“Now what are you doing with those?”
He was on his way outside again when my wife took the scissors from him.
Was that all she could do, snatch the scissors from the boy? It gave the impression that she was dull-witted. She tossed the scissors aside, but the three-year-old went after them again as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
My wife pushed the boy aside: “You little nuisance, what’s a boy doing playing with scissors?”
Unfazed, he found his ball in the far corner of the room and headed outside with it.
“Play inside, you,” said my wife. Then she stuck her knitting needle in the bun of her hair and mumbled to herself, “It’s about time you pooped,” and she led the boy to the chamber pot.
By now the boy was more than able to answer nature’s call by himself, but my wife treated him as if he were younger. Granted, that’s the way my own mother treated me—and still does.
The boy strained for a time but produced nothing.
“Remember, if you do it in your pants, I’ll spank you,” my wife said.
The boy didn’t seem concerned and began to play with the ball.
I produced two coppers from my pocket and tossed them in front of the boy. “Son, I want you to go outside and play.”
The boy looked more surprised than my wife. This had never happened before, and he looked back and forth from my wife to the money.
“Tell him to pick it up!” I said.
“Yes, pick it up,” said my wife.
“I’ll give you some more in a bit. Now go out and play.”
This surprised the boy again, and the ball rolled out of his hand.
A piece of sorghum stalk had come to rest in the room across the courtyard. The boy had probably been playing with sorghum stalks.
Hand trembling, Father flicked the piece of stalk aside. His hand continued to tremble as he placed it on his knee.
“And where have you been gadding about?”
Finding fault is Father’s job, and at home he has to do it whenever he can.
“Why don’t you stay put and sweep the yard or something if you don’t have anything else to do?”
I observed the fingers of Father’s left hand, which continued to tremble even after he had rested it on his knee. Father’s frowning face turned toward Mother.
“I keep telling you you’re spoiling him and still you give him money.”
My mother’s large frame was slumped over as she sat. Her moist eyes looked up, then lowered. For some reason I didn’t understand, Mother was scared of Father.
And then Father muttered to himself, “I’ve never seen an only son who cares so little about family matters.” He sighed.
Along with his fault-finding Father had, not too long before, started feeling sorry for himself. The wrinkles in his face seemed always to have been there, but now they were deeper.
I didn’t feel like letting Father feel sorry for himself, and said, “Educating your children and planting grain are two different things.”
Usually Father would respond to such words by shouting “Unfilial son!” But not this time. I was displeased, though, by the absence of that response, so I said, “We don’t always reap what we sow.”
Father would certainly have been within his rights to take his wooden pillow to the head of a son who made such untoward comments.
Mother’s face blanched in fear. “Now, child.” She was pleading with me to desist.
Still I carried on: “No matter how Father tries to get me to harvest the crop, it won’t work. I’ve no mind to work in the fields and paddies.”
But Father wasn’t shouting today and he wasn’t throwing the wooden pillow. Just the fingers of his left hand trembled.
Mother’s face, cocked at me, changed color as she grew more fearful. Her cheekbones were more prominent, and from the side her face looked older.
Mother’s reddish eyes tended to pool with tears if she peered at something too long. That’s why she was forever dabbing at her eyes.
Mother pinched the end of the thread and tried to stick it through the eye of the needle. She missed. She moistened the end of the thread, twisted it between her fingers, and tried again. It was as if she were waiting for me to help her thread the needle. But I kept to myself.
Mother brought the end of the thread to the eye of the faintly glinting needle, then gave up. “Here, you do it.”
I held the needle against the lighter background of the rice-paper door panel, threaded it, and returned it to her.
“You’ve been good at threading needles since you were young. You probably started doing it around the age Changson is now,” Mother said while she knotted the end of the thread. And then: “Is something worrying you?” She turned her tired eyes my way.
I shook my head, noticing as I did so that numerous fine wrinkles had appeared in Mother’s eyelids. I found myself wondering which of them, Mother or Father, would pass away first. Maybe Father, and it wouldn’t take much.
As Mother began her stitching she said, “Is it because you don’t like your wife?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, the fact is, there’s something about the color of her face. . . . And she’s not much to look at, is she? Too bad she couldn’t change her looks with yours—you’ve had a very pretty face ever since you were a child. But it wouldn’t do to abandon her, no it wouldn’t. And it won’t do to mistreat a wife who’s produced a child. I’ve never seen a family that got on well when the wife was mistreated, no I haven’t.”
“You know I don’t earn enough to feed one woman properly, let alone two. What’s more, a healthy wife has her own kind of beauty.”
Those words must have reminded Mother of the time Father kept a concubine, because she turned up the hem of her skirt and dabbed at her eyes.
A spider was descending from the corner of the ceiling. I grew dizzy looking at it.
One day I was watching the spider weave its web on the ceiling.
“Did you know,” I asked my wife, “that a spider will devour its mother? And supposedly if you eat a lot of roasted spiders you won’t feel dizzy and you’ll put on weight.”
My wife kept her head lowered instead of answering. Her hair was especially dark and also thick. Long, drooping tresses of hair were probably the fashion when she was a girl.
After a while she replied, head still bowed, “I don’t know anything—I’m ignorant.”
“Your hair looks darker these days. How about if I eat some spiders and see if I can get strong like you?”
Her thick earlobes flushed. Suddenly I noticed that the hair in her bun had been trimmed.
“Why do you make your hair so ugly when you cut it?” I couldn’t help saying.
She hung her head even lower.
The spider that had been weaving its web scuttled into hiding in the corner of the ceiling. A single thin strand of web was left to dangle in the air.
“You better not let me see you do that to your hair again!”
Before I knew it my wife was weeping, her shoulders heaving.
Wasn’t Mother going to cry too, as she usually did at times like this? I asked myself.
“For heaven’s sake—I can’t even open my mouth without somebody starting to cry. I feel stifled, staying home all the time,” I said, as Father did on such occasions, and then I left.
The street is so long. I feel dizzy. Before my tired eyes balloons fly dizzily. Their surface is moist and I can see rainbows all over them.
The rainbows twist and fly along with the balloons. One rainbow collides with another and both dissolve. Balloons, popped and unpopped. I paw the air in front of me, but from the place where the balloons pop, all sorts of new balloons float into the air. Balloons, balloons, balloons—when enough of them fly into the air, the rainbows dissolve. Like foam spit by fish. Foam, foam, foam, rainbows, rainbows, balls, balls. . . . I’m thirsty.
There must be a teahouse around here. Water. Ah, that’s better. A young man tells me that life is like collecting streamside pebbles at sunset. I leave him like I would leave a pebble, and emerge from the tea house.
Outside a house-front shop a squirrel is scampering on a wheel inside a cage. The wheel makes a circle. The circles keep accumulating. Circles, circles, circles. . . . Finally only one circle remains. That’s why the scampering squirrel is now a stationary squirrel. I want to lie down. Home we go.
I was lying down.
“Who is better-looking, Grandfather or Grandmother?” my wife asked our boy.
“Grandfather,” the boy drawled. No doubt this was the first lesson in cunning that my own mother had given me.
“Grandmother or Mother?”
With his chin the boy indicated my wife: “Mommy.”
Her earlobes flushed.
The boy answered after his own fashion, no matter what she tried to teach him, so she couldn’t help being embarrassed.
My wife glared at the boy and asked again: “Who?”
“Grandmother,” the boy drawled.
Often my wife followed by questioning the boy about herself and myself. The boy would go along with her and answer, as instructed, that it was I who was better-looking.
But this time I sat up and asked first: “Who’s better-looking, Daddy or Mommy?”
The boy remained still, then gazed at my wife.
“Me?” I asked.
He began to cry, this boy who normally didn’t cry even when my wife snatched the scissors from him and pushed him away.
“And who’s better looking, Daddy or Baby? It’s Baby—this much.”
I spread my arms wide. But there was only emptiness to embrace.
The room across the courtyard was littered with crumbs from the cookie our boy had eaten.
Mother, sitting by herself, picked up the crumbs and ate them, then said, “It’s looking like rain—don’t tell me the rainy season is here already.”
“Maybe so.”
“The wheat must have ripened by now.”
It was a cloudy day, but the mention of ears of wheat made me feel nostalgic for the first time in a while.
“Do you realize what a stir you caused that night you got so sick gobbling wheat off the stalks?”
She looked in my direction for a time, then with the back of her hand wiped the tears squirting from her eyes. “You got scared within an inch of your life, and then the next night you went right back out and did it again. I was terribly worried.”
“Did I used to wander the fields back then?”
“Yes, and you didn’t come back till dark. I worried so much. By the way, your father wants you to go down to the countryside and take care of the harvest. I wonder how you’re ever going to last even a few days in the country—there isn’t much variety in the food, and the insects have always feasted on you. I’m afraid you won’t be able to tolerate it. But whatever your father tells you, just keep quiet and don’t talk back. I’ll do the talking. Before we die, you need to learn something about managing a family. We’re not going to live forever, you know.”
“There you go again, talking about dying.”
“When you grow old like us, that’s all you think about—except for the grandchildren.”
I found the beginning of a line that our boy had probably drawn on the wall, and wondered if, when he was older, he’d have the same conversation with his mother that I was having now with mine. That wouldn’t do, I decided, and in my imagination I forcefully shook my head no.
My wife was in the family room unraveling a skein of thread that our boy appeared to have tangled up. Beside her the boy was by himself, playing with his ball.
I looked down at him and said to my wife, “If I go down to the countryside to help with the harvest and come back with my face all sunburned, all I’ll have to do is look at him and he’ll start crying.”
The boy looked in my direction; he seemed to have forgotten his ball.
Before I knew it, there was my wife bringing the ties of her jacket to her eyes again.
The thing that aggravated me was not so much her crying at the drop of a hat as it was the dirtiness of those jacket ties.
Head lowered, she blurted, “If you want me to go live somewhere else, I will.”
“Stop touching your eyes with those dirty things.”
She immediately let go of the ties.
“But even if I did, part of me will always be here.”
“So I should leave? And how would I survive?” So saying, I laughed for the first time in a long while.
My wife’s shoulders heaved, but she wept silently.
I tilted back the mirror on the dressing table beside her. A portion of the ceiling filled the mirror. I tilted the mirror forward and my wife appeared.
My wife in the mirror spoke to herself: “The one I feel sorry for is the boy.” And she proceeded to weep more sorrowfully than the situation demanded.
The boy was cutting up a scrap of cloth with the scissors as if oblivious to it all.
Mother probably said the same thing to yours truly every time Father went to visit his concubine.
I’ll see if I can feel sorry for myself, I thought. But then I considered both the self that wanted to feel sorry for himself and the self that was being felt sorry for. Which was my real self?
And with Father feeling sorry for himself and not fault-finding these days, which was my real father?
His latest refrain went something like this: “As long as I’m alive you’ll never be able to do as you want, because I worked too hard for what I’ve earned to turn it over to you now,” followed immediately by something like, “Which is not to say I’ll be living that much longer.”
The fingers of his left hand trembled more now, as if to express the long suffering he had experienced in making a success of himself.
Beside him, hunched over and worrying as always, Mother said, “When we’re dead you can do things your own way. I’m sure you’ll have your own thoughts about raising Changson.”
Father merely swallowed. His neck looked so slender.
Once again I played with the notion of which of them would pass on first. But when my thoughts reached the point that upon their passing, the responsibility for our family life would rest with me, I felt a stinging in my chest.
Father and Mother mustn’t pass away, they mustn’t.
“Changson, fetch me that broom,” said Mother to our boy, who was playing with his ball.
I picked up the broom beside me and held it out in front of the boy. Mother stretched out her hand for it. I ignored her and offered the broom to the boy.
He hesitated before accepting it, then with an effort, as if it was too heavy for him, he passed it on to Mother.
Father and Mother mustn’t pass away, they mustn’t.
Father was feeling sorry for himself. “I had gravestones made for us, seeing as how you wouldn’t have a mind to do it yourself,” he murmured.
Who else but yours truly, though, would be the one to have the dates of their passing carved on those gravestones?
In the end, I couldn’t let Father get away with thinking about death and feeling sorry for himself. So like him I murmured, loud enough for him to hear, “I’ll probably end up losing the land, family burial ground and all—I don’t even know what’s ours anymore.”