Drifting House (22 page)

These ­black-and-white women can’t be real, Mina says decisively, and tries to find out by hugging the object of her mother’s love. The electricity tingles through her hands and brightens her cheeks as she presses against all these wives, mistresses, heroines, victims (she must ask her mother what a mistress is) as she tries to enter the screen. And she almost succeeds, she believes, when her mother lifts her off the ground with a cloudy frown and dangles her, and says, That’s very naughty of you.

I know you can’t enter a television, Mina lies. She pinwheels her hair around a finger, trying to hide her shame. Oh why oh why can’t she already know everything?

May I help you? A mannequin leans into Mina’s view. The broad face is painted so thickly white that at each wrinkle, the makeup has cracked into rivulets. Mina leans, reaching toward the ­wo­­man’s cheek, eager to see how deeply her finger can penetrate, but the stranger snaps back to attention. Mrs. Lim misses all the excitement; she has withdrawn her best powder compact (made in France!), which she saves for special days, from a purse removed that morning from its dust bag.

Mina is appalled by her mother’s evident inadequacy in this palace of handbags, but she does not know how to rescue her. To the saleswoman, Mina points her finger at the store’s sign and says, Someday, we’re going to live in a house as big as your store.

This charms the stranger into a smile, which seems strange to Mina, since the woman does not know her mother, so how can she possibly be happy for her?

What a good girl you are, and so lovely, the stranger says, and reaches to pat her, but Mrs. Lim pulls her daughter away and begins circling the department store as if she is an actual paying customer.

It is a perfect day when Mrs. Lim takes Mina to the zoo and insists that her daughter be allowed to mount the elephant. Mina rides around the ring, waving at the last remaining swallows in the bare trees. When she is helped off its hairy back, she says, I wish I had a granny to watch me.

Mrs. Lim is the kind of mother who says with a hard laugh, You know that’s impossible, since I was born from an egg, like King Bakhyeok in the Old Joseon period. She doesn’t explain how strange and difficult her family was; she remains a spontaneous miracle, a mystery to Mina, a mother who has arrived from nowhere. And because she is the kind of mother that she is, afterward she takes Mina to the movies for roasted silkworms and popcorn, and later that evening dresses her daughter up in a yellow princess dress and matching barrettes and lets her eat sweet rice cakes for dinner.

She is the perfect mother!

She is also a mother who, at the year’s end, tells her daughter, In America every family is Christian and has a ­two-story house and Cadillac, and possesses more happiness than I ever will. She elaborates, though Mina is starting to wonder, Who are these Americans that live such gilded lives? She is a mother who, that Sunday afternoon, has her daughter kneel to pray for her father who is not her father, then for strangers: the conscripted Americans and the mercenary Koreans who have straggled back from Vietnam. The kind who tells her daughter afterward, You don’t know what I’ve given up for you, then holds her and says, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Who, that night, cries when she mistakenly believes that Mina is asleep.

Puberty, prepubescence, pornography.
This lexicon of mischief could wake the dead. Mina, just turned thirteen, is learning what these words mean. So when a ­thirteen-year-old boy whispers the word
sex
in music class, the disruption is magnificent. The teacher
soundly beats the boy who whispered the viral word. Still, Mina mines the forbidden word; the students look at one another and see men and women, and are darkly changed forever.

You capture a hair, you capture a boy’s heart, Hana says over lunch on the first true day of spring. She has found a short boy’s hair (though it could be from another girl’s bangs) hooked to Mina’s ear. She inspects the sliver as her eyes, wide and as innocent as soybeans, brighten.

She raises it to her nose and inhales. It smells like passion, she declares. She says with envy, It smells like love, though she carries a tin
doshirak
from home with the best homemade ingredients, the most expensive art supplies, and shoes that she once confessed her mother shines every day for her.

Mina drops the hair into her tin cup of water and pulls her face long like a horse with her fingers; she doesn’t care for boys or studying, but she loves to laugh. Sing the national anthem backward, syllable for syllable. Steal the teacher’s glasses. Reenact her favorite movie scenes for friends. Play dead. It is late spring in 1975, and by now, the soldiers commissioned for Vietnam have returned and are living in ­indifference—to travel all that way to fight for the Americans, and lose, and weren’t they paid for their services? That is what people say, but it never brought Mina’s father back. A man who has become her secret to keep. A man to mourn.

Love, love, I’d rather eat raw squid for lunch, Mina sings in perfect pitch into her chopstick, trying in vain to stay uncomplicated and thirteen forever.

It’ll happen to you soon, Hana says wistfully. I’ve seen the way Junho looks at you.

Junho comes and goes to school like an alley cat, ignoring the tolling bell. No wasted motions, no fat. A young, wheeling fury. Alkaline eyes. A mouth that does not know how to smile. Most of the female teachers, made timid by him, say nothing.

Adolescence has not been kind to Junho, Mina decides as she watches him sleep on his desk. His face reminds her of the carved masks used in farmers’ harvest dances: an elongated shape, crudely drawn–in lips, pupils so black they absorb the classroom lights. He looks like a horse, and there is nothing worse.

They sit in polar corners of the room. Her chatter accompanies his angry silence. When she brushes hair out of her eyes, he flicks an eyelash off his nose. She fidgets throughout a chemistry exam; he sleeps inside the leaves of his comic book. If she catches a cold, he develops a headache. After the music teacher slaps him in class, she praises Mina for her singing voice. Mina thinks, We’re nothing alike, but cannot stop watching him.

Alone girls are different. Jiwon tosses the cotton balls that flesh out her bra to the bathroom floor, Mija lights a ­cigarette—an activity banned for women, Gangin prays before she drinks a carton of soy milk; between classes, Mina jumps up and down in the bathroom stall to wake herself up. Outside, the Seoul sky smells
of pepper gas and burning trash, but in the mirror there are only girls looking at one another, eager and afraid of growing into women.