Billie Pritchett
The Cost of Living
One breezeless May night in Gwangju, Korea, I was walking home along the mountain path toward my apartment when my mother called me on my cell phone. “Happy Mother’s Day,” I answered.
“Not in this time zone,” she said in singsong, her voice jingling with the familiar lilt of her Kentucky dialect. “Listen, Bill—something serious.” The signal broke up. “—Lymphoma,” she said. I slipped on loose gravel but didn’t fall.
“All right,” I must have said, and hung up.
Inside my apartment building, the old woman on the second floor blocked the narrow stairwell with her open door. As I moved past, I saw her sweeping her kitchen floor. She stopped and looked up. I bowed. She bowed. I ascended to the third floor and put my key in the latch. Mina met me in our kitchen. “Hello, doong-gi,” she said, pressing me against her nightgown. I expanded my arms and stepped out of her hug and went into the living room and sat on the floor. As I slid closed the partition wall, I heard Mina’s stomp and the slamming of our bedroom door.
After my father died of renal carcinoma, I didn’t return for his cremation or his funeral. Seeing him in hospice once his cancer had been deemed terminal, two years prior, had been the most recent time. After that, I didn’t want to return home ever again. I had made a new life for myself in Korea, working as an assistant English professor in Gwangju, in the Department of Undeclared Majors. My university was on one side of the mountain, my apartment on the other. I lived with my girlfriend, Mina. We were happy, mostly, except for the fact that I had become impotent as of late, and we had money troubles out the ass. My father’s cremation had cost about twelve-hundred dollars, his funeral five thousand, and I had paid. And since, I barely had enough money to buy the oil to heat my flat, let alone buy a plane ticket bound for the United States, again, just two years after I had been home last. Still, I would be damned if I didn’t see my mother before she passed.
I booked a ticket bound for Nashville from Incheon International Airport, economy seats all the way: Seoul to Tokyo, Tokyo to Chicago, Chicago to BNA. During the longest flight, fourteen hours, Tokyo to Chicago, I thought I’d spend it stewing about the last-minute ticket purchase, that eighteen-hundred-and-seventy-dollar debit card gouge, but there was no time to be alone with my thoughts, because the woman seated next to me wanted to share her religious views. She resembled my Mama Jan, with her youthful eyes and large gray bouffant, though this woman’s religion was exactly orthogonal to my grandmother’s. There is no heaven or hell, she said. The only heaven or hell is what we do on earth. She pointed at the cabin floorboard. That was right, we weren’t on earth, but above it, going against the air currents. I thought of how the Korean word haneul means both sky and heaven. In total, I spent nineteen hours in the sky, and many other hours laid over and jetlagged.
I didn’t need to wait at the airport, because Mara was there to greet me in the glassed-in lobby at the exit. She stood up from the padded sofa. “That all your shit?” she asked quizzically. I held a duffel bag. She patted me on the arm. “Good to see you, buddy.”
Driving the interstate in her red Dodge Ram, Mara spat Grizzly Mint dipping tobacco into an angled Diet Coke can, her tattooed bicep (a swollen heart, realistically rendered, the bandage reading MOM) bulging her tight black short sleeve. She glanced at me. “What’s Korea like?”
“Well, Gwangju, where I live, has a million and a half people, but it feels small, like a small town, like Murray. Country people.”
Mara nodded. “Doesn’t tell me anything.” The sky started spitting rain. Mara sped up. By the time we got to Murray, she had beaten the storm clouds. After parking her truck curbside outside her home, she grabbed the duffel bag, which I had awkwardly been cradling in my lap. We disembarked. The slamming of the truck doors echoed all up and down Main Street. Mara guided me to the back porch and showed me the key beneath the flowerpot. She pushed open the kitchen door. Tomás and Isabel purred and rubbed their bodies against my jean leg. “Heya, babies,” Mara said. “Are you excited to see Uncle Billie?” She picked up Isabel and rubbed her nose against the back of her skull. “Want to hold her? Oh. You can’t. You’re allergic.” Isabel leaped from her arms and followed Tomás to the basement. Mara took me to the guest room. “Voila,” she said, with a flourish of her arm. Then after she walked past me, she turned me around at the doorframe and kissed me between the eyes. “Stay strong, brother.” She went off to her bedroom.
Lying in bed, I heard the floorboards creak, which put me in my mind of when I was a child and stayed at my Mama Jan’s and lay in bed and heard the house pop and the floorboards creak and felt I was hearing the errant steps of restless ghosts. In the morning, when I suddenly woke, I leaned forward and bent the springy blinds down and noticed the dawn’s early light. My mind was still in a different time zone. I grinned stupidly and sticky-gummed at the rising sun. In the kitchen, there was a scrap of paper hanging from the refrigerator by a Budweiser magnet: Hey friend. Stayed with my old flame. Back later. XOXO, Mara. I grabbed my duffel bag from the kitchen table. It was covered in cat hair, but the culprits were nowhere to be found. I located my toothbrush and went back toward the hallway and on into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. There was a bottle of cocoa butter on the sink. I rubbed some on my arms and around my eyes. My mind wanted to stay awake, but my body wanted to sleep. I pattered, sock-footed, into the living room, stuffy with old air and antique furniture, and scanned the bookshelf. Eighty percent of these were mine, from last I was home, when I had gifted Mara these titles: Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time; Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays; a baby-blue volume containing Plato’s Republic and Timaeus in Greek, which I had intended on learning, but never did. My eyes hurt squinting in the dim natural light, cast blue-gray through the open blinds. I sat on the camelback sofa and tried to interpret the wallpaper’s hieroglyphs. I couldn’t stand the heat. I stood, anxious and overheated, and wanted to get out of there, but it became a chore to move. I must have stood in my spot for a half an hour, trying to catch a passing thought. Eventually, I snapped out of it and returned to the bedroom, closing the door to keep the cats out. I lay on the bed. My phone buzzed. My phone had recognized the home WiFi. I picked it up and saw the yellow box on the display screen. I had received a message from my girlfriend on KakaoTalk, the Korean messenger app. I put the phone back on the nightstand. Since things had ended so badly for us before I left, I didn’t want to see what Mina had written. Along the wall across from the bed stood a large fish tank with a couple idle blue-red Bettas. The pump gurgled. I slept more.
I woke up around noon with pains in my belly and beelined toward the kitchen, where I began raiding the cabinets for something to eat. I was pulling down a box of corn flakes as Mara came in through the back door, her black eyeliner smeared, giving her these big, beautiful raccoon eyes. She was in a black sequined dress, with a thick dangly necklace that rattled like scooped handfuls of pirate gold. She approached me aggressively; I thought she was going to start chewing me out about trying to eat her cereal. Instead, she embraced me in the middle of the kitchen. “Hey goose.” She smelled of bourbon. “Ugh, you’re a bad hugger.” She let me go. Afterward, she sat with me at the kitchen table while I ate my bowl of corn flakes. “Of course I don’t mind you staying here as long as you want,” she said, “but why not stay with your mom?”
“The house is messy.”
“A lot of houses are.”
“You didn’t have to live there.”
“Bite my head off, why don’t you. Anyway, I’m just glad you thought to call on me for help. You want a beer?”
“No, no, no. It’s too early for that.”
“Says who?” She came back to the table with a popped bottle of Corona.
Isabel had come up from the basement and was slinking around, waiting to be seen. When I locked eyes with her, she looked up plaintively and mewed, then she hopped up onto my lap. I began petting her as her throat ran like a small motor.
“You’re allergic,” Mara said.
“Maybe I’m not anymore.”
To which Mara smiled and came over to our side. Squatting on her heels, she rubbed her nose against Isabel’s ribs. “You like that, blacky-poo? You like Mister Billie petting you? Yes, you do. Yes, you do.” She grabbed Isabel’s ears and nestled her face against the whiskers. “You like it, don’t you? Yes!”
From the guest bedroom, my phone vibrated on the nightstand. I stood up, handed Isabel to Mara, and went for the phone. It was my mother. “Bill. Did you make it in all right?”
“Hey Mom. Look, when you call this phone, I don’t know if it’s going to be an international charge or what. Call me through the app.”
“I don’t know how. Your brother knows, but he’s job training in Mayfield. Reason I was calling was I was expecting to hear from you when you got in. Where are you? Did you make your flight okay?”
“Don’t worry, I’m home. I’m staying with a friend.”
“You could stay with me.”
“That’s okay. Here is good.”
“All right then. If you’re not far away, Mama Jan wants to pick you up. We’re going to go over to her place for Mother’s Day.”
“Okay. I’ll text you the address. Do you know how to open the app to check messages?”
“Maybe.”
“If you have any trouble, call me back.”
Back in the kitchen, I asked Mara if she had any unused holiday cards lying around. She showed me the drawer next to her silverware, where she kept cards, tape, scissors, and lewd Polaroids she’d taken with exes. Opening the drawer just slightly, I reached into the darkness and grabbed for the cards in their plastic foil. I took them out and shuffled through them. The best I could do in the way of Mother’s Day cards was one that bore a bouquet of yellow roses and read Congratulations! in cursive. The other was a postcard, with a Norman Rockwell painting on the other side, depicting an old man wearing a straw hat, a piece of straw in his mouth, frowning over a young girl’s effort to paint a portrait on her easel. I made out the one with the bouquet to my mother, the one with the old man to my grandmother, jotting the first thoughts that came to mind. When I finished, I got out my wallet and put a hundred-dollar bill in each envelope, the only two of three bills of American currency I carried with me.
Then I sat with Mara at the kitchen table and waited for my grandmother to arrive. Meanwhile, Mara and I did our best to catch up. She asked me if I remembered how we met. I did. I had tried to attend a night screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on the college campus but had gotten too drunk too early taking swigs of Skol vodka from a flask I had wrapped in a scarf and snuck into the theater. I was in the early days of courting the first woman I was ever serious about, but that night, I had to lean over to the seat next to me and apologize to her about the fact that I couldn’t stay, I had to leave the theater. Carrying my flask still wrapped in my scarf, I clopped across campus, almost ten at night, in nothing but a sleeveless undershirt, a pair of boxer shorts that fortunately buttoned in front, and sky-blue galoshes, determined to find the nearest place where I could get some aspirin, since I feared a headache coming on. Finally, from the campus side of Main Street, I saw the glowing lights of the corner Walgreens. Inside at the makeup counter stood Mara, all big eyes and frizzy hair and open-mouthed smiles. She was twenty. I was twenty. “Pahaha,” she laughed. “Hey, Mister, you could get arrested wearing something like that. Wait, you’re Virginia’s boyfriend, aren’t you? Are you drunk? Did you walk? What’s wrong with you? Here.” She took me by my elbow and guided me to the stockroom. I sat on milk crates and held my head. “Are you feeling all right? I’ll be back.” She returned with a Powerade Mountain Berry Blast and a box of Tylenol. She nudged me with the corner of the box. “Take this,” she said. “Listen to me.” I swallowed the pills and gulped the Powerade and slept for a short period while Mara finished up her shift and kept the Walgreens counter clerk from drawing dicks on my face with a Sharpie. She returned and offered to give me a ride home.
“Thank you for the medicine,” I said. “And the sugar water.”
“Ah, don’t mention it. It didn’t cost me anything.”
“You didn’t pay?”
“Never do. So where was it you said you live? On Tom Taylor?”
“Yeah. The white house. Third from the right.”
“Oh, I know where you’re talking about. That doublewide.”
“It’s not. It looks like one, though.” Whenever she dropped me off, I hoped it would be dark enough that she wouldn’t be able to see the overgrown yard, but as soon as she pulled into the gravel drive, there they were, the tall blades in her headlights. She didn’t say anything. I felt grateful. “Do you want to hang out sometime?” I asked.
She put up her palms and shrugged. “Maybe!”
And that was how we met. Sitting across from her at the kitchen table, recalling these events, I suddenly realized something and apologized. “If I had known you lived on the other side of Main Street, I never would have let you take me home. It was so far out of your way.”
“But if I didn’t take you home, we wouldn’t be friends. Besides, there was no way I wouldn’t have taken you home. Poor thing like you.” She did a cheers with her Corona and my cereal bowl. Then she nodded toward the driveway. “Your grandma.”
Even though I only saw her for a moment from the driveway, and thereafter from the rearview mirror, Mama Jan on first impression looked as youthful as I remembered her, very much like what I remembered of seeing my mother last, too, even down to her thick lower lip, mischievously stuck in a grin so slight it would give the Mona Lisa a run for her money. Mama Jan was still driving the same blue Oldsmobile she had driven when she took me to church with her when I was a little boy. I reminded her of this from the backseat of the car. “We’ve got an Explorer now, too,” she said, “but we still drive this old thing.”
“Is Daddy Cecil home?”
“He went out to the tobacco farm after church.”
“Surprised Mom’s not with you.”
“She’s at my and Daddy Cecil’s.”
“Can she drive these days?”
“Probably, but she didn’t. I picked her up earlier. She hasn’t been feeling well.”
“How’s the house?”
“Same as it was. Don’t say anything. She’s embarrassed about people coming over.”
“Are you and Daddy Cecil doing well?”
“We’re about the same.”
My grandmother parked in her carport at her red-brick on Catalina. The windchimes jingled next to the house’s front door. Mama Jan said my mother was already around back. Rounding the side of the house, I crossed the stakes where Daddy Cecil was growing tomatoes and looked for my mother among the patio furniture. I couldn’t see her right away. Then I spotted the wooden swing under the canopied porch where my mother’s sneakered feet dangled in the dark
shade. She got a good look at me before I got a look at her. “Bill?” She stood up and came forward and hugged me. “Oh Bill, I’m so glad you’re home.” She squared my shoulders at arm’s length and studied my face, and I studied hers. In my mother’s face, I saw the echoes of how she had formerly appeared to me, only now her rounded mandible, cute as a Cabbage Patch doll’s, carried stories in its wrinkles, and worse I could not see her hazel eyes clearly, because one was teary and the other was swollen over and bulbous, protruding beneath a taut, irritated eyelid.
I wish I could recall everything we talked about at my grandmother’s house, but I can’t. I remember I tried not to stare at my mother’s closed eye. At some point, she excused herself to go off to the kitchen to get herself some soda. She said there was nothing like a cool drink on a hot day. Meanwhile, Mama Jan leaned forward in her chair and said, “It’s a tumor.” Then she picked up the Mother’s Day card I had given her and said, “I can’t take the money.” I told her sure she could. While I was growing up, she was almost as much a mother to me as Mom was. “How is it over there?” she said, meaning Korea. “Are you doing all right with money?”
“Sure,” I said, “Don’t worry. With the exchange rate, I make about two- thousand dollars net, but the cost of living is low. Don’t worry.”
“You’re not hurting for money?”
“I’m not. Don’t worry.”
She patted my knee. “Good.”
My mom returned, carrying a 40 oz. commemorative NASCAR cup. Now, it was very old, and the paint on the outside was coming off. Mom sat down on the porch swing and closed her eye and took a big gulp and said as she had said before that there was nothing like a cool drink on a hot day. She turned to my grandmother. “Mama, remember when you and me and Honey—” Honey was my grandmother’s father—“went to Kentucky Dam when I was a little girl and we stood on that bridge and looked down over the waterfalls? I turned to Honey and said, ‘Oh Honey, look at all that otter.’” My mother giggled. I had heard this story countless times, but every time my mother told it, it brought a smile to my face, because it made her happy, and I liked seeing the joys of youth return to her face, as though the recollection were enough to restore vitality, like drinking from the fountain of youth. Until then, my mother’s idea of happiness, to the extent I could recall, had been the purchase of clothes, because the purchase of clothes represented the promise of an occasion to be able to wear them to some special event, a future occasion that never came, because my mother was afraid to go anywhere or do anything. But now I saw the power memory held for her, and how much satisfaction she was capable of getting from the simplest of things. She held this oversized plastic cup with both hands, and there was delight in the smile lines around her one good eye when she turned up the cup and let the soda and the ice cubes hit her lips, after which she would briefly close her eye, lower the cup, and grin ear to ear, reflecting on the drink she had just taken, savoring the draft.
That night, Mara took me to Mugsy’s. Her boyfriend’s band was playing, and I wanted to get drunk. “Remember Doctor Holsten?” she said to me. “Lit Appreciation.”
“Always had a camel toe.”
Mara giggled. “Bulging from her waist-high jeans. I’d sit in the front row, and you’d lean in and whisper the dirtiest things to me.” She leaned in to demonstrate and left behind traces of Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue. My phone buzzed on the bar top. I picked it up and looked at the display. “Is that your girrrlfriend?” Mara asked. I didn’t answer the phone or Mara. Her boyfriend and his band were setting up on the raised platform behind us. She swiveled to face him from her stool. “Let’s go say hello,” she said. We went over and I shook hands with him. He gripped my hand like he was trying to crush it. Mara stood on her tiptoes and gave him a peck on the cheek. He was a tall, slender fellow with forward-swooping hair, and was baby-faced but with a lip ring. We returned to our seats. Mara looked at me looking at her. “I like the new beard,” she said, unkinking one of her curls. I picked up my glass of Jameson and took a good swallow. “Everything go well at your grandma’s?”
Yes, I said. I told her Mama Jan said to me on the return ride to Mara’s that she was glad I came home to see my mother. “But I don’t think I’m going to stay much longer. The university in Korea’s giving me up to ten days, but I think I just want to go back.” Mara nodded and toasted me with her Corona.
Her boyfriend’s band played bad punk. At intermission, he didn’t come and talk to us, but a woman did, a little younger than Mara and me, whom I had never seen before. Mara introduced her. “This is Roxie.” Roxie had long, straight, brown, shoulder-length hair and puffy bangs and thick eyeglasses. She said she was playing after “those clowns,” and gestured toward the peripatetic band members with a roaming middle finger. Mara squealed and hopped up from her stool and kissed Roxie on the cheek. When Roxie walked away, Mara got close to my ear and whispered, “Roxie doesn’t like Drew.”
“Who’s Drew?”
“My boyfriend.”
“Listen, if he’s going to stay over, I can do something else. Get a hotel. Something.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re all mine tonight. I told Drew you were grieving.” However, following the performances—Roxie’s band was pretty good—we didn’t go back to Mara’s place right away, because Mara wanted to go to Roxie’s. It was a red-brick on some side street near campus housing, and it seemed like half of Mugsy’s was there. Roxie plied me with brimful glasses of Jameson once she discovered it was my favorite. Mara switched to Jameson, too, and she was
clinking glasses with me one minute and going off somewhere with Roxie the next. Meanwhile, I roamed around the living room and kitchen and pretended to be actively listening to others’ conversations, though I never could make heads or tails of anything. When we got back to Mara’s, I felt sick and was trying to do my best to hide it. We went in through the back door. Isabel mewed at Mara’s feet. Mara knelt and rubbed her face against the cat’s, and then picked her up and carried her like a baby, kissing her forehead and bouncing her around, singing “Mama’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin’ Bread.” We sat down in the living room, and I watched her rock her. I was happy. I was drunk. “She likes you,” Mara said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“She does.”
“Where’s Tomás?”
“Beats me.”
“I’m going to bed.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“No plan.”
Uneasy on my feet, I went off toward the guest bedroom and turned on the lights and stripped down to my undershirt and boxers and socks.
“Hey Billie?” Mara called.
“Yeah?” I walked into her bedroom. She was standing beside her bed, her blue jeans off. A black patch was visible through her underwear. “Yeah?” I said again.
Mara got close. “You didn’t say anything about my jeans.” She held them out to me. “See?” There were hearts and I LOVE YOUs written all over in black marker. “Roxie did that.” Mara looked at me. She smiled. “Isn’t that sweet?”
“Yeah, that is sweet. I’m going to bed.”
I woke up sometime between dawn and dusk, coughing and sneezing, my eyes dry and aching. The nightlight next to the bed was still on. I passed a curled-up Tomás, who was sleeping in the hallway, on my way to the bathroom. I couldn’t stop sneezing, and my tongue hurt from clicking drily against the roof of my mouth. I checked the bathroom mirror, my eyes ringed red and swollen. I was pale and couldn’t breathe. I felt as though I were having a panic attack. I ran the faucet and took big handfuls of water and splashed my face. Eventually, snot loosed from my nose. Finally, I could breathe. I took a shower. I shivered. The water was freezing. But the pressure felt good on the top of my head. I would go home tomorrow, I decided. My mother and grandmother would be upset, and even though I told Mara already, she would be surprised I was following through. Mina was going to be furious that I didn’t contact her at all while I was here and that I was turning up so soon after. But no matter anyone’s expectations, no matter the cost, I’d be damned if I didn’t get back home.