Well, not exactly to get Why couldn't she have kept seeing you, at least? You could still have gone on dating, you know. It didn't have to be all or nothing.
Ah. Well, in point of fact, Jin-Ho's grandpa said, I believe that was more my decision than From the start I felt she was a very cold person. I can say that now that it's over. Very cold and aloof, Jin-Ho's mother said.
She's just a woman with boundaries, hon.
If she's so fond of her boundaries, what did she ever immigrate for?
Bitsy, for goodness' sake! Next you'll be telling me she ought to love this country or leave it!
I'm not talking about countries; I'm talking about a basic… character flaw.
Jin-Ho always worried that her mother might be hurting her grandpa's feelings when she criticized Maryam. But he kept coming back to visit; so it must have been all right.
When Xiu-Mei got up from her nap, their mother took the two of them grocery-shopping without any pacifiers. Xiu-Mei cried the whole way there. She cried in the store, too, but Jin-Ho's mother gave her a banana and that helped a little bit. She went on snuffling, but she did eat part of the banana. On the way home, when she started crying again, Jin-Ho's mother pretended not to notice and talked right over her, discussing the party. I've bought colored sugar, and chocolate sprinkles, and those little silver BBs… I think cupcakes will be better than a single big cake, don't you agree?
Jin-Ho said, Mmhmm, with her fingers stuck in her ears.
As soon as they reached home, Xiu-Mei got herself a pacifier from under the hall radiator and went off to sulk in the TV room.
On Tuesday, when Jin-Ho's car pool dropped her off after school, she found her mother sitting on the front steps in her big thick Irish sweater. What are you doing here? Jin-Ho asked, and her mother said, Waiting for you, of course. But she wouldn't have been waiting there ordinarily. And then she said, I thought maybe we could have our snack on the patio today, which was odd because it was real fall weather sunny, but cool enough that Jin-Ho was wearing a jacket. It all made sense, though, once her mother had the tray ready to take outside. Coming, Xiu-Mei? she asked. Xiu-Mei was pushing her kangaroo mama and baby around the kitchen in her purple toy shopping cart. But you'll have to leave your binky in the house, her mother said, and Xiu-Mei stopped short and said, No! which caused her binky to fall to the floor. She bent to pick it up, jammed it back in her mouth, and started pushing her cart again. They had to go on outside without her.
Over their snack, which was peanut butter cookies and apple juice, Jin-Ho's mother talked some more about the party. She didn't like the sound of the weather forecast; a hurricane was heading up the coast. This is one time the weather matters, she said, because I've thought of a really good solution for the binkies. We're going to tie them to helium balloons and let them fly up in the sky. Won't that be beautiful? Then we'll go into the house, and we'll find the present the Fairy has left.
Could a hurricane blow us away? Jin-Ho asked. (She'd just seen The Wizard of Oz on TV.)
Not this far inland it couldn't, but it could bring a lot of rain. We'll just have to hope it's over by then. They're predicting it for Thursday, which would give us two days to recover, but since when has the Weather Bureau known what it was talking about?
Then she turned toward the house and called, Xiu-Mei? Have you changed your mind? Yummy peanut butter cookies, honey!
They'd left the back door cracked open, so Xiu-Mei had to have heard her. But she didn't say a thing. The only sound was the squeak-squeak of her shopping cart. Jin-Ho's mother sighed and reached for her apple juice. She pulled her sweater sleeve over her hand like a mitten before she took hold of her glass.
Wednesday was No Binkies Outside of the Crib Day. Jin-Ho's father said all he could say was, he was mighty glad he had a job to go to. Then he left for work half an hour early. And Jin-Ho was glad she had school to go to, because already she could see how things were shaping up. By the time the car pool honked out front, XiuMei had thoroughly searched the house and found not a single pacifier. They were all in a liquor-store carton on top of the refrigerator, but she didn't know that. She curled into a ball underneath the kitchen table and started crying very loudly. Jin-Ho's mother was in the bathroom with the door closed. Jin-Ho called, Bye, Mama, and after a moment her mother called back, Bye, sweetie. Have a nice day. From the sound of her voice, it seemed she might be crying too.
So Jin-Ho sort of dreaded coming home again. But when she walked in, the house was quiet a cheerful, humming quiet, not a sulking quiet. She found her mother stirring cocoa on the stove, and her grandpa sitting at the table with the newspapers, and XiuMei in her booster seat sucking a pacifier.
Well, hey there, Ms. Dickinson-Donaldson, her grandpa said, and Jin-Ho said, Hi, Grandpa, carefully not looking in Xiu-Mei's direction, because maybe the grownups had failed to notice the pacifier and she was not about to point it out.
But then her mother said, As you can see, we've changed the rules a bit.
Jin-Ho said, Mmhmm, and climbed onto a chair.
I was telling your mom, her grandpa said, if the Binky Party is the big renunciation scene, why put Xiu-Mei through all this misery ahead of time? Right, Xiu-Mei?
Xiu-Mei busily sucked her pacifier.
We should just wait for the actual moment, he said. I know earlier I suggested a tapering-off approach, but I've reconsidered. Then he nudged Jin-Ho with his elbow and said, 'Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.'
Jin-Ho said, Okay…
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
However, Jin-Ho's mother said, turning from the stove, Saturday is still Binky Day! Remember that, Xiu-Mei! Saturday is still the day the Binky Fairy comes; you know that, don't you?
Oh, hon, give it a rest, Jin-Ho's grandpa said.
I just don't want her assuming But he said, So! Jin-Ho! What did you do in school today? and that was the end of that.
Snack was cocoa and alphabet cookies. Jin-Ho picked different cookies out of the tin and set them in front of Xiu-Mei. See?
An A, she said, and Xiu-Mei removed her pacifier long enough to say, A.
Right, Jin-Ho said. She felt happy and relieved, as if Xiu-Mei had just come back from a very long trip. And here's a B. And another A. And a C. And an A again. They seemed to be all A, B, Cs. She rummaged through the tin, hunting up an X to show XiuMei her initial.
Jin-Ho's grandpa was telling her mother that he had been a fool. Maybe it was just too long since I'd been part of the courtship scene, he said. I mean, what was I thinking? I picture how I must have looked, stashing that champagne in your fridge ahead of time like a total idiot, so cocksure, so all-fired sure that she would say yes Well, and she did say yes, Jin-Ho's mother said. You weren't an idiot in the least! She said, 'Yes,' in plain English, and we drank that champagne. It was only later that You know, her English seems to be a lot better than it is, JinHo's grandpa said. Did you ever notice that? She wrote me a letter once when she was away in Vermont, and that was the first time I realized that she often doesn't put article adjectives where she's supposed to. 'I am having very nice time,' she wrote, and 'Tomorrow we go to antique shop.' I guess that's understandable, when you've grown up speaking a language that doesn't use 'a' or 'the,' but it implies some, I don't know, resistance. Some reluctance to leave her own culture. I suspect that that's what went wrong between the two of us. The language was a symptom, and I should have paid more attention to it.