Fox Girl (9 page)

Clutching the secret stash against my chest, I confronted Sookie, who was still sucking on the last of my egg. I threw the food onto the table, screeching, “What's this?”

Her mouth opened, revealing a creamy mash of pale yellow.

Anger rolled over me, exploded in my head like Sookie's colors. “All this time I been feeding you with food out of my own mouth! I've been starving and you've been feasting on American treats!”

Sookie swallowed, quickly licking the last of the yolk from her teeth. “I'm not, I haven't—”

“You've kept it secret.” I glared at her until she looked away.

“I was trying to save them until my mother got home,” she said. Her voice quivered.

I shook the biscuit bag in her face. “It doesn't seem like you saved very much.”

“I got hungry,” she said, pushing her bottom lip out.

“But I've been feeding you every day!” I said, indignant. At that moment, I conveniently forgot the days I had neglected to bring her anything to eat. “You should have shared these with me like I've been sharing with you.” I ripped open the blue bag. Reaching to the bottom, I pulled out a small, broken cookie flecked with chocolate. “In fact, you're going to share with me now.” I gobbled up the cookie, then reached into the bag for a handful of crumbs to stuff into my mouth.

Sookie watched me with solemn, mournful eyes.
“Chipusa-Hoi ku-ki,”
she announced.

“Wha?” I mumbled, trying to work my tongue around the mass in my mouth.

“That's the name of that cookie,” she explained. Sookie lined up the rest of the American goods on the table, naming them as I sampled each one:
“Be-enna sa-sa-gi. Pow-da mil-ku. Cheezu Wheezu.”

“They were supposed to be for my mother,” she said after I had devoured everything. I was so angry that I couldn't taste what I had eaten, and that made me angrier.

“Don't try to make me feel guilty,” I said, glowering.

“Her darkie boyfriend brought them one day,” Sookie said, rolling the empty Vienna sausage can around the table. I didn't remember eating those, but I must have; I could still taste the juice it was packed in. “He came by a couple weeks ago looking for her. He had gone to the club where she worked and they told her she was sick at home. So he came here. ‘You Duckie's sister-san?' he asked me.

“Do you know, Hyun Jin,” Sookie asked, “what I thought of when he asked if I was my mother's sister? Remember what my mother told us, the secret about
miguk
eyes?”

“That fairy tale that Americans cannot see who we are?” I scoffed.

“I didn't believe her, either,” Sookie said, “But when her boyfriend asked me that, I began to wonder if what my mother told us was true.”

“What did you tell the guy?” My chest felt tight, as if I were the boy trapped by the fox girl's spell.

Sookie shrugged. “I told him, ‘No I am not, you blind, fat-nosed American.' ” She grinned. “Then I told him in English: ‘No. No sister-sans. Me baby-san. Duk Hee mama-san.' ”

I was impressed. I didn't know her English was so good. “Then the darkie left?” I asked, still wondering how she got the food.

“Well, the darkie didn't leave right away,” Sookie said. “First he just stood at the door shaking his head, looking like a confused cow. ‘Mama-san?' he repeated: ‘Duckie mama-san, you baby-san? Old, how muchie?'

“I told him again, slow so he could understand: ‘Duk Hee. Is. Not. Home. She's at the hos-pi-tal.' And I closed the door on his face.”

“No!” I said. “You should have been nice to him. He's your mother's boyfriend.”

“Well,” Sookie shot back, “I could barely understand a word he was saying. Besides, I figured my mother could always get another boyfriend.”

I shook my head. She knew her mother had been working that Joe for a while. Most of her boyfriends were
good-timu boizu.
But that one, she was hoping would get serious enough to ask her to marry him. Americans were different from Koreans that way; an American man would marry a “young sexy” if he thought he loved her enough.

Sookie held up her hands. “Hyun Jin, wait. Wait until I finish the story before you say anything. Listen:

“After I closed the door on his nose, I was thinking the same things you're probably thinking. That I ruined my mother's chances, right?

“But you know what, Hyun Jin? That darkie came back! The next night. And with a bag of food—American food that I never saw before.” She held up the packages in front of her. “This and this and this. And more.” She looked at the table and sighed. “Which is now all gone.”

“He just gave you the food? All of this? For nothing?” I asked. I couldn't believe it. It would have taken all the money my father made in a year at the store to buy all that food.

“I told you to let me finish the story,” Sookie snapped, suddenly angry. “When he gave me the food, he told me, ‘You hungry, you find me. Chazu. Club Foxa.' ”

“Why would he give you all that for nothing in return?” I stopped to think. “I bet he was in love with your mother! I bet he was coming to take her with him. I bet he saw you, and thought, ‘Oh, no! she has a child from another man,' And that was it. I bet—”

“Stop!” Sookie sobbed. She pressed her hands to her ears. “I know I ruined my mother's chance!”

I jumped up and grabbed her hands in mine. “I'm sorry, Sookie,” I said. “I was just talking, just making up stories, really. Don't listen to what I said.”

“It's just that he came with all this food. My mother wasn't here. I was hungry. I—”

“It doesn't matter,” I interrupted, afraid of what I might hear. “Who knows why GIs do anything? He probably didn't know why he did it himself.” Feeling stiff and awkward, I patted her on the back, then sat back down.

Sniffing, Sookie rubbed at her eyes. “Well,” she said, giving me a weak smile. “Why don't we finish this feast?”

She shook a packet of what she said was
pow-da
milk, then ripped a strip off the top with her teeth. A cloud of white dust rose into the air. Squeezing the sides so it opened like a cup, she tilted the packet toward me.

I looked inside. “It's dust. Reminds me of my dirt medicine,” I said.

Giggling, she dipped her finger into the envelope and licked. “No,” she said, “this is good.”

I poked my finger—up to the line that marked the amount of water used to cook a pot of rice—into the packet, then licked the coating off. Back and forth, we dipped our fingers into the milk, until we scraped the clumped grains clean from the side of the packet. When it was empty, Sookie turned the envelope inside out, exposing the silver lining. Only then did I notice that the wall behind her reflected the light from the glittering skins of other milk packets and candy bars. “Next time,” she said when she saw me staring at the decorated wall, “I'll save a little rice to paste this up, too.”

“I'll bring you some rice tomorrow,” I promised. “And some
chige,
too,” I added, though I wondered about how to smuggle extra soup out of the house. I supposed I would have to request it for lunch and give it to Sookie instead.

“Don't bother, Hyun Jin,” she said. She continued to look at her silver wall. “I never want to depend on anyone to feed me again.”

A lump formed in the pit of my stomach. Waiting for her to turn toward me, I watched her in the shadowed evening. The only light, reflecting off the silver wall, flickered weak and uncertain around the kitchen, turning a room where I had spent so much time into a place suddenly and completely unfamiliar.

They came when the sky was at its darkest, without light from the rising sun or setting moon, the hour of ambivalence when nothing is as it should be. When they pulled her up from the sleeping mat, Sookie had been dreaming of flying. In the dream, she and her mother rode on the back of a gigantic flying pig. At first, Sookie had been afraid to board the bristle-backed hog, but her mother had laughed and pulled her up. As Sookie gripped the pig's long, sparse quills, it shrugged its dark wings and pranced into the air. Perched on the pig's back, her ears full of her mother's laughter, Sookie looked down as America Town turned into a set of children's blocks. Above her the sun burned unrelenting and ferocious, so bright she could not bear to look up.

Not quite awake when they jerked her to her knees, Sookie imagined she had fallen off the flying pig and her mother had grabbed her elbows to keep her from spiraling into the sun. But the hands on her were rough, and spoke with loud, harsh voices.

“Get up!” Claws pulled Sookie into a circle of light, the sun of her dream. Behind the light, Sookie was able to discern the shadows, like ghosts from the underworld, of a man and a woman. Squinting toward the edge of the flashlight, Sookie saw, in hyperrelief, sharp purple nails and the edge of a woman's long-sleeved
najang
dress. Sookie's mother told her once that rich gentlewomen wore these thin, loose-fitting silk dresses only inside the home, like nightclothes.

“She must be drunk,” the woman hissed. “Who can sleep this hard?”

“Cho Ho Sook,” the man intoned. “Where is your license?”

“I told you she doesn't have one!” the woman scolded. She kneed Sookie's shoulder. “You are a cheater!”

Tongue thick in her mouth, Sookie tried to answer: “No, no, I ah—” she croaked.

“Mrs. Kim, please. This is official business. Cho Ho Sook, is it true you have been working without a license? I warn you to answer truthfully; we have documentation.”

Sookie pulled away from Mrs. Kim and turned to the man. She wrapped the blanket around her body. “I don't understand,” she whimpered. “I don't work. I go to school.”

“See!” Mrs. Kim crowed. “She's lying!” She raised her hand as if to strike. Sookie flinched, closing her eyes, but when no blow landed, she opened them to see the woman release a handful of paper. Silver-winged paper flashed in the light, fluttering about her shoulders, down to her feet.

“So I suppose these goodies were free?” the woman challenged. “Cigarettes. Biscuits. Milk. Chocolate.”

She jerked the flashlight around the room; the erratic beam of light sliced her home to pieces. Sookie could see that the man and woman had gone through her cabinets, torn the wrapping off her carefully decorated wall. She hated to see the bare boards.

The man cleared his throat. “As I said, Miss Cho. We have evidence of your working. Clinic papers filled out and signed with your name. Witnesses who've seen men visiting this apartment recently. I want to know if you are working legally. That is my only concern.”

“She's stealing my customers,” Mrs. Kim whined. “And keeping the money her family owes to me.” Her flashlight wavered between Sookie's face and the man's chest. “Respected Mr. Li, I need to eat, too. How can I run my hospitality club if the girls think they don't have to follow the rules? I want you to do something about that.”

Mr. Li opened his hands in an attempt to soothe the woman. “Mrs. Kim, there are proper channels—”

“I paid you to fix this now!” Mrs. Kim snarled.

Before Mr. Li pushed the flashlight back into Sookie's face—blinding her—she caught a glimpse of his irritation at Mrs. Kim: he wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something rotten. “As a governing official of America Town,” Mr. Li intoned, his voice placid, “I must see that things are done a certain way. There is the matter of license fee, health clearance, management and rental fees.”

“My mother . . .” Sookie offered, lifting her hand to shield her face.

“Your mother hasn't been around for almost a month!” Mrs. Kim spat. “She probably ran off with some Joe and left you here to pay off her mess.”

“No, that's not true,” Sookie whispered.

“Who cares?” The light jerked toward the ceiling as Mrs. Kim shrugged. “She's not here.”

“I will require that you address these certain matters,” said Mr. Li, breaking into the conversation, “or you must leave this apartment.”

“That'll teach you to steal customers out of my place.” Mrs. Kim again bumped Sookie's shoulder. “If you want to work, work
for
me, not
against
me.”

When they left her apartment, Sookie gathered the papers from the floor and piled them onto her sleeping mat. Making a nest for herself amid the torn labels and tattered wrappers, she thought about her mother flying away on the back of a pig. She thought about where to get money. She thought about me. And she waited for morning.