I'll Be Right There (19 page)

“It was late afternoon by the time we got to our grandmother’s house. We called out for her as we went in the gate,
but the house was empty. The trees, which were like family to my grandmother, stood in a friendly congregation, casting shadows over the wall, and colorful summer flowers planted near the front door were in full bloom. The only way in was through the front door, but it was padlocked. My sister and I sat on the veranda in the shade of the trees and waited for her to come home. Since our mother said she would call her, we assumed she would be there already. We had gone to visit her before without calling first, but she had always been home. She was usually working in the courtyard or the vegetable garden, wearing a hat and baggy pants and carrying a hoe, but the moment we would step in through the gate and call out to her, she would drop what she was doing and rush to welcome us. She called us her ‘puppies.’ I would always run to her and give her a big hug. I loved the smell of her sweat.

“It was strange and a little frightening to see the house without her in it. I kept praying for her to appear. I have no idea how long we waited. I kept thinking, ‘She’ll be here any minute.’ But the shadows of the sunflowers planted along the wall were getting longer and longer and still she hadn’t come. We were getting hungry, too. One of our stomachs grumbled loudly. Since I was the younger one, I kept whining that I was hungry, even though there was nothing my sister could have done about it. She tried to make me feel better by saying our grandmother would be home soon, but her stomach was also growling. She must have been more anxious than I was for our grandmother to appear. She stopped staring at the front gate and got up and went to the locked front door. Even though we knew no one was inside, she banged on the door
and yelled, ‘Grandma!’ I went to her side and yelled with her. When we got tired of that, we leaned against the door and started ticking off the things we would ask our grandmother to do when she finally showed up. Our grandmother had a lot of expensive brass dishes. She told us that in the village in the North where she grew up, whenever important guests came to visit, food was served in brass bowls with brass spoons and chopsticks. It was a sign of respect. Our favorite food was the
pyeonsu
she would make for us.”

“What’s
pyeonsu
?”

“That’s what they call dumplings where she grew up. They cook them in beef broth. My sister and I sat there and listed all the things we wanted her to cook for us. Not just
pyeonsu
but also steamed pork with kimchi, soup made with gourd-shaped rice cakes, stew made with bean paste and dumplings—all of the things she usually made when we visited her over winter vacation. We must have listed fifty different foods and still she hadn’t come. I could not stop whining about how hungry I was. The more I whined, the hungrier I got. There was nothing my sister could do but keep reassuring me that she would be there any minute. I said, ‘What if she never comes home?’ My sister said, ‘Why wouldn’t she come home? It’ll just be a little longer.’ Then I really got worried and said, ‘She could have gone on a trip,’ and I listed all the reasons our grandmother might not return that day. My sister kept knocking on the door. I kept thinking that if only we could get inside, we would have plenty to eat, and that thought made me even more eager to get in. The longer the door stayed closed, the more convinced I was that our grandmother was never coming back. I had never
seen it padlocked like that before. Finally I asked, ‘What if she went somewhere far away and won’t be back for several days?’ My sister stood up.

“She searched all over for something to pick the padlock with—anything long and thin and strong enough to fit inside the lock. But nothing worked. The sun was setting and we were hungry, so we were starting to panic. We forgot all about waiting for our grandmother and became fixated on picking the lock. We racked our brains trying to find something that would fit in the keyhole. The persimmon, plum, and cherry trees in the yard kept watch as we ran around frantically. We must have trampled all over the cockscomb in our frenzy to find something sharp. My sister found a wooden toolbox in the shed and carried it to the front door, groaning from the weight. By then, the sun was on the horizon. We crouched in front of the door and stuck every pointed object we found in the toolbox into the lock. But nothing fit. It was as if the locked door expected some kind of sacrifice first. We stared at the toolbox in disappointment. Our grandmother’s neatly organized tools were jumbled together and strewn everywhere.

“My sister said she had to pee and went behind the plum tree. Even though she loved our grandmother’s house, she hated using the outhouse. Whenever she had to go, she would make one of us wait outside. She would call out to us to make sure we were standing right outside. I would say, ‘I’m right here!’ And she would say, ‘Stay there and don’t move.’ I thought it was funny that my big sister preferred to pee behind a tree than use the outhouse, just because the house was empty, and I said to myself,
‘Unni
is a chicken.’ As she
lifted her skirt and squatted behind the tree, I took the awl out of the toolbox and fitted it into the keyhole. I was hoping to impress her by getting the lock open before she came back. I started chanting, ‘Open, open, open …’ But if she couldn’t pick the lock, why would I be able to? I struggled with it for a while, and then got mad and threw the awl down as hard as I could. My sister called to me. She was standing in front of the tree, the hem of her white skirt in her hand, one foot raised high into the air. Her hand was resting on a low branch like it was a ballet barre. She began moving to invisible music.

“She called out my name again and asked, ‘What did Fokine say to Pavlova?’ Fokine was the one who choreographed the Dying Swan solo for Pavlova. My sister used to share everything she had learned about ballet with me. She would read me the stories from her ballet books and then quiz me on them later. She asked me questions like ‘Who was it who said that any song can be made into a ballet?’ I rarely knew the answer. But every now and then, the answer would come to me. ‘George Balanchine!’ I would say, and she would stroke my head. That was how we talked about ballet. You know how, before a performance starts, the soloists come onstage to give the audience a brief preview of what’s coming? My sister was doing turns like that. She wasn’t wearing her toe shoes, but she managed a few light turns and called to me again. ‘Miru! I asked you what Fokine said to Pavlova!’ I answered: ‘You are a swan.’ That was her favorite quote. When I answered correctly, she collapsed forward, gently and quietly. She was mimicking the way a swan folds its wings as it dies. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She really did look like a dying swan. Once, we had
watched some very old footage of Pavlova dancing the Dying Swan solo. It was from long before my sister and I were born. The film quality was quite bad, and the lines on the film made my eyes hurt, but my sister couldn’t stop crying as she watched it. Later that night, I woke to find my sister on the floor next to our bed—she was curled up like a swan with its wings folded over its head. When I saw her lying under the plum tree, I burst into tears. She looked like she really was dying. It was just so beautiful. She was surprised to hear me cry and folded back her swan wings and flew to where I sat in front of the door. She kept asking me what was wrong. The darkness was rolling in behind her. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asked, but I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t stop crying, either. Maybe I sensed it—that it was the last time my sister would ever dance. Something was bothering me. But I couldn’t explain why I felt so scared and sad. Since I wouldn’t stop crying, my sister went back to the door to try again to unlock it. She grabbed the padlock and dropped to her knees. Suddenly her sharp scream pierced my eardrums. I felt like I had jumped off a cliff. I immediately stopped crying and ran to her. She was clutching her knee. The awl that I had hurled away in anger had gotten lodged between two floorboards and was sticking straight up. It was embedded in her knee. She leaned forward and fell flat.

“After that day, my sister never danced again.”

I sat up and looked at Miru. She was scratching Emily’s neck with one hand and resting the other on her forehead. I grabbed her hand. Her scarred, winkled skin felt warm.

“It’s hard to listen to, isn’t it?” she asked.

I could not get the words out to tell her it was okay. “Miru.”

She looked at me.

“Finish the story,” I said. “Don’t hold it all inside.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’ll get through it together.”

Would sharing her story help heal her wounds? She couldn’t forget what had happened, but I wanted her to start putting it behind her. I wanted her to overcome her faded scars and move on.

“My sister’s accident has been stamped in my memory ever since. Maybe if she had hated me for it, I would have gotten over it. But we never said a word about it. Not once after that day. While she was in the hospital, I watched as my parents took down her ballet barre. And then it was like everyone forgot. No one said another word about it—not my grandmother, not my parents, not my sister, and not me. I don’t remember anymore why my grandmother wasn’t home that day or what time she finally showed up. All I remember is that she took one look at my sister lying on the ground and ran to the nearest village, which was on the other side of a hill. I also remember going with her to the hospital with a young man from the village who put my sister in the back of a tractor with the awl still lodged in her knee … When my grandmother passed away, she left the house to me. She said she wanted me to look after it. There are traces of my grandmother all over that house. She planted the same trees that grew in her hometown up north. If only the accident had never happened, I could have loved that house. My grandmother made all her own blankets and coverlets on her sewing machine, and she planted the courtyard so that different
flowers bloomed every season. Some of the flowers resembled the wildflowers that she had seen up north when she was young, so there were always unfamiliar flowers blooming and fading and then blooming again in her garden. Now there’s no one to keep the place up, so it’s probably falling apart.”

“We should go there someday.” I said it with the same intonation with which Miru had said we should go to Basel someday. I could feel the word
someday
making its way back to me. After my mother died, I had stopped saying the word, but before then, I used to say it to myself all the time. Back then, it was the only word that could comfort me. When my mother learned that she was dying, the first thing she did was to send me to live with my cousin in the city. I didn’t want to leave her. I wanted to be with her as badly as she did not want me to see her suffer. But I had to obey her. She had already spent more time persuading me to leave than getting treatment for herself. I had to leave in order for her to start getting proper care. The day I left, I said, “Someday, Mama.” Those words would repeat themselves in my mind countless times. When she did not have a single strand of hair left on her head, all I could say to her even then was “Someday, Mama.” What I most longed for—to see my mother regain her health and go back to her old self—never came true. When I lost my mother, I threw out the word
someday
. The word became meaningless, a phantom word with no power to change anything. After I stopped using it, my habits of swallowing a bitter laugh, biting my lip, furrowing my forehead, and walking alone to console myself returned intact.

“Do you mean it?” Miru asked.

“Mean what?”

“That we should go to my grandmother’s house someday?”

“Yes … someday.” I felt a sudden urgent desire to keep that promise.

“Will that day ever come?” she asked. It was as if she were reading my mind.

“As long as we don’t forget,” I said.

“If we don’t forget?”

I felt sad so I sat up beside her and said, “Let’s take Emily, too.”

“And Myungsuh,” added Miru. Then she closed her eyes and said in a monotone, “And Professor Yoon, too.”

We were both quiet for a moment. Had she and Professor Yoon become so close that she could propose taking him with us? As if to dispel the silence between us, Miru added, “And Nak Sujang, too.” I laughed. We started listing every single person we knew. I added Dahn’s name, though Miru had never met him before.

“Who’s Dahn?” she asked.

“We grew up together.”

“I want to meet him.”

“You will.”

“Yoon, I want to live in that house someday. I want to till the land with my own hands, like my grandmother did. Plant seeds in the spring and harvest the fruit in the fall. Plant vegetables in the garden, live off the land, and write. My grandmother must have left the house to me and not my sister because she knew that’s what I wanted. Even though I never went back after that summer, she knew. The house is vacant
right now, but I plan to return and open it up again. After my sister’s accident, that house became a forbidden place that we never spoke of, even though no one had told us not to. Even when my grandmother left it to me, my sister didn’t say a word. It’s not that things were bad between us. We were as close as any other sisters. But we never spoke of the accident or that house again. The only time my sister mentioned it to me was when she wanted to hide him there.”

“Him?”

“The man she loved as much as ballet,” she replied. “When my sister started college, she took Emily and moved to the city. By the time Myungsuh and I joined her the following year, she was like a different person. The dark cloud that had hung over her after she stopped doing ballet was gone. Even her voice returned to normal. She had a way of saying, ‘Miru! Look at this!’ whenever she saw something that she liked or that surprised her or that she wanted to brag about. She didn’t come home often, so I had seen very little of her that year. She was always busy, and I was preparing for the college entrance exam. After a year apart, my sister’s black hair shone and her cheeks glowed. Her steps seemed lighter, too. She’d returned to who she was before the accident. It was all thanks to the new man in her life. Her days revolved around him rather than around school. Words like ‘socialism’ and ‘the labor theory of value’ and ‘human rights’ seemed to fall naturally from her lips. And that wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Books I had never heard of before were sitting on her desk. They had titles like
Western Economic History
and
Capital
. There were books by Frantz
Fanon.
A Stone’s Cry
and
How the Steel Was Tempered. The Communist Manifesto. Pedagogy. History and Class Consciousness
. I would wake up in the morning to find my sister sitting at the table, reading books like
The White Rose
the way she used to read books on ballet in the old days. She would be so absorbed in reading that I could walk right up to her without her realizing it. I became more and more curious about this man who was making my sister read
Liberation Theology
. But all I knew of him was what she had told me. He had yet to appear before us. Then, one day, my sister told me he was coming to dinner. She asked me if it would be okay, but all I could think was that I was finally going to meet him. I will never forget that day. Not because of him, but because of how my sister acted. She got up at dawn and took Myungsuh to the Noryangjin Fish Market to buy a load of blue crabs. She said they were his favorite. Blue crabs? I was surprised. They didn’t seem to go with the type of person who could make my sister read
A Critical Biography of Che Guevara
. But she and Myungsuh bought the crabs and released them into the kitchen sink.