Triplines (9781936364107) (2 page)

“You can make a collect call. What's the number?”

Lenny isn't sure what number to give, so offers his home number but changes the last few digits. When the operator connects to the line, she asks him what his name is.

“William,” he says, trying to deepen his voice, thinking of his street name.

The man on the other line says, “William? William who?”

Lenny hangs up. He stands there for a while, wondering whom else he can call collect, impressed by this discovery of free calls. But he can't think of anyone. He has no friends.

Lenny is being punished for losing Yul's slide ruler—Lenny had used it as a toy and misplaced it—and his punishment had initially been to run around the backyard one hundred times. Minor infractions resulted in this common penalty, but when Lenny begins walking and even resting against a tree and Yul sees him, Yul has already started his nightly ritual with Jack Daniel's.

Yul opens the back door and stands on the steps, staring. He is a barrel-chested blunt man with once muscular arms that have become flabby with age. When he's drunk his face flushes and his usual solid stance wavers, as it does now, and he yells at Lenny to continue running.

Lenny does.

Watching his son with disgust and disappointment, Yul says, “Look how slow you are! Feet up! B-Body straight!” He has a severe stutter that recedes when he's drunk.

Lenny sweats, his thighs burning, but he runs faster. Yul continues to taunt Lenny, who glances up at the kitchen window, where his mother watches from the sink. Her expression is shrouded by the shadows from the young maple tree by the window, but he can sense her familiar concern.

Finally, too exhausted, and long having lost count, Lenny slows down. Yul barks at him to continue, but he can't. He begins walking, and this only sets Yul off more. He hurries down the steps toward Lenny, and Umee rushes to the
back door. Yul grabs Lenny's neck and shoves him forward, ordering him to run, but Lenny tells him he can't. He's too tired.

Yul mutters in Korean, and then says in English, “You've been babied too much and are too weak.” He points to Lenny's skinny, pale arms. “Can you even do a pull-up? A simple pull-up?” Yul frowns. “Do a pull-up right now.” He motions to the swing set that a neighbor had given him years ago; the lime green paint has been overtaken by rust, the swings broken, and neither Lenny nor Mira ever play near this.

Yul pushes him toward the swing set and again orders him to do a pull-up. Lenny reaches for the side bar that's chest high, and he hangs down on it, his feet dragging. But his father tells him to use the top bar.

“How?” Lenny asks.

“Climb up it.”

Lenny tries, but flakes of rust dig into his hand, and he whines, “It hurts.”

“You must be tougher. This world is too hard on the weak. Get on the b-b-bar!”

When Yul sees his son struggling, he lifts Lenny up easily. Lenny grabs the top of the swing set, but as soon as his father releases him Lenny feels the rust digging into his hands and he lets go.

He falls to the ground, hard, and cries out. He then lies still, breathing in the cool, dewy grass scent.

Umee yells at her husband in Korean. He turns to her and stares without speaking. Umee freezes, and after a moment of his full attention, she looks away. Yul then hoists Lenny back up and orders him to hold on. The rust flakes
cut into Lenny's palm and he whimpers. Yul stands behind Lenny and says, “Do not let go. You must be strong.”

Lenny's grip loosens, but Yul moves closer behind him and presses a finger into his back, saying, “Don't.”

Lenny's vision blurs, his hands stinging, and he feels his shoulders aching. The jabbing finger hurts his back. Lenny lets go of one hand, and Yul says, “Stay on!”

Lenny latches his hands back on, tightly, and feels more cuts in his fingers and palms, and cries out, “It hurts!”

“Stay on!”

But then Lenny falls to the ground, collapsing into a ball, and he cradles his stinging, aching hands. His father nudges his back with his slipper, the toe digging into Lenny's shoulder blade, and Yul says something in Korean, his tone laced with disgust. Lenny's mother runs to him, yelling at his father, who turns and lumbers away.

“Come, Lenny,” his mother says quietly, helping him up.

“My hands,” he says, shocked by the little beads of blood. “My hands.”

“Come inside.”

Lenny stares at the blood, at the tiny specks of rust in his palm, and then, finally, begins to cry.

His mother hushes him, telling him it will be fine. She spends thirty minutes plucking out the rust splinters with tweezers, his sobbing muted only by his fascination with the way his blood stains the blotted paper towel, turning it pink. His mother, feigning a smile, tells him his favorite folktale about a bear and a tiger to distract him, but he stares at the blood, mesmerized.

Umee's experiences upon arriving in the U.S. were traumatic. She came to Boston alone for graduate school, knowing no one. She was supposed to stay with a host family, one set up by the school, but the first night she stayed there the husband crept into her room and tried to rape her. She screamed and scared him away, and immediately left the house. She had nowhere to go. She tried the local YWCA, which was fully booked, and it appeared as if she was going to be homeless until she broke down and begged the YWCA administrator for anything, even a sofa. Finally, they found her a bed, and the next day she had to beg another administrator, this one at the Northeastern University Housing and Residential Life offices, to help her find somewhere new to live.

She was terrified of this country, of starting over here after fleeing her discontented life in Seoul, which included an annulled marriage, the circumstances of which were mildly scandalous: the groom's physical and sexual handicaps had not been revealed to her until after the arranged marriage. She tells this and many other stories about herself to Lenny when he's a child; he suffers from severe hay fever and is often unable to sleep. She sits on his bed and talks about everything. He becomes her confidant, even as a child too young to understand everything.

But these were the conditions his mother suffered under
when she arrived here, and she cried herself to sleep every night for two weeks. And it isn't too hard to understand why, when she began receiving letters from Yul, a man she'd never met but whose mother knew her mother—it isn't too difficult to see why Umee found comfort with a Korean man also studying in the U.S., a man who had also been married. He had a baby son whom he had shipped off to Korea. His ex-wife abandoned both him and her baby boy, and Yul was lonely and depressed.

His letters to her were affectionate, even loving. He had learned about her from his mother, and both mothers were conspiring to bring them together. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to be married again. He would take care of her, he promised. They would be a happy family.

Rumors about Yul's marriage worked its way to Umee, as a woman abandoning a newborn baby was gossip that moved swiftly through the small ex-pat Korean community. Umee had even known about the ex-wife when she was a student in Korea—they had gone to the same high school, just two grades apart.

However, Umee didn't know the extent of the violence, the abuse, the drinking.

All she knew was that she was alone in a frightening foreign country, and the soothing words of the man in New York gave her hope.

Both of Lenny's parents work fulltime, his father a computer programmer and his mother a small-business owner. Lenny's mother runs a candy store. You would think a kid with a mother who owns a candy store would be something wonderful, but really, the strongest memory Lenny has about the store is her getting robbed.

It happens around the same time Lenny learns about free collect calls. In fact, he probably learns about the robbery after coming home from the train station with more flattened coins. He wants to make something out of them, possibly a necklace for his mother. He adds the new coins to his jam jar and then prepares for his martial arts training. He has an old tae kwon do manual that's written in Korean, but the photos and drawings are all he needs. He also has Kung-fu books, and tries to combine the kicks of tae kwon do with the hand and fist styles of Kung-fu. He brings his books out into the back yard and starts his stretches. He practices the forms—prescribed sequences of punches and kicks that he memorized from the books—and then works on the various kicks and hand strikes.

They have two large trees in the back yard—a tall oak and a young maple—and he uses the young maple trunk as a target, attacking it with various kicking and punching combinations, though being careful not to cut his knuckles. He tries to emulate some of the sound effects from the
Saturday afternoon kung-fu movies on channel 5. He loves these poorly dubbed Shaw Brothers imports so much that he records them on an audio cassette and listens to them when he goes to bed, imagining the scenes that correspond with the dialogue. The sound effects, with the thwacks and crashes amidst the yelling and grunting, help him envision the movie again.

After Lenny hits the tree until his knuckles and feet hurt, he does push-ups, jumping jacks, and sit-ups. By the time he walks into the house he finds his father sitting in his lounge chair with the TV news on. Yul still has on his dress slacks and button-down shirt, the collar open and the sleeves rolled up.

“Where is your mother?” he asks Lenny.

Lenny says he doesn't know.

“Is she at the store?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you know?”

Lenny pauses. “She's usually home by now.”

His father grunts and pulls himself up, walking to the kitchen telephone. Lenny hears the rotary dial clicking, and after a moment his father speaks in Korean. The conversation is brief, and he hangs up quickly. He rushes to the closet to get his coat and tells Lenny to watch his sister.

“What happened?”

“Where is your brother?” Yul asks.

“I don't know.”

“We will be back later.”

“Where's Mom?”

“The store was robbed. Make your sister dinner. We will be late.”

He leaves through the front door, which is surprising. They always use the back door, and as Lenny wonders about this anomaly, the news settles in. Robbed.

Sweets ‘N Gifts, the small candy store, is in Bellmore, the next town over. This was Yul's idea, setting up a business for his wife to run now that all the kids go to school. Both believe in the American dream of owning their own business, and Yul was especially eager for his wife to start a store that would make them self-sufficient. Instead of a grocery or liquor store, the usual Korean immigrant start-ups, they decided on a candy and small gift store that dealt not in the prepackaged, mass-produced candy the supermarkets sold, but in the old-fashioned loose variety that Umee sold out of large jars with shiny tin covers, weighing and bagging whatever the customer pointed to: rock candies, licorice sticks, lemon drops, and Swedish fish.

The store is in a small commercial strip mall next to a large hardware warehouse, and never has customers. They are losing a lot of money, and it's making their already embattled marriage worse, since Umee blames Yul for the bad idea, and Yul blames Umee for the poor execution.

When Ed comes home for dinner and finds that their parents aren't here he tells Lenny that he's going back out.

Lenny says, “Mom was robbed.”

Ed stops. “Is she okay?” He's getting even more muscular, his biceps and chest stretching his old, thin T-shirt. His head looks oddly small. He once told Lenny that he started lifting weights a few years ago to be able to take on their father.

“I don't know,” Lenny replies.

“I'll be back later.” Ed then disappears through the garage. Lenny has only had glimpses of his brother like this for the past couple of years, and he once heard Ed tell his friends that he was going to get as far away from this house as he could after high school. Their father has always been hard on him, and when they all sat together for dinner he lectured and berated Ed for not being a better student.

Mira appears in the living room as soon as Ed leaves and asks what's happening. When Lenny tells her she asks, “Was Mom killed?”

“No! Are you crazy?” But then Lenny isn't so sure.

“I wrote a book. Look.” She shows him a book titled
Me
that she had typed and stapled in between cardboard covers. An “About the Author” section is on the back, with her photo. Lenny is impressed, but also distracted. He tells her, “If Mom is dead, you're going to an orphanage.”

She blinks, taking this in.

“
Back
to the orphanage,” he adds. “You know you were adopted, right?”

“What?”

As soon as he sees that she considers this a possibility, he spins a story about how their mother couldn't have another baby, so they all went to the orphanage to choose a new one. “You were still a baby, crying and everything. We picked you because you look sort of like me and Mom. Maybe you should write a book about that.”

Mira takes her book and wanders back to her room, considering this. Lenny thinks of more ways to torment her, but then wonders if their mother really is dead.

When their parents return home a few hours later, his mother is pale and shaky. Her usually neat hair is disheveled, tufts sticking out. She sits unsteadily at the kitchen table while his father pours them both a drink—whiskey on ice—and she remains subdued. Yul explains that someone came in at closing with a gun and took all the money. The police were there for a while, taking the report.

None of this feels real until Lenny's mother cries for a moment, just a quick sniffle, her face crumpling, and then she shakes this off and sips her drink, the ice clinking. Their father is already on his second glass, this one with no ice, and says something to her in Korean, which makes her face flush. She retorts something harsh, and he stares at her coldly, then mutters something. He takes his glass and the bottle to the living room.