I knew I didn’t have a chance in hell. Not one iota of a chance. A skinny Korean girl who grew tongue-tied in his presence? How was I going to get him if I couldn’t make him laugh? I’d learned to effect a nonchalance to cover up my nervousness, but people took it as haughtiness. When I wouldn’t let Mike Saffo kiss me outside the bathroom, he called me a proud bitch.
In the plum-colored interior of the car, I felt trapped and sorry I hadn’t stayed home. A forty-minute drive on I-95 led us to St. Ignatius, where small groups of people stood talking in the parking lot. From a distance, Father Kwak made a tiny black figure next to the school buses, just a bit of white at his throat. He was looking up at the cloudless blue sky when we parked next to him.
My mother opened her door and called out to Father Kwak, “A beautiful day for a trip, wouldn’t you say?”
He gave her a wide smile and agreed. “I was just looking at the sky with that very thought in mind,” he said.
I gave a quick bow to Father Kwak when he turned to acknowledge me. Then I leaned against the car, a few feet away from the adults. I didn’t talk while they reminisced about day hikes on Bukhansan Mountain. Instead, I stared at Father Kwak, a handsome man in his forties with shiny hair stiffly parted on one side. He was tall and a bit stout, built in a way that made his chest and stomach appear as one smooth piece of armor. All the while he spoke to my parents, he kept his hands folded delicately in front of him.
I liked Father Kwak. He had recently arrived from Korea. Some of the other priests had shocked me by doing things I didn’t know priests could do—smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and playing cards with my father and his friends. Father Kwak didn’t do any of that. I wondered what he’d be like as a real father.
He was the first guest to arrive at my parents’ party one night and had come upon a fight I was having with my father, who didn’t want me to go out.
“No boys!” my father had yelled. “No makeup!”
Later, when the party was in full swing, I was sliding gloss on my lips, getting ready to sneak out, when Father Kwak came into my room, surprising me with his advanced English.
“May I bother you for a minute?” he asked, closing my door.
Awkwardly I nodded yes, then bowed the way I’d been taught to do in front of elders.
He looked around my room, staring at the posters of the Cure and Depeche Mode on my walls, the pictures of long, sinewy women I’d cut out of magazines and pasted over my desk, the wooden cross and picture of the holy family my mother had nailed over my bed.
“Going out?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m meeting some friends.”
“Good, good.” He gave me a beneficent smile. “It’s hard being a teenager,” he said. “I remember it well.”
I nodded, wondering if he was going to give me a lot of advice. But he didn’t.
“Well, I won’t keep you,” he said. “I just wanted to say that I know that fathers can be difficult.”
After a while, my father started shifting long glances around the parking lot. My mother’s conversation with the priest had slowed to a stop. The crowded sounds of the parking lot came back to us like a radio turned up to chattering voices and bursts of laughter. When we heard a car door slam nearby, we all turned to it gratefully.
A pale ghost in a tight summer dress emerged from the passenger side. She stood a little uncertainly on the heels of her strappy red shoes and looked around as though she was lost. Three little girls popped out of the shadow of the back seat, wearing summer dresses to match their mother’s, white with splashy red flowers.
A man stood up from the other side, midthirties, clean-cut, the prototype of an engineer. Like Father Kwak, there was something in his hair that made it stay down and look shiny. But my eye was drawn back to the wife. She was wearing heavy blue eye shadow that stood out like neon on her pale face and made her look strangely festive. Beneath a delicate, perspiring nose were a pair of the glossiest lips I’d ever seen outside of a magazine. She was beautiful and awful at the same time. I couldn’t look away. I could feel how we were all staring at her. She knew it too. She stood very close to her husband, almost clinging to his side while pretending not to see any of us. Their three little girls, shy, hung back on their father’s other side.
They were somehow apart from the rest of us. They stood as in a portrait, refusing to come to life.
“Oh, what cute girls,” my mother said. “And look at those matching dresses! Just like the mother’s! Don’t you think they’re just too pretty?” my mother asked me, a high false tone in her voice. “Who’s that? The Shins?”
“Yes, they’re new to our faith,” Father Kwak said, taking his leave of us.
My mother was wearing a baggy yellow T-shirt with a large crooked pocket over one breast and equally baggy shorts. Putting her yellow floppy hat on her head, she said, “Not a very practical outfit.” She narrowed her eyes and gave Mrs. Shin a long look that she didn’t see but must have felt. Then under her breath, she said to me, “Stay away from them.”
As we walked toward one of the waiting buses, I heard Father Kwak clap Mr. Shin on the shoulder and say admiringly in English, “I thought there were three daughters, not four!” then give a deep, satisfied laugh.
Our bus was divided like this: men in front, women and young children
