LOVE:ZERO

“Jiyu, why aren’t you answering me? Didn’t you hear what mom said?”

Ae-Jeong raised her voice.

Jiyu looked up from her book. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through the half-drawn blinds of the living room window. Her eyes narrowed, as if dazzled.

Pedestrians bustled by the window that faced the Fifth Avenue sidewalk.

It was a bit eerie to see only the lower half of her body moving, her upper body hidden by the blinds.

Fifth Avenue was unusually busy today after a summer of quiet.

Upper East Siders, who had scattered to the Hamptons on Long Island and Nantucket in Massachusetts to escape the sweltering weather, had returned en masse on the first Monday of September, just in time for Labor Day.

Snowflake-like dust floated in the sunlight slanting across the living room floor.

Jiyu liked the way the dust floated in the air. The dust that was only visible in direct sunlight disappeared in the shadows.

Sometimes she wished she could disappear from people’s gazes like that, especially when adults would suddenly approach her, stare at her, and ask her questions she couldn’t answer.

Whenever that happened, her heart would clench in her chest and her head would fill with white paint, and she would feel like an idiot who couldn’t answer even the simplest questions.

Jiyu looked up at Ae-Jeong and stared blankly into her eyes.

Ae-Jeong pinched and lifted the five-year-old’s narrow, delicate chin and spoke patiently.

“Jiyu, you need to be friendly with Hunter.”

“Do you know how hard I’ve been trying to set up playdates with him since last semester? I mean, what does a five-year-old know?”

Jiyu furrowed her brow.

“Jiyu Parker, and what did your mom tell you? when someone talks to you, don’t look away, look them in the eye and smile! She told me a couple times that if you don’t smile, you look so… fat, and Americans love a smiling face.”

Ae-Jeong bared her teeth and smiled as if to say, “Copy that?”

Jiyu mechanically stretched her lips to reveal her gap-toothed smile.

“Yeah, you’re so pretty when you smile, and your dimples are perfect.”

Ae-Jeong laughed and poked her dimples with her pointed nails.

Then she pushed the clothes on the hanger under Jiyu’s chin and talked to herself. Jiyu lowered her gaze back to the book.

“The Hunters are in Europe or the Hamiltons all summer. They’ve been traveling like crazy, and they’re back in New York by September. I’m so jealous, I swear. I bumped into his mom in the lobby and got lucky with this play date, so good for you, Jiyu. Make sure you and Hunter are friends so you can hang out more often. If you listen to your mom, you’ll have intimacy in your sleep.”

Jiyu looked up from her book as she listened to Ae-Jeong’s words.

Her mother sometimes said strange things.

With a hint of fear in her big eyes, Jiyu asked.

“…Do you eat hunters?”

Ae-Jeong clicked her tongue and corrected her.

“No! I don’t want you to eat Hunter, I want you to be ‘best friends’ with Hunter. Do you understand?”

Jiyu shook her head, then buried her head in her book again, only to glance up.

“…No. No.”

Her voice was thin, barely above a whisper.

“What? I told you not to mumble when you talk to mom! Speak up.”

“I don’t like rice cakes. I don’t want to eat it.”

Jiyu raised her voice a little. She didn’t like the texture of the rice cakes, which squirmed and stuck to her teeth.

“You sound like you’re scratching someone’s leg in your sleep.”

Ae-Jeong muttered, pulling her dress off the hanger and helping Jiyu to her feet.

She’d been unusually careful with her outfit today, dropping the bushes.

“We’re going to a rich family’s house, so we should look pretty. Let’s try this first.”

Rich house was a word that mixed like inhalation and exhalation in the vocabulary of affection.

She didn’t know the exact meaning, but she knew it meant a vaguely spacious, ornate house.

Ae-Jeong seemed happiest when she went on playdates with her friend who lived in a rich house.

The book slipped out of Jiyu’s tiny hands, and she tossed it haphazardly onto the living room floor.

The one-piece pajamas she was wearing were quickly removed and replaced with a dress that felt scratchy to the touch.

She went through the process a couple more times before Ae-Jeong smiled with satisfaction.

She picked out a white cotton dress.

“I was in the Hamiltons the other day, and everyone was wearing white dresses like this, so classy and sophisticated. It must be a trend among the rich.”

Muttering to herself, Ae-Jeong changed into a white sleeveless dress of her own and looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the corner of the living room, then spun around like a model on the catwalk.

Ae-Jeong was actually a former catwalk model, so she was still slim and well-dressed, and she was well aware of that, so she favored bold styles that stood out.

Jiyu watched her mother for a moment, then sneaked over and picked up the book from the floor, crawled back onto the couch, and opened it again.

Despite living in New York City for nearly 20 years, Ae+Jeong didn’t know that Labor Day was the unofficial last day of summer.

Nor did she know that there was an unspoken rule among upper-class people that they no longer wore the white clothes they wore at their summer homes after Labor Day.

Labor Day had already passed two days earlier.

To Ae-Jeong, money was class, so those with the most money were the upper class.

Unfortunately, her benchmarks were the strivers who tried to fit in with the conservative and exclusive high society.

They were the ones who seemed to have the most money, as they wore the most luxurious clothes and dressed the most extravagantly.

It was beyond her comprehension how the American upper class, with its inferiority complex about its short and insignificant history compared to Europe, could place so much value on its history and customs.

For a while, she watched and imitated the Chinese woman who was the biggest donor to the preschool, who used to carry a different color Hermès bag throughout the week.

But when Ae-Jeong heard a rumor that she was the concubine of a high-ranking Chinese official, she was furious and changed her benchmark, saying that no amount of money could make her look like a concubine.

The person she chose was a tall, slender, blonde beauty from the Eastern Bloc.

Covered head to toe in luxury goods, she was in her early 30s and her husband was a CEO in his late 60s. She was his fifth wife.

Ae-Jeong was so caught up in their dazzling exteriors that she didn’t know they, too, were on the periphery of the upper class.

On her wrist, Ae-Jeong wears a Rolex S watch and layers it with two matching S-class imitation Cartier X bracelets, and on each earlobe, she pierces a pair of one-carat diamond earrings that she received from her husband as a “push gift” for the birth of her child.

Finally, she proudly slung her 12-year-old gold Hermès S bag from a consignment shop over her forearm.

Then she walked over to Jiyu, who had her nose buried in a book, and smoothed out the large ribbon at the top of her head.

“Close your book, it’s time to go up to the penthouse for your date with the heir to the Hamiltons.”

Ae-Jeong laughed out loud, thinking  Jiyu was being funny.

Jiyu couldn’t see what was so funny about that, but she was overwhelmingly happy that her mom seemed to be in a good mood.

When Ae-Jeong stopped laughing, she tugged on her arm with a stern face.

“This is all I’m doing for you, Jiyu. You’re lucky to grow up in this kind of environment. When I was younger, I used to…”

Ae-Jeong, who had suddenly stopped talking, smiled sheepishly and ruffled her already perfectly set hair, muttering.

“You walked to school and didn’t go to college because you had no money. You made it to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. You made it, you made it.”

Ae-Jeong pulled a hand mirror from her bag and touched up her makeup, pursing her lips.

“Let’s go. Jiyu.”

Jiyu took Ae-Jeong’s hand and left the apartment, her short legs working hard to keep up with her tall mother’s wide strides.

She knew that a boy named Hunter went to the same preschool. She’d heard the name often enough to recognize it, but not the face.

She’d never been in his class before, and she didn’t like boys who ran around noisily.

I wondered, ‘Do they have a lot of books at Hunter’s house? I hope they have a lot.’

Suddenly, Jiyu was warmly curious about the play date.

Ae-Jeong tended to buy her more dresses and ribbons than books.

The children’s books on the low, three-tiered bookshelf had been read and re-read.

She couldn’t figure out why her mom kept insisting that Hunter be friends with her, but she figured if a “rich house” had lots of books, they could be friends.