Triplines (9781936364107) (6 page)

She rubs her throat. “I will be fine, but just in case, you have to promise me you will always take care of your sister.”

“In case of what?”

“In case anything happens to me.”

Lenny remains still. She sees his uneasiness, and says quickly, “Just promise me. Nothing will happen, but I need to know you and Mira will be okay.”

“All right,” he says, but has no idea how he would take care of his sister. “Does it hurt? Your throat?”

“No. It's just swollen.” She explains that she might have a tumor on her thyroid gland, but the doctor doesn't think her anemia is related to that. “I just need more iron.”

She tells him to go to sleep. “Come.” She leads him out of the kitchen and to his bedroom, where she tucks him in and sits on the corner of his bed. “What story do you want to hear?”

“The one with the bear and the tiger.”

She laughs quietly. “Again?” She whispers it to him: There was a she-bear and a tiger who prayed fervently to become humans. To test their resolve, their god told them to stay in their cave for one hundred days, eating only roots and garlic, and only then would they become human. So they did this. The tiger became more and more restless, however, while the she-bear sat quietly. After many days the tiger couldn't stay in the cave any longer and ran away. The she-bear continued to wait without complaining. After the hundred days passed, the god turned her into a beautiful woman. The god then turned himself into a human and married her. They soon had a son who became king of Korea, and ruled the land for fifteen hundred peaceful years.

The fight begins over Yul buying a beat-up old Cadillac. He and Umee share the Dodge Dart, and since he commutes by train, they need only one car.

One afternoon, though, he comes home early from work in a huge Cadillac, the blue paint dull and the vinyl top gray with dirt. The chrome bumpers are rusted, and the exhaust puffs smoke whenever he accelerates. Mira and Lenny hurry to the front window when they hear it pull into the driveway and their mother stands behind them as their father climbs out. She exhales sharply and says something in Korean. She puts on her slippers and runs outside.

Lenny watches them argue, his father pointing to the Cadillac and then to the Dodge in the garage, and the issue is obviously money. His mother storms back into the house, muttering, and his father begins washing and waxing his new car. She says to Lenny, “He wasted an entire paycheck on that car!” She retreats to the bedroom, fuming.

His father comes in, wanting to show off his new Cadillac, and he says, “This is the high-class car of America.”

Mira and Lenny walk out and stare at the car, which seems enormous compared to the Dodge. A closer look reveals the torn upholstery and patches of rust along the bottom of the doors. Lenny isn't sure how much one paycheck is, but even to his young eyes he thinks this is a piece of junk. His brother's friends are car buffs, so he often sees shiny Corvettes and Mustangs picking Ed up, and those deep-throated rumblings
from the engines sounds healthy and vibrant compared to the Cadillac's wheezing and coughing.

When they return inside, their parents continue fighting. His mother says something in Korean, and from the tone Lenny knows it's something along the lines of the unfairness of his purchase. Her voice shakes with anger, and she tells Mira and Lenny to go out and play.

Their father slams his hand against the door. He curses in Korean.

Mira and Lenny hurry outside as their father bellows in his deep, booming voice.

They walk across the street to the Presbyterian church, and head to the small playground in the back, a warped slide and monkey bars covered in spiderwebs sitting in rocky dirt. On the other side of the small lot is a spinning platform that gets Mira sick, and two rocking seahorses on large springs.

Tall thick trees shroud the back of the church, the sun setting and casting an orange glow over everything. The red brick seems brown, even black, in the shadows, with the white trim dirty and speckled with spots of peeling paint. The lights above the back door flicker on, and Lenny notices movement inside. Some kind of meeting is going on in one of the back rooms, the fluorescent lighting shining yellow out the windows. When the meeting ends and the dozen or so men and women file out the back and to their cars in the adjacent lot, Lenny sees that the back door to the church is loose, the last woman leaving having trouble with the lock. The two doors rattle closed, and the woman has to push one door into the other for the lock to engage.

Once all the cars drive off Lenny walks to the rear doors
and pushes. They're still loose. He peers down through the crack and sees the bolt engaged. When he pulls on one door he yanks it free from the bolt, and the door swings open.

Mira climbs down from the monkey bars. “What are you doing?” she asks.

He turns to her. “Want to go exploring?”

The church at dusk is eerily quiet. Mira bumps into him trying to stay close, and he has to resist scaring her with stories about ghosts or demons. He once told her about the devil, and because of the bible stories she's heard from Sunday school, she's terrified of anything linked to Hell.

They walk through the back halls, the linoleum floors reflecting the shadowy orange light outside, and into the main worship area, the pulpit dark and quiet, smelling of pine oil. The carpet dampens all sounds. The pews have a red glow from an emergency exit sign. The dim red glow spreads over them as they approach the choir section and look up at the stained glass windows, where only a part of the reds and blues are lit from the setting sun. They catch the last bits of sunlight as the room darkens, and Mira says, “It's spooky here.”

Lenny walks up to the pulpit and stands behind it, looking out over the pews. His sister moves to the choir section, leafing through the hymnal and sheet music. Behind the pulpit Lenny finds an empty, smudged water glass, a bible, and a tangle of microphone wires. In the bible are a few sheets of paper, drafts of a sermon with the typed text edited and scribbled over. It surprises him that the minister would read from a messy copy.

“I could sing,” Mira says.

“Go ahead.”

“No music.”

The organ sits beside her, but neither of them know how to turn it on. They'd both had piano lessons, though Mira seems to prefer the viola. They walk beyond the organ and find a narrow doorway in back, almost a secret passageway because the door is hidden in the ornate woodwork. “It's so they can sneak in and out without the congregation seeing,” he tells her.

They follow the dark hallway down a few steps and emerge into another hall that opens up to a small office. One of the windows look out the front of the church, and they have a direct view of their house. The large front living room window is lit up. They see their parents still fighting.

Mira says, “It's getting dark.”

“Scared?”

“I don't want to get in trouble.”

He leads her back through the narrow hallway and to the rear exit. Now that he knows how to break in here, he wants to explore the church on his own.

When they return to the house Mira immediately goes to her room, while the fight in the living room escalates. His father chases his mother, who screams. Lenny stays in the kitchen as they tumble into a wall in the dining area. When he peers around the corner he sees his father choking his mother up against the wall. He has one hand on her throat, the other hand drawn back in a fist. She clutches at his arm, gagging, and kicks his leg, which makes him grunt and tighten his grip.

Then Yul turns and sees Lenny. He lets go of Umee's
throat and orders Lenny to his room. Lenny's mother bends over and gasps for air. She waves him away. Lenny quickly retreats to his bedroom and listens to the fight continue.

When Ed learns that he was rejected from all the Ivy League colleges he applied to, but was accepted to the New York state schools, their father is so cruel that even Mira understands the dynamics and turns to Ed in sympathy. They sit mutely through dinner—meatloaf and vegetables piled onto the platters, a large foamy beer in front of their father. They eat in the breakfast nook by the kitchen, and the small radio on top of a shelf plays classical music. Their father tells all of them that he will not pay for his children to go to bad schools. He says to Ed, “Why should I waste my money on a stupid boy?”

Umee snaps at him in Korean, and he turns to Lenny. “You get good grades and go to a good school or you will be a garbage man like your stupid brother.”

He then says to Umee in English, “I warned him that I would not p-p-pay for bad schools. I told him years ago! Did he study and work hard? No!”

He then tells a familiar story, how he had to sell apples on the streets to make money, and how he had gone to the Korean Naval Academy and became one of the youngest officers in Korean history. He then was accepted to graduate school in the U.S. on a scholarship, and his children are all so soft and lucky to have everything handed to them. As he tells this he uses the same hand motions for emphasis, a stabbing finger aimed at Ed, and his normally stoic expression becomes more animated, his cheeks red and his eyes
flashing.

“I can't take this,” Ed says, and leaves the table.

“I did not excuse you!”

Ed says something under his breath, grabbing his jeans jacket, and walks out the back door. Yul then lectures Lenny and Mira about the importance of education and studying hard. He says, “Look at me. I am a professional b-b-businessman.”

Lenny sees his mother frown.

Later that night when Lenny finds his mother doing a crossword puzzle in the kitchen, he asks her about the tests with the doctor.

“I go this weekend. And your father and I are closing the store soon.”

“The candy store? Why?”

She sighs. “If your father loses his job we can't keep losing money with the store. I might have to get a job too.”

“Is he going to get fired?”

She shrugs her shoulders. She studies him, and then walks to kitchen counter and shows him a yellow legal pad with scribbled notes. She says, “Your father was supposed to write a report. He made me write it, and then he handed it in like this.”

Lenny skims the pages. His father had written in broken English, his script messy, and Lenny makes out a few lines that read “transfer data from lupe tape to cartige tape…” He stares at the words, and asks, “What's lupe?”

“L-o-o-p.”

“He spelled it wrong?” Lenny says, shocked.

“And didn't type it. He also made some big mistakes with backing up something, and they lost a lot of information.”

Lenny stares at his father's handwriting, and is amazed by this. Even as a kid he knows to type something up and check the spelling. “That's why he's in trouble,” he says.

“He's already looking for a new job.”

“Why is he so mean to Ed?”

“Maybe because your brother reminds him of himself too much.”

“He's not going to pay for Ed's college?”

“You don't worry. When you go to college I will help pay for it.”

College seems far away, but the idea of it already burdens him. “How much does it cost?”

“Ivy League schools can be twenty thousand dollars a year.”

This amount, twenty thousand, would slowly begin to obsess him. Lenny is a worrier, and has already begun grinding his teeth at night, with headaches and a sore jaw in the mornings. He learned what he was doing only after his mother heard him once and woke him up. She told him that it sounded as if he were chewing on rocks.

His mother said that if he did well in school, a scholarship could pay for tuition, and she could always take out loans. Up until then Lenny has never taken school seriously—it's easy and routine, and his grades are average. He begins wondering if he should pay more attention.

So when he goes to school the next day he feels a new sense of responsibility, of purpose, and tries to pay attention to Mrs. Trilly. She's teaching them geometry, and this appeals to his visual sense of order and structure. Using a compass, with its deadly point, also is fun, and the day goes
by quickly.

When he looks for his sister after the last bell, he finds her near the playground, with Frankie and one of his friends blocking her way. He can see them teasing her, and he walks quickly over there, hearing Frankie tell her that she's a chubby chink. He notices Lenny, and a brief look of fear passes across his face.

Lenny drops his book bag and breaks into a full-out run toward Frankie, who backs away, glancing at his friend, and then, when he realizes Lenny is coming straight for him, he turns and bolts.

Lenny tackles him at the waist, bringing him down and landing on top of him. Frankie cries out in fear, wheezing, until Lenny punches the back of his head, hammering down, and Frankie howls in pain. Lenny keeps punching and kneeing him in the back. He screams, and when one of the teacher's aides runs toward them, Lenny rolls off Frankie and stands up. Frankie sobs on the ground. The teacher grabs Lenny's neck, hard, squeezing, and says, “You're coming with me, you bully.”

Mira yells, “It wasn't his fault!”

But the teacher yanks Lenny back to the school.

Lenny's mother has to close the store and pick both kids up, and the vice principal explains to her that fighting on school grounds is an offense that can result in suspension. Mira waits outside, and Umee says, “Both of them? What did Mira do?”

“No, just your son.” But he explains that because it's Lenny's first offense, and the administration has had trouble with Frankie in the past, Lenny will be let go with a warning.
“Another fight will mean an immediate two-day suspension.”

Lenny watches his mother's expression, which is calm, and she asks him what happened. Lenny tells her what he told the teacher's aide and the vice principal, that Frankie had been picking on Mira, and had bothered both of them for weeks. Knowing that this will elicit a reaction, he says, “He called Mira a chink.”