Janice Lee - The Expatriates

Margaret had her over a few more times before the trip to spend time with the kids, and they loved her. She was energetic and young and thought of great games to play with them, as well as always being available to read a book to them. She was an odd girl, for sure. Once she entered the house and said, out of the blue, “This area, the South Side, must have the highest density of bald white men driving convertibles that I have ever seen.” Margaret laughed, but Mercy was intense in a queer and, at the time, likable kind of way.

The first warning was at the airport. Mercy was an hour late, and they couldn’t check in until she came. Clarke was livid, but when she showed up, wet-haired (she had taken a shower when so late!), Margaret said only, “What took you so long?” lest the trip start off on the wrong foot. Clarke nodded curtly at Mercy and then had not spoken to her again. They checked in and lined up for security in a thick, oppressive silence, the children uncharacteristically quiet as they absorbed the mood. Mercy had apologized, of course, but didn’t seem to have a real excuse, so Margaret spent the whole airplane ride wondering whether she had made the right choice and whether they were now saddled with another child instead of someone who would make her life easier.

At the hotel in Seoul, Mercy was mildly helpful, corralling the children as they ran around the lobby while Clarke checked in, but she didn’t stop G from climbing on top of the coffee table and jumping onto the sofa a dozen times while Margaret watched, frazzled, from the reception desk. Philip, eight, could still get remarkably immature if he was tired, and tried to join in, but Daisy sat and read a book. G and Philip were wired from the soda Mercy had let them drink on the plane while Margaret was in the bathroom.

She remembers thinking that maybe she was a control freak, maybe she shouldn’t have an opinion on what her kids did every second of the day, but what of it? She was their mother, for God’s sake, and she had to have an opinion. She was the only one present enough to know when they had reached their limit on snacks or whether they were too tired to go to an activity. She had to shape their lives, a little this way, a little that, the constant wind shaping the particles of sand that were going to form their lives, their personalities.

So she watched her sugar-addled children jump all over the lobby at nine at night, and then she took them to their room, where Mercy was staying with them — the boys in one bed, Mercy in another, and Daisy on a roll-away. Margaret padded down the hotel hallway back to Clarke in her bare feet and went to sleep, still a little disturbed by the day.

She didn’t know how much to tell Mercy. She couldn’t tell if she knew anything about children. In the morning, Margaret opened the door to their room to find Daisy and Philip watching television in their pajamas and drinking orange juice from the minibar (the cost!) and G brushing his teeth, precariously perched on an upside-down garbage can he must have dragged over so he could reach the sink. Mercy was sitting in a chair by the window checking her e-mail on her phone.

“Uh, good morning,” she said. “Kids aren’t ready for breakfast?” She had told her that it would be great if they could be ready to go at 8:00 a.m.

“Oh?” said Mercy. “What time is it?” She was wearing a watch. “My phone isn’t working well here, must be the different networks. Had to go to Wi-Fi.”

“It’s eight fifteen.”

“Oops,” she said. She was still typing into her phone. “One second,” she said. She finished tapping into the phone and looked up. “Good morning!”

“The kids sleep all right?” Margaret said.

“Didn’t hear anything. They went to sleep around ten, and then I went down and had a drink.”

Margaret’s look was misinterpreted.

“Oh, I didn’t put it on the room,” she said. “I paid cash.”

“No! You can’t leave the children in the room by themselves! G is only four! Are you kidding?” Her voice rose.

“Oh, really?” Mercy said, startled. “I’m so sorry. I really apologize!” She shook her head. “But Daisy is ten!”

“The whole reason I have you here is so that the children don’t have to be alone and I can go to meetings and meals with my husband without worrying about them! Daisy is ten! She is not an adult and can’t handle emergencies. That’s what you are here for!” Margaret didn’t know whether to go crazy or try to stitch everything back together again. Now that Mercy knew the transgression, surely she would be more careful. But the girl was so blank, so odd, sometimes.

Later, they went to Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee and a snack — the stores were shiny and new in Seoul and filled with well-dressed customers, unlike back home. Mercy told Margaret that her mother had often left her in her crib to go out at night with other Korean couples. “She said everyone did it. One woman she knew came home to find her baby almost smothered in a blanket.”

Margaret watched G eat a chocolate-glazed tofu doughnut with a look of total contentment on his face. Daisy had lobbied for an iced coffee, sure that she was too old for hot chocolate and pastries, and had been talked down to some sort of fruity iced tea. Philip didn’t eat sweets and opted for a ham-and-cheese croissant sandwich, an hour after breakfast. Mercy hovered, wanting to make amends for the morning, but Margaret found herself wishing that she would disappear.

“That’s awful,” she said to Mercy absentmindedly. Clarke was at a meeting, and she had brought the children out to walk around. Seoul was immense! It reminded her of New York in that there was a density to it, which was awesome. On the sidewalk right outside their hotel, there were carts selling socks, cell-phone covers, doll clothes, and kitchen towels, a riotous display of unnecessary abundance. The large avenue in front of the hotel could be traversed underground, and when you descended the stairs, there was an entire underground shopping arcade, which sold trendy clothes, eyeglasses, handbags, pharmaceuticals, anything you could think of.

And the smell! It smelled pungent and not unpleasant, like a thick soup of kimchee and garlic vapors, but it took her a while to get used to it.

“Listen,” she said, “I don’t have anything until the evening, so why don’t we meet back at the hotel at four, and you can have dinner with the kids and put them to bed.”

Troublesome babysitter dispatched, she breathed easier and moved into her usual rhythm with her children. She had never known how much she would love, really love, being a mother and having kids, how natural it was to her, how everything else paled in its intensity and pleasure of experience. Clarke asked her every once in a while if she minded that her career had come to a slow halt, but she assured him that these were the best years, the best experiences, she had ever had, that she never regretted it. Although she had definitely grown into it. It had not always been so easy.

She remembers her pregnancy with Daisy so well. Her first pregnancy. The one that changed her into a mother. The metallic but not unpleasant taste of Total cereal in skim milk, which she had eaten religiously every day for breakfast to get all the vitamins and minerals they told you were needed, plus the horse pill of a prenatal vitamin. The websites she lingered over, with pictures of your baby at different stages: the size of a grape, the size of a strawberry, the size of a peach. How she bought maternity clothes at three months, too excited to wait anymore, looking at her reflection in the mirror of the dressing room with a foam pillow tucked inside her shirt.

And she was alone. She remembers this. She stopped working because of an early scare, spotting bright red blood, and when that passed, they decided she wouldn’t work after the baby, so she might as well quit. It was summer, and Clarke was at the office a lot. Most of her friends still worked or went to school, and so she spent a lot of time by herself. And she had loved it, never felt lonely, with her child growing inside her, her constant companion. She had gone to movies to escape the heat, eating a small popcorn in the air-conditioned dark; read books in bed; ordered mayonnaisey BLTs with salty fries and a Sprite at diners, where elderly women smiled at her burgeoning belly. She remembered seeing an exhausted-looking woman at the supermarket just lingering at the edge of an aisle while children shouted, “Mom! Mom!” The woman had lifted a finger to her lips to Margaret, shhh , as she hid from her children for a moment’s peace. Margaret remembers being thrilled by the assumption of their imminent sorority. She joined a health club and swam laps in the pool, afraid to do any other sort of exercise. It was a wonderful, simple time in her life, when she had time to think, and think mostly about herself and Clarke and the baby that was coming. The chlorine smell and echoey, enclosed sounds of an indoor pool could bring her instantly back to those unwieldy, but not unpleasant, last, late months of pregnancy. Those were the final moments of complete peace that she could remember. Then the birth came, like a bomb.