“Make sure you start as you mean to go on,” she said. “Make your boundaries clear.”
The day after we got back from our honeymoon, David went off to investigate a scuba-diving club in Manly, and while he was out my in-laws turned up on the doorstep. My father-in-law carried a toolbox so he could do any jobs that needed doing. My mother-in-law carried two fragrant covered baking dishes. I had just got my appetite back after the incident with the you-know-what.
(The oysters.)
(In case you’d forgotten.)
I threw the door wide open. I said, “Please come in!”
My father-in-law, Stephen, was handsome, distinguished, and kind, a retired bank manager with a calm, unruffled way of looking at the world. My mother-in-law, Michelle, was tiny, intense, and often hit me on the arm to make an important point. She had been a South Korean war bride and had chosen the Western name of Michelle to replace her Korean name, which was Hyo-Ri.
You will recall how much Mrs. Murphy disliked me, and I had been prepared for David’s mother to feel the same way, but Michelle seemed to love me from the moment we met. She liked that I was good at math. “Math is very important.” She liked that I was an incompetent cook. “No problem, I will teach you.” She observed my lack of skill in the kitchen like it was a hilarious comedy act.
She preferred me to David’s previous girlfriend.
“That girl was always trying to hug me,” she said with a shudder. “She keep telling me, ‘Oh, you’re so cute, Michelle!’ Like I’m a doll! Very strange girl!”
Needless to say, I never tried to hug her.
David had just one sibling, an older brother, an ear, nose, and throat specialist who had moved to London to look after British ears, noses, and throats, and then he’d gone and fallen in love with a British woman, so that was the end of him.
Not really. But effectively, because he was so far away and you couldn’t Zoom or FaceTime, text or email, and flights were much more expensive then. Michelle was in need of someone to mother, and along came me. Another daughter-in-law might have felt suffocated. Not me. As an only child I felt more comfortable in the company of older people than I did with people of my own age. Michelle and Stephen became my dear friends. I adored them.
I rarely came home from work without finding a box of food left by Michelle on our doorstep: red rice cakes, fried chicken, soups and stews and kimchi. She made all David’s favorites and then eventually she made all my favorites.
Once Michelle dropped off some ginseng chicken soup (I’d been sniffly) when my mother was visiting. Mum was horrified when Michelle went to the cupboard under the sink, put on my rubber gloves, took out the cleaning products, and began to clean my kitchen, without saying a word. That’s how Michelle showed her love. She cleaned my house. I promise you I tried to stop her in the beginning. Normally I ended up cleaning alongside her. I had a very clean house.
“Cherry!” hissed my mother through clenched teeth. Mum was in a bad mood that day because she was doing the Sexy Pineapple Diet: a popular diet where you ate nothing but pineapple for two days a week. That day was one of the pineapple days.
(Dieting was a new development. Mum had always had a good figure and never gave a thought to what she ate, until the day she found she couldn’t zip up a favorite skirt. She was aghast. It was as if the skirt had personally offended her.)
I managed to get Michelle to stop cleaning and Mum to stop panicking by initiating a conversation about Korean fortune-telling, obviously a topic of professional interest to my mother.
Michelle settled down to tell Mum all about “sajupalja,” which can be translated as “four pillars of destiny.” She peeled an apple with a knife as she spoke and handed us pieces on the end of her knife. She could never not be feeding someone. Mum took the apple, even though it wasn’t pineapple.
Michelle explained that saju readers analyze the “cosmic energy” at the exact moment of your birth: the hour, day, and year.
“If you believe in saju, you believe your destiny is decided by the conditions of your birth,” explained Michelle. “And therefore cannot be changed.”
“Cherry was born at exactly three a.m.,” said my mother. “The midwife said, ‘Look at that! On the dot.’ ”
“Well, I am not a saju reader.” Michelle looked alarmed.
“No, I wasn’t—I was just mentioning—please go on,” said Mum.
Sometimes Mum and Michelle couldn’t quite get their footwork right in the dance of conversation.
Michelle told us saju readers can determine if couples are compatible by checking their “gunghap”: marital harmony. If they are not compatible they’re advised to change their first name, something that millions of Koreans have done and continue to do. She said some couples, if told they had bad gunghap, and if they were serious believers, would regretfully separate.
“I wonder if David and I are cosmically compatible,” I mused.
“Of course!” cried my mother and mother-in-law at the same time, and I saw them exchange secret sparkly looks. Now they were in perfect sync. They both very badly wanted grandchildren.
—
A week after our first wedding anniversary David came home in an excellent mood, his cheeks flushed.
He’d done a night dive off Shelly Beach and seen a wobbegong shark, apparently a good thing. Then he’d been out for dinner at a new restaurant with his diving friends.
Meanwhile, I’d eaten dinner with his parents, played chess with his dad, looked at old photo albums with his mum, and then the three of us had watched a documentary together while we drank tea and ate Korean honey cookies that I had made myself in Michelle’s kitchen, with minimal supervision. They were good. I was improving. David ate three of my honey cookies and kindly but erroneously said they were better than his mother’s while I told him more than he probably needed to know about the documentary I’d watched with his parents. It was about Spitfire pilots.
Then we stopped talking and sat in our favorite corner of our sectional sofa, draped all over each other, limbs overlapping, hands entwined, my nose in his neck, his nose in my hair.
David brushed my hair out of my eyes and cleared his throat.
I thought he was going to say something of a sexual nature. My body was already responding on cue.
Instead he told me we were moving to Perth next month.
The phrase “the rug was pulled out from under me” aptly describes the disorientation I felt.
“Blindsided” also works.
David explained that he would be undertaking three years of advanced cardiology training at the Royal Perth Hospital. We would rent out this house, and the hospital had already found us somewhere to live, by the beach. It was going to be a wonderful adventure. New friends! New restaurants! New diving sites!
I asked why this move to the other side of the country was being presented to me as a fait accompli.
“Because it is one, Cherry,” he said. “I just want to be honest with you.”