A Cab Called Reliable Read online

  As I watched Laurie get up from her seat to wash the blackboard, I told myself that tonight’s rice had to be perfect. When I flattened my hand into the water, it had to cover all my fingers and its surface had to meet the center of my knuckles. The water had to end at the center of my knuckles.

  Laurie placed the wet sponge underneath the green cardboard strip of the alphabet that was taped above the board and smoothed it down while gently squeezing out the water. She was underneath the letter D. To her left, the board had already dried an even black. To her right were chalk dust and numbers that hadn’t been erased. After every three strokes, Laurie bent down, doused her sponge in the bucket of water, squeezed it dry, and started again.

  I closed my volcano book, took out my notepad, and made a list of what needed to be done before my father came home from work. The kimchi needed to be sliced, the yellow radishes washed. A pot of water needed to be boiled with half a cup of dried anchovies, salt, and chopped green onions for the dumpling soup. I had to boil the dried corn to make tea, which would take at least two and a half hours. I decided to fry the last two eggs with baloney slices rather than hot dog slices because they were easier to cut, and they cooked faster. And the faster something cooked, the more time I would have to wash my father’s corduroy and denim pants that he wore to work, to scrub the bathroom sink and tub after he washed, and to shake the dried dirt off his boots. Then I could quickly finish my homework and read if Hazel, Fiver, Speedwell, Pipkin, and the whole lot of them safely crossed the river on their journey to find a new home.

  The bell rang. From the back of the room, Mr. Albert shouted, “Pop quiz tomorrow. Know Columbus and his three ships. What are they?” In unison, the class answered, “Niña, Pinta, Santa María,” and closed their books. As all the others packed their bags, placed their chairs on the tops of their desks, and ran to the door, I remained seated and bit my thumbnail, wondering if it was possible for one to discover a land that had already been found while trying to remember if there was enough cooking oil to fry the eggs.

  Boris was asking Mr. Albert about long division; he didn’t know which number went into which how many times and which number went under which and which got added or subtracted and what about the leftovers? While everyone else filed out of the room, Boris held up his math book to Mr. Albert. Our teacher stretched, went to the blackboard, worked out one problem for him. Then he told Boris he’d teach it again tomorrow. “You’ll get it sooner or later,” he said.

  Boris nodded, dropped his math book in his bag, and made his way across the room. The keys on the right belt loop of his tan denim pants jingled as he limped toward the door.

  I followed him down the hall past water fountains, classrooms, boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, and bulletin boards with borders of stapled tulips made of purple construction paper. As I walked past each classroom, I smelled glue and vinegar from the Easter egg dyes. At the end of the hall, a white rabbit cut out of butcher paper was pasted up with masking tape. The top of one of its pink ears reached the ceiling and the other drooped over its red eye. Its pink tail touched the floor. I smoothed my fingers over the center of the rabbit as I turned the corner. I matched my steps with Boris’s. Right, left. Right, left. When I got close enough, I yanked his keys and giggled behind my fist. I turned, faced him, and with a bounce attending each step asked: “You still don’t know long division?”

  “Shut up, Ahn Joo,” he said, and continued to limp, clink, limp, clink toward the swinging double doors that led to the stairs. The others in the hall gave Boris his space so that he could lift and drag his braced leg, then take a step with his good one without bumping into anyone. I followed him.

  “I’m not a liar, Boris. I am moving to Hawaii,” I said.

  “You’re a fake,” he said.

  His keys jingled clumsily as he quickened his wobble. His fists landed on the double doors and he leaned his chest in, swinging one open. As Boris held the left rail and limped down the stairs, I followed, skipping steps until I stood head to head with him.

  “I’m not a fake. Everything just got postponed, that’s all. What’s your problem? I just wanted to help out. I got a check plus on my homework. I know how to do it. I’ll show you, if you come over,” I said.

  “You come over,” he said, as he took the last step and walked toward the exit.

  I paused at the bottom of the stairs. At the end of the hall—past the glass doors of the main office, past the bench with its vinyl cushions and metal legs, past the two pay phones, past the display case of origami birds, boats, and flowers made by the first graders—stood four doors side by side underneath the electric red EXIT sign that hung from the ceiling. Boris was walking toward the fourth door with his right arm out and his elbow slightly bent, ready to push the metal bar that would take him outside.

  Through the glass doors of the main office I saw the white clockface with a border of black numbers that fit snugly in the corner of the wall and ceiling. The clock hung over a square speaker—the big hand on the ten, the little hand on the two. The red hand, anchored in the center, patiently circled over the numbers. I scraped my heel against the edge of the last step. I pulled and twisted the top button of my orange sweater. The point of the red hand was reaching the twelve. As it floated over eleven, I ran toward Boris, leaned my back against the metal bar, and before pushing the door open, I said in his face, “I’ll walk home with you. I’ll come over. I’ll help.”

  Boris smiled, his upper lip lifting to show his gums, and said, “I’m not paying you anything.”

  * * *

  The cushions of Boris’s green couch were scratchy. I could see Burning Rock Court through his window. I kept an eye out for my father’s car. Boris’s hands were very sweaty. He sat close to me. I placed my hands on his lap and told him to hold them. He placed one hand on top of mine. I sandwiched it between mine and rubbed it in circles as if I were rolling dough into balls. Quickly at first, then as I felt Boris’s hand relax, his fingers feeling for mine, I slowed my circles until my hands barely moved. With his free hand, Boris formed a fist and rubbed it along the crack where his thigh met the cushions of the couch. He looked up, breathing heavily, and asked, “What’d you stop for?”

  I shushed him and stroked his thumb with my forefinger. Around the top and into the crevice. As my thumb kneaded each of his knuckles, Boris closed his eyes, curled his back, and pressed his knees together. His nails were bitten. I played with the pinky, then the ring finger, middle, forefinger, and when I came to his thumb, I milked it and pulled it to my face and into my mouth. When I began to feel Boris’s thumb move on its own, I let go of his hand and gently held his wrist.

  Boris’s eyelids fluttered. He tucked his lower lip into his mouth. Thinking that he was getting sick, I pulled out his thumb, wiped it on my sweater, returned it to his side, and said, “You look retarded.”

  “I’m not retarded,” he said, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth.

  I wanted to lie down on his couch and let him climb on top of me the way men climbed on top of women on TV. I wanted to tell him he was my one and only boyfriend and I wasn’t ever going to move to Hawaii. Instead, I pushed him away, kicked his shin, told him to wake up, told him to get his book out fast because I didn’t have time to fool around with a retarded and handicapped boy who didn’t know his long division.

  Even after four math problems, Boris couldn’t straighten his back. His numbers, crooked and slanted, could barely be read on the page. As I divided five into two hundred six and six into four thousand nine and turned the remainders into fractions, Boris propped his elbow on his knees, pushed his thumb underneath his nose, and sniffed. I snatched his arm away from his face, stuck a pencil in his hand, told him to do the next problem and that he better not get it wrong.

  “Kiss me, Ahn Joo,” Boris said, as he fixed his narrowing eyes on my mouth. His lower lip hung.

  I tilted my head to the right, blinked twice, leaned forward, and brushed my lips against his: righ
t, left, up, and down, then planted them on his nose. When he pressed his opened mouth into mine, I cupped his cheeks in my hands, pulling him closer to me. The top of my nose looked blurry. Boris’s eyelids were shut tight, his eyebrows knitted, his forehead scrunched. How stupid of Boris to keep his eyes closed. I studied the long crack that began at the ceiling, ran through a painting of a pond full of lilies, and ended as it met the cushions of the green couch. But I imagined the crack, crooked and uncertain, traveling down behind the couch onto the linoleum floor, through the swinging door that led to the kitchen, and finally ending underneath the breathing refrigerator.

  While I let Boris breathe into my ear, I closed my eyes and counted my father’s footsteps, heavy and tired. His knocks against the apartment door echoed in the hall. When I didn’t come to the door with my usual greeting, my father would unlock it and let himself in, mumbling something about me sleeping too much after school. No red light on the rice maker. When he lifted the lid, no rice. No soup on the stove. In the sink, dried orange juice on the sides of the glass. Dried rice and cereal stuck on the bowls. Wooden chopsticks and spoons. Dripping faucet. The table wasn’t set with cups for the water, bowls for the rice, chopsticks and spoons on the right, folded napkins on the left, and last night’s leftovers, slices of bean curd fried in egg with soy sauce and vinegar, in the center. When I heard my father shouting, Wake up, what do you think nighttime is for? I opened my eyes and saw the crack travel across the ceiling onto the opposite wall and across the floor, meeting the soles of my shoes. I sprang up, shook Boris’s hand off my wrist, packed my school bag, and told Boris I had to go.

  I kicked the couch and said, “Let go, Boris. I have to go immediately. Right now.”

  Outside, I said to myself that I had to think of an answer. Got to think of an answer when Father asks, Where are you coming from? Where have you been? Why are you late? Got to tell him about volcanoes, long division, and Christopher Columbus discovering America while sailing on the Niña, Pinta, and the Santa María. Got to tell him the principal needed help making posters for the class for the entire school and she picked me because I had the best handwriting. Posters of class rules like “don’t run,” “don’t talk back,” important rules. Twenty posters in all because the whole school needed posters in the classrooms and Mr. Albert asked me to write out the rules because I had the best handwriting. He’ll like that.

  Walk faster. Legs, go faster because it takes time to wash the rice five times or six sometimes until the cloudiness in the water goes away. Two, not three cups of rice. Wash the grains gently so they don’t crack and break in half. Wipe the bottom of the pot dry or the rice maker will explode. Don’t forget to push the button or else hard rice cakes will end up in the trash.

  He’s already had two drinks by now.

  One more and he’ll rub me to make my pretend tummyache go away. That’s what happens after his third drink. He makes me pretend a tummyache so he can kneel at the side of my bed and stroke it with his big dry hand. When he says I ate too much or that the bean sprouts didn’t taste right or that the apple had a worm in it, I know it’s time to get into bed with only my underwear on so he can rub my tummy easily until it’s feeling well again. He feels all right about touching my tummy when he thinks he’s making the hurt go away. I keep my eyes closed and pretend I’m asleep. Rubbing my tummy to make the ache go away, it’s all right. I open my eyes sometimes, and he’s got his eyes closed like he’s praying. That’s when I start feeling soft inside and want to pray with him about maybe seeing Mother and Min Joo again. But the pictures are always changing and I can’t seem to see. I don’t know what I feel when I feel him feel me. It’s all right, I pray, as long as he doesn’t rub down too low or bury his oily face in me. It doesn’t matter. Fine. I feel fine until I smell the fire and metal from his day’s worth of welding, even after his last stroke, after he’s gotten up, walked away, and shut my door tight.

  The mornings after, while we’re putting on our shoes, he always asks if my tummyache is all gone. The first time he asked, I told him yes it was all gone. But he shook his head, tapped his finger on my chin, and said that it wasn’t all gone. Not all of it. Now when he asks, I tell him my tummy’s always aching.

  * * *

  I ran up the apartment steps breathless, unlocked and opened the door. There was a woman sitting on our coffee table with her legs crossed. She was wearing blue jeans with a tight-fitting T-shirt that said, Virginia is for lovers. Her hair was long and permed. Her eyebrows were thin. When she tapped her pink fingernails upon the table, I remembered where I had seen her before. She made that same tap-tap sound against the cash register in Arirang Market. Her sandaled foot shook to the beat of a song that was playing on our stereo. The table was already set for dinner. When the woman saw me, she hopped off the table, approached me, leaned over, and extending her hand at me, she said, “Hi, I’m Loo Lah.”

  5

  “How do you do?” I said, bowing at the waist.

  “Fine, I’m just fine,” Loo Lah said. She picked up her drink and walked over to my father in the kitchen, who was running the faucet over something in the sink. She held onto my father’s arm and whispered in his ear. Two shopping bags from Arirang Market were on the counter. On the floor leaning against the refrigerator was an unopened sack of rice. With Loo Lah clinging onto his arm, my father turned the faucet off, dried his hands, and walked out of the kitchen toward me. Wearing the kind of stupid smile Boris wore on his face after a long kiss, my father told me Loo Lah-sister would prepare dinner tonight. As he walked into the bathroom, he told me to be helpful and thankful because Loo Lah-sister had brought us the food.

  “Thanks for the food,” I said, put down my school bag on the couch, pulled out my spelling book, and began memorizing words. Loo Lah asked what kind of a story I was reading.

  “I’m not reading a story,” I said. “It’s a spelling book.”

  “Are you a good speller?” she asked.

  “Quite good,” I said, putting the book away and walking past her into the kitchen. I looked in the sink and asked, “What is this?”

  “I’m making fish stew tonight,” Loo Lah said, and ran water over the two fish. Tossing her hair back, she said cooking was a hobby of hers. She loved it. “I’m good at it, you know,” she added. When I didn’t respond, she asked me where the knives were.

  Pointing to the top drawer, I said, “There.”

  As she cleaned the fish in the sink, she looked over her shoulder and said, “Ahn Joo, I wonder. I wonder if I were your age … How old are you?”

  “Ten. Almost eleven.”

  “I wonder if I were ten years old again, and you were still ten, of course, I wonder if we would be friends. Or, I wonder if you were twenty-five and I was twenty-five, we would still be friends. I wonder how you would look at twenty-five. But I’ve always wanted a little sister. What about you? Did you ever dream of having a big sister?”

  Shrugging my shoulders, I told her she shouldn’t clean the fish in the sink because my mother never got the garbage disposal fixed because my little brother cried at the sound of it and also because a chopstick fell through and jammed it. My mother always bought her fish cleaned, and if the market was too crowded, she always cleaned her fish on the counter and threw out the unusable parts twisty-tied in a plastic bag in the garbage. Loo Lah probably brought home leftover fish from the market, fish that wouldn’t sell. My mother always bought fresh fish. She always wore an apron when she was cooking. And her hair was never worn down, messy, falling in her face and falling into the food like Loo Lah’s.

  “Why don’t you wash up and help,” Loo Lah said. She tilted her head back and shook her hair away from her face.

  “Your hair,” I said.

  “What?” She turned off the running water. Looking down at me, she again asked, “What?”

  “I said, ‘Your hair.’”

  “What about my hair?” she asked, running the water again.

  “It’s falling into
the food,” I said clearly and loudly.

  As she pulled out the guts of the fish, she told me to go get her a barrette or rubber band for her hair instead of just standing there and watching her like some dumb tourist.

  “My hair’s too short for barrettes. I don’t wear them,” I said.

  “Then get me a rubber band,” she said.

  “They’re in that drawer.”

  “Would you get one out? Can’t you see my hands are busy?”

  “They’re too little to hold your hair,” I said, walking out of the kitchen.

  Loo Lah turned off the running water and in a teacher’s voice told me to stop. I turned my head and saw one of her wet, fish-scaled hands fisted on her hip and the other pointed at me. With lips that moved in front of unmoving teeth, she said, “Get the damn rubber band and tie my hair.”

  “I have to put my books away. I have to get washed up,” I said, and walked on.

  In my bedroom, I sat on Min Joo’s bed and recited the Pledge of Allegiance to keep from crying. I tried to keep my eyes open wide and fixed a stare on the latch-hook rug of three cats in a basket hanging on the closet door. I made that for Min Joo because he was afraid of cats. But as I heard my father finishing his shower and Loo Lah opening and closing the cabinet doors, my eyes began to brim over with tears. I wrapped my fingers around my throat and held my breath, calling myself the names I had called my brother for crying like a baby, but this reminded me of Min Joo and my mother even more. I closed my eyes and wished Loo Lah would disappear. But from the kitchen she called, “Ahn Joo! Ahn Joo!” And when I didn’t immediately answer her, my father yelled from the shower, “Ahn Joo-yah, Loo Lah-sister is calling you. Answer her!”