Blood Sisters Read online

  “Yeoul, when did you get here?” The café owner is so happy to see me that she claps at the sight of me. The café was closed during the holidays, and today it reopened. Even so, why is she here so early? She starts chattering, telling me all the things I didn’t ask about. I went to your apartment with New Year’s rice-cake soup, and you weren’t there. Where were you? She dances like a girl trying out her favorite pink shoes. She spins. “What do you think? I’m wearing this for the wedding rehearsal.” The purple dress she is wearing has a plunging neckline and is trimmed with fur from shoulders to chest.

  “It’s too form-fitting for my taste … But, Ajumma,5 you’ll wear it if you like it, so …”

  “It’s a fault of yours that you can’t lie. This is an expensive dress! Can’t you just say it’s beautiful? And Ajumma? Don’t call me Ajumma. I told you to call me Unni! Okay. Let’s try it again. Call me Unni!”

  Jumping out of nowhere Sungyun suddenly chimes in. “You’ll see. She’ll never call you that. She calls everyone by the terms that she wants to use. She calls me Sungyun-si,6 like I’m a stranger or we’re same age. If she doesn’t feel like it, she won’t even talk to me for days!”

  What the hell? Today Sungyun is wearing a shiny black suit, a floral tie, and even a handkerchief. It looks good on him. This is the first time I’ve seen him in anything other than sweatpants and a T-shirt.

  “Okay, let’s establish the terms we address each other with,” the café owner says. “Call Sungyun Oppa and call me Unni from now on. Doesn’t that sound nicer? ‘Unni,’ it feels warm, intimate. People at the wedding would be surprised if they heard you calling me Ajumma! That’d sound rude and distant!”

  “I’ll call you Sajang-nim,7 then,” I say.

  “You are so stubborn! Whatever. I won’t stand for it if you call me Sajang-nim or Ajumma ever again. And let’s buy you some new clothes! Even Sungyun looks so handsome now that I dressed him up. He looks like a nobleman.”

  The café owner seems to find me beneath her. Ever since I moved into her building, she treats me like her dog, Nana. Eat this. Wear that. She once offered me a cookie that she had taken a bite out of and offered me her old leather jacket and her see-through blouse. They didn’t fit me, and I didn’t like how they made me feel, so I placed them in the café’s kitchen cabinet, and later I saw Eunyong wearing them—she seems to enjoy them. Now the café owner’s trying to force me into calling her Unni …

  I speak with my own mouth, so I will address others on my own terms. Other girls called Jimin Unni, but I called her Sunbe. I didn’t have a particular reason for it. I just liked it that way. My stepmother tried to coax me into calling her Mom. She said in return, she’d give me back the special pillow that smelled like my mother. My ragged but precious pillow, which she kept on top of the armoire, just out of my reach. I didn’t want to call her Mom. I addressed her by “Excuse me” or “Umm,” and she’d slap me across the face. I can’t count how many times that happened. Without the pillow I had a hard time falling asleep, and even if I fell asleep, I got sleep paralysis. When my family slept over at my older uncle’s place for the Jesa ritual, I had to bring the pillow with me in a large paper bag. With incredible cruelty my stepmother made me watch her burn the pillow. What an awful human being. But I’m not trying to paint her as the fairy-tale stepmother-witch here. Not all biological mothers make warm bowls of white rice and wait for their children to come home like textbooks will have us believe, either.

  * * *

  “Yeoul! Yeoul! Where is she hiding again?”

  Seething with anger, I’m trying to eat a bowl of rice soaked in cold water in my room, but the café owner bothers me before I can even eat the second spoonful.

  “Yeoul, check on the cake we ordered at the bakery. See if they are making it tri-layered like I asked. I told them it should be topped with a white chocolate angel. I thought the rose decoration they had on the sample cake was tacky. Check that they’ve done that, and also double-check with them on the delivery time. Remind them I want the cake on Sunday, and that the traffic to Haewoondae gets really bad on the weekend.”

  Reluctantly, as slowly as possible, I go downstairs to the bakery, pushing the door open with my shoulder. The year I got accepted to the university, this had been a bookstore. I used to browse books here. The owner, a young man with Coke-bottle glasses, helped me find Michael Jackson posters and recommended social science books published by small presses like Mung Bean Press, Raven Press, and Rock Pillow Press. He said I didn’t even have to buy books to hang out here, I could just read them there as long as I didn’t wrinkle the pages. This was the place where I bought the Dictionary of Aesthetics Theory Terms for the Aesthetics Theory class I took. (I ended up not really reading the book. I don’t really know what I was doing signing up for that class.) But one day, the New Day Bookstore became the New York Bakery. As with most of the buildings near the university, this building is now filled only with stores for entertainment and food. Oh wait, the fourth floor is for lodging, so my observation isn’t entirely true. The first floor became a bakery, the second floor a café, and the third floor a billiard parlor. The café’s sign—INSTANT PARADISE—is the biggest. At night the sign flashes garishly in the dark. The building owner’s store sign dwarves those of the renters. Faced with this unfair reality, are we just supposed to shrug and say, That’s just the way things are?

  5. Ajumma is used to address an older woman.

  6. Si is an honorific added to a name to make the address formal, used when speaking to a person of equal social standing who is not a family member or close friend.

  7. Sajang-nim is used to address one’s boss in the workplace.

  Matryoshka

  “Do you think he married her for her money?” I ask the toothbrush salesman—I mean, the dentist who’s now become a regular at the café.

  “What?” he asks.

  “You told me he’s four years younger than the café owner, right? He’s a handsome bachelor. Ajumma has married two or three times now. So …”

  “I think they married because they love each other. No one outside a relationship can know what goes on between a couple.”

  “Even if that’s the case … It hasn’t been very long since you brought him here and introduced them to each other. Don’t you agree?”

  He sits at an angle and looks straight into my eyes. His irises seem small in relation to the whites of his eyes. His facial expression is that of a crane waiting for the right moment to snatch up a fish from the river, focusing. I suddenly feel embarrassed and annoyed. Like the fish head Nana likes to chew on, my head droops. With the sudden silence in the conversation, the music in the background grows louder.

  “You must like Leonard Cohen. I noticed that you put on his album,” he notes.

  I got the vinyl record that’s playing now in the café as a gift from this person sitting across from me.

  It was the night of the café owner’s wedding. Out of the blue, he gave me the record. The café was closed that day, and everyone had gone to the wedding hall at the hotel, and I was left alone with Nana at the café. I was reading about Italian baristas because I’d started to appreciate coffee. Several times I’d asked the café owner to buy an espresso machine so we could make espressos and cappuccinos, but she said the machine was too expensive. She wasn’t even replacing the worn needle on the record player, so we couldn’t even play music in here—she kept saying tomorrow, tomorrow … the uncultured bitch.

  I felt tired without music. Spacey. I found myself mindlessly chewing my nails, and that made me angry. I was lying on the sofa, throwing peanuts into the air and trying to catch them in my mouth. The peanuts I missed scattered across the floor. Nana was asleep on my belly. The café owner said she’d be in Guam or Saipan or wherever for seven days for her honeymoon, so I thought that as long as I could hide from Sungyun’s watchful eyes I could be lazy and pick on Nana. But since the early evening Nana had been depressed, not being her usual playful self, and
kept on sleeping. The dentist opened the door, entered the café, and stumbled toward me. He said he didn’t feel good about his best friend marrying the café owner and mumbled something about how he regretted introducing him to her. He had hoped to live with his friend in the house the friend had designed, but that was all moot now. I liked him better now that he was drunk. Until then we had been using the honorific tone with each other—awkward and uncomfortable. It was nice to finally speak casually. He walked into the DJ booth and removed the old needle with his trembling hand. He pulled out a new needle from his pocket, and in a familiar movement placed the new needle in the arm. He placed a record on the turntable, and the needle nimbly moved along the grooves of the record.

  Fortuitously, the fourth track, the same song he played that night, is playing in the café right now: “I’m Your Man.”

  If you want a boxer

  I will step into the ring for you

  And if you want a doctor

  I’ll examine every inch of you

  If you want a driver, climb inside

  Or if you want to take me for a ride

  You know you can

  I’m your man.

  I think the song is saying, “I’m here for you.” The man sings in a slow, cloying voice, viscous like honey. I cringe, but I don’t hate his voice. I close my eyes. What if I could find a “doctor” like in the song who would “examine every inch of me?” I anticipate the dentist rising from his seat. He is going to. He has to. He is going to approach me, sit next to me, and touch me. He will kiss my forehead, my nose, and continue descending … I wet my lips with my tongue. I’ve never kissed a man before. If I’d known an opportunity like this would arise, I would’ve brushed my teeth. I had raw onions with black noodles for lunch. I close my eyes and my eyelids tremble. What is taking so long? Should I open my eyes? Won’t you kiss me? I don’t need you to kneel and beg for my love like in the song. Don’t you like me? No, you’re just a coward. I can’t wait. I won’t wait. I will show you how this works. I’ll undo my buttons one by one. I will caress your cheek, kiss you, then you will hold my hand.

  “Hey! Yeoul! What are you doing, praying? Didn’t you hear me come in? Were you asleep sitting upright like that? There are customers here!” When I open my eyes, everything is blurry and slowly clears up. Shit, how embarrassing. Eunyong makes a spinning motion with her index fingers by her temple. The dentist and Sungyun are looking at me with confused looks on their faces.

  Gwak Eunyong, do I seem crazy to you? Why did you get back so soon anyway? You told me you were going to play billiards in the parlor upstairs with Sungyun. Can I even call you my friend when you choose the worst time to return and ruin things? I hold back all these accusations that want to spring out of my throat, and I gulp down a glass of water. I can’t get a read on the dentist. Does he have any emotions or desires, or is he like the dentures and toothbrushes in his pocket, inanimate and emotionless? Or maybe he’s like a matryoshka, a Russian nesting doll? There might be a different face beneath the face I see, and then yet another.

  Proxima Centauri

  We are closing the café early tonight. As if they could sense the absence of the owner, customers are not coming today. We choose not to be industrious workers. I feel zero guilt—like the time I peed in the communal bath. Sungyun followed the dentist to try out his new car. There’s nobody to bother me and Eunyong. It feels like the café is under siege. Is this what Jimin was talking about when she talked about seizing the means of production? Would she give me a noogie for simplifying her ideas if she knew I was making this connection?

  I take a beer from the fridge. It’s an imported kind that I’ve never had before. Eunyong slices a pineapple for snacks. “Bring some bananas and cheese too!”

  We raise our glasses for a toast. We can replace the café’s food we’re eating, and I have some spare money.

  I’ve been tutoring the dentist in German, but the further we progress on the lessons, the less sure I become about the lessons I am “teaching.” Whenever I get stuck, the dentist quickly looks up the word in the dictionary. Eunyong ostentatiously walks by our table to mutter, “Who’s tutoring who?” That bitch. Her knowledge of English only extends to greetings like Hello, oh my God, sorry, and she doesn’t know a word of German, not even the alphabet.

  What matters is that I got some money from tutoring my older student. A small part of me feels guilty—he gave me twenty thousand won in advance, and we’ve only met twice for the lessons. But then he gave me another envelope of money. I’ve decided I’m going to study German hard myself and teach him well this month. There isn’t any part-time gig as easy as this one. I don’t want him to look for a tutor who is actually competent. If I save this tutoring money for the next three months, I can cover my university tuition. Then I could proudly announce my official emancipation from my dad and declare why I left home.

  “Eunyong! Bring more beer! I can’t even get up right now.”

  “You sound so drunk. I saw you throw up earlier. We gotta stop drinking. We’ve been drinking all these … shit. How much is this gonna cost us?”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine … Just bring more, okay!” As I yell, my voice rings in my ears. It sounds unfamiliar, foreign—like someone else’s voice. Like when you record your voice on a blank cassette tape and play it back.

  I used to record my favorite pop songs on empty cassettes, singing into the tape to hear my own singing. I thought I lost those tapes, but then I discovered that my stepbrother had been listening to them. He used to peek in to watch me bathe too. Crazy asshole.

  •

  Why does everyone I love leave me? Why do they abandon me or drop dead? Tears start flowing uncontrollably. Fuck it, I wanna die too. I chew on my agony. Well, no, actually, what I’m chewing on is this cheese.

  “Ugh, the worst thing a drunk woman can do is cry. My mom used to cry after a few glasses of soju too. Jesus. Didn’t know you were the type who cries. Here, drink this and sober up.” Eunyong hands me a glass of ice water. I gulp it down to choke down my wail. “How do you feel? Yeoul, you are skinnier than me, taller than me, and you get to go to college. If you cry and pity yourself, that’s just bullshit. Stop it! You’re a spoiled little bitch if you don’t stop crying.”

  “That’s true.”

  Eunyong curses, lies, and plays hooky fluently. She doesn’t seem like that on the surface. A lovely girl. But I won’t love anyone ever again. The people I love died because of my love—I know they are with me at all times, hovering around me. How many things are right next to me but can’t be seen? Like Proxima Centauri, the dark star nearest to Earth, this strange planet I stand on, but can’t be seen. Ghosts. Protective spirits. Devils. Devils with angels’ faces. All these confusing things. The invisible hands that constrict my throat. What the fuck are you rambling about? The couch shouts from the corner. The ashtray tries to get my attention. My darling, you were wonderful tonight, Eric Clapton on the wall winks at me. I sense that someone is waiting for me behind the wall.

  “I miss you,” I mutter.

  “Who are you talking to?” Eunyong grabs my shoulder and shakes impatiently.

  “None of your business. You have no idea. You don’t have to know everything.”

  “I know what’s going on. You like him, don’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “Who? Of course I mean the dentist.”

  “Haha, whatever. Imagine away! I gotta lie down.” I hit my head on the table, and rub my cheek.

  “He seems to like you too. I am good at reading men. He has money and he seems nice. So get him! Sink your claws in.”

  “Get him? Am I a cat and him a mouse or something?”

  “Okay. Hear me out. I got the art of seduction down. I’m gonna teach you a thing or two. Hey! Don’t fall asleep. Wake up, Yeoul. Shit. We drank too much. We need to replace what we drank. Where’s the money, Yeoul? I’ll go to the supermarket.”

  “It’s in the kitchen drawer.”

 
; Eunyong rolls on her side on the floor to get to the kitchen. I hear the clink-clank sound of her going through the drawer and see her emerge with the envelope of money and a picture. It’s the picture of Jimin and me. We took a picture in front of the flower tree in the university garden. We are holding hands, smiling awkwardly.

  “I swear I’ve seen her before.” Eunyong scratches her crotch, sniffs her fingers, and tilts her head.

  “No way. Don’t touch that picture with your dirty hands.” I try to get up to take the picture away from her and almost fall over.

  “Hold on a sec.” She holds the picture away from me, just out of reach. “I’m good with faces. I remember every single person who’s ever walked into this café. I’ve impressed several customers with that skill, you know. I’ve definitely seen her before. Not at the café though … Yeah! I remember now. I was on my way to the café, and I saw her screaming at Sungyun at the top of her lungs in the back alley. He kicked her down and I intervened. Who is this woman? Why are you so protective of this photo? She isn’t the one who killed herself, is she?”

  Face-Off

  Lately, Sungyun is MIA, not even his shadow can be found. It’s been a week, and I’ve been searching for him. The café, the alleys, the billiard parlor. I knocked on the door of his place several times a day, but not even a peep. Neither Eunyong nor the café’s owner has seen him recently. I don’t think Eunyong would’ve warned him that I am looking for him like a bloodhound. The more he avoids me, the more my suspicion that he has something to do with Jimin’s death grows. Eunyong said she saw them fighting in the back alley after the presidential election. She said it was around the time the Christmas carols started playing in the streets, when the bakery had a promotion on their cheapest cakes. Jimin died around then. Sungyun didn’t tell me that Jimin visited the café to see me, nor that he offered her a drink when she was getting up to leave. While I was wasting away with sadness, Eunyong and the café owner had harassed me with the questions about Jimin—about her appearance, personality, suspected reasons behind her suicide, her family history—but Sungyun, unlike his usual nosy self, stayed out of it. I can’t focus on anything—my hair is bristling—until I track him down with my sharp nose. I can’t stop until I grab him and break his neck.