Sung started seeing stars. Things were receding. The soldier stopped talking, looked hard at Sung, and then went limp, released his hands, and fell over. He lay in the dirty alley and gave a loud, guttural yell that set all the dogs barking. Then he put his big hands over his face and cried in great, choking sobs.
Sung got uncertainly to his feet, checked his pocket for Jungho’s medicine, wiped the blood off his face, and started for home.
He wandered through the market at South Gate, people clucking at his bloodied shirt and swollen face, and with thelast of his money bought dukkboeki. He knew it was wrong not to share, but he didn’t care. It had been forever since he had tasted anything good. He sat in the dirt outside the small shop and ate the hot, slippery discs until his belly felt warm.
The weather was turning, a cool edge to the still-warm night that was a precursor of the winds that would soon come down from Manchuria. In a few days, it would snow. Sung wondered how long the war would last. It seemed it could go on forever, Seoul going back and forth like money between two merchants. On the other hand, that would mean they would all probably die. Suddenly, by accident, and for no good reason.
Everyone around him hurried to their destination, their shoulders hunched up around their necks. Sung wondered what he’d find when he got home.
Last week, a boy in the neighborhood died when he accidentally stepped on a grenade with a loose pin. It was something else to get used to, people disappearing, people dying, grown American men shouting in his face and crying. But he wouldn’t. He would never get used to it. He promised himself that much.
Magdalena
A week after my sixteenth birthday, I woke up to the sound of my father shouting. At first I thought he was angry, but soon I realized he was just looking for his hat. We were going to McKinney State Park in New Hampshire, the whole parish of the Korean Catholic Church of Concord. I thought with embarrassment of the two bright orange school buses the church had rented for the occasion.
I got up anyway, dragging my feet into the kitchen, where my mother was putting rows of kimbap into Tupperware containers. For breakfast, she had left the uneven ends. I told her I didn’t want to go.
She was unconcerned. “Why not?” she asked. My mother was a slightly chubby woman with a round, bright face. She could look cheerful even when she wasn’t.
“I don’t feel like it,” I said. “I’m too old for it.”
I sat down across from her. I had spoken in Korean, which I could still sometimes do if I didn’t think about it. My parents were that way with English. They still had a terrible time pronouncingthe place where we lived. Lawrence. Massachusetts. My father sounded like he was caught in a fit of sneezing when he pronounced Massachusetts. So we ended up speaking a third language, a strangled jumble of Korean and English that seemed to work.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “Everybody’s going to be there.”
“Who?”
“Somebody said there’ll be volleyball.”
“I hate volleyball.”
“And there’s a beach.”
“There is?”
“Of course! We’re going to the ocean, aren’t we?”
I thought of what I looked like in my bathing suit: a skinny stick figure with a too-large head. When my parents were playful, they called me Olive Oyl; when my brother felt mean he called me Refugee Victim. Still, I loved swimming, the amazement of being held up by nothing but salt and water. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. “Well, maybe I’ll just check out the beach.”
“Good idea,” she said as though I’d suggested something brilliant. “Now, eat something or go get dressed.”
My mother never liked to see me idle. Sometimes she said I was like my father, who could go off to a place in his head and exist without eating. There were whole days when a curious, detached look took over his usual worried expression and he seemed to forget who we were. This kind of dreaming she called blindness. For my mother, reality was a point of honor; her hands were always busy. She wanted me to be like her.
“Go, go,” my mother said, eating and chewing behind her hand. “Hurry or we’ll be late.”
I passed my father in the living room sitting on the floor with his hat on. He had a Korean newspaper spread out in front of him. The hat, made of brown corduroy and turned up on all sides, was too small for his head. It sat atop his greatbushy growth looking temporary and precarious. A quick turn of the head could make it fall.
Luke Ballard was the boy I thought about while I changed into my blue bathing suit and looked at my flat-chested self in the mirror. Luke Ballard was the boy I dreamed of when I let myself. Also, Luke Ballard was a boy who didn’t know I was alive. Two years older than me, he was not only the best-looking boy in the senior class but he was going out with the girl who was the funniest. Not the prettiest. The funniest. That made me like him even more.
He was dark-haired and lean and had blue eyes that seemed to take everything in without judgment. When he laughed, it traveled down my body, landing rumblingly in my stomach. When I touched my stomach now, I could still feel his laugh. The night before I’d seen him at a party, stood so close to him I could smell Irish Spring soap and too much Polo cologne, watched him so carefully I saw the hand he slid along Ronny’s back and
