Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  The coffee table is see-through plastic, an upturned U, and he doesn’t have a TV. Instead he has a projector mounted to the ceiling above his couch. The far wall, the one with the windows, is exposed red brick.

  “Do you want anything?” he calls out from the kitchen.

  “What, other than this apartment?” I clear my throat, standing in the middle of the living room, wishing I could brush my teeth. On the walls hang old movie posters, huge ones, seemingly from actual movie theaters, framed. The hardwood floors are dark, and out the windows behind the couch, I see the guard railing of a fire escape. It’s so gloriously, enviably, unmistakably New York.

  I look down at his feet when he reappears.

  He’s wearing what is tantamount to Uggs.

  “Um.”

  He opens a shoe cabinet crammed with sneakers and pulls out another pair of fur-lined boot moccasins. They’re conspicuously smaller. Either his mom’s or dedicated for overnight guests from dating apps. “I highly recommend them.”

  “Thanks.” I slide my feet in. I wish I could take off my socks, but I don’t know whose feet have been in these. Still, they’re toasty. “Nice place.”

  He takes my coat, hangs it up, then walks across the living room. “Thanks,” he says, and cracks the window.

  Even the honking of the cars outside sounds New Yorkier than usual. I take a closer look at the movie posters. Truffaut, Kurosawa, Maya Deren.

  He has a Wong Kar-wai In the Mood for Love poster. Of course he does. “I love that you have the French edition.” I’ve stalked the poster on eBay since freshman year. It’s the one that features Maggie Cheung on one side of a brick alley and Tony Leung on the other. Both with their eyes downcast, and Tony’s shadow doing what his body can’t and touching her. It’s devastating.

  “I can’t take credit,” he says. “If you’re feeling a commotion in your loins, it’s my mom you’re attracted to.”

  “Commotion?” Loins?

  He smiles and shrugs. “This is mostly her stuff,” he explains. “Except the books.

  “Okay,” he says, washing his hands in the kitchen sink and drying them on a red-and-white-striped towel. “Not to be all, I’m going to slip into something more comfortable, but I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.”

  He pads into his bedroom and closes the door partway.

  “Hungry? Thirsty?” he asks when he returns in gray sweatpants and a hoodie.

  I eye his cozy ensemble longingly.

  He smiles knowingly and shakes his head. “You want sweats?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “Lies.”

  “Okay, fine, I want sweats so bad I’m willing to, like, purchase them from you.”

  He goes back to his room and emerges with an exactly matching duo. “I hate mismatched sets,” he says, and I smile, thinking about my socks. “These are on loan.” He places the pile in my hands meaningfully. “I’m tired of getting robbed for my staples.”

  Again, I can’t help but be curious about all the other women he’s had over. Whether the slippers and sweats are a part of some move or M.O.

  “Thank you.” I raise them, as if toasting him. “Is that the bathroom?” I point down the hall past the kitchen.

  The bathroom is small and perfect, with even more plants and an old claw-foot tub.

  I barely recognize myself in the mirror. My face is oily. My eye makeup smeared. I open the medicine cabinet, locate some mouthwash, swish, gargle, and spit it out, and feel marginally better.

  When I close the mirrored door, I realize I deliberately avoided reading his prescription bottles.

  Shit. I like him.

  There’s a pump dispenser of face wash on the sink, and as much as I want to scrub my face, I still have some sense of decorum. No one’s seen me without eyeliner since I was twelve. My face disappears without it. I don’t have a double eyelid, and Mom and Dad refused to let me get the surgery even though in Korea it’s basically as much a rite of passage as a bat mitzvah. I wash my hands, running warm water over them for a while. And then wash around my eyes and brows with my soapy fingertips like a lunatic.

  Peeling off my jeans that are so tight I can never get them off without rolling them inside out, I realize how filthy and sticky I feel.

  “Um…” I crack open the door, cringing. “Can I take a shower?” I grit my teeth. Maybe I should remind him again that I’m not homeless so that he’ll extra, really be convinced that I’m homeless.

  God, he thinks I’m a grifter.

  I shiver, remembering the puke. How that must have appeared.

  “Knock yourself out,” he says. I turn on the hot water and hear a tap on the door.

  I crack it, hiding behind it. He hands me a towel. “You’ve got to run the water while you press inside the little spigot guy to make it come out of the showerhead,” he says.

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s old and cranky.”

  “Thanks,” I squeak.

  I pull back the shower curtain. Not only is the tub spotless, but there’s a powder-blue rubber mesh over the drain to catch hairs. I’ve seen these exact ones in the household appliance section of H Mart. I smile picturing him tossing it into his shopping basket or else his Mom sending it to him in a care package with the same lime-green square exfoliating washcloth that I keep meaning to use but don’t.

  Even with his fancy parents who speak fluent English and a sister in the Peace Corps, Patrick isn’t above the stupid blue hair catcher. I feel like squeezing his face into mush.

  The spray of hot water is a miracle. I’m so grateful for this moment no matter how the rest of the night goes.

  When I put on the sweats, I feel like weeping.

  I find Patrick in the kitchen. He’s wearing black reading glasses, with a tea towel on his shoulder and his sleeves pushed up. I study the thick lines of ink on his forearms without staring directly at them. I feel another commotion. Definitely in the loin region. “I’m making spaghetti aglio e olio,” he says. “Or aglio e olio e pepperoncino. I guess.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  He laughs. “Pasta.”

  The kitchen’s tiny, with high white cabinets and insultingly abbreviated counter space, but it’s the kind of room that’s perfect for entertaining, the way it opens into this little nook where he’s set up a café table. It’s the sort of cubby that never puts on airs, where if the host is gracious and organized, cooking becomes a collaborative activity. Everyone chopping on whatever available surface, drinking and eating without a sense of imposition or resentment or slavish, burdensome labor.

  Basically, the opposite of the way my mom cooks.

  I try not to move into his apartment in my mind. It’s while attempting not to picture us in matching aprons making pancakes that my eye lands on an old egg timer shaped like an avocado sitting on top of his counter.

  I pick it up. It hums lightly in my hand. I didn’t know I had a hole in my heart in the shape of an avocado egg timer.

  I glance at him again, utterly charmed. Between this and the handkerchief, why is he so adorable? Why the fuck can’t he use his phone timer like everyone else in the world?

  “Guess an egg was too on the nose?”

  “It would be depraved to have an egg complicit in another egg’s demise,” he says distractedly, checking his pan.

  “God forbid a chicken,” I observe.

  Finally, he turns to me and appraises my outfit. I smile goofily.

  I feel ridiculous. He holds his hand up for a high five. I reach over and slap it. “We look like Japanese game-show contestants.”

  “We look like a million bucks,” he says. Suddenly everything is easy. Comfortable. It’s as if we shucked off some film of self-consciousness when we both put on house clothes.

  When the timer goes off, I watch closely. He spoons a little pasta water into his pan of garlic, adds olive oil and bits of red pepper. In deft, economical movements, with a tea towel in hand, he drains the spaghetti, gives it a go
od shake in the colander, and dumps the pasta into the pan, making it sizzle. It smells dementedly good. When he looks back at me, his glasses are fogged. If I were braver, if this were a movie, I would step forward and polish his glasses with my sleeve. He removes them and smiles.

  He piles two blue-rimmed bowls with nests of noodle. “Whatever you don’t want, I’ll eat,” he says, and hands one to me. He wipes his glasses, puts them back on, and opens the drawer by the stove.

  “Fork or chopsticks. I could do either.”

  I marvel at his lack of self-consciousness or formality. Nothing he does is showy. It’s a quiet kind of confidence that’s unfamiliar to me. I grab forks for both of us.

  “There’s Parmesan in the fridge,” he says. “And parsley in the blue thing.” I’m standing between him and the door.

  I find that I’m holding my breath when I open the fridge. There are cans of LaCroix and beer. Oat milk in the door. A rotisserie chicken from the supermarket. There’s also a squat jar of kimchi, a tub of red pepper paste, and a stack of plastic containers with various prepared banchan.

  I’m torn between the relief and this stirring, sparkly almost triumphant other feeling. It’s a revelation to open the fridge door of a Korean person who isn’t related to me.

  See, I don’t fucking worship white-people things, I want to tell June.

  “Right there,” says Patrick, pointing at a dedicated drawer in which there’s a Saran-wrapped wedge of cheese. And, as promised, in a blue-topped container, there are green sprigs. I open it. There’s parsley with a white paper towel lining the bottom. I can imagine him so vividly, carefully blotting the fronds after washing them and it makes my insides evanesce. I want to give his parents a plaque.

  “Grab a drink?” he asks.

  “Sure. What are you having?”

  “Seltzer?”

  I grab the cans. Suddenly I’m starving.

  We sit on the couch to dine at the coffee table, but when I scooch down onto the floor, he joins me. “That’s how I usually do it, but I didn’t want you to think I was an animal.”

  I love this feeling. Like we’re kids having a midnight snack.

  The pasta is delicious. Perfectly cooked. Expertly salted. He offers the cheese grater and then stops me.

  “Um,” he says, eyeing my hands intently. “Is it okay if I grate it for you?”

  “Excuse me?” My hands pause above my bowl.

  “That fucker is weirdly slippery and a total health hazard. It’s a design flaw that I always forget about until someone else uses it.”

  “Sure,” I tell him. “Grate my cheese… Oppa.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Just say when.”

  “That’s good,” I tell him, watching the flecks fall.

  He winds noodles into his spoon and shoves them into his mouth. “Where’d you learn how to cook?” I notice that his wedge of Parmesan is the real deal. That his olive oil is bright green. That even his salt and pepper seem considered, special, extracted from a small wooden bowl and crushed out from a large, well-worn peppermill.

  He keeps chewing. “My pops cooks,” he says finally. “This isn’t a recipe though. Good pasta’s only ever four things.”

  “Your pops?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pops? That’s what you call your dad?” I take a sip of soda.

  He nods.

  “So American.” Again I wonder what his childhood was like that he has gochujang and the good kind of Parmesan in his fridge.

  He laughs.

  “Wait, what do you call your grandmother?”

  “Uh, halmoni?”

  “Okay.” I take another bite of food, reassured.

  “Why do you seem relieved by that?”

  “I don’t know.” I cover my mouth, smiling. “I am though.”

  I look down at my bowl. I’m mowing through it faster than I’d like. “So, Pops went to Berkeley, Mom’s a genius, but what are they like?”

  “It’s weird,” he says. “For the longest time, I was totally incurious about them. They were just my parents. But going back to Korea was a game changer. Moving there for two years and seeing what they were like with their friends and family was wild. My mom is a different person in Korea. It’s fucked up, but I had no idea that she was funny until then. They weren’t people to me before. You’re going to think this is so dumb, but I could see that my parents were, like, popular.”

  At the mention of popular, I don’t even know what to envision for my parents. I picture my mom smoking a cigarette like a little street urchin. I try to imagine her at a poetry reading, but now, in my head, she’s just wearing a beret. My archetypes for cool are astoundingly limited. There’re emoji with more depth than I’m willing to assign to my parents.

  “I know nothing about my mom and dad,” I tell him. “Black boxes, both of them. And I want to know everything. I used to have this fantasy that I’d invent an app where we could talk to each other through a filter with translation and microexpressions and tone and all this stuff so we could properly communicate. But then I realized it wouldn’t make them want to talk to me. My dad’s family was wrecked by the banking crisis, so everything’s about money and success, and my mom’s from some tiny village, but I don’t even know what that means.”

  I’ve never talked about my parents this frankly with anyone. Not even June.

  He sets his fork down. “How’d they end up in Texas?”

  “I don’t know. I’m beginning to think they didn’t even have a plan. It’s not as if we knew anyone out there.”

  “You miss it?”

  I shake my head. “You?”

  “All the time,” he says. “Nobody in New York can make iced tea for shit.”

  It’s true. It’s been an ongoing secret source of pain. “I keep ordering it at restaurants for, like, six bucks and getting so sad. Plus, they charge for refills.”

  “Iced tea in New York is such a scam.”

  “And it’s not like C-Town has Mrs Baird’s Texas Toast for French toast.”

  “Brioche is pretty good for that.”

  “Fuck outta here.” I shake my head. “You know, I’m going back this weekend.”

  I hand him my half-eaten pasta and sit on the sofa.

  “Oh yeah? How do you feel about that?”

  I shrug. My leg’s fallen asleep. “I haven’t been since I got here. Where are your parents right now?”

  “Korea,” he says. He eats like a boy. Wolfing.

  “Do you ever look at your parents and wonder why they make their lives so hard?” I ask him.

  “Okay,” he says, getting up on the sofa with me. “I guess we’re going in.”

  “Sorry.” I bite my lip.

  “No,” he says, and reaches over to touch my forearm. “I didn’t mean that. I just…” He shakes his head. “It’s like you said the exact thing I’ve been thinking for the past few years. It’s just a bit uncanny, I guess.”

  He leans back. “As the kids of immigrants, we always have to think about that whole ‘I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams’ thing. I know my parents made sacrifices, but I also don’t understand their choices. Like, uprooting their lives three times for me and my sister’s schooling. And my dad gives so much money to his abusive brother, who we have to pretend isn’t a narcissist and psychopath because he’s the firstborn or some shit. There’s so much that goes into the collectivist mind-set, considering the good of the whole before prioritizing yourself, but sometimes it’s like, give it a rest already. Just set a boundary and break some patterns once in a while.”

  I lean back with him. His shoulder’s warm against mine.

  “Does your family have secrets that you don’t even know why you’re keeping?” I ask him.

  “Yeah,” he says. “My uncle has a second family that we don’t talk about. What about you?”

  I think about June. How we’re keeping her cancer from Mom. How she kept her job loss from me. “My mom left for three months when we were in high school and we don’t
talk about it. We have no idea where she went, why she left, and when she came back, we all pretended it never happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Do you and June talk about it?”

  I shake my head. “Not really. It’s crazy how lonely it is to be in a family. Even if the stuff with my mom didn’t happen, even if everyone was super evolved and therapized, I think just being in a family is what screws you up. I’m never going to fully understand them. And it’s fucked up because that means they’re never going to understand me. But who knows.” I shrug. “Maybe it’s designed that way for a reason. Families are such fucked-up tiny cults.”

  “Makes sense,” he says. “Marriages are the original tiny cult.”

  “Siblings too.”

  “God,” he says. “That is the truth. I feel like Korean families are extra fucked up though. Because of Han. Because we’ve been invaded and occupied and split up without retribution.”

  “We’re so repressed.”

  “So repressed.” Patrick crosses him arms, lost in thought. “Did you ever have that thing where, like, staying out late, drinking forties, breaking shit, or making out with people in public was, like, white-kid shit.”

  “Totally!” I think about my friends with ripped-up jeans, face piercings, and dyed hair. “Bad-kid shit was always white-kid shit.”

  “I’m sure being an Asian woman is its own thing, but being an Asian dude in America is such a head trip. College was weird; Texas was weird. Especially with those Asia years in between. Even at international school in Seoul, Asian guys were the jocks, the bullies, the stoners, the hot guys, all of it. We didn’t think about it. There wasn’t the ambient trauma of not being taken seriously as a man that I’ve seen Asian-American dudes carry around, where they have to be ripped and mad alpha or else they’re a nerd. But then again, my dad’s a professor. My mom lived in Europe. I lived in Korea, but kids in Southern California act like I’m not Asian enough because me and my sister didn’t have the whole signing up for Kumon and living with our grandmother deal. I’m not a restaurant kid or a store kid. My parents actually encouraged me to go into the arts….”