Before you are anything, you are a daughter.Article continues after advertisement
You are there in the water when it rises above her ankles, haunches, stomach that’s grown to shocking proportions. The master bathroom is dark, only half‑lit by the moon, and with her body submerged she closes her eyes, water steaming her skin. Every night she yearns for this, to be buoyed, feel something other than her body. For almost a year now, everything has been expanding: new home, new extended family, her body getting larger, you the bandleader marching her organs into corners. She is already long‑limbed, and now her hip bones press right up against the porcelain walls of the tub. A nauseous spell overtakes her, and she knocks back her head, steadying her hands over her taut, round stomach. She can feel you beneath the skin, growing inside her, but when she looks down, all she sees is a lock of her black hair falling from the lilac plastic barrette clipped above her ear.
She towels off, balancing her weight on the dresser with one hand. Her feet mash into the holes of the long underwear she insists on for modesty, even though the winter months have nosed into spring. She takes one step, then another, around the enormous square frame of the bed, where she lowers her body next to your father, careful not to wake him. In the darkness, she pulls up the covers and lies stiffly on her back, waiting for sleep to shroud her. She inhales, exhales, the heavy mound of you sinking her abdomen into her pelvis. She was born in ’68, into Korea’s bleak, wretched postwar decades that had known famine, and hardship, citizens of all classes taught to value diligence and endurance as the utmost qualities. In bed, she silently tells herself what she’s been told all her life: Endure, mortify the body.
