Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  I have no idea. “No.”

  “Because even if it is, I’d bet I could put it in the cold cycle and it would be just as good.” I make a mental note to never change out of it. I can’t give her a chance to test her theory. If it shrinks or discolors, it’ll be my fault. Once she disintegrated a bias-cut silk sundress with straps strung of semiprecious stones and she accused me of wearing clothes that were capricious, unserious. Most of Mom’s theories are like witch trials.

  I follow her small shoulders and perm back into the kitchen, wondering how it would feel to be touched by my mother without bracing for criticism.

  “Set the table,” she instructs in Korean.

  “Thanks, Jayne. I love it,” says Dad, in English. I whip around. He’s holding what appears to be a red, cellophane-covered ceramic golf bag. I’m guessing it’s a mug.

  “There are chocolate golf balls and matching tees in the bottom,” says June. I take it it’s from both of us. “Sorry we missed Father’s Day,” she continues. We don’t do Father’s Day. May fifth is Children’s Day in Korea, so we usually do something special for all of us, since Cinco de Mayo is huge in Texas. I widen my eyes at June. It’s insane to me that they don’t see right through her sentimentality.

  “Jayne, please,” says Mom, regarding me with impatience. I have no clue how I’ve managed to disappoint her in the last ten seconds. “The table?” she reminds me with a sigh in her voice.

  I snap the silverware drawer open. I’m confused by the lack of matching chopsticks. I search around the sink, greeted by the row of inside-out Ziploc freezer bags, handwashed and tented. Their logos have been rubbed off from reuse.

  “Dishwasher,” says Dad. I reach in, remembering June’s detergent pods and half-full loads. She’s too busy talking to look at me. I grab utensils, making sure the chopsticks have mates.

  Mom posts up in front of the refrigerator, pulling out an infinite number of shallow dishes, setting them on the table behind her as if there’s an assembly line of factory workers inside the appliance handing them out.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” she says abruptly. When she swallows hard, I look away.

  * * *

  I precisely remember the day Mom left. There’s that Maya Angelou quote how people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. For a few hours, I felt my mother’s love for me in a deep and profound way, and then she was gone.

  That whole morning had been dreamlike. It was the first time I skipped school, so the day’s events stuck out even before I knew it for the day it would become. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to cut class. I felt stupid that it had never occurred to me to do before. I wonder if that’s how Mom felt when she got to where she was headed. Whether she realized how arbitrary it was to stay in one place when she could just as easily be in another.

  She didn’t seem surprised when I walked back into the house three hours after getting on the bus. A girl I’d newly become friends with by our mutual appreciation of thrifted Doc Martens was leaving with her boyfriend, and I’d impulsively asked for a ride. I rode in the back of the truck with my eyes closed.

  I came through the front door and was entranced by the aroma of cooked food. The dining table was set, not the kitchen table or the squat, lacquered foldout we sometimes used on the floor, and it was laden with delicious treats. It was as if I were happening upon a cottage in the woods in a fairy tale. I wondered who she was expecting.

  I could sense someone in the house, but the TV wasn’t on. I walked upstairs. My mother turned to face me. She looked beautiful in the late-morning light. She was dressed in a white bra and a simple gray skirt, as if she were going to work in an office. I was astonished. It was Mom, but I’d caught her in another life. A secret one. As though she played a mother in my movie, but here I was, watching her in another film entirely.

  It had been so long since I’d seen her out of the wrinkle-resistant polyester slacks she bought at Costco. Her hair was pulled back in a silver clip. She even seemed to move differently.

  There was an open suitcase on the bed. It was small, bright green. It usually sat on the floor of her closet. The part of the closet I wasn’t allowed in. I knew better than to ask where she was going. She wouldn’t tell me, and I longed to earn her affections for not asking.

  She held up a jewel-toned silk square to the light. “Do you remember when you’d use this scarf to make a little boddari?” Even her voice seemed different. Happier somehow. Breathier. “You were always so keen to leave.”

  I’d been steering clear of her when it was just the two of us, her rage for the hanbok incident fresh in my memory, the heat still stinging my cheek, but I sensed an invitation. The acknowledgment of a special occasion. A parallel universe. I walked through the portal and sat on her bed, careful not to rumple the clothes laid out there, flattened as if intended for a paper doll.

  I was hungry for her to tell me anything. Mom was unsentimental. Heartachingly disinterested in us. Rarely nostalgic. Halmoni was kind when she came. Slipping us crisp banknotes and patting our cheeks as I pleaded with my eyes, questions leaping at my throat. I couldn’t understand why everything was a secret. Why everything I knew about my mom was ill gotten. I spied on her at the organ at church one time as she played a full classical song without making a single mistake, stepping on the pedals at all the right parts. She’d never once played for us before. And I’d seen old-fashioned black silk stockings with a garter belt rolled up carefully in her underwear drawer, hidden away and speaking to a version of her that I’d never know and would never become.

  “What is it?” she asked me in Korean.

  Mom slipped on a silky ivory blouse. I imagined it felt cool on her bare arms. She was backlit, and even with her C-section scar that I knew was underneath her skirt, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s always been the perfect size. So dainty. The small bones that protruded from her skin were breathtaking. She had nimble hands and tiny feet, with eyes that were the biggest of all of ours even without surgery.

  “I almost fainted,” I told her. Quickly adding, “They sent me to the nurse, and she sent me home.” I didn’t tell her that I’d deliberately not eaten since dinner the day before yesterday. That it was an unspoken pact between me and my new friends. Toward the end of freshman year, one of us had gotten thinthinthin. Only I knew her secret. How she ate everything and then un-ate it. Hit reset. We’d never talked about it, but I heard her. And I know she wanted me to ask, so I didn’t. Instead, I’d watch the door in the bathrooms at school, at diners, turning on the tap as a warning when someone else would come in. I ignored the repeated flushing, the sour smell of her hair and her breath. I loved studying her, both of us pretending I wasn’t. Secrets are like wishes. Everyone knows they don’t work if you tell. But if you really want them to gain power, you can’t acknowledge that they even exist.

  When Mom left, my secret kept me safe.

  “You don’t feel warm,” she said, absently cupping my cheek.

  I closed my eyes when she touched me, enjoying the whiff of jasmine and white flowers. I leaned into her cool hand. When I was young, I couldn’t fall asleep unless I was rubbing her earlobe. I still remember how I worried the tender flesh between my thumb and forefinger, the nubbin of ear piercing scar lulling me. June did the same thing, tugging the back of Mom’s neck, but she’d been bumped from our mother’s lap when I was born.

  She pulled away and turned to the window. I watched the delicate beads of her spine. I loved observing my mother, as unknowable as she was. The way she held her pinkie aloft while arranging things into a silk pouch, which she laid in her suitcase. I watched myself in the mirror, straightening my posture to appear leaner when I heard the expensive click of the jewelry box.

  I tried to guess what she’d select for her blouse, running through the tangle of costume jewelry in my mind, the cold strands of faux pearls, the gold Nefertiti pendant, mysterious amb
er statement pieces, and the jade bangles stacked on the right. I remember guessing it would be earrings. I was startled when she sat down next to me and pressed a thin gold band with two small rubies into my hand.

  I left my fingers splayed as it bore a hole into my palm.

  “Pretty, right?”

  I nodded. She leaned in. I held my breath as she took my hand in both of hers and folded my fingers in. “It’s yours,” she said.

  I slipped it on my ring finger, my wedding finger. My hand could’ve been someone else’s, it was suddenly so beautiful. My fingers had always been my best quality. They are my mother’s exactly. The ring fit flawlessly. I aspired to one day have the rest of me be as pretty as my hand in this moment.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked, smiling conspiratorially.

  I nodded again.

  We headed into the kitchen. I inspected the table this time. Myriad small dishes, jewel-like, glinting under the gloss of Saran wrap. She lifted the steaming glass lids of the largest saucepan. Kimchi-jjigae with fatback. June’s favorite. A black earthenware cauldron of steamed egg. My favorite. There was even mapo tofu for Dad.

  She pulled out a chair and served me generously. Not the half servings I’d been getting from her and from all the church ladies who had been forbidden to overfeed me. My weight was a joint concern.

  It felt like a fable. The kind where you eat what’s forbidden, where you desecrate offerings to the gods and you wake up squealing, wordless, transformed into an animal, punished for your greed. In Korean folklore, women were mercurial, constantly turning into bears, cranes, or nine-tailed foxes. Sometimes as punishment, sometimes as reward.

  I kept eating. Past the point of discomfort. My mother talked about her mistakes and how it would be a sin to expect forgiveness from her girls. I remember thinking that the Korean word for “punishment” was the same as “bee.” I already knew she was leaving, and I ate slower so that she’d stay longer. Part of me ate hoping she’d take me with her. Only me. I ate with the ring held tight in my fist as she extracted the smallest bones of the fish, the tricky feathery ones below the fins, and fed me the meat. And when she told me to go lie down, I did because I was tired. And sick. I could barely lie on my back, I was so uncomfortably, painfully full. I’m not sure I heard the garage door opening, but when I came back downstairs, she was gone.

  I still held the ring when I woke up.

  I felt as though I’d failed a test. That I’d sold her out for a piece of jewelry. I needed to fix all of these acidic, roiling feelings that arose in me. I needed to undo my mistakes. Be forgiven for my sins. I was desperate to get rid of the salty, unctuous, sick, thick bribe inside me. I pulled the cord.

  There was this dream I used to have during those months after Mom vanished. That I was standing up to take Communion in an enormous, Gothic church. It was cold and bright, and I had to climb hundreds of steep stairs into the light. I was always too scared to look down, and when I reached the top, I offered up my hands, one exposed palm over the other, to receive the dried-out wafer of sacrament. And that’s when I’d feel the searing heat of a sting on the outstretched flesh of my palm and watch the bee disembowel itself.

  While Mom was gone, I tried rubbing my own ear and was shocked by how loud and insistent it was, how unpleasant. It never occurred to me that she might not be experiencing the exact soothing, quieting sensation I was. I hadn’t known I was a nuisance.

  I never told June or Dad that I’d seen her go. It became so clear what she’d meant when she’d screamed “You girls don’t get to have everything,” gesturing wildly to the dress I’d defiled. June stayed up for her night after night, but I knew she wasn’t coming back. And each time Dad called when he thought we were asleep, I lost a little more respect for him. I had seen the look on her face. She’d given me her ring, and I’d betrayed her by taking it. I’d given her permission to leave when my sister or father would have demanded she stay.

  When June left, my secret exploded.

  chapter 30

  Mom turns to me with an expectant face. I sense she’s been talking to me.

  The harsh lighting casts heavy shadows at her cheeks, filling the grooves by her lips, her neck. She rarely wears makeup, just a chalky film of SPF one zillion sunscreen, and her hair is heathered in between light brown and gray.

  I shake my head. “I couldn’t hear you,” I tell her in Korean.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says, seemingly annoyed as she busies herself with saucepans. Chopsticks in hand, she sets down trivets on the table and plants saucepans atop them.

  For a brief moment I wonder why we’re eating in the kitchen and not at the dining table. Why the only time the dining table has ever been set was the day she left.

  “Wow,” June says, coming up from behind me. “What a feast.” She dangles a small robin’s-egg-blue Tiffany’s shopping bag by its white handles. “This is from both of us,” she says, nodding at me. Mom looks to June, then to me, and wipes her hands on her apron before taking it.

  “Oh, it looks expensive,” Dad says, smiling.

  Mom cuts him a sharp look. “I’ll look at it later,” she says, visibly embarrassed. “Dinner first.”

  “Just open it,” says Dad. For an unsteady second, I’m convinced it’s a ring.

  Mom takes off her apron and slings it on the back of a chair. She hands the bag to Dad as she tugs her scrunchie off and gathers the loose strands into a tighter ponytail. She wipes her hands on her thighs again and reaches for it. My heart aches when I recognize her actions for what they are. My mother felt the need to change, to be presentable, before she could receive such a fancy gift. If she weren’t so self-conscious about her self-consciousness, I know she would have excused herself to put on lipstick.

  She carefully removes a flat, square box from the bag. She stares at it for a moment, almost suspiciously. “Thank you,” she says, to the box, unable to look at either of us. When she tugs at the ivory satin ribbon gingerly, it’s as if she half expects it to detonate. Set atop a rectangle of cottony fluff is a delicate chain with a tiny diamond-studded cross. Mom lifts it and holds it to the light. It’s beautiful.

  “Thank you,” she says again. In the same breath, she adds, “You shouldn’t have spent so much money.”

  “Do you love it?” asks June, grabbing Mom’s shoulders from behind, jostling her until she smiles. “It’s an early birthday present.”

  Mom’s birthday isn’t for a month.

  “I love it.”

  Mom hands it to Dad for him to fasten, turning and carefully lifting her ponytail.

  “It’s not like anything else you have,” says June, crowding them, casting a shadow so Dad can’t see.

  Dad ushers Mom into the light. “The little clasp is so small,” he says, frowning and craning his neck away to help his farsightedness. My parents seem so old and June seems so needy, I can’t look at any of them.

  “It’s platinum,” says June.

  Finally, Mom touches the cross where it falls on her chest. “I can tell it’s platinum by the weight,” she says, smiling at all of us. “A woman my age shouldn’t have to wear silver.”

  She says it so silkily that we all laugh. June loudest.

  “Now, that’s enough,” she says, hurriedly unwrapping all the dishes covered in plastic. The moment is over. “Everyone sit. I timed it all perfectly.”

  I take my usual seat at the square kitchen table. “You should stop losing weight,” she says, setting down yet another earthenware pot of stew. “It makes you look older.”

  “I am older.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Drink this.” She holds a mug under my nose as if its contents stop time. It’s murky and smells somewhere between nuts and feet. “Chaga mushrooms,” she says. “For your skin.” She reaches out and pats my cheek, not with affection, but as some kind of diagnostic probe. “You look… puffy. Your unlucky ear is sticking out more than usual.” Only one of my earlobes is attached. I forget which is the unlucky one.
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  I touch the liquid to my lips without drinking. It’s the game we’ve always played. Later I’ll tip it down the sink and feel bad when she tells me how much it cost and how far it’s traveled. Mom’s love language is to scrutinize and criticize all the physical attributes that you’re most sensitive about. I glance at my sister, willing my clairvoyant mother to detect June’s cancer from the size of her pores or the sheen of her hair.

  “I thought the food was getting cold,” I remind her.

  Halfway through dinner, Mom leaves the table and emerges from the garage with a store-bought pie in a black plastic tray with a domed lid. “Happy family!” she announces, as if collective birthdays are a thing that’s commemorated by eating pie. “They had blueberry, but it wasn’t as beautiful. And at least it isn’t pumpkin. What a disgusting pie.”

  “You just don’t like nutmeg,” says Dad.

  “I got the last one,” she says, presenting it with as much pride as if she’d made it. “Kim Theresa says that all H-E-B’s get their pies from the same place as some expensive restaurants.”

  “Happy family!” says June, smiling at me.

  “Happy family to you,” I sing, and June actually laughs.

  * * *

  My sister snores softly on my bed above me. I’m lying on the mat on the floor since June pulled rank because her room is filled with restaurant supplies. I stare at Patrick’s text and send him a thumbs-up that I’ve arrived safely. I then send him the cowboy smiley because I’m feeling chatty.

  The woolly stuffiness of the room presses up against my skin. I get up quietly, monitoring June for movement, open my desk drawer, and remove the flat-head screwdriver. I check her again, then step out and quietly close the door behind me.

  The thermostat in the hall is set to 84 degrees.

  I switch on the bathroom light, blinking furiously in the mirror. This is the mirror in which my face looks most disgusting. I’m almost sure it’s not all in my head. I once googled that unflattering mirrors are an empirical scientific phenomenon. They bulge under their own weight, making you appear shorter and wider. And this one, my childhood one, the one I studied most intently during my formative years, distorts all the time.