She picked out some produce for herself—a small watermelon, two oranges, spinach, and a bag of onions—and went down the aisles for staples—rice, ramen, doenjang, and gochujang. Everything seemed surprisingly affordable, even more affordable in some instances than in Seoul.
At the checkout, Mina pulled $20 from her wallet uncertainly, new to the foreign currency. The cashier—who looked in his midthirties, younger than Mina, with a bit of gray at the temples of his thick black hair—lowered his eyes as if to protect her from any sense of scrutiny that might arouse embarrassment. His arms were smooth and lean. She became aware of her chest rising and falling, a fire in the pit of her stomach.
After the bagger had loaded their cart, Mina and the landlady passed a large cork bulletin board by the sliding doors. Among a riot of advertisements for various home and car repair services, banks and churches, a pink flyer spelled in large Korean letters: help wanted.
She looked back toward the checkout where the same man who had rung up her groceries met her eyes this time and smiled. She felt his gaze on her as she turned to leave. She thought of the cold hard coins, the change he had dropped into her hand. Was it the very edges of his fingertips, a flower unfurling, that grazed her open palm? Or had she imagined that detail, that feeling?
Her heart raced. She replayed in her mind the unmistakable curve of his lip, his soft brown gaze, unblinking.
Margot
Fall 2014
AFTER SHE COLLECTED THE DEATH CERTIFICATE downtown, Margot drove beneath the gunmetal morning light and weeping palm trees to the brand-new police station. She had never been to a police station before, and for whatever reason had imagined them to be as grubby as her elementary school, which smelled of chemical cleaners, chalk dust, and rubber. In the waiting area, people of all ages appeared anxious or tired. A grandfather, red polo shirt and gold bracelets, crossed his arms in front of his chest, eyes downcast. A mother, strands rising from coppery hair tied in a bun, observed two children thumb wrestling.
Bleary-eyed and weak, Margot had not slept the past two nights—haunted by visions of her mother, that careful bob of hair, that soft extension of her one arm as if reaching for something, or perhaps just an attempt to break her fall, the instinct to create some final grace, some final comfort for herself.
After she had discovered her mother’s body, she and Miguel had found a hotel on the outskirts of Hollywood near Vermont Avenue—a nondescript, three-story beige structure—one of many hotels in the area of questionable cleanliness and ornate bedspreads that would not show stains.
She spent most of the next day with the maroon-colored curtains closed. Her chest ached like a bowl made of stone, a mortar in which the pestle of her mind ground down the images of her mother in that living room, their living room, a tableau of ordinary life gone awry, the objects that witnessed her final breath—a broken one-foot-tall figurine of the Virgin Mary, a bowl of nuts knocked over, tour brochures for excursions to national parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon) on the coffee table. The smell, that putrid smell, the rot.
When was the last time she had seen her mother? Was it a year ago, last Christmas? The days spent at her mother’s store, full of holiday string lights. Margot hung clothes on rounders and racks that glided into place on casters, swept the industrial gray carpet, rang up and bagged purchases at the counter, or helped customers choose the perfect gifts—a crimson sweater embroidered with bells, a pair of bootcut jeans, a slinky dress for New Year’s Eve.
Every night, except on Christmas when they’d treat themselves at the local soondubu restaurant, Margot and her mother had dinner at home—the usual stews, a variety of banchan, grilled mackerel or gulbi. They’d sit together in silence underneath the dust-filled overhead light, eating from the jumble of plates and bowls accumulated over the years—romantic and rose-bordered, pastel blue-and-white-checkered, stamped with 1970s brown butterflies and flowers. Their apartment was a testament to the accretion that could happen in a family’s life—not through intention but necessity. Objects were acquired while on sale or in thrift stores or as gifts, like flotsam and jetsam as if they had been stranded on an island. Nothing could be thrown away or denied.
But Margot would incinerate it all if she could. She decorated her life in Seattle with austerity and care, leaning toward neutral colors and patternless designs perhaps as a rebellion against her mother, against all that her mother represented to her—poverty, tastelessness, foreignness, uncleanliness, a lack of control.
“Are you going to stay in Seattle?” her mother had asked. The tidy bob, graying at the temples, had been tucked behind her pink ears, revealing the two gold hoops that glinted like metal lures. Her eyes remained downcast as she bit the mak kimchi, tart and scarlet, that she always made at home.
“Yes, I like it there,” Margot said in English. She sipped the last of the miyeok guk—anchovy-flavored and lightly briny, beaded with sesame oil—from her spoon.
“But it rains all the time.”
“It’s not so bad. I’m used to it.” That was a lie. She hated the rain. She missed Los Angeles but didn’t know how she’d live there. She already had a decent job in Seattle and could afford her own apartment in a quiet residential neighborhood that smelled year-round of spruce and pine. (The only needles she had ever found dropped from trees.) In LA, she would have to move back in with her mother at least temporarily. But she didn’t know how to explain this to her, not in Korean, not in English, not in any language.
“Do you have a boyfriend there?” It was a question that her mother had asked more frequently than Margot had liked. Sometimes the inquiry seemed casual, hopeful; her daughter might meet someone responsible and kind, settle down, start a family. But other times the question was carved by a fear that her daughter would do the exact opposite—drink late into the night, meet men who would be reckless with her feelings, her future, her life, end up pregnant and alone—which in a way could’ve happened at that time.
It had been a month since Margot had begun seeing Jonathan, a much older coworker, a job counselor for people with disabilities. The first time they had kissed, their mouths touched gently, narrow columns of sunlight pressing on the office walls around them. The wet earth from his afternoon cigar, entangled with something else, a clean citrus—a bright decay. His sonorous vintage radio voice saying her name: Margot.
But she couldn’t tell her mother about any of this. How could her mother understand a relationship that made no sense to Margot nor her friends? The only explanation was one that she could never articulate out loud—that she was lonely and bored and she found him to be thrilling. He was a coworker. He was over twenty years older than her. He was blind. He was a widower. His life was ripe with so much experience, and she could get lost in being around him. He shrank her. He whittled her down. He made her small, so small that she and what she wanted—a more creative life, a more individual sense of accomplishment, of meaning—could evaporate, disappear.
But she couldn’t explain this to her mother. Even if she spoke enough Korean, how would her mother understand this—hunger? It wasn’t a desire to die, but a need to hide, to delete herself. She wanted to be an artist, and that was dangerous. How could she afford the time and money to have more art in her life? How could she ever be an artist if she had to worry about not only taking care of herself but also her mother one day? All they had was each other in the end. And since she denied herself so much, why not dive into being with Jonathan, who always told her what a wonderful person she was, how smart, how thoughtful, how kind? Jonathan made her feel like the most important person in the world because she erased herself with him. She listened. She supported. She approved. She was like the mother she had always wanted.