Draft

Alrighty, here is the latest  draft I'm sending to Pure Slush.  I spent two hours on it this morning.  I've had a hard time being motivated to work on it.  I don't think I was really up to taking his suggestions.  At one point in his edits, he told me that my choice of the verb "letting" was something a child would say.

Sigh.

I've spent the last couple of years being subservient to just about everyone I encounter (Korea, Netflix CS, Oasis...), so I suppose I was tired of feeling small and I was unhappy with that feeling creeping into my writing.  But, I sucked it up and made some changes.  It's always good to rework a piece, no matter whether you agree with the direction or not.

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Welcome Dinner

We followed Julia to the car. Like her, it was stately, expensive and a little intimidating. She waved us to the back as she slid into the driver’s. I sat. A sickly sweet floral fragrance drifted from a plastic air freshener, the only marker of ownership on the nearly sanitary, bread-colored interior. The awkward roil in my stomach was something I was growing accustomed to in the three days I had been in Korea.

“Where are we eating dinner, again?” I asked Ian in a hushed, mumbled voice, torn between relief at Julia’s sudden neglect and worry for my lack of preparedness for the evening.

“I don’t know. “ He leaned forward. “Julia, where are we going to eat?”

“Uh,” then she said something I didn’t understand. I tried to work it out in my head. ‘Bead-um’ is all I heard her say. I repeated it over and over in my head, searching for a match. Beans? Berries? Bread? Nothing logical came to me. “Rice, vegetable, fish, soup,” Julia continued to Ian.

“Does she remember that we’re vegetarians?” I asked.

“Um. Julia, will the restaurant be alright for vegetarians? We don’t eat meat.”

“Oh, yes. Okay. You eat fish?”

“No. No fish, chicken, beef or anything like that. We do eat eggs and milk, though.” His shoulders tensed with the effort of explaining, rising and taking his voice with them. His briefcase clip made a rhythmic, metallic click under his nervous hand. After the last eight hours making and remaking lesson plans naïvely seeking her approval, I couldn’t look at her. I counted glowing red crosses atop churches. Eleven if you count the ones just past those hills. I had thought Koreans were Buddhists.

“Your parents are vegetarians?” Julia continued.

“Mine aren’t,” Ian said. “They eat a lot of meat, actually. Casey’s mom is, though.” Hearing my name drew me down from the hills and into the car.

“Oh, really? It’s good to do. You are nice children, obedient.”

We drove a few minutes more in silence. Julia began to mumble to herself. A cab passed us hurriedly. I leaned toward her, worried she was trying to talk to us. She wasn’t. She dialed her phone, a jeweled J swinging heavily from it, slowing further as she divided her attention between her phone and the road. I squinted into the headlights of the oncoming cars as we reversed directions on the four lane street. After a minute- long phone call in exasperated Korean and punctuated by considerable sighing, she made another U-turn and we pulled into a nearly empty parking lot. I released my grip on the door.

I interrogated the restaurant’s fluorescent sign, moving my eyes over the Korean writing again and again, but the dramatically written symbols were beyond me. Small, blocky type in the lower right corner answered my question: “Vietnam Cuisine”.