by Frances Cha
I reach over and tap Sujin on the shoulder and jerk my head in the direction of the bakery.
“Oh, we were on our way to say hi to our friend at the bakery who’s getting married,” says Sujin. Clearly I have been tortured enough. She hops back on her bicycle. “Good seeing you!”
I am about to hop onto my own seat when Mr. Moon says, “Actually, I have something for you, Ara. Could you come in for a second?”
“We’ll be in the bakery, Ara!” says Miho, and they push off together, the traitors. I put the brake down on my bike and slowly follow him up the steps and into the salon again.
Inside, the world is muted and smells of hairspray and wax and hair oil. It is the familiar smell that abruptly wakes me up—I hadn’t realized until now that I had been in an almost dreamlike state. Coming back home, seeing Jun, biking through barren streets had not felt real.
In the back of the salon, Mr. Moon opens a drawer in a wooden dresser and shuffles through a pile of notebooks. Up close, I see that he is much older—he looks tired and has gained some weight in the face. His skin is darker and more leathery than it used to be, but his eyes had taken on an alarmingly emotional light when he looked at me. I pick up a finishing spray and pretend to look at it, then set it back down.
“I was cleaning out all the drawers and I found this the other day,” he says, handing it to me. “I think it’s yours?”
It’s a bright blue notebook of mine from high school, from my ethics and morality class. I must have left it behind one of the evenings I was working here. I flip through it and wonder at my neat handwriting. “Public Order and Social Ethics,” “Rules of Modern Society,” “Philosophy of Morality.” It had been an easy class and I had been surprised to have been ranked in the top ten across the entire grade—in all three years of high school that had been the only subject I had found effortless. Perhaps it was years of heightened noonchi—my skill of reading people was rarely wrong—but the answers in the multiple-choice tests had seemed to me clear to the point of idiocy.
I give a little smile and bow of thank you, and roll up the notebook to put in my bag. As I turn to leave Mr. Moon clears his throat.
“I’m glad to hear that you are doing well in Seoul,” he says. His tone indicates that he wants to say something else. I sigh inwardly and send a mental distress signal to Sujin.
“You probably have everything you need in terms of supplies, huh?” he says, waving awkwardly around the shop. “Otherwise I would give you something…some finishing oil, hair packs…”
I shake my head.
“Well then,” he says. He takes a breath and faces me. “You know, I always thought I would live in Seoul. It’s a funny thing. You don’t realize how set you get in your ways as you grow older.”
I wait to hear what he is trying to say.
“I’m glad you are living your life in this adventurous way that I never got to. It makes me feel so proud when I hear about you. It’s a strange thing. I imagine it will be that way with my son one day, but people say never to expect much from children so I don’t know. I suppose I feel this way because I had a hand in your life, and that these adventures have been possible because of me.”
He coughs self-consciously and I feel very confused. Wiping his hands on his pants, he continues.
“I know, I have come to the realization these days that I am a foolish man. Not having a kid to hurry home to, and not having his cries and tantrums and needs filling up every waking moment of my life—it leaves a lot of time for thinking and remembering conversations that should have happened, but did not. And I want to rid my life of any regret. If I were to die tomorrow, I want to have said everything I should have to the people I know.”
He proceeds to tell me that he was the person who had called the police that night—that night of my injury. He had been walking to the Big House that day because Lady Chang had come into the shop for the first time and had left her scarf there. He couldn’t bear to think of Lady Chang worrying about the fate of her expensive scarf at the hands of his customers and he did not have her phone number, so he’d put it carefully into a shopping bag and set off for the Big House after his last customer of the evening.
In the twilight he had enjoyed the walk very much until he began hearing the unmistakable sounds of violence. His first reaction had been fear—he had turned around and started walking quickly away, but almost instantly he had come back to his senses and realized that the screams were those of young girls. He imagined the worst and he had to step up. He called the police from his phone and gave them the location and a description of what he was hearing, and as soon as he hung up, he crept toward the arch.
He saw me first, he says. He recognized me from my trips to the salon with my mother. In fact, she had been the one who had introduced him to Lady Chang, who continued to this day to be a loyal customer.
He saw me and what was happening to me and he began running toward us. It looked—he said—as if the girl was going to kill me. She appeared entirely crazed and was brutally smashing something against my head and showing no signs of stopping. He started yelling “Police! Police!” and other things he could not remember. In an instant, all the students, including me, had disappeared so fast that he had been dumbfounded. He’d taken a few halfhearted steps in the direction I had gone, but then had heard sirens and decided to stay to talk to the police so that they would not see him running and mistake him for a villain in the scenario. And sure enough, the police had seemed suspicious of his involvement, but luckily his clothes were free of bloodstains and a great deal of blood had been spilled that night. They asked if he had recognized anyone and he said that it had been one of his younger customers but he did not know my name, which was true. At the time, he had also not known that I lived at the Big House.
“It has recently come to my attention—actually, yesterday, when one of the women who work with your mother had her hair permed—that my inquiring about you and how you are doing in Seoul has been misconstrued as something resembling romantic attention, especially since, well, as I am sure you know, the situation with my wife,” he says quietly, looking at the floor. “It has made me quite miserable to think that people were thinking that about me, but I did not know how to set things right. This is why I was so astonished to find you and your friends looking straight at me through the window just now, because I had been pondering how to rectify matters.”
His phone rings and he fishes it out of his pocket. “Lawyer Ko” lights up the screen and he silences it, grimacing, before his eyes return to me. He takes a deep breath.
“No matter how dark things get for me, the memory that I saved a life—that my life has mattered—has been something I can cling to,” he says with a catch in his voice. “It is, perhaps, the only lifeline that I possess. And I am so grateful that I can tell you this. What your life means to your parents—you will realize it one day, when you have your own children.”
* * *
—
LATER, WHEN SUJIN and Miho finally emerge from the bakery carrying paper bags of free bread and cakes that Hyehwa has clearly piled upon them, I am sitting on the curb looking up at the cloudless wintry sky and wondering if I am a happier person than I was twenty minutes ago, when I did not know what I know now.
“Hey! So did he propose?” asks Sujin, as she breaks off a piece of choux cream pie and feeds it to me. It is cold and sweet and I immediately hold out my hand for more.
“I can’t believe someone our age is getting married,” says Miho, looking back at the bakery, where I see a trim Hyehwa organizing cake slices through the cloudy glass window. “Do you want to go in there and say hello?” she asks. I shake my head.
“I’m sorry, but getting married in your twenties is just ridiculous,” says Sujin in an exaggerated hushed voice. “What a fool.”
They quarrel over whether we will all head to the Loring Center now to
gether, or if Sujin will just return to the Big House by herself.
“You think Ara wants to be here? Now we’re doing what you don’t want to do, and you better just suck it up,” says Miho, reaching out and giving Sujin a little poke. Loading the bags full of bread onto the handlebars, Sujin exhales a sigh of resignation and says the bread and cakes better be going to the children and not a loaf to the teachers. And with that, the three of us hop on our creaking, frozen bicycles and start off toward the Loring Center, each of us grasping at our own shifting versions of the past.
Kyuri
Bruce has not been to the room salon for almost three weeks now. And the last two times he was here he sat me alongside fat, foreign investors, clearly to punish me. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from finding out about his engagement, but Madam has been commenting on his absence and I need her to shut her face. I have tried texting him, but he doesn’t even respond. The bastard.
I don’t know what possesses me, but when the last Sunday of the month rolls around, I tell Sujin that I am going to treat her to dinner at Seul-kuk, at the Reign Hotel, to celebrate the holiday. Independence Movement Day has been looming for weeks—I have been staring at the calendar, waiting for the days to pass.
It takes a few attempts to convince her to go, because you can still see the stitches on her puffy eyelids and the lower half of her face looks blown up, like a sad, old balloon. I say she looks pretty and no one will even notice.
“I still can’t chew that well,” she says slowly, shaking her head. “My teeth are not aligned. And I still feel so self-conscious on the street even with a mask.”
“They have the best jajangmyeon—the noodles are going to be so soft,” I say instead. “And there’s soup. So many different kinds of soup. Shark fin soup. Have you ever had real shark fin soup?”
“They don’t sell that anymore. And I would never eat the fin of a poor shark,” says Sujin. “And isn’t Seul-kuk the most expensive Chinese restaurant in the entire country? One of my clients from the nail salon was talking about that place—a bowl of jajangmyeon is almost forty thousand won there! Kyuri, you can’t be serious. You’re usually so careful with money!” Her eyes are round in her swollen face.
“Look, I want to see if it’s as good as they say on TV, okay? Are you coming or not?”
When we show up at the Reign Hotel a little before seven and take the elevator to the second floor—Sujin having taken an hour to get dressed, even with my help and my accessories—the restaurant is full and the host asks us to wait in the hall. And so we do, settling ourselves in the red silk chairs by the entrance, my head whipping around whenever I hear the ping of an elevator.
“What’s wrong with you?” hisses Sujin, but then I see a group arriving that must be them. A family of four, very dressed up, faces taut. The mother, fussy-looking in a lime green knit two-piece with a parrot-shaped sparkling brooch on the lapel, is clucking like a hen and picking lint off the father’s suit as he brushes her away. The brother looks pleasant and tall, the girl is wearing a conservative blush-colored long-sleeved dress and carrying a matching tweed Chanel bag from two seasons ago. She’s pretty, in a washed-out way, but completely flat-chested—and looks much younger than I would have guessed. Bruce constantly tells me how much he adores my breasts. “I fantasize about them at the office,” he says. “I get delirious thinking about tickling your nipples until they get hard.”
And then, right behind them, the other elevator opens and Bruce stalks out, his parents and two spindly, chiffon-clad sisters in tow. A strand of hair hangs over his eyes and I want to brush it back.
Bruce’s mother is terribly thin and dressed in what almost looks like deep mourning, in head-to-toe heavy black silk. Enormous diamonds sparkle at her ears and wrists and throat.
“Why, hello,” cry the mothers, “so nice to finally meet you!”
The men shake hands gruffly and there is a disgusting orgy of bowing and compliments all around. Bruce is smiling widely with his hands in his pockets, as if he hadn’t been dreading this moment for months.
“Looks like a sangyeonrae,” whispers Sujin into my ear. “They look straight out of a drama! Can you believe the jewelry? It must be real, right?”
“Shall we go in?” they murmur and start filing past us, none of them giving us a glance. Bruce and his girlfriend are at the back, whispering and smiling together. Then he sees me.
For a second, he stops walking. I am looking at him with my head tilted, my fingers clutching the first Chanel bag that he bought me—a dark red caviar jumbo flap with leather rosettes and gold hardware. It’s a thing of beauty, this bag. My most cherished possession. He blinks in bewilderment and confusion, but almost immediately, his face hardens to stone. The girlfriend looks up at him with a question and he puts his arm around her and steers her past us, into the low din of the restaurant.
“Excuse me, your table is ready now if you’ll follow me,” says a voice in my ear and I jump a little. Sujin flutters ahead with the supercilious host and I follow in a dream. As we begin the meal, the waiter keeps recommending the damn set menu. I resign myself to spending twice the exorbitant rate I’d already budgeted in my head. At least Sujin enjoys herself—she spoons up every drop of every sauce on both our plates. “Do you realize how much that slice of abalone costs? What do you mean you can’t eat it? You are being so ridiculous, Kyuri!”
Halfway through our meal I get a text.
“Your life is over, you psycho bitch.”
It’s from Bruce, of course. From the next room, a lifetime and a universe away.
* * *
—
A FEW YEARS AGO, I had a friend who left the room salon we both worked at when she got engaged. She had been set up on a blind date by her mother’s friend and it had worked out and suddenly she was to be married. I don’t know how she paid off her debts to the shop.
We drank together often and she was so happy about her new life. She showed me the bridal furniture she was getting for the apartment she was going to live in with her husband. We sighed over how pretty the lace was on the bedroom set, how darling her little ivory dining table looked next to her accent wall.
One day, I called her and her phone had been disconnected. She had changed her number because she no longer wanted to get phone calls from me and the other girls.
I understood, of course. I had thought, naïvely, that I would be there at the wedding, holding her veil and sprinkling handfuls of rice and rose petals down the aisle. But I was happy for her to escape this life, and I did not blame her.
She called me a few months after her wedding from a blocked number. She sounded upbeat but distant. “I am always amazed by how busy I am!” she said, launching immediately into her narrative. “It’s crazy how much time goes into grocery shopping and cleaning and cooking and the logistics of running a house. And I have to look after my in-laws. They are retired so they need a lot of care. They expect it of me.”
She did not ask me a single question. At the end of that brief conversation she said that she was sorry she had changed her number and that she wished me luck. Then she hung up and she did not call me again.
* * *
—
I’VE HAD FRIENDS before who were taken in by men who wanted them to become their seconds. These girls would then leave the shop, making a big fuss about how they would invite the rest of us over to their new apartments when they were all set up. Of course there was no mention of love or anything, but what would always make me angry was the embers of hope glowing in their eyes that they could not hide. The men had told them things that fanned it. Sometimes it was a year or even two years later, but they all came back. Every single one.
They’d played house in a nice apartment, sometimes even a beautiful apartment, and practiced monogamy and invited us girls over and watched TV and waited around a lot. Their reasons for coming back were somewhat
varied—sometimes they couldn’t stand the watchfulness of the neighbors, who they claimed knew they were mistresses and were afraid they’d bring the apartment prices down. Sometimes they got pregnant and had abortions. Sometimes the wives found out and they had hot coffee thrown in their faces and threats to have their uteri ripped out.
Most of the time, though, the men grew tired of it all first. And when the girls came back, they were older and usually fatter and they had to go on extreme diets and take pills and all that or the madams would shame them ceaselessly. And their hope-filled glimmers would be crushed to powder.
But back to Bruce—I don’t know what came over me that Sunday at the Reign Hotel. I have always thought of hope as a natural folly of youth that should be discarded as soon as possible.
It is inexplicable to me, and I did not know I was capable of surprising myself. Perhaps I liked him more than I realized. I should have known that I could not afford to.
* * *
—
MADAM SLAPS ME when she finds out. It is Monday, the day after, and I am fixing my makeup in the dark, cramped waiting room. She comes running as fast as she can in her tight lace minidress and high heels. She is on the phone but frantically looking for someone. You, she mouths, pointing a bony finger at me. You, come.
Snapping my compact shut, I get up and follow her into an empty room. In the quiet darkness, I can hear a tinny, otherworldly voice yelling on the other end of Madam’s phone.
I will ruin you. Do you understand what I can do to you? WHO I AM? WHO I KNOW? You will never be able to work again! To my horror, I recognize the crackling, hysterical voice. It is Bruce.
Madam tries to placate him at first, but he does not listen and keeps screaming. Her body has gone rigid and she keeps clenching and unclenching her free hand—the painted talons folding and unfolding.
