A Southern Girl (8 page)

The Riverside Country Club, my destination, lay seven miles upriver from the shipyard. Known simply as “the club” to its members, it took a parental pride in its golf course. I played occasionally; usually, like today, at the invitation of Dr. Ross Vernon, a general surgeon with an eight handicap and a past chairman of the Greens Committee. He was also my best friend and my client. Ross’s wife, Carol, saw Elizabeth often, and except
for Carol’s efforts to recruit her into Mary Kay, Elizabeth liked her. We usually socialized with the Vernons at our home or theirs, but occasionally at the club, where we were not members.

I parked, extracted my clubs from the trunk, and after leaning against the car to change my shoes, I headed across the fairway in the direction of the fourth tee, where instinct told me Ross Vernon would be by now. On a bench near the blue tee I watched Vernon and another man putt out on number three. They replaced the flag and walked toward me.

“You’re late,” called Vernon, a rotund, friendly man with contact lenses and hands surprisingly meaty for his delicate work.

“You’re right,” I returned, rising to meet him.

“Coleman, do you know Ed Polling of Armstrong Securities?”

“Don’t think I do,” I said, shaking hands with Polling who affably assured me it was indeed nice to meet me as well. Polling impressed me as a serious golfer. His bag and clubs showed wear and his golf glove dangled from his back pocket with the insouciance I had come to associate with those who took three-putting personally.

My first impression firmed when Polling, with honors on the third hole, stepped to the tee and drove his ball two hundred and ninety yards at the dead center of the fairway. I caught Ross Vernon’s eye as Polling watched his ball come to rest.

“Not bad,” I said. “Pressure is my middle name.”

Vernon smirked. “There’s beer in my bag. Help yourself.”

I topped my first drive—I usually do—sending it bounding down the rough on the left. Ugly, but the distance wasn’t bad. Vernon then hit a very respectable drive thirty yards behind and to the right of where Polling’s ball lay. I wondered why I played this game. I do not enjoy golf, and I enjoy golfers as a group even less, although Ross Vernon is an exception.

We shouldered our bags and ambled down the fairway, lined on either side by the dead leaves of winter. “Looks like a ten ball afternoon,” I joked. For me, winter golf means lots of time looking for my ball in the woods. I glanced toward Polling to see if my comment provoked a smile, the kind of response that would leave me free to take the game as lightly as I pleased. But Polling’s eyes were fixed on his ball, his mind focused on his club selection, his pace quickening into a martial gait, and he appeared not to have heard. I turned to Ross.

“So, how goes the cut and cure business?”

“About the same,” he answered. “Couple of gall bladders in the morning, golf in the afternoon. The usual.”

“Remind me,” I said, “when I need surgery to inquire about handicaps. I want to die at the hands of someone who doesn’t know a birdie from a bugle.”

Ross Vernon laughed. “You can’t equate golfing ability with surgical skill. The best surgeon in town wins the member-guest every year.”

“Who is that?” I asked. As a club non-member, I know little of these intramural honors.

“Bill Hartsock. The joke around the scrub basins is that Doctor Bill can do brain surgery with a putter.”

“I’m old fashioned. I like the ones who use scalpels and aren’t in a hurry to get to the first tee.”

“Not many of those left,” Vernon said as we arrived at my ball. I checked my distance, took out a five iron, and dropped my bag behind me.

“Ross, you want to run up there and tend the flag for me. I hate it when I get off a two hundred yard chip and the flag deflects it at the last second.”

Vernon grinned. “About twelve shots from now, when you hit the green, I’ll take care of the pin.”

Polling remained silent, as though playing alone. As I limbered up with my five iron, I felt the intimidation of Polling’s stare. I approached the ball, whacked downward, and felt a surge of relief as the ball erupted toward the pin, landing just off the green.

“Nice shot,” allowed Polling.

“Thanks,” I acknowledged. “If I had any sense, I would call it a day now.”

The light was fading. Shadows of the bare oaks and maples lengthened across our path. Vernon took a sweater from his bag and pulled it over his head. When we putted out, Polling had parred, Vernon had a bogey five, and I had shot six, which pleased me. At the next tee, Vernon popped a beer. Polling declined.

On the fifth hole, a par five, Polling and Vernon each bogeyed while I took a ten. “Could have been worse,” I noted. At number six, I made a par three. “Now that’s the Coleman Carter we’ve come to know and fear,” I mocked. Polling actually smiled. As we followed our shots off the next
tee, Polling walked ahead and I said to Vernon, “Where did you find this Polling? Is he one of your patients who suffered oxygen deprivation while you stitched him up?”

“He’s my broker. Scratch golfer, as you can see. Not much at stand-up comedy, but good with the market.” We watched Polling stride purposely toward his ball. “You’re only going to get in four or five holes. How come you’re late?”

“You’re not going to believe it when I tell you.” I had resolved on the way to the club to say nothing about the adoption, but I liked Ross Vernon. “Elizabeth and I had a meeting with Social Services.” Vernon eyed me expectantly. “We’re adopting a kid.”

“No lie,” said Vernon. “When?”

“Soon, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well, it’s not your straight adoption. I mean, we’re looking at international adoptions. There’s a lot of paperwork and then a child has to become available.”

“What kind of child?”

“A girl. Korean, we think.”

Vernon stopped and looked at me, expressionless. “You’re going to adopt a gook?”

I had to laugh. “Gooks are Vietnamese. Don’t you know your ethnic slurs?”

“My error,” said Vernon, returning the laugh. “That’s awfully brave of you. What do Josh and Steven think?”

“It’s okay with them. Elizabeth is ecstatic. It was her idea.”

“I can’t believe she hasn’t said anything to Carol. But you sound less than ecstatic.”

“Frankly, I think it’s dumb.”

“Then why—”

“Don’t ask. Anyway, we’re doing it and I hope it makes Elizabeth happy, because I know two senior citizens in Charleston, South Carolina who are going to go ballistic.”

“Your folks?”

I nodded. “My dad’s been sick and this could push him over. I mean it. And mother still talks about my cousin who got a divorce, of all things, like she turned tricks on the church steps. Telling them won’t be pretty.”

“Sounds like trouble,” Vernon agreed. “And Elizabeth expects this reaction?”

“I have no idea. We haven’t discussed it. I doubt she has given it much thought from their standpoint.”

“They don’t get along?”

“They do, but it’s a delicate truce easily broken by importing alien children into the family.” I felt the tightening in my throat. I had said more than I intended. Still unsaid, but very much on my mind as I walked the fairway, now hidden in the murky stillness of dusk, was the impending pressure to love a total stranger like I loved those boys. I didn’t see how that was possible. I just didn’t.

5

Jong Sim

The trip back to my village was the longest of my life. Your cries followed me down the street until I stopped my ears. When I stepped onto the bus, the driver stared at me because I was looking at him, just standing there like a tree. He took the fare from some money I held, then pushed me toward the back. The people I passed must have known I had done a terrible thing because they looked at me like a criminal. All the seats were filled, but a kind auntie made a space for me. I tried not to think about you but instead about the cane machete with the rusty blade I put under my sleeping mat yesterday. It was not very sharp, but it was sharp enough.

You looked so helpless lying on those steps. I could still hear you crying though the bus had been many miles. I told myself they had found you by now, that you were inside the police station being changed and fed and smiled upon. You were on your way to America, I whispered, but too softly for the auntie beside me to hear. I did the best I could for you by giving you away. You would rather be with me than on a doorstep, but you were helpless. I was just as helpless in a world controlled by men and tradition. I gave away my child. I murdered you. I will murder myself, I had decided.

The temperature dropped. You would be cold, but it was warm in the station, where you surely were by now, being cradled by someone who had seen the mirror and knew that you were special. The auntie beside me was most kind, patting my hand like she understood, but she could not because I myself did not understand. At the sign of the green dragon I got off. The temperature had dropped more and the air was very cold so I shivered as I waited. The bus to the village was not crowded, and the few passengers did not notice me weeping in the back. If they heard me, they did not turn around.

That night I took the machete from under my sleeping mat with only the slightest scraping of its rusty blade against the floor. I did not want my mother to hear. I crept into the kitchen and crawled into the large tub used to render meat. There I curled up with my hands locked around my knees. My breasts throbbed, swollen with milk. They will give you milk but it will not be my milk and you will not like it. I sat in the tub a long time, holding the machete between my legs and waiting for the courage to force it into the very place where I felt your restless stretch at sunrise. My heart beat with love for you and hatred for myself, for my parents, for my grandfather, for Hyun Su, for Uncle Jae, for Korea. Why must I, who had nothing, give up something so precious? If I must give up what I love, so must they. I would enter the next life so they would know I loved you more than life itself. When they found me in the morning, stiff and cold in my own blood, they would suffer loss and know the depth of mine.

I turned the rusty blade toward my stomach and gripped the handle with both hands. I knew I must do it quickly, with one thrust, at the very moment when my courage surged and before I could change my mind. I waited for that courage. The house was silent and I wondered if I would break that silence by crying out at the moment the blade entered me. I placed the point against my belly below the navel. The point was sharper than I thought, and a trickle of blood came down between my legs. To get the courage I needed I thought back to grandfather’s order to “get rid of it,” as if my perfect Soo Yun was some foul smelling garbage, and to Hyun Su’s fists when he accused me of counting the days wrong, but the courage would not come. My hate was not as strong as my love for you, and love is not a reason for suicide. Near dawn, I rose from the tub, my legs like jelly and the machete so heavy I could not lift it but only drag it along the
floor. I returned to my sleeping mat, slid the machete under it, and slept, exhausted.

The first week of separation from you seemed endless. I forced myself into the fields where I worked to forget. I ate little, slept little, and spent myself harrowing fields that were nearly frozen. After a time I could not feel my feet or hands. If only my heart could be numb also. That week dragged into the next. Lying on my back at night, I memorized a mildew pattern on the ceiling, but I avoided a view of the tub through the kitchen door. The mildew pattern formed a map, with crooked roads leading to anyplace but where I was. I walked them until exhaustion brought sleep.

One night I woke up trembling from a picture in my mind—you at the olive door, your oval face, your tiny hands, your nursing lips, those sad cries. What happened to you? Did they take you in? They must have taken you inside because it grew so cold in the afternoon. Will they send you to America? Do you cry for me? The pictures in Min Jung’s magazine were just pictures unless you went to America. You could not grow strong and wear a watch and drive a car and not farm unless you left Korea. It grew so cold that day. Did you freeze? I had to know. I could not spend years thinking about the better life I gave you unless I knew you were on your way to that life.