Kimchi & Calamari

by Rose Kent

  Nash’s mom is a nurse. What’s that saying about too much information being dangerous? I’ve seen her lose it when she catches him doing something she thinks could cause a migraine. It’s not pretty.

  “Wearing that corno seems so dumb. I’m not Italian. Wouldn’t you feel weird if you had to wear a French beret?” I asked Nash.

  He scrunched up his freckled face. “Even a French kid would feel weird wearing a beret in middle school. Could you talk to your dad about it?”

  “You know my dad. He’s Mr. Italiano, always playing Tony Bennett songs and retelling tales from Tuscany. He’ll get all mad or sad. That’s why I’m in deep doo-doo over this essay. All I know is that my birth relatives put my diapered butt on an airplane to the USA. End of paper.”

  Nash’s eyes widened. “I’m on the computer a lot since I can’t play sports now. I could help you search the Internet to find out about the place where you’re from in Korea. My uncle traced his genealogy all the way back to this Irish rebel who escaped from a British prison in Belfast in 1912.”

  “Really?”

  “I swear. And he did all his research online.”

  Hmm. Our family computer wasn’t even hooked up to the Internet. And I sure didn’t want to be flashing this touchy-feely personal stuff on a screen at the library, especially since the big-mouth reference librarian was one of my mom’s regular customers. One time I was there researching the digestive system for a health project, and the next day she asked Mom if I had a nervous stomach. Talk about privacy.

  Besides, hunting for my Korean ancestors online might be easier than asking my parents. Dad got testy over a goat horn. And Mom, well, she’d talk about my adoption, but all talk would eventually lead to tears—that’s just the way she is. And I don’t like making her cry.

  “Let me think about it,” I said as Mrs. Nash opened the van door. I grabbed Frazer’s collar and followed Mom inside, wondering what just a click of the mouse might reveal about me.

  Later that night I lay in bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling. Dad stuck them there the day I first rode a two-wheeler. Most of the Big and Little Dippers’ stars had fallen off, but Pegasus was still glowing bright.

  I kept thinking about the essay. The corno. The birthday brawl. And back to that essay. Nash’s idea to research Korea online might help me get it done. But did I really need that?

  I’d exaggerated a little when I talked to Nash. Mom and Dad haven’t exactly engaged in a cloak-and-dagger adoption conspiracy. Mom loved to tell my story, and Dad always hung around listening.

  “Time to remember that magical night you came into our lives,” Mom would announce when I was little, as she tucked me under my spaceship comforter.

  “Once upon a time, Mommy and Daddy wanted a baby to love,” she said, rubbing my head. “A wonderful baby who would make us laugh and cry with joy.

  “Meanwhile, in Korea, a special mommy was growing you in her tummy, but she couldn’t care for a baby. Still, she loved you so much that she did something very hard. She allowed you to travel all the way to America, to be Mommy and Daddy’s little boy. And that is how we became the Calderaro family.” Mom always smiled when she said that last line.

  Sometimes Mom would describe the stormy night when I arrived at JFK Airport. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and she said Dad was so excited, waiting for the plane, that he passed out plastic cups of champagne to strangers walking by.

  “The flight was delayed two hours because of the weather, and you can’t imagine how worried we were,” Mom said.

  Mom has this Italian saying, niente per niente, meaning you have to give to get. And when she bargains, she makes sure everybody benefits. That night she struck a deal with San Guiseppe, or Saint Joseph, the patron saint of families.

  “I promised that if your plane landed safely, I would toss more money in the church basket for the rest of my life and put his statue smack dab in the middle of my garden. And as you know, he’s stood guard in between the geraniums and begonias for fourteen years.”

  Mom said that when we got home from the airport, I was so hungry I drank two bottles of soy milk. The adoption agency recommended soy milk, and they were right.

  I still get the runs from cow’s milk.

  “The rate you gulped those bottles down, I swear you could’ve been listed in the Guinness Book of Records,” Dad always added with a grin. That’s the only part of the adoption story he told, even if he listened to Mom’s every word, every time.

  What my parents never told me is what I call the MBA piece. Me Before America. Maybe because, in my parents’ minds, my life started presto, the night Mom and Saint Joseph struck a deal and that 747 touched down on the runway safely.

  In third grade, when we had to trace our family tree for homework, Mom told me my Korean name: Duk-kee. That was the name my birth mother gave me. Park was added by the adoption agency. Other than that, I don’t know a darn thing about MBA.

  Right before I dozed off, Mom came in. She sat at the edge of my bed and smiled.

  “Dinner got four stars,” I said, and her face lit up. She likes it when I rave about her cooking. “Is Dad still mad?”

  “He’s not really mad. He just felt hurt that you didn’t like our gift. You know how big he is on family tradition,” she said, rubbing my head.

  “Sorry, Mom. I would just feel funny wearing that corno.”

  “We should’ve known no teenage boy in Nutley, New Jersey, would be thrilled about a goat horn.” She leaned over and kissed me good night.

  Staring up at those neon stars got me thinking about Korea. What it looked like and what fourteen-year-olds did there on their birthday. If they fought with their dads and if they had lousy essays to write too. Korea felt so far away. As far as another galaxy. Too far even for the malocchio to reach.

  The Mona Lisa of Middle School

  The next morning I stuck the corno way in the back of my socks-and-underwear drawer. Out of sight, out of mind, right? I put that essay out of my mind too, at least for a little while. Today was Friday, alleluia! And the best part about Friday, besides just being Friday, was having Life Skills. That’s the politically correct name our school gives sewing and cooking class. It’s required for eighth graders. When the teachers and the girls aren’t around, the guys call it Sissy Skills, though secretly it’s kind of fun.

  But the best part about Life Skills, besides eating gooey, straight-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies at nine A.M., was seeing my crush, Kelly Gerken.

  For weeks I’d been gearing up to ask Kelly if she wanted to go to the movies with me. That’s how smart middle-school kids do it. We act like it’s the movie we’re interested in. That way, if the girl says no, we tell ourselves she just didn’t want to see that particular flick. My plan was first to ask Kelly how softball was going, since she’s the team captain and star pitcher. Then I’d lead into the invite.

  Of course, going to the movies would be just the start. Every eighth-grade guy knew the Farewell Formal coming up next month could be the grand finale of middle school or the end-of-year disaster, depending on who you asked and what she said.

  I walked into Life Skills and headed straight to the storage closet to get my pillow. The sewing project we’d been working on for a month counted double for our grade. My patchwork pillow needed some tender loving care: the seams didn’t match, and the stitching between patches zigzagged like jack-o’-lantern teeth.

  Lewis Knight gave me a forced nod as we both reached for our pillows. He’s the goalie who made the freshman soccer team long before most of us knew what varsity meant. Dad washes his family’s windows. When I told him how cocky Lewis was, he said Lewis sounded like a chip off his old man’s blockhead. Dad always botches clichés like that. Sometimes his mixed-up sayings are dumb, but other times he cracks us both up.

  I sat down at my assigned station, flipped the switch on the sewing machine, and peeked over at Kelly. She had finished sewing all her patches and w
as already pinning them to the liner. Meanwhile the rest of us were still trying to get the hang of threading the machine needle and catching the bobbin thread before it fell and unraveled across the floor.

  Within minutes the Life Skills classroom was humming like a tenor sewing-machine orchestra. My cue to get Kelly’s attention.

  Think, Joseph, something witty.

  My friends say I never shut up and yet there I was, a poet out of words. An iPod without a Play button.

  Finally, it hit me.

  “Hey, Kelly, guess which local pop-culture icon turned fourteen yesterday? Here’s a hint: it’s not a movie star or Mrs. Randall.” I spoke loudly over the gunning sewing machines, knowing Mrs. Randall was listening too.

  “Hmm, let me guess. Joseph Calderaro?” Kelly opened her green, glittery eyes wide, like she had no idea.

  I nodded, pretending to be surprised. “How’d you know?”

  “Happy belated birthday, Joseph,” Mrs. Randall said as she passed my sewing station. She’s one of those easygoing teachers who doesn’t mind if we talk, as long as we get our work done.

  “Mrs. Randall, do you know what they call an explosion in a kitchen in France?”

  She shook her head. “What?”

  “Linoleum Blownaparte.”

  “Cute, Joseph,” she said, smiling. “Now don’t forget to adjust your thread tension.”

  I lowered the dial from three to one and looked over at Kelly. She was smiling back at me. Directly at me.

  “Yeah, happy late birthday,” Kelly said, flashing a twenty-four-karat-gold grin.

  God, she was perfect. Even her hair, what with how it was flipped back with silver clips like the stanchions on the Verrazano Bridge.

  Last year our art teacher told us that Mona Lisa has been gazed upon more than any other woman in the history of the world. Personally, I don’t think she’s much to look at, what with that foot-long forehead and her lips clamped shut like she’s got dental problems. Kelly, on the other hand, has two straight rows of pearls in her mouth.

  “So where’d you spend the day commemorating your birth, at a nudist colony?” Robyn Carleton shouted from her sewing station.

  I wished I could tell her that I was having a humongous birthday bash this weekend, just so I could invite Kelly.

  “I skipped the party this year,” I said. “All those flashing cameras from the paparazzi hurt my eyes.”

  Then Kelly told the whole class that she was having a retro-disco party when she turned fourteen in August. “I’ve got fifty names on the invite list, and I’ve barely begun,” she said, just as Rhonda Gardner walked over to her, whispered something, and pointed to Lewis.

  My friend Frankie Marquette told me that I was setting myself up for rejection by liking Kelly. And not just because she’s athletic and pretty, though she is very athletic and pretty. Kelly is rich, too. Her dad owns a bunch of restaurants in central Jersey. Mom and Dad celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary at one of the Gerkens’ seafood restaurants last winter. Mom said the salmon was melt-in-your-mouth tender, but Dad complained that the waiters buzzed around the table like nervous bees.

  I think Frankie completely underestimates the power of humor. He thinks you impress girls with how many push-ups you do in gym or by wearing hundred-dollar jeans that look a hundred years old. Me? I say a guy can get a girl interested by making her laugh.

  Five minutes left in the period and my heart was pounding boom-ba-ba-boom like a bass drum. I had to time my every move so that I’d leave just as Kelly did. A Saturday matinee date was at stake.

  The God of Perfect Timing must like drummers. Kelly and I walked out of class side by side.

  “Hey, I hear you’re playing an amazon softball team today,” I said, holding the door open for her.

  She nodded. “Paterson won the division title for the past two years. But right now we’ve got the best record in the league.”

  We passed the science labs and headed to the lockers. Kelly told me she’d been taking private pitching lessons all spring. “Paterson has an awesome hitter who’s six feet tall. I hope all this extra coaching helps me strike out that giant.”

  My mind was racing, ready to pop the question. I even had this dumb baseball riddle from Gina to tell her. But I had to be quick. English class was next, way down the hall.

  “Hey, Kelly, I was wondering—”

  Wham! Who wedged right between us but Lewis. He played like I was the Invisible Man and he was the suave superhero, yakking it up with my girl Kelly. And that was it. Advantage came and went for the birthday boy.

  The Emperor with No Clothes

  I opened my bedroom door early Saturday to find Gina standing there with her lips curved in a horse-shoe.

  “Eeyore and I are not having a good morning,” she grumbled. Her stuffed donkey was tucked under her arm.

  “Whatsamatta?”

  “Sophie’s watching ‘Monster Bashville,’ and she knows it scares me,” Gina cried as she pushed her glasses back against her nose. “She is not nice.”

  “Don’t be scared. You know those mangy-looking puppets aren’t real.”

  “They’re creepy. Sophie always gets her way. She’s so mean!”

  Besides their long brown hair and hiccups, my sisters are as twinnish as tiramasu and tortellini. Since the first time Sophie flung a spoonful of yogurt ten feet from her high chair, we knew she would grow up to be a win-at-all-cost woman warrior. Gina, on the other hand, gets her thrills from playing dress up and singing and dancing to Disney tunes. She’s a whiner, too. But a cute whiner.

  Like right now, as she hugged Eeyore and moaned about her wicked sister.

  “C’mon, let’s go downstairs.” I yawned as I passed my desk, where my social studies folder caught my eye. Ugh. When was that monster due? I wished I could be one of those kids to whip out papers last minute, at the buzzer, without worrying. But I wasn’t.

  I grabbed the folder. “I’ll be your bodyguard and you help me write my essay. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Gina said with a thumbs-up.

  In the family room we stepped over Sophie, who was sprawled in front of the TV. I turned on the computer.

  “What’s your essay about?” Gina asked loudly over a commercial.

  “Me, me, me, me,” I sang like an opera star.

  “I know where we can get pictures of you, Joseph.”

  “I don’t need pictures. I need words, lots of them,” I said, but Gina had already pulled down a mini-album from the bookcase and handed it to me.

  She pointed to the label: TWINS’ SECOND BIRTHDAY. “This one looks important.”

  I opened to a picture of my family in the backyard. Dad was holding Gina and I was holding Sophie. Mom was standing between us, dressed in spiky heels and squinting from the sun. Gina and Sophie wore matching polka-dot dresses and sparkly paper crowns.

  I looked at my eight-year-old self. Stocky, with a crew cut and ears sticking out like coat hooks. And tan. It’s silly how people call Asians yellow when my skin gets brick brown in summertime. Next to Dad, who’s six-two and all muscle, I looked like a little puffer fish. I used to tell Dad that I wanted to grow up tall and strong like him. But he’d always answer the same way: “You’re built like a fireplug, son. No one messes with fireplugs.”

  “How come you’re not holding me?” Gina demanded, looking over my shoulder.

  I shrugged. My sisters keep score of everything, from the number of squirts of chocolate syrup in their milk to how many times they get to sit by the car window.

  Gina brought out a few more mini-albums. We looked at everything from Mom and Dad’s honeymoon photos to a picture of us three kids in the backseat of the van, holding Frazer after his hip surgery. Soon Sophie got bored with TV and hopped up beside us to look, too.

  The more I stared at the pictures, the worse I felt about the essay. My parents have always acted like I was their firstborn—Italian just like them—and on most days it didn’t bother me. But mirrors don’t keep se
crets and, like Mom’s shop, our house is covered with mirrors. How many mornings had I jumped out of bed and stared into the dresser mirror, wondering who I looked like and who that person was? How many nights, while I brushed my teeth, had I studied my reflection, a face utterly unlike my sisters’ or my parents’? Probably a million. And every time, I thought about that story of the emperor with no clothes. Was I the butt-naked emperor of Nutley, New Jersey, being duped into believing that I was Italian inside and out, because everyone was afraid to speak the truth?

  I picked up my folder, pulled out the essay assignment, and reread it. Yikes! Dad always says the devil is in the details. The last line said the essay was due in nine days. Usually Mrs. Peroutka gives us over a month for writing assignments. How had I missed that?

  Quickly I grabbed the phone. “Joseph here, desperate to hire an Internet consultant.”

  “Sure,” Nash answered. “Everything okay?”

  “My essay is due sooner than I thought, all fifteen hundred words.”

  “I’m on it, Joseph. Anything special you want me to research about Korea?”

  What did I want to find out, anyway? Enough to fill an autobiography. Or to help make my déjà-vu dream make sense. For years I’d had the same weird dream: me walking along a dirt road with other Koreans, but I didn’t know who they were. I was pulling a red wagon, but I never knew where I was going. Everything was always fuzzy—especially faces.

  But for now I had to stick with getting the essay finished. “Stuff about the city of Pusan. In Korea, back fourteen years ago when I was born, I guess. And if something comes up about a baby being found, that’s even better.”

  “Do you know any details about where they found you or the time of day? The more specific, the better the chance I might uncover something.”

  “I know nothing,” I replied, “but I’ll try to ask my parents and get back to you.”

  “The old guy still has it!” Dad shouted as he sunk the ball into the hoop.