If I Had Your Face(7)
He snorted. “Do you know that her brother actually asks me for pocket money?” He jerked his head in disgust. “And of course he’s going to come to me for a job, when we don’t hire anyone who’s not from the top three schools. Or at least from KAIST. Or someone with parents that have direct power to help us.”
“What does her dad do again? I think I heard once but I forgot.”
“He’s just some lawyer with his own tiny firm in some neighborhood I’ve never heard of that barely counts as Seoul.”
He looked upset.
“Why don’t you just break it off, then?” the girl said, impatient now. “She’s become my friend too, and I’m saying this for her. Don’t waste her time if she is going to have to meet someone new. It’s going to take her another year to meet someone, maybe a year of dating to talk about marriage, then another few months to marriage and then another year to have kids. And she’s thirty already!”
“Yeah, I know,” he said gloomily. “So I agreed to have our parents meet. For dinner. And I’m freaking out right now. Life as I know it will end on March first. Independence Movement Day. Seven P.M. Even all the siblings are coming.” His face was tragic.
“What?” she and I said at the same time. And then both Bruce and the girl looked at me, Bruce amused and the girl with a withering stare.
“A sangyeonrae?” she went on. “That’s more final than a proposal.”
I don’t know why this news shocked me so, but I fashioned my lips into a teasing smile and joked, “You’re getting married? I guess I’ll be seeing you even more often!”
“That’s why I was so pissed,” continued Bruce, as if he didn’t hear me. “I don’t want her brother’s girlfriend there at the dinner—my mother would have a stroke on the spot if she thought someone like her could become an in-law of our family. As if things aren’t going to be difficult enough. But Miae is adamant that her brother will get so upset if we leave the girlfriend out.”
“Why is it such a long way off?” she asked. “Three months? Where is it going to be?”
“I booked a private room at Seul-kuk, at the Reign Hotel,” said Bruce. “Her mom’s been so damn aggressive in this whole process and my parents finally said yes. That’s just the first night that both my parents are free. They’re putting it off as long as possible too. And honestly, the reason this is happening at all is because my mom went to a fortune-teller. Apparently Miae is supposed to be an ideal daughter-in-law and wife and mother. Oh God.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Stop with the misery already,” said the girl in a chiding voice. “Your parents have to meet Miae’s family sooner or later.”
Bruce groaned and fiddled with the strap of his shiny watch.
“At least they’re respectable,” she said after a pause. “It could be much worse.”
Just from the tone of her voice, I could tell she was referring to me.
* * *
—
AS A MATTER of fact, I know all about respectability. My older sister, Haena, married into some wealth.
She graduated from a top women’s university in Seoul with a degree in early childhood education, which is the only thing that made her marriage possible. At the wedding, which was held at one of the most expensive hotels in Seoul, the groom’s side had more than eight hundred guests, mostly men in black suits and animal-patterned Ferragamo ties bearing their gifts of cash in white envelopes. His family had to hire fake guests to fill our side, so it didn’t look like they were marrying down.
She’s been divorced now for a year, and she has yet to tell our mother.
Her ex-husband, Jaesang, has been playing along with the farce by coming to our house for a day for the big festivals, Chuseok and Lunar New Year, but recently he’s been putting Haena in a panic by refusing to attend the weddings of any of our relatives. The pride of our mother’s widowed life is showing off her rich son-in-law.
Jaesang’s parents know about the divorce and are apparently torn, weighing the public shame of it all against the immediate urge to look for a better second wife for their son. They only met my mother twice throughout the entirety of the two-year marriage, and there is no danger of them telling her.
Haena got to stay in the Gangnam apartment, which is still in Jaesang’s name. It remains strategically scattered with his things for when our mother visits bearing baskets of food she’s cooked for her beloved son-in-law.
“It’s the only thing I can do for him,” our mother says whenever Haena protests that Jaesang barely eats at home. “It is my way of protecting you.” So Haena just takes the food.
* * *
—
IT WAS ON one of those days last year after yet another frustrating phone call with my mother about Haena (“Kyuri-ya, what do you think I should buy Jaesang for his birthday? Make sure you send your present early and write a card”) that I invited the two girls across the hall from me to have a drink. I had been meaning to talk to them for some time before I finally got around to it.
It says something about my frame of mind that I wanted to talk to them at all. Neither of them was particularly interesting to look at, nor did they seem to have interesting jobs or relevant hobbies or anything like that. No, what struck me each time I saw them was how close they were—how companionable and comfortable they were with each other. The giddy girl with the square face and the furtive girl with the pale face is how I thought of them. If they were together, their arms were linked, and I would see them around the neighborhood, eating at one of the corner vendors together or buying soju at the convenience store, the square-faced one always loud, both of them radiating tenderness. Sometimes they would leave their front door wide open to air out their apartment and I would see them lounging around in their pajamas, Pale Face playing with Square Face’s hair as they dozed watching dramas. “Like sisters,” I caught myself thinking in a melancholy way.