Householder
My family house has devoured Mother and Father and their master bedroom. Along with them are gone: one expensive stone bed, an assortment of Father’s silk ties, one mirrored vanity with velvet-lined drawers, powder-flecked brushes with which I used to stroke my cheeks for a quick waft of Mother’s skin-scent. On TV, suited anchors discuss receding Korean shorelines. My dog drools attentively on his side of the couch. The wall where there used to be the master bedroom door now shows but blurry wrinkles of a doorframe. They look like a square surgical wound, soft at the edges. The night before she disappeared, Mother defended the house: “You can’t blame the aging for her appetite.” Father chimed in, “Or for a decline in his height.”
I’m still upset that they never took part in accusing the house. Can we do something about the reduced value of this hard-won property? Who would pay for a house that denies its responsibility to stay the same? Even our real estate agent, whom we consulted after the house ate its first room out of three beds, could not refute. I ranted into the phone: we could have brought elephants in the house and made it suffer too. It’s not the agent’s fault, I knew, the house has belonged in my family for three generations. I’ve spent my entire life—twenty-eight years—in this house, no major problem whatsoever. Why the sudden change? I can’t shake the feeling that I have something to do with it. From the outside, the house has remained seemingly unchanged, as if it’s contracting only on the inside in order to digest something disagreeable, a stomach hard at work.
It has been a week since I ended up with a one-bedroom shrinking at a growing pace, but my dog still barks at the walls and wants to get out at all times. Every morning before heading to work, I let him loose in our garden thick with celandines and toads that look like judgmental house sitters. The toads understand my family house is slowly disappearing on me. Ready to take over, those condescending fuckers. If the house hadn’t swallowed my good judgment in sleep, I would have packed up and left a long time ago.
Instead of moving out, I look up recipes for soy-sauce-marinated crabs. September never truly arrives until the scent of Mother’s marinated crabs fills the house. After a long day working at the post office, I meander my way to the night market. Ms. West-sea wrestles eight wriggling crabs in black plastic bags; her only son owns a seafood restaurant named West Sea where my parents and I used to dine. “Why don’t you get some prawns,”
she says, wiping her hands on her red rubber apron. “Make your parents happy.” After a muttered “not today,” I hurry away. This is the deepest the neighborly affection of a small village runs: we encroach on our neighbors just enough to make a living out of one another.
When I enter the front gate, the house looks more or less the same on the façade. I almost stomp on my dog lying on his side nearby. At the sight of me, he begins to wag his tail, slapping the footstone path each flick. “Time to go back inside,” I coax, but the dog’s eyes stay fixed on the gate I’ve just stepped through. His paws have turned brown from digging along the stone wall. His name has faded from my memory, but I’m not sure if it’s the house that took this morsel of information. I do know what I would have named my dog: Muffin. A small, round-headed lump of tan furs rising and falling on the couch. I try the name out on my tongue: “Muffin.” My dog jerks his head up, but budges no more while I go into the house, place the crabs in the sink under running water, and come back out to carry him indoors. On the living room table lies an unfinished letter I’ll send to N in the army, as I do on a monthly basis. Ever since we began a long-distance relationship, I have been writing to him, only to be rewarded with his handwriting no more decipherable than smudges left by dead flies. Most of his letters are now lost. The house, a few weeks ago, wolfed down the attic where I used to keep them. Right after it happened, N and I had one of our rare phone calls. When I explained how I’d lost the letters, how claustrophobic I’d come to feel in the house, N said: “Now you understand how I would have felt sitting in that cockpit.” Which referred to that time when he’d been training to be a freight plane pilot, until he gave in to his claustrophobia. N repeated, “Now you know,” sounding resentful. I wondered if N had known all along, or ever suspected, that I always thought of a teenage fling whenever writing to N. After all those years, this fling was still the only thing that inspired me to write love letters. N clung to that day in the cockpit, seven miles up in the air, as evidence that life once amounted to something more than what it is now; I to that fling with a guy whose face I no longer remember; Muffin to televised happy picnickers.
Muffin has burrowed in the leather folds of the couch’s armrest by the time I’ve finished rinsing the crabs. “Better to freeze the crabs first,” Mrs. Gong said early that week while I helped her fill in an international mail form. She regularly sends a huge box of Korean foods to her daughter studying for a PHD in America, and knows everything about food. Her last piece of advice, before walking off: “If you marinate them alive, the flesh will melt and taste bitter.”
The crabs fumble over each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces come to life with frothy mouths. I put them one by one in a plastic container, latch the lid on, and put it in the freezer.
Only then do I discover my bedroom door does not completely open because of one shrunken wall. With Father’s screwdriver I unhinge the door. Lug the door outside and lean it against the stone wall. Some small garden animals might find a home under its cover. When I look in the freezer, the crabs are still scratching at the container’s translucent walls. I wonder if the house is watching me, too.
The house, though reduced to a more manageable size, still needs some cleaning from time to time. Since the walls started inching towards the center of the house, eating away at each room, the house has dragged dust bunnies from all corners. In this sparsely populated village, I have no nextdoor neighbor who might complain about nighttime noises. More often than not, I have insomniac nights. So I clean my house at odd times of the night, and this is when a friend of mine, from the other side of the globe, calls me for her afternoon chat.
“How’s your adolescent house doing,” is the way she begins our conversation now, in a slightly mocking tone. When I first broached the shrinking house, she responded without shock in her voice, despite all the empathetic phrases. I could easily guess what she actually wanted to say: “But your house doesn’t have cancer like I do, and it is only your house that is dying on you.” She told me to think of it as the house going through an extreme version of puberty: that explains away the retreat into oneself. Of course the house wants to destroy whatever shifts and uses its body, she snapped. “You shit in it, you use fire in it, you snore in it, you period in it, of course it doesn’t want you in it.” Naturally, I haven’t told her the house has eaten not only my parents but also a lot of other things I’ve forgotten for no reason. I only remember what I’ve lost: negotiation skills at marketplaces, the correct use of eye drops, the taste of poppy whiskey that my grandparents used to make me drink to dull my headache before it was illegal, hours in Mother’s lap I know took place, gradations of love, polite ways to stay away from friends.
Most of the time, I listen to her talk. Most of the time, the talk is on three things, each time spiced up with anecdotes of her acquaintances and slightly different conversational routes. (1) She doesn’t want her illness to be her defining characteristic. But I’ve actually had to constantly remind myself of her pancreatic cancer as if it’s an essentially irrelevant factor in our friendship. I blame it on the house, I blame it on my recent forgetfulness, disregarding that I seem to be even more forgetful of other people’s suffering. (2) It is way too expensive to rent even the shittiest studio in New York. Though I would rather have a stabilized studio in the City than a shrinking house in a provincial seaside village in South Korea. (3) She misses Korea, especially its universal healthcare. Though, whenever she gets to that point,
I feel compelled to talk about my past part-time job as a bartender at a local bar. The long hours at the post office, the unlivable wage.
But then I think: what’s the point? So I talk about the crabs instead. How I failed at my first attempt but am soon going to get another batch and try again. Crabs don’t taste the same in America, my friend says. She sighs emphatically into the phone: “Aren’t you so lucky.”
With a threadbare broom clutched in one hand, I stare down at the still half-written letter to N I left on the couch. The broom’s thatch brush has caught some short curly strands of hair, which I’m not sure are from Mother or from Muffin. While my friend labors out another sigh, I try to remember why I loved N. What he means. The rest of his name, at the very least.
When I go back to the night market for crabs, Ms. West-sea asks after my parents. “It’s been so long since I chatted with your mom,” she tells me while I glare into the glass tank full of small octopuses. “Don’t you need more?” she keeps insisting. “Eight marinated crabs for a family of three, that’s not enough.”
“I want to keep the number small for now,” I reply. “In case I fail again.” I leave before she can start lecturing on the fermenting process. The ratio of soy sauce and water, one to three. Thirty-six hours of marination, forty minutes of boiling, then another thirty-six hours of marination. I know all about it by now.
When I enter the front gate, the house looks more or less the same on the façade. I almost stomp on my dog lying on his side nearby. His paws have turned brown from digging along the stone wall, where a line of small mounds of mud has appeared. The dog’s name has faded from my memory, but I know what I would have named him: Muffin.
I try the name out on my tongue: “Muffin.”
My dog jerks his head up at the sound but does not follow me into the house.
When my second batch of frozen crabs is ready for their first marination, I bring home a wavy-haired guy I’d met in my weekend swimming class. My friend in New York hasn’t called me for more than a week, and I suspect something’s happened; there’s no mutual friend of ours to confirm that, though. As the guy’s teeth bite down on my lip, I let that first wave of guilt sweep aside the guilt about my friend. I also need something to fill my letter to N with, even if that is a confession about my infidelity. It’s that or never finishing the letter, I’ve decided. The house has eaten my shame, and perhaps my vague identity as a romantic partner. More than the letter, I’ve found myself longing to fill my shrinking bedroom—now barely bigger than my bed—with the presence of another talking, moving, metabolizing
person. While the guy’s curls rub against my shoulder blades, his elbows creasing my bedsheets, I think of the crabs in the kitchen waiting to be marinated. Their cold bodies atop each other, legs over many other hardshelled legs. Some of them will turn out to contain eggs, a yellow burst of savory bitterness when their shells get cracked open. I crane my neck to meet the guy’s lips when he presses for another wet kiss. Without teeth, only gentle tongues this time. It makes me want to ask: would you like to exchange some childhood stories afterward? But I don’t. Those crabs with eggs, I think, will need more tending to.
After the guy drifts off to sleep, I make the stock for the crabs. Leave them soaking up the concoction of soy sauce and dried anchovies and a lot of onions. Fall asleep on the couch, without finishing the letter, though close enough. That night, all through my dog’s occasional whimpers, I dream of N—his lean thighs against mine. Over his shoulder, I catch a glimpse of my friend in New York and try to reach her. When I stretch my hand out, my pointer finger springs to the length of my leg like a tapeline, shoots right through N’s earlobe. N holds me lovingly while I keep trying to grasp at my friend, pleading: “Would you move over a little, just a little.”
In the morning, I discover my bedroom has disappeared. Did the guy leave before the house gulped him down? If he didn’t, would this count as murder? I don’t know where to look for the answer. I make a slow way around the house, one hand traveling on its wall. From where there used to be my bedroom to the kitchen. No, where there used to be the kitchen. My legs feel as if they will buckle, as my hand traces the ghostly remnants of the kitchen door. The doorframe wrinkles feel to the touch like the surface of a hard-frozen, sinewy meat. Why couldn’t you at least leave me those marinated crabs, I want to ask the house. My dog nudges my ankle with his nose, sniffing for breakfast.
My head against the wall, I cry and cry and cry.
By now, the house remembers a lot more about the narrator than the narrator herself does. Before she returned to live with her parents after a brief stint at college, way before she made up her mind to work at the post office, the narrator used to have a long list of aspirations: from the ambitious six-year-old’s dream of making president to the realistic teenager’s dream of finding a job in some promising, medium-sized company. Secretly, she had always wanted to become a chef. The house also knows that as a child, the narrator loved dropping by her village’s only gas station, whose owner always gave her a small bag of hardtacks. The house also knows about the narrator’s opiate dreams: gold origami birds covering the roof of her family house (which her grandparents misinterpreted as a sign to enter a
lottery), an endless stroll through strips of seaweed drying on clothesline after clothesline, champagne slowly filling up her bedroom until she could feel her flaring gills. One summer shy of seventeen, the narrator met the guy she’d have a fling with: soft-chinned, hard-eyed, with a foreshadowing of a thick beard. She loved him very much, mostly for the slow turning of his neck when she called his name from behind. Years later, N put together what she never could on her own: the more time and energy you have to invest in a certain emotion, the more acutely you’re able to feel it. The house knows that the narrator was attracted to N mostly for his jawline, a trait she also found appealing in her past partners. The narrator learned to tear up on a regular basis, thinking of the run-over sloth she once saw in a Youtube video, so she wouldn’t need eye drops. The house knows that the narrator, fifteen years ago, tried to stone an especially malicious-looking toad, and that toad is now settled in the shadow of the narrator’s bedroom door left in the garden.
The house also knows about the narrator’s grandfather—his construction of its body, his design. The house listened when he was telling its origin story. The time of the Korean War, the destruction of his hometown. Wealthy families stitching a row of gold rings inside the seams of their children’s jackets and their own: on the road, some refugees carrying the amount of gold enough to buy a small patch of land. His ransacking corpses and turning into a scavenger then into a thief, in search of gold. The end of the war, his return to his hometown. On the day of the house’s completion, his long meditation in one corner of the garden, his hands clenched fists. His decision, instead of building a hammer pond, to plant poppies along the stone wall. What the house, however, has never understood: these bright red flowers, from which one can extract morphine—once called an angel for dying soldiers—reminded him of the war.
The narrator’s dog had never been named. At least, not by the narrator’s family. Like many other starving stray dogs, he was simply drawn to the leftover foods the narrator’s parents could spare and took to the strong scents of their garden. Neither the narrator nor her parents shooed him out the gate, and he was willing to stay as long as this kindness lasted. From the dog’s perspective, it was close enough to love. Just as the house had always been the house, the dog had always been the dog.
The narrator, not knowing any better, mistook their feeling of familiarity for proof that they belong together.
The day after the disappearance of her bedroom and kitchen, the narrator mails her letter to N and buys another bag of crabs on her way home. When she enters the front gate, the house looks more or less the same on the façade. She almost stomps on her dog lying on his side nearby. Down the
footstone path, past the sun-bleached bedroom door she left in the garden, toward the house, she walks, eight crabs tussling against each other in the plastic bag. When she opens the door to her family house, she finds the house shrunken to the size of a bunk bed. A coffin lying on its side, agape. She lays down the plastic bag on one of the slabstones and watches as a crab crawls out, the pointy tip of its leg first to appear. Then another, and another, until the bag falls flat with no more crabs trying to escape. The dog starts barking frantically at the crabs scattering in all directions, and the narrator almost misses the muffled beginning of the phone ringing. From inside the house.
First, she folds her legs in through the door as if climbing down a cliff. Then hauls the rest of her body in, hands pushing against the threshold. Something dull clashes against her foot; its ringing sends an electric shiver up her leg. The dark cube of a house doesn’t feel like home, but is tailored to her height. Before picking up the phone, she finds the door above her head and pulls it closed.