by Seong-nan Ha
Though he no longer went to work, my husband seemed to feel that household chores were still my responsibility. The dishes from our rushed breakfast sat untouched in the sink with grains of rice crusted on the plates, and dust piled up in our apartment. The hour of commute time I’d saved went to completing household chores as soon as I got home. It was only when I was doing the dishes at the end of the day that my husband started riffling noisily through the classifieds.
“I couldn’t sleep again last night.”
In less than a week after our move, we’d realized that there weren’t any carpentry shops nearby. No surprise, since these sorts of shops had been on the decline for some time. We’d stopped by a few, but the doors had been padlocked. One had even been converted into a fast-food joint without the old shop sign having been taken down. However, there were two large department stores in the neighborhood, as well as a 200-meter side street lined with furniture stores. Signs announcing furniture sales decorated busy intersections all year round. Perhaps it was a good thing there wasn’t a single carpenter shop in the area. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say a place like this was an ideal location to open up his own shop.
“You can’t be so picky when you’re just starting out. We have some savings and I’ve got my job, so don’t worry about making money for now. Of course it would be nice if you could bring in something as an apprentice, but right now, the most important thing is that you find a place that’s willing to teach you for free.”
Obviously, I didn’t feel the pinch yet.
“Must be nice,” he said, ignoring what I’d just said. “I can’t believe you were able to sleep through the racket last night.”
Our apartment was quite a ways from the main road, so the wail of ambulance sirens and screech of cars weren’t an issue. As far as I knew, no fight had broken out in any of the apartment suites during the night.
“They were running around until exactly 11:27.”
The racket he was referring to was the children from 306, the apartment directly above us.
“Thank goodness that’s all they were doing,” I said. “Sounded like castanets to my ears.”
For the past several nights, we’d heard loud footfalls echoing directly above us, where we lay in bed. But for someone like me who’d grown up in a redevelopment area, it could hardly be called noise. In fact, a bit of noise helped me fall asleep. Plus, I was constantly exhausted. There was always a heap of housework to do when I came home from work. I didn’t even have time to plant myself in front of the television and watch a show in peace, so I couldn’t join in when my co-workers were talking about what had happened on a show the previous night. It was often past midnight when I finished all the chores, and by nine the next morning, I had to be at work, where I was on my feet the whole day, dealing with customers until I got off at eight in the evening. My calves were swollen by noon. The only thing I could do to rest my legs was to hide the lower half of my body behind a counter and raise one leg at a time like a flamingo.
I suppose it was only natural for my husband to be sensitive to the children’s stomping. He was trying to blame his insomnia on our noisy neighbors, but I knew the real cause: he had never found himself in a crisis, not once in the past thirty-three years. Until he’d quit his job at the bank, he’d treaded only life’s safest, securest path. He’d never failed an exam, and he was the first of all his classmates to advance in his career. His biggest dilemma until now had been deciding whether to have soup or sushi for lunch. For someone like him, he probably believed he should have been sitting on the balcony floor by now, coaxing a rocking chair’s rockers into the proper curve.
I hoped the noise upstairs would also sound like music to his ears, but he had no sense of rhythm, which I believed was why he was so clumsy with the hammer. Rhythm existed everywhere in life; it could be found in any repetitive action. But his hammering contained no such rhythm.
I told him I would stop by the security booth in the morning on my way out and ask the guard to speak with the people upstairs. All household matters, including checking the dates of water service disruption and recycling collection, were my responsibility.
The security booth was empty. I waited, but the guard didn’t appear. I noticed only then a Be Back Soon sign on the small door to the left, along with a note that said to inquire at the Tower 236 security booth in case of an emergency. The matter wasn’t so urgent that I needed to go all the way there. I ended up running to the bus stop to make up for the five minutes I lost by waiting for the guard.
“Did you even speak to him?” my husband demanded as I was removing my shoes after coming home from work. He read the expression on my face, and said, “I see how it is. You don’t even take me seriously anymore.”
I registered his sweatpants and the baggy knees. I could tell he hadn’t done a single thing all day. I put on my shoes again and hurried downstairs.
The security guard, who had been dozing in his booth, stirred awake. His body, resembling a dairy cow and probably weighing more than a hundred kilograms, was snug inside the narrow booth. As if he had a habit of documenting every trivial incident, he leisurely took down my name and suite number, and said he would speak with the people upstairs, but couldn’t guarantee that anything would change. When I apologized for the inconvenience, he laughed and said it was all part of the job. After all, he couldn’t expect to relay only good news over the intercom, like letting people know a flower delivery had come for them. His voice, piping out from a thick neck, was high and thin.
“I trust he’s going to take care of it?” my husband asked as soon as I got back.
He still tended to act as if there were people reporting to him. But before I could respond, a sharp vibration started on the left part of our ceiling. Footsteps charged from the direction of the front door toward the master bedroom.
“Ha! An electric drill,” he said. “Designed specifically for home use.”
The noise then started up in a different spot about a foot away.
“So they’re going to drill something at nine o’clock at night, are they?”
I made a direct call to 306 over the interphone. After it had rung many times, a woman picked up, out of breath.
“Hello, I’m calling from the apartment downstairs—”
“Security just called me,” she snapped, cutting me off. “Un-freaking-believable. What do you want me to do? Tie up my kids like a couple of dogs?”
Her voice was shrill. I could picture her: tall, rake-thin, with a weather-tanned face. It seemed the call from security had upset her.
“I hate to break it to you, lady, but kids run. That’s what they do. You know, the people who lived there before you never complained. Not once!”
I heard the drill and children laughing in the background.
“It sounds like you’re doing some drilling over there.”
“So what? We want to hang some pictures, you got a problem with that? Even if I want to turn my house into a beehive, it’s still none of your damn business!”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from selling lingerie for seven years, it’s the ability to tell the kind of people I can argue with from those I can’t. There are certain women who will come to exchange brassieres they had worn for over a week. After raising their voice for the entire lingerie department to hear, they refuse to leave until they have succeeded in getting their way. The woman upstairs was in the same category. I told her I understood, added that I was sorry, and hung up.
“What do you mean you’re sorry? This isn’t a department store and she’s not your customer! If you don’t stand up to her, she’ll only be convinced she’s right and walk all over you!” My husband gazed at me, as if he found me pathetic.
“Why are you picking a fight with someone who just got home from work?” I snapped, uttering the same tired phrase that husbands sometimes say to their wives when they come home. “Why don’t you do something for a change? You think you can control those kids when their ow
n mother can’t? You try dealing with a woman like that!”
“Oh, you think I can’t?” My husband whipped around and glared at me. “Sure, I’ll do something about it. I’m not dead yet.”
He was definitely wound-up. Perhaps he’d been lying about quitting the bank to become a carpenter. While I grew suspicious about his reason for quitting and my enraged husband smoked a cigarette and paced the living room, the people in 306 drilled in five more nails.
Over the next few weeks, the situation grew worse. The children stomped around the apartment incessantly. They bounced and dribbled balls. My husband urged me again and again to speak to the neighbors when I already had my hands full, getting ready for work.
“Don’t stay cooped up all day and why don’t you try exercising? How about tennis? Regular exercise might help you sleep at night.”
“I guess you’re the expert now.”
Our conversations usually ended this way. He managed to fall into a light sleep past midnight when everyone in 306 was finally sleeping, and he woke with a curse at six in the morning when the children upstairs started running again. My husband lost a considerable amount of weight. His cheekbones began to jut out and there were dark circles under his eyes. We had only two options, but moving to the fourth floor above the people upstairs seemed unrealistic, so all we could do was call them regularly over the interphone.
Every time the children jumped off the couch and landed on the floor, our balcony window trembled. At night when the children were finally asleep, a pair of plastic sandals paced back and forth on the balcony and water gushed down the drain. A stainless-steel basin was dragged along the tile floor, or it struck something with a loud clang.
Later, they didn’t bother to pick up the interphone, though we could clearly hear them. My husband sprang to his feet and ran to the balcony, coming back with a plank of wood. He chased the noise around the room with the plank he’d planned to turn into a wooden chair, and struck the ceiling with it. Wherever the plank hit, the paper tore and the concrete began to show. But the noise stopped only for the second my husband banged on the ceiling, then started up again.
“Just pretend a couple of monkeys live above us. We’ll never win against people like that.”
But he didn’t want to pretend such a thing. Soon, louder footsteps were added to the noise. They sounded like the enraged stomping of a tall, skinny woman, who was trying to add ten more kilograms to her fifty kilograms. Noise is often amplified downstairs. If her heavy stomping wasn’t enough to satiate her anger, she dragged a chair or some other furniture across the room and back.
The thermal liner we’d installed on the ceiling when we first moved in was torn in places as if a mouse had chewed through it. The holes were so big you could no longer tell what the pattern had once been. When I lay in bed and gazed up at those spots, all I saw was how my husband had darted crazily around the room with the plank in hand. There was no sign of the professional he had once been. He had zero patience, and was always wry and full of complaints.
I could tell right away that the man sitting on the playground bench was my husband. His head was turned to the left, and the only things in his line of vision were the seesaw and slide.
A little girl stood at the top of the slide with her hands at her hips. My husband’s gaze followed her as she slid down. It was a good thing he was out; it wasn’t good for him to stay cooped up all day. I walked toward him and placed my hand on his shoulder. He flinched and jumped to his feet, instinctively clenching his fists. His fists relaxed, only after his bloodshot eyes registered it was me. We sat side by side on the bench.
The girl scampered over the sand and then climbed up the stairs again. Her fine hair was bound so tightly on top of her head that her eyes were yanked up by her ears. If it weren’t for her two nostrils, it would have been difficult to identify the nose that was buried in her chubby face. The sandals she’d tossed off lay strewn at the edge of the playground, kicked by the other children’s feet.
“What are you looking at? The seesaw? The slide? Or maybe your future?”
He slowly raised his arm and pointed at the little girl.
“Why? You know her?”
“Kim Yeseul.”
“That’s her name?”
“Six years old, goes to Blue Sky Kindergarten. She’s in the Elephant Room. Every morning at nine thirty, the kindergarten bus picks her up at the east gate and brings her home between 2:10 and 2:15 in the afternoon. She usually falls asleep on the bus, which really annoys the driver. She hates playing the piano and her favorite thing to do is to run around all day.”
“What are you talking about? How do you know all this?”
He laughed soundlessly. “Turns out she’s had thorough training in Stranger Danger.”
He stood slowly and shook the sand from his feet. I stood up as well, and glanced between him and the girl.
When the girl saw that a boy her age was blocking her way, trying to climb up the slide from the wrong side, her face crumpled. She opened her mouth wide and burst into tears, letting out a sirenlike wail. A woman’s shrill voice soon pierced the air.
“What’s the matter? Why are you crying? Did I teach you to cry?”
In an effort to stop her sobs, the girl’s chest heaved roughly.
The woman who’d stuck her head out of the third-story balcony window yelled non-stop. She looked as if she’d been woken from her nap by the girl’s bawling, her permed hair was squashed flat on one side. Her voice was familiar.
“You’re driving me crazy! Then go ahead and kick him! Just kick him!”
This time, too, the girl did as her mother said. But she only ended up kicking the air.
“That’s her?” I asked.
My husband clapped his hands, dusting off the sand. “Yup. Those monkeys upstairs.”
The girl let go of the side and slid down at a fast speed. The boy had no time to move out of the way. They tumbled onto the sand. The boy got up right away and dusted himself off, holding back tears, but the girl, who had smashed her head into the ground, opened her sand-filled mouth and started to howl.
“Nice going, real nice!” the woman screamed once more. Just as I’d guessed, she had a tanned, worn face.
My husband thrust his hands in his pockets and said, “Lee Jeongsuk.”
“Who’s that?”
“The woman. Born in 1970, the Year of the Dog. Couldn’t find out any more than that. She never shows up to the block meetings and she isn’t on good terms with her neighbors.”
His lips formed a faint smile. Gleaning that kind of information was easy, if you exchanged a few words with the security guard. As for the girl, he’d probably run into her several times on his way home from his walks.
“I guess it’s a bit quieter during the day when she goes to kindergarten?”
My husband snorted. “Ah, there’s another monkey. Four years old. A kid so hyperactive his own mother doesn’t know what to do with him.”
“I didn’t know you were so interested in the people upstairs.”
I looked back to see the girl walking toward the swings. There were children already on the two swings, but the girl shoved off a small boy and took his seat.
“That’s nothing,” my husband said, without a backward glance. “One time she scratched up a boy’s face real good. The boy’s mother got in a fight with her mother—it was quite a show.”
“Kids fight and get hurt. It’s all part of growing up.”
He laughed and imitated me. “Of course. They fall, and bruise their knees, and break their legs. It’s all part of growing up.”
I took his hand. It had been a while since we’d held hands. People needed to get out. Sunlight improved a person’s mood. My husband’s hand still felt like a banker’s. Soon his hands will grow hard and callused.
As if he finally decided to take my advice, my husband seemed to grow a little numb to the noise. The balcony was strewn with ends he’d sawed off the wooden planks. While I was t
idying up, I noticed an unfamiliar object in the toolbox. It was a can of wax. When I removed the lid, I saw it was brand-new, untouched. The only use I knew for it was for waxing wooden floors. To my knowledge, he didn’t need wax for his work.
The security guard saw me as I was coming home and recognized me right away. “So what happened? She’s a real head case, isn’t she? She got in a huge fight with the people who lived there before you.”
I laughed.
“But you’ll finally get some peace tonight. You probably haven’t heard yet, but there was an incident earlier today. Her kid broke his leg and the ambulance came. He received quite a shock it seems, because when he came out on the stretcher, his eyes were rolled back so all I could see were the whites. The lady screamed and cried, caused quite a stir. A big crowd gathered. Good thing the fire lane was clear. If not, I could have lost my job.”
The guard was in a talkative mood. As I was climbing the stairs to our apartment, the wax can in my husband’s toolbox suddenly came to mind.
“Did you hear? The kid upstairs broke his leg.”
My husband didn’t have a clue about what had happened.
“I heard even the ambulance came and there was a huge uproar. How is it you don’t know?”
“I was sleeping. I didn’t hear anything.”
It was hard to believe that he could sleep through all that commotion.
“It was just a matter of time before something like that happened. He’s always running around, so no surprise there. His mother’s probably learned her lesson, too. People should walk, not run. No wonder it’s so quiet. Guess we’ll finally have some peace.”
It was the first quiet night we were having in a long time, but sleep didn’t come. From a certain point, the noise had become a part of our daily life. Even my husband kept stirring beside me. I quietly got out of bed and went out onto the balcony. I opened the can of wax. More than half was gone.
