For my mother

Margot

Fall 2014

MARGOT’S FINAL CONVERSATION WITH HER MOTHER had seemed so uneventful, so ordinary—another choppy bilingual plod. Half-understandable.

Business was slow again today. Even all the Korean businesses downtown are closing.

What did you eat for dinner?

Everyone is going to Target now, the big stores. It costs the same and it’s cleaner.

Margot imagined her brain like a fishing net with the loosest of weaves as she watched the Korean words swim through. She had tried to tighten the net before, but learning another language, especially her mother’s tongue, frustrated her. Why didn’t her mother learn to speak English?

But that last conversation was two weeks ago. And for the past few days, Margot had only one question on her mind: Why didn’t her mother pick up the phone?

Since Margot and Miguel had left Portland, the rain had been relentless and wild. Through the windshield wipers and fogged glass, they only caught glimpses of fast food and gas, motels and billboards, premium outlets and “family fun centers.” Margot gripped the wheel, hands cramping, damp with fear. The rain had started an hour ago, right after they had made a pit stop in north Portland to see the famous thirty-one-foot-tall Paul Bunyan sculpture with his cartoonish smile, red-and-white checkered shirt on his barrel chest, his hands resting on top of an upright ax.

Earlier that morning in Seattle, Margot had stuffed a backpack and a duffel with a week’s worth of clothes, picked up Miguel from his apartment with two large suitcases and three houseplants, and merged onto the freeway, driving Miguel down for his big move to Los Angeles. They’d stop in Daly City to spend the night at Miguel’s family’s house, which would take about ten hours to get to.

At the start of the drive, Miguel had been lively, singing along to “Don’t Stop Believin’” and joking about all the men he would meet in LA. But now, almost four hours into the road trip, Miguel was silent with his forehead in his palm, taking deep breaths as if trying hard not to think about anything at all.

“Everything okay?” Margot asked. “I’m just thinking about my parents.”

“What about your parents?” She lowered her foot on the gas.

“Lying to them,” he said. “About why you’re really moving down to LA?” Miguel had taken a job offer at an accounting firm in a location more conducive to his dreams of working in theater. For the last two years, they had worked together at a nonprofit for people with disabilities. She was an administrative assistant; he crunched numbers in Finance. She would miss him, but she was happy for him, too. “The theater classes? The plays that you write? The Grindr account?”

“About it all.”

“Do you ever think about telling them?”

“All the time.” He sighed. “But it’s easier this way.”

“Do you think they know?”

“Of course they do. But . . .” He brushed his hand through his hair. “Sometimes, agreeing to the same lie is what makes a family family, Margot.”

“Ha. Then what do you call people who agree to the same truth?”

“Well, I don’t know any of these people personally, but—scientists?”

She laughed, having expected him to say friends. Grasping the wheel, she caught the sign for Salem. Her hands were stiff.

“Do you need to use the bathroom?” she asked.

“I’m okay. We’re gonna stop in Eugene, right?”

“Yeah, should be another hour or so.”

“I’m kinda hungry.” Rustling in his pack on the floor of the back seat, he found an apple, which he rubbed clean with the edge of his shirt. “Want a bite?”

“Not now, thanks.”

His teeth crunched into the f lesh, the scent cracking through the odor of wet floor mats and warm vents.

Margot was struck by the image of her mother’s serene face—the downcast eyes above the high cheekbones, the relaxed mouth—as she peeled an apple with a paring knife, conjuring a continuous ribbon of skin. The resulting spiral held the shape of its former life. As a child, Margot would delicately hold this peel like a small animal in the palm of her hand, this proof that her mother could be a kind of magician, an artist who told an origin story through scraps—this is the skin of a fruit, this is its smell, this is its color.

“I hope the weather clears up soon,” Miguel said, interrupting her memory. “It gets pretty narrow and windy for a while. There’s a scary point right at the top of California where the road is just zigzagging while you’re looking down cliffs. It’s like a test to see if you can stay on the road.”

“Oh, God,” Margot said. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

As she refocused on the rain-slicked road, the blurred lights, the yellow and white lines like yarn unspooling, Margot thought about her mother who hated driving on the freeway, her mother who no longer answered the phone. Where was her mother?

The windshield wipers squeaked, clearing sheets of rain.

“What about you?” Miguel asked. “Looking forward to seeing your mom?”

Margot’s stomach dropped. “Actually, I’ve been trying to call her for the past few days to let her know, to let her know that we would be coming down.” Clenching the wheel, she sighed. “I didn’t really want to tell her because I wanted this to be a fun trip, but then I felt bad, so . . .”

“Is everything okay?”

“She hasn’t been answering the phone.”

“Hmm.” He shifted in his seat. “Maybe her phone battery died?”

“It’s a landline. Both landlines—at work and at home.”

“Maybe she’s on vacation?”

“She never goes on vacation.” The windshield fogged, revealing smudges and streaks, past attempts to wipe it clean. She cranked up the air inside.

“Hasn’t she ever wanted to go somewhere?”

“Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. I don’t know why, but she’s always wanted to go there.”

“It’s a big ol’ crack in the ground, Margot. Why wouldn’t she want to see it? It’s God’s crack.”

“It’s some kind of Korean immigrant rite of passage. National parks, reasons to wear hats and khaki, stuff like that. It’s like America America.”

“I bet she’s okay,” Miguel said. “When did you see her last?”

“Last Christmas,” she said.

“Maybe she’s just been busier than usual. We’ll be there soon.”

“You’re probably right. I’ll call her again when we stop.”

A heaviness expanded inside her chest. She fidgeted with the radio dial but caught only static with an occasional blip of a commercial or radio announcer’s voice.

Her mother was fine. They would all be fine.

With Miguel in LA, she’d have more reasons to visit now.

The road lay before them like the peel of a fruit. The windshield wipers hacked away water falling from the sky.

In Redding, California, shrouded by mountains and dense national forests, Margot and Miguel stopped at the first place they could find—a greasy spoon with red vinyl booths, a jukebox, a waitress in white uniform. The hostess, a blond ponytailed college student, led them to a table and handed them plastic menus. An old man in a trucker hat sat at the counter by himself. In a neighboring booth, two girls colored paper place mats while their parents observed.

Being from LA, in particular Koreatown, where Korean food and Mexican joints had been the norm, Margot always thought of the classic diner as “charming” and “novel,” a location of unspoken heroism out of a movie or a short story about decent, hardworking white Americans trying to catch a break. Margot remembered when she had moved to Seattle eight years ago and made her first white friends—people who seemed to navigate their identities, their skin tones, their appearances so easily, in such an invisible way, as if the world had been created for them, which, in a sense, it had. Many of them—with their blue eyes and tall noses—appeared intrinsically attractive because even white people who weren’t supermodels were at least white.

She didn’t want to think that way since, theoretically, it made no sense. Beauty is a construct, but theory is not the reality we live, she thought. Theory didn’t live in the bones. Theory didn’t erase the years of self-scrutiny in a mirror and not seeing anyone at all, not a protagonist or a beauty, only a television sidekick, a speechless creature, who at best was “exotic,” desirable but simple and foreign. Growing up, she had often wondered, If only I had bigger eyes or brown hair instead of black. If only . . .

The food arrived, interrupting her thoughts. Margot and Miguel devoured their meals—a cheeseburger and fries, a tuna melt on rye, and tomato soup—like animals. Margot tried to slow down, but everything tasted too good, perfect, American. All she could hear was mutual chewing, sips, and gulps—an orchestra of fulfillment. She wanted to sit here forever, forget about her problems, LA, her mother.