My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [123]
“It’s ridiculous,” said Gab, who normally takes an assiduously nonjudgmental view of her mother’s medical beliefs. “Hocus-pocus.” I figured she was just cranky because it had been a difficult pregnancy. (By the eighth month she’d put on forty pounds, nearly a 30 percent increase of her body weight.) But when Kay came back from Los Angeles and started ordering things like the girdle (which looked as if it were made for a Barbie doll), the seaweed soup ingredients and the deer juice, Gab put her foot down.
“We have to move before the baby is born,” she announced. “There’s no way I’m going three weeks without a shower.”
This was really a change. For years I’d watched Kay force-feed Gab giant glasses of deer juice, which Gab hated (I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as it, the stuff smelled so awful), and never once did Gab resist or try to run away. Holding her nose, she’d say, “It’s easier just to do it and not think about it,” an attitude that seemed to capture more than just her feelings toward foul-smelling potions.
But now Gab seemed increasingly of a mind to decide for herself what was best for her. So she told Kay we were leaving, and Kay, though disappointed, reluctantly canceled the order of deer juice and returned the girdle. Soon Gab and I were on the hunt again, prowling the real estate offerings in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park. We were on the verge of signing a contract for an apartment in Bushwick when wham-o! The guilt hit her like a sledgehammer.
“I can’t,” she said dejectedly in a Park Slope Mexican restaurant. She’d been thinking about samchilil and worrying that maybe she was being too dismissive. “I’d hate to be wrong.”
“You mean, you think if you don’t drink deer juice for three weeks you’ll have loose bones?” I asked, now a bit exasperated by the whole thing.
“Hey, my mother knows people who had that happen,” Gab said defensively.
“And you’re willing to spend three weeks dressed like a mummy not to be one of them? Not shower? Pee in a bedpan?”
Gab looked stricken. “You don’t understand,” she said, lowering her voice. “They’re in my head.”
“Who?”
“The voices of my mother and Emo.” (Emo had been enthusiastically gearing up for samchilil too.) “I keep thinking that I know better, but there’s nothing I can do to ignore them. And what I keep dwelling on is the baby—if I’m not healthy, then who’s going to take care of her? Who’s going to provide milk and who’s going to sleep with her and …” Her voice trailed off.
“And I don’t want soft teeth,” she added almost pathetically. However, now that this had come out and the choice was clear, I knew that she would be feeling better, the way she always did after she made a decision. And indeed soon she was, at which point her mood became downright peppy. I watched in amazement as she summoned the waiter and ordered yet another appetizer, “something with melted cheese.”
“But you realize,” I said forcefully, trying to make a stand, “that if we stay in the house past the baby’s birth, we won’t be able to start looking for apartments again until you’re back on your feet, which might take a few months, and then your maternity leave will end and we’ll become dependent on your mother for child care, and she’ll become emotionally connected to the baby, all of which will embed us in the house more than ever.” I leaned across the