Our Country Friends(7)

A sheepdog was pacing up and down the perimeter, yapping her head off about something, the sheep arrayed behind her watching the commotion patiently, assured by their leader’s presence. Karen could make out a lone, tiny figure moving about in the incumbent dusk on the Senderovsky side of the fence and began to walk toward it, entranced. Why had she come here? The official version was to see her friends, whom she felt she had neglected since her success. Though the last time she had spoken to Vinod it was hard to contain her sadness. And her anger. Even after he had lost part of his lung to cancer, he was still working in his uncle’s greasy kitchen. It was as if he was taunting her with how his life had turned out. She came close to actually offering him money or a make-work job—in other words, to breaking his heart. Well, better his heart than his remaining lung. His heart had proved quite resilient over the years despite everything Karen had done to it. So, again, why had she come here?

    The version she told herself, the unofficial one, was that she wanted to see the Actor. It was true that in her new life she got to see a lot of famous people, but she had loved him since that first movie back in the late nineties, the one where he danced naked in that stupid hat, instantly her generation’s darling. The idea of mixing in the Actor with the desperate charm of Sasha’s bungalow colony had moved her to rent a car and leave the canceled city. Even during the drive up on the empty scenic highway, she had found herself placing one hand on the inside of her thigh, her breath unexpectedly warm, her upper lip scented like spring.

So there was an official reason for her visit and the unofficial one. But, former adjunct professor and current kitchen boy Vinod would ask, which one was true?

Now the prancing figure became clear: It was a boy, and he seemed to be—what? Her eyesight was getting worse now, especially in the dark. She was a year older than both Sasha and Vinod, which meant her fifties would be upon her in a matter of months not years. But no, as clear as a fading country day, the boy was prancing, dancing, clapping his hands, punching the air martial-arts style, while singing in a sweet girlish voice as the dog yapped her unheeded warnings and her charges watched raptly, too startled to baa.

When she heard the lyrics, Karen laughed out loud, much in the same way she had when her now ex-husband Leon had served her with divorce papers or when her lawyer presented her with an initial offer for her company. Her childhood had passed with almost no surprises, an endlessly swinging pendulum of parental insults and popular culture, being yelled at downstairs, self-soothing upstairs. (At least, her parents would have pointed out, there had been stairs, unlike her poorer relations in their cramped Elmhurst apartments.) The words the boy was singing were unmistakably in her mother’s tongue, followed by the English chorus: I’m so sick of this fake-ah love, fake-ah love, fake-ah love. It was a boy-band pop hit from maybe two summers ago. She remembered hearing it on repeat while shopping for her deadbeat relatives at Lotte World, back when she had gone to Seoul to receive a week’s worth of adulating press coverage for being a prized sample of her people, a daughter of Daehan Minguk made good.

    The proto-Korean boy was wearing a cute white V-neck cardigan, tan slacks, and what looked like an adult tie that reached down to his thighs. A Korean school uniform gone off the rails. Karen was surprised but also not. Everything that happened within Senderovsky’s orbit was always a little strange.

“Hi!” Karen shouted to the boy. There was no answer. Did he not speak English (beyond “fake-ah love”)? “Annyonghaseo!” Karen shouted. The child looked up, waved, then went back to his prancing and singing. The sheepdog now registering two enemies, one of them larger than herself, began to growl, fury turning to menace, and the sheep started to bleat in response, even though some continued to chew mouthfuls of grass through their panic. And then Karen recognized something in the boy, the oval of the face, the elongated but stocky legs, the flare of the nose, this exact child who’d sat on Senderovsky’s lap several years ago on the covered porch as he tried to explain—in a borderline racist way—how his daughter bore all the trademarks of the region around Harbin by the Chinese-Russian border, from whence she had been adopted.

“Natasha?” Karen said. The child kept dancing. The sheepdog and her charges now formed an angry dialogue, both with their perceived enemies and with one another, a shaken neoliberal confronting a steadfast one. “Natasha!”

“I go by Nat now,” the child said, in between verses, thrusting out her chest, chastely pumping her hips, her moves too practiced to be real. Unbidden, Karen remembered the theme song to a television show improbably titled Happy Days, and how much it had meant to dance to it in her bedroom almost half a century ago, belly full with her mother’s ramyeon. Saturday, what a day, groovin’ all week with you.

“Nat, where’s your mommy?” Karen asked. “And daddy?” she added.

    The child waved in the direction of the House on the Hill. “I like your new bob,” Karen said. No answer. “Let’s go home and get something to eat. I just drove up from the city and I’m starving.”

“No, thanks.” The child sounded out of breath, but spoke firmly. She might have been going for hours.

“Your parents might be worried,” Karen said. She took a step and grabbed one little hand. “I insist,” she said. The child looked up, mouth pursed in anger. “Hey, I’m your aunt Karen,” she said. “We played with my phone on the porch last time I was here. You remember me?”