A Cab Called Reliable (14 page)

A man on a ten-speed carrying a blue knapsack on his back pedaled past us as my father slowed down to exit the bridge. As he switched gears, I saw my hand zigzag and tremble next to his, bound at the wrist by steel rings.

Duty caught me by the throat, keeping me from beating my forehead against the bathroom floor as my mother used to do while she chanted and wailed:
Why did you bring me to this awful, awful country?

13

It was almost three in the morning, and I was reading about metal knees, plastic hearts, motorized elbows, and electronic ears replacing damaged or missing pieces of the human body, remembering Boris, and thinking of turning the radio on low and slow-dancing with my pillow, when the telephone rang. My father's oldest brother from Pusan, who had never contacted us since our family immigrated to America, was calling to inform him that their father had passed away from a long-term illness. Something had been terminally wrong with his male organ for years now. To them, the death did not come as a surprise. He lived some years more than they had expected. Everyone here is fine. Are you fine? I'm fine. We're fine. And my father threw the phone on the floor, returned to his pillow, mumbled something about how unlucky it was to get calls in the middle of the night, and in a matter of seconds, he was snoring again.

“Daddy, are you all right?” I asked. “Do you want me to get you anything? Anything at all?” My father told me to be quiet and go back to sleep.

I returned to my room, thinking that my grandfather's death was a relief for the both of us. He had done enough damage in his lifetime, beating the sanity out of his own daughter, beating and driving my father out of his own country, and stashing his first wife away in some remote village. Who knows how he got rid of his second wife? My father told me that when he visited his mother before leaving for America, she had given him one dried red pepper as a farewell gift, shown him off to the other villagers as her son the doctor in the city, having confused him with her other sons, and offered him dinner while smearing her own feces on walls. My grandfather's judgment day was long overdue, I told myself as I turned on the radio, took a gentle hold of my pillow, and slow-danced with Ian Krauss, my lab science partner and make-believe boyfriend.

For Sunday breakfast, I made my father soybean soup with tofu cubes, squash, and mushrooms, and laid a fried egg on top of his rice. Our retired neighbor, Mr. Smith, was mowing his lawn again, the second time this week, and the our-three-sons neighbor had the sprinkler going over their garden with its tomatoes, cucumbers, and daffodils. While waiting for my father to come downstairs for his meal, I looked out of our kitchen window and watched the Korean grandmother hang long strips of nylon gauze to dry on her clothesline.

Their deck was twice the size of ours. They had a gas grill on which the grandmother cooked croakers and barbecued marinated beef for her daughter-in-law, who was pregnant with her oldest son's first child. Once, I tried to greet the grandmother, and she asked me in Korean if I was Chinese.

“I was born in Pusan,” I assured her.

“Your father's Chinese, isn't he? No? Then, your mother, she's got to be Chinese. One of them has to be Chinese because those eyes, those eyes aren't Korean eyes. The shape of your face, your hair, even the way you blink. It's not Korean. Let me ask you something,” she said, squinting her eyes at me. And when she asked me if American girls menstruated, I firmly told her that menstruation was not a matter of race or culture, and ran back home before she could ask me if I had started mine.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs, I yelled up that the soup was getting cold and the egg on the rice was beginning to freeze. “Hurry up and come down. At this rate, I'll be making lunch in another hour.”

I heard the garage door open, followed by the sound of the sliding door of my father's van. He had woken up early, driven to Good Food for his electric drill, saw, and favorite hammer, and stopped off at a hardware store for two-by-fours, screws, nails, and a twenty-five-foot chain to build a swing set for two in our backyard.

“There's no room for this,” I said.

“Oh sure. Plenty of room,” he said, carrying his toolbox to the back.

“Where? Where're you going to put it?”

“I'm going to hang on cherry tree.”

“Yeah, and break your neck,” I said. “Dad, that's my favorite tree. Don't kill it.”

“Don't worry. I'm not going to kill, silly girl,” he said, and went back to the van for his two-by-fours.

“There's soup on the table.”

“I eat already,” he said.

Sound was coming from every part of our street. If not my father's drilling, hammering, and sawing, then it was the honking cars lined up bumper to bumper on Morning Glory Way trying to find parking for the softball tournaments held at Weston, and the children whose laughter and whining seemed to resonate underneath the heat of the sun, and the lawn mowers that seemed to turn on and off in swift succession. Feeling a little left out, I decided to contribute to the neighborhood noise by vacuuming, running the washer, dryer, and dishwasher, reciting the definition of ten more SAT words, and playing a tune or two on the piano during commercial breaks before running my Sunday evening bath.

I was trying to curl my hair with a hot iron when my father called me from outside to take a look, to take a ride.

“Dad, it doesn't look very stable,” I said, brushing my damp hair behind the kitchen screen door.

“Oh sure, it's stable. It's strong,” he said, as he sat down and swung back and forth. Gripping the chain, he pushed his feet against the grass, and the swing swung higher. “You can try,” he said, waving his free hand and patting the wooden seat where I was to sit next to him.

I told him it would never hold two people, my hair was still wet, the hot iron was on, and I had to warm up the leftover soup for dinner. As I left him on his swing and returned upstairs, I started to feel the way I had some months ago after freeing the brown rabbit my father had trapped and caged in our backyard. I had found my father in his room with his head down on his desk, listening to an opera, and tried to explain in my best Korean that the poor rabbit was better off free, on its own, with its family, with other rabbits. I asked him how he could possibly watch the poor thing mutilate its own face trying to escape through the bars and wires his hands had built. He told me it wasn't my rabbit to free. I hadn't trapped it. I hadn't fed it carrots and lettuce leaves every morning. I hadn't cleaned its cage. I hadn't rubbed ointment on its wounds. He said that when he was a boy, he had taken care of plenty of rabbits in Korea, and he was planning on letting it go once its wounds healed. He said a rabbit in that condition would surely die by the end of the day. He told me to go outside and clean up its mess.

That evening, I had taken apart my father's handiwork. It was a beautiful cage with a wooden frame, sanded corners, a door with hinges, a bed of spinach, lettuce, and dandelion leaves, and a shingled roof to shield the rabbit from the sun and rain.

Finally, our street was quiet, and I could hear Mr. Smith's telephone ringing. After heating the soup, I went outside to the swing set, where my father was oiling the metal rings from which the chains hung. He said it was squeaking a bit. There were white
salonpas
patches on the back of his neck, behind his left ear, and on his right elbow. When he wore one on the back of his neck, it meant his head was aching.

Sitting in the middle of the swing seat, I said, “Dinner's ready.”

My father put down the oilcan and pushed me from behind. “I'll push it higher,” he said.

“Stop, I'm going to throw up,” I said and hopped off.

Stopping the swing, he got on himself, and told me to sit by him. I could smell the menthol of the
salonpas
patches and noticed that my father was beginning to bald. Crickets were singing to each other. Traces of conversation came from another backyard, and someone was having a barbecue. The swing set faced my father's garden, and I stared at the patch of perilla leaves, squash, tomatoes, and the single eggplant that looked like a big fat purple teardrop. When he pushed his feet against the grass to swing a little higher, I told him the tree would come crashing down on us, roots and all. As he yawned and rubbed his left eye with his thumb, he told me that when he was a boy in Korea, he had built a swing out of nothing but a piece of rope and some branches. He had built it on the cypress tree next to the village well.

There were many stories about the village well: drownings of newborns, drownings of virgins, spirits that rose from its water, faces that appeared on its surface. My father could have built his swing on the apple tree that grew on his family's farm, but his stepmother wouldn't let him. She was afraid he would snatch an apple and have one less to sell at the market. The apples grew as large as a man's fists, and they tasted sweet. My father had stolen one the night a fire broke out in another villager's outhouse. He had dug a hole in the ground, lined it with flat rocks, and hid the apple that needed a day to ripen. When he returned to the hole, a juicy red apple awaited him. It was the only time he had eaten from his family's apple tree.

“My oldest brother, the one who called, he tried to eat from that tree, but our stepmother caught him and he was beaten badly. He simply stood there, not saying a word, taking the beating. He never fought back. He couldn't even walk straight for a week. I think that's how he got his stutter.”

My father held onto to the chain and stared down into his garden. It was getting dark, and I could see the calendar hanging on our refrigerator door in the lighted kitchen. Hearing the sound of an airplane flying over us, my father said that it always excited him to hear an airplane passing by. When he was a boy and war planes flew over his village, he would point to the sky and scream out, “It's the nose people, it's the nose people!” because Americans had such tall and pointy noses. When my father was sixteen years old, he had an American pen pal, Naomi Jordan of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. On her birthday, he had sent her a compact and lipstick. He had kept her letters. Her handwriting was beautiful. Before my father could turn to me and beg me to track her down for him, I got off the swing and said that dinner was getting cold, and the soup was no good if more than a day old.

Catching me by the wrist, my father asked me if I had written anything. I told him I was working on my longest story and had written more than half of it already.

“Go get it. Let me hear it,” he said.

“I can't read it out here. It's too dark.”

“Then you turn the light on when you come back.”

“Dad, it's not finished yet. It's not that good.”

“Let me hear it,” he said, and smiled at me.

When I returned to the swing with my pages of writing, my father was holding the eggplant in his hand. He said that if it grew too large, the skin would toughen and its insides would go bitter, that we had to eat it while it was tender and sweet. As I held my pages underneath our deck light and shooed off mosquitos and gnats, I told my father the story wasn't finished yet, and if anything sounded confusing, to stop me.

“Just read,” he said.

“All right,” I said. I cleared my throat to read aloud to my father what I had written so far: “A village schoolteacher calling roll in front of his class of children whose parents were rice, barley, potato, or rabbit farmers threw his chalk at the boy in the back, who never washed, never wore shoes, and had already fallen asleep next to his puddle of drool.”

“Where's school?” my father interrupted.

“In Korea. You've got to hear the rest of it, though. Just wait. It comes up in the next sentence,” I said, and continued. “The chalk hit the shoulder of the sleeping boy's desk partner whose older brother had run away to Seoul to make a life for himself in the city because the filthy country was only full of dirt-work, pulling and planting and eating weeds that grew out of cow dung, and he wanted to work in a government office. Many of the young men and women villagers wanted to work in a government office, especially the women who had finished high school, but could not go on to college. They wanted to be typists or copiers and maybe meet a higher-ranking office worker who was still a bachelor. They could marry, live in one of the new high-rise apartments in Seoul, and have a child or two. What an impossible dream! Either that or meet an American man while working as a typist in an army office, the way one young woman did, except she married a black man, and her mother and father would not let her enter the village or enter the house, not even for a visit, because marrying an American was one thing—but a black man? She was locked out. So the black man took his new wife to America, where they lived in a high-rise apartment with a balcony overlooking streets, cars, people, a purple mountain and a raging sea. There were many women who married American men.”

“Do you want to marry American man?” my father interrupted.

“Dad, that's what you told me. It's not about me. Do you want me to read or not?” I asked.

He nodded for me to continue. “There were many women who married American men. And if they had younger sisters, the girls tried on their lace underwear and slips and smeared Pond's Cold Cream on their faces, necks, arms, and legs, thinking it was lotion, and besides, anything made in America was good for you. Even the peasants with squash-shaped heads knew that. American chewing gum, American cola, American cigarettes were worth a month's worth of wages. If the teacher were to ask his students what they wanted to do when they were older, they would answer, either work as a clerk for the government or become a nurse, doctor, or teacher or live in America. Nobody wanted to be a farmer, potter, sea diver, fishmonger, or popcorn, fruit, rubber shoe seller like their mothers and fathers, who began work before the sun rose and came home to a bowl of barley, a basket of lettuce, bean paste sauce, and a pot of lukewarm cabbage soup after the sun set. In the winter, they ate inside on the heated floor. In spring, summer, and fall, they ate outside on the veranda, while watching uncle climb a crooked ladder to patch a hole in the thatched roof, little brother chase a rat, and mother with food in her mouth yell at them to come and eat the meal she had cooked. The uncle wasn't hungry.…”