Chapter 30

chapter 30

Mom turns to me with an expectant face.I sense she’s been talking to me.

The harsh lighting casts heavy shadows at her cheeks, filling the grooves by her lips, her neck. She rarely wears makeup, just a chalky film of SPF one zillion sunscreen, and her hair is heathered in between light brown and gray.

I shake my head. “I couldn’t hear you,” I tell her in Korean.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says, seemingly annoyed as she busies herself with saucepans. Chopsticks in hand, she sets down trivets on the table and plants saucepans atop them.

For a brief moment I wonder why we’re eating in the kitchen and not at the dining table. Why the only time the dining table has ever been set was the day she left.

“Wow,” June says, coming up from behind me. “What a feast.” She dangles a small robin’s-egg-blue Tiffany’s shopping bag by its white handles. “This is from both of us,” she says, nodding at me. Mom looks to June, then to me, and wipes her hands on her apron before taking it.

“Oh, it looks expensive,” Dad says, smiling.

Mom cuts him a sharp look. “I’ll look at it later,” she says, visibly embarrassed. “Dinner first.”

“Just open it,” says Dad. For an unsteady second, I’m convinced it’s a ring.

Mom takes off her apron and slings it on the back of a chair. She hands the bag to Dad as she tugs her scrunchie off and gathers the loose strands into a tighter ponytail. She wipes her hands on her thighs again and reaches for it. My heart aches when I recognize her actions for what they are. My mother felt the need to change, to be presentable, before she could receive such a fancy gift. If she weren’t so self-conscious about her self-consciousness, I know she would have excused herself to put on lipstick.

She carefully removes a flat, square box from the bag. She stares at it for a moment, almost suspiciously. “Thank you,” she says, to the box, unable to look at either of us. When she tugs at the ivory satin ribbon gingerly, it’s as if she half expects it to detonate. Set atop a rectangle of cottony fluff is a delicate chain with a tiny diamond-studded cross. Mom lifts it and holds it to the light. It’s beautiful.

“Thank you,” she says again. In the same breath, she adds, “You shouldn’t have spent so much money.”

“Do you love it?” asks June, grabbing Mom’s shoulders from behind, jostling her until she smiles. “It’s an early birthday present.”

Mom’s birthday isn’t for a month.

“I love it.”

Mom hands it to Dad for him to fasten, turning and carefully lifting her ponytail.

“It’s not like anything else you have,” says June, crowding them, casting a shadow so Dad can’t see.

Dad ushers Mom into the light. “The little clasp is so small,” he says, frowning and craning his neck away to help his farsightedness. My parents seem so old and June seems so needy, I can’t look at any of them.

“It’s platinum,” says June.

Finally, Mom touches the cross where it falls on her chest. “I can tell it’s platinum by the weight,” she says, smiling at all of us. “A woman my age shouldn’t have to wear silver.”

She says it so silkily that we all laugh. June loudest.

“Now, that’s enough,” she says, hurriedly unwrapping all the dishes covered in plastic. The moment is over. “Everyone sit. I timed it all perfectly.”

I take my usual seat at the square kitchen table. “You should stop losing weight,” she says, setting down yet another earthenware pot of stew. “It makes you look older.”

“I am older.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Drink this.” She holds a mug under my nose as if its contents stop time. It’s murky and smells somewhere between nuts and feet. “Chaga mushrooms,” she says. “For your skin.” She reaches out and pats my cheek, not with affection, but as some kind of diagnostic probe. “You look… puffy. Your unlucky ear is sticking out more than usual.” Only one of my earlobes is attached. I forget which is the unlucky one.

I touch the liquid to my lips without drinking. It’s the game we’ve always played. Later I’ll tip it down the sink and feel bad when she tells me how much it cost and how far it’s traveled. Mom’s love language is to scrutinize and criticize all the physical attributes that you’re most sensitive about. I glance at my sister, willing my clairvoyant mother to detect June’s cancer from the size of her pores or the sheen of her hair.

“I thought the food was getting cold,” I remind her.

Halfway through dinner, Mom leaves the table and emerges from the garage with a store-bought pie in a black plastic tray with a domed lid. “Happy family!” she announces, as if collective birthdays are a thing that’s commemorated by eating pie. “They had blueberry, but it wasn’t as beautiful. And at least it isn’t pumpkin. What a disgusting pie.”

“You just don’t like nutmeg,” says Dad.

“I got the last one,” she says, presenting it with as much pride as if she’d made it. “Kim Theresa says that all H-E-B’s get their pies from the same place as some expensive restaurants.”

“Happy family!” says June, smiling at me.

“Happy family to you,” I sing, and June actually laughs.

---

My sister snores softly on my bed above me. I’m lying on the mat on the floor since June pulled rank because her room is filled with restaurant supplies. I stare at Patrick’s text and send him a thumbs-up that I’ve arrived safely. I then send him the cowboy smiley because I’m feeling chatty.

The woolly stuffiness of the room presses up against my skin. I get up quietly, monitoring June for movement, open my desk drawer, and remove the flat-head screwdriver. I check her again, then step out and quietly close the door behind me.

The thermostat in the hall is set to 84 degrees.

I switch on the bathroom light, blinking furiously in the mirror. This is the mirror in which my face looks most disgusting. I’m almost sure it’s not all in my head. I once googled that unflattering mirrors are an empirical scientific phenomenon. They bulge under their own weight, making you appear shorter and wider. And this one, my childhood one, the one I studied most intently during my formative years, distorts all the time.

I’ve stared in this mirror until I can’t see myself. My face loses meaning. My eyes have been wet and ringed red, lips slick with spittle, cheeks swollen and purple. There have been so many nightmares in this place, but I’m grateful not to ever think about most of them. How I’d sit in the bathtub crying silently. Doing everything silently. It was the only room where the door locked. My bedroom door gave way if you shook the handle and shoved.

I stand on the lip of the tub, steadying myself with a palm to the ceiling, unscrewing the metal air vent with my other hand. The cover swings down, held in place by a screw. I reach inside. My fingers brush against a familiar shape. I clutch the bundle of small hardback notebooks and an old packet of cigarettes. I sit on the bath mat with my legs crossed and flip the blue box open and bring them to my nose. The filters smell exactly as they should. Like raisins. And something else. Something acrid. I tap the box upside down against my palm, and a half-smoked joint slides out.

Tucked between the notebooks, there’s a stack of folded-up yearbook pages that I’d ripped out of the copy in the library. We all pillaged the school copies. Yearbooks were a fortune at $75 a pop, and most of us couldn’t afford them.

I unfold the first page. It’s been handled so much, the creases are worn white. It’s one of my few pictures of him. Him being a dirty-blond boy with hair in his eyes. Him being Holland Hint, the destroyer of hearts, the decimator of self-esteem, the great love of my life, poised in a rare display of academic engagement. He’s wearing safety goggles and a lab coat. Gangly, head hanging.

In the background, you can make me out staring as if willing him to turn around. It’s the only picture of us together. Listed next to my name in the appendix of our yearbook are the three pages where I’m featured, and this is one of them. I was mortified. I never asked if he noticed. By the time it came out, we’d returned to not knowing each other.

I slide off the string from around the bundled notebooks. I grab the ribbon bookmark tail sticking out of the bottom of one and flip it open.

“Why is June such a fucking spaz?” I’d written in red pen.

My greatest fear in high school was that I would be like her, like my older sister. June and I were never in middle school together but even still I felt stupid for not anticipating who she’d be in high school.

I knew she was a hard-boiled dork at home. And it was the consistency that scandalized me. In the hallway, at her locker, she made no effort to stifle her braying laugh. She’d roll out of bed and throw on worn leggings and a sweatshirt without any thought. She was indifferent to makeup trends, the right jeans, vanity backpacks that hung just so. The only people who dressed as carelessly at school were the super-popular boys who were gods in their hoodies. But they could get away with it. June couldn’t.

It was still dark out when we waited for the school bus that first morning. There was another kid at our stop, and the three of us stood in silence. The bus was quiet when we got on, everyone still half-asleep. There was something adult about how subdued it seemed. I was convinced they could hear my galloping heart. I followed my sister into the aisle. When she beckoned me to sit with her a few seats from the front, I was shocked. When she asked if I knew where to go for first period, I could feel their eyes on us. She was so loud. It was as awkward as if she had burst into song. I heard whispers and giggling. I wanted to shush her when she asked if I had money with me. The rules were so clear, yet I could see June had no idea.

I saw how she walked by herself into school, past the clusters of kids catching up after summer.

I hadn’t known that other sixteen-year-olds vaped surreptitiously into their lockers all wearing white Air Force 1s and white sweatshirts.

I hadn’t known that they spent all vacation at their food service jobs or at summer school while June was mostly at home taking online classes.

There was so much I didn’t know.

Juniors were glamorous in a way June wasn’t. They were cultured. They knew when to smile and how to smile so they still looked mean. They knew where to buy lipstick that looked like gloss but was somehow matte. And their earrings bore evil eyes of various sizes. Every single junior girl other than my sister wore shirts that stopped exactly half an inch above their pants. Without exception. And they knew all the dances but laughed goofily through the choreo as if they didn’t.

I was ready to learn it all.

And I learned to see June the way they did.

I learned to sit in another seat near the front of the bus.

I learned to leave campus for lunch because pretending not to see her in the cafeteria seemed cruel.

She had friends, I told myself. They were just friends no one else wanted.

The journal entry’s from freshman year. “She needs to grow up! This is not okay.” I flip a few more pages.

“She needs to wash her hair at least 3x a week.”

“Tell June not to talk so much.”

“Tell her not to laugh when no one else finds it funny.”

“Make her stop selling candy.”

Ours was a football school, and twice a year, our star cheerleaders sold candy for fundraising. June had taken to selling rival, cheaper, better candy at exactly the same time. She also regularly sold Hot Cheetos because we didn’t have them in the vending machines. It was bad enough that my parents worked in restaurants. I lived in constant fear that kids would talk to me about my sister the Cheetos girl. I didn’t have anywhere to hide. There were only six Asian kids in a school of two thousand.

I open the orange notebook, the one from senior year. June was long away at Columbia by then. Here the rules apply only to me. I’d gotten into bullet journaling by then, and beside each handwritten date is another number. My weight. Most days feature a string of numbers, the entries crossed out and rewritten over and over. My weight after peeing. Before and after the gym. Before and after drinking water, eating two inches of a six-inch subway sandwich, a bag of Baked Lay’s, not eating at all. I remember how it felt, pushing the surface of the digital scale with my toe, stepping on with my eyes closed, praying for a miracle.

I climb onto the edge of the tub and screw the vent back into place.

I stow the diaries in my bag. As well as the cigarettes.

I’m awake now and I need something. A diversion. I pad downstairs, phone in hand. Avoiding the creaky parts of the steps.

The family pie’s sitting on the table. They’d all had a slice, but I hadn’t. I pop open the lid, muscles clenched so as not to make a sound. I lick my finger to catch a crumb and dissolve it in my mouth. Then I break off a piece of crust. It melts on my palate. The doughy butteriness floods my senses. I open the dishwasher, again tensing to dampen the noise, and reach for a fork, but since there are none, I grab a pair of chopsticks. I poke into the pie, in a dotted line, perforating a small slice for extraction, and eat it standing in four bites. I brush the crumbs off my house dress, close the lid, and toss the chopsticks into the sink.

Guided by my phone flashlight, I walk over to the enormous lacquered armoire next to the looming black television and open its doors. A silk butterfly charm dangles off the rounded knobs. Inside are our photo albums. There’s one for each of us. All our photos used to be kept in paper envelopes from the drugstore until I organized them in color-coordinated albums. I grab my favorite. The red one. The one assigned to June. As I open it, a page falls to the floor, separated from its glued binding. She was always the cutest kid. Sweet, expressive eyes, always in the middle of something. There are three photos to a page, and in the center one she’s about four, cross-legged on the floor, looking up at her porcelain clown doll, the one that she broke, propped up on a chair. I slot the page back in and put it away.

The fridge rumbles. I look back into the kitchen. That slice of pie was way too small. I’m aching for a proper slice now that I’ve broken the seal. I get up. This time I get a butter knife and cut a good-size wedge. It’s a calorie bomb, but I want it. I deserve it. I came home and I’m owed. I slide it onto a paper towel and then, using my hands, I mash all the stray crumbs together to make one giant crumb and eat it. They’re mine.

I hear myself sigh.

Body humming with sugar and fat, I help myself to a glass of water and peer at the pie box again. Dread creeps along the ridge of my shoulders. There’s only a third left.

I google “twenty-four-hour H-E-Bs.” There’s one an eighteen-minute Uber ride away.

A plan forms. I need to finish this pie and buy a fresh one. I must eat three slices out of the new one to cover my tracks.

“Hi, Jayne Baek.”

I whip around. It’s Dad. With his own iPhone flashlight shining into my face.

“Oh.” Even in the swampy heat of the house, he’s wearing a cardigan. I brush crumbs off my T-shirt. He shines his phone at the open armoire. “Why are you up?” I ask him, clearing my throat. I’m struck by how small he looks in the dark. How angry and foreboding he seemed when we were young. I watch as he opens a low kitchen cabinet to pull out a large mason jar. In it is a pale-brown sludge.

“I have to feed the mother,” he says, shining the light under his face as if he’s telling a ghost story around a campfire. For a moment it’s as if Mom’s power lies in this jar of muck under the sink.

He pours liquid from another jar into the murky vessel and returns it to its hiding place. “It’s my SCOBY. For kombucha.”

Another large glass jar comes out, this time from the fridge. This one with a wide mouth. “Sourdough starter for bread,” he says, spinning off the lid. “I have to keep my family alive.”

He smells it and then holds it up to my nose.

It’s inviting. Warm, not quite bready but beery.

“It’s gluten-free,” he says.

“You’ve always been into this stuff since way before anyone else,” I tell him. I remember all his failed businesses. How the magnets and crystals and jade face rollers were so prescient for him to sell. How it had all been too early. How Texas had been all wrong. My father was the first person I knew who’d tried to import sheet masks from Korea. This was before every Korean product purveyor practically minted money. Before the Danny Songs of the world were on the covers of Vanity Fair. Before random non-Koreans at work would ask me which K-dramas I watched and then instruct me on the ones I should be watching.

“How are you?”

“Good,” I tell him, nodding to make it convincing. “Fine.”

He smiles gently. “It’s been so long since you’ve been back,” he says. “I think I saw more of my parents when I served in the military.”

“I know,” I tell him. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he says. “How are you and June getting along?”

“Okay, I guess.” He chuckles, stirring the fluffy, shaggy dough and then lifting some of it out with a wooden spoon and putting it into a Ziploc bag.

“Where’s he going?”

“I have to separate this little guy for the good of the rest of the family.” He places it into the freezer. “Thank you,” he says to it, and then shuts the drawer. “We can’t keep feeding everyone, so he goes into suspended animation.”

“Tough break.”

He pours some flour into the rest of the jar. “It’s a pretty heroic role, if you think about it.” He mixes with the handle end of his wooden spoon.

“It’s good that you and June are together in New York,” he continues. “Life’s too hard over there to do it by yourself.”

He adds water to his mix.

“Even if being together feels just as hard sometimes,” he says. “Family’s like that.” He stirs for a while and then screws the lid back on. “But they’re the ones who will help when no one else will.”

He stoops down to return his jar to the lower cupboard, closing it softly. The other back into the fridge. “It’s when you really don’t want to ask for help that you might need it the most.”

He pats my shoulder.

I remember when Mom was gone. How sad he was. And how mellowed he seemed after.

“Put everything back exactly as you found it,” he says, swinging his light to the open armoire.

“I will.”

“Because she’ll know.” He shakes his light in my face, chuckling.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Good night, my daughter.”

“Good night, my dad.”