by Sonya Chung
“Just a minute, Benny. Go back downstairs. I’ll be down.”
“Hurry up! You’re not even supposed to be up here without us.”
Hannah closed her eyes, leaned on her hands and wrists on the countertop. She counted to three, slowly, the way her swim coach had taught her, to calm herself before a race.
“Benny?” She’d managed to tone her voice down, solicitous now.
“What.”
“Get Veda for me. Now.” Benny paused for a moment, then sprinted down the stairs, excited. Soon Hannah heard them both, a four-footed stampede, ascending.
“Are you okay?” Veda’s voice sounded concerned; it filled Hannah with gratitude.
“I’m letting you guys in. Benny, you have to be quiet and calm.” She had no choice; who knew what trouble Benny would get into otherwise.
She opened the door and stood there, let the children see. She held a wadded-up piece of toilet paper to her eyebrow.
“Oh,” Veda said.
“What? What?” Benny said.
“Here,” Hannah said. She handed Veda the scissors and sat down on the hard, lidded toilet seat.
Veda took the scissors and cocked her head, placid and thoughtful. Then she said: “It’s going to be kind of … short.”
“I wanna be the barber!” Benny shouted, seeing the passing of the scissors and gradually understanding.
“Be quiet, Benny. This is your fault.” Hannah spoke through her teeth. Her father spoke like this when he was very angry, which was rare, and thus potent. Benny caught the sharpness of Hannah’s tone, crossed his arms and pouted. Hannah ignored him. “It’s okay, V. Just even it out. Small snips, little by little.”
“I did this for Amy’s salon Barbie head once. Your hair is kind of different, though.”
“I know. So go slow. Small snips.”
The operation went on for what felt like a long time, slow, and silent, and tense.
“What are these scissors usually used for?” Hannah asked in a near whisper. She needed to breathe, and to break the tension.
“My dad’s beard. He’s not supposed to leave them out, though. He might get hold of them.” Veda pointed an elbow at Benny, who was sitting on the counter now, opening and smelling every jar and bottle within his reach.
Hannah had noticed that Charles had been growing a beard and mustache, seemingly migrating hair from head to face; she’d noticed, though she did not wonder why.
Veda worked slowly, carefully. She seemed to be cutting one strand of hair at a time. Every time Benny moved or made like he was going to say something, Hannah flashed him a look. She didn’t know she had that look in her; it felt good to know that she did.
Veda stepped back and laid the scissors down on the Formica. She tilted her head, serious. Then she nodded. Hannah stood and turned to the mirror, put on her glasses. The bangs were very short—shorter than Jami Eisenberg’s or Jessica Taft’s, much shorter than Phoebe Cates’s—but wispy at the ends, and even. It was a little girl’s style, like a doll, or a cartoon; but it looked … stylish, too. “Pretty,” Veda said.
“Ew, she is not,” Benny said. He was playing with the open scissors, stroking the flat sides with his fingers like a pet hamster. Hannah let him. Then she had an idea.
“Here, Benny, you want to try at being barber? Here’s a piece in back; you can try cutting it. Be careful, though. Just a little snip.” She held out a lock of hair from underneath that wouldn’t show. “If I let you, though, you have to be good and clean up here, okay? Just like the barber. And,” she said, now leaning away from him, withholding the precious lock and dead serious, “let’s not talk about this with your mom and dad.” Benny nodded and held up the scissors, primed like a wind-up toy. Hannah looked to Veda, who shrugged her little shoulders. Maybe he would keep his promise, maybe not, they both knew. It was worth a try. Hannah leaned over and let Benny snip. His eyes were wide and a little crazy. “Okay, Benny, now you can sweep up.” Benny hopped to. Hannah got the broom and dustpan from the hall closet and handed it to him. “Make sure to get all the little hairs, too,” she said. Benny set to work; he seemed focused. Hannah let out a breath, then she and Veda went downstairs.
When Charles came home, he had a big bag of groceries, and another smaller shopping bag. He told them hot dogs for dinner, and Benny cheered loudly. The boy was easily distracted from one thing to the next, and Hannah was grateful. From the smaller bag Charles pulled out three T-shirts, “from work.” Hannah knew now that he worked for the Washington Redskins, in charge of security at the stadium. Or maybe he wasn’t in charge, but he worked for the man in charge. One of the shirts was maroon, another mustard yellow, the third white. He gave the maroon one to Benny, the yellow one to Veda, and the white one he held out to Hannah. “Thanks for helping out in the evenings,” Charles said. “And with everything.”
Hannah took the T-shirt and said, not looking at him, “Thank you. I mean, you’re welcome. And thank you.” She pulled down on a strand of her bangs.
“That’s number 28. Darrell Green, defensive back. Great athlete, first-round draft pick out of Texas A&M; all instincts and speed.” He looked down, embarrassed suddenly by his enthusiasm.
The children put their T-shirts on over top their clothes. “Put yours on,” Veda said. Hannah pulled the shirt over her head and struggled to pull it down over her tank top. It was a bit small, a child’s size large.
“Your boobs are bursting,” Benny said. Veda slapped his head, not too hard but not soft either.
“Knock it off, Benny,” Charles said. Hannah’s face flushed. Every day it seemed Benny acquired a new inappropriate expression. Yesterday it was bitch on wheels.
Hannah crossed her arms and pulled off the T-shirt. “Let’s go,” she said, grabbing Benny by the arm. “Bath time.”
“Dinner in twenty minutes. Don’t play around, or nothing for you.”
Upstairs Hannah ran the water and waited for Benny to undress. She eyed herself in the mirror, sideways in profile. That good feeling, a powerful feeling, came back to her. “Get in,” she said to Benny. “You heard your father. Don’t play around.”
9.
In August the family would go on vacation. They had been going for years to Rehoboth Beach, where Alice’s maternal aunt owned a condo. Over breakfast, Alice suggested to Charles that they bring Hannah.
“Why would we do that?” There was something in Charles’s voice. They both noticed, but neither knew what it was.
“The children like her. It could make things easier. You’re always saying vacation is more work than work.”
“I wouldn’t say Benny ‘likes’ her.”
Alice knew that Charles wasn’t, in the end, going to refuse; but the discussion would continue. It was Charles’s need to argue against any idea that was not his own. “Maybe not. But he listens to her. He’s calmer. She has that … stoicism. For a girl her age, she’s unflappable.”
Charles wondered what this was about. With Alice, nothing was ever what it appeared. She wanted the girl to come along for her own private purposes. She always had private purposes. “Won’t that be expensive? Full time for a week?”
“We won’t pay her. We’re taking her to the beach. Room and board. Clearly her own parents won’t be taking her anywhere this summer; all she does is go to the pool and the mall, as far as I can tell. She seems very alone. Her mother is a good worker, they say, but not very … warm. I’m sure a week at the beach will be a treat for Hannah. Have you noticed how rarely she smiles?”
In fact he had. Charles hadn’t thought of Hannah as lacking in cheer so much as filled with a gravity beyond her years. It seemed to Charles that Hannah now looked after his children not because they paid her to, but because they needed looking after; that Hannah had come to understand this. What he also felt, but could not have expressed in words, was that Hannah looked after all of them.
“I thought you were just saying you liked the fact that she’s calm. Now you want her to smile more?”
<
br /> Alice snorted a nervous laugh, then started to stack the breakfast dishes. The children had not cleared theirs, because Alice had told them to go outside and play so she and Dad could talk.
Charles watched Alice. She always busied herself when he’d hit upon something she didn’t like to acknowledge, when she felt exposed. And now, he saw it. Or thought he did. What this was about. Alice’s purposes.
When Veda was two, Alice had announced one day that she wanted to adopt—from an orphanage in Seoul where one of the DoD teachers she knew had volunteered. Charles thought she’d lost her mind. Alice had been home all day every day with Veda since she was born, sometimes alone all night when he worked the night shift. She was only twenty-four, Charles twenty-two, and they’d known each other six months when Alice got pregnant. When she told him, she was past three months along already. She’d known for longer and had been planning to have an abortion. Alice never said so, but still Charles knew. He didn’t know what had changed Alice’s mind, but regardless, he was determined to take responsibility—as his own father hadn’t, as some of his fellow soldiers hadn’t.
Adopting a Korean baby? Charles didn’t even know Alice wanted another baby. She was on the pill, as far as he knew. Things were just starting to settle down, he was doing fine at work. Alice was coming unraveled, he thought. When she brought it up, she’d acted entitled and guilty at the same time. Like when she talked about her time in the Peace Corps. Charles wondered if this was about her family, defying them. Alice had told him all about their Florida plantation roots, her father’s ambition, flying the coop to go north, to Dartmouth, where he was now professor emeritus. Dr. Nicholas Weaver Sr. was a supply-side economist, former advisor to the President’s council, board chairman of a major energy company. His wife, Alice’s stepmother, was a curriculum consultant to Christian grade schools.
When Alice started to show, they knew they had to leave Seoul; Charles would leave the Army, they would get married, and they would move back to Uncle Marvin’s house in Pleasant Plains. It was all they had, Charles’s inheritance (Alice did not want to ask for money from her father—who might or might not have given it—and on this, at least, Charles and Alice agreed). Essie and Marvin were both in the ground, along with Charles’s brother Bobby. Derrick, the oldest, in jail, and Carl somewhere in Atlanta with a restraining order filed against him. Charles’s sister, Rhea, a middle-school teacher who lived in Prince George’s County with her much-younger husband, had written to Charles regularly and said she looked forward to meeting Alice and the arrival of the baby.
He had the job offer from the Redskins, which came through the staff sergeant who liked him—full time with benefits, junior assistant to the Manager of Gate Security. It was a good job, opportunities for advancement; Charles would take it, of course. It wasn’t as if he and Alice could just pick a city or neighborhood anywhere on the map where this rainbow family would be accepted (if such a place existed) and then miraculously make a life there. Charles worried for his baby daughter. For her, little V, he would put his head down, do right, and make a family.
Adopting a Korean orphan, any orphan, was all wrong, for all of them. Was Alice serious?
Apparently, she was not. She dropped the notion nearly as quickly as she’d raised it. A year later Alice was pregnant with Benny, and the subject never came up again.
Alice stood and cleared the table. She wore denim cutoff shorts and a green tank top with no bra. Her breasts and buttocks had become flat and flaccid, her belly ample, but her legs were shapely and solid. Her strawberry hair had begun to gray when she turned thirty, and now, at thirty-three, it was brassy like wheat, but full and wavy, and she wore it a little unkempt. Her eyes were often open wide in a startled look.
Moments like these Charles pitied Alice. Her mother had died young and her father remarried a woman who wanted nothing to do with her. She left home for college and never turned back, chose her way farther and farther from her past. She was always somewhere into the future in her head, planning the next move. Scheming. Did she even know she did this? Did she ever consider what these schemes she thought up meant? Charles didn’t think on it for too long. He’d stopped trying in earnest to figure Alice out a long time ago.
* * *
Alice felt her jaw harden, felt Charles watching her. She turned the faucet on and started to wash. He won’t refuse, she thought. Just needs to make everything more difficult, needs always to be trying me for some crime or another. Alice focused on the dishes, scrubbed at dried egg yolk, which Charles never cleaned completely when he did the dishes. She scrubbed harder; she always felt better after completing a task thoroughly. When the dishes were done, Alice turned to Charles; he was reading the sports. He took his time more and more before leaving for work these days. She remembered when he left the house at 7:15, his collars ironed and eyes bright with purpose. She remembered feeling Charles’s absence the moment he left, like a drop in temperature, and looking forward to seeing him at the end of the day, a little more rumpled and worn, but pleasingly spent from a day’s work. Now, he lingered until 8:30, sometimes quarter to nine. She knew better than to ask.
“So,” Alice said, smoothing down her hair with damp hands. “You’ll ask her tonight?”
Charles raised his eyes, a stern look on his face.
That’s just his face, Alice had told herself for years; and yet still sometimes it cut her.
Charles said, “Won’t you be seeing her this afternoon?”
“I have to stop at the bank and the post office on my way out. I won’t have time to talk.”
What is this, Charles thought. She wants me to do it, to invite the girl. She wants to win. Well, fine then. He didn’t mind. He liked the girl just fine, smile or no smile. She wasn’t a lost orphan, she was a good-looking girl, provided for, a little odd maybe. Smart, observant girls usually were. Charles could see it a little already: playing with her looks and not quite easy in her body, which was clearly developing (he’d noticed her shoulders the other day, and how toned she was in the torso from all that swimming). Rhea had been like that—quiet and competent, awkward all the way through her teens, but she blossomed after that, found her own womanly style, unshowy.
This girl, Hannah Lee, she knew their family now. She was one of them. A family like theirs—maybe all families, Charles thought—resembled the Mob: loyal by virtue of silent collusion. Hannah understood the code, and embraced it naturally.
If Alice wanted to think of the babysitter as a needy child, let her. Let her think she’s had a true triumph. “Sure,” Charles said. “I’ll talk to her.”
10.
The car ride was long, and hot. They’d meant to leave at 8:30 on Saturday morning, before weekend traffic hit, but Benny had thrown a tantrum over wanting to bring all of his sandbox trucks instead of just one, and he’d locked himself in his room. They were delayed a crucial hour and a half.
Hannah had arrived, with her canvas duffel and school backpack, in the middle of the crisis. When they finally got Benny to open the door, half of his braids had been pulled out, the left side of his head now a willowy treetop of loose Afro. Hannah didn’t ask what happened, if the tantrum precipitated the hair, or vice versa; or maybe they were two completely separate crises, which you couldn’t put beyond Benny. And what did it matter, anyway: Benny loved those braids, and he’d done it to himself—undone himself—that was clear.
Hannah helped to hold Benny still while Alice and Veda finished pulling out the right-half braids. Then, while Veda gathered the brown bush into a low ponytail, Hannah tied it with an elastic. No one noticed the section on the left side that was just a little shorter than the right, nor the scissor tips peeking out from beneath Benny’s pillow.
Hannah was excited. She was going to the ocean. At first she worried about missing swim practice, but when she told her coach, he said that swimming in the ocean, against the current, was the best training. But be careful of the undertow, he’d said. It can be strong, and when it grabs
you, it happens fast and all at once.
Hannah didn’t exactly know what undertow was. Her parents’ idea of a family vacation was a kimbap-and-watermelon picnic by the Washington Monument, or an outing to the shopping mall the day after Christmas, when all the sales were on—twenty-five dollars each for Hannah and James to spend. Last year she’d bought Ocean Pacific surf shorts and a big velvet bow-tie barrette with her money, both of which sat in the backs of drawers; they seemed childish to her now.
Hannah was also excited because he—Charles Lee—had been the one to ask. “Alice thought it would be good for the kids,” he’d said. “Since they’re used to you now.” Charles had moved about the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors, looking for something he never did find. In his asking, he expressed somehow both reluctance and eagerness at once. Hannah did not know what this mixed expression meant, but she was always seeking out signs of their understanding—that private “it.” She still believed in it, had no inclination to doubt: she was certain Charles sensed it too, but he was being more careful. It was the carefulness that Hannah took note of, and held, like a fragile robin’s egg in her palms.
This wasn’t a mere crush. A crush was how Teresa flushed purple and buried her face in Hannah’s shoulder whenever Mr. Stevens walked by in the halls at school. This was different; Hannah’s heart beat harder, but also slower, in her chest when Charles was in the room. She felt more alert, but also calmer, around him, as if a blurriness in her sight had cleared, a buzzing in her ear had silenced. Hannah had no name for her watchfulness toward Charles, and thus she treasured it all the more.
It was ninety degrees, and humid. Their late departure put them square into traffic at noon, the sun high and strong. The old Chevy wagon, no air conditioning, crawled across the Bay Bridge. Benny sat in the middle, asleep on Hannah’s shoulder, his warm sticky cheek adhered to her skin. His head was a block of concrete, and he’d already drooled on her, but Hannah bore it: a sleeping Benny was better for everyone. Once, she caught sight of Charles’s aviator glance toward them in the mirror. Charles was grateful, Hannah knew this; or thought she did.
