“What were some Korean words your mommy used to tell you?” Nat asked. “Can you teach me?”
Karen thought of what it would be like to take Nat to visit her father in Florida, the only living member of her family she could still locate. But she’s not your blood, he would say after a thorough examination. Or maybe he would accept an adopted granddaughter at this late hour. Broward County seemed to be opening new subtropical perspectives for her father; he now watched the liberal channel on TV, and an older white lady at his condominium complex was apparently closing in on him and his aviator sunglasses and his mini-fridge with its king’s ransom of last Lunar New Year’s ddeok.
Another thought occurred to Karen: Did the boy-band-obsessed Nat only like her for her Koreanness? Like certain men did?
A housefly was barnstorming through the living room of her bungalow, attaching the sticky pads of its feet to every mauve surface it could find, casually scanning for sustenance with its three eyes. It processed visual information at seven times the speed with which we do, thereby rendering a human’s approach in slow motion. This particular fly had already outwitted Senderovsky’s thwack at least three times in the past week and saw the out-of-breath handyman as a comical figure. And so nothing had prepared it for the cardboard form of Love Is Letting Go of Fear smashing it clean into the wall and swiftly robbing it of the sweet buzz of life.
“Jo-ta!” Karen screamed as she pulverized the insect. “That’s what my mommy would say whenever she swatted a fly. It means something like ‘nice job.’？”
Nat grabbed Love Is Letting Go of Fear and swatted it against the wall for no good reason, leaving a secondary imprint next to the corpse of the fly. “Jo-ta!” she shouted.
“Very good,” Karen said. “You have very good pronunciation.”
“What else? What else? What else?”
Karen thought of the other words that left her mother’s mouth on a daily basis. Jo-ta and the accompanying swoosh of a fly swatter may have well been the kindest of them. “There’s Nuh sook je hae!”
“Nuh sook je hae!” the child shouted, her accent perfect. She stood with her arms extended in a martial arts pose. “What does it mean?”
“？‘Do your homework.’ Your mommy probably tells you that in Russian when you haven’t finished your work.”
“No, I like doing homework. Tell me more!”
“Piano chyeo!”
“Piano chyeo!” Nat shouted, again perfectly.
“？‘Practice your piano,’？” Karen explained. “Which I’m sure you already do.”
“I can play all of Swan Lake.”
“Tee-bee kkeoh!”
“Tee-bee kkeoh!” The breath left her lungs with a precision Karen could never quite master. It wasn’t just mimicry; it was borderline spiritual. She must have listened to her K-pop with a fanatical ear. “What does it mean?”
“？‘Turn off the TV.’？”
“We don’t have a TV.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“Nuh sook je hae! Piano chyeo! Tee-bee kkeoh!” Nat started marching around the room, shouting out the parental commands, as if filming her own private Korean version of The Sound of Music. As she heard these words that could jolt her and Evelyn to the quick, Karen felt them deemphasized, neutered, turned into the playthings of the second generation. （Technically Nat had not been born in the country, but still.） Words that had tormented Karen were now the silly singsong march of an eight-year-old trying to communicate with the members of a cool Korean boy band that had conquered half the world （imagine that happening back in Elmhurst, back in 1979）。
Karen’s reverie was interrupted by a male scream outside, or more accurately a human shriek mixed with a puma’s growl, loud enough to send Karen running to the window.
She peeked through the screen, trying to identify the source of the commotion.
Oh my God.
She reached for her phone and pressed the camera button, then selected Video.
“Stay where you are, honey,” she commanded Nat.
4
Masha was talking to a patient when she heard the shrieking.
The view on her screen was of a bedroom in a typical apartment in a Rego Park mini-tower, the morose and faded redbrick kind in which she had spent nine months out of the year as a child. （The other three were spent more happily with young Senderovsky and their friends in the bungalow colony up the river.） Instead of a closet, with which every American apartment is equipped at least three times over, the tenants had bought a high-gloss armoire, which also functioned as a wall-length mirror, and Masha could see her bespectacled afternoon face being reflected on its surface along with the usual schmear of menorahs and provincial lacquer boxes. The woman on the screen could have been a Senderovsky, perhaps her husband’s aunt, one of those peroxide battle-hardened Russian women in their early seventies growling and sighing their way through a lifetime of dysthymia, if not full-on depression, now compounded by the obsessive-compulsive disorder which the virus had only trebled. Perhaps that is why this particular armoire glowed so brightly today; a bottle of glass cleaner could be spotted sitting beside the woman, awaiting her attention like a loyal pup.