Triplines (9781936364107) (11 page)

Mira tries to speak with Grandma, asking about what she did in Korea, but the language gap is too large. Grandma just smiles.

The fight in the kitchen grows louder, with Umee's voice scratchy and hoarse. Lenny glances at Grandma whose expression darkens as she sits tensely on the edge of the sofa. Mira is the only one watching TV, a variety show with a singer, and when Yul breaks a dish and yells something, Grandma stands up and walks quickly to the kitchen.

The voices stop. After a moment Grandma says something sharp, and Yul retorts back in a louder and more threatening tone. Grandma replies, and Umee tries to intervene.

Lenny tells his sister that they should go to their room.

She eyes the TV, weighing her options.

“Want to go back into the church?” Lenny asks.

She perks up, and they throw on their shoes and leave through the front door to avoid the fight.

Lenny and Mira enter the church through the back door again, and this time they go to the small auditorium where there's a stage and an open room that's used for a dining and meeting area. It's dark, but they find the light switch panel by the side door, and after searching behind the stage curtain they turn on one of the spotlights. Mira stands shyly on the stage. Lenny tells her to sing something.

“What should I sing?”

“How about that
Annie
song?”

Although they've never seen the musical, Mira received the record for her birthday, and learned a few of the songs. She steps forward and sings “Tomorrow.” Lenny turns off all the lights except for the spotlight, and she squints. Her voice is quiet and nervous, so he yells for her to sing louder, and he moves toward the back, near the kitchen with two large serving windows. Slowly, as she realizes that she's essentially alone in the dark, she raises her voice and belts it out. Unlike Lenny, she has no speech impediment, and because of her constant mimicking, she has a good voice. She pretends to hold a microphone, making Lenny laugh. She raises an arm to the audience, giddy, and her eyes shine in the spotlight.

They return home and find their father sitting in his lounge chair, the coffee table turned upside down and the green ceramic lamp broken on the floor, the bulb lit and sending odd angles of light onto the wall. Broken dishes lay scattered throughout the kitchen. Their mother is crying in the bathroom.
Lenny and Mira walk by the bedrooms, expecting to see Grandma sitting on the bed, but she's not there. He tells Mira to play in their room.

“Where's—”

He puts his finger to his lips, shushing her. He walks past the living room, avoiding his father's gaze, and checks the basement. Ed isn't there, but neither is Grandma. When Lenny returns to the kitchen and looks out into the back, he sees her sitting on the brick steps at the door, hunched over, her arms folded tightly, and she stares down at the crab grass. She wears only a thin sweater, and she's shivering.

Lenny opens the door, but then his father yells, “She does not come into my house! This is my house!”

Grandma shakes her head at Lenny, waving her hand to the door, motioning for him to close it. He does. She studies him, her face wrinkling as she stares through the darkness. She gives him a small smile and turns back around.

He hears his mother come out of the bathroom and yell at his father. They continue fighting, and because Lenny doesn't want to walk by them to get to the bedrooms, he hurries downstairs and into the boiler room, the water heater rumbling. He kicks his make-shift punching bag a few times, the tightly-packed rags in the bag exhaling with each hit. Farther in is the storage room, where old, moldy boxes filled with clothes, books, photo albums and his mother's old paintings have lain untouched since they first moved here. Curious, he digs through the books, and finds stacks of large art books—Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Monet—with colorful prints.

He hears footsteps above thumping quickly across the house.

More yelling, and then the back door opens. Grandma snaps at Yul, who bellows back, and when Umee screams, Lenny jumps. He hasn't heard her scream like that before. He runs to the stairs, unsure if he should go upstairs.

From down here Lenny can see the back door open, and after a minute of more yelling, his father pushes Grandma and Umee to the door. Umee tries to push back, but Yul easily knocks her aside, and shoves Grandma against the screen door. They argue, Umee crying, and she struggles with him. He hits her chest with an open hand that sends her flying back into the wall.

She lets out a strangled cry and collapses.

Everyone stops. Yul peers down at her. He sways drunkenly. Umee, curled up on the floor, holds her throat. Yul says something and walks back into the living room. Grandma kneels down and speaks softly to Umee who is sobbing, shaking her head, repeating something over and over. Grandma takes her head in her arms, cradling her. She coos, and Umee quiets down. Lenny returns to the storage room and leafs through the sketchings of da Vinci, whom his mother once told him was his namesake. His hands shake as he turns the pages, sweaty fingerprints staining the corners.

The first marijuana catalog arrives, simply a dozen pages stapled together, each page listing a book—or, rather pamphlets. But the pamphlets are all about growing and cultivating marijuana. The publisher, a commune in California, highlights their ten-year expertise with growing marijuana indoors, even in closets. Other titles include: preparing and cooking with marijuana, basic hydroponic gardening, lighting principles, and seed preparation. To order any of these, Lenny only needs to send a check or money order and they will send the pamphlets in a plain brown wrapper.

Although Lenny is eager to show this to Sal, his mother wants him to stay home with his sister because Ed has to drive Grandma to the airport. His mother says bitterly, “I am still recovering and he is sending her away.”

Lenny doesn't know how to reply to this.

She says, “But I feel better. Stronger. Maybe my thyroid and my anemia kept me weak for many years.”

Grandma appears in the living room with her suitcase. She wobbles toward him and opens her arms. Lenny hugs her, and she squeezes him tightly.

His mother calls to Mira, who also gets a hug.

Ed carries her suitcase to the car, and Grandma gives Mira and Lenny another hug, and says in a sad voice, “Good boy, good girl.”

Umee takes her arm and leaves the house with her. Lenny watches them from the front window, and his mother
cries briefly, then rests her head on Grandma's shoulder as they move slowly down the driveway.

After seeing Sal's crawl space Lenny wants a secret room. He tells Mira about Sal's hideout. “It's a long room with the ceiling only this high.” He holds his hand to his stomach. He asks if she wants to join him exploring, and she does.

They begin in the basement, and find a small cubby in the main room that houses a water meter. His brother's room has built-in storage benches that contain more of their mother's books. Other than a sectioned-off area underneath the stairs, there isn't anything else of interest.

But when they check out the garage, Mira points to a small door at the ceiling. It's inaccessible without a ladder, so Lenny raises the ladder that sits on the ground, extending it up against the dirty concrete walls. As he climbs up, the ladder shakes, and he tells her to hold it steady.

The door, a piece of plywood painted brown, pushes in without any hinges. Lenny forces it open, dust and grit sprinkling down. He pushes the entire board aside and peers into the hot, empty space.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Attic. Is there a light switch down there?”

“I don't see one.”

He climbs down, finds a flashlight in his father's toolbox, and hurries back up. Although he's initially disappointed to find a regular attic, empty, with shiny insulation strips layered all along the floor and angled roof, once he climbs up into it and walks along the narrow strips of wood, he knows that he's the first one up here in years. It's remote and removed from the rest of the house.

“I want to see!” Mira says.

He climbs down and hands her the flashlight. “Be careful. Watch out for demons.”

She hesitates.

“And if the flashlight stops working, don't panic. It's dark but if you're careful you won't fall through the floor.”

“Fall through the floor?”

“There's only one piece of wood to walk on. The rest is insulation.”

“Never mind,” she says, handing him back the flashlight.

He replaces the piece of wood, and lays the ladder back on the ground. He keeps thinking about the marijuana pamphlet that would teach him to grow a garden in a closet.

Sal is so excited and impressed with the mail order catalog that he hands Lenny fifty dollars in cash and tells him to order all the pamphlets. He doesn't want to do it himself because his parents open his mail. “After I almost got sent to juvie for stealing they don't trust anything I do.”

“Stealing what?”

He laughs. “I used to work at a hardware store. I knew how to turn off their alarm. One night I broke in and stole a bunch of stuff.”

“And they caught you?”

“Not right away. I got busted when I tried to sell a really nice drill. Anyway, I got probation and a fine. If I got anything in the mail, my parents would open it. How come your parents don't?”

Lenny says that he receives too many catalogs for them to care. He looks at the cash and says, “All the pamphlets will only be thirty-five dollars, not including shipping and
handling.”

“Use what you need and keep the rest. How long will it take?”

“Four to six weeks.”

“That long?”

“Sometimes it's much shorter. I should be getting more catalogs like this one soon.”

“Cool.”

They're sitting in the crawlspace, and someone bangs on the ceiling. Sal sighs. “It's my mom. She's making me clean the yard. You have to take care of the crop today.”

“Watering?”

“We got through the pest stage. They're okay for that now. Check how dry the soil is first before watering. And they're getting big. Noticeable. Set up trip wires or something to see if someone goes nearby.” He gives Lenny a spool of thin-gauge copper wire. “Low to the ground, with a log or rocks tied it, so we'll know if someone other than us has been by. Make it so that you remember how it looks, in case they trip it and try to put it back.”

“Why would they do that?”

“It's too early to harvest. If I came across someone's crop, I'd wait until it was close to harvest and then steal it.”

Sal instructs him to set the wires ten feet from the plants, a perimeter tied onto a stack of rocks arranged so that he will know if they're tampered with.

The ceiling bangs again, louder and more insistent. “I gotta go,” he says. “When will you order those books?”

“Tomorrow. I have to get a money order from the Post Office.”

“Let me know. And show me other catalogs you get.”

Lenny hops on his bicycle and heads to the woods.

After watering the plants, which are now his height, he sets up the trip wire, stringing it one foot off the ground, looping it around sticks he shoves into the ground, and tying it to a stick that keeps a small log propped up. If someone trips over the wire, the log will fall. He makes a mental note of where the stick presses up into the log—two inches from a knothole—and tests it a few times. It will withstand a small animal, but a person should easily trigger it.

He smells the marijuana leaves, which are beginning to have that sweet pot smell he recognizes. With summer approaching, the days are growing longer, and he realizes that he's missing dinner. He races back, and finds everyone at the kitchen table, including his father, who is drunk.

His father lectures Ed, who leaves for California the day after graduation, in only three weeks. Yul barely pauses as he glances at Lenny and says that the next time he's late for dinner he will miss it. Then Yul continues with his story about being a student in Florida during the mid 1950's, when there had still been segregation.

“I had to be better than everyone, black and white. Which b-bathroom could I go to? There was a black one and a white one. I couldn't use either!”

Ed stares down at his plate, his jaw tense. He holds his fork in his fist. Umee wears a scarf around her neck, and stares blankly ahead.

Yul continues, “I have to be b-better than my American coworkers because I am Korean. You have to better than everyone.”

“If you're better, why are you about to get fired?” Ed
asks.

Their father hesitates, and then reaches forward to smack him, but Ed pulls away quickly. Yul then yells that Ed is worthless and stupid, and deserves to be a bum. Ed stands up and walks quickly out of the house.

Umee says in Korean something about how Ed is leaving soon and he should be nicer.

They argue. Lenny tunes out. Mira plays with her rice, drawing designs with her fork. Lenny plans his day tomorrow, including going to the Post Office during lunch period for the money order.

Then his mother says in English, “You are the one who is stupid. You pretend to be much more than you really are. It's sad.”

Lenny and Mira look up. Both are startled, because to say that in English meant their mother wanted them to understand.

Yul promptly picks up his plate of rice and beef and dumps it on her.

She jumps back, yelping, and he throws his drink at her, the glass missing her and clunking against the wall and clattering to the floor. Bits of rice fall off her face and down the front of her blouse. She turns to the children, sauce dripping off her cheek, and tells them to go.

“You want them to hear this,” he says. “You want them to see what a bad man I am? I will show them.” He swipes everything on the table at her, the serving platters, the bowl of rice, the glasses—everything crashes around their mother, who backs into the wall.