Secondhand World

I wondered what being beautiful had done for my mother other than give her no direction in which to gaze but into her own reflection. The state of being beautiful was indiscriminate; it was there for peasants and kings. You couldn't reclaim it for yourself. You could hide it under chador or veil, but it would be there still, more enticing for its secrecy. The state of being unbeautiful was a more exacting affair. If a man found you attractive, you knew it must be so, that he must have looked hard and long to see something within you and was not just another wistful aesthete panting after loveliness. I was suddenly glad I wasn't beautiful, that I didn't suffer my mother's misfortunes of vanity, her disappointment in how far beauty could get you, which was, in truth, not as far as one might imagine.

  My mother decided on the pink dress. “White makes you look green,” she said by way of explanation, holding out her credit card for the salesgirl to process. “This one is much more flattering. Makes you look thin.”

  I said nothing.

  “My daughter is graduating high school next weekend,” my mother told the salesgirl.

  “Congratulations,” the salesgirl said, smiling at me. She handed me the bag containing the dress.

  “Thank you,” I said, and swung the bag like a pendulum out the door.

  That night I dreamed that Stephen was alive and grown, a gawky ten-year-old with too-big permanent teeth in the front and a cowlick in the back of his head. He was taking dresses from my closet and throwing them overhead, their diaphanous fabrics swelling and falling like parachutes. We were laughing together, looking up as they billowed down again, clothes floating, sailing, landing on our upturned faces. He seemed happy to be there with me, as he had been when he was alive. And I was happy too. We were two children delighted by the repetition of a silliness, flinging the voluminous material up in the air—organdy and silk, satin, chiffon and chintz—delighted at gravity for bringing back down upon us what we had tossed away.

  Seeking Counsel

  It felt weird to be in Rachel's house now that she and I were no longer friends. Everything that had seemed familiar, that I'd taken for granted—the trash bins crusted with bread dough, the stacked booster seats and wooden high chairs—took on a foreign aspect. I'd come to see Jerry, who himself looked strange to me, perched on the kitchen counter with his hands at his sides.

  “You want my advice,” he said, his warm brown eyes looking at me with unusual severity. “Drop it. I mean, she says she's giving him up, right? Which I don't really understand, but okay. So no need to tell anybody. Everything's set.”

  “You don't understand why she should give him up?” I asked incredulously.

  Jerry shrugged. “I know it's a pain in the ass when someone older comes across like they've got the wisdom of the ages, Isa, but there're some things you just learn with time and experience. And one of them is that marriage is tough, and happiness is hard to find, and so … I don't know. She's your mother, but try to see it from her point of view. From the point of view of a woman.”

  This stung a little. I thought I was a woman, and it irritated me that Jerry didn't see me that way. “So you think her cheating on my father is okay?” I said harshly.

  Jerry stroked the counter behind him. His fingernails were dirty. When I showed up he'd been working in the garden. He'd hugged me and I smelled damp earth. “I don't know, Isa. Do I think it's okay? No, it's wrong. It's hurtful. Do I think it's human? Yes. People get lonely, they get disappointed—”

  “Have you ever cheated on your marriage?” I said. Jerry's first wife had died after years of being sick with cancer. Audrey had told me of his devotion. He and Louise were always smiling at one another and calling each other “chum” and “baby.”

  Jerry smiled at me. “Listen, Isa,” he said, “if you want to know what I really think, I think none of this is any of your business. Some things are private, even within families. You asked me what I think, and that's pretty much it. I don't pass judgment.”

  “But—”

  “Life is hard and everyone's just trying to make their way.”

  To this I had no answer. I stared sullenly at the brick-colored linoleum, which was strewn with Cheerios and dog food.

  “Isa?” Jerry said.

  “Yeah?”

  “We miss seeing you. Rachel hasn't said anything to us about what happened, but I'm sorry you're not close anymore.”

  I kicked at a Cheerio with the toe of my sneaker. “Yeah, well,” I said.

  “She's spending more time at her dad's these days,” Jerry said. “It's a lot quieter over there, I guess. Less crazy.”

  I nodded.

  “She's a goodkid, Rachel,” he said, “but it's been hard on her.”

  “I know.”

  “Hey Isa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Come by anytime. You're always welcome; you know that. Anytime. We'd love to see you.”

  I smiled. Jerry was pulling on his beard, which was grayer than when I'd first met him, and there were downcast wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. It made him look like a sad person, which I knew he was not.

  “Okay” I said. “Thanks, Jerry.”

  He waved a hand in front of his face. “De nada” he said. “Hey next time you stop by, let's bake some bread!”

  Irresolute

  My father was tired when he got back from Berkeley. The experiment hadn't gone well, and there was tension between himself and the leader of the UC team. He seemed grouchy and preoccupied, which was just as well, because it gave me an excuse to keep out of his way.

  We were studying Hamlet in AP English. The Prince of Denmark's dilemma sprang from the page to my own heart like all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I didn't understand the controversy surrounding the interpretation of the play. It seemed perfectly straightforward to me. Ghost or no, Hamlet knew what he knew, and if he hesitated, it was only because it was hard to work up the nerve to exact vengeance, in any case, especially if it meant hurting his own mother. He knew that she loved Claudius and was, if not entirely innocent of suspicion, then merely weak, not evil.

  It was the first week in June, and summer was testing its powers early. Temperatures were in the eighties and the air was slick with humidity. There was no air-conditioning at school. I signed out early to escape the embalming heat.

  The truth was that I was doing very little at school these days except obsessively reading and rereading Hamlet for a final paper I was writing about the themes of incest and sexual passion in the play which I knew would blow mild, bespectacled Mr. Keniston away. I should have been, as my father kept reminding me, keeping my grades up so that I would have a better chance of transferring from SUNY-Albany after my freshman year, but it wasn't happening. If anything, my grades had slipped into the grim, uncharted territory of the C range, and I didn't care. I had become obsessed with the idea of betrayal, with the fallibility of marriage and the charade of love. It felt to me, in some deep, obstinate way, that if my parents were no longer in love, if their marriage was more an obligation than a commitment to anything higher and truer, then this had profound ramifications for my whole existence. It meant that my birth had been a mistake, a glitch, that the mere breathing of air was something I didn't deserve. A quaint notion, and testament to how innocent I was, how idealistic, because, of course, if this were true, how many of us would feel comfortable about our portion of oxygen?

  I walked home along the church path, stopping to smoke a cigarette at the white birch stump. I looked toward the church and wondered if it would make a difference if I were religious, as it had for Hamlet, who was concerned about his soul's everlasting torment. I had, as a child, been curious about religion, but my father was such a proponent of scientific skepticism that I had left unexplored what might have been a spectacular gift for credence.

  I decided it would not have mattered much—a nihilistic Hamlet would probably not have hesitated quite so long—and what could zealous religious belief have possibly added to my own moral judgment?

  Wh
en I got to the house, I noticed that my mother's car was in the garage. She was usually at BCC at this time of day, so I was mildly surprised, but I figured it must be awkward to have to face a professor with whom you had just called off an affair.

  I opened the front door quietly, and I was almost immediately rewarded by the sound of my mother's voice talking urgently into the telephone in the kitchen.

  “I know,” she was saying. “I feel the same. But what can we do?”

  There was a slight pause.

  “I don't know, Bill,” my mother said, this time with more anguish. “I love you, too.”

  I opened the door and slipped out again. I walked down our street, past the houses with the box lawns and the iron eagles and the flagpoles, and thought that perhaps if we had tried harder to maintain these small symbols, these conventions of Americana, we would have succeeded at being a more normal family. If my father had mowed the grass more often instead of paying a kid down the street to do a desultory job, if we'd put out the Stars and Stripes for those holidays that were deemed societally important, if we had planted marigolds or pansies on our walkway, put a spread-winged eagle, flat and black, over our front door— maybe any one or some combination of these things would have made a difference to the gods of the ordinary.

  My mother could not give him up, this poet, this William R. Moulten. She had promised me she would, with tears streaming down her face, but she couldn't do it. You'd think this would have made me more understanding, the realization that my mother might not be able to help herself, that her unhappiness was so present that she must lose herself in whatever was available to her. But generosity did not reside in me. I walked around the block, hands deep in the pockets of my jeans, brooding over my mother's double betrayal, her persistence in this folly that was, for me, so grotesque I felt it reflected on my own dignity. I was soaked with sweat at this point, the back of my shirt clinging to me as though I had a sponge mop stuck between my shoulder blades.

  I arrived back at the house with much slamming of doors and shuffling of shoes on the slate foyer, and found my mother off the phone, preparing my favorite, mandu-guk, for dinner.

  Hypothetical

  Isaid nothing to my mother about what I'd overheard. She was nervous. She dropped things at the dinner table, causing my father to snap at her.

  “Yeobo” he scolded, “what's the matter?”

  “Nothing, yeobo” she replied, wiping up the spills, bending to pick up the silverware.

  He looked concerned as my mother went over to busy herself with the mandu-guk. “When was the last time you went to doctor?” he asked. “Maybe you should go for checkup.”

  “I'm fine, yeobo” she said. “Just clumsy.”

  My father's eyes softened as he watched her ladle soup into the lacquered bowls. “It's not like you,” he said huskily. “You are usually so graceful.”

  My mother pretended to be focused on the difficult task of assigning the right ratio of dumplings to broth in each bowl. I watched her false studiousness and felt the sweetness of my father's love. It was almost unbearable.

  “Myung Hee, help your mother,” my father said, and immediately, without resentment, I got up and took a bowl from my mother's hands. She shot me a warning look.

  “Here you go, Dad,” I said, presenting his bowl with two hands, in an exaggerated display of Korean politeness. He looked up at me, some of the softness carrying over from his vision of my mother. “Thank you, Myung Hee,” he said. “Mmmm, this looks good!”

  It was two nights later that I woke to the sound of my father going down the stairs in his slippers.

  When I was younger, lying in bed at night, I imagined I was blind. I believed my sense of hearing became more acute as a consequence, reaching the radarlike proportions of a bat's. I would listen to the creaking of the house, my brother's middle-of-the-night feeding cries, a car turning down our street. The sound I would listen for was my father's ritual excursion downstairs. It was, in some strange way, the closest I felt to my father, these late nights when I was in bed and he was downstairs, unaware of my hyper-vigilance to his small sounds, the creak of the freezer door, the clink of ice in a glass.

  I got up now and let my legs swing across the edge of the bed. I sat there for a moment, feeling cool air circulate around my feet, then stood up in one motion, like a gymnast landing a jump. I wore an oversized blue T-shirt with a picture of Daffy Duck, which I'd had since I was thirteen; it was so comfortable, the cotton thinning to transparency in spots, the material the softest-feeling thing imaginable.

  I crept down the stairs barefoot and stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway. My father was sitting in his customary spot, a glass of whiskey close at hand. The lights were out and there was no magazine in front of him. He seemed to be staring at the far side of the table. My eyes adjusted in the dark and I made some small noise in my throat to warn him of my presence.

  “Myung Hee,” he said hoarsely, “what are you doing up? It's late.”

  This made me smile—my father with his talent for stating the obvious.

  “I couldn't sleep,” I said.

  He grunted. “You get from me,” he said. “Not like your mother. World could be ending and she'd be sound asleep.”

  To my surprise, my father motioned toward the bottle of Jim Beam, which was still out on the counter. “Whiskey helps,” he said. “Pour a small glass. Not too much. You are old enough.”

  I got out a glass and poured an inch into it, got two ice cubes, and dumped them in. I realized I should have done it the other way, that the sound I listened for was made by putting the ice in the glass first, then stirring the liquid to make the ice cubes tinkle.

  I sat down beside my father and held the glass out level with my forehead. “Cheers,” I said. My father touched my glass with his, tilting it slightly toward mine.

  “Ganpai” he said.

  We drank. The whiskey tasted harsh and smoky, with a warmth going down that felt like velvet.

  “Good?” my father asked. He seemed amused.

  I nodded.

  It was a companionable moment. We sat in silence for some time, sipping our drinks.

  “Dad?”

  “Mm?”

  “As a scientist—hypothetically—if you knew that the result of some experiment was very exciting and made a lot of people happy, but you also knew the data was being falsified, would you feel obligated to tell, or would you let it go, knowing that the data was inaccurate but knowing it did no real harm?”

  I'd spent a long time configuring this particular analogy, certain that this approach would catch my father's attention right away, but now that I'd spoken it aloud, it sounded forced and inapplicable to me. Of course I knew what he would say.

  My father furrowed his brow, as he did when he was given a pleasing problem to consider. “So, someone is deliberately falsifying data to get this exciting result?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “And yet you say this falsification does no harm? I find that difficult to believe. Any result not based in sound research does harm. We could say we had a cure for cancer, and that would make people happy, but if we had no hard facts, it would not cure cancer, and this would cause harm.”

  I tried a different tack. “But I mean in a more general way. Morally, say, if you know something is hurtful or harmful to another person, but they don't know it, so they think they're happy. Do you have an obligation to tell them, or is it better to keep quiet?”

  My father pondered this for a moment. He stared at a spot on the table as though the answer could be gleaned there. “If a person thinks he is happy,” he said slowly, “but this sense of happiness stems from ignorance of the true situation, then he cannot be truly happy.”

  “So, you think that if you are the only one who knows the truth, you should tell the person, even if it might make them unhappy?”

  My father took a long pull from his drink, and I followed suit. There was a prolonged silence, no longer companionable. />
  “Myung Hee-ya” he said, turning to look at me, “what are you trying to say?”

  “Nothing,” I said quietly. I was wishing for Hamlet's fine oratory, his slippery, brilliant soliloquizing that could turn the words back and around themselves, eluding suspicion, deflecting meaning.

  “Obviously something,” my father said. Anger had returned to his face, the familiar mask.

  I knew two things in that instant: that he did not want me to tell him, and that he already knew but had decided to deal with it the same way he dealt with everything that was inconvenient or painfully unquantifiable—unsolvable for Xor Y-—by tamping the emotion down so hard and tight, the way he used to tamp his pipe tobacco, that there was no way to get at it without ignition.

  I was angry now myself, though, for petty, shameful reasons. I felt my father wanted to protect my mother, the two of them content to remain aligned against me, with their shared language and their strange, inexplicable marriage. For almost my entire life I had not understood what my mother saw in my father, how she could stay with a man so severe. Recently, I'd come to wonder how my father could love my mother with such unwavering devotion, when she was so capricious and self-centered. I felt there was no loyalty in my mother except to herself, to some conception she had of her dazzling future, a destiny that had begun with a nearly lethal accident and that had shown itself only in comparable mockery since. Their intimacy baffled and annoyed me, and because I could not understand it, I was seized with the desire to destroy it.

  “She's in love with her poetry teacher,” I said. “The guy at BCC. I saw them together. I tried to get her to break it off, but she wouldn't.”

  My father said nothing.

  “I'm sorry to have to tell you,” I said, “but it's been going on a long time—whenever you're away—and I just think it's not fair for you not to know.”

  “You are sure?” my father said, as though confirming a calibration.

  I nodded.

  “This professor who wears blue jeans to class?”