Fox Girl (24 page)

My stomach growled.

Kitchen Auntie pulled me into the kitchen, closing the door on Lobetto. “If you want to eat,” she said, “you got to pay for it just like the other girls. It comes off your earnings.”

“Not hungry,” I lied.

“Ate too many eggplants?” she hooted.

Sookie had warned me that bouncing up and down to the music would not be enough for the stage at Club Foxa. I needed a hook, she had explained. Props. She stole a few vegetables from Lobetto's mother and showed me what to do with them. As she waved the eggplant and cucumber, thrusting them around her distended belly, we had laughed until tears ran down my cheeks, until she had shrieked that she was about to birth the baby.

But on the stage, bumping and grinding, naked except for the tassels swinging from my nipples, it wasn't funny. The eggplant felt awkward and slippery in my sweaty hands, and when I started stroking the long purple shaft, I heard the drunken slur: “Old news! Boo with the vegetables.” Someone barked like a dog and someone else yelled, “Do something new.”

I stood there, gaping into the light, knowing that there was nothing new but that if I didn't come up with something, I would lose my chance. I would lose the baby. American hits radio blared—“Honey, Honey,” boomed through my head, Bobby Goldsboro shouting at me to “do anything, do anything”—so I couldn't think above the music, and just when I saw the angry face of Bar Mama coming to yank me off the stage and throw me out of the club for being so stupid, I spun toward the big-mouth man and yelled, “Do anything! What you like?”

“A cock suck,” he tossed out, and his friends laughed.

I marched over, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him onto the stage with me. “You got it,” I said. I could taste my fear, bitter at the back of my tongue, smell the acrid smell of it. But like a puppet, I tapped my feet, jerked my hands into the air, shook my hips in front of the man. The man acted up by groping my breasts and crotch and for a long horrible moment, it was the three GIs from Lobetto's apartment grabbing me. Shaking my head to block them out, to turn off my mind, I placed my hands on the hips of the man in front of me. The GIs hooted as I unbuckled his pants and the man's grin wavered. When I yanked them down, his face flushed red.

He tried to push me away before I could reveal his penis, which was still soft, but I held on, putting him into my mouth the way Sookie had taught me. I pretended he was a zucchini, an eggplant, forcing my mouth to slide up and down. I needed to do this show. I needed the money for the child.

From then on, I became the “Hunni Girl,” the bar girl called on for requests, doing what the other girls didn't want to do—at least not on stage. I was the GIs' life-size doll, always smiling, always bendable, always able. I had sex on stage with whoever and however many marched up. I poured beer and shot cherries from my vagina into men's mouths. I got pissed and shit on. I had oral sex with a dog that someone pulled in from the streets. The mangy thing kept trying to run off with its tail between its legs. I was afraid it was going to ruin the show until I came up with the idea of rubbing chicken grease between my legs. Then I was afraid it was going to bite me. But I built a name, a reputation as the girl—that freak—who would do anything. They paid to push the limits of what Hunni would do.

Lobetto wrote up some new flyers talking me up, and the more business I brought in Foxa, the bigger chunk of money I brought home. Lobetto took most of it, but I hid some money that I planned to spend on my child, which Sookie was growing. Remembering what I craved the short time I was pregnant, I hunted the fish markets for the right taste to coax Sookie to eat.

I dressed as what I was, not bothering to try to hide that I was an America Town girl. Though the fishwives would look at me as if I were trash—they in their grimy, gut-stained rags—I flashed my money. Enough of it to make them hide their scorn and smile at me. Enough to make them greet me like a celebrity, and to compete for my attention. “Here, lady, here,” they would call to me. “Fish just pulled in today. Someone like you should have only the best.”

I suppose they must have felt like choking on their words, steeped in false praise, but I wouldn't buy from them unless they said them. The more they catered, the more they groveled, the more I minced around their stalls, teasing them with what I could buy. I paraded through the maze of stalls, selecting only the choicest and most succulent offerings: fetal octopus, sea cucumber, abalone, and oysters, knowing Sookie would consume them as soon as I walked in the door. Hands dripping with brine from the bucket, she would devour the slippery morsels as if starved for the salty fish, savory as primal memory.

But I always made sure to visit the anchovy girl and her mother, buying a small packet of their dried fish for soup. The mother never spoke to me, never came forward to greet or acknowledge me in any way. The girl, however, bubbled as if we were old friends. She was, I think, dazzled by the clothes I wore, by the jewelry that flashed from my neck and fingers.

The closest the mother came to speaking to me was when I offered to give the girl one of my bead necklaces. I had seen her eyeing the shiny strand and, remembering how much I had loved the fancy things Duk Hee wore when I was younger, I pulled it off my neck and placed it around hers. The mother jumped up and yanked the necklace away. The string broke and the glass beads clattered to the ground in a dizzying shower of color. “Trash,” the old lady spat, directing her words to the ground, “from trash.” The girl cried and bent to salvage the beads, but the mother kicked them away, crushing as many as she could under the heel of her slipper.

After working the club, I hosed off in Lobetto's kitchen, attempting to scrape myself clean as I tried not to remember the first time I honeymooned. Lobetto had thrown away the wire vegetable brush after that night, replacing it with a plastic one with softer bristles. I used that to try to scrub the dirt off, but no matter how hard I pressed, I could never break the skin.

I kept the water pressure low so that the water wouldn't bang through the pipes and wake Sookie. Sookie and I had set up a bed outside the tent, taking half the floor of the kitchen. I was careful to stand directly over the drain as I washed my body, careful to keep the water away from the nest of blankets where Sookie slept.

I crawled into the blankets with Sookie, loving the way she turned toward me even in her sleep. It always took me a while to fall asleep those mornings, with Sookie shifting constantly to get comfortable. She used me like a pillow, throwing her arms and legs over me. Sometimes she woke briefly to complain: “I cannot stand this body. I cannot stand being so fat and helpless. I promised myself that I would never have to depend on anyone to feed me, and look. Look at me now. Gigantic and ugly as a sow, can't even flip over without help.”

I helped her turn onto her side, and she fell back asleep. When she slept, the baby swam inside of her, tumbling in the ocean of her womb. If I pressed my belly against Sookie's, skin to skin, I could almost pretend it was swimming in me.

One night I had a dream: I am walking by the docks, looking into the sea, the light silver on the water. Ripples quicken on the surface, slap into the pier in an excited chatter; a spiraling shell of magenta pierces the waves. I focus. The conch shell reveals itself to be the nose of a dolphin, small and very pink, a baby. Unable to resist, I bend down to touch her downy head. The baby smiles, cooing, then flips back, taking my hand in her teeth. She pulls me under, deeper and deeper, and in the distance, I can see where we are going: to an underwater city, a flash of gold and silver stars.

When I described that dream to Sookie in the morning, she said: “If that thing bit my hand, I would have beat it in the head until it let go.”

When it came time, Sookie did beat it in the head until it let her go. She began screaming as soon as her water broke, and didn't stop until thirteen hours later when Lobetto's mother reached between her legs to pry her vaginal lips open. During each contraction, Sookie arched her back, cursed, and slammed her hips back down onto the floor. “Rub my back,” she'd yell at me, “harder!”

I pressed until I could see bruises flowering on her spine, and still she yelled at me to squeeze, to punch, to hurt her. During the labor, Sookie and her baby battled each other. As she struggled against the waves of pain, Sookie chanted, “Get it out, get it out, I hate this, get it out.”

Lobetto's mother forced Sookie to squat over the drain. “Push like you're taking a crap,” Lobetto's mother said as Sookie crouched on all fours, whining like a dog.

Finally, I saw the baby's head, crowned with thick black hair, at the bulge of Sookie's vagina. When Sookie bore down, the top of the baby's head squeezed through then receded repeatedly, as if pulled by the tides. After surfing the contractions for a long while—long enough that her skin reddened and wrinkled in the brine—the baby's flattened nose popped out, and then the rest of the head. Mother and baby rested, then fought again; after a brief skirmish, the baby's body shot out, slick as a fish, and Lobetto's mother almost dropped her.

“Better that this one died,” said Lobetto's mother as she toweled blood and mucus away from its eyes and mouth.

“Why?” I demanded. “What's wrong with it?” I grabbed the small body, checking for two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes. Then under the cord, I saw the vagina. “A girl,” I breathed and loved her even more. I loved her fiercely, this being I had called back to life. But I was shocked at how ugly she was. The girl's head was long and lumpy, cone-shaped, with blackened eyes that made it look as if she had been hit repeatedly.

“What's wrong with her?” Sookie groaned. “She's a monster, isn't she? I felt it inside of me.”

I placed the baby, still connected to the womb by the birth cord, on Sookie's chest. Sookie craned her neck to look at her child and grunted at me: “Ugh. She looks like you.”

After Lobetto's mother sliced the cord with a kitchen knife and tied the ends, I snatched the baby back. “She'll grow out of it,” I retorted, though I doubted it. I didn't care if she was ugly the rest of her life; I knew how to love the unlovable. Cradling her in my arms, I could not help wondering if the baby I had carried would have looked like this one. She resembled both Sookie and Lobetto, a blend of Korean and American, in the way that all mixed-race babies—the
tweggis
—resemble each other, siblings in a way.

Sookie put off naming the child, careless with it. When I brought the baby to her to nurse, she'd wrestle with her, crying that the sucking cut her breasts like knives. The baby would fuss, straining for the nipple while at the same time butting against it. In frustration, the baby would wail and Sookie would shove it away. “It's a stupid little animal,” she'd spit out. “Something's wrong with it. Or with me,” she'd complain. “It hurts too much.”

I took the screaming infant, soaked a rag in sugar water, and let her gum that till she fell into an exhausted sleep. I slept with the child, and if it woke during the night, I let it suck on my own dry breast. I would have cut myself open if the baby had drunk my blood. Still, she probably would have died if Lobetto's mother hadn't relented and stepped in.

In the middle of the third day of the battle between mother and child, she intervened, taking the crying baby on her back. “Better I should let it starve to death. Better it's put out of its misery early in life. Better it dies now before it knows anything,” she muttered as she paced the room. When the child quieted down, she returned to Sookie. She taught Sookie how to cradle the baby, how to lead her to the breast, how to push her mouth onto the nipple. “Don't worry about the milk,” Lobetto's mother explained. “That will come when your body knows your baby is eating.”

Lobetto's mother ordered me to bring home seaweed. Every day, she made Sookie a bowl of seaweed soup and rice. Though she guzzled it without restraint, Sookie complained about the food, how she could not stand to eat the same thing every day, several times a day, the only variation being whether or not it was clams or anchovy in the soup. Despite her grumbling, she always devoured whatever she was served.

Her own stomach soothed, Sookie began feeding the baby with milk that came in so fast and plentiful that at each nursing the unused breast shot out streams of milk, drenching the blankets. In the mornings, we lifted the sodden sheets, dragged them into the sun to dry like fishing nets. Still, it was as if in the first three days after the birth, something between mother and child was irretrievably lost. Sookie began to get restless, resentful of the baby and its groping, greedy mouth that constantly strained to latch on to her.

 

After three months, Sookie got up one afternoon, fed the baby, and placed the unsuckled breasts over a jar. As the baby ate, her extra milk sprayed into the jar. Then, the baby and jar both full, she announced she was hitting the clubs. “I'm bored,” she said. “I'm ready to play.”

“Why, Sookie?” I felt so tired. If I could have nursed the baby, I would have been grateful to stay home, to quit working the stage, the booths, the back alley honeymoons. “The baby needs you.”

“Well, I need to get out of here,” Sookie said, holding the baby toward me. “I heard you're pulling in good money at Foxa.”

I shrugged, gathering the child into my chest. “I don't see much of it,” I said in a singsong voice, trying to make the baby smile.

“I'd make sure I kept all of my money,” Sookie bragged. Crawling to a pile of clothes, she began to rummage through it for something to wear.

“Stay home, Sookie,” I coaxed, trying to keep the irritation from my voice. “Rest.” The baby whimpered, her arms flailing. I propped her against my shoulder. “Wait until the baby is a little bigger.”