Kate Jacobs (11 page)

* * *

The graduate students' lounge hadn't been
redecorated in far too long, the tiny kitchen area still awash in avocado green
and harvest gold. It was Friday, the end of a long, long week for Darwin. Her
research wasn't much further along than it had been at last week's knitting club
meeting. Darwin lifted the mug to her mouth and took a tiny sip of hot tea.
"Ouch, that's toasty!" she commented, a bit too loudly, to a woman
sitting nearby. Women and beer-making in the twelfth century. Darwin knew about
her thesis; they shared the same advisor.
"I always do that. Drink too soon. I should just wait a bit. Do you do
that?" she asked.
The woman made an uh-huh sound, didn't look up. Darwin moved closer to her, sat
in a chair opposite. The woman was reading the newspaper. Darwin scrunched up
her nose, read the headlines upside down. More bad news about the economy. She
cleared her throat.
"So how's your research coming along?"
The woman looked up. She did not look happy.
"Can't you see I'm trying to take a break here? Let it be, Darwin!"
The woman folded the paper, glared at Darwin, and exited.
"I thought that's what we were doing?" said Darwin to no one in
particular. There was no one else in the lounge. She sat, drinking her tea,
waiting. A cookie would go well with this, she thought. Darwin zipped open her
backpack, rooted around for a treat, but all she came up with was an apple from
yesterday's lunch. Nah. She saw her notes from the last meeting, hesitated,
then zipped up the bag. She held the cooling mug in both hands, savoring all
the warmth, blowing on the hot drink. Soon enough another student sauntered in.
"Hey Jeff! How's your research coming along?!"
The student stopped, looked quickly at Darwin, hesitated. Then he turned on his
heel and walked back just the way he'd come.
She sighed. Darwin had been at Rutgers for five years, and if she could name
five friends, she would have been rounding up.
"They're jealous of you because you're so smart," her mother used to
tell her as they sat at the kitchen table, watching the dreary Seattle rain out
the window. Darwin became suspicious of her mother's advice somewhere around
sixth grade though she didn't let on; she didn't want her mom to feel bad. But
she knew the drill: the other kids loved her to help with their homework, but few
of them ever wanted to hang out with her. There was the girl from across the
street; she played with her often until the family moved away. And Darwin tried
to be funny, checking out joke books from the library. But all she learned was
that staying up all weekend memorizing knock-knock jokes did not guarantee
popularity by Monday. "Be good and people will come to you," her
mother insisted. Be quiet. Work hard. Listen to your mommy and daddy. Don't
make waves. Never make waves.
It wasn't Darwin's natural inclination to be a Goody Two-Shoes. She didn't want
to sit silently while adults were in the room, and she didn't want to help her
little sister, Maya, clean up her room, and she didn't want to wipe the table
after dinner. (When her mother's back was turned, she swept the crumbs right
onto the floor.) No, she didn't want to burn money for her ancestors on Chinese
New Year, and she didn't want to go to Sunday school, and she didn't want to
wear knee socks and a camisole when everyone else had training bras and nylons.
But she did. There was some secret part of her that didn't want to jinx the
chance that her mom was right and that if she just did as she was told, a best
friend forever would appear. Poof! Like magic.
"Someday my best friend and I will share all our secrets," she told
herself every night before she went to sleep, repeating it over and over until
the loneliness of the day began to subside. Who would her friend be? Maybe
someone like Princess
Leia
, ready to stand up for
her, or more like Patty from
Square Pegs
, or even like Mary from
The
Secret Garden
. Someone good and true, who always picked you first in gym
class.
And so Darwin Chiu was good, the best good girl there ever was. She didn't
spill lunch on her dresses, and she always did her homework as soon as she came
home, and she made sure she was the first one to put her hand up in class.
"I know, I know," she'd burst, reaching high, glancing to the side
and grinning, certain to impress her classmates with her quick answers. The wait
for a friend dragged on. But few invitations ever came for a birthday party,
only rare phone calls on a Saturday morning to ask if she could come over and
play. And no, it didn't count when cousins came over; it's not like they had a
choice.
High school was more of the same. No date for the prom. Check. No Saturday
night parties. Check. No boyfriend. Check. No first kiss. Check. Too smart, no
friends, a seething layer of resentment. It was the foundation for turning into
a serial killer, Darwin told herself. So by the time she hit her sophomore year
of college, she officially quit playing the role of Hello Kitty. The new Darwin
had a criticism for every wrong answer from a less gifted student, a comment
for every fashion disaster, a smart retort for every request from her sister.
And what did she care? She was going to go on to grad school, move out of her
parents' home, and get the hell out of there.
And then came Dan. He sauntered into the history of midwifery in colonial
America when she was a junior in college and, unlike the lazy-asses sitting in
the back row, actually participated in the lecture. Dan tilted his head and
paid attention when Darwin made a point. And then, after that first class, he
caught up with her as she headed to the doorway and touched—reached out and
touched!—her shoulder. "Hi, I'm Dan," he said, his voice low and
rich. "Love what you said in there. Hey, I bet you've already planned your
final paper, but I was wondering if you'd like to study together
sometime…"
Handsome, quick with a joke, easygoing—Dan Leung was a natural leader, the kind
of guy who held court in the dining hall and nailed impressive internships
during his summers. Ambitious, he had stacked up AP credits in high school and
was set to graduate in only three years. Even Darwin hadn't done that! But most
of all he was cute, impatiently brushing his too-long hair out of his eyes,
laughing. Darwin met him for study time once, twice, and soon enough they were
talking movies and music instead of midwives. She loved how he listened, really
heard every word she was saying.
She loved how he didn't seem to think she was a geek.
Not to mention that he'd never been in chess club.
"Why me?" she asked him once.
"You look like every girl I'm supposed to date—and you act like none of them,"
he'd answered, crushing her lips in a too-hard kiss, slightly sloppy. It was
her first. (Check!) And it was delicious, made her insides all
gooshy
and twisty and jingly-jangly.
If never having had a real friend in all of her nineteen years was because the
she-spirit of the universe had been waiting to bring her Dan, then it had all
been worth it, she told herself after that kiss. He never asked her to tone it
down. Darwin, he said, was the sharpest girl he had ever met.
And when Dan was on your side, no one ignored you. Suddenly girls were talking
to her on the way to seminars, in class ("
Shhhh
,
I'm listening," Darwin would tell them, annoyed), in the campus café, at
the mall. "Oh, you have so many new friends, Darwin," said her
mother. "You should have them over." But just Dan was enough for her.
He said he found Darwin beautiful. From her early protests—you're just saying
that!—to her slow acceptance that maybe, just maybe, there
was
something
in the way she carried herself, to letting him gaze into her deep brown eyes as
he brushed her long, dark hair before he began to lick her neck and work his
way down, Darwin began to feel different about herself. She was proud of her
intelligence, sure, but there had always been something else. Dan's attentions
were as if her deepest, most shameful hope had been discovered, examined, and
found to be true. She was
pretty
.
Of course, how the two of them looked was the catch. He was also
Chinese-American—the one thing that would make Darwin's mother so delighted, so
ultrasatisfied
that she had raised her daughter
right. It might even repair the years of screams and slammed doors. Her family,
in her opinion, was far too sheltering and Old World. She'd begged and pleaded
to go to a school out of state—"It will test my character!" was
argument No. 9; "I hate you" was reason No. 31—but ended up just
where she had always been, sleeping under her flowered duvet in her single bed
and sharing a bathroom with her little sister. The road to a graduate program
studying women's history was paved with clichés about earning A's and
respecting her elders and, oh yes, finding a nice Chinese boy. The thought of
living up to traditional expectations made her want to scream herself hoarse.
"So you're going away to study the history of famous women?" asked
her father, a literal-minded biologist who seemed confused as to why she wasn't
going into law or medicine as he and his wife had advised.
"No, Dad, I'm going to research women's history. Regular women. Everyday
women. You know, the part all the male historians ignored." He frowned,
but her mother jumped in, always ready to smooth things out: "Well, at
least we can call her a doctor!"
Although she never let on to Dan, Darwin toyed with the possibility of dumping
him—her one friend, her dearest friend—simply because she had been adamant
about not loving a Chinese boy. But she wanted him more than she wanted to be
defiant. Dan saw all the good that was inside her and imagined even more that
she suspected really wasn't there.
And then the universe tipped its hand again: he got into med school at NYU and
Darwin got into a top women's-history program at Rutgers. A night of
celebration with just enough red wine and, um, conversation, and Darwin had
talked Dan into moving in with her. We'll be able to spend so much time
together and save money, she had said. As expected, her mother was horrified
(check!); as an added bonus, Dan's mother refused to speak to her for years
(check
check
!). And when, in a rare argument, Dan
accused her of being anti-tradition for its own sake, Darwin followed up with a
spur-of-the-moment proposal, offering no ring and no change of surnames. Let's
elope, she whispered. Affable as ever, Dan thought that sounded just fine to
him. They settled for swapping vows at City Hall. He wanted a partner, and the
woman he wanted was Darwin. And so it was: no red dress for Darwin, no
shark-fin soup, no Double Happiness for her mother. Perfect.
But now their life together wasn't exactly going according to schedule. For one
thing, Dan finished up med school in the city but ended up with a residency in
Los Angeles; Darwin was still fighting her way through her dissertation.
"I can't just toss aside everything I've been working on because you need
to go to LA," she had cried the previous summer. "My dreams are
important, too!" She needn't have worried, of course. Dan was as
understanding as he had always been. No, no, he said, stroking her hair, you'll
stay and study and I'll fly back when I can. It'll all work out. And soon
enough we'll be together again. You'll see, Darwin, you'll see. She wanted to
believe Dan. She really did.
But his unwavering support just made it harder to see him go.
Now she woke up every morning alone, knowing that the best she could hope for
would be a stolen moment from his shift when he could call from his cell phone.
"Hey, Darwin, how are you?"
"I'm okay, Dan, but I miss you."
"Me, too, babe. Holy cow,
gotta
go already, I'm
being paged—"
And that would be it. Click. Call you again in another thirty-six hours.
There was another obstacle, thought Darwin. One that was pushing them further
apart than the physical distance between them.
She'd lost the baby.
The one Dan had really wanted.
Oh, it had been a stupid idea to begin with: she was still in school and he had
years of residency ahead of him, and neither one of them had ever changed a
diaper in their lives. They were too busy. Too unprepared. It was too soon.
Then again, is there ever a right time? That's what Dan had said. And imagine
how cute the baby would be if it looked like its mother, he would tease. They'd
debated the pros and cons of getting pregnant and looked at calendars—will it
fit into our schedule?—and worked out a budget and even read a book on positive
parenting. They made a deal about how they would split the childcare
fifty-fifty, and then they tried the craziest of all marital ideas: Dan and
Darwin had unprotected sex. On purpose. And it worked. Just like the science
books say.
But that baby was never born. And she'd never told her husband what she'd done.
And then her original research just fell apart. Darwin couldn't sit still and
write about childbirth customs in the Victorian era. Not anymore. So that left
her with no brilliant dissertation almost finished, no impressive graduation
ceremony for her parents to fly across the country to watch. All she had was a
stack of student loans and an uncertain future, anxiety attacks that awakened
her in the middle of the night, a distant voice on a phone line for a life
partner ("Won't you please tell me what's wrong, Darwin. I've been up all
night with patients…"), and an empty apartment to go home to after a
frustrating week.
But it was Friday, and that meant it was time for that knitting group. She
could watch them all tackle that sweater pattern, click-clacking away.
"I think I'm changing my thesis," she told her mom on the phone a few
weeks ago. "I'm curious about why women cling to outmoded craft activities
in the modern era."
The owner of the store, Georgia, didn't like her very much, but that was same
story, different day. Since never had she been popular. So what? What Darwin
cherished was eating that little girl's cookies. (Should she warn her about the
perils of domesticity?) And seeing Anita's big smile every time she walked into
the shop. She even practiced clever little small talks—the weather, the
traffic, the man selling purses on the sidewalk—so she could draw out her
weekly hellos, grab a little bit more of Anita's attention.