Montauk is the final stop. Suzy finds a seat easily enough. The train leaves exactly on time. She will have to make the connection in Jamaica, which is about twenty minutes away. Leaning back, she looks out the window, although the view is nothing, just the outskirts of the city, impossible to place. And yet she keeps on staring, because she is sitting by the window and there is nothing to do except follow this motion and let the barren scenery pass like a dull movie.
Outside is a mess of twisting highways and cement buildings. Some bits seem familiar. The train passed by Long Island City, where they had once lived, many years ago, when her father got a job at a Korean deli for a few months. It was an ugly, depressed part of Queens, and she was glad when he finally quit, or was he fired? Suzy is not sure anymore, but she recalls the fiercely unpleasant drive through the neighborhood and the oversized man with the overlapping front teeth named Mr. Yang who owned the store, who tossed a dollar at eight-year-old Suzy to run along and get him a slice of pizza from across the street, and how Dad had put a hand on the man’s right shoulder and said in a quiet but menacing voice, “Don’t tell my daughter what to do.”
The memory seems slightly skewed. What had she been doing with him at work? Why wasn’t she at school on that day? Did he really say those exact words? Perhaps he mumbled with an awkward slouch to his shoulders, “Please don’t order my daughter around,” or lashed with a stone in his voice, “Who do you think you are, ordering my daughter about?” Or is it possible that he did not say anything at all? It’s been so long, over twenty years. Hard to remember now how it had really been between a father and a daughter, how he might have taken her small hand and stormed out of the store with the parting spit at the rotund man, “Don’t you dare tell my daughter what to do!”
Outside, the familiar streets are gone now. The train is moving swiftly, almost gliding. She cannot recall the last time she was inside a moving vehicle in such tranquillity. Perhaps Dad’s Oldsmobile had felt this safe, pure. All you had to do was just hop in and let him take you. Mom never drove, although she kept saying that she should learn, since she could not get anywhere on her own. But she never did, because they had only one car anyway and she had gotten used to being driven around. Dad was the best driver, never got a ticket, never got into an accident, never drove in the wrong lane. Later on, Suzy expected the same when she first rode in Damian’s Volvo, and was shocked to discover that she had to check her seat belt several times before settling down. Luckily, she rarely found herself riding in cars. New Yorkers don’t drive. The city is all about smelly subways and screaming taxis. Subways often get stuck in the middle of dark tunnels, and cabs, of course, are driven by a breed of wild men who zoom through the grids with a certain unexplained rage. The train remains ancient, Suzy thinks, like Dad’s Oldsmobile. It sticks to the right course, from here to whatever its destination.
The first time she went to Montauk was for the ashes. She did not know that her parents had ever been there. Like most immigrants, they never took a vacation. Long Island for them ended in Bayshore, a seedy town where a few Koreans owned dry cleaners and fish markets. Dad once mentioned in passing that the business was not bad over there and the schools were better than the ones in Queens. But both Mom and Grace were fiercely against the idea. Mom could not imagine having to take a car to the nearest supermarket, which meant having to learn to drive immediately, and Grace said she would rather die than divulge that she was from Long Island. Suzy did not care one way or the other. They moved so often that it did not seem to matter where they went, for she was sure that they would move again before the year was up. Besides, she did not feel that she came from one particular place. When someone asked where she was from, she would pause and run through her mind the various apartment complexes in Flushing, the Bronx, the inner parts of Queens, even Jersey City, where they had lived for a few years when Mom got a job at a nail salon during their first years in America. None of them fit the bill, she thought. Korea, she would ponder, but that also seemed far away, for they immigrated when she turned five, and Grace six. Suzy could hardly remember the place. They had lived in a tiny apartment complex on the outskirts of Seoul, she was told. Oddly enough, the only detail she remembered about this childhood home was the elevator. Their apartment was on the fifth floor, which was the uppermost floor, according to her parents, because the topfloor units usually cost less; most young families did not trust the elevator and feared that kids might fall from the windows, which had happened in some buildings. What Suzy remembered vividly was the tiny box of the elevator, which was not so tiny in her child’s eyes, and the mirror that had hung on its wall. She always wanted to look at the mirror, but it hung so high that she could never reach it. She would ask Mom to hoist her up on her shoulders, but Mom was always carrying bags of groceries and was busily pressing the numbered buttons, because the elevator would never respond to the first try. Sometimes Dad would give her a lift—although this happened rarely, for he came home long after the kids went to sleep—but then she was too high up on his shoulders, and the mirror reflected only her dangling feet. Suzy was not sure why this mirror should stick so distinctly in her mind, but almost always she would look for a mirror upon entering elevators and would immediately feel a lack, or a pang of something distant and impossible to name.
They never did move to Bayshore, and Long Island remained a distant place she never thought much about until shortly before the funeral, when she was told that the ashes would be scattered over the Atlantic from the Montauk Lighthouse. She thought it was a bizarre idea; there had been no will, and she had not realized that her parents had ever been to Montauk. Grace would not explain, and everyone assumed that it was fully discussed and understood between the two daughters. When Suzy pressed the matter, Grace cut her off in mid-sentence and snapped, “That’s what they wanted; since when do you care about their wishes?” Suzy took the LIRR to Montauk three days later and watched Grace scatter the ashes. Suzy merely walked alongside Grace and let her conduct everything, as the older child, which was what her parents would have wanted, she thought. There were only a few people who seemed to have known her parents through work, and a reporter from the Korea Daily who showed up uninvited. It was exactly five years ago. November, rain, and her entire world had just ended.
Why Montauk? No one told her anything. Maybe Mom had mentioned something about it to Grace, or Dad had left a diary somewhere in the back of filing cabinets, or Grace knew things about their parents that Suzy did not—but it was a mystery, and there was no one Suzy could ask other than Grace, who, even five years later, would not speak to her. The one thing Suzy knew was that Grace disapproved. Grace was a fervent Christian, and burning the body was unacceptable. If Grace had had her way, they would have been buried in a sunny lot somewhere in New Jersey, preferably near her own church, where the funeral was held, as though her parents had ever believed in Christ.
Her parents had been floaters. They went to churches on a whim. Good for business, Suzy thought. They always had a specific reason for each visit. Either a job connection from one of the elders or trade gossip or market information. A church was where most Koreans gathered on Sundays, and it would have been foolish to ignore its usefulness. But they were atheists at heart. More than once, she overheard Dad cursing off Christians. “Bastards,” he’d say. “They’d even give up their own mother if they thought it would guarantee a spot in that nonsense called heaven.” Sometimes Mom would say a prayer to Buddha when Suzy or Grace got sick, or Dad would say something about the ethics of Confucius at the dinner table, which all seemed confusing somehow, but the message was clear: Jesus was not for Koreans. One night, Suzy walked into the kitchen to find her father in a heated argument with someone on the phone and overheard only the last bit before her mother pointed to her to get back in her room. He was screaming into the phone, “Your ancestors would weep if they knew you were pushing this Christ shit on your countrymen!”