Please Look After Mom (25 page)

·   ·   ·

The wardrobe is frozen solid, too.

The doors don’t even open. But it should be empty. When my head started to hurt so badly, I wanted to go to that man, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. I thought maybe I would get better if I did. But I didn’t go. I pressed down my desire to go, and went through my things. I could feel that it was approaching, the day when I wouldn’t be able to recognize anything because I would be numb. I wanted to take care of all my things while I could still recognize them. I wrapped in a cloth the clothes I didn’t wear, which I’d hung in the wardrobe, unable to throw them out, and burned them in the fields. The underclothes that Hyong-chol bought me with his first paycheck had been in the wardrobe for decades, with the tags still on. When I was burning them, my head felt like it would split in half. I burned everything I could, except the blankets and pillows, which the children could use when they came home for the holidays. I burned the cotton blankets that my mother had made for me when I got married. I took out everything I’d spent a long time with and looked at it all again. The things I never used because I was saving them, the dishes I collected to give my elder daughter when she got married. If I’d known that she wasn’t going to get married, even though her younger sister is married and has three children, I would have given them to my younger daughter. I stupidly thought I had to give them to Chi-hon because I’d planned to give them to her. I hesitated, then took them outside and smashed them to pieces. I knew—one day I wouldn’t remember anything. And before that happened, I wanted to take care of everything I’d ever used. I didn’t want to leave anything behind. All the bottom cupboards are empty, too. I broke everything that was breakable and buried it all.

Even in that frozen wardrobe, the only winter clothing would be the black mink coat my younger daughter bought me. The year I turned fifty-five, I didn’t want to eat or go out. I spent my days buried deep in unpleasantness, feeling like my face was being torn off. When I opened my mouth, I thought I smelled something bad. At one point, I didn’t say a word for over ten days. I tried to shoo away negative thoughts, but every day a sad thought was added to my collection. Even though it was in the middle of winter, I kept dipping my hands in cold water and washing and washing them. And one day I went to church. I stopped in the churchyard. I bent over the feet of the Holy Mother, who was holding her dead son, to pray for her help to pull me out of this depression, which I couldn’t stand any longer, to beg her to take pity on me. But then I stopped myself, wondering what more I could ask of someone holding her dead son. During mass, I saw that the woman in front of me was wearing a black mink coat. Drawn by its softness, I quietly lowered my face to it, without even realizing I was doing it. The mink, like a spring breeze, gently embraced my old face. The tears I’d been holding back poured out. The woman moved away when I kept trying to rest my head on her mink coat. When I got home, I called my younger daughter and asked her to buy me a mink coat. It was the first time I’d opened my mouth in ten days.

“A mink coat, Mom?”

“Yes, a mink coat.”

She was quiet.

“Are you going to buy me one or not?”

“It’s not that cold this year. Do you have someplace to wear a mink coat to?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going somewhere?”

“No.”

She laughed out loud at my curt replies. “Come to Seoul, then. We can go shopping together.”

As we walked into the department store, to the mink coats, my daughter kept looking at me without saying anything. I had no idea that my mink coat, which was slightly shorter than the one I had buried my face in, the one that woman in church was wearing, was such an expensive thing. My daughter didn’t tell me. When we went home with the mink coat, my daughter-in-law’s eyes bulged. “A mink coat, Mother!”

I was quiet.

“You’re so lucky, Mother. To have a daughter who buys you expensive things like this. I haven’t even been able to buy my mother a fox scarf. They say a mink gets handed down for generations. When you pass away, you should leave it to me.”

“It’s the first time Mom ever asked me to buy something for her! Stop it!”

When my daughter shot back at her sister-in-law as if she was angry, I realized it. The reason she kept looking at the price tag, again and again. And the reason she kept looking at me. At that time, she had just graduated from college and was working at a hospital pharmacy. When I got back from Seoul, I took the mink coat and went to a similar store in town and asked the girl working in the mink-coat department how much it cost. I froze. Who knew one piece of clothing could cost so much! I called my daughter to tell her that we should return the coat, and she told me, “Mom, you have every right to wear that coat. You should wear it.”

In this region, there are very few cold days in winter, so I could wear a mink coat only occasionally. Once, I didn’t wear
it for three years. When I had depressed thoughts, I opened the wardrobe and buried my face in the mink coat. And I thought, When I die, I will leave it to my younger daughter.

   Although it’s frozen now, in the spring the flower garden near the wall will come alive again. The blossoms on the neighbor’s pear tree will bloom, and their scent will float over. The rose vines with pale-pink buds will flex their spikes, cheering. The weeds under the wall will grow thick and tall with the first spring rain. Once, I bought thirty ducklings from under the bridge in town and let them out in the yard, and they rushed over to the flower garden and stepped on all the flowers. When they ran around in packs with the chicks, it was hard to tell which were ducklings and which were chicks. Anyway, in the spring, the yard was noisy because of them. It was in this yard that my daughter, who was digging under the rosebush, saying that it would yield a lot of flowers if it was given manure, saw a wriggling worm in the dirt, threw the short hoe aside, and ran inside; the hoe hit a chick and killed it. I remember the wave of the smell of dirt that would reach my nose when, in the summer, a sudden rain fell, and the dog and chickens and ducks that had been wandering around the yard crawled under the porch and into the chicken cages and under the wall. I remember the droplets of dirt formed by the sudden rain. On windy late-fall nights, the leaves of the persimmon tree in the side yard would rustle off and fly around. All night, we would hear them scuttling across the yard. During snowy winter nights, the wind would blow the snow piled in the yard onto the porch.

   Someone is opening the gate. Ah, Aunt!

You were an aunt to my children and a sister to me, but I
was never able to call you “sister”: you seemed more like my mother-in-law. I see you have come to check on the house, because it’s snowing and windy. I thought nobody was here to look after this house, forgetting that you’re here. But why are you limping? You’re always so spry. I guess you’re getting old, too. Be careful—it’s snowy.

“Anyone home?”

Your voice is still powerful, like it’s always been.

“Nobody’s here, right?”

You are calling out even though you know nobody is here. You sit on the edge of the porch, not waiting for an answer. Why did you come without wearing enough layers? You’ll catch a cold. You’re looking at the snow in the yard as if you’re somewhere else. What are you thinking?

“It feels like someone’s here.…”

Halfway to being a ghost, Aunt.

“I don’t know where you’re wandering around when it’s this cold.”

Are you talking about me?

“The summer went by, and fall went by, and it’s winter.… I didn’t know you were such a heartless person. What is this house going to do without you? It’s just an empty shell. You left wearing summer clothes, and you haven’t come back even though it’s winter—are you already someone of the other world?”

Not yet. I’m wandering around like this.

“The saddest person in the world is the one who dies outside their home.… Please be alert and come back home.”

Are you crying?

Your eyes, long slants, look up at the gray sky and become wet. Your eyes aren’t scary at all, now that you’re acting like
this. I was always so frightened by your stern eyes that I honestly didn’t look at your face, so as not to meet your eyes. But I think I liked you better when you were no-nonsense. This doesn’t seem like you, sitting with your shoulders drooping. I was never able to hear anything nice from you when I was alive, so why do I have to look at your dejected figure now? I don’t like seeing you weak. I wasn’t only afraid of you. If something difficult happened and I didn’t know what to do, I thought, What would Aunt do? And I would choose what I thought you would do. So you were my role model, too. You know I have a temper. All the relationships in the world are two-way, not determined by one side. And now you’re going to have to look after Hyong-chol’s father, who’s all alone. I don’t feel good about it, either. But since you are near him, I feel a little better. When I was alive, I knew full well that you were depending on Hyong-chol’s father, since you were all alone, and I didn’t feel hurt or left out or disappointed. I just thought of you as a difficult elder of the family. So much so that you felt like our mother and not our sister. But, Aunt … I don’t want to go to the grave set aside for me a few years ago at the ancestral grave site. I don’t want to go there. When I lived here and woke up from the fog in my head, I would walk by myself to the grave site set aside for me, so that I could feel comfortable if I lived there after death. It was sunny, and I liked the pine tree that stood bent but tall, but remaining a member of this family even in death would be too much and too hard. To try to change my mind, I would sing and pull weeds, sitting there until the sun set, but nothing made me feel comfortable there. I lived with this family for over fifty years; please let me go now. Back then, when we were assigning grave sites and you said my plot should go on a site down the
slope from yours, I glared and said, “Oh, so even when I’m dead I can do your errands.” I remember saying that. Don’t be upset about it, Aunt. I thought about it a long time, but I didn’t say that with ill will. I just want to go home. I’ll go rest there.

   Oh, I see the shed door is open.

The wind is pounding at the shed door as if it would knock it down. There’s a thin layer of ice on the wooden platform that I liked to sit on. If someone sat there without seeing the ice, he would slip right off. Chi-hon used to read in this shed. Getting bitten by fleas. I knew that she crept in here with a book, in between the pigsty and the ash shed. I didn’t look for her. When Hyong-chol asked where she was, I said I didn’t know. Because I liked seeing her read. Because I didn’t want to disturb her. Straw was piled on the board covering the pigsty. Chickens would have taken over one side and would be laying and sitting on eggs. Nobody would find the child squeezed in there, on top of the straw pile, putting spit on her flea bites to soothe them, reading. How much fun must it have been for her to hide there, reading, hearing her brother opening doors, pushing into the kitchen, looking for her? And the chickens, how particular were they? Huddled over eggs on the straw pile on top of the pigsty, they would get annoyed at the sound of my daughter turning pages. These chickens, who didn’t lay eggs if we didn’t make their nests cozy and tempting with nest eggs, became sensitive to Chi-hon’s rustling, and one time they cackled so much that her brother found her. What did she read, hidden quietly in the shed, with a pig grunting next to her and the chickens clucking above her and the hoe and rake and shovel and all kinds of farm equipment and straw around her?

In the spring, the dog, growling, would lie with her new litter under the porch, where the family’s winter shoes were scattered. You could hear the water dripping from the eaves. That gentle dog, why did she get so aggressive when she had pups? Unless you were a member of the family, you couldn’t get near her. When she had a litter, Hyong-chol would repaint the sign on the blue gate that always hung there, the one that said “Beware of Dog.” Once, I took a puppy from the porch while the dog was sleeping after her dinner, put it in a basket, covered it with a cloth, and, with my hand, covered where I thought the eyes were, and brought it to Aunt’s.

“Why are you covering its eyes when it’s so dark out, Mom?” asked my younger daughter, following me. She looked confused, even after I explained that if I didn’t do it the pup would find its way home.

“Even though it’s so dark?”

“Yes, even though it’s this dark!”

When the dog discovered that her puppy was gone, she refused to eat, and lay around, sick. She had to eat to make enough milk to feed the other puppies, so they could grow. It looked like she would die if I left her alone, so I brought the pup back and pushed it next to her, and the dog started eating again. That dog lived under that porch.

   Oh, I don’t know where to stop these memories, the memories that are sprouting all over the place like spring greens. Everything I forgot about is rushing back. From the rice bowls on the kitchen shelf to the big and little clay jars on the condiment ledge, from the narrow wooden stairs to the attic to the pumpkin vines spreading thick under the dirt wall, climbing up.

·   ·   ·

You shouldn’t leave the house to freeze like this.

If it’s too much, ask our younger daughter-in-law for help. She always carefully looked after their house, even though it wasn’t their own. She has an eye for this kind of thing, and she’s exact and warm. Even though she works, her house is always sparkling clean, and she doesn’t even have help. If it’s hard to maintain the house, try talking to her. I’m telling you, if she touches an old thing it becomes new. Don’t you remember how they rented, in the redevelopment area, a brick house that the owner didn’t maintain, and she mixed cement with her own hands and fixed it? A house takes on the characteristics of its occupant, and, depending on who lives in it, it can become a very good house or a very strange house. When spring comes, please plant some flowers in the yard, and rub down the floors, and fix the roof that collapsed from the snow.