Drifting House (16 page)

“Is my house your tourist attraction?” asked Mina.

“And my husband, yours?” Eunkang’s own honesty embarrassed her.

There was nothing more to pretend. Still, Mina smiled that sweet, girlish smile as if determined to enjoy this.

Eunkang filled a kettle with water and green tea leaves as if it were her own house, then set it on the portable burner. She sniffed. “Chun Mee tea from China,” she observed. “A little sweet.”

Mina watched ­sharp-eyed but did not protest.

“My mother calls my life a tragedy,” Eunkang said. “But she says all women’s lives are tragic. Do you think it’s so tragic?”

Mina shrugged. “We’re just here for a little while, then we go. I don’t think about big words like
tragic
. It seems so melodramatic. Our country’s so melodramatic.”

“So that’s what’s wrong with us!”

But Eunkang agreed with her. Someone else had watched the great, important men do their dance, and laughed, knowing that the magpies would continue to fly and defecate whether people lived or died. Knowing that in a mere hundred years, all their differences would not matter.

She poured tea and respectfully handed a teacup to Mina with two hands.

Mina accepted it, her head slightly bowed.

“You’re very attractive,” Eunkang said, and immediately felt mortified.

“That’s a strange thing to say just now, but thank you.” She set the teacup down at the corner of the low floor table, pushed a sketching pad aside, and sat down on the floor. “I never imagined he’d call me while you were there, so I froze. I don’t do things like that, really. All I remember is cleaning!”

Eunkang sat across from her. “And now you know the kind of person I am.”

“In Seoul I take good care of myself, not like this,” Mina said, her hands busily defending herself as she made large gestures at the sagging tin roof. “I’m good at taking care of people.”

“I wanted to know these things about you,” Eunkang said. She dipped a finger into the teacup, let it burn. “To see you the way my husband knows you.” She said this as if she had followed a plan, though she had surprised herself by coming.

“
Does
he know me?” Mina said, and laughed. “Why do you let him do this to you?”

“Why did you?”

“When you’re gone for the weekend, the village kids use a ladder to climb into your yard and play.” Mina smiled, amused. “They say they even watch your television. They’re so afraid of you two, they put everything back exactly the way it was. Now that’s manners.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know,” Mina said. “I’m a little nervous. I wanted to learn how to paint from the best. It was something I wanted to do, just now.”

She looked up, ­bright-eyed, though there was aggression in the smile. She added, “And I guess I wanted to know what it tasted like. Power.”

“And what did you learn?”

She considered this, cocked her head, and spit out, “For some people, floors have to be so clean people can eat off them.”

This made Eunkang angry, and uncomfortable. It also delighted her. She curled up at the foot of the bed like a cat, while Mina sat on the floor ­Buddha-style. They loosened up because they had nothing to hide from each other; they would never meet again and were safe in that knowledge.

“You won’t be surprised, but I’ve done some terrible things,” Mina said.

“You’re so young, how terrible could they be?”

“Terrible, and more terrible.” Her head tilted proudly. “But I don’t regret anything.”

“I’ve never kissed anyone before marriage,” Eunkang said. “That I regret.”

Mina drank tea and nodded and listened.

“I wanted to be liberated, a new woman, but I lived so quietly.” Eunkang spoke honestly, the way she rarely allowed herself, like a woman hungry for speech, and she felt herself lighter with each sentence.

“I would like a quiet life,” Mina said. “My life’s never been quiet.”

“Would you be good at that, a quiet life?”

“My mother wanted a quiet life somewhere, anywhere. She wanted to be taken care of and be loved.” Mina swirled the teacup, spilling on the floor. “She grew up around here. I wanted to see it for myself.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a mother,” Eunkang said. “I’ve always wanted children.”

She stopped there, unable to continue. Only then Mina came closer, filling Eunkang’s eyes with her long arms and breasts as large and round as a foreigner’s, a body that had been raised on milk and meat instead of vegetable roots and rice, a body that would remember peace more vividly than it did the fear of war, the body of a woman the daughter she would never have might have grown into. This beautiful woman took Eunkang by the shoulders and kissed her on the cheek, like a real daughter.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” Mina said decisively, mercifully. “It’s time for me to go home.”

“Where will you go?” Eunkang studied the way Mina carried her power. Would her daughter have been so bold, so sure of herself?

“Back to Seoul. That’s where they are, the people who love me.”

Only when Eunkang rose and asked to look at Mina’s paintings did the girl become shy.

Mina said, “It’s just me, dirtying up the canvas.”

When Eunkang turned over the first canvas, then the next, she saw that the critics would say the work was amateur. Perhaps they were right, but she also saw how playful the paintings were, and how dark. The thick oil surfaces were sculpted, scraped into an age that seemed to date itself from the beginning of time, and the amorphous figures rising from that darkness that could be about creation, survival, or destruction, she wasn’t sure.
I have seen,
the paintings said, and she wondered what it was that a girl of Mina’s age must have seen. She had expected to confirm that Mina could not compete, and win something ­back—her pride, her dignity. Instead she was delighted by what Mina might be capable of someday, and relieved. There was also a sense of loss, which made her feel older than she was.

“Don’t listen to what they say about you,” Eunkang said, her voice vehement as if “they” were specific people they both knew. “They’re usually wrong about everything.”

Mina smiled, brightly this time. “It’s a clear night tonight,” she said, her hands to the windowpane. “You’ll be safe driving home.”

Eunkang allowed herself one last slow gaze, memorizing, before she shut the door behind her.

She drove rapidly home without decelerating, only stopping once when between two mountain peaks, a view of the moon, the vast rice fields, and the shadowy mountains stilled her with their imponderable gaze. She walked gingerly down the neat aisles of rice shoots and murky water up to her ankles and listened to the music of groaning frogs that made her feel erotic, sexy. This was her, finally listening to her body whisper its needs; she heard the woman she had imagined herself being. She took off her blouse and bra, tied them around her waist, and let the moonlight and the wind caress her chest and hard, cold nipples. With her eyes closed, her face upturned, she relived the persimmon splitting against teeth and smelled Mina’s room in her hair. Someone might see her; she did not care.

Seongwon met Eunkang at the gate. He said nothing of the lateness of the hour and did not comment on her muddy beaded slippers and shirt, which only now she realized she had put back on backward. Instead he said, “Have you had rice?”

She shook her head, no longer pretending she had visited her family.

After a few minutes he reappeared from the kitchen with a
low table heavy with rice, soybean paste soup, beef ribs marinated in honey and soy sauce, and pickled vegetables. There was her favorite
banchan:
­beef-stuffed chili peppers and candied lotus flower roots. Men rarely entered the kitchen; the ­store-bought
banchan
arranged on small plates was his usual plea for forgiveness.

“I made dinner for you,” he said.

As she sat on the floor and ate his lie, he watched, delighted. He kissed her on the throat, the earlobe, the mouth, until she said, “That’s enough.”

He kneeled on the bamboo mat beside her. “I’m a foolish, weak man.”

“I know.”

“I want to be the universe for you.”

She tapped the thin fuzz on his scalp with the fat end of the chopstick. “That’s impossible.”

She thought of Seoul, the city that she loved a new city now, with no more enforced curfews and now with young women talking too loudly in orange drinking tents with the men. The tear gas that had fogged the streets for the last decade was the past, democracy was theirs, and the riot police were now restationed as sentries by serious embassy gates and the presidential compound. The hundreds of thousands of protesters had nothing left to risk and nowhere to go but back to their own lives. They had returned to the disorientation of light conversation, weighing the watermelon per milligram at the market, waiting in traffic, enduring living and loving, like Seongwon, like her. So how could Seongwon be an entire universe when he could not even be a stone?

She blew air into his serious, devoted face, making him blink.

“It’s hardly fair to place the universe on your shoulders.” She felt wonderful, weightless. “You’re so earnest. You take life so seriously.”

“Have I disappointed you?” He looked worried. “I am disappointing, aren’t I?”

“Silly man that I adore,” she said, and kissed his baldness.

“What if a woman does what she wants and they call her a bad mother, a whore?” She pulled her blouse up to her rib cage and twirled her finger around her naval. “I like the word
whore.
”

She said the word
whore
out loud again and enjoyed Seongwon’s fright.

“The carp,” she cried. “They’ll look so beautiful in the moon!”

She scrambled up. He followed her out the door, determined and sincere. The carp now flashed an archaic beauty that reminded her of the traveling
pansori
singers and the medicine men of her youth who had all but disappeared. When she dipped her fingers in the pond, a large orange carp nibbled on her fingertips. Goodbye, she thought, to all the beauty around her. Tomorrow, she decided, they would return to Seoul, to home, and she would find out what other kind of life she could live in the city.

“I see Sagittarius.” Seongwon squatted behind her, his lips to her ear. His voice dipped anxiously. “Oh, and there’s the rabbit on the moon. What do you see?”

“Me?”

She broke away from him. She turned squarely and saw the man she loved, a man incapable of change. But she could.

“Seongwon,” she said. “Wait and see.”

F
OR JENNY,
G
was always for God. God was there, God was everywhere. She saw Him in the penumbra of her father’s doubt and her mother’s anger plummeting out rust red. She saw Him in the vast, ululating dreams of all the people she met, and the nebulae that she sometimes woke ecstatically to, a monster gliding along the sea’s black floor, traveling tirelessly despite the weight of human catastrophe, its prehistoric face the face of all time, the face of God.

Then one day God was nowhere. That day, she had come home from the seminary that she attended despite her father’s desire for a doctor or lawyer in the family. She remembered hearing the gurgle of the yellowed refrigerator that they had bought used, and feeling thirsty. After slipping out of her sneakers, she went to pour herself a glass of orange juice. She hoped that her mother remembered to buy the pulpy kind, though most likely she wouldn’t have.
That was when Jenny saw an arm in the sink, the small hand outstretched like a mast. A friendship bracelet circled the wrist. She saw the torso of a Chinese American boy she knew, a fifth grader in the neighborhood, protruding from the ­industrial-size waste bin. The Transformers T–shirt. The boy’s ­pinkish-blue eyelids pinched shut, as if they had been forced closed, his dark lashes fanning out against his cheeks.

She closed her eyes for a time. It was the creation of her mother’s mad rabble, one of her fits, Jenny told herself, but when she opened her eyes, the boy was still there. It was so humid the windows were steamed up with condensation, but she shivered. Only then she noticed her mother squatting in the corner, still holding a bloody saw that she must have found in the toolbox; she looked frightened, bewildered. Jenny felt a sudden hatred for this woman, but she was her ­mother—and how could you hate your own mother? She heard moaning and realized that it was her own sounds.

“Calm yourself,” she whispered. “Calm. Yourself.”

The sound of her breath was an underwater sound. Only the thought that the boy had a mother and a father who loved him kept her from running. Her feet moved millimeters at a time. They were so heavy, she thought, this is how prisoners’ feet must feel. Finally she pulled the boy out of the bin, and, while her mother watched, cradled him in her arms. The top of his head touched her chin; she buried her nose in his hair’s minty shampoo and sweat to suffocate the other smell, as she dragged him into a triangle of light and laid him across the tile. Blood now streaked her white T–shirt, her skin of milky pear. She stripped off her clothes, trying to feel clean as each garment dropped away from
her. She wiped the blood rising from his severed arm with her blouse. Slowly she ran it down his shoulder’s length and his pale, stained chest. The sun beat down on them through the narrow kitchen windows. Her nipples stood erect as if it were cold. She arranged the dimpled corners near the boy’s lips with her ­still-clean pinkie so he almost looked peaceful. With her long skirt, she shrouded him. Naked, she kneeled in the pooling blood and, for the last time, prayed.

Her father refused to talk about what happened. Once her mother was institutionalized, the media uproar about “the Korean killer” quieted, and the hate mail from the local community had dropped off, he reopened a clothing store near South Williamsburg in the winter of ’86. They moved away from Flushing. In their new neighborhood of Flatbush, he jogged block after block be­­tween cars while listening to vocabulary tapes; he remembered his customers’ birthdays, even the ones who stole from the store, then tried to resell him the very same items the next day.