If I Had Your Face(36)

“That’s because you didn’t like the food,” said Minwoo as he bit into a delicately grilled chicken wing. “I remember your driver had to bring you Japanese food from Boston every few days.”

“Even that was terrible,” said Ruby, rolling her eyes. “I hate Boston Asian food. But anyways.”



* * *



—

I DON’T THINK I missed “home” much. There wasn’t much to miss. During the last few months that I lived there, my aunt had taken to agonizing by herself in the afternoon, when, often, there would be no customers. Her hair covering her face, she would weep over the cutting board as she chopped vegetables, salting the carrots and squash with her tears. Kyunghee avoided coming home at all, burning all-nighters in the study carrel that she rented by the month, while my uncle would often disappear, saying that he was going to drum up some business. The air was thick with stress. I did not realize until recently that my aunt’s weepiness could also have stemmed from her condition.

My aunt gave birth in the fall, five months after I had been deposited at the Loring Center, to a baby boy that they named Hwan. I did not know she was pregnant until one day she showed up at the Center and her shirt was stretched taut to bursting by her overlarge belly, unmistakably with child. I never met him, my boy cousin, because after he was born they didn’t come again. But by then, the Center was home to me. The girls I lived with became my sisters—the ones I covered for and complained to and swapped clothes with.

At the Center, my heart did not feel as if it was being shot with acid the way I felt whenever I saw my aunt and uncle worrying over money, or when Kyunghee tried to help me with my homework and would sigh, exasperated, when I couldn’t follow her explanations. No matter how much we fought among ourselves at the Center, we were an impenetrable unit, bristling at any hint of scorn or pity from the other children at school who had parents to go home to. We were brazen and confident in our unity and the teachers did not touch us because they could not predict what the consequences would be if they did. One time, Sujin slapped a girl in her class who said her mother was a beggar, and Miss Loring showed up, dressed purposefully in her floor-length mink coat and matching hat. The sight of Teacher Kil sweating as he tried to speak to her in English (and he was our English teacher!) had us screaming with laughter for days.

The only times I ever felt pain were right after my aunt and uncle’s visits, when I would see them walking away toward the bus stop, my aunt waddling as her stomach grew bigger every time I saw her.

She was alarmed, I know, by the disabled people who lived at the Center. There were several boys my age who lived in a separate building from us. Two of them looked all right, but one of them would hit people if he was in a bad mood and the other one could not look at one thing for very long. The other girls and I did not talk to them either—we were cruel with ignorance in those days—but we knew their families who visited, and we knew which tree-canopied benches they liked to sit on outside and what times they would come so that we could avoid them. My aunt and uncle did not say anything when the disabled and their caregivers would cross our path but my aunt would instinctively put her hand on her protruding stomach.

The last time my aunt came, she had to sit and take gulping breaths every few minutes. She said she could feel the baby on her pelvis and that his head was hitting her pelvic bones every time she took a step.

I had not known it would be the last time, but after they left, Miss Loring came to tell me that they had left me an envelope of money, entrusted to her for safekeeping, which they had not done before. When she showed me how much, I was shocked—it was more money than I had ever seen—or heard of—at one time. They must have borrowed it—I knew they had never had this kind of money.

But had I known it was their last visit, I would have been glad. I was grateful I never had to say goodbye to them again.



* * *



—

“I DON’T CARE what your aunt’s situation was,” said Ruby. “Who does that?” We had been eating at the izakaya for almost an hour but no one showed any sign of slowing down. The table was crammed with tiny dishes of grilled meats and vegetables while waiters frantically passed us by with orders from the other tables. As always, I thought of the bill, how much it would be with all of this meat. The tongue in particular was expensive. The endless pours of shochu would also drive up the bill, and I took care not to drink very much. It made me feel less bad when, inevitably, either Hanbin or Minwoo, but usually Hanbin, paid the check. Never once had I heard Ruby offer. When I had offered to chip in early on, when I first met them, Hanbin had just laughed and patted my head while Ruby looked on with amusement.

Ruby’s face was flushed and she shook off her camel-colored fur jacket, which slid down the seat and then onto the floor. I bent and picked it up gingerly and draped it back over her chair, my fingers lingering on the softness of the fur.

“So you never saw them again?” she asked, picking at a skewer of chicken hearts. “They never even called you? Do you know where they live now?” She held up the bottle of shochu and shook it, to show that it was empty. Minwoo called a waiter and asked for another bottle, then saw a friend at another table and went to talk to him.

“Maybe we should talk about something else if Miho is uncomfortable,” said Hanbin, reaching over to Ruby’s cup. It was half full and he picked it up and finished it, putting it down on his side of the table. “And I think you are drinking too fast,” he said to her. Looking at him, I thought how big his shoulders were. In his thick, ribbed turtleneck sweater, he looked as if he belonged in some New England catalog against a backdrop of a log house and snow-dusted fir trees. His face was mostly impassive—throughout my story he had not said a word. I noticed just a glint of disapproval, although at whom it was directed was unclear.