Drifting House (6 page)

His mother sighed. “We didn’t have food, and he’s choosing to starve for a girl whose name he won’t remember in two months.”

His father said, “Don’t forget you’re angry at me, not Myeongseok.”

Mark crossed his arms across his chest. “I’m a person of principles.”

She slapped him, her hand as light as a young palm leaf on his cheek so it wasn’t much of a slap, and told him to apologize.

He straightened up in bed. “Did you know that even George ­Washington—”

“I don’t know anyone like that,” his mother said.

“—that even America’s first president was scared of his mother?”

On Sunday his mother locked him in the car after he threatened to tell the pastor that she stole rolls of toilet paper from the church bathroom. He no longer made an effort to entertain and educate his parents. Sometimes he missed the toilet when peeing, there was still nothing for him to shave, and he had only a
yellow belt in tae kwon do after two years of lessons, but someday, oh, some glorious day, he vowed, he would protect the one he loved.

The calendar informed him that it had been one week since the world became different. It felt like a year. Around then his mother reserved a motel room near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim for a family trip. The Grand Canyon. One of those places his mother was always talking about. She practically sang those words as if it were going to save their lives. When Mark said he wouldn’t go without Chanhee, she lifted him ­one-handed out of his chair and deposited him in the backseat of the car. “You’re going,” she said. “And you’re going to enjoy yourself.”

In the middle of a concrete motel room pretending to be a log cabin, Mark unpacked a blanket and folding chair to build a tent for himself. His mother unloaded the entire kitchen from the car, including a portable gas burner, sneaking in two grocery bags at a time so the motel manager wouldn’t catch her. As they rattled about unpacking, his mother and father pretended that they were no longer angry at each other. Chanhee wasn’t there, and the five days ahead looked long.

He lay in the tent and folded his hands across his chest like a vampire. The North Rim was higher than the South Rim by eleven hundred feet, the Colorado River moved at four miles an hour, but there was no one to share all this with. He missed his quilt and firm mattress, he missed people to talk to. He didn’t like camping after all, so he crawled out of the tent. The clock said he had been cloistered for exactly eighteen minutes.

“I’m not going anywhere special,” his father said.

“So why can’t I go with you?” His mother looked upset. “Let cats be cats and dogs be ­dogs—I’m not the one dragging us back to where we began.”

“Stop it. Now.”

She nodded, her head slowly descending, ascending.

I’m so afraid,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

“Tomorrow,” he said firmly. “We’ll go hiking. We’ll have a good time tomorrow, our family.”

He put on his brown jacket, brown socks, brown shoes. Hunched over, his father looked smaller than he was, and it was strange to think that in a year or two, Mark would be taller than his father.

“This is a time to be alone,” he said. “You know what day it is for me today.”

She didn’t push further. He opened the door and left in the cool wind.

His mother pinched Mark’s cheeks, hard. “You need to follow him. He’ll listen to you.”

He pretended not to hear her.

She said, “Make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy like walk off the rim.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

She didn’t answer, so he draped on his cape and crept after his father from a distance. He was discreet the way his mother told him to be, but it wouldn’t have mattered—his father didn’t notice anything. His father sat on a bench gleaming with dampness and counted the number of stars out loud to himself. When a couple walking by stared at him as if he were crazy, Mark felt protective.
He looked comfortable, no longer intently studying people, no longer ill at ease. He could not imagine his father as a kid playing soccer or having kid friends in North Korea, the land of missiles and rogue leaders in newspapers. His father got up and pulled wide the elastic band of his sports sock and withdrew a bill. He walked to a small shopping center and into a bakery, and a few minutes later appeared with a white box. Mark followed several yards behind. They walked. Away from the stores and restaurants, away from the streetlights, away from the motel, away from what seemed everything he had ever known. He wondered if they were going to walk all night. There were so many stars that he wanted badly to name all the constellations out loud and impress his father. He missed his father.

His father walked, beaming a flashlight ahead of him, and Mark tiptoed behind him, to the rim. They were standing on forty layers of limestone, sandstone, and shale. It felt like they were at the edge of the world. His father leaned against the flimsy wire fence and kicked a stone over the crumbly ledge. They both leaned forward, son behind the father, listening for the sound of the stone, but there was only the wind. It was a long way down and he was sure that every year there were accidents, the kind that couldn’t be undone. Mark was afraid, seeing his father at such a vulnerable place, the cake box pressed to his chest and one foot raised ­knee-high as if to climb the fence. He prepared to tackle his father like a common athlete and endanger his velvet cape if necessary, anything to stop him from doing
the awful thing.
His father stepped forward; Mark squatted a few yards back, about to spring into NFL action, but his father sat in the dirt and opened the box. Inside there was a scalloped cake that he studded with candles.
Mark realized that it was past dinnertime; his mother would have a lukewarm but delicious dinner waiting for them.

“Happy birthday to you,” his father sang, his hands over the candlelit cake as if it were a cozy fireplace.

Mark was weak with relief. His father was a reasonable man, a man who knew not to test the gravitational laws of the universe. He knew to go only when it was his time. It was the father he knew, using inscrutable ways of getting at something, but still Mark cried, his knuckle in his mouth so that the crying was happening in some other dimension and time, because he was a boy and boys did not cry.

Soon everything was quiet and he was no longer shaking. He and his father watched the emptiness of the canyon below, and the sky above that was a dense blanket of stars. It was the kind of silence that allowed the voices of the wind to be heard as they moved above, across, along the bottom of the canyon, where the bones of explorers must be buried. It was enough to make him want to write a poem, though poetry was for girls.

Only when his father cut a slice of cake, a frosted masterpiece the size of a ­travel-size chessboard, and lobbed it over the rim as if feeding the canyon, only then did Mark find the courage to speak.

“Don’t waste cake!” he said. “Think of the poor kids in North Korea. Think of me.”

His father smiled. The most awful smile Mark had ever witnessed.

“That was for Big Uncle who you never met,” he said. “It’s his birthday today.”

Mark wondered if his father threw away a cake every year. He said, “You scared me, Appa.”

“Never be scared of me,” he said. He had the blank look of someone not present, and this made Mark angry at the past that kept taking his father away from him.

Mark vowed that he would never allow anything bad to happen to himself; he would hurtle into the present, straight into a large ­two-story house, and live in the same neighborhood into his ­white-whiskered age, install his parents as his neighbors, and raise a litter of gifted children with Chanhee. There would be no dis­asters or loss, nothing unplanned. He was carefully navigating the future when his father surprised him with a ­hug—if you could call it a hug. It was more like a slow-motion tackle that squeezed out the thin stream of air in Mark’s windpipe and left him breathless, and with a longing he did not understand. He was overwhelmed.

“Mani sarang handa,”
his father said. I love you so much.

His arms enfolded Mark like warm bathwater, and stayed tight around his neck and shoulders. “Appa, I can’t breathe,” he said, but his father did not let go.

M
Y MOTHER’S LAST
wish was to have my father marry a childhood friend of hers: Hyeseon Min. Hyeseon had lived with her parents in Seoul her entire life, supported herself by giving piano lessons to rich children, and, as we learned later, read romance novels and the Bible with equal interest. Love wasn’t mentioned; sex wasn’t imagined. At that time, everyone, even I, naively believed that Hyeseon desired a kind of insurance in her old ­age—nothing more, because that was what she promised my mother.

But when we left California and its memories in December, and arrived for the wedding in Seoul, Hyeseon had blushed as she gripped my father’s hands to her like a ­twenty-year-old. It was embarrassing for my sisters and me, and mortifying for my father to endure. Instead of the promised quiet family gathering, Hyeseon’s tribe had opted for a typical Korean ceremony and hired a flashy wedding hall for several hundred acquaintances. Our recently widowed father was forced to ride a mechanized
Venetian gondola to the altar; a fog machine blew smoke into his face, and we endured two wedding ceremonies: a ­Western-style ceremony followed by a private Korean
pyebaek,
where nine dates and chestnuts were tossed into the skirt of Hyeseon’s
hanbok,
which meant that she would have nine children.

“Pastor Ryu, tonight’s the night,” said one man to my father with a wink, as Hyeseon lurched around with a tiara perched on her perm.

I watched my father, his muscular body barely contained in the funereal black suit and his white pastor’s collar that he had worn for fifteen years, the span of my life at the time. He made a stately matron blush to her fingertips, then ­bear-hugged her stolid husband, and I was surprised as I always was by his charisma. How easily it fooled people.

He was the only parent I had left and I wanted to believe that the marriage would save him. And I had almost convinced myself, right up until New Mother finished waving at guests like a celebrity, and hitched her froth of pink and white and entered the hired sedan.

As soon as he drove past the hotel entrance, my father stopped and flung his corsage in her face.

He said, “All your lies about a small family wedding were heard straight in heaven.”

New Mother touched her cheek with the rose petals as if my father had stroked her. Her fingers dreamily scaled up and down the dashboard as if it were a piano.

My oldest sister covered my eyes, but I wasn’t a child anymore, so I pulled away from her. I said, “Abeoji, we’re holding up a parade of cars.”

My father turned to the backseat and grabbed my arm so tight,
the skin bubbled up around his fingers. “Son, I’d rather not hear from you right now,” he said.

One of my older sisters scrambled out of the car, her hands to her throat in an asthma flare–up. In her rush she tore her silk dress on her heel, but leaning outside against the car window, her aspirator in her mouth, she didn’t care. Only then I realized that my life was changed forever. I wouldn’t live in the same time zone as my friends in America, I could never go to the record store and have long, meaningless conversations with the salesclerk about the reason why everyone should buy a copy of the new Culture Club CD, and my two older sisters would soon rejoin their ­good-hearted, steady Jewish husbands in Jersey City, and leave me alone in Korea with my father and the stranger I was supposed to call New Mother.

“My doctor,” New Mother said, “says it may not be too late to have children.”

She was fifty.

My father’s head fell against the wheel as if he were exhausted. The horn blared long; New Mother didn’t flinch. Her eyes were luminous; her wide gummy smile ardent with worship. I found myself sympathizing with New Mother in spite of myself.

Six months into the marriage my life had changed. I had come into school in the middle of the term and hadn’t made a single friend. They treated me like a foreigner, saying I spoke Korean like a fourth grader, even getting angry when I answered questions in English class. They said I showed off about my life overseas because I talked about myself too much. No one talked much
to me or to a Japanese girl who cried each time a student told her that her country had colonized Korea. I pretended I didn’t care. Instead I spent all my time running and studying Korean comic books, dreaming about blowing up everyone at my new school, trying not to think about my mother.

Home was no better. One Saturday at noon, the day of my father’s sixtieth birthday celebration, I found him asleep in his white briefs, sprawled underneath our last family portrait taken before my mother died. The picture was one of the only reminders of the dozen American cities of my childhood. Like many Koreans living overseas at the time, we had scraped by, living without the health insurance we couldn’t afford, without security, and after my mother’s hospital bills came in, we lost the little we had. Bankrupt and determined to honor my mother’s last wishes, my father decided that marrying her childhood friend in Seoul had become his only option.

The marriage had only made him worse. The sixtieth birthday was a day as celebrated as weddings, but my father, who had spent his entire church life guarding his reputation, was now flat on the floor. He had a mane of ageless black hair swept to his street fighter’s shoulders (much later, I realized it was dyed), a face marked by time and travel and adversity, the weary smile of Job. During the postwar years, he had been a shoe shiner, a hustler, a whaler, and then a
kkangpae,
that part of his life still evident in the speckled ­orange-and-white carp and goblins tattooed across the barrel of his chest and swimming up his spine. And after these many lives, when he had no one and nowhere to go, he had turned to God. He who had once shaken chapels and made the figure on the wooden cross weep, attracted disillusioned millionaires, exiled
Korean divorcées, dancers, and Christian zealots across America’s prairie lands and its desert communities, this man who had once been so mighty behind the pulpit, whose rod and staff I ­worshipped, feared, and hated, had become so weak, so human in scale, he reminded me of myself.