Table for one, p.25
Table for One, page 25
It wasn’t really a question. She was trying to point something out. As soon as I nodded, she asked again.
“Then why did you draw a sun?”
“The sun is in the sky.”
“But you can’t see it at night.”
“It’s just our eyes that can’t see it,” I explained. “It’s there.”
The art teacher shook her head like that wasn’t the right answer. Then she asked about a girl I’d drawn walking down the street.
“Is she going home? Is she going to school?”
“She’s going to school.”
The art teacher snorted while smiling at me. She repeatedly gathered her black hair behind her as she asked about the girl again.
“Why would you go to school at night?”
I didn’t say anything. The art teacher was acting like I had some sort of impure intentions making this drawing. When she asked for a second time why my picture featured a sun instead of a moon, I held my ground.
“The sun and the moon are both in the sky,” I said. “They stay where they are—the earth is what moves. Why don’t you make us draw any of the things the earth rotates around?”
I shouted like Galileo, burning with conviction. The earth rotated, I was sure of it!
“But in a landscape, you draw what you see. I told you to make landscapes.”
My art teacher hit the glass surface of the desk, making a clacking noise. A sheet of paper bearing the words “Fourth Grade First Semester Art Curriculum” lay under the glass panel. I looked at it as I answered.
“You can make things up in a drawing, too.”
“This is a landscape drawing. Surrealism is next month.”
My art teacher spoke with an annoyed tone in her voice.
“And you couldn’t really say this is made-up. If something’s made-up, there has to be something special about it, right? Something that isn’t possible in our reality. Something like a flying carpet, or a time machine, or a city under the sea.”
My art teacher looked down at my picture like a person sitting in front of a bunch of food she couldn’t eat.
“Well, then, what category does my painting belong to?” I asked. “What kind of painting is it, exactly?”
“I’m just trying to explain things to you,” my art teacher retorted. “What are you doing now?”
“You said that there can’t be a sun in the night sky.”
I was using a black crayon to erase the sun in my picture.
“Is this okay?” I asked.
The red color of the sun mixed with the black crayon, so it looked like clouds or fog. Now my drawing was very realistic.
* * *
The art teacher sent a few of our landscape drawings to the children’s art competition being held by the local office of education. A few weeks later, I received yet another call to the faculty office. This time, the art teacher greeted me with a slightly friendlier expression on her face. She didn’t tap her desktop with her fingernails, and she didn’t pick on me by asking whether I had drawn night or day.
“Hongdo Park, you won the silver medal,” she said.
The drawing with an erased sun had won silver in the children’s art competition. If you looked at the drawing that had won gold, you could see that its sense of time was very exact. But as for creativity, there wasn’t any. To be fair, according to the art teacher’s logic, my picture wasn’t a landscape.
On the day of the exhibition, our house was abuzz with energy all morning. Mom wrestled with her hair dryer for thirty minutes before giving up and exasperatedly going to the hair salon. She also wrapped exactly one scarf around her neck, and that was enough to make her look like the kind of woman who wore a different scarf every day of the week. There was a strange piece of fabric wrapped around my art teacher’s neck as well. In order to stop the fabric from falling, she’d clasped a sparkling brooch to her clavicle. The whole way home, Mom kept talking about the brooch.
This time, neither Mom nor my homeroom teacher could avoid a face-to-face encounter. Neither of them brought up the April 19 incident. They artfully ignored the issue. My homeroom teacher welcomed Mom like he was seeing her for the first time, and Mom kept a straight face as well. If my teacher asked about what had happened, I was considering telling him that my mom and my aunt were twins. That made me feel really exhausted.
Afterward, my homeroom teacher walked us to the exit. I was acting shy, but Mom looked excited.
“How was it seeing my teacher for the second time?” I asked her once he was gone.
“Looking at him again, I realized he has a hook nose.”
“What’s a hook nose?” I asked. Mom took her hands off the steering wheel and pretended to draw an incline over her face. Just then, the car rattled as we went over a speed bump.
“The reason this street is bumpy is because it’s like a hook nose. People with hook noses are indecisive.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it didn’t give me a good feeling, so I changed the topic of conversation.
“Mom, my homeroom teacher is really talented,” I said. “Think about how he joined us in the middle of the semester.”
“That’s not talent, that just means he’s a short-term employee. Your homeroom teacher is a substitute teacher, you know?”
“What’s a substitute teacher?”
“A temporary one.”
Mom was bad-mouthing my teacher.
“Mom, my teacher drinks green juice every morning, too. He likes clean living.”
“Your homeroom teacher seemed stubborn,” she replied.
How did green juice equal stubbornness?
“You just said that he’s indecisive. How can indecisive people be stubborn?”
“Cause he’s got a hook nose.”
Sitting next to a matchmaker whose motivation was fading, Mom continued to reveal her pet theories about hook noses, like a quack physiognomist.
“How is class with the substitute?” she asked.
“The substitute? Mom, the way you’re talking about him is offensive!”
“What do you mean, the way I’m talking? Hongdo, you need to learn some manners yourself!”
I saw the cotton candy man’s motorcycle out the car window. He was starting the engine with a vroom, getting ready to go home. Food that normally felt like lies, food that was a lot less filling than it looked, suddenly seemed like it would really satisfy my hunger.
“Mom!” I shouted. “Stop for a minute!”
“Why?”
When I pointed to the cotton candy, Mom pressed down on the accelerator. The car left the alley in an instant. As I whined about how I was hungry, the following words flew out of her mouth: “Junk like that is all lies. It’s not even food.”
In the back mirror, I saw the splendid image of the cotton candy man on his way home. Cotton candies flanked him like ornaments, and he disappeared zigzagging between cars.
Honk honk!
Mom honked the horn and unrolled the car window. There was a man in a trench coat—probably a flasher—loitering to our left. He was always hanging around school, waiting to scare unsuspecting students. Now he was on his way to work, or maybe on his way home. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but his scruffy attire put him on Mom’s blacklist. She looked out the window and said the following: “The girls’ high school is the next block, the next block! Not this street.”
In that moment, the flasher looked like he was about to pull his pants down, so Mom pressed on the gas pedal again. I don’t know if he really went to the girls’ high school, but I didn’t see him in front of my school again for a while.
5. LIFE IS A PYRAMID SCHEME
I was an early bloomer. At the end of second grade, my chest began to swell, and I was worried about how big it would grow. I’d opened my mom’s dresser and saw how Mom’s bras ranged from A to C cup. How could even her underwear be inconsistent? I wondered. But the size I saw the most was C. Unless I was an aberration, I’d probably grow to be a C cup, too. Or, since I was a glutton for snacks, maybe I’d be a D cup. I didn’t know how I’d feel about it later, but having a voluminous body in fourth grade wasn’t very comfortable.
When I started to develop, some of the mean girls in my class would yell, “Mrs. Cow, Hongdo Park!” And sometimes they’d ask, with serious expressions on their faces, whether eating carrots really made your chest big. The boys would brush against the girls’ backs as they walked past us. Then they’d shout things like, “She’s wearing one!” and “She isn’t!” To the girls who were “wearing one,” they asked, “What cup size are you?”
Teen bras don’t usually close with a hook. Even when I wore one that had a band, though, if my outer clothing was thin and someone touched it, they could feel the fabric traversing my back. I hated that. One day, I went to school wearing my mom’s strapless bra that she taped to her chest, and I couldn’t sit up straight the entire day. My chest wasn’t big enough to wear a sticker bra, and after putting on the C-cup stickers, the breasts that I did have hurt, like the bra was pulling my skin off.
The boys’ curiosity reached its peak on the day of our physical examinations. They were somehow trying to figure out the circumference of the girls’ chests. A pretty pathetic task. I told one boy that, contrary to expectations, chest circumference consisted of breasts and back measured together, in centimeters. The kid listened to me intently before asking, “So what cup are you?”
“I heard that the art teacher is measuring chest circumference!”
As soon as someone said that, an outburst of student gossip erupted across the room. I wasn’t the only person to feel a strange sense of rivalry with the art teacher. The girls were embarrassed about having to lift up our shirts in front of her. Why did the art teacher have to measure our chests, and why with a cold tape measure?
Last time I’d gone with Mom to the doctor, she didn’t have to lift up the front of her shirt. The doctor held the stethoscope to her back, or maybe she’d placed the stethoscope on the outside of her clothes. I didn’t know why I was remembering that, but I hoped that the art teacher would do the same: measure my chest without making me lift up my shirt, or stand facing my backside. I just wanted her to respect my privacy.
“Are you not going to lift up your shirt?” the art teacher asked.
My privacy was gone in two seconds. I became a meek lamb, just like all the other girls who’d gone before me, and pulled my shirt up. Since it had come to this, I thought it would be nice if the art teacher would see my chest and realize that I wasn’t a kid anymore. Maybe the art teacher was flat chested. She’d see my chest and get irritated. Oh, she’d say. Since my chest was disproportionally large for someone my age.
“Hey, it’s over, kid!” she called out.
In another two seconds, my privacy was obliterated for the second time. The art teacher was already thrusting the tape measure at the girl behind me. I rushed to lower my shirt, my face flustered. We sat like products rolling down a conveyor belt, and the art teacher measured us to see if we met the standards.
“Hey, Hongdo Park!”
It was Minyeong Han. Running into Minyeong in the middle of the long hallway outside the examination room felt like meeting an enemy on a single-log bridge. I’d been in the same class as her in third grade, too, but this year, whenever she was in my presence, she’d just look at me and growl. Minyeong stuck out her sharp lips and spoke. I knew she wouldn’t have anything good to say.
“Hey, you stupid rooster! I heard your sitting height was crazy high.”
Of course.
“No it wasn’t.”
As I turned to leave, Minyeong called my name again and stopped me.
“Why, I heard that you had the tallest sitting height in our class? Even though you’re short.”
I quickly swiveled around.
“Don’t talk unless you have something nice to say,” I said.
Minyeong giggled noisily. I didn’t know what was funny. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing to laugh or if something actually was humorous.
“Does our homeroom teacher know about your height?” she taunted me. “Since you like him so much.”
I realized why Minyeong was nagging me. Minyeong was another one of the girls who liked the homeroom teacher. Among the girls, bras, periods, and cosmetic procedures were no longer the only subject of conversation: a new secret, our homeroom teacher, was emerging as a favored discussion topic.
“Oh, you’re embarrassed, aren’t you? I heard that last time in art class, you drew our teacher’s face.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Now you’re playing innocent! In art we were supposed to draw the face of a family member, but you drew our teacher’s face—did you think I didn’t know?”
The person I’d drawn in art class wasn’t our teacher, it was my dad. I’d realized that there weren’t many opportunities to talk about family at school, since we mostly gossiped about celebrities and clothing trends and dance moves. Kids spent the school day as fellow prisoners, and after class, we passed through the gates together, briefly making sugar candy and eating it before parting ways to our respective after-school tutoring programs. The next day, we’d convene at school and talk once again about celebrities and clothing and dances and teachers and the weird kids. At school and at home, I didn’t have the chance to talk about my dead father. Mom had once told me that if people were ever talking about fatherless children, I should tell them straightaway about Dad, but since first grade, the topic had never come up. There was no reason to talk about children without fathers, and I had no one to tell my story to. Even the people who had found out, like Jinu, were too busy to care. At least my lack of a father wouldn’t cause other kids to tease me. There were other things that made you a target of bullying. Like if you were fat or didn’t dress well, or if something you did bothered people. And now Minyeong Han seemed to think that I was an enemy on the front lines of her relationship.
“It’s not what you think it is,” I told her. “Even if I explain, you won’t understand. I’ll be wasting my breath.”
I turned to walk away as soon as I finished talking, but for some reason my feet wouldn’t move. Maybe I really was a rooster, ready to fight. I looked like I was waiting for an excuse to shut Minyeong’s trap for good. For better or for worse, she had a personality similar to mine. I figured I’d just leave if I could make it through the next five seconds. But after exactly three seconds, Minyeong starting gabbing again.
“Hey, you! Stop being like this.”
Sheesh. As soon as my feet touched the hallway floor, my center of gravity shifted, and I faltered. Two more girls came up and encircled us. They weren’t on my side. Minyeong was full of confidence.
“Did you hear?” she asked the other girls. “Hongdo Park said she’s in love with the homeroom teacher.”
It seemed like there was a fire in my chest, growing red-hot. The girls were giggling. I wanted to grab their long hair, but I controlled myself. I took a step forward, barely lifting my feet off the ground. Then two steps. When I was ten steps away, I could hear Minyeong and the two girls next to her murmuring behind me. I didn’t understand exactly what they were saying. But a few words flew at me like an axe and stuck in my back. The axe was an order. Turn around!, it said.
I turned and made a screeching noise that rang down the hallway. All my eyes could see was Minyeong Han’s talkative mouth. She quieted. Until now, I’d never been proud of having large breasts, and the words that came out of my mouth were an exception to how I normally felt.
“Your chest is tiny!”
Minyeong flinched, dumbfounded by the unexpected attack. One of the friends by her side started laughing. Anyone who saw us could tell that my insult was perfect, absurd as it was. Minyeong started chattering again, just as annoyingly as before.
“I’m going to be a model, so it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a chest. And I’m way taller than you, you know?”
You could smell the flames coming out the top of her head. She seemed fragile enough that now anyone who came at her for a fight could have won. I’d already hit Minyeong’s weak point. I could have turned around and left, but a sense of competition flared inside me. I was filled with a previously unknown pride in my voluptuous figure. The voluptuous bad girl inside me spoke.
“So what? Boys don’t care. At least, it’s not what our teacher likes.”
“What are you saying?” Minyeong asked, a little flustered. I wanted to turn around at this point, but my stupid busty alter ego kept going.
“Our homeroom teacher: he said that a little while ago. He said that women who are skinny and flat chested as chopsticks smell like fish. Anyone who looks at you knows you’re flat chested. You can go jump off a cliff, little princess!”
The future model flopped on the ground. She broke into tears. It was silly. Fiery energy was still burning above my head, ready to go, but now I’d barely started and Minyeong Han was already crying. She couldn’t even insult me: Why had she bothered attacking?
On the way home, I showed Jinu my sketchbook.
“Hey, who do you think this is?” I asked.
Jinu spoke without looking at it for long. “Is it our teacher?”
I looked at my sketchbook for a long time. Our homeroom teacher’s face was familiar, but the memory of my dad’s face was muddied, so I couldn’t know whether or not they resembled each other. It felt like my white notebook had a black ribbon wrapped around it, like it was a funerary portrait, and I quickly closed it.
* * *
As he switched repeatedly from hat to scars and then back to hat, the cotton candy man’s popularity fell. The pink baseball cap was a symbol of defeat and degradation. The cotton candy man, who’d apparently worked full-time in front of our school for the past twenty years, tried various promotions to recover lost business. One of them was a special deal: bring two friends with you and one eats for free. A sign attached to the front of his cart read: “2 + 1 Free.”
