by Roxane Gay
Yet she brought to the low table a fermented bean curd stew still bubbling in its clay pot. How had she come up with such a thing in Philadelphia? That smell. It was the bean paste. Soybeans, charcoal, and honey placed in an earthenware vessel, buried deep in the frozen ground and over the seasons grown elemental. It stank of home.
They helped themselves from the same pot, bringing the silken onion or softly crumbling potato onto their plates of rice. They dipped again and again into the pot with their spoons. And then, stinking softly of garlic, he took hold of her wrist, drawing her down as she rose to clear the table. She showed no surprise.
Afterward, she asked for his sock, to mend it. The meek look of her bent head, her fluency with the needle, his deflated sock in her hand, had caused a movement in his pride that he didn’t know then—or perhaps ever—to call love. Still, he began to spend nights, which he had previously devoted to his studies, at Young-Ja’s place. And when he received news through an aerogram that his mother had died, when she was no longer around to be disappointed that her only, late-born son would not live up to his educator father, his thoughts turned to marriage.
Yes. That was how it had transpired.
Now, in later life, he began to see her with new fascination. That wife of his. She was always busy—cooking, cleaning, nagging, blindly pulling out of parking spaces without a rearview glance. Even now, she was bustling about on some mission that didn’t involve him. She emerged from the bathroom, having drawn on eyebrows and applied rouge. He noticed a new fullness to her hairdo that revealed itself, as she came into the natural light, as a hairpiece. He followed her into the kitchen, where she acquired keys, phone, and bag. It came to him, what she was doing. She was leaving.
This made him anxious. He realized that with her gone, he would be obligated to himself. To remember to eat. To remember that he had eaten. To turn things off after he had turned them on. To zip his fly. To occupy the present moment. Suddenly, he hated her. He watched her jam her feet into her shoes, then bend to recover the collapsed backs. He hated her right down to the wayfaring look of those shoes.
At the threshold, she turned back for a moment. A change came over her expression, and he wondered if she had intuited his anxiety. But no. Whatever she saw was behind him, further down the hall, and caused what was honest about her face to come into bloom. Be good! she cried to that vision. Then opened the door and walked through it.
Vanishment.
What to do next. He placed his hands in his pockets and took them out again. He straightened a neat stack of mail on the entryway table without a glancing interest at their contents. Looking down the hall, he noticed the boy. Of course, the boy. He took a closer look.
The child was small, definitely under five. There was something about him that didn’t seem perfectly Korean: some touch of dusk to his complexion and gold to his curls. The shirt he wore was yellow and read HAPPY. But the boy himself looked neither happy nor unhappy. He looked how he looked. Small. Temporary. Everything about him would change in another five years. In five minutes.
“Well,” said Mo-Sae, heartily.
Ignoring this, the boy turned toward the kitchen. Mo-Sae followed. “What you looking for?” he asked in English.
The boy braced to open the fridge and surveyed the contents. He didn’t seem interested in the child-size packs of yogurt or bendy sticks of cheese or even the various Korean side dishes in little containers. Instead, he pointed to a can of Coca-Cola on an upper shelf.
“This?” Mo-Sae asked, even as he took it down.
“Open, please.”
The can was so simple, so presumptuous, as was the child’s belief that an adult could open it. Mo-Sae held the cold, weighted shape in his hand, considering it. He felt his judgment was being tested. Was it wrong to give soda to the child? What would Young-Ja say? But at the thought of his wife and her little criticisms, he grew bullish. After all, he had had his first bracing metallic taste of cola as a boy. It reminded him of the K-16 Air Base in Seoul. The grinning GIs. As a boy, Mo-Sae had served as a kind of mascot for them. They would strap a helmet on his head, ask for a song, teach him to swear. How easily the memories came to him: Hershey’s Tropical Bars. “Good-Bye Maria, I’m Off to Korea.” He remembered how one soldier, a wondrously black man, could pop the cap off a cola bottle using only his strong white teeth. He wished he too had some entertaining way to open the can for the boy, to bring him to delight.
“Watch this,” he said, although he had no plan. He tried a twisting motion on the tab. Nothing. Perhaps, then, a countering motion. The tab began to loosen, then broke off. This filled him with a frustrated gall that automatically made him think of his wife. “Yeobo?” he shouted. “Yeobo!”
Where was she?
Was she somewhere laboring over her devotions? Wiping down the leaves of her showy house plants? Shala-shala-shala with church women on the phone?
Then it dawned on him. Had she left him alone with the boy?
He began to move through the apartment. There were signs of her. At least half-a-dozen pairs of reading glasses; some unfinished work beside a sewing basket; something simmering on the stove. But no wife.
He entered the living room, which was set like a stage for the occasional visitor. Matching armchairs angled as if in conversation. An ornately framed print of a peasant couple praying in a wheat field. A bowl of fancy dusty candies. Even the piano bench wore little crocheted socks. This was all Young-Ja. All this stuff. When had she turned so aspirational?
At that moment, what appeared was the boy—appearing also in Mo-Sae’s cognition—as he struggled to drag a large toy bin down the hall. Mo-Sae moved to help but was dissuaded by the child’s look of fierce refusal. When he reached the living room, he threw his weight into upending the bin. Toys dumped everywhere. Mo-Sae surveyed the mess. He should have been angry at this demonstration, which, he suspected, was aimed at him. Instead, he was transfixed. A stray block. A plastic soldier. A marble on the run, which he nabbed.
Now he was fully engrossed—sorting, retrieving. Puzzle pieces, dinosaurs, cars. He put them in files, rows, ranks, and columns stretching across the living room floor. As he worked, he swore under his breath to mask the pleasure of having something to do, to make that pleasure seem obligatory. TS. Tough Shit. Fuck it got my orders. Goddamn Jodie. Goddamn Gook. Fucking Biscuit Head, shit for the birds.
When he straightened up, he noticed that the sliding door was open. As he drew closer, he heard whoops and shrieking laughter: the sounds of some exclusionary fun. He saw a boy standing on a chair to look way down over the balcony railing. Below, other children played in the communal swimming pool. Waist-high, the boy was clear of the railing.
Mo-Sae was suddenly overwhelmed with love for the boy, that yearning posture pitched against the open air. He was so small and his frustration was so great.
Mo-Sae called to him. “Danger,” he said.
The boy did not move.
“Down, Jonathan,” he said. The name had come to him.
No response.
In a few steps, Mo-Sae crossed the balcony and seized the child around the middle. A naïve fight went up in the live body: sharp kicking feet, valiant muscles.
“Yeobo!” Mo-Sae yelled as he attempted to embrace the struggle.
The kid wrestled free and ran back into the house. Mo-Sae found him back in the living room, breathing hard and scheming. When he saw his grandfather, Jonathan deliberately plowed through the organized toys with his feet. As Mo-Sae approached, he shouted, “No, Grandpa, no!” and picked up a car as if to hurl it.
Young-Ja always rushed home, handbag gaping, outracing disaster. She felt her heart do just what her doctor had said it must not do as she thought of the pool, the gas stove, the three-lane intersection beside their apartment. Sometimes the anxiety kept her homebound, but little by little, she would start again, coming up with errands that were really excuses to leave. Stamps, prescription pick-ups. Sometimes she would drop by T.J. Maxx for the s
mall pleasure of buying something she didn’t need or, as it invariably turned out, even want.
She was never gone long.
This afternoon, she even left a length of pork belly simmering on the stove with some peppercorns and a spoonful of instant coffee. She told herself she would just run to the bank and deposit the monthly check her daughter gave her for childcare. On her way out, she glanced at the mirror. She felt a complicated sense of recognition at her reflection, not unlike the feeling she had toward the look of her full name, Young-Ja Han, written out in her daughter’s hand. Payable to.
As she waited for the elevator, she heard the door of a nearby unit opening. She realized that she had been listening for it.
“Damn chain latch.”
It was Mr. Sorenson. He had trouble with small physical tasks, like opening jars or unhooking a latch from its runners. Sometimes she wondered if he kept his eye to the peephole and watched the elevator all day, so canny were their afternoon meetings.
“Young-Ja!” he called. “An-yeong-ha-sae-yo?” He knew a little Korean because he had been stationed near Seoul during the war.
It always caught her off guard, how handsome he was. White hair, blue eyes, profile like an eagle. He was always bringing her things—jam-centered candies, cuttings of begonias. Always telling her things. Once, he told her he had an organ at home and promised to play it for her someday. He expected her to believe, or act as if she believed, that an instrument of such occasion and size could fit into their modest units.
Still, she gave him what she could in return. Her docile attention. Half-smiles. A secret.
It had been right around the time that Jonathan was born, three years ago, that she had been diagnosed with a condition. She had left the doctor’s office determined to tell no one, not even the children. Especially not the children. But on her way home, she had run into Mr. Sorenson. In his presence, she found herself seeking the exact name of her condition. She could only remember that the doctor had said something that sounded like “a tree.”
“Atrial fibrillation,” pronounced Mr. Sorenson. “Increases your chance of stroke by five.”
Since then, it had become part of their routine. “How’s that atria,” he would ask, and she would become acutely aware that she had one. Actually, two. One on the right and one on the left side of the heart, according to Mr. Sorenson. It gave her a feeling of strangeness toward her body and all its functioning parts, as if they were not to be taken for granted.
Today, he handed her a medicinal brown bottle. “Take this,” he commanded.
She took the bottle.
“No, not all of it,” he said, seeming annoyed that she had not understood the precise measure of his generosity.
This embarrassed her. She was not a person who took more than her due. Even in her discomfort, she performed the small service of loosening the cap of the bottle before returning it to him so he would not have to ask.
ORGANIC INDIA HEART GUARD, the label read.
“Take some,” said Mr. Sorenson. “Take ten.” He shook some capsules into her palm and counted them, moving each pill across her palm with the stiff index finger of his stricken hand, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times.
“Now,” he said. “These are from the bark of the Arjun tree. Buddhists call it the tree of enlightenment. You know Buddha, of course. He’s Oriental.
“See here,” he continued, reading from the label without needing glasses. “Take with food. Take twice a day. Do not take if you’re nursing or pregnant.”
He looked at her with private amusement. His still-keen blue eyes. “Any chance you’re pregnant?
“Come on. Smile.”
When she returned home, Mo-Sae was in the living room, reading the Chosun Daily. He had a certain frowning expression when he was with a paper. She had once been fascinated by this look, had wanted to come under it herself: the look of a man exerting his personal opinion on the ways of the world, the movement of nations. Now she only snuck a glance at the front page to check the date of the paper he was reading.
The headlines referenced the historic summit between North and South Korea, the first such meeting since the country was divided. Could this be the start of reunification? Would there be an easing of military tensions? An opportunity for family reunions?
Last month’s news.
She rubbed her hands, dislodging the sticky, warmed pills that Mr. Sorenson had given her. With that gesture, she reclaimed a kind of housekeeping competence over her mood.
Casting a brisk, efficient glance around, she noticed that the living room was neat and yet strangely occupied. Whatever had happened in her absence, it would never tell. All the toys that she normally swept into bins were categorized and lined up across the floor, some by size, some by type, some by color, some by fancy. It unnerved her, this carefully presented nonsense. The room was empty of the boy.
“Where is he!” she demanded.
“Who?”
“Don’t say who! You know who! Jonathan! Where is he!”
“Jonathan?” asked Mo-Sae, half-rising from the chair. “Why he was here just a moment ago.” He had started doing that: coming up with likely versions of the past that became fixed in his memory.
The boy was not inside the hall closet, hiding in the bedroom, the bathroom, the bedroom again, not crammed into the storage ottoman, suffocated in the front-load washer, splattered on the concrete from a five-story fall. She could not stand Mo-Sae’s forbearing attitude as he trailed her on her frantic search. She whirled to face him. That uncharacteristically meek look. She wanted to beat it out of him. You! No! How!
But then, Jonathan simply appeared, in full view of the door through which she had just entered. She wondered that he hadn’t called to her sooner.
Later that day, in the absence of tragedy, she and Mo-Sae sat in the living room with Jonathan lining up cars between them. The radio was turned to the Christian station, which played arrangements of hymns. “Just As I Am Without One Plea.” “Rock of Ages.” Mo-Sae sat in an armchair with no other occupation. She sat on the floor, with one knee hugged to her chest, snapping the scraggly ends of mung bean sprouts onto a spread section of the newspaper that Mo-Sae had been reading. All this talk of reunification. “Permanent peace.” “Long road ahead.” Her thoughts turned, with gentle reluctance, to the past.
That little room in Busan that she and her sisters had shared—so small that at night they had to sleep alternating heads and toes. They lived above a noodle shop, and day and night, as they went up or down the back staircase, they would pass the open kitchen door. Inside, the red-faced ajuma would work flour with water and a pinch of salt, cutting the dough into long ribbons, lowering the noodles into steaming vats—never once offering them a bowl.
How young she had been then, yet how like an old woman. Her work at the local rubber factory left her always tired, always short of breath, blisters between her fingers, curing fumes in her nose, a constant ringing in the deep cavities of her back teeth.
Once, she had come home from work to find her middle sister missing. The room could be swept in a glance. There was no trace of her. Only her youngest sister crouched in the corner. Her rising panic had felt almost euphoric, how her fatigue lifted, her aches vanished, and the spirit of drudgery and depression that accompanied her suddenly found clarity and purpose. She ran back into the streets, easily skirting the iron bicycles and slow oxen pulling hopeless carts of merchandise. The road beneath her pounding feet began to slope downhill, and she felt the easy momentum, the blood pumping into and out of her heart, her living body.
She realized that she had returned to the factory. There, in the last light, she could make out a humped form on the dusty road alongside the factory wall.
It breathed.
It slept.
Even now, she could feel between her thumb and forefinger, the tender curl of Young-Soo’s ear as she gripped it, hard, right at the lobe, and yanked her to her feet. She could still see the look of distant amaz
ement on her sister’s face, lagging in dreams, emphasized by the dust in her eyebrows and lashes and hair. She had never struck Young-Soo before, but that night she discovered a taste for it. Nothing else could express so well her outrage, her longing for their mother, her need to connect again and again with something solid, resistant, and alive—shoulder, cheekbone, the open mouth that housed the teeth.
That was how it had been. She had forgotten. Her sisters had married and left her charge. They had emigrated—one to Germany, another to Australia. In later years, she had received news of them. One was divorced. The other unexpectedly died of a reaction to penicillin. Distant news, by the time it reached her. Here, in America, she had a different life, a different set of fighting instincts. When she had her own children, she never once laid a finger on them, no, not when they mouthed off or frankly and freely disobeyed. If anything, she was a little shy of them.
She glanced at Mo-Sae on his armchair, half-expecting to find him asleep, with the sense that here was her life. Yes, his eyes were closed. It was that time of day. What did the doctor call it? Sundowning. She had been told to expect increased confusion, even agitation. She had been told that the only way to respond was with patience and kindness. Patience. Kindness. What did they really mean between husband and wife? Sometimes she felt that patience and kindness could be stretched so far in a marriage as to become their opposites.
She studied the face tipped back on the armchair, unconscious yet holding fast to mystery. A face already given to absolution.
Did he know?
She could never directly ask him, never actually say the word Alzheimer’s, chimae, in English or Korean. She would rather pacify, indulge, work around his nonsense. Perhaps this was patience and kindness. Or perhaps it was the worst possible way to be unkind.
Sometimes she wondered. Was it all an act? Would nothing really remain? In the middle of the night, did a dawning horror sometimes spread over his soul? Or did he really think, as it seemed when his defenses were up, that all the world was in error and he was its lone sentinel of truth and fact?
