Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

Despite how Ahjuhma felt about the three of us, our unusual little family, Lelia made several more futile attempts before she gave up. The woman didn’t seem to accept Mitt, she seemed to sour when she looked upon his round, only half-Korean eyes and the reddish highlights in his hair.

One afternoon Lelia cornered the woman in the laundry room and tried to communicate with her while helping her fold a pile of clothes fresh out of the dryer. But each time Lelia picked up a shirt or a pair of shorts the woman gently tugged it away and quickly folded it herself. I walked by then and saw them standing side by side in the narrow steamy room, Lelia guarding her heap and grittily working as fast as she could, the woman steadily keeping pace with her, not a word or a glance between them. Lelia told me later that the woman actually began nudging her in the side with the fleshy mound of her low-set shoulder, grunting and pushing her out of the room with short steps; Lelia began hockey-checking back with her elbows, trying to hold her position, when by accident she caught her hard on the ear and the woman let out a loud shrill whine that sent them both scampering from the room. Lelia ran out to where I was working inside the garage, tears streaming from her eyes; we hurried back to the house, only to find the woman back in the laundry room, carefully refolding the dry laundry. She backed away when she saw Lelia and cried madly in Korean, You cat! You nasty American cat!

I scolded her then, telling her she couldn’t speak to my wife that way if she wanted to keep living in our house. The woman bit her lip; she bent her head and bowed severely before me in a way that perhaps no one could anymore and then trundled out of the room between us. I suddenly felt as if I’d committed a great wrong.

Lelia shouted, “What did she say? What did you say? What the hell just happened?”

But I didn’t answer her immediately and she cursed “Goddamnit!” under her breath and ran out the back door toward the apartment. I went after her but she wouldn’t slow down. When I reached the side stairs to the apartment I heard the door slam hard above. I climbed the stairs and opened the door and saw she wasn’t there. Then I realized that she’d already slipped into the secret room behind the closet.

She was sitting at my old child’s desk below the face-shaped window, her head down in her folded arms. When I touched her shoulder she began shuddering, sobbing deeply into the bend of her elbow, and when I tried to coax her out she shook me off and dug in deeper. So I embraced her huddled figure, and she let me do that, and after a while she turned out of herself and began crying into my belly, where I felt the wetness blotting the front of my shirt.

“Come on,” I said softly, stroking her hair. “Try to take it easy. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say about her. She’s always been a mystery to me.”

She soon calmed down and stopped crying. Lelia cried easily, but back then in our early days I didn’t know and each time she wept I feared the worst, that it meant something catastrophic was happening between us, an irreversible damage. What I should have feared was the damage unseen, what she wouldn’t end up crying over or even speaking about in our last good year.

“She’s not a mystery to me, Henry,” she now answered, her whole face looking as though it had been stung. With her eyes swollen like that and her high cheekbones, she looked almost Asian, like a certain kind of Russian. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She looked out the little window.

“I know who she is.”

“Who?” I said, wanting to know.

“She’s an abandoned girl. But all grown up.”

* * *

During high school I used to wander out to the garage from the house to read or just get away after one of the countless arguments I had with my father. Our talk back then was in fact one long and grave contention, an incessant quarrel, though to hear it now would be to recognize the usual forms of homely rancor and still homelier devotion, involving all the dire subjects of adolescence — my imperfect studies, my unworthy friends, the driving of his car, smoking and drinking, the whatever and whatever. One of our worst nights of talk was after he suggested that the girl I was taking to the eighth-grade Spring Dance didn’t — or couldn’t — find me attractive.

“What you think she like?” he asked, or more accurately said, shaking his head to tell me I was a fool. We had been watching the late news in his study.

“She likes me ,” I told him defiantly. “Why is that so hard for you to take?”

He laughed at me. “You think she like your funny face? Funny eyes? You think she dream you at night?”

“I really don’t know, Dad,” I answered. “She’s not even my girlfriend or anything. I don’t know why you bother so much.”

“Bother?” he said. “ Bother? ”

“Nothing, Dad, nothing.”

“Your mother say exact same,” he decreed.

“Just forget it.”

“No, no, you forget it,” he shot back, his voice rising. “You don’t know nothing! This American girl, she nobody for you. She don’t know nothing about you. You Korean man. So so different. Also, she know we live in expensive area.”

“So what!” I gasped.

“You real dummy, Henry. Don’t you know? You just free dance ticket. She just using you.” Just then the housekeeper shuffled by us into her rooms on the other side of the pantry.

“I guess that’s right,” I said. “I should have seen that. You know it all. I guess I still have much to learn from you about dealing with women.”

“What you say!” he exploded. “What you say!” He slammed his palm on the side lamp table, almost breaking the plate of smoked glass. I started to leave but he grabbed me hard by the neck as if to shake me and I flung my arm back and knocked off his grip. We were turned on each other, suddenly ready to go, and I could tell he was as astonished as I to be glaring this way at his only blood. He took a step back, afraid of what might have happened. Then he threw up his hands and just muttered, “Stupid.”

A few weeks later I stumbled home from the garage apartment late one night, drunk on some gin filched from a friend’s parents’ liquor cabinet. My father appeared downstairs at the door and I promptly vomited at his feet on the newly refinished floors. He didn’t say anything and just helped me to my room. When I struggled down to the landing the next morning the mess was gone. I still felt nauseous. I went to the kitchen and he was sitting there with his tea, smoking and reading the Korean-language newspaper. I sat across from him.

“Did she clean it up?” I asked, looking about for the woman. He looked at me like I was crazy. He put down the paper and rose and disappeared into the pantry. He returned with a bottle of bourbon and glasses and he carefully poured two generous jiggers of it. It was nine o’clock on Sunday morning. He took one for himself and then slid the other under me.

“ Mah-shuh! ” he said firmly. Drink! I could see he was serious. “ Mah-shuh! ”

He sat there, waiting. I lifted the stinking glass to my lips and could only let a little of the alcohol seep onto my tongue before I leaped to the sink and dry-heaved uncontrollably. And as I turned with tears in my eyes and the spittle hanging from my mouth I saw my father grimace before he threw back his share all at once. He shuddered, and then recovered himself and brought the glasses to the sink. He was never much of a drinker. Clean all this up well so she doesn’t see it , he said hoarsely in Korean. Then help her with the windows. He gently patted my back and then left the house and drove off to one of his stores in the city.