If I Had Your Face(31)

“Good riddance,” I say. “Why would you want to bring more children into this world so that they can suffer and be stressed their entire lives? And they’ll disappoint you and you will want to die. And you’ll be poor.”

“I want four kids,” she says, grinning.

That’s because you’re dating a rich boy, I want to say to her. But really, you should know that he’s never going to marry you.

“No surgery will be able to fix your vagina after that,” I say instead. “You really want to pee every time you sneeze?”



* * *



—

IT’S TRUE, THOUGH. Other than Miho, no one I know wants to have children. Least of all me. Just the thought of getting pregnant makes my blood pressure shoot up.

When my mother was my age, my sister, Haena, was already six and I was three—a fact that my mother reminds us of every time we see her.

“You don’t have to be ready before you have children, you just have them and then they will grow up one way or the other,” she pleads to us and to Haena especially, since she thinks Haena is still married. “Who will take care of you when you are old? Look at me, what would my life be without you?”

She doesn’t understand that I will never have the capacity to shoulder the responsibility of another life when I am scrambling like a madman in my own. It’s why I buy ten boxes of birth control pills at a time from the pharmacy. Miho told me once that in America, they don’t sell birth control over the counter and you need a doctor to prescribe it. And to see a doctor, you can’t just walk in—you have to schedule an appointment days or even weeks in advance. A lot of the things she tells me about America puzzle me because it is so different from how I imagine it to be. I suspect there might have been a lot of miscommunication while she was there. She probably didn’t understand much of what anyone said to her. I’ve heard her speak English before and it didn’t sound that fluent.

Miho herself doesn’t use the pills because she says they affect her moods and her work too much. That and she’s afraid they’ll prevent her from being able to get pregnant in the future. I told her I hope that’s true—for me, I mean.

I’m lucky, though, I haven’t had to have an abortion yet because I’m so punctual with taking my pills. It doesn’t matter how drunk I get the night before, or even if I am drinking during the day. I’ve set a daily alarm on my phone and even if my battery is dead my body remembers. I wake up from sleeping like the dead right before it’s time for me to take one.

I know a girl—she was a few years older than me—who worked at Ajax but quit because her sponsor wanted her to. She got a fancy apartment and had two babies. The last I’d heard was that she lost her mind and was shipped off to the mental hospital.

I think of her, and I think of Miho and Nami and Haena, and then I go to my fridge and take out a grape vinegar drink and go to the cupboard for soju. Mixing them together, I start drinking, sitting down on the floor in front of the window that looks out onto the street.

I don’t know, I have half a mind to move to Hong Kong or New York like a few of the older girls I used to work with, who told me they found jobs in room salons there. Apparently the standards of beauty are very low in those cities and people walk around with all kinds of ugly faces. “You should come too!” they said, as if it was an adventure instead of forced retirement. They gave me their contact information but they didn’t even respond when I wrote asking what their new lives are like.

Who knows? Maybe someone will marry me if I move there. A foreign man who will think I was born beautiful, because he cannot tell the difference.





Wonna


This is the fourth time I’ve gotten pregnant this year and I already know that this one is not going to make it either.

I have not told my husband yet about this conviction—he would just say, “Thoughts become seeds for bad luck!” or something else inane, and try to change the subject.

It wasn’t like I had an ominous dream or anything—I just know. A motherly intuition if you will—or the opposite.

In the waiting room of my doctor, three other pregnant women are shifting uncomfortably because of their swollen bellies. None are “glowing”—they all look puffy and tired. Two of them have dragged their husbands here with them—I don’t understand why they subject the men to such a waste of time. I never let my own husband come even though he always says he wants to. “Just concentrate on making more money, please,” I say, all polite, and he shuts up like a clam. It’s difficult enough to be a midlevel employee with a middling paycheck as it is, without taking time off to go to your wife’s obstetrician visit. “I don’t understand why you want me to have a baby when we won’t be able to pay for childcare,” I used to say to him before I started trying so desperately to have one. “I won’t be able to afford to work, or not work.”

My bright husband always has an unfailingly asinine answer for such practical questions—“All we need to do is have one and we’ll figure it out! Our parents will help!”

I see him sometimes, with his plain, happy-go-lucky smile, and feel my heart wrenching in such pained dislike that I have to look down so that he won’t catch the expression on my face. He is a kind man, if nothing else, and I always have to remind myself that marrying him was my choice. All my adult life, and in my marriage, I am trying not to be cruel because I know that it is only a matter of time before what is in my blood rears its ugly head.