by Nami Mun
I ran my hand along the bottom of the bench and tried to feel all the dings and divots. I wanted that scumbag.
“That’s disgusting.”
It took me a second to realize Tati wasn’t talking about me. She was looking down the block, past the pay phone. It was the old man. With his legs apart, he was crouching over the gutter and washing his face in rainwater, his ears and neck, too.
“I bet you it’s some girlfriend,” Tati said.
The old man stopped washing and reached into the water. I thought I saw him fish something out and place it in his basket but I couldn’t see what. “What girlfriend?”
“This Mary he’s looking for. I bet she’s from a long time ago, like when he was a kid, some girl he would’ve died for but he let life and bullshit get in their way.”
“Mary could be a dog,” I said.
“It could be, but it’s not. Only love makes you run around in the rain without feeling cold. Only love numbs you out like that and still lets you feel every fucking cell in your body.” When Tati said this the look in her eyes told me that she was proud to have said it.
She stood up suddenly. “I gotta make a call.”
I asked her who she was calling this late, even though I knew.
“I paged him like fifty times today.”
“That’s kind of sweet,” I said, sincerely.
“He hasn’t called back.”
I looked at the ground. I felt too weak for this kind of honesty.
“I think he’s fucking around on me.” She looked out onto the street in front of us as if it were the ocean.
“Has he cheated before?”
“Nah,” she said, walking away. “But with my luck.”
The rain finally slowed. For a second I felt lucky. At least Benny cheated in front of me. A strong wind played with the row of traffic lights, and the old man, who was now a few blocks away, looked like an old thought. Across the street a bus pulled up. People got off and rushed into a dive bar with a blinking martini. I could hear laughter coming from there and, if I strained enough, music from a jukebox. The melody, low and muted, made me want to head back to the motel, get back under the covers. I’d been away from him maybe twenty hours now and I missed him needing me, I missed him looking at me. Benny had round, wishful eyes, and he wanted everything from me. And when I gave him everything and was left with nothing, he wanted that, too. He was always hungry. His body was a long white candle of wax and bones, and he was always hungry. If that wasn’t love, I didn’t know what was. While Tati was in the phone booth, praying for the phone to ring, I got up and left for the motel. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t even turn around to see if she could see me leave. What did I know about love and fate and fortune back then? These were big words and you could only gain their meaning if you looked up at the sky but I could only look down and see myself in the wet grains of cement, in the cracks, in the moss that grew between the cracks.
A year later I saw Tati for the last time, in prison. She was in not for killing her father but her boyfriend Vinh. That night, after I left, Tati walked over to his place. He wasn’t home but a neighbor woman told her that she had bumped into Vinh as he and his sister were entering an all-night movie theater. Tati didn’t bother telling the woman that Vinh was an only child. She ran to the theater and found him sitting in the front row, finger-fucking some girl. Tati took out her switchblade and waved it at the girl, screaming, kicking, promising her the worst death imaginable.
Through the pellet-sized holes of the Plexiglas window, Tati told me that she had only wanted to scare the slut but that Vinh stepped in between them. He turned toward her and caught the knife between his ribs.
“I really loved him,” she said, almost a whisper.
“I know,” I told her.
The guard tapped on the door behind her, signaling for us to wrap it up. Tati rubbed the top of her head, which was now shaved.
“What do you think the odds are of someone dying from a switchblade wound?” she asked me.
I said that I didn’t know.
“.058,” she said.
I couldn’t think of anything to say but that number rang in my ears for days.
“I guess it was meant to be,” she said, not necessarily to me.
At the Employment Agency
The nameplate on his desk read Ted Flukinjer, Recruiter. A small wiry man with no arm hair, he shrugged behind a large metal desk, a pencil poised over an open file folder. My folder. I crossed my legs and hoped for him to peer up, just once, to see how professional I looked in a blouse and skirt. I kept my briefcase on my lap, and even though it was empty, except for my seven dollars and a stick of gum, the weight of it calmed my knees. I fixed my skirt and straightened my stockings. Mr. Flukinjer himself wore a short-sleeved shirt and tie. It was a clip-on. I knew this because the beak of his collar was flipped up, unveiling nothing but the yellow of his shirt.
“Are you eighteen or over?”
“Yes,” I said, and for once I wasn’t lying.
“Previous work experience.”
“Yes.”
“I’m asking you to name where you’ve worked.”
“Oh. I could just—”
“For example, have you worked in customer service, retail, commercial offices, or in the health industry.”
I nodded but he still had his head down, so I said yes, maybe too loudly. He pencil-checked a box.
“Start with the most current.”
“I worked in a nursing home.”
“Position held.”
“I was the assistant to the activities director.”
“Reason for leaving.”
“I got fired.”
He paused his pencil. With a look of restrained disgust, he jerked his head to the right, as if my answer had slapped him in the face. He sighed through his nose.
“Reason for termination.”
“I stole from them.”
He tapped the pencil on the desk to the pace of a ticking time bomb. Still, he wouldn’t look up.
“I’m sorry. My NA sponsor told me I should be honest about my past. All the time, to everyone.”
“What’s NA?” he asked a stapler to his left.
“Narcotics Anonymous.”
“Great.” He pronounced and then noted “drug addict” into my file.
“Recovering,” I corrected him. “It sounds nicer.”
“Any arrests.”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful.”
“Just misdemeanors.”
“Plural. Excellent. You drive?”
“No.”
“Experience with a ten-key.”
“Is that a calculator?”
“If you have to ask, you don’t know it. Next. Can you take dictation, I’m going to answer that for you and check no. Operate a switchboard, again a no. Can you type?” The pencil tip hovered over the no box, waiting for my answer.
I thought about the typing class I’d taken in seventh grade.
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Definitely.”
“Oh really,” he said, facing me squarely. Flat brows, tidy nose, coffee teeth. The orbs of his eyes, enormous and white, showed too much anatomy. “How fast?”
After four practice tests, he clocked me at seventeen words per minute, as long as numbers, punctuation, and capital letters weren’t involved.
We were back at his desk.
“Okay, so that’s a no on typing.” He checked off the final box and gave my application the once-over, signed, stapled, and rubber-stamped the bottom of pages like a machine set to HI. When he finished he shut my folder and laid his pencil gently on top of it, as if placing a pea there. I played with a button on my blouse.
“This can’t be news to you . . .” He leaned back on his chair and interlocked his fingers before resting them on his stomach. “You didn’t do so hot here.”
“I know.” I sat up on the edge of my seat. “What can we do about it?”
“We aren’t doin
g anything. You’re not hirable, plain and simple. With your record, lack of experience, no high school education. Nobody’s going to want you, and that’s the truth.”
“Oh.” I put my briefcase down, hadn’t realized I’d been holding it the entire time. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, so I bit the inside of my lips, a new and beautiful habit of mine. It seemed stupid to cry there, in that office, after all I’d been through.
“I understand,” I said, nodding.
“Good.” He pushed my folder to the side and picked up the receiver. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have to . . .”
“I understand,” I said again, barely able to say the words this time.
“Good luck to you.” He got up to shake my hand except I didn’t move. “I have to make a call and that means you have to go now.”
“I understand,” I said, for the third time, unable to stop my head from nodding. I grabbed my briefcase, and I did plan to get up and go but some force pushed the briefcase to my chest and made me say out loud: “I can’t leave. You have to give me something. Anything.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh God, not again,” he grumbled, and sat back down, the phone still in his grip. He shook his head at the door, which was open, the sounds of conversations drifting in and out.
“Look.” I stood up and put a hand on his desk. “I’ve sobered up. I’m clean. I was an A student. I’m smart, I’m hardworking. I can play the piano, I can clean houses, or pick up trash. I don’t care. Just try me out, for one week.”
He applauded. “Are you finished?”
“Depends.”
“I’m sorry your life was so tragic but, really, I don’t have time for it right now. So if you want to sit there and pout, suit yourself.” He pulled out a Rolodex from one of his drawers and spun it to a card. “We all have problems,” he said, and dialed a number.
“I think you’re making a big mistake,” I said, sitting back down.
For about an hour I listened to him make several more calls. My briefcase and I didn’t budge, and Mr. Flukinjer went about his business. Too easily, I thought. He made a call to someone who annoyed him, saying things like, “That’s not what we agreed on,” and “That’s a complete lie.” Then he called his son, whom he called “buddy” and “pal” while promising to take him to Play-land. A few calls were made about an apartment rental, and finally a call about a new set of tires for his ’77 Chevy Impala. Office workers came in once in a while to drop off paperwork or to ask him questions, and if anyone said hi to me he’d say, “Don’t mind her,” and wave their attention back to him.
Another hour went by, during which he found jobs for other people. After delivering the good news, he would end the phone conversation with, “Good. I’m glad it worked out,” and sneak a peek at my reaction.
During these calls something bulky settled in my gut, the weight of it keeping me down. I realized then that I wasn’t being brave by not leaving his office—I was simply sinking. Into the chair, into the past, where images of Jake the night manager at the Plaza Motel came to me. He had taken my money without letting me and Lana stay in that room, and I had given up too easily. I should’ve fought harder. That was my money. But instead I left that lobby, like I’d left everything else in my life. My home, my mother, my name. Leaving was all I knew. That was all I was qualified for.
I looked up at Mr. Flukinjer. He looked too tired for me to hate him. The baggy folds under his eyes tried to drag the rest of his face down. His office had one window and the light from it had darkened to a sooty gray. Coworkers poked in and gave their goodnights, the air conditioner fell silent. Placing his briefcase on his desk, he slowly and gently clicked open the latches, letting me know with some sympathy that my time was up. He began packing, sliding folders and pens into their rightful pockets. I stared blankly at his hands, waiting to see what they would look like clasping the briefcase shut. He pulled out a sandwich, wrapped in clear plastic, to make room for a binder.
“You hungry?” he whispered, and that was what unraveled me. The way he barely said the words. The way he looked at me without looking at me. The way he held the sandwich so hesitantly, wanting me to take it but not wanting to offend, understanding that even someone like me could have pride. All I remember is my face against his chest, the smell of pencils, and him holding me the way a father would, stroking my head and saying things I hadn’t heard before. I knew I was crying. The sounds were definitely coming from my chest, though I didn’t recognize myself in them. When my sobbing slowed, Mr. Flukinjer let go and sat me back down. He got me a glass of water, for himself, too, and wheeled his chair around so we could be on the same side of his desk. There, listening to the hum that follows a burst of emotions, we sat on the edges of our seats and shared the sandwich.
“How are you at math?” he asked.
I broke off a corner of the bread and whispered into the tear, “I’m Korean, so . . .”
“Right,” he said, and gave a short laugh, erasing the pity that was poisoning the air.
I had gone into the employment agency with seven dollars and a stick of gum, and came out five hours later with a job delivering lunches to offices. It paid $3.35 an hour, plus a free lunch if there was a mistake in ordering. Three-thirty-five times eight hours a day is $26.80. Times that by five days a week and you get $134, and $134 multiplied by 52 weeks is $6,968, which meant that I could get an apartment with a mailbox and a toaster, and maybe within a year I could have enough money to move to California, where the sun was free for anyone who wanted it.
It took two people to deliver these lunches. One to drive and wait in the truck, and one to enter the offices and hand out the meals. I was that person.
Mr. McCommon
Long before I moved out to California. Long before I caught Wink on the evening news, talking about how glad he was for having finally contracted HIV so he could be hospitalized and cared for like the people he’d seen on the news. Long before Knowledge got clean and got work as a counselor in a teen shelter, only to be shot by a kid she was trying to help out.
Long before all this.
I returned to my mother’s house in the Bronx. I wanted proof that she had not been a ghost, that she had been as real as blood.
On my way there I pictured our place—a two-story tract home that held down the corner before the ground swelled to a small, grassy hill that lipped the expressway. Cars were always leaving us. Only a few trickled down the exit ramp, and I could hear the sputtering of engines from my bedroom, late at night, when the silence after my parents fought kept me numb and awake. I figured that another family might be living there now, lounging around as if the living room, the vegetable garden, and the front windows bleached by the three o’clock sun had always been theirs. But when I stood at the end of my block I saw no family. And I barely recognized the house. In all the years of reimagining my childhood home, not once had I pictured it boarded up and abandoned.
All the windows were nailed with plywood, and the screen door lay crooked on top of a sagging hedge. Bands of graffiti blackened the aluminum siding, even the dead, brittle lawn, and someone had spray-painted NZONE on the front door, vertically, one letter stacked neatly on top of the other. I couldn’t help but take all of it personally. I was being punished for having left without looking back. Five years had gone by, though judging by the sickly roof, the derailed gutters, and the detached emptiness I felt about my mother’s death, it might as well have been five light-years.
I walked to the rear, where the kitchen door stood unfazed by all the garbage surrounding it—beer cans, a single flip-flop, a plastic grocery bag trapped under a can of Valvoline. Without much hope I jiggled the brassy doorknob. Nothing. I even tried the back basement door, the one my father had used to escape in the middle of the night to see his mistress, until my mother suddenly took an interest in carpentry and nailed the door shut with two-by-fours, from both inside and out. In return, my father nailed up her dresser drawer, just the top one, where she kept her Bib
le and brown photos of herself as a ponytailed girl in Korea. This was how my parents talked. They used nails, hammers, dinner plates, and knives, and when those didn’t work, they used leaving.
I circled the house. The plank on the side kitchen window—the same one I had once peeked through to see my mother rising from the ground—looked especially warped. I marked a mental X in the center, backed up a few steps, braced my arm and charged, leading with a shoulder and channeling all the TV cops I’d seen doing this very maneuver. The cops were the size of a duplex and I was all of 105 pounds, but I hurled my body into the wood anyway—one, two, three times too many. A strong breeze had a better chance. Without screaming, I held the pain in my shoulder and understood what it was trying to tell me: that I was a stupid girl, that I wasn’t getting into the house unless I got rid of my stupidity, and that I would never understand my mother.
“Joon, is that you?”
I was startled to find a man behind me. He was in his mid-fifties and nearly bald, with a few scraggly curls frizzying the sides. I had barely known Mr. McCommon when I was growing up, but he came in for a hug, which would’ve been fine except that I hadn’t expected it. Our clumsy dance led to a sideways embrace, ending with a stutter of pats on the back. His tracksuit, a neon-green, felt both scratchy and smooth.
“I can’t believe you’re back,” he said, and I kept my head down so he could study me without feeling awkward. “I thought you were dead.”
A fly landed on his fresh white sneaker. “I thought I was dead, too,” I told him.
The boys in the neighborhood had always made fun of his name—Mr. McCommon. Mr. McAverage. Mr. Mc-Usual. It didn’t help that he’d worn a boring gray suit and tie almost every day and drove a car the color of masking tape. He was short and thin with narrow shoulders and a long forehead. The expression on his face, which was also long, reminded me of chalkboard that had just been erased—you knew something had lived there once but you never knew what. I’d always felt a little sympathy for him, maybe because the kids who made fun of him had also changed my name to Joon Ching-chong, Joon Ah-so, Joon Chow-mein. None of the kids cracked jokes about his wife, though, a woman everyone thought was the life of the neighborhood, with her frilly voice and large, blond hair. But to me, she was worse than the kids. Whenever my parents battled, I could always count on seeing Mrs. McCommon by her kitchen window, talking into the phone with a hand cupping her mouth, squinting at our house to get the play-by-play.
