I had been thinking constantly about han, a feeling that had been killing generation upon generation of Korean people. According to Mom, han was born in the gut and rose to the chest. Every injustice, every instant of helplessness, when the only reply to a situation was a mumbled “Fuck this,” all of it noted by an invisible scorekeeper in your heart. Han was a sickness of the soul, an acceptance of having a life that would be filled with sorrow and resentment and knowing that deep down, despite this acceptance, despite cold and hard facts that proved life was long and full of undeserved miseries, “hope” was still a word that carried warmth and meaning. Despite themselves, Koreans were not believers, but feelers—they pictured the light at the end of the tunnel and fantasized about how lovely that first touch of sun would feel against their skin, about all they could do in wide-open spaces.
I wondered if a more complex language like Korean had a singular word to describe the feeling of getting off a long shift of a physically demanding job and finding that, for at least half an hour after, everything, every last thing, was too beautiful to bear.
Jenny asked the question so simply—“Okay, what do you want to talk about?”—and I nearly reached across the table and grabbed her hands back, whispered thanks against each of her knuckles. I was about to ask her opinion on lakes and oceans—which did she prefer, contained and musty, or vast and salty?—when she suddenly sat up straight, eyes wide. “So—what did you think of that meeting today? Hold nothing back.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know, it was fine.”
“Come on, you can do better than that.”
“Okay,” I said. “It was hard to sit through. And I don’t mean that it was too long or that the seats were uncomfortable. It just hurt to be there, you know? Every time someone finished speaking, I wanted someone to hug me and then, immediately, I felt bad for being selfish. There didn’t seem to be a right thing to say.”
“It’s the clapping that gets me, the forced support,” Jenny said. “I just want someone to finish talking and instead of clapping, say, ‘Wow, Patricia. That really fucking sucks.’ ”
I laughed. “I liked what you said in the meeting.”
After a woman who was trying to decide the proper way to tell her husband she didn’t want to name their future daughter after his dead mother, Jenny told the room about her hometown of Bismarck and how the sky looked different there, the flatness of the land allowed you to see more of it than in a place like Los Angeles, where buildings covered every square inch. The speed of things was slower there, people didn’t walk places, but strolled. If someone in front of you in line at the supermarket was taking over a minute to fish out that last penny they needed from the depths of their bag, you wouldn’t yell or ask for a manager, you just smiled and said, “Take your time.” If you knew their name, and you probably did, you might offer them a penny of your own and tell them not to worry, there would be a next time and they could help you out then. Cheap gas, diner sandwiches slathered in mayo, multiple lakes a short drive away—there was no better day than picking up a grilled cheese and fries to go, eating them by the lake as you read your book, hopping off the dock for a swim when you got too hot. When you got home from the lake, damp and satisfied, one of your neighbors would probably be hosting a BBQ for someone’s birthday, a husband’s promotion, just because it was a day that ended in “y.”
“Bismarck sounds like a nice place,” I said. “I wish I grew up somewhere like there.”
The waiter dropped off our food. What sounded good to me less than fifteen minutes ago now seemed disgusting. I shouldn’t have gotten the eggs over easy, they looked too soft and runny, like the chicken who laid them barely had time to say goodbye. The hash browns glistened where I wanted them to be crispy. I forced down a few bites to be polite. Jenny finished half her sandwich and all of her fries before she spoke again. “I didn’t grow up in Bismarck.”
“But you said in the meeting?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That was a lie.”
I sucked on my fork. The metallic taste was soothing. “Where did you grow up, then?”
“Actually, not far from here. I went to high school around the corner. My first kiss was on the bridge over the 110 Freeway.”
I pushed away the image of her kissing some faceless boy from my mind. “Why wouldn’t you say that, then? Have you ever even lived in North Dakota?”
“I have. Of course I have. I went to college at NDSU and then lived in Bismarck after Adam was born.”
Jenny with water dripping off her skin, her wet fingertips darkening pages of thick books, being kind in grocery store lines—this had to be real. “I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t say that, then. What’s the point of lying? Why go to the meetings at all? Did you ever even have grilled-cheese lake days?”
She looked miserable, stopped eating, and began pulling the top of her sandwich off, tearing it into little pieces.
“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t mean to attack you or make you feel bad.”
“It’s not you.” Jenny grabbed my hands again and this time didn’t let go. I felt warmth and calluses. I wondered how she got them, what actions she’d committed so repeatedly that there was physical proof of them on her palms. “I don’t know why I told everyone I was from North Dakota.
“When I was eighteen, I only applied to colleges in weird, faraway places. I ended up choosing NDSU. My mom and dad thought I did it to make them furious and maybe I did a little, maybe I was tired of being a smiling size-two who never broke curfew and was described by all her teachers as ‘quiet, serious, a dream come true.’ Mostly, I felt small every day and blamed the city, thought maybe if I went somewhere unlike anywhere I knew I could be fixed and new and like I’d always wanted to be.”
“So you went to North Dakota.”
“I went to North Dakota!” She let go of my hands and shoved a couple of torn bread pieces into her mouth. “I was so charmed at first. Los Angeles sounded so exotic to all my classmates, and at parties people were always refilling my glass and asking me endless questions about my opinion on this, that, whatever. The school’s mascot was a bison, a big shaggy, horned creature. There was a statue of one on campus that looked so powerful, its body leaning into motion, front hoof forward. I liked reading by it, especially in the fall. I looked cute in a scarf and beanie.”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said ‘at first.’ ”
She paused, smiled. “You really listen to every word I say.” I knew then that all the moments that followed would be in service to that one. I would be scratching my nose, brushing my hair, double-knotting my sneakers, driving to work, talking to Mom, Billy, Darryl, whatever hungry soul opened the door, standing in the shower scrubbing sweat, grease, whatever got stuck to me through the day off my skin, and I would ask myself—what are all the ways to make Jenny Hauser smile?
“So—what happened?”
Her hands were out of bread to tear. She clasped them together, tightly. “Nothing crazy or dramatic, just what always seemed to happen: I got bored. Everything I loved about North Dakota felt tired by the end of my sophomore year. As I lay in bed every night it felt like an invisible hippo was sitting on my chest, and I couldn’t help but think: I am wasting my life.
“One of the guys I was sleeping with was a city kid like me, but from New York. He talked constantly about the city and would earnestly call it ‘the best place in the world.’ It got me thinking that maybe it wasn’t the city that had been killing me, but the wrong city. So I moved to New York that summer and never went back to school.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to New York,” I said. “My dad lived there for a little and played in a band. I listened to one of their records and they weren’t very good, but I liked the idea of them playing in dark, smoky bars.”
“I wasn’t in New York long.
Met a guy and moved to Miami. Then on my own again, headed to Austin, then D.C. when I thought I wanted to be in politics, Portland, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, a brief month in Dublin, then back to New York City, Bismarck, and now here, Los Angeles again.”
So many landscapes to picture her in. Her ponytail riding the subway, pushing through bodies and bodies on crowded sidewalks, surrounded by buildings so high she’d have to tip her head backward to see the tops of them. Her ponytail on a beach, salt and sunshine soaked into it. Among dark suits and conservative ties with the Washington Monument looming behind her. Hiking through forests in a haze of mist. Fruity colorful drinks with chiseled tan men. Casinos. Desert nights. More drinks, more men, but Guinness now, burly, red-faced men. Same skyscrapers, more bodies. Bismarck, a place I still didn’t have a clear picture of. And now Los Angeles, her in front of me, mere feet away—I could reach across the table and grab that ponytail between my fingers if I wanted to.
“Why not just say that, then? That’s all so much more interesting.”
“Listing all those places doesn’t make me feel worldly or fascinating or anything close. I like the idea of me being some doe-eyed Midwestern girl moving to the big city for the first time more than the reality. Because the reality is, I’ve been to so many places and not a single one has saved me. And I need Los Angeles to save me. I need this place to work this time.”
I realized then that for her even to be sitting across from me she would’ve had to find someone to watch Adam. Whether a babysitter, a friend, her faceless husband, she called in favors or pulled out her wallet to go to the meeting in the church she talked so much shit about. I watched her fiddle with the edges of the menu, flip pages back and forth, mumble something about dessert—should we get some?—and thought about how easy it would’ve been for Jenny just to stay home if a small part of her didn’t hope that the meetings weren’t bullshit, that one day she would emerge from the church basement and onto the street, blinking rapidly, her eyes adjusting to the brighter, more beautiful world of a healthy, well-adjusted person, all of it unlocked for her by a circle of women.
I waved the waiter over. “Can we get a bowl of ice cream? We’re going to be here for a while.”
The waiter walked away, Jenny had that smile again, and I hoped she was thinking, yes, Los Angeles would work this time.
* * *
—
JENNY DROPPED ME OFF a couple houses down. The Freemans’ front yard was cleaner, never a bag of garbage on their curb. “See you soon,” she said before she reached across me and opened my door.
I watched her taillights until they turned the corner and let those words swell up inside me and carry me to my front door, up the stairs, and away from Mom’s and Billy’s worried faces and simultaneous sentences—“Where have you been?” “Do you know what time it is?” “We were so scared”—onto my bed, where I flopped, shoes still on. Billy crawled next to me soon after and I only distantly felt myself saying, “I’m sorry, I should’ve called. I lost track of time. It won’t happen again, I swear.” His arms curled around me and even those, in all their muscled solidity, felt barely there.
“See you soon”—no day attached to it, because why? She was a part of my life now, I was a part of hers. When you were a part of someone’s life, you saw them, you didn’t have to say a day of the week, you knew you’d see them. “Soon”—it was a beautiful word.
For the first night in a while, I didn’t go to Dad’s shed. I slept, dreamless.
7
THE LAST TIME I thought about a girl so intensely, I was sixteen and failing U.S. history.
There were a lot of reasons I was failing—lack of interest, the teacher had wandering eyes and a lisp, it was the class right before lunch and I was always tired and hungry, lack of interest—but the main one sat in front of me and her name was Becky Rivas.
On the third day of class, she had searched frantically through her bag, zipping and unzipping pockets, until she turned around and said five of the few words she would ever speak to me—“Can I borrow a pen?”
I had only the pen I was holding, a shitty blue Bic I used when I wanted to draw cats and dogs running across my legs. She was fully turned around in her seat, her eyes on me alone. It’d made me shiver, being stared at so closely. I gave my pen to her and she smiled, said the last four words she would ever speak to me—“Thank you so much.”
I spent the rest of the class staring at the back of her head, counting and naming the individual strands of her hair. When she leaned back and stretched, the ends of her hair would brush against my desk, hypnotize me with their sway. She would gather all of it between her hands, like she was going to tie a ponytail, then release it. I noticed she had three moles on the back of her neck, and I began writing haikus about them in my head. I wouldn’t have taken notes even if I’d had a pen to do so.
The next month passed like this. The minute she sat down in front of me, I’d stare at the back of her head and try to work up the courage to tap her shoulder, say “Hey.” It was the best I could come up with. I could never understand how people were able to start conversations out of thin air and keep them moving and breathing. Mostly, I waited for her to turn around and ask me for a pen again. She never did. My grade in the class continued to plummet.
One day, she went through the same nervous routine of rooting through her backpack. I sat up straighter, the hairs on my neck prickled, I was already reaching into my bag to pull out the many pens I now carried.
She didn’t ask me, though, didn’t even turn around. She turned to her left and asked Scottie Tsuji for a pen, and I stopped staring at the back of her head. Scottie had cornrows and thought it was hilarious to draw dicks on whiteboards when teachers weren’t looking, which it was a little, but not as often as he did it. If she could ask Scott Tsuji for a pen, we were never going to be anything. I ended up passing U.S. history, got a C+.
This thing with Jenny was different.
Becky I only thought about passingly, mostly in the hour before class. Jenny I thought about minute by minute. I began aching for Wednesdays and Thursdays.
It was impossible to deny the thing wasn’t at least a little sexual. I was masturbating every morning in the shower again and, unlike the past weeks, I was able to orgasm. Now my mind had something concrete to focus on—baggy stained shirts, jeans that sagged sadly, crinkled eyes, a ponytail that I wanted to wrap around my fist, pull against my face, rub over my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, see if it had the power to improve my senses, what did pepperoni and pickles taste like on her tongue, I often pictured us standing close but not touching, just saying “Hey” back and forth, her breath meaty and sour. I did my best not to think about any of this on the nights Billy and I fucked.
When Wednesdays finally came, I wouldn’t finish in the shower. I’d get in and out as quickly as I could and put on my uniform polo and jeans I’d made sure to wash the day before, kiss Billy and Mom on the cheek, wish them a good day, the best day. At Eddie’s, I’d chug Hawaiian Punch, the only drink we had without caffeine, to keep myself busy. At 3:00 p.m., my body would be humming and my teeth and tongue would be red. I’d go to the bathroom and pull out the toothbrush I’d started to bring with me, scrub until the red of the juice and the blood from my gums swirled in the sink with the Crest foam. When I went back out, Darryl would often tell me that that woman had called, asked for me. Even if he didn’t, I’d know that she was calling soon, that I’d be ready.
I never really remembered the drives over. I’d park across the street and walk to her door in a sort of trance. My first knock would be aggressive, the two after shy, then the painful seconds until the lock clicked open. If I’d wanted to write haikus about Becky’s moles, I needed to write epics about Jenny’s collarbones.
She’d never take the pizza right away. There were always things she had to tell me, details from our days apart—the egg she’d
fried for breakfast the day before, which had been a double yolk, a good omen; a TV sitcom that she hated but couldn’t stop watching; gray hairs she’d plucked; Adam’s fights with his teacher; three plastic bags full of soccer trophies on the side of the road all with the name “Charlie Wilson,” and how she spent the rest of the day wondering who this Charlie was and if it was him or his parents that put them there, why that day was the day that they were unable to spend another second with his childhood achievements shining on shelves. I hoped he wasn’t dead. Yesterday, she’d been driving around when she saw a ninety-nine-cent store that called to her, went inside expecting just to wander the aisles, but immediately saw a bin filled with rainbow pinwheels that made her think of the fields of giant windmills she’d seen as a kid from the back seat of her parents’ car on a trip to Palm Springs, wind turbine farms, how majestic they were, what a lovely trip it had been, her parents wearing sunglasses and lying around the hotel pool while she played in the water, splashing, churning her arms like those giant windmills, she bought the whole bin of rainbow pinwheels and stuck them in her front yard, see? I swallowed up every morsel she gave me.
After the stories ran out and I felt the box cooling in my hands, she’d give me cash and make me promise to be at the meeting on Thursday, always the same words when she closed the door behind her—“Take care, Pizza Girl.”
I’d drive back to Eddie’s and turn over the new details she’d given me in my mind. Sometimes I couldn’t wait, I’d lock myself in the bathroom the minute I arrived and touch myself—us eating eggs off the same plate, my fingers weaving through her ponytail searching for gray, in a pool together, our arms moving in unison, water splashing left and right—other times, I wouldn’t do anything. I’d go back to work and just enjoy those images, the idea of us together. If Peter noticed I’d been gone for too long, he’d take away my break. I never cared.
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