Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  He stared at the phone.

  “All you ever think about is yourself,” his wife said. Her eyes turned tight as bullets.

  She understood nothing. All he had ever done was think of others. That was the problem. He thought too much about how others saw him. Including his daughter, who, after today, would see him as a liar or, worse, a coward. And especially his wife, whom he’d wanted to impress the moment he met her. All those years ago. So many miles ago. Just outside their window a bus shrieked to a stop and sighed, and a woman wearing a head scarf got on. It was early and the woman’s features got lost in the dirty light of morning, but Lee could tell by the crook of her back that she was a hard worker—someone who’d never be rewarded while she was alive.

  “Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, why don’t we just get dressed.” His wife was sitting up now, reaching for his pack of cigarettes.

  Her dress lay on the coffee table. On top of that, a necklace. The previous night she announced that appropriate attire was important, adding, For many are called but few are chosen. Christian nonsense. For most of their twenty-five-year marriage she went to church and recited verses as though she had written them herself, but Lee knew all along that to her, church was just a vessel for networking. Every Sunday she sat in the front pews, her face shining with piety, and every Sunday afternoon she tried to shake hands with the right people, hoping that someone would introduce her to a smart investment, a quick moneymaker, anything that could catapult her into one of those immigrant success stories she’d read in Korea Daily. That was how they’d gotten involved with the motel. And now Lee understood why the money, at first, came so easily.

  He picked up the necklace and held the tiny cross in the center of his palm.

  “We’re doing the right thing,” she said and took a long drag.

  “I wasn’t disagreeing.”

  “But I can feel you turning weak. I always can.”

  “I’m not as weak as you think I am,” he said, feeling bold.

  “Well, I’m not as strong as you think I am so perhaps today, just this once, you can be a man.”

  Without much thought he flung the necklace at her. “I am your husband and you will not talk to me that way.”

  The necklace had missed her. She laughed, her mouth slacking wide enough to show the gaps in her upper row of teeth. “We’re not in Korea anymore, my dear. It’s much too late for you to have the upper hand.”

  He wanted to hit her. He wanted to stomp her face and break that smile.

  “And if you think beating me will finally turn you into a man, you have my blessing.” She slid out of bed, picked the necklace up off the floor, and coiled it around her wrist as she walked up to him, stood close enough for him to smell her breath. She was tall for a Korean woman. Slender and taut. A human knife. “But there are other ways to prove your manhood.” Her hands swirled against his chest and then coaxed the sides of his arms, chilling the nerves along his spine. “You have to trust me and know that we are doing right.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “Because . . .” Pulling him in gently she spoke into his ear. “It’s easy to be certain when you don’t have options.” She tilted his chin and kissed him lightly on the lips, twice, before walking him back to the bed and sitting him down so she could examine the top of his head. She fingered the outer edges of the bandage and peeled up a corner, gently, and blew into the wound.

  “Does it hurt?”

  He lied and said no.

  Her hands smoothed the stubble on his face. “Soon, nothing will ever hurt you,” she whispered, her eyes closed in prayer. “The path has already been built, not by God but by us. Now we must simply walk down it.”

  “We can tell the police how little we were involved.” He squeezed her hands, wanting her to open her eyes, but she kept them closed.

  “Our duty in life is to die with a little more honor than we were born with.”

  “We didn’t know what they were doing. With the girls,” he said.

  Her face opened and looked at his, searching for something, a flicker of understanding. But he didn’t understand, never could. On the coffee table her dress waited. She touched the fabric, the bright white a contrast to the room’s sickly gray. “No one will believe us. We’re immigrants. We’re nobodies.”

  “Maybe the journalist can help. Jimmy Park can translate for us. He wants to help. I don’t know why but he keeps offering.”

  “Jimmy’s a useless man. And he keeps offering help precisely because he knows he’s useless.”

  For months Lee had wondered if she and Jimmy had been having an affair. Now he was certain. And certain it had not gone well. Her affairs never surprised him. The fact that she found time to have one was what confounded him most.

  “He’s a good man,” he added, wanting to see her reaction.

  “I’d rather have a useful one than a good one. Why do you think his wife tried to kill herself?”

  Lee slid off the bed and sank to the floor. “When did you get this cruel?”

  “When?” Using the window as a mirror, she put on her necklace. “The real question should be how, my dear husband.”

  “You weren’t always this way.”

  “Whereas you have always been this way,” she said too quickly.

  “And what way is that?”

  “Someone who makes me this way.” She went to the desk and began straightening it, pushing the mound of bills into the trash can with dramatic indifference, repositioning the phone, putting away a roll of stamps inside a drawer. “You would’ve kept us washing dirty underwear for the rest of our lives. You would’ve let Songmi grow up to also be a nobody. What have you done to get us out of this apartment? Nothing. And what have you done to accept that you knew exactly what the girls were for?”

  “I knew nothing.”

  His wife got on her knees and took his face in her hands. “Listen to me, Hanju. I’m begging you. We must admit to what we did. We must know we did wrong. One has many good reasons in lying to others but there is no use in lying to oneself. Not at this point. Do you understand?”

  He looked up, at her eyes, that efficient mouth of hers. “But you were the one who shook hands with the Russian. And you were the one who wanted the motel.”

  She let go of him.

  “Oh God,” he heard himself say. He stood up and backed away from her. “You knew.”

  The silver cross winked from the base of her neck. “It must feel good to blame others.”

  “You knew it all along.”

  “We were in debt.”

  He walked to the desk, grabbed the chair for support.

  “Somebody had to do something,” she said.

  “But nobody asked you to.”

  “You’re absolutely right. You never have to ask for anything. I just take care of things, don’t I? I do all of the dirty work so you can go on believing you’re a good man. Well, being good in America is a luxury. A luxury I never got to have.”

  She took off her nightgown and began getting dressed. She hadn’t changed much since they’d first met. Skin as white as paper. Jet-black hair tapering at the middle of her back, pointing to the rest of her. Her beauty only confused him. She was far more beautiful, even at this age, than any of the girls the Russian had brought over—from Vietnam, Laos, Korea, from wherever, to be hostesses. That’s what they were supposed to be. In retrospect, the idea of hiring girls from other countries to be restaurant hostesses sounded absurd. And now the truth reverberated through him, endlessly, like the bells that kept on ringing long after the monks at the orphanage had left the courtyard. Only then did he remember his dream. Then the little girl, the one they found in the empty lot, just down the road from the motel. Why did she have to be Korean? Why did she have to be so young? Just barely twelve years old. Legs bent unnaturally. Blood smeared across her face
, as though someone had tried to wipe it. He wanted to vomit. He shut the image out because none of it mattered now. None of them mattered. He finally understood. He had to sit down.

  “Put on your suit,” his wife said. She was dressed now. White dress, tight at the waist, with a pair of white stockings, white shoes. Funeral colors.

  “You’re the one,” he said, barely able to get the words out.

  She put on earrings.

  “You took the girl’s body out to the lot, didn’t you?”

  His wife walked up to him and turned. “Help me with the zipper.”

  He couldn’t move.

  “Help me,” she said again, this time taking his hands and putting them to work.

  When he finished, all she said was, “I’m not a monster,” in a voice he had never heard before. Now look who is lying to oneself, he wanted to say but didn’t because she was crying. He couldn’t see her face but her shoulders shook. She cried often but this time felt different. This time, he could tell, she actually believed she was a monster—and her denial had simply been a wish for the truth to be untrue.

  “How could you do it?” he asked, knowing that even this didn’t matter. Today wasn’t about truth or lies or blame or monsters or money. Today was about the end, and the beginning—that day in Seoul when she walked through the doors at the watch repair shop where he worked as a clerk. Today was about the silk blouse she had on. Her cream-colored shoes. Her eyes as bright as apples.

  When she came into the shop all Lee had wanted was to wake up every morning to that face. To be graced by those hands. He straightened his posture so as to seem taller, counted money at the register as though his family owned the place, as though he had family, and tried not to think of himself as the thug that he was, the high school dropout that he was, the part-time employee that he was, getting paid under the table, mostly in cash but sometimes in unclaimed watches, which he sold in the black market. In two years I’ll have my own business, he remembered saying as she was leaving.

  She paused at the door. Hope the watch will be ready before then.

  Friday, he told her.

  She nodded and made to leave again.

  At five, he said, stepping out from behind the counter. Then we’ll go out to dinner afterward.

  She turned and smiled that smile of hers. Tiny fishhooks in his heart. What else will I be doing? You seem to know my schedule.

  On Saturday you’ll be at the beach. I’m done at noon.

  I can’t swim, she said.

  Neither can I, he said.

  Two years after that he didn’t have his own business but he proposed anyway, only to have her family object. Her father threatened to disown, and then disowned. And as if her parents’ actions had lit a fuse in her, she left everything behind—her name, her inheritance, her country, her seat at Seoul University where she would have studied medicine, her silk blouses, her chauffeur, her cook, her maid—to accompany Lee to the States. First to Oklahoma; then to Daly City, California; then to the Bronx, to end up working at a Laundromat, washing clothes at fifteen cents per pound. All those years, Lee wondered why she never left him. Only now, as he held her in his arms, did he understand that maybe her loyalty was nothing more than unwavering spite.

  He watched her now, her hands covering her face, and he imagined those very hands dragging the girl’s body into the empty lot in the middle of the night. He imagined his wife trying not to look at the girl’s face, a face that, even in the dark, would’ve reminded her of a younger Songmi. How could she do it, he asked himself, but then the answer hit him almost immediately. She had done it, as she had done everything, because she knew he couldn’t.

  She held out his shirt. Lee took it, got dressed, each layer of clothing helping him stand straight. A kind of armor that arrives only after one accepts all of one’s actions in life. And in Lee’s case, his inactions. Today, this moment, was not about truth or lies. It was only about whether one wanted to die with or without love. “You’re not a monster,” he finally said.

  She wiped her tears and then fixed his tie, the knot hitting his Adam’s apple.

  “There,” she said and stepped back for a look.

  Minutes from now, Lee will focus on his wife, his beautiful monster wife. “You be the strong one,” she’ll say, and he’ll guide her to the bed, straighten the folds of her dress as she lies on her side. First he’ll pour the gasoline on his half of the mattress, then around her, outlining her shape, before letting the clear solvent splash her legs, her trembling chest. The bright white dress will sag to a brown, and his wife will whimper like a child lost in the woods. The fumes will bend the air. Everything will turn to a sheet of glassine. He’ll sit on the bed and pour the entirety of the second can onto his head and shoulders, the gasoline showering the back of his neck at once cold and burning.

  He’ll grab the lighter. His wife will tug on his elbow and try to pull him down beside her. She’ll cry Please between tears and Lee will hold the lighter inches from his chest and understand that he has never loved his wife more than in this moment.

  Minutes after that, their studio apartment will be the brightest it has ever been. The mattress Lee and his wife have slept on for nearly a quarter of a century will go up in flames, the fire tickling the ceiling fan before melting the blades into taffy. People in the apartment above and adjacent will wake up to the smell of smoke. They’ll grab their photo frames, their immigration papers, their soda cans of cash, their cigarettes, their check-cashing cards, social security cards, bus cards, green cards, parole cards, their plastic rosaries, their food stamps, their eye-rubbing children. Sirens will wail. Firemen will sweat. The sun will rise but the sky will darken just above their building, and coughing tenants will be ushered across the street and they’ll stand there, in their bathrobes and socks, trying to figure out who the hell lived in apartment 1G.

  HAPPY

  Brad Watson

  WHEN I WAS a boy in Meridian, Mississippi, my mother, who’d thought she had a happy life of mid-twentieth-century homemaker ahead of her, had to go to work. I was five and not happy about it, but she went anyway. And though my father wasn’t making much money (sometimes none), and she wasn’t going to make much on her new job, she needed a caretaker for my little brother (then one and a half or two) and me, so she hired a maid.

  In the South then, if you were a middle-class or even lower-middle-class white family like us, you could hire a maid. The maid would be a black woman, maybe young, maybe not so young. Experience was good, so not too young was best. In any case, the reason a woman like my mother, a mother of very modest means, could hire a woman to look after her children—and cook, clean house, do laundry, handle discipline—five days a week, eight hours a day, was because these women came from a segment of our society in which women pretty much had two “honorable” livelihoods they could pursue: schoolteacher, or what everyone called a maid. (I know maid has long been a common term for a general housekeeper and child-care person. But when you apply it to a fully grown, usually married woman with children of her own, the word takes on a particularly onerous quality.) If the woman had a college education, she likely worked as a schoolteacher. There were jobs in the offices of black male professionals—businessman, dentist, doctor, merchant, etc. But there weren’t many of those jobs.

  If the woman did not have a college or even high school education, chances were she worked as a maid in a white household. And because the competition was pretty tough, and because black people had no economic or political power in those days, a white mother/head of household affairs could get away with paying her maid a phenomenally low sum.

  There came the day I was old enough to be standing next to my mother when she wrote out the check for our maid’s weekly pay.

  Even at that age—I must have been twelve or thirteen—I was flabbergasted. I won’t say how little it was, but I will say that even by then I knew that I
could make that much money mowing three yards, and I could make it in one day. I could make, mowing yards, in one day what our maid was paid for a forty-plus-hour week.

  And I said something about it. About how I couldn’t believe she paid the maid that little. My mother got angry. She got defensive. “That’s all I can afford to pay her!” she said, upset. And this may very well have been true. If I’d been able to mow four lawns a day five days a week for a month, I would have been able to make more than half of what my mother was making at the clinic where she worked. And she was, in the worst times, supporting a family of five on it.

  Still. I’d seen the run-down house where our maid lived with her family. It was pretty much a wooden shack on brick foundation posts. It had no running water. It may have had electricity, but I’m not sure. There was no grass in the yard (until sometime into the twentieth century, of course, no one in the South had grass in their yards except a few town people, so this had very recently been common among country folk, but still).

  I brooded over it. But of course I let it go. It wasn’t me paying the maid, who was still needed to look after my younger brother, and whom my mother still needed to help keep the house clean and the laundry washed. It wasn’t my call, finally.

  There came the day, though, when my mother accused our maid of stealing our (my and my brothers’) underwear. She’d noticed some underwear missing, more than once, and she came to the conclusion that the maid had to be stealing it. So she fired her.

  I remember the morning she fired her. We were backing out of the driveway in my mom’s economical three-on-the-tree small sedan when the maid came charging out of the house toward the car. Before we could pull away, she was on us, shouting into the window past my older brother sitting up front, saying to my mother, “Ms. Watson, I did not steal that underwear, you can’t accuse me of stealing, I’m not a thief, and you can’t call me a thief, you can fire me for whatever you want, but I’m not a thief!” My mother put the car into first gear and drove off. The maid stormed back into the house.