Fox Girl (4 page)

I liked when wash days stretched into weeks, even if that meant Sookie's mother could only offer rice and sour kimchee stew for lunch. Duk Hee always sat the table with us, drinking and urging us to eat, and talking like we were her girlfriends at the clubs. Even though this irritated Sookie, she tolerated her mother's advice because I loved it.

“If you ever catch an American man to marry,” Duk Hee would say, “you need to learn their secrets. The more you know about them, the more power you will have. Remember, it is war.” Then I'd laugh, picturing the
jajie
dog soldier marching across the table.

She'd drink a little, thinking of something bizarre about American Joes she could tell us, something that would test our credulity. “When hair stops growing on top their heads, it will find a new path, sprouting out of their ears and on their knuckles,” Sookie's mother offered.

Even Sookie laughed at that, but she shook her head and said: “Strange, yes, but Frog-Face Ota from Okinawa has no hair on his head and still has hairy arms.”

“And ears,” I added.

“And nose.” Both Sookie and I squealed.

“Okay, how about this.” Sookie's mother tapped the table for attention and tried again. “The
miguk
GIs grow so tall, that their heads hit the ceiling on buses and they have to walk like apes to get in the door of people's houses.”

I pretended to consider this, not wanting her to know we had seen one of her darkie boyfriends draped in her bed, his legs hanging off the mattress. He easily could have been that tall. “Heard that already,” I finally said.

Sookie's mother tried to think of something stranger, something that would stump us. “
Miguks
can't see us,” she said. “Korean faces blind them.”

“Aha!” said Sookie. “That can't be true.”

I thought about it for a moment. It could be true Americans didn't see like Koreans did; they had overly large, odd-colored ball-eyes. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Just that it's possible to be invisible to them.” Sookie's mother pushed away from the table and held her hands out to us. “Come,” she said, “I'll show you what I mean.”

Duk Hee led us to the back room where she and sometimes her boyfriends slept. Sookie and I perched on the edge of the bare mattress while she searched through her drawers of makeup. When we saw her filling her cosmetics bag, looking over her shoulder once in a while to consider our faces, we started wriggling like market dogs for sale.

“For some reason,” she explained, “American Joes cannot see our faces clearly. Especially when we use the eye shadows, lipsticks, powder, blush-i they give us, we confuse them.”

I pointed to the bottle of foundation. “What's that?” I asked, pretending I didn't know. The last time we had played with her mother's cosmetics, Sookie and I had used up so much foundation we needed to make up the noticeable difference with water.

Sookie's mother poured the liquid skin on her hands and rubbed it over my face. “Magic,” she breathed.

When she came to my birthmark, she hesitated and frowned, then dabbed more foundation into the creases and darkened pits. Again and again her fingers rubbed my cheek. I closed my eyes as she touched my face. Only she and Sookie had ever acknowledged my defect; not even my own mother would caress me there.

“You know Grandmother of Chung Woo, right?” Duk Hee asked. When I nodded, she gripped my chin to still my head. “Let me put some blue eyeliner on you, then I'll line Ho Sook's eyes in black.” I felt the brush lick around my lashes like a small snake. “Well, Grandmother of Chung Woo has to work in the clubs when her good-for-nothing son spends all his money on his
chop.
I tell you, he cannot even support the family he has and he is off trying to make a new one with his mistress.” She snorted in disgust. “I heard that was against the law in America—that's a good country for women, I think.”

I opened my eyes when I felt the makeup crust around them. Duk Hee turned to rim Sookie's eyes with a thin paintbrush dipped in black ink.

“Anyway, when Grandmother of Chung Woo does this to her face,” she continued, “she can get any man at the clubs, even one young enough to be her son. Imagine, they cannot even tell how old she is.” Sookie's mother clucked and shook her head as she sketched an extra line above her daughter's eyes, then licked her smallest finger to erase a smudge. Then she blew on Sookie's face. When she was done, Sookie opened her eyes.

“You look like the king of raccoons,” Sookie said, teasing me.

“Don't bother looking in the mirror,” I retorted. “You look like a ghost.” Secretly, though, I thought I looked glamorous.

“Shup!” scolded Sookie's mother. “Let me work on your mouths. I'll tell you what I think. I think that this makeup is magic—a disguise that lets us move through their world safely.”

I tried not to smile as Duk Hee brushed a fluorescent pink on my lips.

“Ooooh, Hyun Jin!” Sookie squinted and raised her hands in front of her, groping air. “Where are you? I can't see you anymore; your mouth is blinding!”

Duk Hee knocked her daughter's hands down, ignoring her giggling. “It's like the story of the fox who wraps herself in the skin of a dead girl,” she explained. “Somehow, in real life, we have to become like the fox girl.”

I didn't like the story of the fox girl. In the version my father told me, a big fox visits a country school. It is late at night and the students have decided to sleep in the schoolroom because it is too dark to walk home. All but one of the hundred students have fallen asleep when the one awake hears a soft guttural voice counting pairs of shoes outside—
hana, dul, set, net
—all the way to one hundred.

Through the window, the boy sees the snout of a fox, but as it crawls through the window, it takes the shape of a beautiful young woman. The boy thinks he must be dreaming and rubs his eyes. He strains to see in the darkness and notices: the dirt from a newly dug grave lodged under her nails; the blood like lipstick staining her mouth; the glittering of a hunter's eyes in the night.

The boy crawls away, hiding in a far corner of the room. He watches the fox girl count the students with a kiss that steals their breaths. With each kiss, a boy stops breathing and dies in middream.

When she approaches the corner where the youngest boy is hiding, he creeps back to his sleeping place. Sick with fear, he lies down among the dead bodies of his friends. When the girl reaches the end of the row of students, she growls. “Only ninety-nine! There is one missing. How can that be?”

She rushes outside to recount the pairs of shoes. One hundred. She counts again, to be absolutely certain, and all the while the boy inside tries not to move, tries not to breathe. After again finding exactly one hundred pairs of shoes, the fox girl turns toward the door to recount the boys. Just then, a cock crows. The demon drops to all fours and scampers into the nearby woods. The clever boy is saved, the only one out of a hundred to live.

“I don't want to be a fox girl,” I told Sookie's mother. “They are evil creatures.”

Sookie's mother shrugged. “I suppose it depends on who tells the story,” she said, choosing a deep red lipstick, like blood from a fox's mouth, for her daughter. I smacked my own lips, which felt heavy and thick. The smell of the lipstick reminded me a little of the taste of rubber and hot dog.

“The fox girl was only trying to regain what those boys stole from her,” Sookie explained, making an effort to keep her mouth open and still.

I frowned, and Sookie's mother finished the story. “The fox was once the keeper of the jewel of knowledge. She kept it safe, hidden under her tongue. One day, a young scholar hunted her down, begging her to teach him a little of the world. He seemed a nice boy, sincere and eager.

“The fox allowed him to kiss her, so he could have a taste of knowledge. But he became greedy and swallowed the jewel, planning to look up at the sky, then down at the ground before it could dissolve, knowing that if he did so he would possess all the wisdom of heaven and earth.

“But the fox pulled at his chin to try to get her jewel back, and he was forced to look only at the earth. That's why men only know about things on earth. And that's why the fox borrows a human form, forever searching each man for that lost jewel.”

I stared at Sookie's mouth—her teeth looked sharp and white in that red, red mouth. “I never heard that ending before,” I said.

Sookie laughed. “Maybe my mother made it up then.”

“Both of you, close your mouths and your eyes.” Sookie's mother ordered. She dusted powder across our faces, and when the cloud evaporated, settling on the oils of our skin, I began to understand how makeup could be worn as a disguise. It felt like one, a shield over tender skin. And the face I saw across from mine was Sookie's but not Sookie's. It was instead an ageless mask, cool and deadly, capable of swallowing the jewel of a man's soul.

 

One Thursday, no sheets were hanging in the yard. Thinking Duk Hee must have snuck in a boyfriend, Sookie and I waited in the ditch, kicking away a pile of rotting lettuce leaves and fish bones to set up a game of seesaw in the dust. We pried a board loose from the shed Crazy Lady Li slept in at night and balanced it across a brick. We jumped for a while in the hot sun, until we were too thirsty to continue. Dragging our feet through the gray dirt to Sookie's apartment, we peered through the kitchen window, but couldn't see much through the boards; it was too dark. We stomped around the building, shouting at each other—“We're home from school now!” and “It must be past dinnertime!” hoping Sookie's mother or her Joe would at least throw down some won for us to leave.

When one of Sookie's neighbors—a
yong sekshi
who had just started working at the same bar as Sookie's mother—opened her window and threw water on us, I called her a fat hippo whore.

The GI girl waggled her butt at us. “See me, see yourself,” she sneered and slammed her window shut.

I wanted to pound on that girl's door, then on her face when she opened it, but Sookie stopped me from marching over there. “Stop fooling around,” she scolded. “Something's wrong.”

Sookie hit the door of her own apartment with the brick we had used to balance the seesaw and splintered the frame by the doorknob. After pushing our way in, we were forced to realize the room was empty.
“Omoni,”
Sookie called out in the darkness.
“Omoni!”

We lit a lamp. Our faces looked sharp and ghostly. “I have to go home,” I whispered.

Sookie nodded. I didn't move.

“Go on, Hyun Jin,” she said, lifting her chin toward the broken door. “It's okay.”

“One of her boyfriends probably asked for her at the club,” I offered. “And she had to go, right?”

We both knew she wouldn't have worked at the clubs on the day she checked in at the clinic. It was against official policy. But Sookie said, “Right, She'll be home soon or in the morning, like always.”

“I'll meet you here before school,” I said, though I didn't need to remind her of our established routine.

Sookie turned away from me, leaving me in the dark room. I wanted to ask her to come home with me, to eat with me at my house. But I knew and she knew my mother didn't like to feed her. “Stray cats will keep coming back if you feed them,” my mother always said about Sookie, though not in front of my father. My father had a soft spot for my friend. But I knew he wouldn't stand up for her against my mother. My mother was the head of the house and the kitchen; she was the boss of the food.

When I stopped at her house the next day for school, the door was wide open. Sookie lay sleeping in the middle of the floor, the lamp still burning dimly by her head. She hadn't bothered to lay out her blankets and the
ondol
floor was cold. She hadn't even bothered to fire up the heater before curling in on herself like a wounded animal.

“Sookie,” I whispered. Clearing my throat of its scratchy worry, I tried again, louder: “Sookie, time for school.” I shook her shoulder, tickled her toes. She kicked out at me, then growled. “Shushushu,” I crooned. I sat cross-legged behind her and stroked her hair. I thought I heard her whimper. I hugged her, trying to pull her into my lap. We were the same size, but she made herself as small as possible to fit across my legs. I stroked her, humming softly. “It's okay, it's okay,” I crooned even though I was afraid, too. I kept thinking what her mother had told us: that we were in the midst of a war, and that anybody—even a fox in disguise—could get bitten.

I gathered Sookie closer and let words tumble out of my mouth. “Your mother is a fox, she can take care of herself. She's smart and she's beautiful. She'll be home soon.”

I sang on and on until Sookie lay quiet across my lap. “Your
omoni
knows you're waiting for her, Sookie, and she's looking for a jewel to bring home to you.”