“I’m glad you’re home,” she says abruptly. When she swallows hard, I look away.
* * *
I precisely remember the day Mom left. There’s that Maya Angelou quote how people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. For a few hours, I felt my mother’s love for me in a deep and profound way, and then she was gone.
That whole morning had been dreamlike. It was the first time I skipped school, so the day’s events stuck out even before I knew it for the day it would become. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to cut class. I felt stupid that it had never occurred to me to do before. I wonder if that’s how Mom felt when she got to where she was headed. Whether she realized how arbitrary it was to stay in one place when she could just as easily be in another.
She didn’t seem surprised when I walked back into the house three hours after getting on the bus. A girl I’d newly become friends with by our mutual appreciation of thrifted Doc Martens was leaving with her boyfriend, and I’d impulsively asked for a ride. I rode in the back of the truck with my eyes closed.
I came through the front door and was entranced by the aroma of cooked food. The dining table was set, not the kitchen table or the squat, lacquered foldout we sometimes used on the floor, and it was laden with delicious treats. It was as if I were happening upon a cottage in the woods in a fairy tale. I wondered who she was expecting.
I could sense someone in the house, but the TV wasn’t on. I walked upstairs. My mother turned to face me. She looked beautiful in the late-morning light. She was dressed in a white bra and a simple gray skirt, as if she were going to work in an office. I was astonished. It was Mom, but I’d caught her in another life. A secret one. As though she played a mother in my movie, but here I was, watching her in another film entirely.
It had been so long since I’d seen her out of the wrinkle-resistant polyester slacks she bought at Costco. Her hair was pulled back in a silver clip. She even seemed to move differently.
There was an open suitcase on the bed. It was small, bright green. It usually sat on the floor of her closet. The part of the closet I wasn’t allowed in. I knew better than to ask where she was going. She wouldn’t tell me, and I longed to earn her affections for not asking.
She held up a jewel-toned silk square to the light. “Do you remember when you’d use this scarf to make a little boddari?” Even her voice seemed different. Happier somehow. Breathier. “You were always so keen to leave.”
I’d been steering clear of her when it was just the two of us, her rage for the hanbok incident fresh in my memory, the heat still stinging my cheek, but I sensed an invitation. The acknowledgment of a special occasion. A parallel universe. I walked through the portal and sat on her bed, careful not to rumple the clothes laid out there, flattened as if intended for a paper doll.
I was hungry for her to tell me anything. Mom was unsentimental. Heartachingly disinterested in us. Rarely nostalgic. Halmoni was kind when she came. Slipping us crisp banknotes and patting our cheeks as I pleaded with my eyes, questions leaping at my throat. I couldn’t understand why everything was a secret. Why everything I knew about my mom was ill gotten. I spied on her at the organ at church one time as she played a full classical song without making a single mistake, stepping on the pedals at all the right parts. She’d never once played for us before. And I’d seen old-fashioned black silk stockings with a garter belt rolled up carefully in her underwear drawer, hidden away and speaking to a version of her that I’d never know and would never become.
“What is it?” she asked me in Korean.
Mom slipped on a silky ivory blouse. I imagined it felt cool on her bare arms. She was backlit, and even with her C-section scar that I knew was underneath her skirt, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s always been the perfect size. So dainty. The small bones that protruded from her skin were breathtaking. She had nimble hands and tiny feet, with eyes that were the biggest of all of ours even without surgery.
“I almost fainted,” I told her. Quickly adding, “They sent me to the nurse, and she sent me home.” I didn’t tell her that I’d deliberately not eaten since dinner the day before yesterday. That it was an unspoken pact between me and my new friends. Toward the end of freshman year, one of us had gotten thinthinthin. Only I knew her secret. How she ate everything and then un-ate it. Hit reset. We’d never talked about it, but I heard her. And I know she wanted me to ask, so I didn’t. Instead, I’d watch the door in the bathrooms at school, at diners, turning on the tap as a warning when someone else would come in. I ignored the repeated flushing, the sour smell of her hair and her breath. I loved studying her, both of us pretending I wasn’t. Secrets are like wishes. Everyone knows they don’t work if you tell. But if you really want them to gain power, you can’t acknowledge that they even exist.
When Mom left, my secret kept me safe.
“You don’t feel warm,” she said, absently cupping my cheek.
I closed my eyes when she touched me, enjoying the whiff of jasmine and white flowers. I leaned into her cool hand. When I was young, I couldn’t fall asleep unless I was rubbing her earlobe. I still remember how I worried the tender flesh between my thumb and forefinger, the nubbin of ear piercing scar lulling me. June did the same thing, tugging the back of Mom’s neck, but she’d been bumped from our mother’s lap when I was born.
She pulled away and turned to the window. I watched the delicate beads of her spine. I loved observing my mother, as unknowable as she was. The way she held her pinkie aloft while arranging things into a silk pouch, which she laid in her suitcase. I watched myself in the mirror, straightening my posture to appear leaner when I heard the expensive click of the jewelry box.
I tried to guess what she’d select for her blouse, running through the tangle of costume jewelry in my mind, the cold strands of faux pearls, the gold Nefertiti pendant, mysterious amber statement pieces, and the jade bangles stacked on the right. I remember guessing it would be earrings. I was startled when she sat down next to me and pressed a thin gold band with two small rubies into my hand.
I left my fingers splayed as it bore a hole into my palm.
“Pretty, right?”
I nodded. She leaned in. I held my breath as she took my hand in both of hers and folded my fingers in. “It’s yours,” she said.
I slipped it on my ring finger, my wedding finger. My hand could’ve been someone else’s, it was suddenly so beautiful. My fingers had always been my best quality. They are my mother’s exactly. The ring fit flawlessly. I aspired to one day have the rest of me be as pretty as my hand in this moment.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, smiling conspiratorially.
I nodded again.
We headed into the kitchen. I inspected the table this time. Myriad small dishes, jewel-like, glinting under the gloss of Saran wrap. She lifted the steaming glass lids of the largest saucepan. Kimchi-jjigae with fatback. June’s favorite. A black earthenware cauldron of steamed egg. My favorite. There was even mapo tofu for Dad.
She pulled out a chair and served me generously. Not the half servings I’d been getting from her and from all the church ladies who had been forbidden to overfeed me. My weight was a joint concern.