What were you thinking about so hard?
“What were you thinking about so hard?” she asked. “Nothing,” he said. “Just looking at the water.” “With your eyes closed?”
SMOOTH BY MEAGAN BERNABÉ 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 07
The interior of his car was black leather. The front seats had built-in warmers, and when he picked her up, her side was always already warm.
“Cold outside?” he would ask her, his Korean accent faintly audible as he pronounced the word cold.
“I forget,” she would say.
He’d smile with the corners of his eyes. She could never tell whether he understood what she meant. Part of her believed that he was smart enough to understand anything, while another part wondered if certain differences might be impossible to overcome.
They’d met two months before on the street where Delilah took the bus home from work. Behind the bus stop was an office building 35 storeys high, the bottom floor of which was occupied by an organic café. While she waited, she would lean up against a post and watch people go in and out. Most of them bought tea or juice. But one man came at the same time every day to buy a canned Coke and a Mounds bar, which he then consumed sitting on the steps in front of the building, gray suit coat draped over his shoulder.
She watched him for several days before he noticed her. Then one day their eyes met. She looked away, but it was too late; he pulled the wrapper over what was left of his Mounds and stood up to toss the can in the trash. It clunked against the metal bottom of the bin.
The next day she didn’t work. She spent the afternoon at home flipping from the Korean channel to NBC whenever her room-mates walked in. She didn’t know anything about Koreans except that most of them liked tea or juice. On the Korean channel she learned that they also liked drama: she saw pieces of three different shows in which a woman cried and stretched out her hands to a man with crossed arms.
The following morning she went back to the theater where she’d worked selling tickets since arriving in Los Angeles six months before. She spent four hours selling 50-dollar seats to A Streetcar Named Desire, left work at noon, and walked slowly to the Koreatown bus stop. At first she saw no-one, nothing. But then her eyes caught motion, and she saw his familiar slender figure rise from the steps.
“So you have a sweet tooth,” he said later as they walked down the block away from his office. When standing he was actually somewhat shorter than Delilah, but he walked elegantly, hands in his pockets, face tilted slightly away from her.
“Actually, I’m not a huge sugar fan,” Delilah said. She spoke quickly, as if she only had 30 seconds in which to explain her soul. “I just like people who stand out. Do you realize they probably stock those Mounds bars just for you? In the six months I’ve been working out here, I’ve never seen anyone else buy one.”
The corners of his eyes wrinkled with amusement. “Neither have I. I can’t live without sugar. Thanks to you damn Americans. In the past, junk food was not available in Korea.”
She laughed. “Right. We forced it on you. There’s some white guy in that café wearing red, white, and blue who shoves a Mounds bar into your hand every time you walk in there.”
“I like your sense of humor.”