If I Had Your Face(9)
I am terrified of her dying. When my mind wanders, I think about her tumors spreading poison throughout her body.
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THE OTHER DAY at my clinic, I finally saw the actual girl that I modeled my face after: Candy, the lead singer from that girl group Charming. She was sitting in the waiting room when I walked in, slumped in the corner with hair spilling messily out of a black cap.
I went to sit beside her because I wanted to see how clear the likeness was. I’d brought in photos of Candy’s face when I had my first consultations with Dr. Shim. She has a slight upturned bump at the end of her nose that makes her so uniquely, startlingly beautiful. Dr. Shim was the surgeon who gave it to her, which is the reason I had come to him.
Up close, I saw that her eyes were streaked with red, as if she had been crying, and she had ugly spots on her chin. She hasn’t been having a good year, with all those rumors flying about how she has been bullying Xuna, the new girl in their group, and that she’s busy running around with a new boyfriend and missing rehearsals. The comments on Internet portal sites have been merciless and torrential.
Sensing my staring, she pulled her cap down lower and started twisting her rings—a slender gold band on each of her ten fingers.
When the nurse called her name and she stood up to walk in, she turned to look at me and our eyes met, as if she could hear what I was thinking.
I wanted to reach over and shake her by the shoulders. Stop running around like a fool, I wanted to say. You have so much and you can do anything you want.
I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.
Wonna
My grandmother died last year, in a hospital for the senile in Suwon. She was alone when she died—that is, no family members were with her—and the old woman in the next bed was the one who told the nurse to remove the body because it was starting to smell.
When I heard the news I became so distressed I had to leave work and go home to lie down.
My father was the one who had called to let me know. “You don’t have to go to the funeral,” he said. When I was a child, and then when I was older, I used to daydream about her dying. I told my father I had no intention of going to the funeral.
My father and I had never really spoken about the years I lived with her as a child, when he was working abroad. Sometimes, one of us would obliquely refer to her things—“He looks like the dog your grandmother brought home one day when I was in middle school” or “That shed looks like the outhouse at Grandmother’s house”—but these were comments to which neither of us expected a reply.
My husband came home early that day. My father must have called him at work. He came into the bedroom, where I was lying with my eyes open, and he sat down next to me and took me by the hand.
I don’t know what he thought I was feeling. He knew that I had spent my childhood in the care of my grandmother, and also that I never talked about her and had never once gone to see her. So he must have understood something. But I cannot possibly discuss my memories with him. I can picture his round, well-meaning face puckering up in sympathy, and I would have to get up and leave.
“I have experienced terrible events in my life as well, you know,” he said to me when he was first trying to ask questions about my childhood and I would just look at the floor and not respond. He was talking about the death of his mother, which I am sure was very sad and scarred him to a sympathy-inducing degree, but he would not understand what I went through living with my grandmother. Most people have no capacity for comprehending true darkness, and then they try to fix it anyway.
He is a person who expects people to be kind because he is kind. When he drinks or watches a movie, he will say sentimental things that will make me embarrassed for him. If we are in a group setting, I become deeply ashamed. I married him because I was tired and it was already too late for me, even though I was still so young.
* * *
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AT NIGHT, when my husband is sleeping next to me, I often become so claustrophobic that I have to walk downstairs and go sit on the top step of the front stairs of our office-tel. Our street is so full of life at night that it wipes my thoughts clean.
If it is a weekday, the girls who live above me usually start trickling home around 11 P.M. They look so quiet and cold no matter the weather and they nod at me and whisper hello under their breath. Sometimes I say hello back and sometimes I look away. They don’t know that I have been waiting for them to come home.
On weekends, I occasionally catch them on their way out. But the best is when I hear them knocking on each other’s doors to borrow makeup or order fried chicken together at strange hours of the day.
Until they come home, I sit on the stoop and watch passersby. During the day ours is an ugly street, washed out and dusty with trash piled up and cars honking and trying to park in odd corners, but at night, the bars light up brilliantly with neon signs and flashing televisions. In the summer, they set up blue plastic tables and stools outside and I can hear parts of people’s conversations as they drink. Usually they are sharing anecdotes about the last time they drank together. Sometimes, men talk about the women they are seeing and vice versa, but a lot of times, conversation is about TV shows. It is astounding, how much people talk about TV.
Perhaps it’s because I spent most of my childhood without one—my grandmother smashed her television in one of her rages—but I still don’t know how to talk about dramas or actors, nor do I understand jokes from those reality shows. My husband thought this was charming when we first met and he would always try to work it into conversations somehow until I asked him to stop. Everyone who heard that small fact about me, though, assumed it was because my parents were focused on education—apparently there are many young parents these days who don’t allow televisions in the house because of their children. I understand how reality TV can damage your brain, because the way they replay the same punch line scenes with the laugh tracks over and over is enough to make one go mad. But when they hear the name of the provincial university I graduated from, they look at each other as if to say, See, this is why progressive parenting is risky.