A Cab Called Reliable (15 page)

I stopped, noticing my father was yawning. I told him the soup was surely cold by now and my throat was dry from the reading. “Let's go inside. I'll finish it later,” I said.

“If it's cold, then it's cold. Just finish it right now,” he said. “Just finish it.”

I skipped a page and read about a young woman. “The young woman was a bit uncertain and hesitant, but she did not show it because she loved the young man, who was so eager to please her. Caressing her cheek, he said he would take care of her, take her away from her father and four brothers, who only made her work. He kissed her coarse hands, telling her she was made for more than farm and housework. Farm and housework was not the reason one mother was packing her bags to leave her husband and two daughters. While her daughters were at school and her husband at work in the rice mill, she stayed home and drank bowls of expensive coffee until a well-dressed man in eyeglasses, a silk tie, and polished shoes knocked at her gate to use her telephone. He told her she was beautiful and asked if he could join her for a cup of coffee. She was restless and lonely and tired of being teased by her friends because her husband worked in a rice mill. She wanted to live a bigger life. So she let the man return to the house two, three, four times, and when he told her he had to go tend to his orchard of orange trees on Cheju Island, she said she would follow him. She would follow him anywhere. ‘Please let me go with you,' she begged him in a low whisper, which he could hardly hear because the old woman next door was wailing about her oldest son, who had died of a heart attack a week ago. The mother wailed, while a boy three houses away yelled from outside his gate, ‘I am a thief. I am a thief. I am a thief,' as a punishment from his father for having stolen his stepmother's gold ring. He wanted to trade it for comic books, chewing gum, Popsicles, and a kite that would surely fly higher than any of the other boys' in the village.

“Fly high, high, high, swooping over the peak of the One-Hundred-Year-Old Mountain, where a temple was carved on its sloping side. A Buddha with smooth stone joints sat erect, looking down on the three piles of carefully stacked pebbles beside its left knee. On the second step of the tile-roofed temple housing the monks lay a row of white rubber shoes. The servant, who was a seventeen-year-old girl, swept those steps of the leaves that fell in autumn, snow in winter, and rain in spring. She walked with a limp and suffered pain when she had to straighten her back to light the candles on the high shelves. She was told suffering would purify her soul. So, when she waited for the large pot of rice to finish steaming to feed the monks with and remembered her poor mother, she sighed and tried to hold back her tears for the sake of her soul. Her poor mother. She remembered how her father had pulled her mother by the hair, dragging her body toward the door because she had sneaked out of the house in the afternoon to meet her friends, who laughed, sang, imitated their husbands, and told stories. She had worn her colorful clothes beneath the gray full-length skirt and heavy sweater, pretending to go to market, but turned the corner into her friend's house, where the music came from.

“When the servant girl saw her mother last, she was counting and recounting the five dried red peppers laid out on her skirt, dividing them among her invisible friends and telling stories about her son, who was a famous doctor in the city. She said he was coming to visit her, and when he came, she would take him around the village from door to door to show him off because he was a handsome man. She had no sons. Like the mother of four daughters, who rubbed her hands under the moon praying the fifth child would be a boy or else her mother-in-law would demand her husband take another woman, who was able to bear him a son. The oldest daughter cut her and her sisters' hair to boys' length and told them to deepen their voices because it was their faults their mother threw up all her food.

“The mother finally had her son, but soon after the birth, she left her five children and husband to live on Cheju Island as a sea diver for oysters, clams, sea cucumbers, and worms. She was losing her hearing. The silence at the bottom of the sea met her on land, and she could not hear the prices her customers called out. She read their lips. In a loud voice, she called out a more reasonable price. Her children were forgotten in the sea. ‘From sea to shining sea' were the words to an American song one woman had learned while living with an American man in the basement of a house owned by an elderly couple, who lived upstairs and constantly told her how beautiful her hair was. But mice lived in the basement as well, and they reminded her of the huge rats at the orphanage that bit her in her sleep. Whenever she heard scratching or squeaking, she jumped on the bed, slapping her face as if fighting off crawling insects and screaming for her mother in Korean.

“At first, the American man was understanding. He gently held and rocked her to sleep, calling her his baby, sweet little baby, there, there, you're safe in my arms. But after a few months, he grew tired of her broken English, her broken ways, and got into the habit of striking her whenever she jumped on the bed. When that didn't stop her outbursts, he held a mouse by its tail over her head, threatening to drop it on her beautiful hair if she didn't shut the hell up because she was giving him a fucking headache. During those nights, she tried to remember the face of her elder sister, who she dreamed was eating delicious foods and wearing pretty dresses, living in a house of her own. And she hoped to see her again someday, which was unlikely because her sister had returned to Korea to a remote village in a country and worked in a winehouse, entertaining men with her piano playing, singing, and if they were willing to pay, a private room for the night. It rarely happened that a winehouse girl met a man who would marry her, but she did because she happened to know the music and words to his favorite song: ‘I'm just a lonely boy, lonely and blue, I'm all alone with nothing to do.… All I want is someone to love, someone to kiss, someone to hold, somebody, somebody, somebody, please.…'”

My father's eyes were closed, and the night wind was gently swinging us. I tapped him on the shoulder. When he opened his eyes, I told him that was all I had written so far, that I tried to get everything he had told me down, that my throat was hurting, and I was hungry. He nodded in agreement, and we walked into our kitchen.

The next morning, my father did not go into the store and I did not go to school because on his chest, right over his heart, and all across his left side, ending at the center of his spine, were red, inflamed lesions. The pain would not let my father move. He told me to boil dandelion leaves, take him to his acupuncturist, and hang a crucifix on the center of his headboard.

I drove him from doctor to doctor. Those Korean doctors could not tell us what the hell was wrong with him; they said he had liver problems, indigestion, maybe preliminary signs of heart disease, allergies, a pulled muscle from his daily sit-ups, too much stress from work. At the end of the day, I drove him to the emergency room at the hospital, and as we waited, I told my father that this was all because of Grandfather. “He's haunting you,” I said. “You've got to get him out. You've got to talk him out. He's an asshole. Talk about it.” He answered me with a one-syllable grunt, in agreement or disagreement or simply to shut me up.

A bearded doctor examined my father and diagnosed him with shingles. Shingles! What a lovely simple sound. It rhymed with jingles, tingles, mingles. Shingles was not a terminal or dangerous disease. It was caused by stress or fatigue, a reawakening of a chicken pox virus living in the bloodstream infecting the nervous system. It was a simple and common virus, the nurse explained. The lesions and the pain would vanish in two weeks.

My father, lying on the tissue-covered bed with his hand over his heart, helplessly repeated to the nurse, “I'm so scared for tonight. It's so painful, so very painful. How can I sleep?”

I listened carefully to my father as I sat on the plastic chair next to the stainless-steel sink underneath a box of rubber gloves that hung from the wall. Under my breath, I was urging him in Korean to tell the nurse about his father's death. Tell her everything. Tell her what an asshole he was. The shingles was caused by the news of his father's death. Instead, my father was asking the nurse if he could be operated on to get rid of the awful pain. She said an operation was unnecessary, and he would be given a prescription for painkillers.

I wanted to hear him say, “It is so painful, so very painful. I am scared for tonight. I cannot sleep. You see, my father has died, and I cannot get myself to do the right thing, which is to go to Korea, which is to go to his funeral. My father has died. All day long, I have been hearing his voice in my ears. His voice rings in my ears. My father's last words to me were spoken on the telephone. He told me to have a good life. The way you Americans say it to people you don't ever want to see for the rest of your life. He told me to have a good life. I will not go to his funeral. I have no excuse. The only thing that keeps me here in America like a coward is hatred. You see, I hate my father because when I was a boy, he sent me into the fields to work while my brothers were sent to school. They all live well in Korea. He beat me. He would not buy me shoes. He would not let me eat eggs, which he said were too good for me. It was because of him that my sister is living in a Buddhist temple, a little crazy in the head, that my blood mother is living alone in a village, very much crazy in the head. On my wedding day, he struck me across my ear so hard that when I was walking down the aisle to meet my bride, my ears were ringing. I could not hear the music. I could not hear her vows. She is no longer with us. She took my son and returned to Korea. I ran away to America because of my father. He was so bad to me. I do not know why. I do not understand. And now, now, now, my father is dead. It is so painful. I am scared of tonight because the pain will be most agonizing in the night on my bed when my clock blinks two fifty-five.”

I imagined hearing my father saying these words in perfect English or broken, I did not care, in tears or with a smile, I did not care. He was saying them to the bearded doctor and the nurse who spoke slowly and clearly when she explained that shingles was not dangerous. In my perfect world, they would have listened and been moved by my father's story. I imagined they were moved to tears. But the visit ended with a morphine shot, and I led my dizzy and babbling father out of the hospital.

At home, when I put him to bed, my father cried and mumbled that he loved all his brothers, would lay his life down for them, would send them all the money that they wanted in the world, and as he started to mumble something about Min Joo and my mother, I walked toward the door. He called out, “Joo-yah.”

“Dad, what can I get you?”

“Joo-yah,” he cried.

“Dad, what do you want?”

“Joo-yah, I'm not feel good.”

“Should I get you some water?” I asked, walking toward the door.

“Joo-yah, don't leave me. Don't leave me.”

Weeping into his pillow, my father begged me not to leave him. He said none of it was his fault. The doctors said she couldn't have any children, and then Min Joo came along, my crying Min Joo; he said he wanted to see his son, his own flesh and blood.

That night, I returned to my room, stuffed my mouth with a corner of my blanket, and wept because my father, in his stupor, had confessed that the mother who had left me, and whom I had waited and longed for, was not mine.

14

You liked anchovy soup, so I stunk up my hair and the house to cook it for you. You wanted eel, I almost burned down the house smoking it for you. You liked live squid, so I fought with its tentacles to dump them in the
kimchi
for you. I cut them up, dumped them in the stinging red sauce, and they were still moving. You wanted to listen to old Korean songs, so I bought a tape of
“Barley Field,” “When We Depart,” “The Waiting Heart,”
and
“The Wild Chrysanthemum”
at Korean Korner for you. For weeks I heard,
“Above the sky a thousand feet high, there are some wild geese crying,” “Where, along the endless road are you going away from me like a cloud? like a cloud? like a cloud?” “Lonesome with the thoughts of my old days.”
I had to eat my corn flakes with crying geese and rivers that flowed with the blood of twenty lovers. You wanted to read a story about rabbits, so I borrowed
The Tales of Peter Rabbit
for you. You liked cowboy movies, so I bought John Wayne videos for you. You liked to garden, so I stole Mrs. Lee's perilla seeds for you. Your help quit on you, so I skipped two weeks' worth of classes to fry shrimp, steam cabbage, boil collard greens, and bake biscuits for you. You liked Angela's mother, so I drove to her store in Southeast D.C. to set up a dinner date for you. You thought you were losing your hearing, so I laid your head on my thigh and removed the wax out of your ears for you.

You sat on the couch. Your feet rested on top of the table. Your gray eyebrows fell over your drooping lids. On top of your heaving stomach, your hands were folded, and the remote control was balanced on your left thigh. You flipped through the channels when I told you I had grilled the croaker and that my car was up to 9,000 miles. You flipped through the channels when I asked you to show me how to change my oil. Without turning your head to look at me, you said that I had to get under the car, that I would crush my head, that I would die. Too dangerous. You told me to get it done and that it was cheap, as you handed me a twenty-dollar bill from your shorts pocket and walked to the kitchen table to eat your grilled croaker. But it was a Sunday evening. Everything was closed on Sunday evenings, and I could already hear the knocking.

“I can hear the knocking.”

You broke off the tail end of the croaker and bit into it, leaving the fin between your thumb and middle finger. You chewed the bones and spit them out. “Knocking? That's something else. Not oil problem.”