My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (19 page)

At that point the door swings open and I reflexively jerk my head to see who it is, expecting Jesus, Buddha or maybe even Big Bird himself (at least a pizza deliveryman), but it’s nobody, just another faceless customer. There’s nothing to do but get up and serve him, this stranger, while praying he won’t be the last of the evening.

THEY SAY IF YOU WANT REDEMPTION YOU HAVE TO SURRENDER
something, some piece of your self. It would have to be an important piece, presumably, one you didn’t want to give up; otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice. But what if the decision to let go was the easy part, and the challenge was figuring out
which part?
Every now and then I think of that platitude you hear in graduation speeches about “stepping outside yourself”—well, great. Sounds like a plan. But what if you don’t even know what “yourself” is and can’t figure out what to step out of? What do you do then?

Of course, if redemption takes place in a memoir, the process necessarily includes a third step, which is that along the way the
author must stand up to the Nazis or become the first white shaman of a reclusive Amazon tribe—none of which is going to happen here, alas. But the first part, the disassembly of my old self, has been under way now, I realize, since we moved in with Gab’s family (how quickly one’s identity begins to crack when there are no
New Yorkers
stacked next to the toilet!) and only accelerated after we bought the store. I feel like I’ve bonded with the deli, sort of the way you bond with your seat on an airplane during an eighteen-hour flight. It’s cramped, it’s miserable and when you get up you feel like a piece of boiled meat, but you’d fight to the death with anyone who tried to steal it from you. However, I also sometimes feel like a lab rat in some cosmic sociological experiment to judge the effect of precipitous class descent via a kind of Wittgensteinian wormhole of reverse immigration. (Somehow I have started to go native in a foreign country with people who are actually newcomers too, in a country that turned out to be my own, or something like that.) The worst of it is coming to realize that principles I used to believe in as staunchly as anything, like that wide-open embrace of the world and those tried-and-true Strunk and White rules, haven’t been of much use during the ordeal we’ve been experiencing; in fact, if anything they might have been counterproductive.

A WEEK OR
so after the sauce delivery, Mother Nature decides that having inflicted one of her coldest winters ever on the East Coast, she needs to throw in a historic blizzard as well, so tonight I am at the store listening to radio forecasts of thirty-plus inches of snow, hurricane-strength winds and potentially an economic disaster for the city’s merchants. Even before the storm arrives the mayor cancels school the next day and calls out the National Guard. Residents are told to stay home at all costs, and judging by the sudden surge in customers wanting candles and bottled water, they’re planning to obey.

“Do you think you’ll open tomorrow?” more than one customer asks.

“If the roads are blocked, we can’t,” I reply, surprised at how anxious supposedly tough New Yorkers can get about weather. Spending the day locked up or out in the snow sounds like fun to me. But this storm promises to be different, if for no other reason than that I’ve never been the owner of a deli during a “cataclysmic weather event.” And there is another thing that gives me pause: the older people of the neighborhood who can barely get out of their apartments on a normal day and won’t be able to move around at all if the sidewalks are buried. Based on how much food they buy, I would guess that some of them have only enough in their cupboards to last a few days.

If not for the roads (and the bridges, which will definitely be closed tomorrow if the forecast holds, cutting off Staten Island from the rest of the city) I would find a way to make it to the store—for the neighborhood, but also for us, because I know now that Kay was right about the hazards of closing for even one day. When you close, bad things happen. You may not lose all your customers, but you might miss an important delivery, or your food might spoil, or the cat might get angry about not getting fed and pee all over the store. Plus, if you survive taking off a single day, you might be tempted to take off two in a row.

“No way,” says Kay when I tell her I’m willing to drive in. “Forget about it. No matter how much we need money, it not worth dying for.” Which is a pretty good indicator of how scary this storm is, that even my mother-in-law is counseling restraint.

There’s been a lot of sober reflection around here lately. No one has a formula for determining when to call it quits, but if they did I imagine it would be something like: you’ve made less money than you’ve spent for way too long (check); even if you were making money, you’d be so deeply in debt that it wouldn’t matter (check); not
only is your business failing, but your house, which wasn’t threatened before you took on the business and which you vowed to protect under any circumstances, is starting to feel jeopardized as well, thanks to your decision to dip into the savings to pay the orange juice company (check); and, finally,
you are miserable!
(check).

That night we sit at the window and watch the storm, which, of course, is not only savagely destructive but mesmerizing in its way. Usually when you look at the Paks’ backyard you see a slag heap of spare refrigerator parts rusting amid dead leaves and flapping tarps, but tonight it looks like a miniature version of the Rockies—there’s Mount Frigidaire and the Compressor Range, the Luxaire Basin and Great Fan Belt National Park.

The other good thing about the blizzard is that it is so powerful, so enveloping and so fast at piling up snow that early on it forecloses even the possibility of driving, which means that we can all go to bed planning to wake up late. I feel bad for the old folks, but they’ll have to survive until at least tomorrow afternoon, which is when the most optimistic forecasts have the storm letting up.

However, in the middle of the night Gab apparently has a different idea from the rest of us. At four in the morning, without telling anyone, she sneaks out of bed and mummifies herself inside about eight layers of winter clothes, and then, hip-deep in wet, heavy snow, she thrashes and stumbles her way across two miles of snow-covered hills to the St. George ferry terminal. It’s not a totally out of character thing for her to do. Gab admits that she is the sort of person who “has to do, has to do whatever comes into my mind,” much like her never-say-die mother. Lately, however, she’s been trying to curb those tendencies, almost as if in the process of trying to match her mother’s tenacity and determination over the last few months she’s scared herself with how much like her she can be.

This morning, though, Gab is a shopkeeper possessed. After
getting herself to the ferry terminal and crossing New York Harbor at sunrise, she finds that subway service has been canceled, which leaves her no option for getting to Brooklyn other than walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in a whiteout as fifty-mile-per-hour winds lash its exposed pedestrian walkway. For someone who has never been particularly adventurous in a physical way, it’s probably the most impulsive thing she’s ever done, but then again, how often do you have the Brooklyn Bridge all to yourself? Three hours later (five after she left the basement), she lights up the store’s funky tropical awning, and for the rest of the morning she is rewarded with the distinction of being the only store open anywhere in the neighborhood.

That one act seems to bring back a large number of customers, including, I would guess, many who’d been avoiding us simply because we’d rubbed them wrong. (Take your pick how: the siren in the night or the cold coffee? The price increases or the turned-off TV?) New York may be a hard and impersonal place, but people do actually want to like the people they give business to on a regular basis. Today, by showing commitment to the neighborhood, Gab goes a long way toward rebuilding that crucial relationship.

But there’s still a long way to go, and this is but one step. In a smaller place than New York they might give a business endless opportunities to get it right, because there’s less competition and something better might not come along. Here, a thousand other wannabes are ready to replace us.

JUST AS I’M
thinking that Gab, who, unlike me or Kay, has never taken off even one minute from the store, is the one person in this family who’s indispensable, in March she gets a call from a friend at her old law firm, the one she quit because it was hollowing out her brain. The friend wants to know if Gab would be interested in a job at a big international bank selling off commercial jets in the
bank’s midtown office. The friend’s husband, who works at the bank, is looking for someone with Gab’s qualifications and specifically asked about Gab.

When she tells me this I can’t help but laugh, because what could be more ridiculous than going from peddling Slim Jims and Nutrament to selling Boeings? And how could Gab possibly abandon us now, with the store in so much jeopardy? Not even Gab or her mother would try to work at a deli and a bank at once.

Quickly, I realize she’s not laughing with me: she’s going to apply for the job.

“But you said you’d never go back to corporate law,” I cry, suddenly panicked.

“I did?” replies Gab, who has the power to eliminate any traces of doubt in herself once she has settled on a course of action. “I don’t remember that.”

“You made me promise to incarcerate you in a mental hospital if you even considered it. Don’t you remember the long hours and meaningless work—the drudgery?”

Gab looks genuinely baffled. “Even if what you’re saying was true,” she says skeptically, “this job wouldn’t be like that.” She explains that it’s a contract position, which means they’d be paying her by the hour and therefore she could leave the office every day at five o’clock.

“Which leaves me time to get to the store and work the night shift!” she adds.

Oh God
, I moan. Are all Korean women like this? Are they all unsatisfied merely holding down hard jobs while being dutiful daughters, wives and mothers? Do they all have to run extended-family boardinghouses, take classes in flower arranging, start a youth group at their church and master the art of traditional Korean cooking (based on vegan principles, of course) at the same time?

As we’re having this conversation I notice that Gab has taken
out some of her dour old shoulder-padded jackets and knee-length gray skirts from the storage closet in Kay’s basement.

“Well, even if you don’t remember how miserable you were, I do. You spent seventeen hours a day in a windowless office reading contracts. At night you came home and ate a scoop of rice in a bowl of tap water. You slept all weekend and went right back to the office on Monday. Your appetite for life seemed to disappear.”

“Do you have any kind of evidence for that? Did you write any of that down? Because honestly, I’m having trouble remembering it that way.”

I feel like I’m trying to unbrainwash a zombie
. Maybe I should sabotage her job application by calling up the bank after her interview to tell them that Gab owns a failing deli. Who would want to hire someone who can’t even run a convenience store?

“This is insane. You’re being just like your mother.”

Which causes Gab to stop unpacking her suits and sit down close to me—very, very close.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” she whispers. “Turn down a potential job offer? In case you haven’t noticed, WE NEED MONEY.” She pauses.
“Did
you notice?”

“Of course.”

“Well, someone needs to do something about it. My student loans are about to kick in again. And if we’re ever going to move out of this basement, we need to stop waiting for the store to pay us back, because at this point I don’t know if it ever will.”

I stare at Gab and try not to look dumb
.
What about it, lazy bastard? What’s your plan?

In my defense, lately I have been trying to pull in more money, but so far not one of my magazine pitches has been accepted. Most of the time I’m not even getting rejections, just dead air. And meanwhile, the way things have been going at the
Review
, I’ll be lucky to keep getting my $3.65 an hour, or whatever it is George
pays me.
Starting tomorrow, I vow silently, I’m going to redouble my efforts!

Then Gab drops the bomb.

“I want children,” she says.

Again, I can’t help laughing, because the thought is so absurd. Children, now of all times? Could there be a worse idea? Of course not. Even Gab knows that.

“Okay, now I can say you’ve really lost it. This isn’t you talking. You’re driven but not insane. I’m the one with unrealistic tendencies. You’re pragmatic. I’m just going to wait—you’ll get your senses back in a couple of days.”

“No, I don’t think I will. Because yes, you’re right. I have lost it. Probably I lost it a long time ago … But we don’t have the luxury of waiting for things to get easier. This is how our lives are and probably how they’ll be be for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, I’m just getting older. So, yes, I want children.”