“Request is a strange word, Uncle.”
“Is it? Then I’ll ask you for help.” Uncle’s smile is wide, showing all of his teeth.
There are times when you should listen to the doctor. The doctor told me that the patient’s family has to determine when to be active in the treatment and when to step back. If you become involved too quickly, it can trigger avoidance or anger. This is enough for today. I get up from the bench and dust off the back of my pants.
It’s difficult for an alcoholic to stop after the first glass. Drinking becomes a defense mechanism, and when someone tries to stop him, he gets more aggressive, destroying not only himself but also his loved ones. An alcoholic like Uncle has to understand two things: that he can’t drink less or quit in one fell swoop, and that he can’t ever give up trying. Alcoholics believe that they can limit themselves and trust that they have the willpower to quit. Neither is true. But I’m confused. Am I talking about Uncle or about myself?
CHAPTER 16
“I HATE ONIONS.” Mun-ju frowns, glancing at the chopping board.
I am carefully slicing onions into rings, taking care not to ruin their shape. I smile. Grandmother valued the onion, just after garlic and the potato. On Grandmother’s death anniversary, the first food I make to honor her memory is onion pancakes filled with meat. “What’s so bad about them?”
“Everything. Their shiny hardness and their smell and their white color. They look exactly like testicles.” Mun-ju never met Grandmother but came over to cook with me at every death anniversary and to drink the ceremonial wine to honor Grandmother’s spirit. She is trimming mushrooms to be skewered.
“So you don’t like garlic, either?”
“Come on, stop laughing.”
“It’s funny. You like garlic but not onions.”
“So? Onions are onions and garlic is garlic.”
“They’re in the same family, though.”
“Plus I had a dream about onions last night.”
I should have made the onion pancakes before Mun-ju got here. I quickly finish slicing the onions and rinse them in cold water. Mun-ju’s dreams are quite structured and colorful—of course, the person who has the dream and the person who analyzes it see the same thing differently, and if I had her dreams I wouldn’t call them colorful. I’ve dreamt about tomatoes several times, baring a segment of my unstable unconsciousness as if I were a holey block of Emmentaler.
“What was the dream?” I ask.
“I was lying in bed and the door opens and a man with a tray walks in, holding the onion dish I hate the most. He rubs it all over my face and tries to shove it into my mouth. I tried so hard not to open my mouth that when I woke up my jaws were sore.”
Mun-ju looks calm. Last time, she’d dreamt she was so thirsty that she hacked at a hard palm and cracked it open, getting drenched when all the juices dribbled out. A more visceral dream was the one in which dirt-caked carrots pushed through her body, one by one. Mun-ju’s dreams are filled with grinding teeth and swallowing and being eaten up and bitten and chewed, violent and aggressive like an imaginary world created by a child. I wonder what Uncle would say if I were to tell him about Munju’s dreams. People you need aren’t there for you. Maybe Mun-ju wouldn’t want to relate those stories even if Uncle were here. If only the dreamer could accurately translate the dream. It’s a positive sign that Mun-ju no longer rinses out her mouth after eating or dreaming.
Mun-ju now enjoys food, but she still has a hard time with sex even though the fundamental sexual instinct is oral. I find it interesting when sexual, but not oral, repression exists. Is it because we become aware that we have a tongue before understanding we have a penis, a mouth before a vulva? The organs located in the lower regions, the penis and the anus, feel pleasure by contracting and retaining, which relates to control and obsession, but the mouth is associated with immediate pleasure: sucking, licking, biting. You can try to control your mouth through eating. And although everything involved with eating—swallowing, chewing, digesting, and going to the bathroom—can be orgasmic, achieving an orgasm requires a will. So the urge to maintain control over yourself compels you to control your food intake, then represses your sexual urges. We neither know how to cure it nor do we have the courage to do so. Liking or disliking something is a conceptual problem, not a real one. It’s the same even for dogs.
“Grandmother once had a dream about onions,” I remember.
“What was it about?”
“She found a trunk, and she opened it to find shiny gold onions. It wasn’t money or gold, but Grandmother thought it was a good omen. Onions shimmering like gold—a whole trunk’s worth at that! Grandmother thought she saw something that doesn’t exist in this world, like the ancient Egyptians used to.”
“Egyptians?”
“If you look at an onion sliced in half, you see concentric circles. Egyptians thought this mirrored the concentric circles of the heavens and believed that onions and garlic had powerful healing properties. So they packed onions inside mummies, and when a loved one died, they placed them in their eye sockets.”
“That’s kind of disgusting.”
“Well, I know you don’t like onions, but try to look beyond that.”
“Was your grandmother a happy person?”
“I think so. At least before her son and daughter-in-law died in the accident.”
“I think I would be different if I had a grandmother.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, maybe I wouldn’t have grown up hating the kitchen.” Mun-ju smiles.
That might be true. Mun-ju’s mother died before Mun-ju was old enough to learn how to cook by her side. You don’t enjoy cooking if you think of it as a duty. Mun-ju couldn’t understand that the kitchen is a warm, cozy place—Grandmother used to say that being in the kitchen is like sitting close to someone in front of the fireplace on a winter night. Even if I’m preparing food for a death anniversary, I’m not making the dishes for a dead person: It’s as if Grandmother is scheduled to come in five minutes, holding dried lavender in one hand and a basket of steamed potatoes in the other. Filled with excitement and expectation, I season fernbrake and boil chicken and fry beef and onion pancakes. The first time I cooked a full-course meal was on the date of Grandmother’s death, the year after she died.
“If I picked up that trunk, I wonder what would have been inside?” wonders Mun-ju, still thinking about onions.
“I don’t know. What would you want to be inside?”
“Hm, I’m not sure.”
“Something you like, I’ll bet.”
“So something like water?”
What am I supposed to say to that? You can’t go back after a potato has cooked through or an egg has been broken. Just forgive your father, Mun-ju. Otherwise Mun-ju might continue torturing herself with these dreams. Dreams where nobody can help her.
“What would be in it if it were you?” Mun-ju asks.
“In the trunk?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know…”
I don’t think it’s appropriate to say tomatoes, but I can’t think of anything else. Once when we were young, Uncle said, Want to see something interesting? and pulled down his pajama bottoms. There’s a flesh-colored pinky dangling between Uncle’s legs, I thought, and immediately fainted. I also fainted after I first slept with Seok-ju, as if I were a woman living in the nineteenth century who’d bitten into a tomato for the first time. The tomato was an emblem of fear and terror for me: With its thick, sticky innards and densely embedded black seeds, it was as if I were touching something forbidden. My hidden sexual orality slowly drifted downward, like rain trickling down a tree branch. Seok-ju licked it and smelled it and touched it and wet it like it was a small fruit that would burst and lose its juices if he didn’t take care of it, and he waited for it to ripen and open up like a fig. That’s how I was able to get over the tomato, although it took almost a year.