Re Jane (11 page)

“Nina Scagliano. Long time no see,” he said, addressing not her face but whatever it was behind her right ear—the row of top-shelf liquor bottles, the other female patrons—that seemed to catch his interest.

“Joey! Wow! It's been . . . years!” Nina almost dropped her pink drink. She'd mistakenly thought his gaze had been directed at her, checking her out.

“Actually, I go by J. now,” he said.

“Right! Jay. My bad.” Nina let out a nervous trill.

Joey—Jay—J.—surveyed the room again and rolled his eyes. “This your usual jam?”

“Wha—? Huh?” Nina turned strangely self-conscious. She tucked her neck in like a turtle and her fingers touched her right ear, as if she were trying to caress the droplets of his exhaled breath.

Joey Cammareri glanced over in my direction and gave me a half nod, like it wasn't worth the full effort. So I half nodded back.

“But I thought, 'cause I heard from my mom, that like . . .” As Nina sputtered, I kept willing her to return to proper form. To make a crack about how he looked as though he'd just fallen out of bed. But the Nina I thought I knew was shrinking fast.

When she squealed—a notch too eagerly—it caught the attention of Nina's other friends. They all turned around and began to smother Joey Cammareri in hugs, double kisses, and
omigawd!
's. Angela, with her big boobs, chest-butted me to the periphery of their circle. Then Marie elbowed me out entirely. A goofy laugh—Nina—punctured the air. The group drifted to the dance floor.

I was still standing along the perimeter of the bar, three people deep. I suddenly became very engrossed with the red straw poking out of my glass of rum and Coke. Then, as the ice melted, I turned my attention to my shoes, then the shoes of all the other people in the club. Each time I glanced over to the group, Nina seemed to fall more and more out of character. As she swayed from side to side with the music, she kept tucking the tendrils of hair behind her ears, head cocked awkwardly, which only made her hair pitch forward again.

I was down to the last swirl of my second drink. The dress had done nothing to attract anyone's attention. I was debating whether to order another or just go home when a clean, soapy smell cut through the throng of sweet colognes and fruity shampoos and gels. Ed's smell. I entertained the briefest fantasy that he was here in this club and would whisk me away.

What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?
Ed would say. We'd exchange a hearty laugh.

Unconsciously I had drifted toward that soap smell—it was coming off a guy leaning against the slate bar. From his sideways profile, he could have been Ed: same broad shoulders, same narrowing at the waist, same blondish hair and strong jaw. But when he turned around, his face was unlined, boyish, different. Ed had the look of a man who'd weathered his youth. He'd had a whole life before we ever met. I wondered whether he'd spent his twenties in Chelsea clubs or fratty Upper East Side bars? Would he have offered up a round of Flaming Dr Pepper shots to a gaggle of girls like Nina? To me? I turned my attention back to the guy. He was looking me up and down, the corners of his mouth lifting in something like approval.

You want something happen, you gotta make happen.
I smiled back.

“You want me . . . to buy you a drink?” I said, my voice shaky. Nina was the kind of girl who could walk up to a guy and demand that he buy her a cosmo, but I wasn't.

I thought for a second the guy was going to laugh in my face. But then the corners of his mouth were curling up again. “Sure,” he said. “But only if I can get your next one.” I had just enough money left for our two drinks. I was glad I'd loaded my MetroCard before going out.

Over the blaring music, he told me his name was Evan (or something that sounded like Evan), and as he spoke, I let myself grow intoxicated on both my rum-and-Cokes and his smell, a smell that made me feel like I was back at the kitchen table with Ed. I looked over at Nina. She was dancing close to Joey, a boozy glaze in her eyes. By the way he refused to make eye contact with her, I could tell he wasn't that into her.

Evan was drawing closer to me. It was flattering—terribly flattering—the way he kept looking at me, and was now touching my arms and the small of my back. This was what being young and in your twenties was all about, wasn't it? Going out in tight dresses, getting drunk, and letting random guys feel you up.

Evan drew even closer and whispered in my ear. “You're real pretty, you know that?”

His words cut through the fog of my inebriation; I'd never been called pretty before. Girls like Jessica Bae were pretty. Mary, despite her yo-yoing pudginess, was cute and petite and had her fair share of boyfriends. But I was never considered attractive—people thought there was something a little too unfamiliarly
ish
about my features. Eunice had a name for me: “the uncanny valley,” what Beth would've labeled as “the Other.”

So all my crushes were invariably one-sided. At our high-school graduation party in the church basement, James Kim had showed up drunk. He'd sidled over to me and said, “No offense, Jane, but sometimes when I look at you, I feel . . .” His beer-laced breath coated my face, and my heart skipped a beat. He was going to tell me he thought I was pretty. He was going to confess he'd nursed a long-standing crush on me all those years, too. “I feel like I'm looking at something from
Willow.
Like, kinda human but not really.”

As the blow of James Kim's words sank in, Eunice appeared at my side. “I believe the ‘nonhuman' creature in
Willow
that you're referring to is the Eborsisk,” she said, crunching her fingers into air quotes. “Actually, the Eborsisk is an inside joke that George Lucas—”

“Okay, whatever,” James Kim said, and walked away.

“Ignore him, Jane,” Eunice said after he'd left. “We'll deprogram all thoughts of these losers once we start college.”

It was almost five years later, and she had learned to forget. But I could not.

Now Evan said those words, and suddenly I was placing my lips on top of his. “Well, hello!” he mumbled out of the side of his mouth before pushing his tongue against mine. He tasted of whiskey and breath mints. My nostrils were filled with that smell of soap. This was not the first time I'd ever kissed a guy (we'd played versions of spin the bottle at church retreats), but it was the first time I was actually enjoying it. His hands were again at the small of my back, pulling me closer to him, pressing me firmly against his growing hard-on. I could see myself going home with Evan and returning early the next morning to the Mazer-Farleys', no longer a virgin.

We drifted to the dance floor. Evan's hands were still all over me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that other couples had formed, all locked in some kind of embrace. DJ Stixx's music went
untz-untz-untz
. I didn't see Nina, but I did see Joey Cammareri, this time pressing up close to Angela.

Just as I was about to run my fingers over Evan's cheekbones, I spotted Nina. She had rejoined the group, and from where I stood, it looked like she was winding back, about to launch herself—literally—at Joey. She would've been humiliated, and her other friends seemed to lack the
nunchi
to intervene.

In the way that drunken nights like these tend to happen, time moved both quickly and impossibly slowly. I was extricating myself from Evan's mouth, wiping my own with the back of my hand. He might or might not have been reaching out for me, unwilling to let go. Soon I was pulling Nina's arm, drawing her away from Joey Cammareri. “Time t'go,” I said. My words were sluggish. “Leggo! Leemelone.”
Her
words were sluggish. She fell backward, and I righted her in slow motion. I somehow managed to wrestle her from the group, Evan and the club fell away, and Nina and I were once again on the train home.

“I was having fun back there,” Nina said, drifting out of the fog of her drunken stupor just long enough to form a coherent sentence.

I touched my lips, remembering the sheer pleasure of kissing Evan. My ears still rang from the music of the club. “You weren't the only one.”

“Then why'd you drag us out?” She slumped down, her legs spreading apart, oblivious to the middle-aged man across from us, who'd just perked up in his seat.

I slapped her legs shut. “You were acting like a fool.”

“Thanks,
Mom
,” she said. “Dint I tell you Joey Cammareri's mad cute? Hewuzlike
totally
inta me.” Nina was slurring again, as she seemed to lose focus on reality.

“He was, like, totally into everybody,” I said, but Nina was already fading out. Her eyelids drooped.

We were starting to attract attention in the almost empty train car. The man across from us had his hand in his pocket. My eyes caught a jerking motion; I dared not lower them. Two other men at the far ends were sliding across the benches toward us. Nina leaned her head back and started dozing, while I was conscious of the pack of eyes drinking us in. I folded my arms tightly over my chest. I kept blinking and pinching the skin of my forearms, willing myself not to pass out.
You don't need to pander to the male gaze.
Well, here we were, on full display. So desperate had I been for male attention. But right now it felt as cheap as the dress.

* * *

After I dropped Nina off at home, I walked back to the Mazer-Farleys'. Light beamed out through the bay window. Beth was probably still up. I knew what she'd be thinking when she saw me:
Told you so.
I fished the key out of my bra. If I could ease open the door slowly, quietly, perhaps I could avoid detection—

But the door swung open, and the hallway light switched on. I blinked rapidly, my eyes adjusting to the sudden brightness. Ed.

“Now,
that's
not what you were wearing earlier today,” he said, taking off his reading glasses.

I couldn't tell if it pleased him or not. I crossed my arms over my chest again. “S'Nina's.”

Ed laughed. Was I slurring? Swaying? “Sounds like you had a good time. Go sit down. I'll get you some water.”

He returned with a large glass of water and a plate of toast. “To soak up the alcohol,” he explained.

I took both from him gratefully.

He sat on the floor by my feet. “So . . . you have fun tonight?”

Toast was crammed in my mouth. “Wuzzatta club.”

“A club, huh? I remember those days.” Ed looked into the distance, as if a wave of nostalgia were washing over him. “How many hearts you break?”

I flashed back to earlier—Evan's hot breath at the nape of my neck. The whole night was designed around this stupid dress. I hated my naïveté, my stench of desperation.

My face crumpled. “I'm so . . .”
Ashamed.

“Hey, what happened?” Ed's voice went soft, and he moved to the wicker love seat and put an arm around me.

I wiped away my tears. Apparently I was a sad drunk. “Sorry, I'm stupid.”

“No you're not. You're not at all,” he said, stroking my back.

“It's just, every day of my life I feel . . .”
Mot-nan
.
Bad-born.
The word didn't translate.

Ed must have filled in my words. “Nobody thinks that.” Ed smoothed my hair. “You know what I see when I look at you? I see a beautiful young woman.”

No one had ever called me beautiful before. Earlier that night Evan had called me pretty, but all he saw was an easy girl in a tight, low-cut, crimson dress. I felt like an acquired taste: a raw fish, a funky cheese.

“If I were your age, I'd be too intimidated to talk to you,” he said. “You'd be way out of my league. You've got this beautiful dark hair and those dark eyes. . . .”

I stared across the room, at the hooded bay window that looked out onto the street. The rest of the family was just upstairs, yet in that moment they seemed so far away.

Ed inched closer, running his fingers over my cheek and tucking strands of hair behind my ears. I grew self-conscious; I could still feel Evan's dried saliva along the perimeter of my mouth.

And suddenly Ed was pulling away. “Good night, Jane.” His tone had gone chilly. He bit his lip. Abruptly he left me.

What had I done to turn him off? Maybe Ed had smelled the other man on me and thought I was a slut.

Rejection has a numbing quality. I sat like that in the wicker love seat for a minute, an hour, I couldn't tell you how long.

And then it was dawn. The morning sun slivered through the windows. I'd been dozing on the couch, covered in an itchy woolen blanket. Someone had draped it over me while I was passed out. I stole away upstairs before the family could stir from their beds.

A
little later that morning, I awoke from a rum-and-Coke-induced haze—in my own bed—to the sound of the upstairs telephone ringing. I tripped from the tangle of sheets and out the door. When I picked up, a familiar voice blasted through the receiver.

“You come home right now. Grandpa coming from Korea. Not look good, you living outside house.”

I tried to hide the sleepy mumble from my voice. “I have a
job,
Uncle. With
responsibilities
.”

“What exactly you do all day?”

I launched into a vigorous explanation of Devon's rigorous schedule. Chinese school. Art lessons. Violin lessons.
Tutoring
sessions for the Hunter—

“You not say your bosses professors? They not have vacation right now?” Sang interrupted. “Why they need three people watching only one child? Should be other way around. Grandfather arriving Friday. You be home before then,” he ordered, and hung up.

Later that afternoon, once I'd showered off the remains of last night that still clung to my body (making sure to scrub my mouth especially with extra force), Beth knocked on my door. “Ed and I were talking,” she said, sinking onto my bed and patting the seat beside her. “And I realized we haven't exactly been the most benevolent of employers. You haven't taken vacation or
anything
since you started.”

I sat. Usually we sat across from each other. This was the first time we were sitting side by side. “That's okay. I don't need one.”

“Actually, it was Ed's idea. Typical of me. I'm in a daze from everything with the department and my book. . . .”

First last night's rejection. Now Ed wanted me out of his house. It was as if all those late-night heroes had meant nothing to him.

“Also, it sounds like your grandfather's coming to town, and you're expected home on Friday?”

“You overheard that?” I hoped that was the only other conversation she'd heard echoing throughout the house.

“So I thought, perfect! The timing is just
perfect,
” Beth said. “I'll have just finished off edits to my next chapter by then and will need a break before diving back in, so your absence won't be a problem. Take the week off and return home to your family. I mean, we'll still pay you and everything.”

Then she lowered her voice. “Actually, I was kind of hoping to . . . you know, rekindle things with Ed.” A strange almost girlish grin spread over Beth's face. The way I'd imagined Ed's female students smiling up at him as he stood in front of the classroom.

On the one hand, Beth was still clueless. I breathed a sigh of relief. But on the other, my heart
burned
at the thought of her doing anything with Ed. I chastised myself anew. As if I had any claims on him.
He's not yours, Jane.

And so it was decided—whether I liked it or not. I would leave for 718 Gates Street and bid 646 Thorn, and Ed Farley, a temporary farewell.

Ed was stiff in the days leading up to my departure. His earlier kindnesses, his continued thawing, had reversed. If anything, there was a coldness in his movements and gestures toward me. Needless to say, there were no heroes consumed in the middle of the night. On the day I was to leave, I had packed my bag, ready to take the subway back to Queens, when Beth volunteered Ed to drive me home.

He looked put out by Beth's offer, and I told her I didn't need the ride.

But Beth insisted. “You've got a heavy bag and everything.” Devon clutched me and made me promise I'd return. Then Ed and I set off. And indeed we spent an awkward, uncomfortably silent ride whisking down the BQE, the Manhattan skyline blooming before receding from view.

We turned off Northern and pulled up in front of Sang's house. Ed cut the engine. He nodded in the direction of my hand, which was still gripping the handle of the door. “Dying to see your old gramps, huh?”

I loosened my grip. “I don't know how I'll make it through the week,” I found myself saying.
Without you
, I added silently. I could not keep my eyes from tracing over his face, trying to commit his features to memory.

“Well, if you need an SOS . . .” He trailed off. His tone resumed its distance. “I'll help you carry your bag inside.”

Sang answered the door. In their brief exchange, my uncle did not feign politeness the way he did with even the most disgruntled customers at the store. Instead he was gruff, treating Ed with the same dismissiveness he adopted when regarding the sales reps that came to Food.

After Ed shook my uncle's hand good-bye and left, Sang said, “I thought old lady who come to Food your boss.”

“She is,” I said. “That's her husband.”

“Husband!”
He worked his jaw, attempting to right his face. In a smoother tone, he went on. “You get call from Lowood Company. Sounding like they want you back.” He held out a scrap receipt with a phone number jotted on the back.

I took the paper from him. “What you waiting for? Hurry up, you call! Before they changing mind about you again.”

My uncle watched as I punched in the phone number. He listened as I left a voice message. Just as he would watch and listen when Lowood called back, asking me to come in again. I would go through the motions in front of Sang. Last summer—last fall, even—I would have died to work at Lowood. It would have been my ticket out of Flushing. But that was before Ed Farley.

* * *

The whole family stuffed themselves into Sang's station wagon to meet Re Myungsun at JFK. When my grandfather stepped through the gates, we formed a procession to greet him, bowing one after the other like dominoes falling in his wake. My grandfather wore a dark suit. He had a slight build, shriveled with age. His jaw was perpetually clenched, his eyes shone with disapproval, and his silver hair swept smugly across his forehead. To Sang he said, in Korean,
“You've aged.”
He said the same to Hannah, but he didn't linger to see her displeasure. He gave George's fleshy shoulder a severe squeeze and said,
“You alone carry the family name.”
He softened when he got to Mary, touched the air next to her cheek and said,
“You got prettier. Round-faced, like a lotus blossom.”
And when he reached me, the last in the line, he offered the perfunctory,
“You came.”
It was a standard enough greeting in Korean, but after my time living with the Mazer-Farleys where each member's comings and goings were met with much fanfare, the words felt distancing.

Over the course of the week, we were expected to wait on Re Myungsun hand and foot. He, for his part, seemed to appreciate none of these efforts and pointed only to our flaws. When we returned to the house and Hannah had tea and sliced fruit waiting for him, he complained of the tea's tepidness. Sang apologized for her carelessness. Re Myungsun complained about the humble furnishings, the threadbare slippers he was offered, the loud rumblings of buses drifting through the windows from Northern Boulevard. When George pounded away on his computer game, Re Myungsun complained about how Hannah's unhealthy cooking had let the boy expand to unruly dimensions.

Sang left Hwan in charge at the store so he could take his father to the Statue of Liberty, on a Circle Line cruise, and on a horse-drawn carriage ride in Central Park. Yet another steady stream of criticisms emerged from Re Myungsun's lips: This ferry ride was too slow—they should market an express route. This carriage smelled like a pigpen. This hotdog was too greasy—no wonder the American people were so fat. With every such comment, a look of exhaustion would flood over Sang's face. It almost made me feel sorry for him.

When Re Myungsun was out of earshot, Hannah said her father-in-law was no better than a baby who could neither wipe nor feed himself. It was a rare moment when Hannah took me into her confidence.
“I never understood why my friends complained when their relatives came to visit. But now I do. They come here thinking they can just sit back and relax, like kings. Everything fancy-fancy, so they can go show off back home. Like they think we don't have businesses to run or bills to pay?”

In the days away from Thorn Street, everything I learned at the Mazer-Farley household began to disappear. And yet, back at Gates Street, there was a hitch to my herky-jerky movements, as I'd stop myself from asking a
nunchi
-less question while helping out in the kitchen or slicing fruit without peeling it first. Shedding newly acquired customs and reassimilating to a former way of life is a painful transition. I could not beat against the forceful current of Sang and Hannah's ways, and as the days passed, I had no choice but to acquiesce—borne back to the rhythms of the past.

Each restless night under Sang's roof, I endured Mary's snores and the sounds of the house settling uneasily into place. I remembered my first night at Thorn, tossing and turning as I heard the springs in their master bedroom squeak and creak.
I'm hoping to rekindle things with Ed
.
Beth . . . is brilliant
. I ached with jealousy. I would return to Brooklyn only to find I'd become nothing to Ed.

In those small hours of the night, whenever some particular memory of Ed would flare up—the way he'd smiled at me at McDonald's or how he'd tucked my hair back from my face the night after Twine—I'd force some corresponding memory to override it: Ed stroking Beth's back, the look they'd exchange across the breakfast table in the early days, those damn bedsprings. On the chart I'd created in my mind, Beth clearly ranked so much higher than me:

As if I stood a chance.

Falling in love with Ed Farley had not been part of the plan. But, reader! I did. Try as I might, I could not stop my feelings. And never had I loved him so well.

* * *

Because (according to Hannah) Re Myungsun was expecting fancy-fancy, Sang took the family to dinner at Windows on the World. I thought for sure my grandfather would be impressed, as everyone at church had been. Even Nina had remarked, “Look at you, all high class,” when I'd mentioned it to her. (While Beth and Devon checked in just once in my absence, and I had no communication with Ed, Nina and I spoke on the phone almost every night.)

We drove into the city, traffic all the way. When we stood at the foot of the Twin Towers, Hannah pointed up to the buildings.
“Father-in-Law, isn't this amazing? Sometimes I can't believe man can build something like this.”

Re Myungsun said,
“How can you compare anything man-made to the pure beauty of nature? This will never be as amazing as Kumgang Mountain.”
His tone was oddly philosophical, his expression uncharacteristically placid. But then, as we soared up the elevator of the North Tower, our ears popping with the change in air pressure, he righted his voice to its usual note of superiority.
“And anyway, Sinnara Incorporated is breaking ground for a skyscraper that will be even taller than your twin buildings.”

Sang stared impatiently at the numbers lighting up each floor:
80, 81, 82.
The elevator could not go fast enough. He faced me and said sharply, “Isn't Lowood office inside here? What they say when you calling them?”

I was scheduled to go into the office the following week. The company had lifted its hiring freeze and was calling back previous candidates. But I had already told Sang that.

I looked over at George. He was wearing a T-shirt that read
EAT MY SHORT
s. Yet no one said anything to him. I looked at Mary. As usual, her clothes were two sizes too tight. She'd once managed to squeeze into a size zero after a week on a cabbage-soup diet. The next week her body rebounded, but she'd been in denial ever since, and no one said anything to her either.

The hostess greeted us when we finally arrived up at the restaurant. We must have seemed like a ragtag bunch in her eyes—George's and Mary's clothes, Sang's creased work trousers, Re Myungsun's sour expression. “How are you folks this evening?” she said, leading the way to our table. She was probably new. I could tell by the way she nervously gripped the stack of menus. Sang's and Hannah's eyes crinkled into smiles, but they didn't speak—they grew shy around unfamiliar American people. Then she looked up expectantly at Re Myungsun. But he did not answer either. I couldn't see his expression just then, but I knew exactly what face was staring back at her—cold, unfeeling, dismissive.

Suddenly she dropped her menus—they scattered across the floor.

“I'm so sorry!” she said, falling to her knees to scoop them up. “I'm so sorry, it's my first day.” She spoke with a flat, nasal tone. It was clear she wasn't from around here.

Just then a man across the room—her boss, presumably—gestured at her with a curled finger.
See me.
I hoped she wasn't going to be fired.

At the table Sang and Hannah insisted Re Myungsun take the seat with the best view. As he lowered himself into his chair, he grunted with displeasure.
“Doesn't this place have private rooms?”