If I Had Your Face(63)

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MY HUSBAND is in China again this week for work. This means at night, I can stretch my body across the whole bed and the sheets feel twice as delicious against my skin. I can roll toward either side of the bed and toss and turn to my heart’s content.

If there was a marriage handbook of do’s and don’ts, the first chapter should be titled “Buy a King-Size Bed.”

With a queen bed, my husband always falls asleep first and I end up glaring balefully at him as he shifts way past the halfway line. His arm or leg ends up plopping on my body and I cannot fall asleep, so I stare at the ceiling in hatred, then I jab his back and he rolls over to his side, but it is only a matter of time before he rolls back to me. And now that I am pregnant, I can no longer take sleeping pills, and with the first series of negotiations about my baby with the unnamed deities, I gave up my melatonin too. I should have stretched out my bargaining—giving up the dosages by 1 milligram a week perhaps. Since I was starting with 10 milligrams a night, it would have given me an extra ten weeks of sleeping aid. But I gave it up completely during the second week or so, and now, if I fall asleep around 3 or 4 A.M., I consider the night saved.

In the beginning of the pregnancy, it used to infuriate me when I couldn’t fall asleep because of him. I would shake his shoulders roughly and say, “You are keeping me awake.” He would apologize and lie straight on his side, almost falling off the edge because he was so far over, but inevitably he would fall asleep again and roll over to my side and it would be the start of another cycle of chafing.

What changed was that I started reading blogs that said insomnia is inevitable and permanent—once you get pregnant, you will never sleep again anyway. Even when the baby is sleeping you will still not be able to sleep and you will lose your mind.

That was when I decided to try to think that it was not my husband’s fault. It is my fault for bringing the queen bed into the marriage in the first place. My father was so amazed that I was getting married at all, let alone to a normal man with a job, that he must have sold something in order to buy it for us. If he was spending money he didn’t have anyway, I should have made him spring for a king. But the mattress salesperson did not even attempt an upsell, and said that this bed would be the wisest investment newlyweds could make. They should hang salespeople who tell such lies.



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BEFORE MY HUSBAND left for his trip, we got into a fight. “There’s a baby fair at SETEC this weekend,” he said. I was cooking kalguksu for dinner after work while he was clearing and setting the table. “Don’t you want to go look at some clothes and bottles and strollers and stuff? I know it’ll take more than a few shopping trips to test gear and figure out what we need. My father said he’ll give us some money. He’s getting his retirement settlement next month.”

I whirled around and fixed him with a stare of disbelief. “You are jinxing this,” I said. “Don’t talk about her! Don’t even think about her!”

His brow furrowed slightly.

“Wonna, this is ridiculous,” he said. “We’re already halfway into the pregnancy. You really need to tell your boss soon. And by the way, you are the one making assumptions. You shouldn’t assume it’s a girl. I’m starting to get worried about your disappointment if it turns out to be a boy. I hope you will love him just as much if it is.”

“Oh shut up,” I snapped. “I bet you are hoping for a boy!”

It was the first time I had spoken to him that way. Laced with venom the way that my grandmother used to talk. I knew I had hurt him because he then did a rare thing—he didn’t talk to me for the rest of the night and even the next morning. I think he expected that I would apologize, because I would catch him casting hurt looks at me throughout the night, but he underestimated me. I took no notice and he took his bowl of kalguksu into the bedroom and ate it sitting at my vanity while staring at his phone. I had to wipe away the droplets of soup splatter later that night after he had gone to sleep.



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THESE DAYS, the only time I feel vestiges of fondness for him is at work, whenever and wherever the inevitable husband bashing starts. It used to happen on occasions where there were only female co-workers about—at lunch, or coffee, or while waiting for meetings to start—but these days it’s beginning to trickle into regular work conversations even when the men are present.

“This is really the last straw,” Bora sunbae would say. “He came home at 3 A.M. last night and woke up Seung-yeon and this morning he asked me to make some hangover stew. And when I said that I have to, you know, go to work, he said he was going to ask his mom to make some next time so that he can freeze it and have it on hand. Can you believe it? My mother-in-law already thinks I’m such a neglectful wife and mother.”

And then Joo-eun sunbae would chime in. “That is nothing. Do you know how many times my mother-in-law has been in my house this year when we are not at home? Just because they bought us the apartment, my mother-in-law thinks it’s her house. Whenever she knows we’re away, she ‘pops by’ to put her son’s favorite food in the fridge and of course she’s snooping all over the place! She asked me accusingly if I am using birth control the other day because she must have seen it in the bathroom in my bedroom. I can’t even change the locks because that would cause an epic shitstorm that would probably leave me out on the street!”