If I Had Your Face(33)
All the strollers look precariously high—the Scandinavian ones that are everywhere these days. I want to yell at the mothers—the babies look like they’re going to fall out! Stop texting and strolling!
A little baby peers up at me from his stroller and scowls while his mom is browsing through an accessories rack on the street. He’s wrapped in a two-tone embroidered cashmere blanket that I recognize from the European baby clothes blogs—it must have cost more than my monthly salary. I give the mom a hard once-over—she looks haggard, even under a full load of makeup.
I don’t want anything to do with boys—I just want a tiny little girl, to dress up in soft, chic beige and pink and gray dresses and bounce in my lap. I wouldn’t get one of those top-heavy strollers but a sturdy one with a big basket on the bottom for when I’d go grocery shopping with her to make her baby food. All-organic porridge with a little bit of meat and mushrooms and beans and carrots. No salt or sugar until she’s at least two. Definitely no cookies or juice or television.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up because I have been dreaming that my baby is sleeping next to me and I have rolled over onto her and she is suffocating. I wake up panting, with sweat coating my back.
I don’t tell my husband about this, of course. I tell no one.
* * *
—
WALKING UP the front steps of my office-tel, I almost collide with a hurtling body. When we both take a step back, I see that it is a girl from upstairs. She’s one of the Loring Center girls who is always ordering food at all hours of the night, the one who has had some kind of massive surgery on her face recently and still has bandages wrapped around her jaw. She apologizes and bows. “That’s okay,” I whisper.
She bows one more time and then bounces away down the stairs, her step light and buoyant despite her face. Where is she going, looking like that?
I turn after her and watch as she skips away down the street. She looks so free. They all do—the gaggle of girls upstairs.
If I had known I would envy children from an orphanage, I would not have lived in so much terror of my grandmother threatening to drop me off at one.
That girl was actually the reason my husband and I came to live here, in this office-tel. My husband and I, before we were married, had visited several real estate agents in the Yeoksam area close to his work. We had been sitting in front of a neighborhood map with the agent when I heard voices behind me talking about the Loring Center. I stopped breathing as I listened with all my being.
Long ago, my grandmother had taken me to one of the Loring Center branches, which was one neighborhood over from ours. She sat me down on the steps and said to think about what I had done wrong that day and whether I deserved to come home with her, or be dropped off like the other children whose parents did not want them. She pointed to a large box that protruded from the wall and said all she needed to do was ring the bell that hung over the box for someone to come and take me in.
The girls who were sitting behind us at the real estate office were talking about their dorm room at the Loring Center in Cheongju, and how having a new place together would be like living there again. They were so na?ve, those girls, that they would discuss such a thing in front of a real estate agent.
But to my surprise, the agent who was talking to them was quoting a price that seemed not only reasonable but cheap, and he was promising that the office-tel was new and clean. When the girls had left to follow him to see the room, I asked our agent about the office-tel they had just talked about. “I couldn’t help overhear that conversation,” I said.
“But that’s not really for married couples,” he said, frowning. He had been thinking of more expensive apartments for us when he heard where my husband worked.
“Cheaper is good,” I said. “I want to see that office-tel, please.”
And so we had installed ourselves at Color House, happy about the cheaper rent. And I got to see these girls come and go—perhaps I would have been one of them, once upon a time.
Then perhaps I would have been as free as they are. I would love to be on my own, living with a roommate, ordering noodles at 2 A.M., waking up deliciously alone, with no one to ask what my plan is for the day.
I wish I could invite one or more of them over, but that would require me to possess an entirely different personality. I wish I could tell them that I empathize with them, that we are the same. I want to tell them I was given up by my mother too.
* * *
—
I SUPPOSE that thinking about my mother makes not being able to have a baby all the more difficult. Getting pregnant is not the issue, it’s that these babies keep on dying. I read somewhere that miscarriages are babies self-terminating when they know there will be a problem. It hollows me out, the way that they would rather kill themselves than be born to me.
* * *
—
WHEN I THINK of my mother, I imagine that she is a rich woman—self-made and invincible. I also like to imagine that she is alone and tortured by regret over how she left her baby. Sometimes, if I am in a public space, I look around casually to see if there is a well-dressed woman in expensive sunglasses lurking behind a corner with a hungry expression on her face.
After leaving you, I have never known what it is like to be happy, she says, when she musters up the courage to come talk to me.