AS IF HAMBURGERS WEREN’T BAD ENOUGH, In Young Kim was now being subjected to a thin, triangular piece of bread covered with melted cheese and tomato sauce. She picked it up like the way she’d seen her husband do it, folded it in half by the crust, but she hadn’t counted on the orange-colored oil dripping off the crease and plopping onto the paper plate.
Her kids had called it pizza, an unpronounceable word. The best she could do was peejaa because there was no such sound as ts in Korean, but this was not important. When it came to food, only one aspect mattered, and this particular dish tasted greasy and salty and just plain awful. If only she could chase each fatty bite with a mouthful of kimchi—but that wasn’t a possibility.
In Young placed the slice back on the plate, and as if alive, the piece slowly unfurled back to its original flatness.
Her husband said they couldn’t eat kimchi at the store because it stunk. Americans found the smell unappetizing, though nothing disgusted In Young more than to walk by the cheese aisle in the supermarket. How anyone ate something so rank and continued to live was anybody’s guess.
Usually she brought discreet Korean meals from home to the store, but the little refrigerator in the stockroom was broken, so she was stuck with disagreeable American meals for one more day. Her husband would drive into the city tomorrow and return with another fridge, probably used and in need of cleaning, but as long as it worked, In Young didn’t care.
“Hi,” a male voice said from above.
She was sitting at the front counter where her husband usually sat because he’d taken the kids for ice cream. He promised they’d be back in fifteen minutes, so if anybody asked anything she didn’t understand, she was to tell them to wait. Before leaving, her husband had made her say the usual phrase, to make sure she remembered it.
“Fifteen minute please,” she’d begrudgingly repeated for him. It seemed like a silly thing to do, but now, looking at the people in front of her, a man and a woman who were about to say words that meant nothing to her, she was glad he’d made her practice.
“Hello,” she replied.
She thought she’d seen the man before, and his white shirt and pants and dirty apron provided confirmation. He was the chef at the restaurant where her husband and Mr. Hong met for their Saturday lunches. The last time she’d seen him, which was maybe a couple of weeks ago, he had started to grow a beard, and now it was a big, bushy thing. He was a large man to begin with, and the beard somehow made him appear even larger.
“I’m Jake,” he said, offering his hand. “Hometown Grill? This is Martha, my wife.”
“Yes,” In Young said.
“I need your help,” he said, then scratched his beard. Tiny follicles fell from his cheeks, and as In Young tracked their descent down onto the counter, she caught his wife watching, too, and her obvious disdain. When Martha turned away, In Young noticed she was pregnant. Very pregnant, probably eight months.
“I’m looking for a lantern,” Jake said, “kind of a small one, about yay big.”
He gestured an open circle with his huge hands, but In Young remained clueless as to what he wanted. Yet, instead of uttering the rehearsed phrase that asked the customer to wait fifteen minutes for her husband’s return, she found herself wanting to help this couple, and maybe help herself, too. She was going to have to learn this language if she wanted to make her life here, and the only way to do that was to just do it.
“Lantern,” Martha said, also gesturing a circular object.
“Lantern?” In Young said. “I don’t know lantern.”
“Oh,” Jake said. “Jeez.”
“Over there,” Martha said, pointing at the back right corner of the shop. There were a few round-shaped objects there, but the one that stuck out was a threesome of lighted orbs hanging in a line off the ceiling.
From afar they looked like flawless spheres of light, but standing directly below them broke their smooth illusion. The lanterns were actually made of many thin aluminum rings, glued half an inch apart to the inner curved surface of the rice paper. A green sticker stuck at the bottom of each reported their size: twelve, twenty-four, and thirty-six inches.
“That’s it! The twelve is what we need,” Jake said.
Twelve. Numbers she understood.
“Okay,” In Young said.
This was a part of the store she didn’t know well, but she’d seen her husband root through a box behind the eight-paneled screen, and sure enough, that’s where the lanterns were, collapsed into flat round discs and stacked vertically, like LPs in a record shop.
“Okay,” she said again, pointing to the box.
“Fantastic!” Jake said.
“One, two, three?”
“Huh?”
“She’s asking if you want one, or two, or three,” Martha said. “Come on, Jake, I’m tired, let’s get it and go.”
In Young looked twice through the box to make sure, but unfortunately, it was the only size they didn’t have in stock.
“No twelve,” she said.
“No problem,” Jake said. “Thanks so much for looking. Maybe when you get them in again, you can let me know? Our restaurant is at the end of . . .”
“Christ, Jake,” Martha said, cutting him off. “She hardly understands anything, can’t you see?”
The woman was obviously running out of patience. Without another word, Martha turned and stormed out of the store.
“Sorry about that,” Jake said. “I think it’s the hormones. But wait a minute, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.”
They walked back toward the front of the store together, In Young quickening her steps to keep up with Jake’s gait. The only word she heard for sure was sorry, but she knew what he’d meant. He was apologizing for the way his wife was acting, which was probably something he did often.
“Thank you again,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
She watched him go, hoping he’d duck past the string of wind chimes he was walking toward, but no, he ran right into them and flooded the store with a chorus of metallic tinkling.
“Oops,” he said, and when he turned back, as large as he was, he looked like a little boy who’d done something wrong.
“Okay,” she told him for the fourth time, wishing she could say something other than that stupid word, but he waved and she waved and that was the end of her encounter, because her husband and her two kids came sauntering back, each with an ice cream cone in hand.
“Did we miss any excitement while we were gone?” her husband asked.
For a moment she considered telling him what happened.
“No,” she said.
He’d left her behind. No matter how many times she tried to convince herself otherwise, that was the truth. Even though she had ample warning of her husband’s departure to the United States—after all, his emigration process took a year—the fact was, one day they were a happy family of four, and the next day, they weren’t.
The first year had been the hardest, not only because of her husband’s absence but because of money. He tried his best to wire cash every two weeks, but sometimes it was three weeks and sometimes it was half as much as the one before, which made life harder than it already was. Every time either of the kids came down with something, it literally made In Young’s stomach churn, and she hated how she could never get them anything worthwhile on their birthdays or Christmas.
But that was all in the past. Her family was together again, so she should be happy, but she wasn’t. Obviously being in a foreign country had something to do with it, but it was more than that. The fact was, even though she was no longer the one left behind, she still felt like she was.
Maybe it was because her husband had changed. It wasn’t anything big, like the way he made love (still the same, still awkward and sweet) or his favorite dish (bulgogi, thinly sliced beef marinated in soy sauce), but it was the littler things, and what she had never realized was that a significant portion of a person’s identity was an accrual of miscellaneous traits such as these:
He never watched movies back in Korea, but now he watched them all the time.
He used to sleep on his back, but now he slept on his side.
She’d never seen him wink, ever, but now he winked on a daily basis.
In Young knew it was foolish of her to expect her husband wouldn’t change. After all, it was his life that had been turned upside down, not hers. He was the one who had come to this country first, slaving over dry-cleaning machines in the morning and attaching heels to countless shoes in the evening, living with three other Korean men in a grungy Jersey City apartment, saving every penny so he could start his own business.
She felt a hand on the small of her back.
“Now what are you thinking?”
This was another new facet of his character, asking about her thoughts. Perhaps it was what sensitive American men asked of their wives, but In Young found the question tiresome and, frankly, frivolous. Thinking about things never got you anywhere; it was doing that mattered. But here was her husband, his tender eyes magnified by his eyeglasses. Lately she had to make things up just to appease him.
“I was just thinking about how healthy our daughter is looking.”
She followed this up with a long, thoughtful gaze toward In Sook, who was indeed feeling better—eating more, frowning less, even taking her brother out to lunch—but her husband wasn’t buying it.
“Yeah,” he said, “yeah.” He sank farther down into his chair and nodded vaguely to no one.
Fortunately a few customers walked up to the counter, so while her husband rang up a couple of sales, she stood next to him to bag while she searched for something more compelling to say.
When things quieted down again, In Young said, “I was also thinking about what you said to Dae Joon last night.”
He almost jumped out of his chair.
“You know,” he said, “I was just thinking the same thing!”
In actuality, nothing could’ve been further from the truth. The previous evening, their son had gone to great lengths to describe a game you hooked up to the television, some machine called Atari. After his presentation, her husband told him to leave the living room, so he and his wife could discuss the subject in private. As soon as Dae Joon left, he wanted to know what she thought, what their plan of action should be.
If In Young had her way, her choice would’ve been to say she had no opinion whatsoever. For five years, she had made all the decisions, and that was fine because that’s what a single parent did. And now that they were reunited, she had looked forward to letting her husband take up the patriarchal reins, let him make the choices she had made for all those years.
But no, he had to ask, he always wanted to talk, just like now. Was this torture ever going to end?
“I’m beginning to think it wasn’t a great idea to have Dae Joon saving up half the cost and us footing the rest,” he said. “I mean, he wants this thing, right? And it’s not for school or learning, it’s a game. Maybe 75–25 would’ve been the smarter thing.”
Now it was her turn to nod vaguely while scanning the store for a possible escape from yet another dialogue on this subject. And there, she had it.
“Yeuh-boh,” she said, still a surprising delight, using the Korean term of endearment for a spouse. She’d missed that word far more than she’d imagined. “Hold that thought. Looks like that old lady over there can use my help with those Chinese slippers.”
“Oh, sure,” he said as she headed over to the customer. “You know, you’re really good at selling shoes.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Kinda funny, isn’t it?”
It was funny because it was true. Even though she could hardly communicate with these Americans, she somehow made them feel good about buying shoes. Maybe the secret was the reverence she felt for the least appreciated part of the human anatomy. Here and in Korea, feet were seen as generally dirty and unpleasant, but In Young never felt that way. She’d always considered a person’s feet as the core of his being, the living bedrock, and every time she saw a pair, she felt great compassion for the amount of abuse they took every day.
The ones in front of her now were no exception. Having sat down and slipped off her leather flats, the old woman wriggled her toes and looked at her own two stockinged feet. For her tiny frame, they were enormous.
“Ronald McDonald, my grandkids tell me,” she said with a chuckle.
Her hair was as white as a Q-Tip and her thick glasses reduced her eyes into brown pinpricks, but this lady was full of life. It was good to see someone so old still so happy. Most of the older folks she’d known in Korea seemed bitter, probably because their bodies hurt more. Medical care was so much more advanced here, just like everything else. Even though leaving her country was the hardest thing she’d done, In Young was glad to be here. Once her kids became Americanized, which they would sooner than they knew, they would be happy, too.
In Young crouched down and helped the old lady try on a pair of black velvet slippers, the fancy ones with sparkly dragons on top. The lady put her feet together and tilted them in various angles, the detailed embroidery glittering.
“Do you like them?” the woman asked.
“Looks good,” In Young said, one of two phrases she used to make a sale. Then she said the other: “Very pretty on you.”
“Yes,” the old lady said, “I think so, too.”
She bought not only one pair but two, both in black, probably wanting to have a spare. It was something In Young often did, buying two or three of the same shirts if she found one to her liking, an act her husband had always found strange. Because he was the kind of person who would opt to buy not only different colors, but different shirts altogether. They were different people, but they still made a good couple.
“My wonderful shoe-selling wife,” he whispered to her when she walked up to the register with the old lady in tow.
She stood by and watched him punch the keys on the register. She watched him take the old lady’s money, watched her own hands slide the slippers into the brown paper bag.
This was her life now, and what her life would most likely be for the foreseeable future. Selling shoes to people, giving them a quick bow and thank-you and goodbye. It wasn’t such a bad life, was it? Her kids were right there, sitting behind the showcases, waiting for the next customer just like she was. She knew they wouldn’t always be there, that they would grow up, and go to college, and get a job someplace far away—this country was way, way too big—but the important thing was that they were here now, and she was with them.
“Joon-a,” her husband said, calling their son to the counter. “Can you come over here?”
The boy came, though with a hint of reluctance. She wished they would get along more easily, like the way the little black kid named Arnold and his rich foster father got along in that TV show, but that was make-believe and this was reality. It would just take time, like anything else worthwhile in life.
“Yes?” he said.
Her husband pointed to a large box that was sitting next to the desk. “Wanna find out what’s in the box?”
Like most kids, her son liked to open things up. Her husband handed him the box cutter, and the boy sliced the tape down the middle and flung open the flaps wildly, making a handful of packing peanuts fly through the air.
“Good job!” her husband said, overenthusiastic as usual.
The two men of the family proceeded to unearth the contents of the box, which were a bunch of smaller boxes. One of them had a drawing of a lantern on it, and it looked small enough. She picked it up and opened it to make sure of the size.
“I’m glad those finally came in,” her husband said. “I ordered them a while ago.”
“I’m glad, too,” In Young said, and when her husband looked at her quizzically, she told him she’d place them into stock.
As she walked the box to the back of the store, she thought of why she didn’t want to tell him about Jake and Martha. Was it because he would insist on taking over the transaction? What was the big deal? Why did she care?
Because it’s mine. I started it, and now I’m going to finish it.
In those five years of loneliness, she’d learned to do things by herself, for herself, and it was strange to realize that she missed these solitary moments now that she was back with her husband.
Making sure no one was looking, In Young took a lantern out of the box, slid it inside her T-shirt, crossed her arms, and began to walk toward the exit. She’d almost made it when her husband hailed her.
“Hey,” he said, “where are you going?”
“Just the bathroom,” she said, hoping it didn’t sound like a lie.
“Okay,” he said, and he and their son were back at it, forming a pillar of bamboo coasters on the desk. They had made restocking into a makeshift game, taking turns to see who could stack one more before it all toppled over. Her husband worried about being a good father, but seeing the two of them like this, she knew they would be just fine.
As soon as she was out of sight from her family, In Young pulled out the lantern. The white disc felt warm but still looked fine, none of its wires bent out of shape.
It was half an hour before closing time, the walkways of Peddlers Town virtually clear of shoppers, her footsteps clicking loudly against the floor. She’d been by Hometown Grill before, but never at this time of night. Restaurants usually had stragglers who stayed beyond their meal, so as In Young looked into the window, she expected to see a couple of late diners, but the place was empty. She tried the door, but it was locked, which was strange because she was certain the restaurant actually stayed open later than the mall.
She was about to leave when she saw someone walking through the swinging door to the kitchen. All she caught was a blur of white, most likely Jake. So he was still here, probably closing up.
In Young knew there was a back door to the restaurant, so she exited the mall and walked around to the rear of the building. Outside, the night was cool, the late April moon hanging low against the line of faraway evergreens. She wondered if she was being too obsessive with the delivery of the lantern. After all, she could easily do this tomorrow morning, too, but she’d come this far. It seemed right to finish it.
As she walked past the giant green Dumpster and navigated around a slapdash cluster of milk crates, she heard Martha’s rising voice.
“It’s exactly the same thing. Yes, your body is yours, but because we are married—this ring here, Jake, that means we’re married, right?—you have to think of somebody else besides yourself, and that’s something you’re gonna have get through your thick skull before our baby is born.”
She sounded extremely angry. Then In Young heard Jake.
“You don’t understand. Just let me say what I have to say.”
“No, I don’t think you understand what the hell is going on here. A very, very fragile creature, who has no ability to live on her own, is going to be our responsibility.”
If this was an argument, from the sound of his voice he was losing badly. Martha continued.
“This is not one of your many hobbies, not something you can abandon like your workshop in the garage, the model airplanes in the basement, the fucking coin collection, God knows what else. You, Jake, you’re gonna have to grow up!”
Then silence. Considering how loud the voices were, she knew they were close. Two steps from where she was standing, there was an open window, but she didn’t dare move.
Jake spoke once again. “I’m not shaving my beard.”
“You think this beard gives you something, but it gives you nothing. Makes you nothing!”
More silence, then footsteps moving away from her, and now returning.
“You want my beard gone so bad? Well, go right ahead. Have a fucking blast.”
In Young began to step away slowly, but what she heard next made her stop. And when the sound continued, she found herself quietly creeping toward it.
It was the unmistakable noise of a pair of scissors cutting human hair, and that’s exactly what she saw when she peered at the corner of the window. In the back of the restaurant’s kitchen, Jake sat on a stool while Martha sheared off his beard. In Young knew it was wrong for her to witness this private moment, but at the same time, she couldn’t pull herself away. What was it about human misfortune that was so endlessly fascinating? Why did people slow down to gaze upon car wrecks and burning buildings? As she watched Martha snip her scissors with surgical precision over her husband’s cheeks, In Young considered the possibilities and came up with what had to be the simple and cruel truth: because the tragedy was happening to someone else.
After Martha had razed half his face, Jake said one more word, almost a whisper.
“No,” he said.
Martha stopped and dropped the scissors, then sank down to the floor, sobbing.
Jake made no move to stop her. Instead, he stared blankly at the random clumps of hair around him.
In Young placed the lantern next to the back door and hurried back to the mall, her face hot with shame. It felt as if she’d seen them naked.
She wanted to rid herself of the experience, but an image of Martha refused to fade. It was her ring finger wrapped around the handle of the scissors, her diamond catching the lights above, flashing gaudily as she cut away at her husband. That Martha—she was a piece of work. She was an American. In Young tried to imagine doing something like that, and couldn’t. It was beyond her. This country was beyond her, these people, these weird, weird people.
When she returned to her store, they were in closing mode, her husband starting in the rear right corner of the store, her kids in the rear left, turning off the spotlights one by one as they worked their way to the front. In Young stood in the center of the store and watched the gradual darkening.
It was good that a day ended, that there was morning and there was night, and it was good that her children were now walking toward her.