Kyung-ran Jo - Tongue

I think I’ll make a meatless sandwich of herbs, vegetables, and eggs. There’s nothing more fitting for a meal at two P.M. on a Sunday. If it’s true that he already had lunch, the filling should be light. I put the cold chicken and the can of smoked salmon back in the fridge. Then I spread a thin layer of butter on the baguette and drizzle it thoroughly with olive oil infused with chopped garlic and thyme. Without the garlic and thyme enlivening the olive oil, the sandwich is boring. I usually add a bit of mayonnaise, but this time I don’t, since he’s not a fan. Now all I need to do is stack the ingredients. I spread lettuce, spun dry, slices of boiled egg, tomato, cucumber, onion. Usually one baguette is more than enough for the two of us. I cut it into thirds with the bread knife, on a slant, and nestle them in a gauze-covered basket. Even if it’s a simple sandwich, you have to choose quality bread, the ingredients have to sing together, and, whether it’s thyme or basil, there must be some kind of herb—this is my philosophy for sandwich making.

“Go ahead, try one.” I wait for him to take a bite of the sandwich. The person you can eat with is also the person you can have sex with, and the person you can have sex with is the person you can eat with. That’s why dates always start with a meal. You get to experience the impulsive expectation and curiosity toward the other person this way first, not in bed. There are many instances when the opposite is true, too. When you eat together, your relationship deepens or takes a step back—it’s either one or the other. Eating together, having sex—he and I are used to both, and we also know how to bring it up to the next level.

I eat by myself. I gulp down two pieces of the sandwich. I’m full. I’m satisfied, but not completely. Sharing something and feeling satisfaction from it—now I can’t seem to recall how much joy that used to give me.

“Why don’t you just take a bite?” Is the sandwich too boring to stimulate his appetite? He doesn’t even look at it.

“I told you I don’t want to. Why do you keep doing this?”

“Why do you think I keep doing this?”

“It’s over, okay, so please stop.”

“Over? What’s over? You’re not being rational right now. Any day now you’re going to come back and beg, saying you were wrong.”

“That’s just not going to happen. And I wish you’d stop going around talking about Se-yeon.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“I mean, you two liked each other back then. Why would you do something like that?”

“I’ve never said anything about her to anyone.”

“Okay. I guess it’s Mun-ju, then?”

“Stop it. All you do is worry about Se-yeon, right? Have you bothered to ask me how I’ve been doing since you got here?”

“If you keep doing that, you really make me out to be the bad guy.”

I can’t speak.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, but I can’t do anything, okay?”

“You can come back. I told you I understand.”

“It’s not you I want to live with anymore, it’s Se-yeon. How many times do I have to keep telling you this?”

“You told me you loved me with that mouth of yours. Don’t you remember? Did you forget all of that?”

“Yeah, I did back then. It’s all in the past, though.”

“Come back to me.”

He doesn’t say anything.

I lay a hand gently on his arm, near his left elbow. No matter how much you kick off the covers in bed you always have a corner of it covering your stomach—just like that, we’d always been linked together, by one leg, one arm, one hand. “I’ll wait.”

He pushes my hand away coldly. “It hurts me, too, to think about us ending up like this.”

“It’s not hurt—you probably feel guilty.”

He’s silent.

“Isn’t that right?”

“I think in the future I should just visit with Paulie in the yard.”

I’m shocked.

If I bake a cake, I think I’ll make it in the shape not of my body, but hers, Se-yeon’s. Giggling, watching you shiver in disgust, I would pierce the chocolate eyes with a fork and eat them. You would ask, very seriously, How did it taste? How’s that? And since you’ll be curious about its taste, we can eat the entire cake, from the ankles. How’s that?

He’s not standing in front of me anymore. I rush out to the front door. He turns around, pausing as he slides his feet into his shoes. “Look in the mirror,” he says to me, his voice softening with pity for me for the first time.

“You, you’re about to leave the person you love the most, okay? So think about it just one more time.”

“I’m really sick and tired of that kind of talk.”

I’m stunned into silence again.

The door closes.

If I turn around, I’d be able to see him one more time, walking across the yard, kindly but sadly hugging Paulie, whispering, See you soon. I’d loved the shadow he casts, as sturdy as that of a grove of trees in the sun. I’m so worked up that all I can do is crumple onto the shoes stacked in the foyer. I’m not sure what this heavy thing is, pressing down on my shoulders—hunger, powerlessness, Paulie. Okay. Goodbye, just for now. Even if I have everything, you leaving like that—it’s like losing everything. Bye. Even when you’re with her, you will have to think about me from time to time. I’ll continue to piece together my sorrow here, like this .

IF THERE HAS TO BE a reason for it, I think Mun-ju and I became close not only because we’re the same age, but also because I understood her appetite. Mun-ju said she was the eldest of five sisters. Pausing after revealing this, she asked me, Could you turn the lights off?

It was late at night, after her coworkers had left and I’d even told her about the pheasant I’d encountered when I was twenty years old, a story I’d never told anyone. I turned out the light in the kitchen, came back to the table, and extinguished the light hanging over the table, dangling from the ceiling above Munju’s head. Amid the honks and the intermittent flashes of headlights racing by on the eight-lane road outside the restaurant in the deep of the night, we were floating in a space of zero gravity where we couldn’t feel or taste or smell.

My father wanted to raise us very strictly, Mun-ju continued. Maybe it was because he felt unsettled that he didn’t have a son. He had rules about when we slept, woke up, studied, and didn’t allow us to wear skirts or blouses. My sisters and I had to grow up like little soldiers. But raising girls like that doesn’t turn them into boys, you know? Our relationship got worse after Mom died. My father set strict curfews and even forbade me from hanging out with friends. I think he was the worst with me because I’m the oldest. Once, after a group tutoring session, a boy walked me home, and my father caught us. For a whole month after that, he didn’t touch the food I made, like it was dirty. Food was the hardest thing for him to control. Once a week, he’d force me onto the scale and weigh me, saying a fat girl was of no use to anyone. You can’t understand how hard that was for me. I wasn’t stick skinny, but I wasn’t fat either. So I ended up stuffing myself when my father wasn’t looking. There was no other way to rebel. I used to keep a whole bag of brown sugar in my purse. When I was sad about something, I ran straight to the fridge. But the odd thing is that I gained weight every day, a lot of weight, but my father didn’t say anything about it. And I couldn’t stand that either, because it felt like he was ignoring me.

My father would appear in my dreams and say, I’m going to eat you up because that’s how much I love you. I got fatter and fatter. At one point I was so fat that I even dreamt that my girth blew the house to pieces. My life’s purpose boiled down to this—leave home as soon as possible, which I did when I was seventeen. I think bingeing and starving are really the same. They both have the same purpose—they give you a twisted sense of accomplishment, allowing you to say, I’m the best at bingeing or starving myself. But that really was all I had. I met you at a time in my life when I was thinking that. And your cooking taught me, for the first time, that food wasn’t just for stuffing your face, but was supposed to make you feel something. That first day, the roasted duck breast you made, topped with roots of baby spinach, really got me hungry, just by looking at it. That’s why I wanted to leave as soon as possible. But then you came after me in the parking lot, asking why I didn’t eat it, how could I write an article about it if I’d never even tried it. You really cracked me up. You were so serious! That day, I thought there must be something special about your food. It’d been a long time since I’d eaten something that made me feel as if a weight had been lifted off me. I feel like I spent all of my twenties struggling with something stupid, with eating, with food. I’m really pissed about it, I really am.