by Patti Kim
“Where’re you moving?”
“To Hawaii.”
“You’re not coming to school tomorrow?”
“It’s the last time you can see me.”
“You can come over right now, can’t you?” he asked. Looking at my things, he said, “You’re not moving.”
“My mother’s coming to get me,” I said.
“That’s my window. You can look out,” he said, pointing in that direction. “I’ll give you my quarter.”
Because Boris was the only boy who had ever kissed me, I told him I would come over and play with him, but only for five minutes because my mother was coming to get me any minute now. He pulled out a quarter from his pocket, put it in my hand, stood up, and told me to come on. With one arm around my box and the pillowcase slung over my other shoulder, I followed Boris to his apartment, where he would sit me on his lap and kiss me.
“Don’t touch me. That’s yucky,” I said.
“If you like someone, you can touch them there,” Boris said, putting his head on my shoulder. I sniffed into his curls, shrugged him off, and told him his head was making me cry because it smelled just like onions.
I stood up to look out the window. Parked in the center of the court was a white van, but there was no cab—blue, yellow, green, black, or any other color, with any sort of lettering on its door. I did not want to wait outside because it was getting dark and my father would see me with my things and make me stay with him forever. When Boris’s mother came in through the door saying something to Boris in Portuguese, I tried hard to remember my mother’s song, wondering if the country girl ever got her silk slippers in the end.
After seeing me at her window, Boris’s mother walked into the kitchen telling the air it was natural and all right for a girl and boy to kiss as long as no one had a cough, sneeze, or sniffle. She filled a saucepan with water, placed it on the stove, and brought out four potatoes from the cabinet under the sink. While scrubbing them, she told me to stay and eat something because my head looked too big for my body. Skin and bones, she called me. On the television set was a framed photograph of Boris’s father. He was smiling and waving, hello or good-bye, from the driver’s seat of a truck. Poor Boris and his mother were still waiting for him to drive the truck back to Arlington from somewhere in Texas.
I told Boris’s mother I needed to eat by the window because my mother was coming soon to get me. Boris told her we were moving to Hawaii. She did not believe me; nevertheless, she smiled and said that Hawaii was a beautiful place, and I was a lucky girl. Then she left me with my bowl of potatoes with butter and garlic at the windowsill while she and Boris ate at the table.
As I finished my food, I saw that the light of our apartment was turned on. My father must have come home. I asked Boris’s mother for another bowl of potatoes because they were more delicious than anything I had ever eaten, and she gladly took my bowl and filled it. Before giving me a second helping, she wiped my mouth with a corner of her gray apron, and puckering her lips at me—the way lips are puckered at poor strays—she called me a sweet girl. I quickly finished the potatoes, took my bowl to the sink, slipped the spoon into my sleeve, gathered up my belongings, and thanked Boris’s mother for a delicious dinner. I told Boris it was time for me to go because my mother was waiting.
Outside, I crawled into the azalea shrubs that grew near our building and with the spoon dug a hole deep enough to hide my box and pillowcase. If my father saw my things, he would point his middle finger at the box, tell me in that voice my mean and greedy grandfather used to open it up, and then, seeing the four dollars in change, he would pocket it. Reading my poem, he would know that I knew it was because of him my mother cried into the toilet. The rock he would throw out the window because rocks were dangerous weapons in the hands of children. Looking at the lipstick, he would tell me that eight-year-old girls with color on their faces grew up to be whores, and I would tell him I was already nine. But I would never tell my father about the note and the cakes that had been left for me.
When I walked into our apartment, I saw my father’s back. He was looking out the window, with the telephone receiver held between his shoulder and ear. One hand held the phone; the other was moving a cigarette from his lips to his side, where he flicked the ashes onto the floor. My mother used to yell at him for that. I quietly shut the door, sat on the arm of the sofa, and listened to my father trying to ask Mina or Hyun-Joo or Whan’s father or mother in a careful and polite way where his wife might be. My mother used to baby-sit for all of them.
“Yes, I know about that. She told me she would stop baby-sitting Mina,” he said. Turning around, my father saw me and said with a smile, “You have to excuse me. She just came in.” He set the telephone down on the air conditioner and walked toward me with his work boots still on his feet. He placed his large, open hand on top of my head, held it like a ball, then gently pushed it back so that he could take a good look at me while asking where I had been, and where my mother went.
“I played at Boris’s house,” I said.
“Where’s your mother? Where’s your brother?”
I shrugged my shoulders and told him Min Joo wasn’t in school all day; the door was locked when I came home, and with no place to go, I went over to Boris’s. I told him Boris’s mother gave me potatoes for dinner so I wasn’t hungry at all. My father removed his hand and walked into the kitchen where he kept bottles on top of the refrigerator. I followed him. With a drink in hand, he went into the bathroom. Following him, I asked, “Where are they? Where are they?” As he washed his face with cold water, I squatted on the rim of the toilet seat and stopped asking where they might be. I watched him comb his hair back with his fingers, and thought that my father was a handsome man. After drying himself, he told me to get off the toilet, get out of the bathroom. When he shut the door, I pressed my ear against it and listened for my father’s breathing. I held the knob ready to turn if the bathroom suddenly became silent.
I followed my father everywhere because I did not want him to disappear. I followed him to his bedroom, where he opened and shut the dresser drawers, checking for my mother’s clothes. He sat on the bed and took off his work boots. He searched for his secret cigar box of emergency money that had been hidden in the closet. I followed him to my room, where in the dark he kicked my box of Magic Markers and threw my notebooks at the walls. He kicked the leg of my desk. He kicked the radiator. I followed him to the living room, where he turned the television on, drank some more, asked me if she said anything in the morning, and made phone calls. To one person he said, “Did Ahn Joo’s mother mention anything about meeting you tomorrow?” To another, he called my mother a begging bitch, told the person she stole all of his emergency money and ran away, and when she returned, he would beat her to death.
I followed him to his room, where he sat on his bed and drank more. Lying next to him on my mother’s side of the bed, I felt my eyes grow heavy with sleep. I did not want my father to disappear. Before closing my eyes, I placed a finger on his shirt and listened to my father drinking and smoking and thinking of what he would do to my poor mother when she came home to get me, and what my poor father would do when she started nagging again about his drinking, coming home late, not enough money to even feed the children whole milk, magazines of long-legged women that could have paid for his son and daughter’s school lunch tickets for an entire month, why did you bring me to this awful country. If I hadn’t married the likes of you, I wouldn’t be washing someone else’s dishes, delivering newspapers I can’t read, looking after someone else’s children. What kind of living is this? This is a dog’s life. And you are a coward for running away from your father like a beaten dog. No wonder you are a drunk and a lousy father and husband—look at the family you learned from.
My father would return her words with a smack or a tight collar made by his hand around her neck. The collar would tighten and tighten, as she looked at him with her go-ahead-and-kill-me-I’m-ready-to-die-death-is-better-t
han-life-with-you look in her eyes.
As I fell asleep thinking of my mother’s voice, I prayed that it would rain because Min Joo cried when it rained; but remembering that my things were buried outside, I changed my mind and asked God to stop the rain. I asked God to hurry up and return my mother to me. Please, please, please hurry up, I begged. I promised never to torture Min Joo ever again. I promised to be good. And if God was not able to hurry them home, I asked him to please show me where in the world RELIABLE might be.
2
The telephone rang. I answered it with a hello, waited for a response, asked who it was, then waited in silence. The person on the other end hung up, and I was certain she would call again because I was convinced it was my mother wanting to hear my breathing, my voice. The telephone rang again. This time, I answered it with a hello in Korean. When I heard quiet breathing, I called out: “Mother, Mother, it’s me, Ahn Joo. I’m here. I’m waiting. When will you come for me?” But the voice at the other end belonged to a man. His name was Paul. He asked what language I was speaking, what country I was from, and if my mother or my father was home. He said my English was very good and he could tell from my voice that I had a pretty face. “You’re pretty, aren’t you?” he asked. I smiled and nodded. He asked my age, my school, my favorite color, my favorite time of day, my favorite ice cream flavor, television show, and holiday. He said he liked the way ice cream felt in his mouth, icy and creamy, and asked if I knew how good that felt. He asked if I had a boyfriend. He asked what I was wearing. When I told him a blue dress, he said to lift it up and touch the place between my legs.
3
Miss Washburn sat at her desk and ate spaghetti out of a blue plastic bowl. The rest of the class was outside for recess. She and Mrs. Martin took turns monitoring the third graders’ recess time, and today was her day to have thirty-five minutes of quiet to herself. Sipping from the lid of her thermos, Miss Washburn looked up at me and asked why I wasn’t playing outside with everyone else. I handed her a piece of paper on which I had printed the word RELIABLE in capital letters and asked her if she knew where it might be. She put down her drink, held the paper in both hands, tilted her head, squinted, leaned toward me, and explained that the word was not a noun. “A noun is a person, place, or thing. Reliable,” she said, “is not a place, person, or thing. It’s an adjective. Ahn Joo, do you remember what an adjective is?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“A describing word. It describes a noun,” I answered.
“Where did you see the word?” she asked, holding the paper up to me.
When I told her I had seen it on a cab, she smiled and said that it was very smart of me to write down words I did not know the meaning of. She explained that “Reliable” was probably the name of the cab company, and the reason they called it that was because they wanted their customers to know that their service was reliable or dependable or responsible or faithful or trustworthy. When I returned her explanation with a confused stare, she pushed her seat away from the desk, stood up, and pointing to her chair, said, “See this chair? It is reliable because I know it will not break when I sit on it. See?” Miss Washburn sat back down. She tapped the toes of her canvas sandals against the floor. Her fingers were spread out upon her lap. “Now, you tell me, Ahn Joo, what other things can be reliable.”
Pointing my chin at her, I said, “You.”
Miss Washburn put her hands together, smiled as if she had won a contest, took a breath, and leaned down to hug me. Her hair smelled like brand-new crayons. She then went to the back of the classroom, brought back to her desk the Living Dictionary, and read aloud to me the definition of the word: “Worthy of trust. That can be depended on. Worthy of being depended on or trusted. Reliable implies that a person or thing can safely be trusted and counted on to do or be what is expected, wanted, or needed.” She closed the book, smiled, and asked if the word made sense to me. I nodded.
“Ahn Joo, why don’t you do an exercise with the word. Why don’t you do what we always do with new words?”
“You mean write them up and down?” I asked.
Miss Washburn in her singing voice said with excitement, “Yes, yes, write the word up and down, and think up others that start with the same letters.”
Making lists was one of my teacher’s most favorite and important lessons. Each morning began with a list of things to do for the day, and each afternoon ended with a list of things to do for homework. She covered the walls of our classroom with rows and columns of rules like BE AT THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME and WALK—DO NOT RUN. She listed the fifty states of America in alphabetical order, with Alabama near the ceiling and Wyoming touching the floor.
I took back my piece of paper, politely thanked Miss Washburn, went to my seat in the fifth row, and for a few seconds put my stupid head down. RELIABLE was not a person, place, or thing. What was I thinking, trying to locate it on a map or atlas?
As Miss Washburn finished her bowl of spaghetti, I opened my notebook to a blank page, wrote the word up and down along the red margin, listed words that began with the letter R, then E, then L, then I, and became bored with the exercise. My teacher winked at me as she left the classroom to rinse out her empty bowl and fork. The sound of her footsteps faded down the hall. I tore the page out of my notebook, crinkled it up, and tossed the ball of paper into the wastebasket.
The wind blew in through the window and fluttered the corners of Miss Washburn’s posters. Across the top of the chalkboard hung the long green strip of the alphabet. The white letters were written in perfect script. The arrows around all the curved lines showed us how to write in cursive, when to move and lift our pencils, and in which direction to take them. Take your pencil this way. Take it that way. I began to scribble in my notebook. I could hear the others playing outside. I imagined Judy and Kirk were trying to have sex in the forsythia shrubs.
“R is for rain,” I wrote. “My little brother cried when it rained.”
* * *
The bell rang. I put my pencil down and ran my fingers over the words with which I had filled two entire pages. The classroom smelled of oranges. There were peelings on Miss Washburn’s desk. She was writing math problems on the chalkboard. I liked hearing the clean tap, tap, tap of the chalk against the board. I showed her my writing. She read the first page, took a seat, turned to the second, and looked up at me with proud eyes on the verge of tears. “Do you know how wonderful this is?” she asked. She wanted my permission to make a poster of my words to hang on the bulletin board. She said it was the most beautiful writing she had ever read.
The next morning, my words covered an entire bulletin board. Miss Washburn had labeled my writing “New Word of the Week.” This was what I had written:
R is for rain. My little brother cried when it rained. I could depend on my brother to cry. A walnut formed on his chin. Tears fell down his cheeks. He cried winter, spring, summer, and fall. I never liked to hear him cry, but I miss it now. My little brother and mother went away. I miss them very much. I wish I could hear him cry again.
E is for eat. I like to eat cupcakes. I could depend on them to make me happy. My mother used to make me fish cakes and rice cakes. I didn’t like them because they tasted too salty and felt too slippery in my mouth. But if she made them for me right now, I would not mind. I would actually thank her and happily eat them.
L is for locusts. I could depend on them to visit every seventeen years. The noise they make fills the summer air. It keeps me company. No one can escape it.
I is for India. Kavitha and her family is from India. India is a country in Asia. I could depend on her because she is my friend. We like to make dandelion sandwiches for our brothers. She keeps all of my secrets.
A is for abba. That’s the Korean word for “father.” That’s also the Indian word for “father.” I say it whenever I need him. I could depend on him. My father does not go away.
B is for baby-sitter. My mo
ther used to baby-sit Mina, Hyun-Joo, and Whan. The babies depended on her. She fed them water, rice, and soy sauce. She changed their diapers. She played with them. When they cried, she bounced them upon her lap. When they became sick, she placed her eye on their forehead to feel for the fever.
L is for love. My mother used to sing Korean love songs. One was about the love for a river. Another was about the love for a mountain. And another was about the love of a mother. She sang about chrysanthemums, barley fields, and whispering winds. She knew many songs by heart. But only one line to only one song was taught to me: “It’s not love if you can’t let me go.”
E is for exit. I could depend on the red signs. They blink and reflect light. They hang above the main doors in Sherwood Elementary School. We can all depend on them to show us where to go at the end of the day, when the last bell ringalingalings.
Day after day, posters were made and hung all over the classroom walls. We learned the meanings to prima donna, martyr, festival, antepenultimate.… With each new poster, the words became longer.
When the last day of third grade came along, we signed our posters, rolled them up, and traded them. I took home Judy Davis’s definition of the word “exotic.” I thanked Miss Washburn, hugged her goodbye, and walked out of room 304 for the last time.
4
During silent reading, my book about volcanoes was propped up and opened on page sixteen. I sat in desk number six in the third row of Mr. Albert’s fourth-grade class. My desk partners were falling asleep. Jason drooled onto his book about the Civil War. Our teacher sat in his recliner in the back of the classroom and read the sports page of his newspaper.
I laid my book down, turned the page, and smoothed my hand over the glossy pictures. I traced my thumb over the lava that poured out of the volcano’s opening. I traced it down to my other hand, which was flattened at the bottom edge of the book. With the nail of my left index finger, I scratched a line across the center of my knuckles. Two inches. I told myself that there had to be two inches of water above the rice. My father’s rice had to be sticky enough to stay on the tips of his chopsticks as he brought them to his lips. One night the rice was too watery, and he complained about having to use a spoon. He said he hadn’t come all the way to America to lose his wife and son to a poor man’s bowl of porridge. The night before, the rice had been too dry. Two nights before, I had forgotten to push the “on” button on the rice cooker, left it on “warm,” and the grains simmered in the water and turned into hard rice cakes. My father had knuckled my head and told me to throw the entire pot away and that we would have to wait thirty more minutes for dinner. Thirty more minutes meant two more drinks.
