Park The Summer My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-956474-33-6
Verlag: Heliotrope Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 146 Seiten

The Summer My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon is an emotionally charged, cautionary tale about alienation and the spiritual deformity that ensues when it feels like the whole world hates you. In the summer of '76, with no other Koreans in Glover, Virginia, fourteen-year-old Marcy Moon idolizes her irreverent big sister Cleo, who has her pick of lovers and uses her sexuality to prevail against racism. In Marcy's eyes, every guy would cut off his ponytail, burn his guitar and shoot old ladies if you told him to. Her dream, a dangerous one, is to be like Cleo. Central to the story is the girls' inability to bond with their mom, who left her heart behind in North Korea and finds it difficult to love her daughters the way a mother should. Most heartbreaking is the sisters' love for their dad, a complicated and worldly man who wants to be the best father and provider, but, in the end, cannot escape his demons.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Park, Frances

Leseproben

2

The neighborhood we lived in was typical of the times: split-level houses, tricycles turned over, no crime to speak of. In the winter we shoveled our driveway; in the summer we watered our lawn. Our house was cedar-shingled with tan shutters. It sat majestically on a small hill, unlike the other homes, which sat squatly on flat lawns. Our lot had thick woods, too, and our back yard blended into a wilderness of birds bathing and leaves swirling. I could not imagine growing up in any other place, among any other people. It was the only world I knew.

And yet I knew little of the world my parents had come from. I’d hear them whispering in their mysterious tongue and run for cover. Run for my life! Their world was smoke from a bomb, shrapnel, someone else’s history, not mine. It was not spelled out for me and, like the language, not taught to me. It was a black cloud over the other side of the globe my father had given me for my tenth birthday. Their world was so far away I could spin it out of my mind with ‘Movie Star Makeovers’ in American Teen. Skimpy lashes? Powder them first, then apply Maybelline mascara with long, sweeping strokes.

I had visited their world four times. Every third summer my parents would drag Cleo and me back to our homeland, courtesy of the World Bank. Homeland? They had to drag us there by our hair! Our grandparents’ house in the outskirts of Seoul was the Mount Vernon of their village. Meaning it was a stone house with a toilet, a yard, and a high gate that kept the lepers out. There was nothing to do, no water to drink, nowhere to go without all the raggedy people pointing at us.

“We’re Made in the U.S.A.,” Cleo would explain.

We stayed in and played a lot of cards and Omok, a Korean game. Monsoon rains were always falling.

My grandparents were too foreign to bother with. I didn’t like the way they looked, dressed, spoke, or smelled. Like pickled garlic and mold. Worse, they fought late at night, every night. They were cruel to their young maid, who slept in a closet off the kitchen. My grandmother beat her silly for stealing Cleo’s lacy underwear, then turned around and slipped a charm bracelet right off my wrist. With her grotesque, gold-toothed smile she marveled over the colorful glass gems glued onto silver clovers.

“Fake,” my father told her.

“Ah.” She frowned, giving it back.

Korea — whose homeland? — was a land of flies swarming around dusty beggars. Bus fumes. Rotting garbage. My earliest visits remain the most haunting, though they didn’t seem so at the time. Neither the orphan boys circling our cab at Kimpo Airport — their faces flattened up against the windows crying gum! gum! — nor the cloaked lepers in the mountains made me question or wonder why everyone over here had such rotten luck. From taxis, I’d look out for Jeeps rumbling by for a glimpse of American soldiers and grow homesick for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

Our only consolation was knowing that on the return trip, the family would vacation on a Hawaiian island — Oahu, Maui, the Big Island. One island was as good as another. We were back in the U.S.A.!

Tim and Tom Duncan were my age, but a grade behind me. In the second grade we had worked together on a papier-mâché project, a standing bear that looked more like a cactus than a bear. That’s what Miss Delaney said, awarding our Cactus Bear with an A-plus. So beloved was our Cactus Bear that it went on exhibit in the school’s display case before somebody broke in and stole it. That year in Miss Delaney’s class, our A-plus was divided equally. We were equals. But somewhere along the line, Tim and Tom fell behind.

Frail boys with pasty complexions and feathery auburn hair, they were truly identical, and what they shared more than freckles was dyslexic genes. Reading was a slow, grueling experience.

They lived in my neighborhood, a few blocks away in a small, stately colonial with manor airs. Trimmed hedges fenced them off from the rest of us. Their father, Major Duncan, was a mean man who probably went to bed in his uniform and, if he ever actually slept, dreamed of being saluted by all of us peons. He kicked the whole household around, including their black toy poodle, Afro.

“Out of my way, Afro, before I stuff you!”

Poor thing, I can still see him flying up the white carpeted stairs. The air conditioning is on too high, the house is so sterile.

A green Cadillac sat in the driveway, but I never saw it move. Mrs. Duncan stayed home and drank a lot of coffee. Her face was always perfectly made up, but her expression was worn down. She had no distinct personality to speak of: meek, aggressive — both words described her. I noticed this one morning when she offered me a jelly doughnut after a particularly frustrating lesson. Tim had given up and left the kitchen table.

“They still can’t get it right, Marcy. Major Duncan thinks he has all the answers. He drills them at breakfast, then blows his stack. After dinner he sets out Scrabble and drives them to tears. Guess who has to pick up the pieces?”

“But it’s not their fault,” I said, watching her pour another cup.

“Try telling that to the Major. The bastard blames it on me, you know. ’Tina, I come from a long line of military men, and they always knew which boot they were putting on.’ Lord knows where I’d like to put his boot!”

Mrs. Duncan was given my name by our school principal, but the truth was, I wasn’t qualified to tutor Tim and Tom. Dyslexia? I could barely spell the word. What little I knew came from an article I had read in American Teen. Conquer Your Learning Disabilities with a Smart Attitude. Each weekday I gave Tim and Tom a reading lesson, period. I paced them slowly so they would study each word before saying it aloud, before getting all tongue-tied and defeated. Most times it didn’t work, but on the rare occasion one of them got through a whole paragraph, I would hear a queer, hushed “Cactus Bear.”

“Please don’t tell any of your friends about our arrangement, Marcy,” Mrs. Duncan said.

What friends? Meg was in Texas.

“Major Duncan would die of humiliation. And the boys, well, I don’t want to make it any more difficult for them than it already is. Their classmates think they were held back because of too many sick days.”

I liked my role in the Duncan household. I was their savior, their teacher. Their master, if I read between the lines. For every two-hour lesson I got six dollars and a feeling of Cleo — I was looked at in awe.

Maybe in my cracked little core I knew Cleo was right about American Teen, but I finished my essay, typed it up, and mailed it along with a picture of me with my eyes half closed. No one ever claimed I was a vision of beauty, what with black straw for hair and a face so flat Santa musta sat on it — I’m quoting the creeps on the bus. But the editors would look beyond that, wouldn’t they? A face is a face is a face, and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, isn’t it?

On a morning of mixed sunshine and clouds, I started my period. Cleo called in sick and took me to lunch at the Tiny Teacup. We celebrated with wonton soup, egg rolls, and sizzling pepper steak. The sizzling plate scared me; then excited me. I broke out in a sweat; my bra was soaking wet. Was I a woman now?

After my meal I cracked open my fortune and read: Your heart will always make itself known through words. I believed this to be true.

I would win the contest!

Cleo wasn’t as upbeat; her good mood had waned halfway through her soup. She got into vans with total strangers, but the thought of telling our parents she wasn’t going back to school rolled in her head like distant thunder. She crumpled her fortune into a small ball and flicked it into a crowded ashtray then lit up a cigarette and started dropping ashes into her teacup.

“What did it say?” I asked her.

“You’ll choke on a chicken bone before you’re legal,” she said, deadpan.

“Cleo —”

“Cleopatra or I’ll stuff your fortune down your pretty little throat.”

“Cleopatra, don’t joke about your fortune. You’ll jinx it. That’s what Meg says her aunt says.”

“Fortunes are for Sad Sacks, Marcy. For dreaming old maids who wish they could start over. For Petunias who pray some Porky will sweep them off their fat feet. For Mits and Mots who don’t know which way is up. For Ma and Pa Kettles who hope the rain will come, dang it all. But not for Cleopatra Moon,” she said, gorgeously puffing. “I don’t stake my fate on a scrap of paper, wishful thinking, or silly Magic 8 Balls. No offense to Meg, I know she lives by that crap. The power is in me and me alone. When a good-looking guy goes by, I don’t need to cross my fingers. And when he says he loves me the next day, I don’t need to knock on wood.”

I inched closer to Cleo, my idol, wanting her smoke and musk oil — her miraculous power — to rub off on me. Who would dare to call me Miss Moonface...