THEY CAME IN WAVES, they always did. An hour would go by and not a single customer would jingle the bell on the door of Lucky Grocery, and then in a matter of minutes, a line would snake from the cash register to the back wall of refrigerated cases full of soda and beer.
“Just moment,” Julie said to the woman standing at the register. The customer looked like a lawyer, a burgundy jacket fitted tight over a white blouse, her leather briefcase standing upright next to the pack of cigarettes she wanted to buy.
The customer crossed her arms. “What is going on?”
Julie pointed to the final piece of pink-streaked receipt paper sticking out of the machine, curled like a scroll. “It’s out,” she said. “Just moment, please.”
“Jesus Christ,” the woman said, glancing at her watch.
If there was one good thing about being in a wheelchair, it was how it extended most people’s level of patience. Julie rolled away from the register to holler down the basement stairs at her brother. “This line’s not getting any shorter,” she said in Korean.
“It’s here somewhere,” Doug echoed from below, also in Korean. “Ha! I found it.”
Her handicap now fully visible, Julie noticed the customer looking away. She was pretty, especially her legs, her calves long and toned. Julie stared at her own set of useless limbs, her feet clad in a pair of olive-green slippers. It wasn’t that long ago that she walked the streets of New York like this woman, her toes sardined into uncomfortable high heels. What she’d give to feel that sharp pinch at the tip of her toes. It was really true: You never knew what you had until it was gone.
“Thirty second!” Doug announced to the crowd, and flipped the receipt slot open and went to work. “Hello, dear sister,” he said.
“Hello, dear brother,” Julie said.
“Are you having a good day, a great day, or a fantastic day?”
As usual, Julie felt sorry for Doug, for having the burden of keeping up her spirits. And she constantly felt Doug’s pity for her, for being bound to the wheelchair for the last nine months. Nine months, Julie thought. The time for a baby to be born, this was her baby, her god-damn worthless legs.
But that wasn’t true, and she had to stop thinking so negatively because she was getting better. Inside her slippers, she wiggled her two big toes as a reminder of her steady but slow recovery.
Doug was three years her junior, two years shy of hitting his thirties. He used to talk about his plans—to sell this grocery store of his and pack his bags for Europe. It wasn’t fair, none of this was fair, and it still amazed Julie how her life was only one unfair accident away from becoming a mess, how everyone’s lives, every single person in this store—the lawyer woman with her cigarettes, the guy in the Jets cap with a fistful of beef jerky, the two teenagers sipping from their shiny cans of Coke—they were all a single incident removed from utter disaster. How did people go on knowing this? They couldn’t. Everyone lived in a delusion of safety.
“Julie,” Doug said, gesturing to the door, “he’s here.”
She could set her watch by this man. Every other day at three o’clock, Mr. Paik would come in, snap her a quick bow, and wait for her to roll over to the back door that led to the apartment upstairs.
“Hello, Mr. Paik,” she said.
He greeted her and the rest of their encounter fell in step like a ritual. Mr. Paik set his rectangular bamboo case on top of the box of cabbage. She opened her arms to him and he crouched and met her embrace like a lover. As she wrapped her arms around Mr. Paik’s neck, he slid his left arm underneath her knees and lifted her out of the wheelchair.
He pushed open the back door with a gentle kick, and Julie reached out and picked up the bamboo case. Mr. Paik climbed slowly, one step at a time, his breathing becoming labored as they ascended. Julie felt the dampness around his neck, smelled the hint of lavender on his shirt, and closed her eyes. She thought of her childhood home in the Korean countryside, the stream that ran through their backyard, the porch that overlooked the neighboring farm’s rice fields. Her mother and father had liked sitting on the floor of that porch, and every chance she got, Julie nestled herself between them, her legs hanging off the ledge, swinging free.
A month ago, Julie had received her first acupuncture treatment.
“Okay,” Mr. Paik had said at the top of the stairs. His arms were shaky from the effort of carrying her up.
“There,” Julie said, pointing to the flower-patterned couch against the wall. Like the rest of Doug’s furniture, this, too, was a purchase from the Salvation Army. Even though it had been in the apartment for as long as Julie could remember, the couch still retained the clinical odor of the hospital it had come from. Her brother had tried everything to get rid of the smell—various upholstery cleaners, a lime and juniper-leaf solution from Heloise, even a basil and ginger concoction from his neighbor Mrs. Yoo. Now, as Mr. Paik laid her down on the cushions, Julie found comfort in the faint scent of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant that surrounded her.
“Breathe,” Mr. Paik said. “Into your belly, like this.” He puckered his lips into an o and drew in a magnificent lungful of air, his hands palm side up and rising. It might have been more of a performance than an actual intake of air, but Julie couldn’t deny what she saw, his chest and stomach expanding like a balloon. His eyes bulging out, Mr. Paik held the air like a tenor holding a note. Then he exhaled, the release accompanied by something like the deep growl of a lion. It was an impressive, funny, and slightly scary demonstration.
“Now you do it,” he said, “just like that. I’m serious.”
Julie did as she was told, even though she figured this was Mr. Paik’s attempt at distraction. While she tried emulating his breathing technique, she watched him open up his bamboo case and bring out a shallow red box.
Inside the box were needles, no doubt, hundreds and thousands of needles, and now Julie did take a deep breath, so deep that it almost hurt. The idea of having ten, twenty needles piercing through her skin—Mrs. Yoo, a devotee of acupuncture, told her that she regularly had at least twenty on her—made her stomach lurch.
Mr. Paik collected the scattered magazines on the coffee table into a single pile and sat down. The red box lay next to him, and as Julie looked at it up close, it seemed more malevolent than ever, the paint on the tin a perfect, brilliant crimson, the trim around the edges glinting silver like a knife.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“No. Why?”
He rubbed his hands together vigorously, then rested them both on her stomach. “Your tummy’s growling.”
He had small hands. Everything about him was small—the tiny mole above his left eye, a slight piggy nose, ears that reminded Julie of the little pork dumplings her mother used to make. Mr. Paik rubbed her belly in a slow, circular motion, and the ache subsided.
“Your brother—what’s his name again?”
“Ki Duk.”
“No, his American name.”
“Doug.”
Mr. Paik chuckled. “Makes sense. So Eun Joo becomes Julie, right?”
She said nothing, just stared at him, her Korean name ringing in her ears like an echo. “Say it again,” she said. “My name.”
Her name was composed of two syllables, like most Korean names. “Eun,” he said slowly, “Joo.”
It wasn’t his voice but the way he’d said it, the questioning lilt at the end of “Eun,” the full extension of his lips as he said “Joo.” All week she’d tried her best to push Min out of her mind, but now here he was, her memories running a slide show of him in various poses: smiling Min standing under the Statue of Liberty, mirroring its pose with his ice-cream cone; laughing Min sitting next to her in the Korean restaurant, telling her a raunchy joke; weeping Min at the foot of her hospital bed, his hands clasped in prayer.
Mr. Paik handed her his handkerchief. He wore the expression of lost tourists who sometimes came into the store.
“I’m all right,” Julie said, but she wasn’t. Everything that happened that day rushed back at her—the girl and the boy barging into the store, the girl shouting horrible things to her and hurling apples at Doug. Even if Min hadn’t shown her a picture of his children, Julie would have known who these two were, especially the boy. The resemblance between the son and the father was strong. The encounter had lasted no longer than a minute, but as Julie played the scene back in her mind, it was in ridiculous slow motion, the sharp screams of the girl elongated into howls, the widening of Doug’s eyes as he barely ducked the apple aimed for his head.
Mr. Paik slid down from the table and kneeled on the floor. He took her hands and turned them palm-side up, revealing her wrists. “Doug told me you didn’t like needles,” he said, applying slight pressure to her pulse, “but there is nothing to be afraid of.”
Did he actually think that she was this upset over acupuncture? Julie didn’t know whether to be amused or annoyed. “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.”
Closing his eyes, Mr. Paik touched her wrists lightly. “Your pulse,” he said finally, “it’s wiry. Fast and light.”
She didn’t know what heartbeat had to do with sticking needles into someone’s body, or for that matter her tongue—now Mr. Paik asked her to stick it out and say “Ahhhh”—but she couldn’t argue with his prognosis. He asked her if she hadn’t slept for the last few nights. He asked her if she was irritable.
“You’re a little dizzy right now, with a headache more on your left side than your right?”
“Did my brother tell you all this?” Julie asked.
Mr. Paik chuckled. “Flaring up of excessive liver fire,” he said, picking up the red box and opening it. He removed a clear cylindrical vial, a bag of cotton balls, and a brown bottle of rubbing alcohol, and placed them on the table. “That’s what your pulse and your tongue tell me.”
He didn’t wait for Julie to ask what he meant. Mr. Paik told her about fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. The idea was to keep these five elements in balance, and right now, her kidneys and liver—water and wood organs—were severely off.
The last item he extracted from the box was a matching red notebook. He flipped it until he found the right place and returned to sitting on the table. “We’ll get your gallbladder running good, too. But before we start, can you tell me what happened?”
Min’s daughter had called her a whore. A fucking whore. Was there any other kind? The boy had stood still during her tirade, looking just as frightened as Julie. When he asked his sister to stop, she whipped around and slapped him so hard on the cheek that he almost collapsed. The apple the girl was squeezing in her other hand was bleeding with juice.
“No,” Julie told Mr. Paik, “I don’t think so.”
He looked up from his notepad. “You don’t have to tell me every detail, but the more I know, the better I’d be able to help you. I know Doug brought me for your legs, but the principle of five elements acupuncture is not about treating specific areas, it’s about moving you back into harmony with yourself, your emotions, your life as a whole.”
And suddenly Julie was furious. Why was Mr. Paik doing this to her? Why was he making her remember? What gave him the right? She stared at him and said nothing and welcomed the uncomfortable wall of silence that formed between them.
“Okay,” Mr. Paik said. There was genuine hurt in the single word he’d just spoken, and Julie found pleasure in jabbing this man with a shard of her personal pain.
Mr. Paik said nothing as he prepped her for acupuncture, and watching him, Julie found her satisfaction slowly turning into guilt. All he wanted to do was help her, and she was doing the exact opposite for him. But she couldn’t tell him about the attack; she couldn’t talk about it with anyone, not even Doug, and he had been there. Not only was it the most embarrassing moment of her life; thinking about that incident was a harrowing experience: the girl’s mad eyes, her arm loaded like a slingshot, her lips trembling with hate.
After pumping a squirt of alcohol onto a cotton ball, Mr. Paik stood up and surveyed her like a painter planning out his canvas. He started with a needle between her eyebrows and worked his way down: four needles on her arms and hands, another six needles on her legs. She enjoyed this moment, feeling the initial cool touch of the alcohol before it evaporated into nothing. Julie wondered if Mr. Paik saw her body as a network of points, like those connect-the-dots drawings she used to do as a kid.
“You are ‘wood,’ ” he said.
She answered immediately, glad he was talking to her again. “I’m what?”
“Breathe in,” he said, so she took in a breath. Mr. Paik’s right hand flew out of nowhere, partially covering her vision, then it was gone again. “Now breathe out. How was that?”
“How was what?”
Mr. Paik pointed to the mirror on the far side of the room. In it, she saw the glint of the acupuncture needle sticking out of her forehead.
“Didn’t feel a thing, did you?”
Now she saw what was in his hands: a tiny strawlike tube and a metal needle. He loaded up the needle like a blow dart and tracked her left hand with the tips of his fingers. When he located the point, a fleshy area between her thumb and index finger, he again told her to breathe. He tapped the end of the tube and it shot right in.
That one hurt, and she told him so. Sometimes they did hurt, he admitted, especially when he gave the needle a slight twist, like he did now.
“But it’s only for a moment,” he said, loading up another one. “It’ll fade within seconds.”
He was right. Even when it did pinch, it always dissipated into a dull thudding. As he moved from point to point, he explained that each person was closest to one element. Wood was the element of spring and was associated with anger. “When out of balance,” Mr. Paik said, “wood people tend to have a sense of hopelessness.”
Julie gestured at her legs. “I don’t have a right to be hopeless?”
“Sure. But it isn’t healthy. I know things may seem bleak right now, but you’ll get better. You will. The best thing you can do for yourself is to let your anger go.”
Jesus Christ, now she really was getting mad. “Will you please stop telling me how angry I am? You keep saying that, and I’m not, but you know, now I am! Okay? Are you happy?”
Mr. Paik said nothing, just nodded. He moved down to the end of the couch to work on her legs.
Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was angry at Min, but that wasn’t fair. He’d never lied to her about anything, not about his kids or his wife. She’d always known what situation she was getting into. So if Julie was angry at anyone, it was at herself.
She watched as Mr. Paik treated the last four points, two on her ankles and two on her feet, the needles shooting in one after the other. It was like watching somebody else’s body, and suddenly Julie felt heat rise to her face, her hands tightening into fists.
Her legs, her worthless, lifeless legs. She wanted to take a hammer and bash them into a bloody mush.
Mr. Paik took one last needle and poked it into the webbing next to her right big toe. “Nothing?”
Julie shook her head.
He got up and stared at her like a specimen, which she supposed she was. “Five weeks.”
“Five weeks what?”
“You’ll feel something in five weeks.”
He had been wrong, and Julie couldn’t have been happier: It only took three. She never thought she could receive such joy from the sharp prick of a needle.
It was an ordinary day, nine months ago. The sky was a clear cobalt blue, finally cloudless after three days of steady snow. New Yorkers, fluffy and fat in their long winter coats, carefully negotiated the slushy streets of the city. That morning, Julie was shoveling out Lucky Grocery’s sidewalk with Doug, the two of them working side by side, heaving away two feet of snow while they listened to Christmas music blaring from their neighbor. It was an electronic interpretation of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the song reduced to computerized beeps and blips. Even though no words had been exchanged between them, Julie knew Doug hated these songs as much as she did. Maybe she knew it by seeing how hard he drove his shovel into the snow, the way he flung the white mound up and over his left shoulder, like he wanted to get rid of something toxic. Or maybe it was because she was his sister and he was her brother, a bond of blood and time that led itself to a certain kind of familial, genetic assuredness.
As she watched Doug scoop up another shovelful of snow, Julie wanted to tell him how good it was to be here with someone she’d known all her life, how valuable this intimacy was, and how it could be replicated with no one else, but she said nothing. Instead she shoveled next to her brother, choosing to partake in the experience instead of verbalizing it. Because talking about something was always less than actually doing it, wasn’t it?
That’s what she and Min had agreed on last night after another argument, which was the usual progression of their weekly encounters. He took her out to dinner where they ordered enough drinks to get a buzz, then back at the empty apartment, with Doug politely having vacated the premises, they stumbled into her room and made love on her twin-sized bed. And then they fought.
“Please,” Min said. “What’s wrong?”
Julie wanted to shout at him, I’m with a married man. I’m the other woman. She didn’t shout at him, but she did tell him her feelings, and he listened.
Underneath the covers, he interlocked his fingers with hers. “You do know that we always fight about the same thing, right?”
She pulled her hand away. She stepped out of the bed and walked up to the window and gazed at her half reflection. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, she knew that, but she wasn’t ugly, either. People often complimented her naturally wavy hair, an anomaly for Koreans. She had just turned thirty, a spinster if she were back home, but she was here in the United States of America. If Julie wanted, she could find somebody else, but that was the problem: She didn’t want anybody else. The man she wanted was in her bed, staring at her nakedness with a smile that made her blush.
“Come here,” Min said. Sometimes these fights ended well, and Julie could tell this was going to be one of those occasions.
Min greeted her with three kisses, two on her nipples and a full one on the mouth. “Talking about something,” he said, “is always less than actually doing it, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t brilliant, what he said. It hardly ever was. What gave her hope was how he seemed to genuinely believe what he was saying, a childlike optimism that led Julie to think that next time, she might be able to avoid the guilt, the shame, the self-hatred. It was possible, wasn’t it? It was possible, and that sliver of possibility meant everything. It saved her.
“Salt. Julie. Salt. Julie. Salt. Julie.”
She hadn’t noticed Doug standing beside her and dangling the empty bag of rock salt. MELT-AWAY, the outside of the bag read. A grinning snowman was pouring salt onto the ground.
“I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. Can you be more specific?”
“Salt. Julie. Salt. Julie. Salt . . .”
She snatched the bag out of his hands.
“Just get a little bag? Duane Reade has them on sale, I think.”
“Little bag,” Julie said, and remembered the McDonald’s on the way to the drugstore, the tiny white packets of salt in the plastic bins on the counter. She’d grab a handful of those and present them to Doug. “You said little bags,” she’d tell him with a straight face.
At Duane Reade’s checkout line, Julie stood behind a girl and a boy. Both had blond hair and identical eyes, obviously siblings. Before he left last night, Min showed her a photograph of his two children, brother and sister like these kids in front of her. They and his wife were due to arrive by January—which meant what, exactly? She had no idea, and she was afraid of asking Min, because she already knew the answer: He didn’t have a clue. How was it that they continued to have this relationship when they knew nothing, planned nothing, were nothing? Sometimes it seemed as if the only reason that they kept going was inertia.
The kids in front of her paid for their packs of gum. The boy, strangely enough, turned around. “Bye,” he said. The girl, embarrassed, yanked him out the door.
“Goodbye,” Julie said.
Two blocks down the street, after stopping in the McDonald’s for her packets of salt and waiting for the light to change, Julie continued to revel in the boy’s unexpected farewell. He had no reason to say anything to her, but he had; it was a good omen. She recalled Min’s photo and zoomed in on his son. “Dae Joon,” she said to herself, wanting to permanently imprint his name in her head. In the picture, he’d stood with his left shoulder slightly lower than his right, a posture she’d often noticed in Min.
The light turned green, and the walk sign lit up. Julie cradled the bag of salt like a baby and rocked it back and forth as she made her way across the street.
At some point in the future, she would meet these two kids of Min’s, she was certain. “I’m Julie,” she’d say, and give the girl a hug and shake the boy’s hand.
“It’s nice to meet you,” the boy would say.
Then something would pass between all three of them, some silent, beautiful feeling, and this was what she was thinking when the taxi slammed into her thighs, pitching her into the air and throwing her down onto the pavement.
Before blacking out, she saw snowflakes, which was strange because it hadn’t been snowing, but she was glad they were there. What she actually saw were the packets of salt that had flown out of her left hand, cresting before their inevitable descent.
On their second date, he told her he was married with two kids.
“Oh,” Julie said. “I see.”
If they hadn’t been in a restaurant, surrounded by four other dining couples, she would have cried. Not because he’d lied to her, but because he wasn’t hers to have.
Julie could almost hear her brother’s exasperated voice: It’s only your second time together, your second time! She knew there was no explicable reason for her to feel this strongly about Min, but so what, wasn’t that love? No, it’s just foolishness. You do this with every guy you meet. You give them what they don’t deserve, and that’s why they hurt you.
Julie picked up her chopsticks and stared at her half-eaten bowl of rice, tinted pink from the kimchi. At least he came clean with it, Julie thought. At least he had the decency to end it quickly. She looked up from the dinner table, expecting to see a familiar expression on Min, the solemn, serious face men reserved for letting down stupid girls like her.
“What are we going to do?” he asked her, and seeing the distress in his eyes unlocked her tear ducts. Min followed suit. It didn’t matter that the diners around them had turned silent. She and Min, holding hands across the table, wept together until the owner came out and asked them to leave.
Later that evening, as they strolled through Washington Square Park, Min put his arm around her shoulder and she looped her arm around his waist. It was the end of spring, white and pink flower petals scattered over the grass like confetti. As they walked, they realized that their strides matched exactly, like a pair of metronomes tuned to the same beat.
“This is it,” Min said. “This is all that we have to do.” Seeing that Julie didn’t understand, he pointed to their feet.
Was it that simple? Why not. She was young, she wasn’t even thirty yet. She had time to make this work. All she needed to do was put one foot in front of the other.