Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [14]
You stood up and hurried back to the road without bothering to brush the sand off your clothes. You decided against taking the plane to Seoul, and instead took a taxi to Taejon and got on a train to Chongup. Thinking all the while that you hadn’t seen Mom’s face in almost two seasons.
You remember a classroom from long ago.
It was a day that the sixty or so kids filled out applications for middle school. If you didn’t write an application that day, you were not going to middle school. You were one of the kids not working on an application. You didn’t completely understand what it meant that you would not be going on to middle school. Instead, you were feeling guilty.
The night before, Mom had yelled at Father, who was sick in bed. She had shouted at him, “We don’t have anything, so how is that girl going to survive in this world if we don’t send her to school?” Father got up and left the house, and Mom lifted a squat table from the floor and threw it into the yard in frustration. “What’s the point of having a household when you can’t even send your kids to school? I might as well break it all!” You wished she would calm down; you didn’t mind not going to school. Mom wasn’t appeased by throwing the table. She opened and banged shut the door of the cellar and yanked all the laundry off the line, crumpled it, and threw it on the ground. Then she came to you, cowering by the well, and took the towel off her head and brought it to your nose. She ordered, “Blow your nose.” You could smell the intense stink of sweat on Mom’s towel. You didn’t want to blow your nose, especially not into that smelly towel. But Mom kept telling you to blow your nose as hard as you could. When you hesitated, she said that way you wouldn’t cry. You were probably standing there looking at Mom with an expression bordering on tears. Telling you to blow your nose was her way of saying, Don’t cry. Unable to resist her, you blew your nose, and your snot and the smell of sweat mingled in the towel.
Mom came to school the next day wearing that same towel. After she spoke with your teacher, your teacher came to you and handed you an application form. You raised your head and looked outside the classroom as you wrote your name on the form, and you saw Mom watching you from the hall. When your eyes met, she took the towel off her head and waved it, smiling brightly.
Around the time the fee for middle school was due, the gold ring that used to be on Mom’s left middle finger, her sole piece of jewelry, disappeared from her hand. Only the groove on her finger, etched by many years of wearing the band, was left behind.
Headaches attacked Mom’s body constantly.
During that visit to your childhood home, you woke up thirsty in the middle of the night and saw your books looming over you in the dark. You hadn’t known what to do with all of your books when you prepared to go to Japan for a year with Yu-bin on his sabbatical. You sent most of the books, books that had stayed with you for years, to your parents’ house. As soon as Mom received your books, she emptied out a room and displayed them there. After that, you never found the opportunity to take them back with you. When you visited your parents’ house, you used that room to change your clothes or to store your bags, and if you stayed over, that was where Mom would place your blankets and sleeping mat.
After you got a drink of water and returned to your room, you wondered how Mom was sleeping, and you carefully pushed her door open. It looked as if she wasn’t there. “Mom!” you called. No answer. You fumbled with the switch on the wall and turned on the light. Mom wasn’t there. You turned on the light in the living room and opened the bathroom door, but she wasn’t there, either. “Mom! Mom!” you called as you pushed the front door open and stepped into the yard. The early-morning wind burrowed into your clothes. You turned on the light in the yard and glanced quickly at the wooden platform in the shed. Mom was lying there. You ran