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“Sometimes, agreeing to the same lie is what makes a family family, Margot.”
Beauty is a construct, but theory is not the reality we live, she thought.
Theory didn’t live in the bones. Theory didn’t erase the years of self-scrutiny in a mirror and not seeing anyone at all, not a protagonist or a beauty, only a television sidekick, a speechless creature, who at best was “exotic,” desirable but simple and foreign.
She had always counted on one more hour, one more day, one more year to explain herself to her mother, to tell her that she loved her more than anyone in the world but could never live around her, never live under the same roof with her again.
How much language itself was a home, a shelter, as well as a way of navigating the larger world.
Growing up American was all about erasing the past—lightly acknowledging it but then forgetting and moving on.
Maybe it was not mainstream, maybe it was not seen with any compassion or complexity on television or in the movies, because it represented all that middle-and upper-class people, including Margot, feared and therefore despised: a seemingly inescapable, cyclical poverty. But in actuality this was the American dream for which people toiled day and night. People had left their homelands to be here, to build and grow what they loved—family, friendship, community, a sense of belonging. This was their version of the dream.
Because their life would be part of the lie that this country repeated to live with itself—that fairness would prevail; that the laws protected everyone equally; that this land wasn’t stolen from Native peoples; that this wealth wasn’t built by Black people who were enslaved but by industrious white men, “our” founders; that hardworking immigrants proved this was a meritocracy; that history should only be told from one point of view, that of those who won and still have power. So the city raged. Immolation was always a statement.
And the whole world told women every day, If you are alone, you are no one. A woman alone is no one at all.
Maybe it was the tiniest of things, at times, on a consistent basis, that kept us alive, and if she could not create such kindnesses for herself, couldn’t she allow someone else to do so for her?
But the past always had a way of rising back again when so many of the questions had remained unanswered, wrongdoings remained unacknowledged, when a country torn by a border had continued for decades to be at war with itself. Both the living and the dead remained separated from each other, forever unsettled.
“Well, something I learned is you don’t have to know where you are going to, you know, enjoy yourself a little, have a good time.”
Pages on pages like teeth once white, now yellowed. How a book was kind of like a mouth. Did stories keep us alive or kill us with false expectations? It depended on who wrote them perhaps.
Perhaps that was the life of any woman like her mother, a woman who was poor and in so many ways powerless but nonetheless persisted like a kind of miracle, a defiance against the world.
Something about this country made it easy to forget that we needed each other.
Women like herself rarely wore red lipstick, not only because a woman who wore it called attention to her face—carved with lines by a life of working long hours—but because red lipstick required the wearer to be vigilant about where they placed their hands on themselves, so as not to mess up or smudge their mouths, vigilant about the lining of their lips so that the color wouldn’t bleed into the tiny cracks that formed as time went by, as they had on both Mina’s and Mrs. Baek’s. But
Their decisions would always be scrutinized by the levels at which they were able to sacrifice themselves, their bodies, their pleasures and desires. A woman who imagined her own way out would always be ostracized for her own strength. Until one day they found each other by some kind of magic or miracle or grace—here now. They were safe.
Makeup expressed a desire to be seen while providing some camouflage as well.
Nature in its most extreme forms taught us that there was a design greater than us, and we could unburden ourselves briefly from our individuality in this world, our self-importance. Wasn’t that the relief?
The closest proximity to which she could attain this feeling in her everyday life must have been under God’s roof in a cathedral, where the vaulted ceiling, that arch, was a refuge in which the entire universe, in the form of prayer and song, hummed. Beauty was safety. Beauty kept us from harm.
In this country, it was easier to harm someone else than to stay alive. It was easier to take a life than to have one. Was she finally an American?
She lifted her face, revealing the depth of how crushed she had been, how so much of her life had been about finding beauty and wholeness, the kind of meaning that stories gave us, gluing herself back together—the perfectly lined red lips, the dark crescents for brows, the shimmering brown eyeshadow on her lids—after being smashed by the circumstances of her life over and over again.
“Did you push her?” Margot asked. “I didn’t think... It all happened so quickly.” Her voice broke. “Did you push her?” Margot repeated. Mrs. Baek nodded yes. Margot burst into tears.
Choosing if and when and how to share the truth might be the deepest, most painful necessity of growing out into the world and into yourself.
Sometimes we wrongly guessed how much others could bear. It was in the curve of a question mark—should I or shouldn’t I?—in which we all lived.
Wasn’t that the thing with words? It wasn’t just their surfaces—sometimes serene and shimmering, others violent, crashing, and brash—but what they, when carefully considered, conveyed: we are more than friends. We’re family.
She had always been embarrassed when her mother had given people such odd and practical “Korean gifts”—the boxes of apples or even laundry detergent—when in reality, outside of America, these objects might have some rich symbolic relevance that perhaps Margot didn’t understand.
Forgiveness was always a possibility.
