby brother or sister—everyone else has one.”

  Ahma didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, and her expression was so sad that I knew I had said something wrong. But I was a kid, so I persisted.

  “Please. Just one. I want a baby to play with.”

  “Me too,” she finally said and turned her head.

  Her answer made no sense. If she wanted a baby, too, then why couldn’t we have one? But even at that young age, I knew I shouldn’t ask. Even then, I knew that some things were best left unspoken.

  On the first day of June, I moved into my old bedroom. It was easier to move this time, since I had been in my apartment less than a year and had already done an extensive purge of my belongings. Yet I still had more to discard, since I was moving from a one-bedroom apartment to one bedroom. This was further evidence that I was regressing, my life contracting instead of expanding. All my possessions had to fit into my car. There was no need to take my dented cookware or threadbare linens. They were from my married life, old and cheap, and not worth the storage space. Once I found a new place, I would buy nice new things, start over for real this time.

  But that would all be in the perfect future. In the messy present, I had no money, and a housewares-shopping trip to Target was out of the question. Anyway, Ahma already had housewares and linens, so I took only what I needed and the things I cared about the most. That included my father’s belongings, of course—the old cashmere sweaters that Ahma had saved for me, and his notebook, which I had saved from her.

  It’s been a month now since I moved in with Ahma, and I’m more or less settled. I keep the yellow envelope hidden at the back of the closet in my childhood bedroom. I flip through the pages every now and then, looking at my father’s neat handwriting. It is a plain composition notebook. I recently spent some time researching translation services online. Not many of them translate Korean to English, and the few that I found were expensive and seemed sketchy, their websites full of typos and weird grammar. I don’t feel comfortable sending my father’s notebook to a stranger to translate without knowing what it says, and I won’t know what it says without sending it to a stranger to translate. Still, I am curious.

  I have a feeling it is something personal. A diary, perhaps? But my father wasn’t the type to keep a diary, and I never saw him write in one. I don’t remember ever seeing him write anything other than a check. My mom usually scrawled out all the birthday cards when I was young, signing them very formally, “Your Loving Mother and Father.”

  Maybe it was a practice he developed after I went away to college. But if it is his diary, then why would Ahma throw it away? Is she that unsentimental? Doesn’t she miss him at all?

  “There are supposed to be seven stages to death,” I tell Janine. “Apparently nobody told my mom.”

  We’re in a booth at El Toreador, Janine’s favorite restaurant, locally famous for its strong margaritas and spicy salsa. The food is greasy and too salty, but nobody comes to eat anyway. Like Janine, they all come for the margaritas.

  Janine doesn’t think Ahma’s rapid recovery is all that shocking.

  “They say that it’s harder for people to get over a divorce than the death of a spouse,” she tells me before licking the salt off her glass. She reminds me of a cat cleaning itself. She is wearing a tight red pencil skirt and a black fuzzy short-sleeve sweater, even though it is nearly eighty degrees. She has pulled her hair into a high ponytail and is wearing her tortoise-frame glasses. It’s her “sexy librarian” look, which means that if I’m not careful, she will be dancing on tabletops tonight. Janine’s idea of having fun is the same as it was when she was in college.

  After graduation, I went to UC Irvine, primarily because it was close enough for me to come home whenever I wanted. Janine, who had a lower GPA but a greater sense of adventure, ended up tending bar at a ski resort in Colorado for a year, ran out of money, and then returned home to get her degree at the community college. When I was married, we saw each other occasionally, but not as much as we do now. When I told her that Louis and I were getting a divorce, she sounded nearly gleeful, but not because she was malicious or didn’t like him. Her friends, like my own, had all gotten married and started families. She saw social possibility in my marital disaster.

  “I guess I always hoped that my parents were really crazy about each other deep down and that they were just hiding all that passion for my sake.”

  “Count yourself lucky. Believe me, it’s no fun having parents so passionate about each other you think they’re going to either have sex in front of you or kill each other.”

  Janine’s parents divorced when we were in high school.

  “At least they felt something for each other.”

  “Passion is no guarantee that the marriage is going to last. Or that it will keep someone’s dick in his pants.”

  She’s talking about her own father now, who left her mother for his secretary. Such a cliché.

  “Still, it’s kind of surprising,” I say. “I thought it would take her longer than this to get back on her feet. I never imagined she would start dating at all, and so soon?”

  “Your mom doesn’t have to hold out hope that her husband’s coming back. He’s gone forever. You, on the other hand . . .” She sticks a chip into the salsa and stuffs it into her red-rimmed mouth. She flaps her hands. “Yeow! That’s really hot.”

  “We’ve been here dozens of times. You know the salsa is spicy.”

  Janine stuffs another chip doused in salsa into her mouth. “Yahem, I know.” She polishes off her margarita and motions the waiter for a refill. She fans her mouth. “This salsa! It’s going to kill me!”

  She grabs my margarita and takes a chug and then picks up another chip. “These are just so good—I can’t stop eating them!” Her eyes are watering, but she scoops more salsa onto her chip. She reaches again for my margarita. “You can have mine when it gets here,” she gasps. She grabs another chip.

  This happens every time we come here. Chip, salsa, margarita, chip, salsa, margarita . . . it’s a vicious cycle. Next, she’s going to want to go to a lousy club and rub up against some musician while I sit by myself in a corner booth sipping ice water. Is this what the next ten years of my life look like?

  “Are you hungry?” she asks. “I’m not really hungry.”

  “You just had two baskets of chips and two margaritas . . .”

  The waiter places another drink in front of her. She raises it in a toast. “To finding you a new man!”

  She says this so loudly that the couple at the next table glances over at us and smirks smugly. I know how they feel. I used to be just like them.

  “I’m not looking for a new man,” I hiss.

  “Did you forget about Friendship Rule Number One?”

  She is referring to the rules that we made up when we were in middle school. We called them the “Rules of Friendship,” which would govern our friendship for life. We weren’t supposed to keep secrets from each other (Rule #1), and we had to tell each other if we had a crush on someone (Rule #2, which was actually an application of Rule #1 but important enough to merit its own rule), and if one of our crushes showed that he liked the other one (by asking that girl to dance, although it included other things, like giving the girl a valentine), then that girl had to get permission from the other girl before accepting the dance or the valentine (Rule #3). Of course we added to our Rules of Friendship as the years passed so that they included cheating (or not) on tests (Rule #12), which girls we could invite to sleepovers (Rule #6), and whether we (meaning Janine, because I didn’t go out) should drink beer at parties in high school (Rule #16) and, if so, how ma
ny we should drink (Rule #17).

  “I’m telling the truth. I’m not looking for a new relationship,” I say.

  “Oh, come on, raise your glass,” she says.

  “There’s nothing in it.”

  “It’s symbolic,” she says.

  I lift my empty goblet and clink it against hers. Her drink sloshes onto her fingers, and she laughs and takes a sip.

  “I think you have a drinking problem.”

  “That’s only because I’m on a diet,” she says. “I can drink anything I want, as long as I eat only nine hundred calories,” she says.

  “That’s crazy! Where did you hear about this diet?”

  “On the internet.”

  Ninety minutes later, I am sitting by myself at the back of the Slo Club while Janine canoodles some part-time saxophonist while swaying to moody lounge tunes. I am trying not to make eye contact with anyone for fear that I might be approached—which, so far, is not a huge problem. I should have done this right after high school, when I might have thought it was fun. Instead, I went from sitting on the couch watching television with Ahma to sitting on the couch watching television with Louis. I’m too old now to be barhopping with Janine. This is not progress.

  Janine’s face suddenly appears in front of mine. “Isn’t this more exciting than watching TV?” Her mascara is smudged, and her breath smells of alcohol. Mr. Sax takes the stage and dedicates the next set to “that beautiful brunette in the corner.” Janine beams like a schoolgirl. Only she’s not. We’re not.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The commute to work takes fifteen minutes longer from Ahma’s house. Even though I’ve been here over a month now, I still underestimate the extra time it takes being in a new location, finding my clothes, chatting with my mom, eating breakfast. I used to just grab a latte on the way to work, but Ahma insists I sit down and eat something. This morning, she has made me scrambled eggs with a mound of steaming rice. I’m not really hungry, but my plate is waiting for me like a rebuke. I am living, rent-free, in her house. What right do I have to refuse a nutritious meal? Ahma doesn’t even make me wash my plate, insisting that she’ll do it—I better hurry or I’ll be late.

  I am thirty minutes late to Harry Gee, my first client, but he merely smiles and waves as he talks on the phone. Harry owns a discount men’s clothing store that has been around for years. I got this gig when his old accountant died. I spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings in Long Beach taking care of Harry’s books and those afternoons in Anaheim at the office of Randolph Johnson, a retired and wealthy real estate investor, who has a whole team of financial advisers but needs me to do basic bookkeeping. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I drive forty minutes to the Restin Public Library as an accounting “floater” working with Special Collections. My job was created from a public-private initiative passed by voters in the last election. Restin is like that—wealthy but generous.

  I don’t know exactly how I became a bookkeeper, except that I’ve always been pretty good with numbers. When I was in elementary school, they put me in these special genius classes where I was the only girl. The boys all wore Coke-bottle glasses and watched Star Trek. My eyesight was perfect, and I couldn’t keep my fingers together in a Vulcan greeting to save my life, yet I was still the math and chess champion of Westfield Elementary. But being the best at math is different than, say, being the best at cartwheels or jumping rope. While the other genius boys played together, they pretty much ignored me. The girls didn’t want anything to do with me. I didn’t get invited to birthday parties and sleepovers and stood around by myself during recess and lunch. Being the budding genius that I was, I devised a solution. I started to say “I dunno” to questions when I knew the answers and, on the timed exams that we took every few weeks, I counted to thirty before filling in each bubble on the answer sheet so that I never completed them. I sat on my hands so that I wouldn’t wave them around wildly in response to questions that hung heavily in the air. It worked. By the time I reached sixth grade, I was kicked out of the genius class and put in with the normal kids. I think everyone was relieved when that happened. Appa ruffled my hair and said, “The tallest rice stalk always gets cut down.” Ahma expressed hope that I might actually get married now that I wasn’t smarter than every boy in my class, as though I might actually consider marrying one of them at the ripe old age of eleven. My bearded Trekkie teacher, Mr. Richardson, reassured me that I was still pretty smart, for a girl. He tried to convince me that the early promise I’d shown was simply a developmental fluke, like a growth spurt. He told me that there was something about the female brain that made it impossible for girls to be as good as boys in math and science. “Look at all the famous scientists and inventors. Newton. Einstein. Salk. All men.” I opened my mouth to offer up Curie but remembered that he was merely falling into the trap that I had set, and instead swallowed hard. “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “You’ll do all right in life.” I wonder what would have happened if I had said the words Marie Curie, or had parents who expected more from me, or if I had simply believed that being invited to sleepovers wasn’t as important as finding an algorithm that would unlock the mysteries of the universe.

  Now, I balance books by default, because it’s something I can do without really trying. I drive around from client to client with my laptop and flash drive, clicking my mouse and counting their money. The work is not awful but doesn’t thrill me. It’s a living, but is it a life?

  Sometimes I daydream about enrolling in a graduate program in economics. I even went so far as to take the GRE and did much better than I expected. But I couldn’t figure out what to write in the essays, and I never felt like filling out the applications. Would having a PhD really make a difference? Anyway, the program is seven long years. I would be too old when I finished, only a few years shy of fifty. Louis used to tell me that I never wanted anything enough. I wondered why he thought that was such a bad thing, given the luck he’d had as a musician.

  It’s funny that Louis is working in financial services, since he was always so awful with our finances. I was the numbers person in our relationship. I was the one who balanced our checkbook and paid the bills. He was the one who composed music and couldn’t remember what day it was—the ninth? Or the tenth? No, Louis, it’s the eleventh. Time flies when you play gigs at night and freelance as a web designer. Now he wants to work market hours. I’m not sure why the idea bothers me so much. Probably because he’s moving on, and I feel left behind. The train has left the station with Louis on it, and I haven’t even climbed onto the platform.

  The thing that gets to me is that I didn’t plan this. It wasn’t like I made the choice to be a bookkeeper for the rest of my life, or to rent and not own, or to be childless and divorced at the age of thirty-nine. That’s the problem. If, at any point in my life, someone had forced me to make a decision, I might have chosen something else. At least, that’s what I like to think.

  Ahma isn’t home when I return from work. It is only six o’clock, and I am starving. I open the refrigerator door, only to discover that there isn’t much to eat. Some pickled beets, preserved radishes, some kind of marinated root. Anchovies made sticky sweet with sugar and soy sauce. Hardly any fresh fruits or vegetables. I didn’t think about the need for grocery shopping, just as I had never thought about it before when I was a kid and took for granted that Ahma would have dinner ready. I have been living at her house since June, and she has made us dinner almost every night, except for the weekends. Without being entirely conscious of it, I was expecting her to have dinner waiting again tonight, which is of course ridiculous, given her work schedule. After Appa died, she got a job working at a real estate agency, driving around rich Koreans looking to buy in the best neighborhoods. She’s apparently pretty good at it. She’s in escrow on her third house. She has some arrangement with her agency, since she isn’t a licensed broker yet, so she doesn’t get the standard broker’s commission. Still, the houses are north of a million, so whatever she gets, she’s defi
nitely making more than I am now.

  I can understand her wanting to get a job after Appa’s death, but I am surprised by her gung-ho attitude. She hustles as though she needs the money, but Appa was a dentist with a busy practice, and the house is paid for. She rushes around as though she’s in a hurry to catch up on the life that she missed. But life with Appa wasn’t so bad, was it? My parents never had a passionate marriage, and I always had the feeling that it was my father’s fault. When I think about them together, she’s leaning toward him, and he’s always pulling away. I remember all the times she offered him something to eat—“Try this”—and how he would refuse, shaking his head and turning away. How many times did she brush something off his shirt or fix his tie, only to have him move away annoyed and brush or fix it himself? I didn’t think much about it at the time—it was just the way they were. But now I wonder—what would it be like to spend so many years with someone who recoiled whenever you tried to get close?

  I had always assumed that my parents loved each other, even if they didn’t hug and kiss each other in front of me. I figured that was just the way they were and didn’t question it, just like I didn’t question why it was always Ahma who went to parent-teacher conferences, even though Appa was the one who could communicate in English more effectively. They had their respective roles. Ahma’s life revolved around our family and our needs, like the moon revolves around the earth, and Appa was the sun, the distant yet essential center of our universe. At least, that’s what I always thought. But now that he’s dead, I’m no longer so sure. Rather than going dark and frozen, Ahma’s world seems to be thawing, becoming vibrantly alive. Which makes me wonder—did my parents stay together for my sake? I recall a conversation I had with my mother when I was in tenth grade, after Janine’s parents had split up. My mom acted like they had committed murder.