A Cab Called Reliable by Patti Kim

don’t have a leg, and two people can’t hang together on one pole.”
    As I watched Boris walk to his apartment, I told the pole that Boris was stupid to have a crush on Mrs. Chambers just because she listened to handicapped boys say tongue twisters all afternoon. She was married, too old for him, and probably had children our age. What did they talk about today? Old MacDonald moving mountains on Mondays?
    I clung to the pole, smelled the metal, and picked at the rust with my thumbnail. Mr. Albert, Miss Martin, the librarian, the secretary, Mrs. Lubbock, the guidance counselor; they were all so damn nosy. What’s it to them if I throw up my breakfast eggs all over their desk while I hand them my lunch money? What’s it to them if I wear the same jumper every day of the week? What’s it to them if my father can’t meet them for conference time? I wish they’d stop asking me about my mother. How many times do I have to tell them that she’s on vacation and can’t chaperone those stupid field trips to the Kennedy Center, where everyone has to bring a bag lunch. How was I supposed to know that once I opened the foil, the kimbop would stink and leave seaweed pieces in my teeth?
    I remember how my second-grade teacher stooped down and blinked her eyes when she asked me about brushing my teeth. Ann, have you been brushing your teeth? Do you know what I mean? She made a fist and shook it left and right next to her exposed teeth. And I smiled at her while answering in my head, No, Miss Martin, I don’t know what you mean. We don’t brush teeth in our country. We let them rot. See? I saw her. I saw how Miss Martin’s eyes looked over at me when the lice inspector told her the entire class was clean except for one student. I saw how her eyes grew big with surprise when he whispered the description of the little black boy sitting at table four, instead of the Chinese girl at table six. I’m not Chinese. My father’s not Chinese. My mother’s not Chinese. Loo Lah’s not even Chinese. She’s my father’s girlfriend.
    My father wants her to be my new mother because the real one left. He found Loo Lah behind one of the cash registers in Arirang Market. She used to sell rice cakes, green and pink fish cakes, instant noodles, rock candy, and sacks of rice. Loo Lah used to bring my father and me food from the store. But once she came to live with us in our apartment, she quit her job at Arirang Market. Loo Lah now takes long hot baths, shortens and takes in the waist of the dresses my mother left behind, covers our beds with sheets—American style—listens to love songs, and watches television to improve her pronunciation, while my father welds silver fences around parking lots all morning and all afternoon. She cooks bean cakes, makes rice wine, pickles radishes, and makes rice with sweet corn, my father’s favorite. He calls her Lah-yah. He tells me to call her Sister or Little Mother. But I can’t.
    I try not to call her at all. But when I find her hair, long and permed, all over the bathroom floor, I become angry and say, “Little Mother, clean up the bathroom floor or shave your damn head.” She cannot mother me. Loo Lah’s only twenty-five years old. Although she feeds me, she cannot press her lips together as she chews her gum. She falls asleep on our sofa to the noise of the television. After eyeing me, she suggests I condition my hair with hot oil, pierce my ears, pluck my brows, and if my father is willing to pay, have folds surgically formed on my eyelids. She croons popular Korean songs about how a lover could so easily leave her beloved with the excuse of teaching him the sadness of love or with a good-bye note tucked in a bouquet of chrysanthemums or a drawerful of un-mailed love letters. When my father leaves us alone in the apartment, he hopes that on his return he’ll find me sitting on the floor between her knees, while