I will tell my daughter these things, and about the box that kept my mother’s past and future, and though she will never know her grandmother’s name, she will know who her grandmother is.
Later, perhaps, when she is older, she will sift through her own memories, and through the box that I will leave for her, and come to know her own mother—and then herself as well.
In the box I hold for my daughter, I keep the treasures of my present life: my daughter’s one-hundred-day dress, which we will also use for her first birthday; a lock of her reddish-brown hair; the dried stump of her umbilical cord. And a thin black cassette tape that will, eventually, preserve a few of the pieces, the secrets, of our lives. I start with our names, my true name and hers: Soon Hyo and Bek-hap. I speak for the time when I leave my daughter, so that when I die, she will hear my name and know that when she cries, she will never be alone.
17
According to my mother, the rituals that accompanied the major transitions in a woman’s life—birth, puberty, childbirth, and death—involved the flow of blood and the freeing of the spirit. Slipping out of the body along pathways forged by blood, the spirit traveled and roamed free, giving the body permission to transform itself. Necessary but dangerous, these were times when the spirit could spin away forever, lost and aimless, severed from the body.
“This is the blood of a lost spirit,” my mother told me when I first noticed the bloodied pad she unfolded from her panties each month. “Every once in a while a woman opens her mouth and a wandering spirit tries to take her body. I’m just spitting it out.”
“What? How?” I mumbled, afraid to open my mouth.
“When women are forced to bleed, we have to take care to bind our spirits to us, or they will get confused and wander away. Ejected from our bodies, the spirit flows out on the river of blood, losing its name and its place. Sometimes that yongson spirit will try to invade another woman’s body—maybe one that reminds them of the body they left behind. Sometimes they will catch a seed in a woman’s body and be born again, but most times they will die. See? Like this one.” My mother ripped the sticky pad from her panties, rolled it into a wad of toilet paper, and dropped it in the trash.
“Will that ever happen to me?” I asked, unsure if I was referring to losing my spirit or bleeding out a stray.
My mother reached into the box of maxipads and stuck a fresh one on her underpants to catch the blood of more dying spirits. “I will protect you, Beccah,” she said, “when the time comes. And I will pray.”
But despite my mother’s prayers, her charms for my safety, her chants against Saja and Red Disaster, and despite my own efforts to still my body, I eventually bled.
When I felt the knot of pain pulling in my abdomen, pinning me to my seat in Mrs. Abernacke’s ninth-grade homeroom, I folded my hands over my belly, picturing a beam of light soaking up the blood. The visualization had worked to suppress menstruation for more than two years, the flash of light cauterizing the wound between my legs, but this time I felt the light merge with my blood, rushing true and deep, thickening as it pounded against my tailbone and poji with heavy fists.
While Mrs. Abernacke called attendance, I dropped my head over my desk. I imagined blood, sweet and sticky as syrup, soaking through my jeans and onto the plastic seat. I stayed down, closing my eyes when first bell rang and everyone left for first period. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that the only ones left were me and, toward the back of the room, Fiaso Rialto—whom everyone called Fatso. Fatso, a cushioned cheek piled like dough on the desktop and his large, fat-ringed arms hanging down the sides so that his knuckles grazed the floor by his slippered feet, slept on even as Mrs. Abernacke stalked up behind him. She placed a hand against his neck, a caress really, and when he didn’t move, she knocked the back of his head.
“Mr. Rialto!” His head snapped back and he looked around with red-rimmed eyes. “Naptime ended with kindergarten. Please gather up your belongings and proceed to your next class.”
“Huh?” said Fatso.
“Go,” said Mrs. Abernacke as she marched over to my desk. I expected a whack on the side of my head.
“Miss Bradley, first bell has sounded. If you don’t want detention, please tell me why you are still lounging about in homeroom.”
“I, uh, don’t know,” I stammered.
“Then go on.” Mrs. Abernacke folded her hands across her chest, waiting for me to stand.
I slid off the seat, keeping my eyes down, expecting to see a smear of red blood on the chair. Relieved to see nothing but a heart someone had carved, I bent to retrieve my backpack.
“Oh, I see,” Mrs. Abernacke said. “You should have just told me. I’m a woman too, you know.”
“Huh?” I said.
“It’s a natural, though unfortunate, function. Let me write you a pass for the nurse.”
“For what?” I asked. I held my backpack between us.
“Please do not play games,” she said, looking pointedly at my pants. Then she frowned. “Didn’t you watch The Time of Your Life in fifth-grade health?”
Instead of going to the nurse, I changed into my PE shorts and went home. I tried to sneak my pants into the laundry without my mother seeing, but she found me as I was rubbing Stain Stick against the crotch of my jeans.
“It’s time,” she cried. “I delayed it for as long as I could, but now it’s time.” She grabbed the jeans from me, pulled the legs apart and wailed, “Oh, my poor baby! Does it hurt?”
I pushed her away as she tried to hug me. “Quit it,” I told her. “It’s no big deal, just the facts of life.” And then I started to cry.
“Aigu,” my mother clucked as she ushered me into her bedroom. “It does hurt. Lie down.” She pulled the blankets to the foot of the bed, nestled me into her pillows.
“I swallowed a spirit, Mom,” I said, half laughing.
“No,” my mother said. “It’s your own spirit fighting to get out, wanting to travel. We must make the way safe for it to go and then come back.”
“I was only joking,” I said. “I’m not a baby anymore that you can fool me with this stuff, you know.” And then I groaned as a spirit raked its nails against my womb.
“Shh, shh,” she crooned, stroking my hair. When I closed my eyes, I felt my mother move away from me, heard the glass doors open onto the garden.
I slept, sailing in and out of dreams, riding the waves of my first cramping. Through the night, my mother bathed my face and body with water that smelled sharp, like freshly cut grass, like newly unearthed roots. And as she stroked me, I dreamed I was swimming, then drowning, then climbing an embankment that eroded and dissolved as I scrambled toward the stars. I dragged myself over sand and stone, following the light, until I stepped on a bridge of fire and found a beautiful woman waiting for me.
At first I thought the woman was my mother, then I realized it was myself. “My name is Induk,” the woman said through my lips. I looked into the face that was once my own and wondered who she saw, who stood in my place looking at the body that Induk now claimed.
I looked at my new hands, trying to find a clue to my present identity, but as I looked, the hands melted, then dissolved into ash. Quickly I looked at the arms, the feet, the legs, and they, too, disintegrated. I knew I was being devoured by flame ravenous as a dragon, fierce as the sun. I waited, a thin column of ash, for the dragon’s breath, the wind that would blow my body apart.