GREASE AND OTHER KINDS OF VISCOUS MISERY

What’s strange is the way we talk about it by not talking about it. I join in, eat my cereal, and quietly read the back of the box while he spills some artificial sweetener into his coffee. The trees outside roar with laughter. They are happy just because the sun is out.

“Can’t do that,” I say. And they quiet down.

My dad eats fried chicken out of cardboard buckets as though he’s trying to prove he’s from the south. This addiction is comfortable and under the circumstances wildly acceptable. In the span of ten years his older sister had died of a heart attack and then another sister had a stroke and then his brother, the oldest, had a stroke as well.

Last year my dad began losing feeling in his feet and complained of blind spots in his vision, and then, a week after a lonely Thanksgiving, he had a heart attack too. It made him feel closer to his extended family, he said.

We spent a lot of time together that first summer after my mom left. I didn’t want to stay at school. I was tired of feeling logy and constantly hungry from all the drinking and pot smoking, plus I knew my dad needed help with the small things—keeping up with his laundry, cutting the grass, getting into bed by nine so that we could wake up and open the store on time.

After I came back we talked about her absence and the heart attack all the time, while herding crumbs off the table, while watching the Weather Channel, while silently deciding whose turn it was to call the pool man about the broken pipe that was flooding the yard and drowning the grass.

The trees are being loud again.

“It’s raining!” They announce. “Our roots run so deep. What could be better?”

The convenience store is the biggest inconvenience in my dad’s life and I was expected to work there while living back at home.

“Candy’s here,” he says.

I looked at the stack of candy I had been refilling since I was six. I could switch out Charleston Chew with one hand and my eyes closed. I pull out a box cutter from my back pocket and flip it a few times like a drummer with a drumstick. I miss and it drops to the floor and skitters until it hits a patch of red dirt caked onto the linoleum. My mom had always mopped at the end of the day. I pick up the cutter and kick at the dirt to loosen it.

“We should mop!” I shout to my dad. He’s standing at the counter, eyeing a kid at the soda fountain.

“You mean you should mop.”

The kid pops a lid onto the soda, strips a straw, and pokes it in. He walks up to my dad and dumps a pocketful of change onto the counter. My dad counts it quickly, efficiently, like it’s in his blood. He doesn’t look up once.

The customers slog in and out, mumbling about it being the worst summer ever. It reminds me of a Camus story where the man is blinded by the sun and shoots someone because the heat is clogging his brain. People walk slowly, zombie-like. We do not complete thoughts, much less speak.

My dad refuses to turn on the air conditioning, so when I finish the candy I head to the cooler. I prop up a few cases of beer to sit on and don’t bother turning on the light. It smells like wet cardboard and rancid yeast and somehow this comforts me. The smell of spilt beer is stronger than I remembered and I realize that it’s because my mom wasn’t around to clean it or to tell my dad to clean it.

I watch as a customer walks up and grabs a soda. She stands with the door open for a moment, savoring the cool air. Her mouth falls open as she closes her eyes and for a moment we share the same heaven.

On the way home my dad grumbles about the kids being out of school for break. They steal candy when he’s not looking and then when he tries to stop them, they just run. He wants to install rounded mirrors at every corner, but that will cost more money, even more money than he is losing from the stealing. I say that the mirrors are a good idea; if anything, it would cause paranoia, make the kids feel like they are being watched.

Staring at the brown yards as we approach our neighborhood, we talk, but not about the things we need to talk about. We continue with the heat, the mosquitoes. He pulls into the drive-through of his favorite fast-food restaurant and orders the only thing that brings him joy. I want to make him promise not to have another heart attack, to admit that he has been defeated by my mom’s departure. I want to make it through the summer without having to talk to a doctor again.

When we arrive at our driveway all I can hear is the crackle of rocks under the wheels of our car. I ask the trees why they are so quiet lately.

“Too hot,” they say, “it hurts to talk.” And they’re right. Even after the sun was gone, you could still hear a sizzling in the air.

At home we discuss things in silence. I chew the chicken with my mouth open, not wanting to taste imminent death. The skewered corn leaks butter onto the mail. Neither of us do anything about it.

We clean up, and when I come back into the house after taking out the garbage, he is already asleep on the couch, a bottle of aspirin on the coffee table in front of him. The remote control is balanced in his outstretched hand, perpendicular to his body as though he was about to hand it to somebody.

I lace up my sneakers and step out for a walk in the nice and well-wooded suburban neighborhood that we are no longer part of.

“Why do you do that?” the trees ask. “Why do you let him eat that crap?”

I don’t bother to answer. I preoccupy myself with the fireflies grinning with light.

The day the letter comes, the newspaper headlines mention E. coli at the water park. It was the end of August, high poop season for kids in the water. Now everyone was sequestered at home in the air conditioning, tugging at the straws in their slushies bought at our store. The letter was addressed to my dad, so I don’t touch it. It stays with the other mail for days, collecting grease and other kinds of viscous misery.

Then it was gone.

Once, my dad had asked me to measure the gas in the gas tanks: Regular Unleaded, Super Unleaded, Premium. I felt like I was taking the temperature of the earth, and each time I’d pull the long measuring stick out of the deep tanks beneath the canopy, I would check the numbers and diagnose it with an ailment. On this particular day, when I looked up I saw my mom being escorted into a police car. She saw me looking and shrugged her shoulders.

My dad often tells me that being humble is one of the most important things in life. The most fruitful rice plant is the one that dips closest to the ground, and in Korea the person who bows deepest has the most to offer. My mom thought that my dad was too proud to ever admit when he was wrong. When he bowed, he only bent over further than the other person because he had back problems from being overweight. My mom, she never took things very seriously.

I asked the police officer leaning on the car what had happened.

“She sold cigarettes to a customer without checking I.D.,” he said, nodding at a guy talking on the payphone. He looked like he was twelve.

“He looks young. She really had no excuse.”

When I walked back into the store I checked to see if the same “We I.D. It’s the Law” sign was still taped onto the counter. It was, so I found a black marker and added some exclamation points to the end. Now it read: “We I.D. It’s the Law!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?” The question mark was an exclamation point that got twisted with the texture of the clear tape. I decided not to change it.

After that she lived with her family in Korea for a month and then moved to California. Her address was somewhere in the southernmost part of the state, but further inland, near the desert.

I imagine the trees are quiet where she lives. No weeping willows, no dogwoods or magnolias. They seemed scattered about and lonely, especially the gnarled and ugly Joshua Trees.

“The divorce is killing him,” I say out loud. I am sitting at the edge of the pool smoking a joint; my legs are in the water up to my knees. I can hear my dad turning on the television as he drifts into another food coma. The weather report comes on. It will be ungodly hot for the rest of the summer, the average high over a hundred degrees. The woman reporting fakes incredulity. I want her to tell the truth, that we had been judged and were fast approaching hell.

“I’m not sure what to do.” I look up through the vertical tunnel of trees to the tiny patch of open sky. It had been my mom’s idea to move into this particular house, because of all the trees. Unlike the other houses in the neighborhood, ours sat further back and was almost embedded in the woods, as though we were hiding.

When I get no answer, I dip the tip of the joint into the water, rest it on the concrete and jump in. When I emerge, it is still quiet except for the hum of the recently fixed water pump. I wipe my hair away from my face and notice that my arms are sore from bagging ice all day. I slowly, methodically, pull off my bathing suit and toss it in the direction of my towel. I can just make it out as my eyes adjust to the darkness. I swim back to where I had left my joint, relight it, and inhale until I feel the burn on my fingers. Then, with my toes grazing the bottom of the pool, I move towards the deeper water where I will feel most buoyant and closest to nothing.

When I was eight, our house caught on fire. A pilot light had kissed the Christmas ornaments and set other the holiday decorations ablaze before creeping into our bedrooms.

I was in class scrutinizing the anatomy of a frog when I was called into the principal’s office. When I arrived, she immediately took my hand and drove me in her car to the blackened remains of my house. The firefighters were pulling furniture out of the living room to protect it from further smoke damage. The ivory keys on the upright piano were distorted like melted candy. The goldfish that had lived on top of the piano swam in its bowl at the corner of the driveway.

My dad was talking to a firefighter, gesturing at the side of the house with the most damage. He looked calm. When he saw me, he walked over and started stroking my head. “It’s going to be all right,” he said, “I have homeowner’s insurance.” I nodded, having no idea what that meant.

I surveyed the woods surrounding the house. The trees were not happy. For them, fire meant renewal. Only trees in the west caught fire regularly, and when they did, entire forests were incinerated, but I didn’t tell them that. Trees are very loud when they cry.

“We only got a little singed,” said the pear tree, disappointed. It sat just outside of my bedroom.

Soon after I got there, my mom pulled up. She had locked up the store in the middle of the day, the first and only time that would ever happen. She ran up to my dad and me, worry bursting from her face.

A firefighter carried a small box over to where we were standing in the driveway. He held it up. “Yours?” he asked.

My mom reached out, shaking. It was hers, yes. She opened it slowly, revealing the things my father had given her over the years, starting from the time they’d met in Korea. She began to cry.

My dad spoke to her in Korean. “It’s okay. We will clean up and begin rebuilding tomorrow.”

The three of us stood and watched the smoke rise from the extinguished remains of the house, floating up as though running away from the earth.

by Charlene Kwon