Suki Kim - The Interpreter

But those things were not what differentiated Jen from Suzy. Two girls of the same age, the same education, the same earnest propensity for Brontë’s Villette, and yet their makeups were different from the start. It was neither because Suzy spent her early years moving constantly from Flushing to the Bronx to the inner parts of Queens, as new immigrants often did, nor because Suzy’s inner-city public-school education suffered next to Jen’s suburban private-school history, a deficit that Suzy was bright enough to overcome. But there was something else, something markedly different, something more fundamental, ingrained, almost inborn. Jen seemed to float about their mutual college life with the brightest sunlight, whereas Suzy, no matter how she tried to hide it, was stuck somewhere cold and brooding. And Damian was the first one to notice, and was not afraid to tell her about it.

On their first date, sitting on the bench in Riverside Park—although “date” might be a misnomer, since they had just slept together for the first time that day—Damian gazed at her awhile and said, “Stop looking at me for an answer; you’re not going to be happier.” Suzy knew that he was telling the truth and kept silent, because she still did not know what she wanted, and could still feel the pain between her legs, and felt no regrets. She looked away instead at the afternoon calm of the Hudson River, across which New Jersey loomed with not much promise, and remembered that she had missed language lab that afternoon. Damian was forty-nine then, a married scholar whose picture she had seen framed at Professor Tamiko’s office. Suzy had just turned twenty, a comparative-literature major, a virgin, which strangely did not matter at all. Neither discussed it. Suzy’s virginity was the last thing on their minds. From the first meeting, there was no doubt that they would make love. What bothered them was the darkness they sensed in each other, which pulled them together, which let them know almost instantly that their union was not a good thing, was doomed, was bound to hurt people and leave scars that might not go away no matter how much time passed, how they reorganized their lives so that one might forget that the other had ever happened at all.

The phone is persistent, and Suzy is not sure what makes her finally answer it. Perhaps she hopes it is Damian after all, perhaps she imagines that he has gotten softer with years and will break down just once. She tightens the towel grip and walks over to the end of the room and picks up the receiver before its fourth ring. She does not say hello. She waits for a voice, a signal. But instead, a pause, a drawn-out silence. She will not speak. She will not give up easily. Then, finally, comes the click—she knew it—a smooth, intentional hang-up. Must’ve been a wrong number, surely a prank call. And yet, for a quick second, she cannot help looking to make sure that the blinds on both windows are drawn.

NO MATTER WHAT TIME OF DAY, it seems, the north wing of Penn Station is packed. Eight a.m., and a horde of men and women in suits and briefcases pour out of Long Island Rail Road trains and rush into the subway to reach their cubicles on Wall Street or the Avenue of the Americas by nine o’clock sharp. The commute costs them the better part of the day, the better mood of their lives. But a small sacrifice for a two-story house with a basketball hoop in the backyard and a cozy public school whose PTA meets for a monthly picnic in the town park. It’s worth one and a half hours each way, three hours combined. Who would want to raise kids in the city, who could afford it? So they recline in their seats with The Wall Street Journal, the Long Island Weekly, or the Times . The clever ones make the best of the lull by balancing their checkbooks, or reading over contracts or invoices, whatever they do all day at work and still take home extra of because there never is enough time, because time is what such commutes are all about. And amidst crowds who reappear from the LIRR each morning like ants out of mounds, Suzy stands waiting for her 8:25 to Montauk, glad to be going in the opposite direction.

Montauk is the final stop. Suzy finds a seat easily enough. The train leaves exactly on time. She will have to make the connection in Jamaica, which is about twenty minutes away. Leaning back, she looks out the window, although the view is nothing, just the outskirts of the city, impossible to place. And yet she keeps on staring, because she is sitting by the window and there is nothing to do except follow this motion and let the barren scenery pass like a dull movie.

Outside is a mess of twisting highways and cement buildings. Some bits seem familiar. The train passed by Long Island City, where they had once lived, many years ago, when her father got a job at a Korean deli for a few months. It was an ugly, depressed part of Queens, and she was glad when he finally quit, or was he fired? Suzy is not sure anymore, but she recalls the fiercely unpleasant drive through the neighborhood and the oversized man with the overlapping front teeth named Mr. Yang who owned the store, who tossed a dollar at eight-year-old Suzy to run along and get him a slice of pizza from across the street, and how Dad had put a hand on the man’s right shoulder and said in a quiet but menacing voice, “Don’t tell my daughter what to do.”

The memory seems slightly skewed. What had she been doing with him at work? Why wasn’t she at school on that day? Did he really say those exact words? Perhaps he mumbled with an awkward slouch to his shoulders, “Please don’t order my daughter around,” or lashed with a stone in his voice, “Who do you think you are, ordering my daughter about?” Or is it possible that he did not say anything at all? It’s been so long, over twenty years. Hard to remember now how it had really been between a father and a daughter, how he might have taken her small hand and stormed out of the store with the parting spit at the rotund man, “Don’t you dare tell my daughter what to do!”

Outside, the familiar streets are gone now. The train is moving swiftly, almost gliding. She cannot recall the last time she was inside a moving vehicle in such tranquillity. Perhaps Dad’s Oldsmobile had felt this safe, pure. All you had to do was just hop in and let him take you. Mom never drove, although she kept saying that she should learn, since she could not get anywhere on her own. But she never did, because they had only one car anyway and she had gotten used to being driven around. Dad was the best driver, never got a ticket, never got into an accident, never drove in the wrong lane. Later on, Suzy expected the same when she first rode in Damian’s Volvo, and was shocked to discover that she had to check her seat belt several times before settling down. Luckily, she rarely found herself riding in cars. New Yorkers don’t drive. The city is all about smelly subways and screaming taxis. Subways often get stuck in the middle of dark tunnels, and cabs, of course, are driven by a breed of wild men who zoom through the grids with a certain unexplained rage. The train remains ancient, Suzy thinks, like Dad’s Oldsmobile. It sticks to the right course, from here to whatever its destination.

The first time she went to Montauk was for the ashes. She did not know that her parents had ever been there. Like most immigrants, they never took a vacation. Long Island for them ended in Bayshore, a seedy town where a few Koreans owned dry cleaners and fish markets. Dad once mentioned in passing that the business was not bad over there and the schools were better than the ones in Queens. But both Mom and Grace were fiercely against the idea. Mom could not imagine having to take a car to the nearest supermarket, which meant having to learn to drive immediately, and Grace said she would rather die than divulge that she was from Long Island. Suzy did not care one way or the other. They moved so often that it did not seem to matter where they went, for she was sure that they would move again before the year was up. Besides, she did not feel that she came from one particular place. When someone asked where she was from, she would pause and run through her mind the various apartment complexes in Flushing, the Bronx, the inner parts of Queens, even Jersey City, where they had lived for a few years when Mom got a job at a nail salon during their first years in America. None of them fit the bill, she thought. Korea, she would ponder, but that also seemed far away, for they immigrated when she turned five, and Grace six. Suzy could hardly remember the place. They had lived in a tiny apartment complex on the outskirts of Seoul, she was told. Oddly enough, the only detail she remembered about this childhood home was the elevator. Their apartment was on the fifth floor, which was the uppermost floor, according to her parents, because the topfloor units usually cost less; most young families did not trust the elevator and feared that kids might fall from the windows, which had happened in some buildings. What Suzy remembered vividly was the tiny box of the elevator, which was not so tiny in her child’s eyes, and the mirror that had hung on its wall. She always wanted to look at the mirror, but it hung so high that she could never reach it. She would ask Mom to hoist her up on her shoulders, but Mom was always carrying bags of groceries and was busily pressing the numbered buttons, because the elevator would never respond to the first try. Sometimes Dad would give her a lift—although this happened rarely, for he came home long after the kids went to sleep—but then she was too high up on his shoulders, and the mirror reflected only her dangling feet. Suzy was not sure why this mirror should stick so distinctly in her mind, but almost always she would look for a mirror upon entering elevators and would immediately feel a lack, or a pang of something distant and impossible to name.