LALATOWN LIFE

A few days ago, I was on the phone with my sister when, completely out of nowhere, she said,

“I must have been crazy. For a moment, I missed my ex-husband like crazy.”

We laughed.

Then she said something about the years when they were still happy together.

“You know how he was back then. He would have torn off a piece of his own flesh to feed me.”

And I knew exactly what she meant.

Before everything went bad between them, he really had loved her that way. Of course there had been disappointments and arguments. There always are. But I remembered how he treated her. He barely let her lift anything heavy. He took care of her.

So I said, “Maybe this is finally the time to let him go. Not just the marriage, but that part of your life. That version of the two of you.”

“Oh,” she said. “Maybe.”

And then we moved on, the way sisters do.

Before we hung up, I said something almost jokingly.

“I’m kind of jealous. I wish I had a memory like that.”

After the call, it started raining.

Not a long, gloomy rain. A sudden summer downpour.

And for some reason, I remembered Mexico.

It was early in my marriage, probably before we had even been married five years. I was new to America then and working at a travel agency. It was an American travel agency, and through work I sometimes earned points or opportunities to travel.

That was how I ended up in Cancún.

By then, I had already begun discovering how much certain places moved me. I loved old neighborhoods, iron gates, houses with flowers and trees spilling over walls. They reminded me strangely of the Korea I remembered, even though they looked nothing like Korea.

Mexico did that to me.

Later, Puerto Rico and Taos would do it too.

I think that may have been when I first began having this little thought:

I could live somewhere like this.

Anyway, while we were in Cancún, there was one place I desperately wanted to see: Chichén Itzá.

The organized tour from the resort was expensive, so we figured out how to go ourselves. We went to the bus station and took essentially the same kind of comfortable coach for something like a fraction of the price.

We spent the day there, saw what we wanted to see, ate, wandered around, and eventually started walking back toward the bus.

And then the sky opened.

If you have ever been caught in a tropical downpour, you know there is no such thing as getting a little wet.

You are wet.

Completely.

By the time we reached the bus, both of us were soaked.

Then we got on.

The air conditioning was blasting so hard that the bus felt like a refrigerator.

My husband was sitting next to me, shivering.

He was a big man, probably more than twice my weight at the time. I was under a hundred pounds then—tiny.

But I was Korean.

Which meant, naturally, that I had brought a cardigan.

It was a beautiful little summer cardigan that I had owned since before I got married. Good quality. Thin, soft, and absolutely tiny. Looking back, it was probably about the size of a handkerchief compared with him.

Underneath it, I was wearing one of those little sleeveless tops that left most of my back exposed.

He kept shivering.

So I took off my cardigan and gave it to him.

He wrapped that tiny thing around himself as best he could. It probably covered a third of him.

And I sat beside him.

For what I remember as nearly two hours.

Freezing.

I was so cold that at some point I almost felt delirious.

And yet, for reasons I still cannot quite explain, I could not bring myself to say,

“Hey. I’m freezing too. I need my cardigan back.”

I just sat there.

Cold.

After I got off the phone with my sister the other day, that memory came back to me so clearly that I almost laughed.

There I had been, thinking,

I wish I had a memory of someone loving me so much he would tear off a piece of his own flesh for me.

And then I remembered the cardigan.

Oh.

Right.

In my marriage, apparently, I was the one taking off the cardigan.

And the funny thing is, that wasn’t even the beginning of anything.

It had been that way from the beginning.

At first, things would leave me speechless.

Then I got used to them.

Eventually, I stopped expecting anything different.

Somewhere along the way, I suppose I also stopped expecting certain kinds of happiness. Certain kinds of tenderness. Even something as small as being able to say, I’m cold too.

Maybe if I had memories like my sister’s, leaving would have been harder.

Maybe I wouldn’t have left at all.

Then again—

who knows.

This Saturday, some friends invited me over for dinner.

One friend’s husband is in Korea, so a bunch of Korean women are getting together at her house. One person is bringing spicy pork with lots of garlic, and I’m not really in a position to cook and carry food over there right now, so I volunteered to bring fruit and my favorite condensed-milk cake from Whole Foods.

“What is condensed-milk cake?” they asked.

Only the best thing ever.

These women still don’t understand my dessert preferences.

I keep telling them I don’t like scones, and somehow they keep buying me scones.

I don’t particularly like brownies either.

Still, brownies.

Still, scones.

Dear God.

I actually considered not going on Saturday.

Then I thought,

Why not?

I’ll go.

I’ll eat Korean barbecue wrapped in lettuce with my friends. I’ll eat my condensed-milk cake. I’ll stay late and laugh.

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to take off my old pedicure and paint my toenails with a new color I bought recently.

And that is really all I wanted to talk about today.

I’m not trying to blame anyone.

I’m not trying to rewrite thirty years of my life or decide that every moment of it was terrible.

I’m not even particularly interested in regretting it.

I’m just a woman in her mid-fifties who happened to watch a rainstorm today and suddenly remembered how terribly cold she had been on a bus in Mexico almost thirty years ago.

My life right now isn’t exactly where I want it to be.

There are things I desperately want to be over.

But they will be over someday.

And when I come out the other side of all this, I hope I will be a little stronger, a little wiser, and much better at enjoying my own life.

I have, however, already learned one very important lesson.

Never again will I get involved with a man who needs the cardigan off my back when his body is twice the size of mine.

Ha.