2
Plans
With varying work and sleep schedules among five people, there was usually someone in the apartment. On Sunday afternoon, the Cho sisters finally got a few hours alone.
The women were seated in the living room. Perched on the corner of the new L-shaped sectional, recently bought for Sonya’s visit, the older sister nursed a cup of Earl Grey, while the younger one sat cross-legged on the floor, hemming a new pair of khakis for her son.
Uncomfortable, Helen set aside her sewing work to stretch out her legs and touch her toes.
Sonya remarked, “You’re still so flexible.”
Helen smiled. Sitting up, she winced and rubbed her stomach.
“You didn’t eat much. Are you hungry?” Sonya asked.
“No. I can’t digest well at night. I had too much coffee this afternoon. I have to cut down. We drink Taster’s in the morning, and I switched to Sanka for my second cup, but a nurse I know from church said all coffee has too much acid. Even decaf.” Helen took up her sewing again.
“Drink barley tea,” Sonya said.
“Is Mido’s room okay?” Helen asked, rethreading the needle. She cut the gray thread from the spool with her teeth, then made a neat knot.
“Use scissors,” Sonya said.
“Ah, there she is. My nagging older sister. Gosh, I missed you.”
“You could lose your nice teeth,” Sonya said. “You wouldn’t be as pretty without teeth.”
Helen smiled like a little child, exposing her straight teeth, feeling content to be with her big sister.
“Remember that room in Haebangchon after that time Father disappeared?” Sonya said.
Helen almost shivered at the recollection. A distant older cousin had rented a place for them in a shantytown at the bottom of Namsan.
“That wasn’t even a room, was it? I don’t know how we slept there. That horrible woman who owned it was so mean to Mother.”
Sonya’s chin dipped, breaking up her lovely profile and straight posture.
Abruptly, she looked up and exhaled at the memory of the landlord who’d push their mother around and call them peasants.
After the cousin paid the first month, he refused to help any more.
They were late with the rent until their mother got the cleaning job at the bathhouse.
“She smelled like mildew.”
“Right!” Sonya slapped her own thigh with recognition. “She wore that awful yellow sweater with the brown elbow patches. Ugh, I hated that room. And that man who rented the room next to ours. He was always trying to touch us.”
Helen had tried to forget. There was a handsy neighbor who’d leave the outhouse door ajar, and if she or Sonya opened it by accident, he’d try to pull her in. Once, when he attempted this with Mother, she picked up a pebble and threw it at his head.
“If it wasn’t for school and church, I think I would have died when we lived there,” Helen said. There had been so many neighborhoods like that growing up, and it was a wonder that the three of them had survived at all.
After school and on weekends, the three children would go anywhere else because there was nothing and no one for them at home, and they learned quickly that if they were studying or doing odd jobs, strangers didn’t bother them.
They studied in the back pews of churches, in any empty classroom or auditorium, and Sonya and Helen would take their baby brother Kenny to the park along the river when the weather was warm enough and teach him whatever they were learning, and of course, whenever they could, they’d find part-time jobs.
Helen and Kenny would give their earnings to Sonya, who’d hide the money from their parents, who would certainly squander it on cards or soju.
After Sonya was accepted to Ewha, she helped Helen get in, and a priest from St. Francis found a way to help Kenny go to Sydney. He swore never to let the soles of his feet touch Korean ground again.
“Mother shouldn’t have drunk so much,” Sonya said.
“Father, too,” Helen said. She looked up at her sister, whose gaze was fixed on the empty space below the television stand on wheels.
“I miss them sometimes, though,” Helen said. “They died so young, and you know they weren’t all bad. Even that landlady could be nice. When she had extra cakes, she’d give us some. Remember?”
Sonya smiled. The nuns and priests had taught them never to forget a kindness, especially from an unkind person.
“I’m thinking of buying a business here,” Sonya said.
“What?” Helen stuck her needle into the unfinished hem and looked at her sister. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“I think it might be a good idea for me to have something here.”
“You don’t have to work,” Helen said. “I don’t understand. Did the IMF hurt your husband’s business? I thought the Chairman owned his buildings and land outright.”
“They’re fine. It’s just that I have some dollars, and I thought I’d buy a business.
Do something useful, and one day, maybe I can earn a living.
The lawyer said that I can get a visa if I invest in a business and create jobs.
I was thinking of something not too difficult.
I mean, I can still work hard, but something manageable with regular hours.
I think a business like Mrs. Chung’s requires too much costly inventory.
No restaurants. Too much work. Shrimp Castle has good hours, but it’s very hard work.
” Sonya couldn’t imagine the smell of oil on her clothes.
In the apartment, even though Helen did the wash four or five times a week, it was impossible to escape the smell of frying oil from John’s uniforms.
“I heard that car washes can make a lot of money. Or coin-operated laundry machines. Again, that’s still a lot of people to manage. Maybe your kids can help me run it,” Sonya said.
“Are you getting a divorce?” Helen studied her sister’s calm expression. “Your sons live in Korea. I know they’re grown men, but I never knew you wanted to live in Los Angeles. I don’t understand.”
“My sons are fine. They’ll work at the company. They love their father. I still need to care for the Chairman—”
“Why would you?”
“He’s getting messy.”
“The Chairman?”
“No. My husband. He’s always fooled around with hostesses, and he used to be more discreet. Respectful, I thought. I know he didn’t want to marry me.” Sonya shrugged. “I don’t care anymore. Being here with you—that’s what matters. I feel like there’s so much to do. You need my help still.”
Helen smiled. It was true. She needed her older sister, and it was hard to live like this. Every day she would think about how Sonya would have approached a person or a problem.
“But your sons? How about them?”
“If I leave Yong-gil without divorcing, I think they’ll be okay. A few of my friends live abroad while their husbands live in Korea.”
“Your sons have always wanted to work with their father.”
“Yes, that’s true, and they’re genuinely interested in the business,” she said, sounding a little sad. “If they took my side, they’d lose their positions. They have no interest in living in America anyway. Korea is the only place for them.”
Helen felt a weight of sadness descend upon her. Her sister had raised two ideal heirs, trained to take over the Chairman’s business, but it had cost her something greater than she could name.
“They’re better off without me. I think they’ll understand when they get older.
It’s just—” Sonya couldn’t say the words to Helen, when it appeared as if she had everything.
It seemed wrong to talk about humiliation and pride in front of her sister, who was working so hard to start again in a new country when she was fifty.
What nagged at her inside was this feeling of wondering what it was all for.
Though, of course, she had done good things.
She had raised her siblings, cared for her husband, her sons, the Chairman, and even his late wife.
Sonya had served the poor at her church and taken care of the women in her fellowship group for over two decades.
She knew she hadn’t wasted any of her time.
But these recent visits from the hostesses—had there been four or five now?
She couldn’t remember how many exactly—exposed the fractured core of the life she’d crafted with such care.
And so she had drafted an escape plan: Go to Los Angeles to check on her sister.
Helen’s fiftieth birthday had been a good excuse.
She had spoken to a lawyer, who had told her how to get an investment visa.
She thought that her husband might help her with the money.
She wasn’t sure the Chairman would understand. He would feel betrayed.
In this small brick building in a California suburb, Sonya had felt hopeful and well for the first time in years. No one knew who she was here. She felt younger and more alive. Even at fifty-three.
“So you don’t want to go back?”
“No.” As soon as Sonya said this, she realized that it was true.
She could not go back to the way things were.
The idea of running that house again while being so disrespected by her husband felt impossible.
Of course, her husband knew her feelings.
He cared, but not enough to change. She would miss her sons terribly and the Chairman, too.
“If I go back to Seoul, I feel like I’ll die,” Sonya said.
She got up and went to Mido’s room, returning with her carry-on bag.
She laid it on the coffee table, opened the hidden bottom of the trunk, and lifted the silk scarves hiding the stacks and stacks of $100 bills she’d taken from her husband’s safe without his knowing.
“I need to speak to a lawyer and deposit this money into a bank account.”
At four o’clock, Shrimp Castle was almost empty of customers. John was in the kitchen preparing fish fillets for the next day when Nari said there was a call for him from his second son. John wiped his hands on his apron and rushed to the counter, worried that something bad might have happened.
“Dad?”
“DH, are you all right?”