Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014

by Carmen Johnson

  I hate those things, too. Until recently, I was living with So-yeong in her apartment, which was old, dark, and dirty, like an abandoned ship on the verge of sinking. The fire escape with its rusted, broken railing was barely hanging on, and the building housed a poker den where salarymen who worked in a nearby office park would gather, their eyes bloodshot and ties loosened, and a piano school on the second floor where primary school students carrying little keyboards in their bags would show up like a relentless swarm of bugs once the deathly silence of midday had passed. The monotonous Czerny étude that would start to drone in the early evenings was probably overheard by a typist in the bathroom of a small office nearby, where she was touching up her lipstick and anxiously checking the clock. With the dark sunset reflecting in the bathroom mirror, she would turn and check how she looked from the back and then gather up her makeup and run back to her seat. She would still have fifteen minutes left to go before she could leave for the day.

  I keep going.

  “Do you remember those green apples, from the last time we took a trip?”

  Why am I suddenly thinking about those green apples?

  “Green apples? Oh, those horrible sour apples. They made my mouth pucker.”

  “I remember the women who were selling those apples. It was a shabby little street. The women were covered in dust and just watching the cars race down the highway. And they were all bundled up in thick scarves.”

  “What’s wrong with you? You’re always trying to shut me up by saying something ridiculous. Why can’t you take anything seriously?”

  “You know what I thought about back then? I thought about going back to that street someday and becoming one of those women who sell green apples.”

  “Instead of selling shirts in a department store?”

  He sounds a little hurt.

  “I don’t know why I thought that either. I just got this premonition that someday I would be old and poor like those women and wind up selling apples on a dusty highway. And terrible green apples at that. I would stand there until evening, until I was sure that no one was coming to buy my apples. Until it was completely dark, my face covered in a thick, hand-knit scarf, staring down a road that leads to some far-off place I’ll never reach.”

  Because life has not turned out the way I wanted it to. Because that’s how it always is—as a child, you get no love from your parents, and at school, you get bad grades and never catch anyone’s eye. And after you’re all grown up, you keep peeking in the door of the gynecology clinic, and then wait for an hour, and another hour, at the café where a man has promised to meet you, gulping down several cups of weak coffee before leaving alone in the dark. Then, to top it off, the cat that crosses your path one day on a highway with green apples turns out to be a black cat.

  The following afternoon, I bump into one of my cousins. She is eagerly picking out a necktie when she spots me and comes over to say hello.

  “I didn’t know you work here,” she says.

  “I didn’t tell anyone at home.”

  “Want to get some coffee?”

  She looks like she has a lot to tell me. I dread, and hate, this. Home, family, dropping out of college, runaway daughter—the words waver before my eyes. Everyone always wants to know why. They bring it up lightly, the way you would ask a child why she didn’t do her homework, then they light a cigarette, pull the ashtray closer, lean way back in the chair, stretch their legs out, and wait for me to answer. I hate it.

  “Do you have something to ask me?” I say.

  “No, I won’t ask any questions. I just wanted to know if you want to get coffee with me.”

  True to her word, we go for coffee. She tells me that since I left home, she’s married the medical student she was dating. Come to think of it, there is something about her that suggests a housewife.

  “Did you get married?” She raises her coffee cup to her lips.

  “No.”

  She slowly lowers the cup.

  “How’ve you been getting by?” she asks.

  “I’m managing okay. But don’t ask me where I’m living, and don’t tell me to call my parents.”

  “I thought you got married. I thought you ran away to be with a man your parents didn’t approve of. That’s what we all imagined. I heard you wrote it in a letter. This is a surprise.”

  I feel sorry to have disappointed them. I can’t tell her that I ran away simply because I felt like it.

  “Eun-gyeong told me she saw you in a car with a guy.”

  Eun-gyeong is my younger sister by two years.

  “She said he was wearing a denim jacket and sunglasses. You were sitting quietly next to him with a flower pinned to your dress. She said you two drove right by her, but you didn’t see her. I’m the only one she told. She was upset and said, ‘Why doesn’t she call home if she’s happily married now?’”

  “He’s just a friend. I don’t even see him anymore. Hey, you said you wouldn’t ask any questions.”

  “Sorry.” She sets the cup down hard.

  “Are you going to tell them I work here?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  This cousin, the daughter of my mother’s older sister, is the same age as me. We were close as children, and we even went to the same college. So we have been closer than friends. Now that she’s married to a doctor and well-off, she must pity me.

  “After you left home, you got an offer of marriage. You remember that brick house with the triangular roof, in the next neighborhood over? The matchmaker said that family’s son thought you were pretty and wanted to marry you. Your mom had to lie and say you’d moved to the provinces for work. She said you weren’t ready to get married yet.”

  I remember the guy. I used to run into him all the time at the bus stop on the way to school. He wasn’t particularly memorable. He was always pretending to read things like Newsweek. I was the kind of girl who felt defeated at the sight of pretty girls walking around confidently. I never trust anyone who tells me I’m pretty or says they like me. It’s the same insecurity I feel as when a teacher calls me by the wrong name on the first day of school. The night before I left home, I dropped bits of fish on the dinner table and broke a glass while washing the dishes. It was toward the end of summer vacation, and my report card had come to the house that day. Everyone was sweating, even with the fan turned on. My report card had one A and one D, and all the rest were Cs. The D was in statistics. My little sister Eun-gyeong was hiking in the mountains with her friends, and my older brother was irritated with everyone and everything because his girlfriend had just broken up with him. I hated statistics and hated my brother and hated my parents, who were watching TV with glum faces. Vacation would be over in a week, and classes would start again. Pretty girls of every shape and shade would fill the hallways and classrooms. I had finished washing the dishes and was in the yard clipping my fingernails. The sound of the nail clippers must have annoyed my brother because he stuck his head out the door and yelled at me to be quiet. My mother, who felt nothing for my father, discovered the glass I’d broken while doing the dishes and scolded me from inside the kitchen, as if she’d finally found the proper outlet for her frustration. Crickets chirped in the corner of the yard. I asked myself over and over, When will I ever get out of here? I had no hope of becoming a female doctor or simultaneous interpreter or even a modest office girl. I had always respected those women and looked up to them, as if they lived in a country that was off-limits to me. And I didn’t want to live like my older married cousin—marrying a man like my father or brother, eating the kimchi my mother made, pumping out babies nonstop. If I’d been cute, smart, or charming like Eun-gyeong, maybe people would’ve liked me more. I thought about the job application I had turned in a few weeks earlier for the sales position at the department store. My brother yelled from the other room for me to bring him coffee. I sat down at my desk and wrote this note to Eun-gyeong:

  Dear Eun-gyeong,

  I am leaving. I have
fallen in love, and I don’t want to live at home anymore.

  I paused for a moment and stared blankly at the words fallen in love. It wasn’t true. I wasn’t in love with anyone. That in and of itself made me sad. But I knew that Eun-gyeong would wonder why I left. The mere thought of loving someone who wasn’t one of my family members made me so happy, I felt like I could fly. My brother kept shouting for coffee, and my mother kept yelling at me. I went to the kitchen to boil water. In my memory of these events, everything is foggy and gray, like an old black-and-white movie. I dragged my feet over to the stove to put the kettle on and then moved even more slowly to get a coffee cup. My brother opened the door and yelled.

  “Who do you think you are? Is it too much to ask for a cup of coffee? You’re a woman, aren’t you? What do you think you’ll do once you’re married? I shouldn’t have to call for you all day long just to get a glass of water! You’re pretty stuck-up for someone with grades like yours.”

  My father said to my mother, “What’s wrong with her? She used to be a good girl. It’s your fault she turned out that way. All she does is sulk.”

  My mother’s face turned deathly pale. I witnessed all of this through the wide-open door of my parents’ room.

  “She takes after her aunt,” my mother said. “You know as well as I do how stubborn and empty-headed that younger sister of yours is. Besides, it’s not like I had her alone. Why do you blame everything on me?”

  It seemed I would never meet a man who would be sweet to me, a man who would hold my hand as we crossed a raging river, a man who would come to mind whenever I got sick. That’s what I thought about as I tipped the hot kettle over the coffee cup. If I ever did meet a man like that, I would think of him as the person in my note, the one I’d “fallen in love” with. On that night, before running away from home, I felt certain that just because practically every single person found someone to marry did not mean that they’d found a love as gentle as a spring breeze or that shook them up like a midsummer storm. I was certain of this. I also suspected that I stood among the have-nots in that respect. Brother, I thought, you may be able to strut around in front of us and take the last chicken leg for yourself and never once wash your own socks, but no matter how loudly you yell, you cannot stop me from leaving. I leaned against the rusted kitchen door and listened to my brother slurp his hot coffee for the last time.

  In the department store café, my cousin seems determined to not let me go. She doesn’t seem to care that I am working and that, unlike her, I need this job to get by.

  “Eun-gyeong is finishing college this year. She’s been taking design classes after school, too. She’s so clever. Your mother loves to brag that it didn’t cost her anything to send her to school. My brother Seop has been arguing with our mom about marriage. Right now they’re at a stalemate.”

  She twirls her coffee spoon between her pale fingers. In the afternoons, the café gets as crowded as a subway train on a rainy evening at rush hour. The clattering of china is constant, and the air is thick with noise and the languid smell of coffee like nausea. People keep stomping back and forth on the hardwood floor of the café, and I am anxious because Yuseon, who just started work the day before, is watching the shop alone.

  “Everything’s different now that everyone’s grown up. In the old days, all the cousins would get together every holiday to take a family portrait. Remember that shabby old photo studio on the edge of town? We used to huff and puff our way up three flights of stairs and stand in front of a dusty black velvet curtain, trying to catch our breath. Back when Grandma and Grandpa were alive.”

  “I have to get back to work. I can’t stay here all day with you. Come visit me again sometime. Just don’t tell anyone else. If you do, I won’t talk to you anymore.”

  My voice is firm. She pays for the coffee and follows me out of the café, looking hurt.

  “You’re shopping for a necktie, right?” I ask. “I’ll help you pick one out.”

  I want to be a little nicer to her. Also, I wonder if I’m too harsh, considering that we haven’t seen each other in so long.

  “No, it’s fine,” she says. “I was just window-shopping. I wasn’t planning to buy anything. Sometimes when I’m bored, I come here to look around.”

  I remember which photo studio she was talking about. Both of our families used to go there to have portraits taken. One summer, we all got together for a family portrait. I wore a new white, polka-dotted dress. I think I was in high school at the time. My cousin was very pretty with bright red cheeks and dewy lips. It might have been her brother Seop’s birthday. My aunt wanted a picture of all six cousins together. That was probably the last time we had our pictures taken at that studio. We stood in front of the camera—my sister Eun-gyeong, my brother, Seop, and another cousin who were both in college at the time, my older female cousin who was married, and me. Back then, I was fond of Seop because he was so different from my own brother, who was delicate, high-strung, and acted like a little prince when it came to food. Not that it made any difference now. A cousin isn’t something solid. Neither is family. We held hands and sat in a semicircle. From behind the camera, which was covered with a black cloth, the photographer set off something that flashed like a firecracker. I was sweating. It was an extremely hot day, and all the windows in the photo studio were shut tight, making it hard to breathe from the heat of the flash and the smell of old dust. We were each promised a copy of the photo. The hem of my sweat-soaked dress fluttered as I ran down the dangerously steep and narrow wooden steps of the photo studio. Behind me, my cousin shouted for me to wait and go with her to get popsicles. From the staircase of the dark photo studio, the white dust-covered street in the midsummer sun dazzled my eyes. I could just make out some elderly women walking slowly beneath light-colored parasols. We ran across the street to the store that sold ice cream and bought strawberry popsicles. The rest of the family slowly emerged at last from the photo studio, wiping their sweat with handkerchiefs. Seop saw us and waved. A dust-covered taxi whooshed past down the center of the street. The breeze from the passing car whipped up my hair and the hem of my skirt, and one of the old women who was standing under a parasol and waiting for the bus looked me over. In that moment, I was dazzling, too. I sat on the curb and leaned back against a white railing and looked at the woman. I closed my eyes. The bus arrived, and people got on the bus. The road emptied again to white. A premonition came over me—a vague sadness, as if this exact feeling, this same summer day, would come around again sometime. As punishment for sitting in the dirt in my brand-new tailor-made white dress, I wound up having to scrub that dress clean by hand.

  He liked to remind me of our first phone call. It was before we’d started seeing each other. He’d met me only once, but he wanted to see me again so badly that he went outside every night to the phone booth in front of his family’s apartment at two in the morning and paced back and forth, drinking a can of beer. After several days of agonizing, he finally got up the courage to call and was surprised and a little disappointed when I wasn’t put off by it but instead answered the phone as if he were a male cousin calling. I wished I had a story like that of my own. But it was different for me. That autumn afternoon, when we returned to the city from our long drive, the sky was so clear and pure blue that I erased all memory of the bitter aftertaste of those green apples. Everyone I saw looked beautiful, and because it was early afternoon on the last day of a long holiday weekend, the bright expanse of sycamore and cherry trees lining the road was like a painting that you wanted to keep looking at for no reason. I took out my sketchbook and started drawing.

  “It doesn’t make you carsick?” he asked.

  “It’s just a sketch,” I said. “And anyway, it’s not me drawing but a stranger inside of me who compels me to draw. When that happens, I have no choice but to draw, even while driving.”

  “Why do you talk like that?” He was always criticizing me for not sounding more like his mother or older sister. “Why can’t you j
ust say, ‘I feel like drawing, so I have to draw.’ I think you like it when I can’t understand you.”

  I closed the sketchbook with a snap. He hated it when I did that. I did it on purpose. What happened to the docile, slightly sexy, five-foot-four shopgirl he thought he’d met? Me, the girl who never mended the buttons on his dress shirts or pierced her ears so that she could wear the same hoop earrings all the other girls wore, who spent her days off shut inside a cramped room all afternoon with unwashed hair, standing in front of an easel, drawing apples on a tray.

  “It’s not like you’re a real painter,” he said quietly. “And those apples are too green. They should be light green with hints of reddish-pink. When you draw them that way, they look creepy.”

  He once admitted that he’d felt disappointed to discover that I didn’t know how to make pickled radishes or grilled fish, and wouldn’t sweetly knot his neckties for him like I did when I was working. I’d told him I wasn’t looking for a man who would be my rock in life. That was another shock to him.

  “If you like painting that much, shouldn’t you be a painter instead of working in a department store? If you don’t want to live an ordinary life, then why are you dating a good-for-nothing like me, instead of finishing college and meeting someone in the same league as you?”

  He steered the car toward an empty office park; the cold, bright sunlight was blinding. I didn’t respond. A girl in her late teens looked our way, the crisp sound of her shoes ringing as she walked quickly along the border between the shadow of the buildings and the bright sunlight. Her cheeks, pale with makeup, were beautiful. Fallen leaves that hadn’t yet lost their color skittered around the hem of her skirt.

  The girl’s black hair swayed around her pale cheeks. She disappeared into the shadow between two buildings, covering her face with the book she carried in her hand as if to ward off the wind. The street was empty again. People had not yet returned from their road trips to the coast or the mountains of Gangwon province, where the leaves were still frantically changing color.