Susan Lester
Belongings
At twenty, he has square feet and wide bones and thick coarse hair; a smile that, while slow, is generous. You want to pet him.
From all the bulk and fur of him you wouldn’t expect his hands, magician hands. Quick. He draws caricatures in charcoal, plays Bach on guitar, juggles bean-bags, and folds colored papers into deer and mice, cuts perfect stars with scissors in one snip, hiding, always hiding the effort.
“Ancient Oriental secret,” he tells you when you ask. Understand that he drills himself in skills, wrests them painfully from nothingness, trains his hands as if they are wild animals.
Maybe it was night and cold. (According to almanacs, it snows in Seoul.) Concealed by darkness she took him to the orphanage, laid him on a table cunningly designed to revolve, outside to in, accepting infants without revealing mothers. She walked home, still tender from the birthing.
He is seven months old when they send him to us on an airplane. We wait at the terminal to receive him, our son. Thirty babies are carried from the jumbo jet by men and women with dark hair, dark eyes. He is among them, asleep, full head of black hair sticking straight up, skin warm as a fever, voice deep when he murmurs. He doesn’t cry. They pass him to me. I cry. I undress him in the airport bathroom like a gift I can’t wait to open. His diaper is dry. My hands are shaking.
Maybe it was daylight and, unashamed, she strode to the orphanage to deposit him. She had meant the conception to be a tool with which she would pry open a distinguished place for herself. Too late, she saw it was her censure. She wiped her hands on her clothing going home.
His brother is inside my belly, a quick little fetus seven months old, conceived on the day we decided to adopt. Magic decision. He turns in my womb, taps at me from inside as if curious. I laugh. The Korean men smile for politeness when I laugh, not knowing the joke that is passing between my children.
Maybe she was charmed by a stranger, felt his love like the sun’s light and opened herself, morning flower that broke laws with its tenderness. That night when she walked to the orphanage, there were stars above her, stars whose light had begun many hundreds of years before. She knew about stars, she understood that many hundreds of years hence, this moment would be seen by the stars she saw now. Pure light.
They hand him to me, asleep, then bow. Two men. I look at them covertly. This is how my son will look someday, this tall, this dark, this broad of face.
Bewildered, he opens his eyes, dark eyes, so dark I can’t see pupils in them. He comes to me nuzzling his forehead in my neck, moving his head back and forth, back and forth, as if saying “No, no, no, no, no.” He lays his head against me then sleeps again. Once more, the men bow. They don’t know my tongue. We smile. We compare the name-bands on our wrists. Mine. His. Theirs. Yes, they match. We smile.
Maybe this was the punishment she meted out to her lover: to dispose of the object created by his passion and thus make all his passion negligible. Maybe on the way home she ate chocolate.
He is five and in school. He hates school. He says he fears he will fall out of line. On his first day, he asks me to pray to God to see if God can change his eyes. A child told him God could.
I pray a curse on the child who inaugurated this hope in him. I rake leaves in the yard for a week, turn soil, prune branches, master anger. I brush aside pebbles and branches and sticks to discover an ant hill from which emerge a thousand ants. Within seconds they have filed themselves into lines. I shift a stone to divert them. I uncover, with a start, a lemon-colored toy car in a square hole, a small pebbled driveway for its entrance, a pine-cone roof. I kneel and look, intrigued, my heart opened like a flower to the sunlight.
Maybe she was a New Woman, one who stepped away from the governing social order in which, ant-like, individuals served as cells of a greater organism. She was warned that when isolated, one died; when shamed, one lost her place. But she stood brave against it, loved a man despite it, bore a child because of it. In anger she conceived, in triumph gave birth; in hope she gave away her son to live where she believed he would be free.
He is a mewling infant with moist, soft skin, infected navel, self-containment. I do not know him yet. A foster family keeps him. Five sons. They carry him on their backs and feed him rice milk. They sleep with him on their heated floors and tease him so he moves his head back and forth, back and forth, as if saying “No, no, no, no, no.” Outdoors, the country smells of minerals and earth, inside, of boiled rice and tea and garlic.
Maybe she hid herself, magician girl, appeared always to be obedient, all the while breaking with the order that sustained her. She bowed as if she obeyed, but broke, then feared the law. She hid the hot fetus within her, the fetus that would cut her, like a sword, from her mother and her father and her husband-to-be. Isolated, she would die. She crept, terrified, to the orphanage’s turntable, hoping to abandon there, fear. But fear went home with her, and with it, grief.
He hoards things. I call him a pack rat, though he knows I’m intrigued by the things he keeps. He refuses to cut his thick horse-mane of hair. “Are you saving it for something?” I try to show reason.
“It’s only peach fuzz,” he answers. “Ancient Oriental peach fuzz.”
His room is a labyrinth of beautiful things: guitar, girlfriend’s pillow, drawing board, the I Ching, broken clock parts, Holy Bible, plastic jars, blue glass bits, stuffed dogs, burnt-edge corks, wooden boxes, rolls of tape, his baby blanket.
I kneel and look. This, I say, is because, at seven months, he knew that a person could lose everything, his people, his belongings, the smell of his ground, the hot floor where he sleeps, the white robes of ceremony, even the sound of his language. He does not know he remembers these things, or remember that he lost them. I do not remind him, but I let him hoard; I let him explain.
“What happened to your real mother?” asks Clark, blond four-year-old living next door.
“She died,” he says.
“So,” I say. And maybe she did. I would have.
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