Comfort Woman (19 page)

Sorry I am, I said, my tongue stumbling in English in front of this woman who would not look at me. I not knowing you still wanting meat.

The lady did not look away from my husband. How quaint, she said, a poor little orphan Jap.

To learn to be an American was to learn to waste. Food, paper, clothes—everything was thrown away when we got tired of it, because there was so much. The cities, especially, were places of waste; it seemed like everything everyone had ever thrown away collected in the cities. Looking up, you saw buildings so high they could catch the clouds, but then you stepped into side streets littered with rotting paper and old food and throwaway people wearing throwaway clothes. Rivers of cars snaked between buildings and blared at people as if they were cows. And the rivers of water were thick as sludge, slick enough with oil to catch fire. The cities all looked like shit alley to me.

In one of the cities, my husband took me to the highest building in the world. We rode to the top in a box that made me so dizzy I clutched at my husband's arm to keep from falling. See the numbers, he said. I looked up at the numbers lighting faster than I could count and dropped to my knees. At the top of the sky, everything glittered, the sun glinting off metal and concrete. From so far away, the city seemed beautiful, because you could forget about the waste and the dirt when you didn't have to step in it. Maybe that's what the earth looks like to people in heaven, to ghosts and to God.

That's what all of America was like to me. When you see it for the first time, it glitters, beautiful, like a dream. But then, the longer you walk through it, the more you realize that the dream is empty, false, sterile. You realize that you have no face and no place in this country.

My husband never talked about a home, about family, and I never asked. In fact, it did not occur to me that he might have a family, parents who loved him, until two letters from the place where he was born caught up with us at the First Friendship Bible Church in Illinois. The first letter we opened, from the manager of Cuyahoga Falls Sunnyside Retirement Community, told my husband that his mother had died. The second one told him she was ill.

We followed the letters back to their origin and found the last place where my husband's mother lived. After several false turns along roads that spiraled into dead ends, we entered the building's soot-stained parking structure. Someone had planted a handful of mugunghwa, the everlasting flowers, along the walkway that led into the three-story building. I took seeing them as a good sign, even though their stems seemed withered from the smell of burning tires and bent under the heavy eyes that looked down on them from the building's windows.

The lobby smelled of mildew and of old people without families to care for them, ancestors without descendants. It smelled like abandonment and loneliness and ghosts. It smelled like home.

As we waited for the elevator, old people flocked to us, eager to touch our young people's skin and smell our young people's breath as we received their questions.

You related to Mrs. Bradley? Never knew she had a son. Never knew he was married to a Chinee. All them people are so small, see? How adorable! You speakee English?

They crowded against us, eager to escort us to my husband's mother's door, eager to tell us of her death and her funeral, which was beautiful, just beautiful, even though none of her family saw fit to come.

When we entered the mother's apartment, her ghost rushed out at us. She enveloped us with a heavy stickiness that sucked us into the room. A fat spirit, she demanded in death the space she had never had in her life as a thin, sickly woman. She pushed us up against each other, the furniture, the knickknacks and mementos that filled shelves and counters and floor spaces.

Jesus Above, Good Lord in Heaven, my husband said, trying to maneuver his way between a Dalmatian-dog lamp and thigh-high stacks of
National Geographics
to get into the kitchen. What'll we do with all this junk?

A tower of magazines toppled onto the floor, knocking over several figurines and picture frames from one of the end tables placed in the middle of the living room. I stooped to pick up a wooden owl, a porcelain clown holding a bunch of balloons, a tea-cup, and the pictures. As I unfolded the backs of the silver frames to make them stand upright, I studied the people my husband's family once were: a gray-haired, thin-lipped man with heavy eyebrows, dressed in a military uniform; a bony woman with pointy glasses on a sharp nose, pressing a fat boy against her breast; the same fat boy, several years older and starting to stretch into the man who was my husband, with his hair curled about the high-necked collar of his private school uniform.

For a long while after that first day, I could not live with the dead woman and her possessions. I could not touch her things, even the carpet that I walked on, without feeling her spirit trying to squeeze me out.

Help me tag and box everything, my husband would say, as he sifted through mountains of his mother's old magazines and letters, through her armies of tiny dolls and animals. And when I would not move, letting the dust fall and settle over everything like snow, he'd scold: Wife, be subject to your husband, as sayeth the Lord, for as Christ is head of the church, the husband is the head of the wife and savior of her body.

A good wife will turn a house into a home, he'd say. It's your duty as wife and helpmeet.

Then, after lecturing on cleanliness and godliness, he'd beg: Please,
please,
at least help me tidy up.

But I could not forge through the space filled by the mother. It was as if she sucked all the air from my body and pressed me down with the weight of her possessions. I spent most of my time hiding in the bed that had conformed to her body's indentations, under her mustard-and-green knitted blanket that smelled like lavender and must, dreaming of Induk and people who looked like me peeking in through the windows.

Finally, perhaps by way of my dreams, Induk slipped into the mother's apartment. After she rolled me out of bed, she slid her hands over the mother's desk, over the pictures, over the wooden animals and ceramic figurines, until her fingers were coated with dust. With the dust of all the mother's possessions cupped in her hands, Induk lured the ghost mother into her palms, where she pressed and pushed until the fat spirit became as small as a speck of dust. Then, bringing her fingers to my mouth, Induk told me to suck, to taste, to make this—the apartment, the city, the state, and America—home my own.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I made tea with the black dirt from the garden outside our room at the Mission House for Boys. I drank the earth, nourishing her within the womb, so that she would never feel homeless, lost. After her birth, I rubbed that same earth across my nipples and touched it to my daughter's lips, so that, with her first suck, with her first taste of the dirt and the salt and the milk that is me, she would know that I am, and will always be, her home.

I dreamed.

The sentries at the Yalu River checkpoint aimed their rifles at me instead of letting me hurry across.

Shall we make her eat a few beans? one of them asked, laughing.

I looked up at them just as the other mouthed, Pat-ta-ta-ta-tat. As his lips moved, I dreamed I could see the words leaping like the feet of a fire dragon from his gun.

When I turned to run, I felt the bullet words enter my back, burning through skin and blood, muscle and bone, so hot that I could feel myself evaporating. My legs still pumped but became heavier, denser, as the water in my body boiled into the air. Finally there was nothing left of me except for salt and the fire inside of me.

I heard more laughter. And felt pricks of brilliant heat from the dragon's teeth before a blessed coolness blew my body apart. When the grains settled, all that was left was the dragon, blue-white with its heat, chasing its tail around and around, faster and faster until it spun like the sun.