Native Speaker (24 page)

As she kneels with the dustpan, I can already see the coil in her back that says she is her mother's daughter. The waiting rheumatism. The soft bones. I have to remind her to drink more milk. I can see now, too, how she used to pick up after Mitt, the way the day's weariness would fold upon her body, how she'd almost collapse on her legs to pull off his socks or wipe his chin. Then he'd jump up again, bare-assed and wild, and shout, “Come on, Mom!” and off they'd go across the apartment, chugging like locomotives, never any stops.

Mitt always spoke beautifully, if I remember anything. Lelia read to him every night since he was a year old. She wanted me to read him stories, too, but I never felt comfortable reading aloud, even when I was in high school and college, and I didn't want to fumble or clutter any words for the boy just as he was coming to the language. I feared I might handicap him, stunt the speech blooming in his brain, and that Lelia would provide the best example of how to speak. My silliness. I should have watched and listened. When Mitt played with my father their communication was somehow wholly untroubled, perfect in its way, and if there were questions between them the boy would simply repeat what the old man said, try to echo his pidgin, his story, learn that talk, too. I suppose they could build a bridge because they needed one. I was too close to the old man, we were always within striking distance of each other. We were intently inarticulate, competitively so. But I thought that Mitt was beginning to appreciate the differences in the three of us; he could mimic the finest gradations in our English and Korean, those notes of who we were, and perhaps he could imagine, if ever briefly, that this was our truest world, rich with disparate melodies.

“Come on, Henry,” Lelia says, tossing the sponge into the bucket. “We've cleaned enough. Let's go outside. Let's go to the park. It's too pretty a day to waste.”

“Okay, but downtown. I'd rather ride the ferry.”

“Fine. Anything. To Staten Island, then.” She was already changing, loose slacks and a blouse. Muted greens on muted greens. “Let's just move.”

The ferry, everyone knows, is the city's cheapest vacation. For fifty cents you can escape Manhattan by boat, crossing the waters of the harbor and bay past all the famous islands, Governor's, Liberty, Ellis. It used to be a quarter, before that a dime. Lelia and I must have taken the trip over fifty times, not once setting foot on Staten Island itself. We always stand against the railing, whatever the season, whatever the weather, making sure to get a good spot on the Manhattan side of the boat so we can watch the skyline both ways. How it looms, unlooms, looms again. In the daytime, most of the traffic is commuters, some school kids, always a few tourists, many more in the summer.

But after eight or nine at night, it's a different crowd. You hear the portable music, the boat is full of dressed-up kids, Italian and Irish kids, Hispanic kids, laced up in silk, all the youthful couples, the lovers. They are journeying to Manhattan to dance. To drink and maybe fight and make a little love. To act old. Play with their hard-earned money.

We leave the big island with crowds of office workers going home early for the weekend. They're weary. They stay inside where it's warm and undrafty, where they can sit down and finally read the day's paper. We're in our spot next to the wide gangway, standing among the traders and workmen and a pack of youthful Japanese, everyone waiting for the launch and the black billows of diesel. The sun is dipping below the rim of clouds, a sudden last brightness. Lelia pulls my hand around her and tucks it inside the lapel of her blazer. My palm is cold on her breast, and she jumps a little. Although it's balmy, we're not dressed for the sea wind, even the one of this harbor, which reeks of long-dead water. As we push off the dock, Lelia reminds me that whenever a boat departs the land a hundred hearts are broken.

“That sounds like a saying of immigrants,” I say.

“My mother told it to me,” she replies. “I think it's for sailors and their girls.”

“Was Stew a sailor?”

“Double-u double-u two,” Lelia growls, turning into me. It's funny how she can never just speak for her father. Certain voices you have to honor. They're unassailable. “Backed the landing at I-wo Ji-ma,” she says, “and then Ko-RE-a.”

“No kidding. He never mentioned that to me.”

“I don't think he likes to talk about it. I think some of his friends got killed.”

I kiss the softness between her eyes. People watch us. “My father never talked about the war,” I say. “He tried once. I had to write a report for social studies. I got the bright idea to do something on the Korean War. I asked him what it was like. He almost smiled and started to talk as if it was no big deal but then he choked up and left the room.”

“How did you do the report?”

“I read my junior encyclopedia,” I tell her. “The entry didn't mention any Koreans except for Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, the Communist leader. Kim was a
bad
Korean. In the volume there was a picture of him wearing a Chinese jacket. He was fat-faced and maniacal. Bayonets were in the frame behind him. He looked like an evil robot.”

“The Mao lover's Mao,” Lelia answers.

“Exactly,” I reply. “So I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of the class. So my report was about the threat of Communism, the Chinese Army, how MacArthur was a visionary, that Truman should have listened to him. How lucky all of us Koreans were.”

“You really felt that way?”

“More or less, when I was little. Sometimes, even now. You know, it's being with old guys like Stew that diminishes you.”

“But I thought he never said anything to you. You didn't even know.”

“It doesn't matter,” I tell her loudly, holding her close. The boat is powering up to speed, throwing its wake. “It's that coloring those old guys have about the face and body, all pale and pink and silver, those veins pumping in purple heart. It says, ‘I saved your skinny gook ass, and your momma's, too.'”

“I never understood that word,” she shouts into the wind. “
Gook
. I sometimes hear it from the students. I thought it was meant for Southeast Asians. I don't get it.”

“Everyone's got a theory. Mine is, when the American GIs came to a place they'd be met by all the Korean villagers, who'd be hungry and excited, all shouting and screaming. The villagers would be yelling,
Mee-gook! Mee-gook!
and so that's what they were to the GIs, just gooks, that's what they seemed to be calling themselves, but that wasn't it at all.”

“What were they saying?”

“‘Americans! Americans!'
Mee-gook
means America.”

“That's perfect,” Lelia says, shaking her head. “I better ask Stew.”

“Don't harass your father,” I tell her. “He won't know anything. It's funny, I used to almost feel good that there was a word for me, even if it was a slur. I thought, I know I'm not a chink or a jap, which they would wrongly call me all the time, so maybe I'm a gook. The logic of a wounded eight-year-old.”

“It stinks,” she utters, turning to the waters. Her hands are white on the rail. “If I had heard that one redheaded kid say even one funny word to Mitt! God! I would have punched his fucking lights out! I would have made him scream!” Her chest bucks, and she almost starts to cry, strangely, as if she's frightened herself with a memory that isn't true.

The redheaded boy lived in my father's neighborhood. He was older than Mitt, maybe nine or ten when Mitt was six, and we often saw him at the town pool. Mitt would always step behind us when he approached. He used to tell us how the kid, named Dylan or Dean, had “the hugest muscles,” and when I see that kid now I understand the proportion Mitt's eyes must have been measuring, I can see the creamy flesh of a nine-year-old bully, the brutish, magical pall he must have cast. Of course, he was also a kind of friend. Dylan or Dean would teach Mitt and the other kids the run of bad words; he'd teach them how to trash-talk Mitt and then teach Mitt how to trash-talk them back. It was our boy's first formal education. But the other kids would have more ammo against Mitt, they were all just Westchester white boys, some of them Jews. Maybe Mitt could say “kike” (which he did once in the house, until Lelia cracked him hard on the ass) or else pretty much nothing, maybe something lame like “paleface” or “ghost,” unless the kid had big ears or was plainly slow. Because there isn't anything good to say to an average white boy to make him feel small. The talk somehow works in their favor, there's shield in the language, there's no fair way for us to fight.

We're nearing the dock. Lelia suddenly wants to get off the boat. She wants to stay on Staten Island tonight. I tell her it's haunted, spooked, that it's the isle of brutes and bigots.

“Who's the spook?” she says, though gently.

She knows it will only be a few more weeks with Kwang. This is the promise that hangs between us. She'll go back to the school district, and I'll stay at home for a while, keep my head low.

When the boat docks we step off the gangway and ask a cabdriver to take us to any nearby motel. He drops us off at the Grey Island Inn, a long rectangular three-decker with a view of the ship docks and the Jersey shoreline. We order in hamburgers and beer from the Greek diner next door and pay for the in-room movie, though we can't watch much of it. It's a new technothriller stocked with laser-guided weapons, gunboats, all flavors of machismo. Muscular agents. Give us
The Third Man
, we decide, give us
The Manchurian Candidate
and
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
.

Lelia switches the wall heater to high and we take off our clothes and slip into bed. We try to take a bath but the water doesn't clear of its rust; the shower is the same. The pay movie is finally ending. We first muted the sound, but there's no remote so we let it go on, silent. Now, the flickering lights of the finale wash over us, spectacular explosions, muzzle flashes, the steady glow of reactor fires. Only a movie can color your lovemaking like a movie's.

We know the hero won't die. He can't. There's too much blood on his face, he's too pummeled and wrecked to perish, his bedragglement is the sign to us that he is safe, actually immortal. The gunmen who sport $200 haircuts and Italian suits take bullets to the head. Lelia winces each time they fall. I imagine Jack in Cyprus, both knees broken, blood gluing his teeth, taking aim and shooting his young captor in the eye while lying on the ground. In our fictions, a lucky shot saves your life.

Lelia sits up to go to the bathroom, waits for a second, then runs through the dark. I hear her pee and then flush. The creak of the mirror. Then she's still for a moment.

She calls out.

“Henry,” she says, sounding worried. “I think I'm getting old. Fast.”

“Not so fast,” I say.

“That's not the right answer,” she calls, singing the last word.

She creeps out, runs back. After certain movies we rent, a sniper waits somewhere in the room, a strangler or rapist lurks. She used to check on Mitt during the credits, making sure he hadn't been stolen. She still insists on renting slasher films, demon movies. She wants to get stuck in her imagination. I saw her carry a marble paperweight through our apartment after we watched
Jaws
.

But I think the rest of her is becoming dauntless, even with our years and troubles. Mitt. Her trip of escape, the brief love affair. My treacheries. None of these are written on her face, none of these can be read on her body. History, it turns out, is not a human expression. Age is, time is. And she's right; the oldness is now just appearing about her lip, her temples, in the tide of her voice, which is steadily deepening, broadening. In fact she is beginning to sound a little like her old man, but without all the heady blow and bellow. These days, I notice, she likes to hum her songs, prefers this, when once she would only sing pristine notes, ring them out like clarions around the apartment.

“Try to find the weather for tomorrow,” she says to me, nodding toward the television. “If it's nice, maybe we should stay another day.”

I get up and flip around until I find the local news station. Another cabbie is dead, shot in the back of the head, this time a Cuban driver in the Bronx. They show the blood-soaked seat, the shattered windshield, a dashboard scent infuser tagged with a religious inscription in Spanish.

“Christ,” Lelia whispers.

The man is the fifth or sixth driver murdered in the last two months. The cabbies are threatening a one-day strike of all New York. They want something done, more police protection, swift justice, but no one has any good idea of how to get it done. The news shows Mayor De Roos venerably bowing his head at a press conference. The reporter speaks to several drivers at the company garages, and though all of them are concerned and scared there's nobody who can speak for the drivers as a group, who even wants to, they're too different from one another, they're recently arrived Latvians and Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Hmong.

What they have in common are the trinkets from their homelands swaying from the rearview mirror, the strings of beads, shells, the brass letters, the blurry snapshots of their small children, the night-worn eyes. I wonder if the Cuban could even beg for his life so that the killer might understand. What could he do?
Have mercy
, should be the first lesson in this city, how to say the phrase instantly in forty signs and tongues.

The next story is about a small freighter that runs aground off Far Rockaway in the middle of the night. The boat carries around fifty Chinese men who have paid $20,000 each to smugglers to ship them to America. Men are leaping from the sides of the boat, clinging to ropes dangling down into the water. Rescue boats bob in the rough surf, plucking the treaders with looped gaffs. The drowned are lined up on the dock beneath canvas tarps. The ones who make it, dazed, soaked, unspeaking, are led off in a line into police vans.