Triplines (9781936364107) (3 page)

She looks at Lenny and says, “I'm okay.”

“What happened?”

She waits a moment, then tells him that a young man, possibly a teenager, with large sunglasses, came in, pulled out a gun and ordered her to give him all her cash. She had eighty dollars in the register. He then told her to get into the back closet, and he shoved a chair under the door handle. She waited a few minutes then broke out and called the police.

“That's all?” Lenny asks.

“He could've shot me,” she says.

“Oh.”

“We will install a special alarm tomorrow.”

“What kind of gun was it?”

She sighs. “I don't know. Go to bed, Lenny.”

He returns to his room, passing his father, who stares
angrily at the TV news. The smoldering expression on his face means that he's not finished with his wife, and Lenny prepares for a fight.

It begins with low, sharp murmurs in Korean, their voices modulated because they are aware of their children in the house, but as the fight escalates, with the see-sawing dynamic of Yul retreating to the living room and Umee following him and arguing, and then Umee running into the kitchen with Yul following, they soon forget about the kids and yell at each other in their loudest voices.

Lenny isn't sure what they're saying. Their parents never taught him Korean, and because of speech problems from his cleft palate, a speech pathologist recommended that they speak only English to him. Korean, then, became the language of fighting.

The argument goes on for another forty minutes, and it sounds as if Yul blames Umee for not trying to fight to keep the money. Lenny hears English words sprinkled in, and infers meanings from their tones. Umee accuses him of wanting her dead. The fight quiets down, and then kicks up again a couple of hours later as Yul becomes more drunk. They shift from arguing about money to venting and cursing. Lenny recognizes the Korean curses, the “shangs” and the “michin nyuns” spat at each other. Then he hears his father hitting his mother – a slap, a cry of pain, more yelling, and crying.

His father chases his mother through the house, their steps heavy, his mother wheezing in fear. The floor and walls shake with their steps, and his mother's lighter, quicker footsteps run down the hall and toward his room. She leaps in and locks the door. His father crashes into the door,
bellowing in Korean, and bangs his fists for a minute, but, exhausted, he eventually retreats to the living room. They hear glass clinking, the TV going off, and the stereo turning on.

Lenny sits up in his bed. His mother stands in the middle of the room, her fists pressed against her stomach. He smells the familiar mixture of her sweat and his father's alcohol. She sees him in the darkness and tells him to go back to sleep, but his heart beats quickly and he remembers how once his father had once almost crashed through the door. His mother tells him again to go to sleep. He lies down, and reaches under his pillow, holding onto his favorite pair of nunchucks. He made these from an old broomstick, fish-eye screws and a chain from the hardware store. The feeling of them in his hands is reassuring, and he hears his mother lower herself to the floor, waiting until his father passes out. After a few minutes his heartbeat slows and he relaxes into his pillow. He hears his mother sighing.

Lenny falls asleep with the sounds of classical music floating in from the living room.

Lenny has Speech Therapy every Thursday afternoon. He and three other kids from different grades show up at a small office near the Janitor's room where they sit at a tiny table with a young speech therapist, Ms. Feinberg, whose perky and enthusiastic demeanor helps yank them out of their post-lunch torpor. She has shelves of toys and devices, including a blue bubble head-piece that funnels their voices directly to their ears, so that they can hear their voices acutely, but Lenny doesn't like what he hears. He has a nasal, high-pitched voice that embarrasses him, and Ms. Feinberg tries to teach him to block off the airflow to his nose when he speaks. It's difficult. The cleft palate he was been born with had been minor—only the soft palate had been split—but it had been enough to render that muscle useless, so he has a lot of “leakage.” Hard consonants come out soft. Sometimes he sounds better when he has a cold and his nose is stuffed up.

The other kids have different problems, lisps and stutters, but they are all similarly frustrated with the exercises and lessons. They are also similarly embarrassed by their disabilities, and they rarely talk to each other. They certainly don't acknowledge each other outside of this room. Once, when Ms. Feinberg was late, they stood outside the door silently, not even looking at each other.

This session Ms. Feinberg rips up small pieces of tissue, places them on a piece of cardboard, and holds this up to
Lenny's nose. She tells him to say, “Sally sells seashells by the seashore.” He does this, and the air from his nose moves the tissue pieces. Ms. Feinberg instructs him to practice this now without moving the tissues. “Don't let air out through your nose.”

Lenny tries, but the leakage keeps fluttering the tissue pieces. She gives the others different tasks. One of the kids, the stutterer, has to recite the same line but with a wooden tongue depressor in his mouth. He stutters over the line and almost gags. The two lispers also repeat the line, but with the bubble head-piece on, the light blue plastic making them look like astronauts. All of them now recite the line, out of sync, in monotones, and it has the chanting quality of Lenny's mother's bible study group.

After school Lenny waits patiently for Mira, because he promised he'd walk home with her. She appears at the entrance with an armload of books, her blue sweater buttoned crookedly, and he tells her that it's a long way with all those books. “You should take the bus.”

“But it left already!”

Lenny loads half of the books into his back pack, and starts walking. She hurries after him, asking him to wait up.

Lenny has already explored the neighborhoods during his roaming lunch periods, when he'd eat the cold leftovers his mother packed for him, and he'd wander farther and farther from the school grounds. Sometimes the crows would see him, and he'd throw them pieces of Korean barbecued beef, the fat congealed white and cold. They'd swarm down and fight for it. Then they'd follow him, flying from telephone pole to telephone pole, watching and waiting.

As Mira and Lenny walk along side streets he spots someone from his grade, Frankie, a hulking overweight slob who picks on the younger kids. He munches a bag of Doritos while walking, and when he sees them he holds the bag in his mouth and pulls his eyes slanted. He yells with the bag still in his teeth, “Ching chong chinaman!”

Mira turns to Lenny, who shakes his head and continues walking. Frankie yells it again, but this time drops his bag of Doritos, the chips spreading across the sidewalk, and he curses. Mira laughes. Frankie looks up venomously.

Lenny whispers to his sister to shut up and keep walking.

Frankie yells to Lenny, “You're gonna pay for that!”

Mira looks confused. “Why do you have to pay for that?”

Lenny yanks her along, saying, “You just got me in trouble.”

“Oh.”

“Now he's going to pick on me.”

“I didn't know!” she cries.

“Come on.”

She follows him home contritely.

Lenny practices saying, “Sally sells seashells at the seashore,” muttering to himself while trying to keep the leakage down.

“What?” Mira asks.

He repeats it quietly.

“Who's Sally? What are you talking about?”

He looks directly at her and says, “Sally sells seashells at the seashore.”

Mira sighs. “You're weird.”

Sweets ‘N Gifts is on Merrick Road, a busy highway with no bike lane, so Lenny has to ride on the sidewalk. A mix of storefronts and office buildings line the street, and he weaves around annoyed pedestrians. Twenty minutes later he approaches his mother's store, which looks very out of place nestled between the Emerald Bar and Carpets for Less. A large hardware depot looms nearby, and most of the other businesses here—a linoleum and flooring outlet, a mattress store—are connected to home and building supplies.

Lenny drops his bicycle in front of the store and walks in, a small bell ringing. His mother leans on the front counter, reading a large annotated bible. She looks up, startled. “Lenny?” she asks. “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting.”

“You rode all the way here?”

He nods and looks around. She has added more jewelry in the front display cases, silver and jade earrings and necklaces and small jewelry boxes sit on shelves next to silver seagull mobiles and figurines. The collection is eclectic and puzzling to Lenny, since the jars of candy lined up behind the counter have nothing to do with jewelry, and customers who want one wouldn't really want the other. He stares at the mobiles hanging near the front. The afternoon sun shines through the tinted front window and hits the sparkling stars.

“Do you want some candy?” she asks.

Strangely enough he doesn't. When the store first opened, Lenny tried the different varieties, but he preferred sour candies, which she doesn't carry. His brother and sister like the myriad of chocolates, but Lenny doesn't seem to have the same sweet tooth. He takes a sweet rock candy just because he might regret later not having something.

She shows him the alarm button, just a doorbell button under the counter that buzzes the carpet store next door in case of an emergency. Without thinking, Lenny presses it. Lenny's mother yells, “Don't!” and he jumps away. She turns to the door, waiting. She explains that the owner is supposed to come here to help her if she buzzes.

But after a few minutes of silence, she wonders aloud if he didn't hear it. She tells him to go play in back, and never to press the button again. Lenny wanders past the shelves along the walls, more wiry desk mobiles with glittering gulls rocking and swaying.

He pushes through a beaded curtain and stops at the sight of the back closet. A folding chair from their kitchen stands by the door. This must have been the chair the robber had used to trap his mother in the closet. Lenny peers out through the beaded curtain and sees her checking the panic button, following the wire along the counter and into the wall.

She turns and says to him, “I think it's okay.”

“You were in the back closet?”

She nods her head. “Your father wants me to have a gun here.”

Lenny wonders if his father has a gun at the house. “Are you going to?” he asks.

“No.”

“Does he have a gun?”

“Your father used to be a soldier. Didn't you know that?”

“The navy.”

She looks at him for a moment, and says, “He was a commando.”

“What's that?”

She tells him the story: Not too long ago, when they had gone to the Korean church in Flushing, Queens, a man took her aside and asked if she knew who her husband was. “Who my husband is?” she asked. “Of course I do.” “No, who your husband was,” he replied. She wasn't sure what he was talking about, but he explained that he was a former commando with the South Korean Navy. He had recognized her husband. Umee, suddenly understanding that something bad was about to come out of this man's mouth, didn't want to know anything and stopped him. Later, though, as she kept thinking about it, imagining all kinds of possibilities, she had to know. She looked up the man in the church directory and called the man's wife. Then, after talking with him, she learned that her husband Yul was infamous. He had been in the special forces, in an elite commando unit that interrogated enemy soldiers. Yul outshined everyone in his unit, but he had a reputation for cruelty, especially for murdering the prisoners.

Lenny listens to this story, incredulous. “Dad?” he asks.

She replies, “Other soldiers knew about him and were scared of him.”

“Really?”

She nods her head. She studies him, waiting for more of a reaction.

Lenny asks, “How many people did he kill?”

“I don't know. I think many.”

The fact is that Lenny can easily imagine his father shooting someone. He had once seen his father look coldly at his mother and smack her in the face without blinking. Lenny was only five years old, maybe even younger, and the brutality of the act hadn't surprised him as much as the efficiency and speed, and how emotionless his father had seemed.

“Does he know martial arts?” Lenny asks.

“Maybe,” she replies. “Do you want to stay a while? I can drive you.”

“I have to practice.”

“You're going to ride your bike all the way home?”

“It's not far,” he says, seeing the open bible on the counter. He knows she's bored and lonely, but there isn't much for him to do here. He walks toward the door, and she asks him what he wants for dinner. “Anything you want,” she says.

“
Bibimbap
.” It's a mixed rice, vegetable and beef dish.

“Okay!” she says. She waves to him as he leaves the store, the bell on the handle jangling.

As he rides home, he keeps thinking about his father as a killer.

This is what Lenny knows about his father, Yul: Raised in a turbulent household in North Korea before the Communist takeover, Yul was the second of four children—he had three sisters and a brother. Yul's father was, among other things, a drug smuggler who often disappeared for weeks, and sometimes Yul would have to track him down.

Yul once told the family a story about how his father had made an opium run into China, and Yul, only a teen, had to sneak into China to find him. Yul's mother had ordered him to bring his father back. Yul eventually found his father and helped him smuggle opium back into Korea.

Lenny learns from his mother that Yul and his brother had been beaten by their father, and had a miserable childhood. Yul's younger brother confirmed this once when he visited, and told Umee how they used to have chores on the farm that often kept them working ten hours a day. When the war broke out, Yul ran away from home and enlisted in the South Korean Navy by lying about his age. His family escaped to the south, but he didn't stay very close to them. After the war he emigrated to the U.S. on a student visa to study computers and finance, and married Ed's mother. After she abandoned both of them, he sent Ed to Korea, to stay for more than four years. When he married Umee, Ed returned to the states and Umee accepted him as her own. Lenny was born a couple of years later.