Re Jane (30 page)

I
t was wishful thinking, I knew, to expect Devon to thaw toward me, yet I hoped it all the same. I asked her to tea, to the movies, to go shopping. If only I could spend some one-on-one time with her, I might have the chance to explain better and take steps to repair our relationship. Devon turned down every single one of my invitations. While she was sullen with her father as well, every now and again a flicker of her former sweetness shone through. Never with me. The three of us were thrown together quite frequently, and she made her displeasure about our relationship quite plain.

Once, when her father had excused himself to go to the bathroom, Devon and I sat across from each other in our usual strained silence. I broke it by rambling about “the good old days” back at 646 Thorn Street, to which she retorted, “I'm sure that all had to do with you baby-sitting
me.
”
She made no effort to hide the bite in her tone.

The next day I told Ed what Devon had said. We were spending a rare afternoon together—I had to run some paperwork downtown, and my boss had given me the rest of the day off. Ed had finished his lesson planning early and had a few hours to kill before his class that evening. He'd driven into the city to meet me. I asked him what he thought I should do. “Whenever I ask if she wants to talk, she just shrugs me off.” What she'd
actually
said to me was, “Can you, like, please mind your own business?”

“Do you think she knew about us, back then?” I asked.

“She's a perceptive girl,” Ed said, “but you and I were pretty good at covering our tracks.”

“I think it might help things if you talked with her. About us.”

Ed glanced into the rearview mirror before changing lanes. “I'm sorry. It was a nasty thing for her to say. But we just have to chalk it up to puberty.”

“Is it
that
big a deal to have a conversation with her about it?”

Ed was quiet; I could tell he was annoyed. But still I pressed on.

“Well, what about Beth?” I asked. “What, exactly, did you tell her about us?”

Ed looked tired. “I came clean right after 9/11. Right after I got that e-mail from you, saying thanks but no thanks.”

That shut me up. We drove on in silence.

We passed the exit for the Midtown Tunnel, then the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge; Ed continued north on the FDR. “You taking the Triborough?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “I thought we'd swing by Devon's school. She's probably just getting out now,” he said, glancing at the clock.

“Does she know you're coming for her?”

“No, but I thought we'd give her a ride home. Beats taking the train.”

“You think that's a good idea?” I remembered what it was like to be in seventh grade. All the other kids watching while your parent came to pick you up, like you were some little kid. Forget about it.

“Why wouldn't it?” Ed's tone was testy. “I would've been
thrilled
if my old man had bothered to show his face every now and again.”

I stopped myself from saying more. Maybe he was right. Although nothing seemed to thrill Devon these days.

We pulled up in front of the school. I touched Ed's arm. “Why don't we just call out to her from here—” But he was already stepping out of the car. Since we were double-parked, I waited inside.

If Hunter was anything like my junior high, kids were starting to group off with their own kind; like hung out with like—and like only. Hispanic, Indian, Jewish, Greek, Caribbean, mainland Chinese versus Taiwanese versus kids from Hong Kong. At my school there were so many Koreans they broke off into cliques according to which church they attended, and still there was a ranking system. The groups seldom mixed, unless they banded together against a common ethnic enemy. For the most part, we coexisted independently, like self-sufficient ecosystems.

Occasionally there were those who crossed the party lines. They were given names that usually revolved around junk food. The Asian kids who hung out with the white kids were Twinkies (or sometimes, more nutritionally, bananas). Whites who hung out with Asians were Reverse Twinkies. Black kids who hung out with white kids were called Oreos or Ding Dongs. Whites who hung out with blacks were Sno Balls (or sometimes, completely un-food-related, “wiggers”). Koreans had a name for one of their own who deigned to hang out with the Chinese:
jjangkae
lover—the pejorative for the rickshaw guy who delivered your Chinese-style
jjajang
noodles. If the Chinese had a name for one of their kinsmen who ditched out for the Koreans, I didn't know it. But I suspected it might have been considered an upgrade.

Ed had indeed timed our arrival just right. At first a handful of students dribbled out of the building, and then they were immediately followed by herds, color-coded by race, hair, clothes. Everywhere were more impenetrable knots of Koreans, Chinese, Indians. I thought I saw Alla Peters firmly at the center of one of these packs, but when I looked again, she was swallowed up by a swirl of chattering friends.

I had to remind myself to look for Devon's taller, sleeker self. She was no longer a runt of a girl with a tortoiseshell for a schoolbag. After the last swell of students passed through the front doors, a few lone stragglers ventured out, the ones who couldn't keep up with the flock. And there was Devon, one of the last to emerge.

Based on the way she was dressed, she was clearly trying to fit in with the other Asian kids. But the Chinese and Korean faces around her glanced up at her, then past her. Not one in those crowds called out “Over here, Dev!” and waved for her to join them. It was painful watching her, the way she looked eagerly through the crowds. I recognized her expression: feeling desperate for a group—
any
group—to take you in. But kids can smell that kind of desperation a mile away. Devon was completely alone.

This was the exact moment Ed decided to make his presence known. “Kiddo!” he shouted. “Over here!” The nearby groups turned around at the sudden commotion.

Devon hesitated, as if debating whether to acknowledge her father's voice or to slink away.

Before she could decide, her father bounded toward her. “Dev! What are you, deaf?”

She gathered her arms up and across her chest, a barrier from her father. But Ed closed the distance between them, squeezing her into a hug.

He could not see Devon's face, but I could. It was frozen in panic. A dad picking up his kid at school: embarrassing. But a man who looked nothing like you—still your father nonetheless—embracing you in front of your whole school? Those milling about glanced from Devon to Ed before resuming their conversations. But how long those glances must have lasted for Devon! I remembered the way she had squirmed in front of the Chinese grannies on the 7 train and the man in the moon cake bakery in Chinatown. It was the same discomfort I felt when Hannah would take me in and out of the shops on Northern, and I'd sense the shopkeepers' eyes scanning from her to me and back again. I wanted to step out of the car right now and link my arm through Devon's, but I didn't want to make the situation even worse. As if her father had a particular fetish: a white man with his Asian girls.

Finally Devon broke free from Ed; she said something to him, then stalked off. He stood there, dumbfounded, arms falling helplessly to his sides. Her long strides slowed to a dawdle. Her face looked not angry but
hopeful.
She stopped, peered over her shoulder.

But Ed was already bounding back to the car.

Anger resurged across her face. She, too, bounded away.

Whenever Sang and I used to fight when I was a child, I'd try to run off. But he always ran after me, grabbed my arm, and pulled me home. One time I felt so
tap-tap-hae
that I sprinted away from him. After six blocks I thought I'd lost him. The second I stopped in my tracks, panting, he was right there behind me, not even a whit breathless. Gotcha. He had a surprising amount of endurance for a middle-aged man. Why didn't he just let me run and wait for me to return home, sheepish, exhausted, penitent? I never understood why my uncle didn't simply give up, when it would have been the easier thing to do.

I felt oddly unsettled when Ed returned to the car. “Where is she?” I asked.

“She left. Let's go,” he said.

“And you just
let
her?”

“I wasn't planning to drag her back to the car, if that's what you're asking.” He started up the engine.

I couldn't hide my annoyance. “I
told
you we shouldn't have stopped here in the first place.”

“Jane.” He used a firm tone with me, one I hadn't heard since my early days as the family au pair. “I don't need to hear it.”

It was a tone that normally would have shut me up. Now it just set me off. “What'd you expect?” I said. “You totally humiliated her.”

“Humiliated her? I'm her
father.
”

“That's what I mean. . . .” How could I explain? “Try to see it from her perspective. Maybe not all her classmates
know
you're her father.”

“Let me get this straight: First you yell at me for picking up my daughter from school, and now you're yelling at me for not chasing after her? There's a logical fallacy here.”

That might have been true, but he hadn't seen the look on Devon's face. “You make this big to-do about coming all this way to see her, and then we're
here
and you just let her walk away. You can't even follow through—”

I was interrupted by my own phone ringing; it was Sang. Ed stewed while I answered.

He asked what I was doing after work that evening. “Oh, you free now? You can stop by store for few hours, while Uncle running errand?”

“Yes, Uncle. I'll head over soon.”

“Good. You come home after, we gonna have dinner together.”

Then we hung up.

“You're still going to Queens after this, right? Mind dropping me off in Flush—?” I stopped. Ed was letting out an angry laugh.

“That's real rich, you know that?” He shook his head. “You're telling me I need to fix my relationship with my daughter, when look at you! Do you
hear
the way he talks to you?”

I'd actually thought it was one of our more pleasant phone conversations.

“For one, he hollers at you—although that's not news to you, the way you hold the damn phone away from your ear. He wasn't even on speaker. But then he expects you to come at his every beck and call. And guess what? You come running.”

“He's
family.
”

“Does he even pay you to work?”

I wasn't officially on the books—that wasn't the way we did things at Food—but Sang would always send me home with groceries when I left, and he'd give me the periodic handout. In
fact,
Ed had just eaten one of Sang's apples that morning.

“Well,
does
he?”

“Do
you
clock in and out to watch Devon?”

Maybe it was a cheap shot, but his question felt that preposterous. You don't keep a tally of expenses with family.

Ed let out an exasperated sigh, the way he sometimes did with his daughter. “I just
hate
watching the way he treats you. And don't even get me started on everything with your late mother. You know he's still holding all that against you.”

I hadn't actually broached the topic of my mother—and father—with my uncle since I'd returned from Seoul. I continually debated whether to bring it up, but things had been going so well between us (okay, as well as they were probably ever going to go) that I'd held off. I didn't want to rock the boat.

“He's a man of his generation,” I snapped. “
You
try working fourteen hours on your feet all day.
You
try operating in a language that's not your native—”

“Stop defending him!” Ed interrupted. His tone was so sharp that I shrank back. He must have seen my stricken look, because he softened his voice. “He should love you
for
you
.
Not
in spite of.
But that man talks to you like he doesn't have an ounce of respect for you.”

Ed's words stung me into silence.

* * *

“You late
,
” Sang said when I arrived at Food.

Do you
hear
the way he talks to you?
I tried to shut Ed out. “There was traffic coming from the city.”

“Now because you late,
I
late.”

I'm the one doing
you
a favor
,
I thought.

His eyes narrowed slightly. “And why you driving from city? Who drive you?”

“I
told
you. I had to review some paperw—”

“Hurry up, you change your clothes,” he interrupted, waving at my dress shirt and slacks.

We could have been back in the old days at Food.

Dinner that night, too, seemed to regress to the patterns of the past. Hannah picked and prodded at my “salty, bloated face,” pointing to my “bad American diet” as the culprit. Mary, who was also home that night (she was hardly ever at her Barnard dorm; it seemed like an expensive dumping ground for her books between classes) chimed in, saying it looked as if I had eaten “like, a huge bowl of instant ramen right before going to bed.” Sang jumped in about my job—“Who this company? How much business they bring in?”—as all the while George grunted. And round and round and round they went.

Maybe it was what Ed had said earlier that was making me see everything with a different slant. Or maybe the family had really directed a heightened criticism at me that particular evening. To this day I'm still not sure which is the truth—for all I knew, that dinner could have been just like any ordinary one. But it didn't feel ordinary to me.