A Cab Called Reliable (2 page)

My father swung his arm back and covered his ears. My mother followed him, but stopped. She stopped, turned, picked up the iron, and struck my father on the back of his head. He stopped, gripped the back of a chair, shook his head, then walked on. He got water from the refrigerator and drank it. Min Joo's face was buried in his lap; his head wrapped up with his arms. Mother was breathing heavily. She coiled the cord around the iron and laid it on its side on top of the folded quilt. As she walked to the bedroom, she pulled her earrings off. Clutching them in her hand, she turned around, waved her fist in the air, and with the scary expression on her face, she told my father he would live with regret for the rest of his life. My mother threw her earrings on the dresser and shut the door.

The apartment was quiet. I was alone. I stopped crying.

On the kitchen table was a white box with a red ribbon tied around it. On the top right corner was written
Cho, Ahn Joo
in Korean. Inside were four perfect little white-frosted square cakes, the kind I had seen only through bakery windows and in storybooks where girls wore yellow bows with matching yellow aprons and had parties with cake and tea. Two of my cakes were decorated with pink ribbons and two with pineapples, and there was a note tucked between the two kinds. In Korean, my mother had written to tell me that the cakes were for me and to eat them slowly and deliciously and wait with patience because she would come back to get me. With my thumb and middle finger I held a piece of cake to my mouth, smiled, and wondered why I had almost cried minutes ago, forgetting that I had seen how rushed, determined, scary, and secretive my mother looked with Min Joo in her arms as she entered the cab that looked ready to drive off far away. I ate all four pieces and licked the wax paper that lined the bottom of the box. I decided to keep the white box to carry my most important things in for when my mother came back to take me to where she, Min Joo, and I would secretly live.

I put in the box the four dollars in change I had saved from milk money I had not used because milk made my stomach turn; the lipstick called Devon Rose #260 I had stolen from my second-grade teacher's purse because I thought such a person did not deserve to wear such a beautiful color; a poem about my mother that I had written in brown Magic Marker called “Tears in the Toilet”; and the rock Boris had tossed up my pant leg during recess. I removed my pillow and stuffed the empty pillowcase with my spelling book because I needed to know how to spell wherever I went; my favorite yellow dress, with buttons the shape of stars; clean underwear, white socks, and the red mittens my grandmother had knitted for me and sent all the way from Pusan in a box full of dried kelp, dried red peppers, and dried anchovies.

Then I placed my box and pillowcase near the door and sat on the radiator underneath the window, looking out for a blue cab with
RELIABLE
written on the door. I counted the cars that drove by and took in the scene at Burning Rock Court as if for the very last time.

Removed from everything that had gone on the night before and the night before and the night before, I felt that the girl who had seen her mother throw a hot iron at her father because he smelled of liquor, perfume, smoke, and urine again, who had seen her father bounce her mother's head on and off the refrigerator door calling her a begging bitch because she mentioned returning to Korea again, who had seen the dark blue print of her father's hand around her brother's neck, who had felt the same large hand remain seconds too long on her own bottom as he patted her for being a good girl and then on her stomach as he rubbed her indigestion away—that girl was no longer me. That girl would have been standing in front of a mirror reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. But I was here with my most important things packed and ready to be taken to the secret place where only mothers, daughters, and little brothers were allowed.

I began to hum a tune my mother once taught me. I did not know the words to the song, but I remembered it was about a girl who lived in the country and was watching her older brother ride a horse on the road to the city. When his figure became as small as the size of her thumb, she returned to the house and stared out the window. She was sad, but full of hope because her brother had promised to return soon with a pair of silk slippers.

As I saw the sky changing colors, I began to panic because hours had already gone by and my mother had not yet come for me. I panicked, thinking she had forgotten about me or had somehow found out about all the naughty things I had said and done to torture Min Joo and decided it would be best to leave me with my father. I prayed Min Joo did not tell her how I carried him on my shoulders and dropped him on the floor, how I held down his head in our bathwater, how I told him to brush his teeth with soap, how I told him Mother and I had found him underneath a bridge in a Korean village where lepers lived. If my mother knew these things, she would surely never return for me, and my father would find me here with my most important things and never ever let me leave.

With my mother's note in hand, I took my belongings outside. Waiting on the bench, I prayed that Min Joo, wherever he was, would be crying, because my brother was not able to cry and speak at the same time.

From across the court, Boris Bulber saw me sitting on the bench and began limp-running toward me with a bag of corn chips. He was wearing a brown T-shirt and a pair of brown corduroys that were too tight and too short for him. Brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair. Everything on him seemed to match. I wondered if on a map, Portugal would also be the color brown.

He sat down next to me, twitched his good leg, and offered me a corn chip. I told him my stomach wasn't feeling good and I could throw up all over him any minute. He smiled, showing me the gap between his two front teeth, and told me I could come over and play because his mother was working at the motel today. She was a cleaning lady for the Madison Inn, which was the two-story white brick building with orange, yellow, green, and blue doors. It stood between Buckingham Theater and the Rose Garden Chinese Restaurant, right across the street from Pershing Market. I had seen Boris's mother come home from work before. She wore what looked to me like a nurse's uniform: white blouse, white skirt, white shoes, and two safety pins holding up the gray apron that covered her large breasts. The first time I saw her, she looked so important and professional that I decided when I grow up, I would like to be a cleaning lady at the Madison Inn.

“Boris, I can't play today. I'm moving,” I said and pulled my things closer to me.

“Where're you moving?”

“To Hawaii.”

“You're not coming to school tomorrow?”

“It's the last time you can see me.”

“You can come over right now, can't you?” he asked. Looking at my things, he said, “You're not moving.”

“My mother's coming to get me,” I said.

“That's my window. You can look out,” he said, pointing in that direction. “I'll give you my quarter.”

Because Boris was the only boy who had ever kissed me, I told him I would come over and play with him, but only for five minutes because my mother was coming to get me any minute now. He pulled out a quarter from his pocket, put it in my hand, stood up, and told me to come on. With one arm around my box and the pillowcase slung over my other shoulder, I followed Boris to his apartment, where he would sit me on his lap and kiss me.

“Don't touch me. That's yucky,” I said.

“If you like someone, you can touch them there,” Boris said, putting his head on my shoulder. I sniffed into his curls, shrugged him off, and told him his head was making me cry because it smelled just like onions.

I stood up to look out the window. Parked in the center of the court was a white van, but there was no cab—blue, yellow, green, black, or any other color, with any sort of lettering on its door. I did not want to wait outside because it was getting dark and my father would see me with my things and make me stay with him forever. When Boris's mother came in through the door saying something to Boris in Portuguese, I tried hard to remember my mother's song, wondering if the country girl ever got her silk slippers in the end.

After seeing me at her window, Boris's mother walked into the kitchen telling the air it was natural and all right for a girl and boy to kiss as long as no one had a cough, sneeze, or sniffle. She filled a saucepan with water, placed it on the stove, and brought out four potatoes from the cabinet under the sink. While scrubbing them, she told me to stay and eat something because my head looked too big for my body. Skin and bones, she called me. On the television set was a framed photograph of Boris's father. He was smiling and waving, hello or good-bye, from the driver's seat of a truck. Poor Boris and his mother were still waiting for him to drive the truck back to Arlington from somewhere in Texas.

I told Boris's mother I needed to eat by the window because my mother was coming soon to get me. Boris told her we were moving to Hawaii. She did not believe me; nevertheless, she smiled and said that Hawaii was a beautiful place, and I was a lucky girl. Then she left me with my bowl of potatoes with butter and garlic at the windowsill while she and Boris ate at the table.

As I finished my food, I saw that the light of our apartment was turned on. My father must have come home. I asked Boris's mother for another bowl of potatoes because they were more delicious than anything I had ever eaten, and she gladly took my bowl and filled it. Before giving me a second helping, she wiped my mouth with a corner of her gray apron, and puckering her lips at me—the way lips are puckered at poor strays—she called me a sweet girl. I quickly finished the potatoes, took my bowl to the sink, slipped the spoon into my sleeve, gathered up my belongings, and thanked Boris's mother for a delicious dinner. I told Boris it was time for me to go because my mother was waiting.

Outside, I crawled into the azalea shrubs that grew near our building and with the spoon dug a hole deep enough to hide my box and pillowcase. If my father saw my things, he would point his middle finger at the box, tell me in that voice my mean and greedy grandfather used to open it up, and then, seeing the four dollars in change, he would pocket it. Reading my poem, he would know that I knew it was because of him my mother cried into the toilet. The rock he would throw out the window because rocks were dangerous weapons in the hands of children. Looking at the lipstick, he would tell me that eight-year-old girls with color on their faces grew up to be whores, and I would tell him I was already nine. But I would never tell my father about the note and the cakes that had been left for me.

When I walked into our apartment, I saw my father's back. He was looking out the window, with the telephone receiver held between his shoulder and ear. One hand held the phone; the other was moving a cigarette from his lips to his side, where he flicked the ashes onto the floor. My mother used to yell at him for that. I quietly shut the door, sat on the arm of the sofa, and listened to my father trying to ask Mina or Hyun-Joo or Whan's father or mother in a careful and polite way where his wife might be. My mother used to baby-sit for all of them.

“Yes, I know about that. She told me she would stop baby-sitting Mina,” he said. Turning around, my father saw me and said with a smile, “You have to excuse me. She just came in.” He set the telephone down on the air conditioner and walked toward me with his work boots still on his feet. He placed his large, open hand on top of my head, held it like a ball, then gently pushed it back so that he could take a good look at me while asking where I had been, and where my mother went.

“I played at Boris's house,” I said.

“Where's your mother? Where's your brother?”

I shrugged my shoulders and told him Min Joo wasn't in school all day; the door was locked when I came home, and with no place to go, I went over to Boris's. I told him Boris's mother gave me potatoes for dinner so I wasn't hungry at all. My father removed his hand and walked into the kitchen where he kept bottles on top of the refrigerator. I followed him. With a drink in hand, he went into the bathroom. Following him, I asked, “Where are they? Where are they?” As he washed his face with cold water, I squatted on the rim of the toilet seat and stopped asking where they might be. I watched him comb his hair back with his fingers, and thought that my father was a handsome man. After drying himself, he told me to get off the toilet, get out of the bathroom. When he shut the door, I pressed my ear against it and listened for my father's breathing. I held the knob ready to turn if the bathroom suddenly became silent.

I followed my father everywhere because I did not want him to disappear. I followed him to his bedroom, where he opened and shut the dresser drawers, checking for my mother's clothes. He sat on the bed and took off his work boots. He searched for his secret cigar box of emergency money that had been hidden in the closet. I followed him to my room, where in the dark he kicked my box of Magic Markers and threw my notebooks at the walls. He kicked the leg of my desk. He kicked the radiator. I followed him to the living room, where he turned the television on, drank some more, asked me if she said anything in the morning, and made phone calls. To one person he said, “Did Ahn Joo's mother mention anything about meeting you tomorrow?” To another, he called my mother a begging bitch, told the person she stole all of his emergency money and ran away, and when she returned, he would beat her to death.

I followed him to his room, where he sat on his bed and drank more. Lying next to him on my mother's side of the bed, I felt my eyes grow heavy with sleep. I did not want my father to disappear. Before closing my eyes, I placed a finger on his shirt and listened to my father drinking and smoking and thinking of what he would do to my poor mother when she came home to get me, and what my poor father would do when she started nagging again about his drinking, coming home late, not enough money to even feed the children whole milk, magazines of long-legged women that could have paid for his son and daughter's school lunch tickets for an entire month, why did you bring me to this awful country. If I hadn't married the likes of you, I wouldn't be washing someone else's dishes, delivering newspapers I can't read, looking after someone else's children. What kind of living is this? This is a dog's life. And you are a coward for running away from your father like a beaten dog. No wonder you are a drunk and a lousy father and husband—look at the family you learned from.