Triplines (9781936364107) (7 page)

His mother's cheeks redden and she asks the vice principal, “What will happen to the other boy?”

“I've already talked to his parents. Frankie has been suspended from school next week. It will be on his permanent record.”

“My daughter is upset. I have to take them home now.”

“I apologize for taking you out of work, but the late bus has already left.”

She stands up and touches Lenny's shoulder. They walk out, meeting Mira, who stands anxiously by the door, her eyes wide and fearful, but their mother says everything is fine. She then looks down at Lenny and says, “Good boy.”

When she drives them home, she asks if this kind of thing happens often. Lenny eventually tells her that it was worse when they first moved here. He explains how he had seen Ed fighting with someone from the neighborhood, he and the other boy rolling on the cement sidewalk, grappling and punching. The kids looking on taunted his brother with cries of “chink” and “jap”. Lenny was halfway down the block, not sure if he should get closer, and when he heard this he backed away.

“How come you never told me this?” she asks.

“Ed told me not to.”

His mother grips the steering wheel. She shakes her head. After a while she tells them that tomorrow she is going to the doctor with their father.

Mira asks, “Can we come?”

“To the doctor? No. You stay home with your brothers.”

She pulls up to the house. Before they climb out she tells them that she will eventually be much busier. “You two have to be good. I can't do this if I am working in an office.”

“We didn't start it!” Mira says.

“I know, but you'll have to figure it out yourselves. What do you want for dinner tonight?”

Lenny and Mira say “McDonald's” in unison.

Lenny dials Nancy's number from the kitchen telephone, his hand shaking from nervousness. When the familiar voice answers he tells her who it is. She's quiet, and then says, “Oh, the collect call boy!”

“You gave me your number.”

“I certainly did. It's funny, your calling me. How are you?”

“Okay. How are you?”

She laughs that whispery delicate laugh, and Lenny smiles.

“I'm good,” she says. “I'm writing a paper for my psych class. Did I tell you I'm in college?”

“No,” Lenny says.

Nancy is a junior at Hofstra University, and lives in one of the high-rise dorms near the highway, working nights as a waitress at an Italian restaurant. She tells Lenny she hopes to specialize in child psychology, which is why she accepted his collect call. “Any young kid who calls strangers like this has got be interesting. What's on your mind?”

Lenny doesn't know what to say, and after a few moments she asks, “Okay, tell me one interesting thing that happened to you today.”

He tells her that he was almost been suspended from school.

“That
is
interesting. Why?”

When Lenny describes his fight with Frankie he finds it
easier to talk to someone he doesn't know. She asks about what Frankie said to Mira, and when Lenny tells her, she says, “Oh! You're Oriental?”

“Korean.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Merrick.”

“I didn't know there were any Orientals in Merrick.”

Lenny suddenly doesn't like her knowing too much about him, and he hangs up.

After practicing his kicks and punches in the back yard, he heads up to the train station but sees one of the neighborhood kids on a minibike, riding fast in the middle the street. They recognize each other, and the boy rides up onto the sidewalk to say hello. He introduces himself as Sal, short for Salerno, and asks Lenny if he wants a ride.

Sal is tall and lanky, with an underbite that seems to slur his words. He wears an AC/DC concert shirt and dirty jeans with holes on the knees. Long scratches cover his arms, as if he fell into a thorn bush, and his fingernails have grease under them.

The minibike looks like a lawnmower engine in a basic metal frame, the tires small and bald, and he controls the throttle with a shoelace tied to the springloaded switch on the engine. A thick cocoon of duct tape attaches the seat to the frame. Lenny asks him if he built this himself, and he replies, “Most of it. My dad helped. Get on.”

Lenny climbs onto the back. Sal tells Lenny not to drag his feet, and they take off. There are no shock absorbers, so the ride is bumpy and erratic, and the shoelace throttle jerks them forward. Sal speeds down Wynsum Avenue, the engine
whining, and Lenny grips the back of the seat tightly. Sal yells, “Hold on! I'm opening it up!”

He yanks on the shoelace and they lurch forward and speed about twenty miles an hour. Lenny starts laughing hysterically because he's scared, but he's also enjoying this, and when Sal brings them to a slow stop, using his sneakers as brakes, Lenny calms down. His hands hurt from holding the seat so hard. Sal shuts off the engine.

“Thanks,” Lenny says.

“I saw your brother smoking weed last week.”

“Yeah?”

“You go to school with my sister?

“No. I go to Birch.”

“How come you go to Birch? We live right near each other.”

“I'm on the dividing line.”

“Too bad. You could've just walked across the highway to go to school. Take it easy. I gotta run.” He climbs back onto his minibike, yanks the engine alive with the starter cord, and then slowly tugs on the shoelace, the bike drifting forward. He says, “Let me know if you ever need to buy some weed.”

Lenny asks, “What?”

But Sal is already speeding away, his shirt flapping up his pale, bony back.

Because this weekend is Umee's doctor's appointment, the mood in the house is strangely subdued. Yul, although drinking as usual, is solicitous with her, cleaning up the McDonald's wrappers and washing the glasses in the sink. They talk quietly about closing the store, and Lenny hears
them discuss other job options for her. They speak a mix of English and Korean, and his mother mentions her graduate work at Northeastern, and how that might help her get a secretarial job.

Umee's favorite novels are on the bookshelves in the basement, and until Lenny overhears her talking about graduate school he doesn't connect these novels with her schooling. He leafs through her paperback copies of Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner and Steinbeck. In the margins are notes in Korean script, and when he brings
The Scarlet Letter
up to the kitchen he asks her what the notes are.

She skims them, smiling to herself. “Some words I needed translations of.”

Lenny then understands that she read these in a second language.

She says, “That's one of my favorite novels. I must have read that twenty times over.”

“Really?” he asks. The only books he ever rereads are his martial arts manuals. “Should I read it?”

“Try Mark Twain. Maybe Charles Dickens. Have you been going to the library?”

“For karate books.”

“Oh, you should read fiction. It's more fun.” She flips through the novel and says, “Books saved me.”

“What do you mean?”

She smiles. “You'll see.”

It's a quiet night for the first time in weeks, and Lenny keeps waiting for a fight to erupt, but it doesn't. Instead his parents go to sleep together in the bedroom, something that ends up disturbing him because it's so unusual. He hears
them murmuring.

He has his mother's copy of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
with him, and reads the first couple of chapters, studying the Korean notes in the margins. When he sees the brief note about the author in the back, he's amazed that this novel is almost a hundred years old and that his mother still likes it.

The house becomes quiet. He hears his brother in the kitchen, and walks out to see him. Ed wears sweat pants and a ratty T-shirt and eats a cold burger. He glances at Lenny and grunts.

Lenny tells him that Sal saw him smoking pot.

Ed smiles. “That dirtbag sells it. He's pissed that I didn't buy any from him. What are you doing hanging out with him?”

Lenny shrugs his shoulders.

“Watch out for him. He'll get you in trouble.”

“Why?”

“Just watch out for him.” Ed punches his arm lightly. “Who's going to look out for you when I go to college?”

“I can look out for myself.”

Ed laughs. “Tough guy.” He finishes his burger and goes downstairs. It occurs to Lenny that he barely knows his brother.

The lump in Umee's thyroid is a tumor, and she needs to go back in for more tests and a biopsy. She explains this to Lenny on the way to church. Mira stays at home with a cold, and Yul has work to do, something about looking for a new job. So Umee turns to Lenny, who sits in the passenger seat, and tells him that if the tumor is cancerous she might be in trouble.

“What kind of trouble?”

“It could spread. I need an operation no matter what, but they want to check the tumor first.”

Lenny stares at her throat. Nothing looks different, but he imagines a pulsing tumor. She says, “I want to have your grandmother visit, to help out. She might come before my surgery.”

“From Korea?”

“Yes. She will stay with us,” she says uneasily.

He asks if Grandma ever visited before.

“Yes, when I was pregnant with you. She and your father don't get along.”

“What happened?”

She sighs. “He told her to leave.”

“He kicked her out?”

His mother says, “They are both very strong people. Very stubborn.”

“What happened?”

“Your grandmother saw how your father treated me and
couldn't stand it.”

“And she's coming back?”

“I need help. We have to close the store, and take care of you children. I need your help. You and Mira have to do more chores.”

“Okay.”

“And you have to pray for me.”

Lenny doesn't know how to respond to this. He has never really prayed. Even when he was supposed to be praying at church he ended up looking around to see what everyone was doing. Although he understands the concept of God and prayer, he never really believed God could hear him.

His mother drives into the parking lot, and Lenny sees some of the other kids heading up to the children's service. He doesn't tell his mother about his plan to skip both the service and the Korean language lessons. He's here only for the tae kwon do.

They walk into the church, his mother patting his head and heading up to the main service while Lenny slows his pace, watching her, and then turns around as soon as she disappears into the chapel. He walks past other kids and their parents, and out to the small building by the cemetery.

There's no one inside, so he takes off his shoes and socks, and begins stretching out. He hears the music from the church carrying across the cemetery, and looks out the window. The voices of the choir swell and echo. The early afternoon sun lights up the tombstones—glistening black marble and polished white granite glaring back at him. He hears the congregation joining in, and the music fills the graveyard. Only then does Lenny fully absorb the fact that his mother might be sick.

The tae kwon do teacher singles him out again for his bad form, and humiliates him by making him stand in front of the entire class and practice a side kick a dozen times over. By the time the lesson is almost finished, Lenny's shirt is soaking in sweat, his thighs burning in his jeans, and he can sense all the other kids watching everything he does, waiting for him to mess up again.

The teacher has them do warm-down stretches, and finally, when they finish, Lenny runs out of the building and waits by the car. He knows his mother is having lunch with the rest of the congregation, but he doesn't want to go anywhere near the church. He promises himself that he will never ever come back here again.

He watches the other tae kwon do students file through the cemetery and back into the church, where they join their parents. Lenny sits on his car's front bumper, his damp T-shirt now cold. When his mother appears, looking for him, she sees his expression and asks what's wrong.

“I want to go home now.”

“What happened?”

“I want to go home.”

She studies him. “Did you get into a fight?”

“No. I just want to go home now.”

“What about some lunch—”

“I want to go home!”

She sighs and touches his cheek. She says, “Do you know how important you are to me?”

Lenny looks up at her pale face, her forehead shiny. She gives him a sad smile. He says, “I don't like it here.”

“All right, Lenny. Let's go home. Do you want to see a
movie?”

“Really?”

“Just us two.”

She lets him into the car, and as they drive away he sees some of the other kids walking out into the parking lot eating sweet rice cakes, talking and joking with each other.

That afternoon Lenny torments his sniffling and coughing sister with the news that he saw
Meatballs
, and that she missed a great movie. Mira complains to their mother that it isn't fair, and his mother, annoyed, says that Lenny has to take Mira to
The Muppet Movie
when she feels better.

“But that's a little kid's movie!” Lenny says.

Mira gives him a satisfied “Ha!” and returns to bed.

Their father isn't home, and their mother lies down on the living room sofa and naps. Lenny gets on his bicycle and rides around the neighborhood, heading for the woods near the edge of town.

Cedar Swamp is a small creek fed by run-off and has streams that lead toward the canals of Newbridge Park and into the many tributaries that eventually empty into the ocean. Everyone calls it the “woods” or the “swamp,” and in summer the neighborhood kids sometimes hang out there. Last summer someone strung a rope swing over the water, though no one went swimming—the creek often looks polluted, with strange foam, garbage, and rusted shopping carts piled near the large concrete drainage tunnels.