He tightened his belt and began knotting a tie. Most kids thought their fathers handsome, but mine was startlingly so. The other dads at church looked out of focus next to Appa, whose cheekbones seemed cut from marble. He did the thing with his hair he still does, slicing his fingers like a comb through the front. He pushed past me into the den and sat down in front of a briefcase.
“Where are you going to work?” I shrieked. I hadn’t seen him carry a briefcase since before Sugar Land.
“I got a job at a big oil and gas company. I’m going to be an engineer again.”
It started to dawn that this would mean changes for our family. “Are you going to get a real salary? How much are you getting paid? Will it be once a month or twice a month? Check mailed home or to work?” I knew I sounded like Umma at her worst, but I was desperate to know he had worked out the details. I wasn’t a little kid anymore—I was ten—and the days of Appa starting business after business, chasing Big Money, when my hope had been cheap, were at an end. I knew to keep my dreams close.
“Hyeseung-a. Do you think I can make real money working for someone else? Besides, I’m going to keep doing my own projects, and with this money, I’ll have even more capital for research and development. I’ll be a billionaire faster than ever now.” And then quietly, he added, “This is just to help Umma.”
He was referring to the abortion last winter. The doctor had implied the baby had serious issues because Umma worked too hard. The abortion had devastated my Catholic parents, who had even sought out Father Ko about it. In the end, they didn’t think they had the resources to raise a child with special needs who probably wasn’t going to live to his first birthday.
Appa put on his shoes and called out to Arthur to hustle. Back then, my brother practically lived in day care, a sad, dirty place called Tomorrow’s Promises. He perpetually nursed a runny nose and came home smelling of graham crackers and other children. If it was Appa who picked him up at the end of the day, he brought a Happy Meal in atonement, which Arthur ate silently on the car ride home, hoping, I think, that food was happiness.
After they were gone, I covered the banchan and left the dirty dishes soaking in the sink. I locked the front door and crossed the courtyard toward the bus stop. The Coca-Cola Umma had put in my lunch sloshed around in my backpack. I have to tell her I just throw it away when I get to school, I thought. Umma believed drinking Coke was a benign way for me to fit in and be American, but she’d gotten it all wrong; the kids drank Hi-C or Capri Sun, ate PB&Js or Lunchables, and the final flourishes in their lunchboxes were the notes penned on napkins by their stay-at-home moms. I decided I wouldn’t tell Umma about the cola after all. She was always working hard, doing the slightly wrong thing for the entirely right reason.
As for Appa, I had half stopped believing in him. Even after the bankruptcy and our move to Memorial, it was business as usual for him, with no acknowledgment we had failed as a family. When I was younger, I prayed people would recognize his ideas; then, later, that he would be wiser when they did so; and, finally, that he’d stop everything altogether and be a normal dad. Never had I known him to sleep more than three hours a night or voluntarily do anything but work. When he was forced to take a break because of church or a guest, his gears still turned and inevitably, he said something awkward, about how much something cost or how much a person made a year—a comment shivved on the whetstone of his obsession.
The day may have signaled defeat for him and his dreams, but a father who went to work with a briefcase every day and got paid reliably was better than an ambitious dream-chaser who failed all the time. Maybe someday I wouldn’t be poor and people wouldn’t think I was stupid. Maybe someday we would leave the apartments.
With Appa working sixty-hour weeks as a process engineer, there were only nights and weekends left for world domination. On Saturdays, after he dropped us at Korean School, he drove out to Katy to check on the factory, which by the time of its shuttering he’d more than doubled in size. A thick chain was coiled around the gates now, secured by a Master Lock, and on the other side slept the furnace. On Sunday afternoons after church, while I devoured shrimp chips from the Korean store and Bruce Lee movies on channel 26, Appa sat next to me on the floor and like old times pored over the Yellow Pages, made lists on legal pads, drew boxes around names he intended to call. He was still scheming. On TV, Bruce battled the bad guys with nunchucks. On Monday morning, Appa was back in his shirt and tie and out the door with his briefcase by seven.
If Sugar Land had been the days of my father, Memorial was the time of my mother. Now that we lived close to her hospital, I saw her more than ever, but she was different from the mother of the early Bellaire days who patiently taught me how to draw and read. The bankruptcy still front and center, she sustained a high level of anxiety and could not relinquish her poverty mentality, even though we had two steady paychecks now. Who knew when Appa might quit and start another business full-time? Consequently, Arthur and I spent the hours after school with Umma grocery shopping, which meant driving toward our church to the discount Save A Lot and the two Korean markets (the relative superiority of which she had opinions on), and then along the main road near our apartment to the Kroger and Randalls, the American stores where she only shopped on designated coupon days. When a Mexican grocery opened up in a cathedral-like space north of the interstate, Umma started dipping in there, too, on account of the vine-ripe tomatoes that were fifty-two cents a pound and so ssingssinghae, so fresh. Pulling back the corn husks, investigating the meat, she was the only non-Latino in Fiesta.
Every time we left a store, she calculated the tally in one long sentence. “Ohhh! I’m so happy Fiesta had the cans of peas for cheaper so I can return these at Randalls; that’s forty-two cents a can, so that’s one twenty-six for three cans, with tax, let’s see, that’s one thirty-six, and I spent thirty-four eighty or so, and the Randalls check is fifty-one fifty-seven, plus eleven nineteen at the Korean grocery, the electric bill is twenty-four fifty and goes out tomorrow”—she accelerated through the signal—“and there’s still one hundred nineteen in the bank until Friday: so, we’re good!”
Looking over at me, she clapped the steering wheel victoriously. When I was young, I had snapped my head from the window and made sure to meet her smile.
“That means we can get potatoes and sour cream from Kroger!” She sang happily, “Sour creeeeammm!” She caught Arthur’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Do you want baked potatoes for dinner tonight?”
“Creeeeammm!” he sang back dutifully.
As I grew older though, I kept silent during the grocery tally. Instead, I held my chin steady toward the window as if my life depended on it, focusing on the objects outside as the car lurched in traffic. The headache from the unrelenting Texas sun and the motion sickness were familiar. Inside I fumed. Umma always tried to get me to do the poverty math with her, not as an arithmetic lesson for my own sake but because it was an incantation that lent her a sense of control. She never considered I might end up learning her habit and practice it in my own life.
But thanks to these exertions and her innate creativity, she was a beautiful cook who never made what went on the table seem like it was the blue plate special or arranged on the cheap. Appa hated all things Western except for Western money, and especially loathed Western food, which he argued tasted inferior and caused sickness, so we usually ate Korean at every meal. But once in a while, Arthur and I begged for something that wasn’t chicken soup with ginseng, jujubes, and sweet rice, or snapper with soy sauce and ginger, remembering with distorting nostalgia the Salisbury steak and gravy tray from the school cafeteria. The times we implored her for a Western dinner, Umma never complained. As in all things, she went to apply herself, re-creating the potluck recipes her coworkers introduced her to at the hospital. Most of her colleagues were white, or what our family called “American,” not having any notion that we might be American, too. The nights she made us meat loaf or spaghetti, she made a separate Korean dinner for Appa.
4.
AS IT HAD BEEN WHEN I moved to Memorial and lost touch with my Sugar Land friends, so it went with Avery, who tested into private school. I still played with Hannah and some of the apartment kids, but in the middle of fifth grade, a plucky, Pippi Longstocking–esque girl named Macy Jordanowicz moved to the neighborhood.
Macy lived in the subdivision behind our elementary. On my first visit, Umma made conversation with Mr. Jordanowicz, who was working on a classic car in the covered driveway. He didn’t cock his head or cup his ear in an exaggerated pantomime as if it were his hearing that made it difficult to understand her. Everything was natural, as if they were equals speaking the same language, which of course they were. The anxiety I wore like a work smock every day of my life loosened for a moment as I watched Umma laugh and enjoy a conversation the success of which didn’t begin and end with basic comprehension.
Mr. J. was older than my parents and had a square, masculine head inside of which ran a slash of straight white teeth. He had a wonderful, open way about him, and he called Macy “girlie.” He was wearing a pink-and-blue Hawaiian shirt the likes of which my father would never be caught dead in. “Flowers are for women,” I could hear him say. “I don’t want my penis to fall off!”
“Call me Pat,” Mr. J. said to me, extending a massive paw he’d wiped off with a rag.
I told him I couldn’t do that and if it was all right with him, I would just go with the traditional “Mr. Jordanowicz.”
“That’s okay with me, girlie!” With a boom of a laugh, he propelled himself backward in pleasure. I saw straight into his mouth, back to his molars, and knew then and there that Mr. Jordanowicz wasn’t going to be like the other Memorial dads. He asked Macy about her day at school, crying “Hoopah!” at the exciting parts. When he grabbed her by the shoulders and pressed her to his chest, I saw how different he was from my father. I loved it and felt shy at the same time.
Macy opened the back gate, and a yapping, pint-sized dog bounded out of a hole in the kitchen door. “This is Lala,” Macy said. “She’s a rascal and my best friend.”
The rascal was white with apricot patches. She hoisted herself up, stuffed her snout in my crotch as if it had been made to fit there, and calmly breathed in and out until Macy scooped her up. We went inside, where I was given a tour of the house, a classic one-story Colonial with gleaming wood floors. I noticed art on the walls, which Macy said her mother selected with her interior designer.
Lala followed us into Macy’s room, which was painted the deep blue of an ocean and furnished with a matching five-piece bedroom set. Everywhere were framed pictures of Lala.
“Are you an only child?” I asked suspiciously. On the tour, I had counted a guest room, her mother’s office, and her parents’ room, which I was not invited to step into.
“My sissy’s twelve years older than I am. She lives in Abilene and has a career.” She aspirated the last word, ccah-reer.
Then, Macy stripped out of her school clothes and plunked down on the floor in an oversized shirt and her underwear. Cradling Lala in her lap, she slid out an electric keyboard from under her bed. “You said you play the piano. Why don’t you play from the sheet music they gave out in choir today?”
The year before, Umma had saved enough for a down payment on a piano. I had wanted to play for a while, thinking it was the kind of thing you needed to do if you were going to go to an Ivy League school as I planned. I learned about the Ivy League from a television show starring a smart kid I identified with. The smart-kid character was going to a college called Harvard, which Umma said was the equivalent of her alma mater. “Then, that’s where I’ll be going,” I’d said to her, and she had been happy.
I pulled the music up to the keyboard and started to play. Macy howled along. “There is a place I call my own… Where I can staaaaaannnd by the sea…”
Lala lifted her muzzle into the air and began howling, too. I tried to focus on the music, but the feral canine was ruining everything. Her voice a quarter step off-key, Macy belted a few more verses and then leaned over and pressed the bossa nova button, which unhinged Lala further. Then Macy pressed the samba.
“And look beyond the things I’ve known… And dream… that I might be freeeeeee!”
I persisted in playing chords, Macy in pressing random buttons, and Lala in yowling as if she were in heat. What had happened to my neat recital?
Macy had told me right away she had hypoglycemia, which meant she needed to “feed frequently or crash.” She’d been eating tortilla chips, sticking her skeletal index finger into a tin of bean dip and letting the rascal lick off every other bite. I avoided the dip, which looked like an unfortunate bowel movement swarming with dog germs.
“That’s really good, Hyeseung!” Macy yelled over the Casio and the caterwauling. “But I think it needs something more!”
And that is when she scooped a generous wad of bean dip and smeared it on middle C. Lala bounded from Macy’s lap to lick the salty brown smear off the key, depressing it in staccato sixteenth notes. The mongrel’s bottom half was raised up into my face, her talons scratching my bare legs. Macy thought this was hilarious and proceeded to daub more dip on the keys. Before we knew it, Lala was playing a symphony with her tongue.
“I give up,” I said, turning to Macy, whose thick glasses had fogged up under her hysteria. The electric tango pulsed in the air. “You’re bonkers.” I pushed the dog off me.
