A Cab Called Reliable
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Authors: Patti Kim
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Contents
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To my mother and father
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I am grateful to my teachers at the University of Maryland: John Auchard, Michael Collier, Joyce Kornblatt, Reginald McKnight, Glenn Moomau, and Jack Salamanca.
If not for the friends at Global Missions Church and Cedar Ridge Community Church, I would be a miserable and lonely soul.
Our apartment on Burning Rock Court was two blocks away from Sherwood Elementary School. When I started third grade, my mother had told me that I had better know by heart the names of every street I had to walk along and across, or else I would remain forever missing because she had no clue where to go look for a nine-year-old girl stupid enough to lose her way in Arlington, Virginia. She said this place was nothing like Pusan.
In Pusan, my mother, father, little brother, and I used to live in a room behind a grocery store owned by my best friend's mother. Na-Ri and I used to make mud pies, jump rope, bang pots against pans, and sing jingles in front of her mother's store. Our favorite was for
Boo-Rah-Boh
ice cream cones. It went something like this:
Let's meet at noon for a Boo-Rah-Boh cone. We have to meet at noon for a Boo-Rah-Boh cone. No matter how the day goes, let's meet for a Boo-Rah-Boh cone.
I missed those cones. I missed Na-Ri.
A school bus screeched to a halt at the intersection of Wilson Boulevard and Oliver Lane. The crossing guard ushered me off the curb of the sidewalk. I looked left, right, left, crossed Oliver, tried hard to forget the ice cream cones, and practiced reciting the Pledge of Allegiance because Miss Washburn, my third-grade teacher, had chosen me to lead the rest of the class into the pledge for the next three mornings. Everyone thought it such an honor to stand in front of the class next to Miss Washburn's big brown desk, place their right hand upon their heart, and say “I pledge⦔ while the rest followed. But I dreaded it. I could never remember which words came after “⦠to the flag of the United States of America.” Miss Washburn would surely be disappointed to find out I had been mumbling the whole time. I did not want to disappoint my teacher. I liked Miss Washburn. She had long brown hair with ends that curled into the shape of sixes. She wore lavender dresses that flowed when she strolled up and down the aisles. She played the piano and taught us songs about purple mountains and shining seas. She was nothing like my second-grade teacher, who had crooked teeth and called me Ann, Ann, Ann. If I had been older then, I would have politely told her that my name was not Ann. My name was pronounced like the sound one made after drinking iced lemonade on a hot day or when one began to understand why two plus two equals four. AH. My name is Ahn Joo. Like the “a” sound in “far.” Far. The A with the two dots over it. Look it up in the dictionary. Like Aida. Ave Maria. Awabi.
While waiting for cars to pass on Thayer Street, the crossing guard asked me where I was from. When I answered her, she said she had a friend who was from that very same country. Then she asked me how long I had lived in America. “Two years,” I said, and held up my two fingers. She smiled, nodded, and let me pass.
A group of older girls walked by me. The tallest of the four wore bright yellow tights and shiny black shoes. She was giggling and talking about boys. They hurried down the street toward the ABC Drug Store, where they would probably buy strawberry-flavored lip gloss, bubble gum, and fashion magazines.
Before turning onto my street, I waited to see if the girls did go into the ABC. I clapped my hands in triumph as I watched them run across the parking lot and disappear through the double doors.
I turned onto Burning Rock Court and skipped the rest of the way home, keeping an eye on the cracks in the sidewalk. Dandelions grew out of them. I stopped to pick a bunch. Then from a distance, I heard my little brother crying. I looked up and saw that he was being carried by my mother into a cab. She was wearing her brown-and-white polka-dotted skirt that clung to her thighs. She took long strides away from our home into the cab and thumped shut the door. Hiding behind a tree, I counted the dandelions in my hand. There were only four. When I heard the approaching car, I looked up to see my mother's stony face behind the half-opened window of a sky blue cab with “
RELIABLE
” written on the door.
The milk from the broken flower stems dripped down my wrist. I quickly licked it, remembering something my mother told me about dandelion milk being good for nervous stomachs. She also once said that it was wicked for a child to cry in public. She had pointed out to me a little black girl crying in a shopping cart at Pershing Market and said that the girl was a big show-off, bragging to the whole world what little control her mother had over her. My little brother often cried in public, but I was told Min Joo was special.
As I walked toward our apartment building with the black door marked “3501,” I passed the parking spaces; the
STOP
sign that was missing its capital S; windows with blinds and without blinds, with curtains and without curtains; the broken swings at Burning Rock Court; Boris's apartment, which always smelled of garlic and onions; Kavitha's apartment, which smelled of dirty rags; the patch of weeds we cooked up meals for our brothers in; the bench we turned into a house with a sheet and two branches; and the white tree I sprained my wrist against running to first base. Last summer Kavitha's father sat underneath that white tree and performed magic tricks with his cigarette. He looked like a brown skeleton, tall and bald, and wore tattered pants held by a rope and no shoes. His toes were long. His feet were dusty. He looked to me like a man who while walking across the Sahara Desert decided to take a rest in the shade of our tree. My favorite of his tricks, which I called “The Living Ashtray,” was when he would flick his cigarette ashes back onto his tongue with his lower lip. No hands. I saw the ashes land on his tongue. I saw him swallow them, too. I thought it was amazing that a man could carry ashes in his body, and when I told my mother about it, she said to stay away from Kavitha and her family because those things were works of demons.
I walked past the tree with a different feeling from the one I had last summer or even yesterday walking home from school. What a silly monkey I must have been to laugh, clap, and sing along with the other children. What a stupid girl I must have been to braid blades of grass into bracelets, necklaces, and engagement rings.
As I climbed the stairs to the second floor, I wondered where
RELIABLE
might be.
I pressed my ear against the neighbor's door. I listened for the flute I had once heard back in December when I knocked for my father, who wanted to give the American woman next door a gift for the holidays. “Do you want a Korean calendar?” I had asked. But there was now no sound of flutes, only the sound of my breathing and my footsteps.
Our door was not locked. I turned the knob, walked inside, sat down next to my father's boots, and began to cry, remembering the expression on my mother's face. She looked as if I were the last thing on her mind. I had seen that expression before. She wore that scary you-mean-nothing-to-me look on her face whenever she and my father fought.
I was alone in the apartment, but there, right there, I could see my mother sitting in front of the television. I could have sworn she was there. She was ironing my father's dress shirt. It was a Sunday morning, and she was getting us ready for churchâthe New Covenant Korean Church. An hour and a half away, but my mother woke us up and made us go every Sunday. My Sunday School teacher's name was Howard. He had orange hair, freckles, and wore a shirt that had yellow, green, red, and orange parrots painted on it. He taught us that the devil was a beautiful lying snake and that God spoke through donkeys.
My mother, with her ironing quilt laid out in front of her, pressed my father's collar, cuffs, front side, back side, right sleeve, left sleeve, and told me to pull my dress down, pull my socks up, tuck my hair behind my ears, and wake up Min Joo and Father. Min Joo was combing his hair in the bathroom. Father still slept.
My mother was wearing a two-piece dress. It was pink, with tiny black roses lined up in columns and rows. Her hair was tied in a braided bun. Fake diamond earrings with dangling blue teardrop stones. After pressing my father's shirt, she folded the quilt and pushed it underneath the sewing machine. The iron, still hot and propped up, stood next to the door. On the doorknob hung my father's dress shirt.
I crossed my legs. I waited near the shoes. Min Joo's wet hair was parted down the middle. When he sat next to me, I smelled shampoo. I told him he didn't wash it all out. “Your hair's still soapy. Your hair's going to fall out.”
Min Joo shrugged his shoulders, pressed his elbows onto his knees, rested his chin in the palms of his hands, and told me that our father was still sleeping.
“You should've woken him up,” I said. “You know what's going to happen, don't you? Don't you?”
I
should have woken him up.
I
should have swung open his door, stomped across the room, pulled up the blinds, turned him onto his back, shaken his shoulders, jumped on the bed, pulled the blanket to the floor, clanged pot lids against each other, and screamed in his ear that Mother was coming with the back scratcher.
Mother came.
Is this woman crazy? Get the hell off of me!
You're not going to wake up? You're still smelling of vodka. I wash and iron your clothes until my tongue falls out, and you stink it up with vodka and cigarettes. What is this smell? What is it?
You're making too much noise. I'm getting up. Stop screaming.
Get out of my bed!
I'm getting out.
What have I done wrong? What is it? Why do you treat me like this? You can't make me live like a dog.
You're making too much noise. I'm getting up.
Lying coward. Where were you last night?
Shut up, crazy begging bitch.
I'm crazy. I'm crazy! Min Joo-yah, Ahn Joo-yah, your mother is crazy. Come in and smell your father's breath. Listen to your crazy mother and smell your father's breath. Smell his clothes. Smell them and ask him where he's been all night.
I'm getting up.
Korea or America, you're just the same. No change. No change.
You're making too much noise.
Where are you going? Are you still drunk? The bathroom's over there. Get in the shower. Take a shower, you coward.
Leave me alone. I'm getting a drink.
There were pink streaks on my father's arm. His pajama pants hung low underneath his belly. He combed his hair with his fingers and walked toward the kitchen. My mother followed.
Again? You're drinking in the morning?
Water, bitch. I'm getting water. Leave me alone.
Drink in the shower.
Are you not going to shut your mouth? Do you want me to smack it shut?
