Suyon’s face is darker than it was when you saw her in spring. Her in-laws made her work in the fields all summer alongside the tenant families. They won’t say they don’t care if the hard work kills her growing child, but it’s clear just the same. Her belly is huge but the rest of her looks thin and you feel an urge to put an arm around her. She sits alone on a stone wall, glumly in the dark, far away from the warm bonfire. You hold out a tin mug of apple cider.
“Oh, Unni,” she says, trying to smile. You notice her eyes are glittery. “Thank you for thinking of me. It’s been some time since I felt that.”
“I heard your family has been hard on you.”
She shakes her head. “If only they’d let me go home to my own family.” She fans herself and pulls the collar of her shirt away from her neck. “It’s so much cooler in the mountains. You remember how nice the nights were midsummer? When the fireflies were out?”
“Of course,” you say. You used to compete to see who could collect the most. Now you think how all you did was kill those poor fireflies. You used to pull the wings off dragonflies too. Stick them on rocks. Lick the bottoms of red fire ants to make the world buzz. You were monsters. But you’d do it again to feel that free.
“Is the baby due soon?” you ask.
“Who knows?” she says. She sits with her legs apart and passes her hand back and forth over her exquisite roundness. “This one feels different. Busy. Kicks a lot,” she says. “It’s because they’re not feeding me well. The first three times they made me drink honey water all day long. Now I’m lucky if I get a piece of fish for dinner.”
Suyon pulls out a bottle of soju and offers you a taste. You decline; it smells too much like your husband’s rejection.
“You’re probably wondering,” she says. “Who the father is. Go ahead. You can ask.” She makes an aggrieved clicking sound with her teeth. “Everybody wants to know who knocked up the slut.”
You tell her you hope it’s her husband.
“Well, you’re the first.” Suyon laughs. “My husband hates me—everyone knows that.”
You scold her, ask her what she expected. You can’t cuckold a man and expect to get away with it.
“Further,” you tell her, “you’re losing your looks too. You’d better be careful. Women can age in a day.”
“If only my husband would send for me,” she says softly, tugging at your sleeve. “But I’m a stupid girl, I know that.” She sighs wistfully.
You don’t ask about the merchant’s son, because you’ve already heard. When his father discovered he’d been playing around with Suyon, he sent him away to Seoul to finish his last year of schooling.
“The boy will send for me when the baby comes,” Suyon says. It’s hard to tell in the dark but you think you see a gap in Suyon’s mouth where a couple of teeth are missing. “He loves me.”
“But he’s just a boy,” you say. “Under his father’s thumb.”
She laughs wickedly. “You wouldn’t say that if you lay under him.”
“Suyon!”
“Oh, Unni,” she says. “Why were we born? To work? To suffer? Can’t we have a little fun in life? Would the Buddha hate that so much?”
“Maybe not,” you say, “but your in-laws do.”
She spits at the mention of in-laws. “I hate them,” she growls.
“Listen, this is what the Buddha would say. Take joy and comfort in the children you have. They’ll take care of you inyour old age, give you grandchildren who’ll remember you after you die.”
“My in-laws have already turned them against me,” she says bitterly. She rubs her huge belly. “This one is just mine. It’s not a part of them at all. Once I’ve had this baby, I’ll be leaving for Seoul.”
“Selfish, stupid girl,” you say. Your anger makes you stand. You remember the thick clot of blood that came out of you in the outhouse. You stare at the great mound of her middle and curse her silently.
Suyon puts her head down on her arms. “I’m so tired,” she says. “I’m so tired of never getting anywhere.” She looks up at you. “Aren’t you?”
“Where can we go?” you ask, though you know exactly what she means.
Everyone says the first birth is the hardest, the second easier, the third lightning quick, and the fourth the scariest because it is the most unpredictable. It could come shooting out with the first cramp or it could take days. Of course, the longer it takes the more dangerous it is for the mother and baby.
You know about Suyon, but out of spite you don’t go to her until she has already been laboring for a day and a half. Your husband takes you in the wagon to her in-laws’ house, which is in a state of uproar. All the men are in the front public rooms of the house, drinking heavily and cursing women. You pass them without acknowledgment and hurry into the private quarters. A servant leads you out into the courtyard and to the smallest, darkest room, closest to the outhouse. Suyon’s mother-in-law and her daughters are rushing about, doing Buddha knows what, while inside her room Suyon brays like a donkey. She’s cursing too.
The mother-in-law screams, “If you don’t stop that noise, I’m going to knock you in the head!”
In response, Suyon gives a great guttural
