by Grant Koo for the Autumn 2025 issue
“Well it’s easy for Mom. She gives off those sexy librarian vibes.”
“Have you seen her high school photo album?” Her father raises his eyebrows diplomatically, then marshalling more consoling tones, adds, “It’s better to grow into sexy later in life like she did. Ideally in your mid- to late-twenties, young lady.”
In the brief silence that follows, they each recalled the other’s lines from a more innocent dialog exchanged years earlier, which in retrospect served as a kind of prelude to the conversation they were currently having, one that has thus far successfully skirted the ever-present danger of devolving into the stereotypically awkward discussion of sex that daughters and their unsuspecting dads are prone to. She’d been in middle school when she first asked him what sex was in a precociously off-handed manner, and he’d replied rather boldly with a question of his own.
“What’s the most disgusting thing you can think of?”
As if on cue, she made a pistol of her right hand and rested her chin in the crook where thumb met index finger like she’d seen used by television actors to simulate thinking, then straightened up with a snap of her fingers.
“An old man I saw in the doorway of a building holding one nostril shut to shoot snot out the other.”
“Perfect, I promise you that sex is ten times grosser than that. That’s why your mother and I have never tried it. The mere thought of it makes us want to throw up.”
She had been old enough to know even then that her father was only pulling her leg, her very existence posing the paradox exposing the joke, and that a mysterious intercourse between adults was somehow necessary for the production of babies.
“Did you have sex in high school?” Mimi, now finishing up her senior year in the same public high school he’d graduated from nearly thirty-one years earlier, asks with the same off-handedness she’d cultivated as a child.
“Nope, stayed a virgin all through high school…. To maintain my purity, you understand.”
“Opportunity never came up?” she teases with instant regret.
“What can I say? You see right through me,” he parries without missing a step. “Didn’t have a serious girlfriend till senior year. She was in the year below me. We always stopped at…foreplay.”
“So when did you lose your virginity?” she asks with some effort at composure.
“Thanksgiving weekend my freshman year in college. My aforementioned former girlfriend had impulsively hopped on a bus to come visit me, and well, we went all the way. But another buddy, you remember Siddhartha, had already arrived the night before, which complicated things logistically. I remember Sidd being mad the next morning because he’d needed something from his bag which was in the room, but we didn’t open the door for him and pretended not to be there. All through brunch the next morning, we continued insisting that we’d been out for a walk till he finally just let it drop. I think he thought we were making fun of him when really it was just uncomfortable for us to talk about so soon…. You know, this is not nearly as awkward as I’d always imagined it would be.”
Which wasn’t entirely true. He couldn’t even bring himself to ask if she’d ever had sex. The punchline of an off-color joke suddenly occurs to him, and he barely manages to suppress the guffaw, reducing it to a single, sharp exhalation through his nostrils, which he immediately waves off in a dismissive gesture meant to preempt questioning. Maybe when she’s older, he thinks, shaking his head.
American women on average lost their virginities at 17.3 years of age with 62% of high school students surveyed reporting having had penetrative intercourse, alarming facts that he’d looked up several months earlier after she came home one day and made a beeline for the bathroom, suspiciously taking her bag in there with her. When she finally emerged asking what was for dinner with a repulsive nonchalance, how could he not jump to conclusions involving pregnancy tests, even though they would later be proven baseless?
She shrugs now, shoulders her bag, and retreats into her room with a few words, less complaint than excuse, alluding to the next morning’s AP Biology test. While clearing the dinner table, he suddenly recalls the fact that his wife had been a virgin when they met, without being able to recall any of the actual circumstances surrounding her disclosure. How did I just know? he murmurs in vocalized wonder, leaving the dishes stacked in the sink to soak overnight, and retreats into his room to pick up where he’d left off, which oh right, was nowhere. Still, he felt he had something, an internal rhyme bouncing around in silence for another line to couple with, and that wasn’t nothing.
We kiss to feel the osmosis….
That stray lyric kept rotating through his aural imagination like a skipping record stuttering bashfully about love. But the next line to complete the couplet, which he was absolutely positive needed to end in halitosis, adamantly refused birth. He keyed another few variations into his laptop with the free hand that wasn’t unconsciously tightening its chokehold around his uncooperative guitar’s neck.
We kiss to feel the osmosis,
One two three four…halitosis.
Think! he thought. Why do people kiss?
“Dad!”
“Yeah?” he confirmed having heard her and waited for a reply. No answer meant for him to come investigate, a tacit understanding that was long-established between them.
“You called?”
“Do we have any fruit?”
“I don’t know. You know I stay away from that stuff.”
“Can you check what we have?”
“Sure princess.” Footsteps fade, footsteps reappear. “We have strawberries and tangerines. And a melon, honeydew I believe. I would recommend the honeydew.”
“Sure.”
He watches as his daughter types into her laptop, switches browsers, scrolls slowly, runs a bandaged finger across the page of her biology textbook a few times, looks up, switches back to the previous browser, and types some more at record- and keyboard-smashing speeds. She looks back at him and meets his eyes, which are brimming with pride.
“That will be all; you may go now.” He’s impressed that she didn’t even have to interrupt her typing to achieve such a haughty tone.
“You got it, but if I may, milady. My troubled head grows dark with suspicions that I may be spoiling you for all suitable suitors save the bravest and most devoted among them, whom you may one day deem fit to bestow the blessing of a glimpse into your true worth,” he finishes with a flourish, but she has already stopped listening ages ago. Her keyboard croaks clickety-clack, clackity-click. He backs out of the room to go slice up what turns out to be a cantaloupe, wondering what game the two of them are playing at exactly. Once, a long time ago, Mimi’s parents were her whole world, but over the years, she grew up, naturally, and opened herself to the influence of a wider circle of people and ideas floating through the world writ large, one that has always been subject to endless eleventh-hour additions and re-editing, which established a fundamental imbalance in their relationship since she had remained, as ever, their entire world.
He consulted his watch before video calling his wife who was in London that week for work. The differences between the two countries’ scheduled daylight savings going into effect that month meant they were only four hours apart instead of the usual five. At first, she seemed distracted, evasive even, but following a close shave with Occam’s razor he settled on maybe just jet lagged. He brought her up to speed on his recent conversation with their daughter, and learned they’d already had a separate talk themselves not too long ago, which was a relief to hear.
“I hope you didn’t ask if she was a virgin herself.”
“No, of course not. But I wanted to. Do you think she is?”
“Yes.”
“Good, so do I.”
He briefly considers telling his wife the story of how he’d lost his virginity before thinking better of it.
“How was your night out with the team?” he asks instead, then remembering her mentioning that a colleague was out on bereavement, adds, “Did Rupert make it?”
“No, he wasn’t feeling up to it, but he said he might come in for lunch tomorrow before my flight.”
He hears a knock at the door; she freezes.
“Just a minute,” she says just loudly enough to leave him uncertain as to whether she’d been addressing him or whoever was knocking on her hotel door at such a late hour. She mutes her mic before exiting the frame as his thoughts descend into a dark place. She returns on screen exactly a minute later, starts moving her mouth, pauses to unmute, and repeats the apology that she’s feeling tipsy and still jet lagged and really just needs to go to bed. He wonders who was at her door. She says it was just room service with the extra blanket she asked for, and reiterates her exhaustion. His thoughts grope around the dark for a while longer as if looking for a light switch as the screen too goes dark from inactivity.
…
They circled the airport a second time to avoid paying for parking. Mimi jumps in a beat too early on Twist and Shout blasting over the radio, but correctly guesses that it’s John instead of Paul on vocals, a distinction she wasn’t always so good at making. Her father glances down at his phone lighting up with a message from her mother before joining in on harmonics. They pull up behind another double parked car, in front of which Mimi’s mother is standing with her hitchhiker’s thumb out. Her hand falls to her side as if it’d held a handkerchief to signal the start of the flurry of activity that characterized airport family reunions. The father puts on his blinkers, pops open the hood by mistake, then the trunk, and scrambles around the front of the car, sheepishly slamming the hood shut again, to collect her luggage with a quick kiss. Mimi steps out on the passenger’s side to side-hug her mother before climbing into the back seat, while her mother eases into the recently vacated, but still intimately warm, front seat and adjusts the angle to a more comfortable reclining position. She keeps her sunglasses on against the glare off the hood and reaches out a pale arm to lower the volume of the car radio.
“Enough room back there?”
“Yep.”
“So what’d I miss?”
Having had video calls every night she’d been away, there was precious little to catch up on besides soaking in each other’s physical presence and joking around to make each other laugh. Mimi, with her low tolerance for silence, started chatting about her AP Biology exam, which through some loose chain of associations ended in the revelation that she had recently rejected a boy who’d asked her to prom, which was news to both of them. Still, Mimi’s mother glances over at her husband, wondering if he’d possessed prior knowledge and feeling reminded yet again that the two of them had always been closer.
The mother starts slow clapping with genuine pleasure, which makes the other two laugh. The father wonders playfully whether their daughter’s news merits applause. The mother concedes the point and asks who it is. Their conversation, drifting into unexplored territory, acquires a new valence of intrigue. Mimi hesitates, but is still smiling. The father intervenes with a less specific question, asking her to at least tell them whether it’s someone they know. It isn’t. The mother asks a series of questions, noninvasive by her standards, meant to elucidate the boy’s dominant qualities and determine what specific deficiencies had contributed towards his rejection, gleaning whatever insights Mimi’s responses might offer into her developing tastes and preferences when it came to boys. The father wonders if the prom proposal has made things awkward between them, which Mimi confirms it definitely has, adding that they haven’t spoken since, not once, despite the considerable overlap in their schedules. Did you suspect he liked you? Complete surprise. Have any of your friends been asked? Just Jenny, as far as I know. She was asked by two different boys and a girl.
“Hey Dad, were you working on a new song last night?” she asks in an undisguised attempt to change the subject. “It sounded pretty different, very punk rock.”
“As a musician,” which all three knew he definitely wasn’t—he occasionally borrowed chord progressions from old songs and supplied his own lyrics, adjusting the melodies to fit his narrower vocal range, and leaving his underdeveloped musical memory to finish distorting the original tune beyond all recognition; that was all—but he’d taken the bait, “I experience a kind of nonphysical intercourse with my listener. But in the creative process, I have to really listen carefully. Being a good listener makes you a better musician, and vice versa. I’ve been revisiting bands like The Sex Pistols and Green Day as much for their lyrics as for their distinctive vocal stylings….” He rattled on till they reached their turnpike turn off though he could tell the two of them had already stopped listening, probably several exits ago. It no longer bothered him though, and he never called either of them out for being inattentive as long as it remained intermittent.
They stopped to pick up Middle Eastern food for dinner as neither parent felt like cooking. Mimi may have started giving off adult vibes, but never when it came to meal prep, and was only ever found wandering into the kitchen during dinnertime to check when the food would be ready or to casually restate the dire case of her hunger. In fact, Mimi’s parents never required her to do any of the household chores, though for about a month during the fourth or fifth grade, Mimi took a shine to cleaning toilets, pulling on rubber gloves that looked comically large on her, so much so that she declared wanting to clean toilets for a living when she grew up, elevating the work a notch by specifying she’d be cleaning toilets not just at home but in fancy hotels, too.
He gazed out the kitchen window some more, rinsing another glass, and recalled another memory from her childhood.
“Whatcha looking at?” Toddler Mimi toddles in, looking up at her father for clues as to where in the sky she should be looking.
“Just watching the jets criss-crossing the sky out of Newark and LaGuardia. You?”
“Just watching you,” she answers, as if stating the obvious.
Just watching you. The words echo through his mind, stumbling across the years to bring him back to the semi-adult Mimi who has just entered the kitchen to check the fridge for what there is to drink. There she stood, five foot two in stockings, the top of her head level with his chin, on the verge of womanhood.
“Any iced tea left?”
“There should be some on the top shelf behind last night’s leftovers.” But what he’d really wanted to say was: Never go to parties alone. Always go with a friend, someone you trust to look out for you. Girls have to look out for one another. Never leave your drink unattended or accept one from someone outside your tightest circle of trust unless you’re absolutely certain it’s clean and ruffie-free. Ruffies are the date rape drugs found on campuses, even at the Ivies, used to induce amnesia and render the victim unconscious. Think about that for just a second, being utterly defenseless. So be careful and remember to make good decisions that keep you and your friends safe.
“Found the iced tea. Mind if I kill it?”
“Be my guest. Here’s a glass. Ask Mom what she wants to drink.”
“Mom! Dad says to ask what you want to drink.”
“Sancerre, please!”
“Thanks Mimi,” he says with gentle sarcasm, knowing she knew that that wasn’t what he’d meant.
“No hay problema, papi,” she chirps, then chugs what’s left of the iced tea. “Let’s eat. I’m famished.”
He retrieves the bottle from the side door of the fridge, holds it up to the light a moment to check how much is left, then proceeds to carefully empty its contents into an identical pair of crystal wine glasses typically reserved for company. Unhappy with his own uneven pour, he hands his wife the fuller glass as a kind of penance. They toast to Mimi’s mother’s return with Mimi joining in pantomime and saying chink, chink for the wine glass that wasn’t in her hand.
“Do you want to taste the wine?” he asks.
“No thanks.”
“You know, it’s not a bad idea to know how alcohol affects you before heading off to college.”
Mimi’s mom nods, chiming in, “Florence’s mom told me the other day that she’s started going to parties where there’s alcohol. Her mom wisely supports a safe introduction to the realities of underage drinking. Better now, while her mother can still go to pick her up. Apparently, there are always kids making out in the corners, and some boy at one of these parties asked if Florence wanted to go someplace quieter, which she turned down emphatically. She told her mom knowingly that he was just trying to get her alone, scoffing derisively that he probably had more than just kissing in mind.”
We kiss to feel the osmosis
Divine disregard of halitosis.
Open arms as if affixed to a crucifix
Vanishing bodies like magic tricks.
Aargh! he thinks alone later that evening after Mimi and her mother have already gone to bed.
…
The parents of one of Mimi’s close circle of friends had invited them that weekend, along with several other families they’d known since kindergarten, to a barbeque they were hosting in their building’s outdoor amenities space for having survived high school, a cause for celebration among daughters and their dazed parents alike, or so the recurrent joke ran that day, which turned out to be gloriously sunny with just a gentle breeze blowing around heady whiffs of fresh cut grass, in other words, a perfect day for barbeque. Mimi’s parents brought five pounds of marinated bulgogi from H-Mart and a pre-chilled bottle of Sancerre.
The three of them split up almost immediately upon arrival. Mimi’s mother took the bottle with her over to the table serving as a bar that some of the other mothers had formed a circle around, while her father took the bulgogi over to the grill that their husbands had lined up behind. He slowed his steps trying to remember everyone’s names. They’d gotten together far less frequently since the pandemic, before the girls achieved greater independence in high school and no longer relied on their parents to handle all the social arrangements.
“Miguel, glad you made it.”
“You kidding, Tomito? Sorry we’re late. I love barbeques, especially yours,” Michael casually harkened back to the barbeque Tomás had thrown when their girls had finished elementary school. Michael one-armed the bulgogi and gave Tomás a fist bump. “Is there space on the grill for some Korean BBQ?”
“Claro que sí, these burgers are just about done. You know I’ve always wondered, what makes it Korean? Is it the spices? The preparation?”
“It’s Korean BBQ when I’m the one grilling it.”
A few of the fellas laughed and one handed him a can of beer. The barbeque was off to a promising start.
“Have you seen Mom?”
Mimi hadn’t. The festivities were well underway, with several of the parents already shit-faced. Like the Moons, most of them only had one child. Michael had only had a few drinks in as many hours and was ready to leave before everyone exposing their feelings around becoming empty nesters led to tears. Mimi was also ready to go. She and a few friends were thinking about taking a walk somewhere outside parental earshot. Michael, wanting to detain her a few moments longer, started talking about meaning, so maybe he was more buzzed than he’d originally thought.
“Meaning is produced through attentive observation and transmitted by a variety of means. Mine has always been music, which is maybe why I’ve always felt so misunderstood my whole life. I just didn’t have the words. And yet when I met your mother, not having the words was fine. More than just fine; our romantic relations were premised on the assumption that a linguistic barrier existed between us, so out of necessity, we got good at paying more attention to where our words were coming from than the words themselves. I think my Korean may have been a smidge better than her English back then, but still everything felt turbocharged with meaning, and all the words, words, words that I’d struggled with since I first learned to speak and could start forming memories suddenly became superfluous. It felt as if we’d been preloaded with the ability to read each other’s intentions in our looks and gestures. I fell madly in love with your mother and proposed less than three months later. But do I wish she’d been my first sexual partner like I’d been hers? I don’t know, maybe not. Don’t misunderstand me. I think how Mom saved herself for the man she would marry, that’s me, makes for a splendid memory, but more practically speaking, I think having the prior experiences I’ve had inoculated me against the curiosity of seeking sexual encounters outside the marriage. You’ll make the choice that feels right to you, and so, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, it will be. But for that to happen, you have to stay safe. Throughout history, men have always posed the number one threat to women. ¿Comprende, mi hija?”
“Sí, lo entiendo.” And he was finally satisfied that she really did. “I should get going though. They’ve been giving me the signal.”
He glances over her shoulder at them and for a moment looks hurt. She looks around and, seeing no one else close enough to hear, confides in her father as if to make it up to him, “Ishita says someone she knows from volleyball is getting an abortion. Can you believe it? Knocked up at the prom, she thinks. Anyway, we’re just going down by the river to gossip for a little bit. You guys can head home without me. I’ll walk back with Stacy.”
He stands there watching his daughter walk away from him, getting smaller, towards her childhood friends who are now all grown up. Justine is tapping an imaginary watch in the pantomime of impatience. He felt time running out himself, and suddenly calls out, “If you see Mom, let her know I’m looking for her, will you?”
Most fathers admit under questioning to never having had the sex talk with their daughters at all, entrusting it entirely to their wives to handle with far more finesse and tact than they themselves felt psychologically capable of. But Stacy and Justine’s fathers didn’t seem to mind imparting details about their respective sex talks to the other fathers gaffawing around the grill. Stacy’s father had said it went fine (lowering his voice to a whisper as if to place the topic into parenthesis), but looked away suspiciously as if he were lying, even if it was only to himself, while Justine’s father exploited its default cultural cringiness to comic effect. Michael’s own sex talk has been ongoing for weeks, a real marathon of the mouth where he’d occasionally have to triangulate with his wife in the next room whenever he was feeling lost himself. He kept quiet about his own experience though, which if he were being honest with himself, aligned more closely with Stacy’s father who’d said it went fine, but was probably just lying to himself.
He spit and rinsed his toothbrush under the faucet, noticing without much concern as a spot of blood in the foamy white mixture washed away with the saliva and spearmint toothpaste. Looking up, he confronted a thought experiment in the mirror. If his wife were having an affair, would he want to know? Nope. He knew he’d be unable to forgive her; better to carry on blissfully unaware than to blow up his life. Did he want to think about whether she ever thought about it? Also a resounding no thank you. He considered extramarital affairs a perverse national obsession, one that probably pervaded all cultures at all times in one way or another, insinuating themselves into most plot lines developed across television, film and books targeting adults, even if only tangentially. Still, he didn’t personally know of a single couple who’d gotten divorced due to one or the other’s unfaithfulness. What accounted for this imbalance between the stories we stirred into the cauldrons of collective unconscious versus how we actually conducted ourselves in real life? He could not discount the possibility that maybe everyone was just as good at concealing their indiscretions as he was at minding his own business.
We kiss to feel the osmosis.
We kiss to explore halitosis.
We kiss to practice kissing
So when at last we kiss for real,
We kiss, blissed into osmosis.
Back in the bedroom, Michelle tells him that Mira told her that Steve and Sara were filing for divorce, which is why they didn’t see them at the barbeque. In response, Michael wonders who Steve and Sara are and tells her that their daughter told him that Ishita told her that she knows a girl getting an abortion. They shrug as if to say, that’s life, and anyway, it’s been a long day, before rolling away from each other and onto their elbows to turn out the lamps on their bedsides. The evening deepens with still so much drama swirling around them.
In the dark, on the cusp of conscious thought’s translation into dreams, he regards his family with gratitude. They managed to evade the fates this time around, but maybe next time they’re not so lucky. Maybe next time, it’s one of them that becomes the spicy topic of conversation around the bars and barbeque grills. Mimi may drop out of college, while her mother may pick up a habit for casual affairs with strangers or straight out demand a divorce once Mimi moves out at the end of the summer. He himself might fall prey to any number of things that could just take him out completely. Falling into a crushing depressive episode to never climb back out, gambling away all their savings in the stock market, succumbing to alcoholism, losing first his job and then his wife and will to live. The seeds of tragic possibility were all there, pre-planted, so to speak. And in the morning, he will have to tend to his metaphorical garden, which demanded continuous vigilance to keep the family from falling into despair and disrepair. He consciously conjures Mimi, who appears on his dream side to play a scarecrow in overalls, hung out like a crucifix in an unmolested garden, the metaphor now manifested as a dream with scavenger birds circling in the distance. He is faced with the choice of remaining on this side of the psychological border in his bed, or he can take that last enticing step across to better hear what Mimi is telling him in his garden variety dream. He and his wife would eventually have to have a frank discussion about why they haven’t engaged in sex for so long, but he was just feeling so tired right now and anyway, he thought to himself just before finally drifting off to sleep, there would always be time to talk about sex later. 🏁
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