“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It’s that Shin woman—what’s she call herself? Maggalina?”
“Magdalena,” I said.
My mother rolled her eyes and said, “A name a Korean person can’t even pronounce properly.”
“So, what’s wrong with her?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Father Kwak thinks she might be too sick to answer the phone. He says when he talked to her last week she didn’t sound well. And now she’s stopped answering her phone.”
“Could she have gone somewhere?”
“Father Kwak says she wouldn’t have the money. C’mon, let’s get going. I have to finish this,” she said, looking around the kitchen.
I tried to get out of it, but my mother was afraid of driving in the snow. Within minutes, we were bundled up and sitting in the car, our breath coming out in engine puffs.
“Dirty weather,” my mother said. She looked up at the snow angrily.
I turned on the wipers and backed out of the driveway. I asked my mother why she didn’t like Mrs. Shin.
“Oh, she’s so tiresome,” my mother said. “I don’t like people like that—people who need so much attention. People who can’t take care of themselves.”
I nodded.
“Those people,” she said, “they make life seem so hard. They make it seem impossible. But it’s not really. It doesn’t have to be. You do what you can and hope for the best. If you need to change something, change it. If you can’t, ignore it.” She leaned back against the seat. “Don’t be like your father, brooding over your life.”
“I’m not like him,” I said.
She looked over at me and said, “Good. I hope you’re right.”
“What does she do for work?” I asked.
“She’s a tailor.”
“She’s a tailor?” For some reason, that seemed strange. I don’t know what I thought her occupation would be. I guess I could never imagine her doing anything except maybe getting dressed up, sitting in front of her mirror, putting on that everlasting blue eye shadow. Just then I swerved to avoid a car fishtailing ahead of me and my mother grabbed her chest with one hand and my arm with the other.
“No more talking!” she said. “Concentrate!”
We found Mrs. Shin’s apartment on Front Street above the tailor shop where she worked. It was in a neighborhood of sub shops and package stores close to the old shoe mills. Next to a metal gray door we saw Magdalena scrawled on a small slip of square paper. It flapped when a gust of wind kicked up, the tape peeling. We went through the unlocked door and up a flight of stairs to another door. The air felt warm and moist and smelled slightly sour. I knocked. No answer. My mother knocked. Silence. She called out, “Mrs. Shin. Mrs. Shin!”
I jiggled the locked knob. My mother kept banging away. Out of desperation, I yelled, “Magdalena!” After a long while, we heard a kind of croaking coming from the other side. Then the sound of the locks being undone. Half of Mrs. Shin’s face peeked out. She looked like a skeleton. Her skin was so white and thin that I could make out the shape of her sockets.Underneath her chapped lips protruded the line of her teeth.Her cotton nightgown hung on two knobby shoulders and her hair, usually sprayed and brittle, sat tight on her head in wettish strands. She hung on the door and weaved.
When she moved aside, my mother went in and dropped our bags on the kitchen table. Then she took off her coat and, guiding Mrs. Shin by the shoulders, turned her away from the door. “Why don’t we get you to lie down?” she said. They shuffled down a short hallway and disappeared.
I shut the door and sat at the kitchen table. From there I could see into the living room, which was empty except for a small TV on a chair and some cushions on the floor. Every blind was drawn and the air felt old. I was a little shaken—Mrs. Shin looked so hollowed out.
I took off my coat and stood in the living room. The room didn’t feel used, the walls were empty and bare, but in the corner by the door was a messy pile of shoes. They were the only things giving life to the room. When I walked down a short hallway, I heard my mother’s murmuring voice coming from a room on the left. I opened a closed door to my right and entered a haze of pink. Soft pink walls, a tiny child’s bed with a silky pink cover, a pink lamp on a box reading CLOROX. Against one wall were several boxes of toys, all of them unopened and new. Other than that, there was just a small child’s vanity table. Pink, of course.
Then I saw a sheet of paper taped next to the window. It looked like a drawing. When I stepped closer, I saw a copy of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Not the whole thing, just the details of God reaching for Adam and Adam about to receive the touch. And amazingly—I don’t know how Mrs. Shin caught the exact expression—but Adam looked up at God utterly, infinitely bored. The angels surrounded God like shadows; Mrs. Shin had left them faceless.
While my mother heated up a can of Campbell’s beef-and-barley soup, she told me to go and sit with Mrs. Shin. She seemed shaken too and said the woman looked much worsethan she’d expected. Dammit! She wished she’d brought along Father Kwak’s number.
Mrs. Shin’s room was dark and smelled oily. The one window in the room was covered over with a dark sheet. Mrs. Shin was lying on a mattress along the wall, her hair spread damp and greasy on the pillow as if she had just emerged from the sea. Her eyes were closed. I sat down close to her head.
Her beauty, always close to garish, was now frightening. She made me angry
