Re Jane (33 page)

Ever think she's just jealous?
But I wasn't going to give power to Ed's words. I relented. “Look, this is such bullshit. We are
not
going to let a bunch of guys get between us.”

“Bros before hos,” she said, cracking a smile. We both laughed. It felt good to laugh with her.

Then Nina tilted her head, the way she did when she was about to share bad news. I was immediately on guard. “But, like, you and Ed—” She stopped, started again. “You guys, like, working out okay?”

“
Yeah.
Why.”

“It's just . . .” Nina ventured carefully. “I know you blew up Ed Farley back when you were the baby-sitter. But don't you think he's, like, kind of lame?”

“Why? Because he doesn't pop his collars?” I faced Nina. “What's your problem with Ed?”

“It's just . . .” She fiddled with the corner of her book cover. “I just get the sense it's all about what Ed wants. Older guys can sometimes be . . . controlling.”

When I didn't say anything, she said, in a light, buoyant tone that I could tell was forced, “Hey, I should know.
I
was with an older man once. Remember? Joey?” Joey Cammareri was only two years older.

I knew she'd said it to try to get me to crack a smile. But I didn't smile back.

“Ed's asked me to move in with him.”

Nina struggled to compose her face. “So . . . you going to?”

“I told him I'd think it over.”

She got up, came back with two glasses of water, and set them down on our makeshift table.

She drank, we drank. I was still drinking when she took her empty glass to the sink. She washed it. She reached for her bag and shouldered it. I knew she had an open house to work that day. Then she spoke.

“You can be a pretty accommodating person, Jane,” she said. She reached for her keys. “Whatever you decide, don't just do it for him. Do it for you.”

I
don't know what your beef is with Abba, but you better call it off.” Mary's voice rang out through the phone receiver.

“Hello to you, too,” I said.

“You haven't been back home in forever.” Seven weeks, actually. “And you know Abba's
too stubborn to make the first move. You have to be the one to
yangbo
to him.”

Yangbo,
schmangbo. “Mary, I appreciate your call. But I don't have anything to say to your dad.”

“‘
Your
dad.'
You talk like he's not even related to you.” Mary took a deep drag of her cigarette; I could tell by the way she exhaled. “You know what your problem is? You're, like, willfully blind. You think it's only about
you.
You ever hear what they say about me? Like, Umma said she was embarrassed that I was showing off my
defects
to the world. Remember? About those white pants I wore the last time you came home?”

It annoyed me that Mary expected I would remember; it annoyed me even more that I actually
did.

“I don't think anything.” The pants hadn't been as egregious as some of Mary's other fashion choices. “I do think it's good you finally stopped chewing like a cow, though. Last time I was home anyway.”

“Ja-
ane!
” Mary said, aghast.

“Chyap, chyap, chyap,”
I mimicked. “My God, it used to drive me crazy.”

“Why didn't you tell me sooner?” she wailed. “Peter”—her on-again, off-again boyfriend who was in his fifth year at SUNY Albany—“said that, too, but I didn't believe him. We got into a huge fight. If my own family doesn't tell me what I need to fix, then who else out there will?”

When Mary said that, I realized that was the internal logic of our family. Tear each other down
before
we stepped outside and faced public humiliation. Like the good friend who points out the spinach wedged in your teeth. But that was the thing, wasn't it? What Sang and Hannah thought were flaws weren't necessarily what other people considered spinach in the teeth. And I was now entirely freed from their particular, critical slant on the world.

“Just come home. Tell him you're sorry. You'll lose one whole excruciating minute of your life.” Mary took another drag on her cigarette. “Then everything'll go back to normal again.”

But it wouldn't. I had changed, but Sang had stayed the same. And for us to return to “normal,” either Sang would have to be willing to change or I'd have to force my eyes shut and become the person he was trying to mold me to be. I told her it wasn't going to happen.

Mary let out another long exhalation. “You're such a
babo,
Jane. You've always been his favorite. And he, like,
misses
you.”

“Nice try, Mary.”

At that moment the front door buzzed—I couldn't have planned it better. It was probably Ed.

“Gotta go. That's my boyfriend.”

Of
course
I felt smug as I said it.

Mary sighed into the receiver. “You're as stubborn as Abba. Good-bye, Jane.”

And with those words, she hung up.

As I ran down the stairs to the front door, I thought about what Mary had said. I should have felt liberated now that I no longer had to be subjected to Sang's scrutiny. And yet. Did some part of me miss his picking and prodding, our continual push-and-pull? Was it
jung
?
No: I forced the word out of my head.

A slight, black-haired figure was sitting hunched over on our porch.

“Devon?” I said.

She stood up, brushing the dirt from the seat of her pants. “I was in the neighborhood.” The thick black eyeliner rimming her eyes was smudged in the summer heat. Her expression was sheepish.

“You're a long way from home,” I said.

She toed a stray pebble on the landing. “If now's a bad time, I can just . . .” Maybe she thought I was giving her
nunchi,
because she muttered, “Forget it,” and quickly turned on her heel.

“Devon, wait,” I said. “It's hot out here. Come inside, we'll talk.”

“All right,” she said, and we went in, the screen door slamming shut behind us.

As we climbed up the stairs, I asked Devon how she'd found her way here. “We only dropped you off like a thousand times,” she said. “I'm not stupid, you know.” I thought of that first day I started with Devon's family; it was she who'd navigated the way to and from her school.

“Your mom ever let you redo the map in the
primer?”

“There is
no more primer,” she said. “Yours was the last edition.”

Inside, we sat at the kitchen table. I set a glass of ice water before Devon, then rummaged through the cupboard for snacks. All we had were stale pretzels. Technically they were Nina's. I poured them into a bowl and brought them to the table. Devon fingered the water droplets trickling down the side of her glass. I hesitated before getting up to switch on the air conditioner.

“Must be nice having your own place,” she mused, looking about the room.

To the objective eye, the shabbiness of Nina's and my apartment was glaringly obvious: the warped wooden table, for one, along with the other foraged pieces from here and there. The floors sloped, tipping to one side as if the house itself were drunk. But it was ours.

“It took a long time to get here,” I said.

“I can't wait till I'm old enough to leave that place,” Devon said. “Peace out, Brooklyn.”

I thought of her empty, cavernous home. One day 646 Thorn would be all hers and hers alone.

“You're welcome to come here whenever you want.” I added a hasty disclaimer: “If your mom's okay with it, that is.”

“Mom never lets me do
anything.
But whatever.” The eyeliner smudged above and below her eyes had hardened into clumps with the cold air-conditioned breeze.

“Is there something you want to talk about?” I asked.

She took a pretzel, only to drop it back into the bowl. “Remember that time? When we went to get moon cakes? And you were telling me about you not fitting in back home?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that's what it's like every single day at school. I feel like a freak!” Devon burst with a sweep of her hand, upsetting the bowl of pretzels. They scattered, dancing softly on the tabletop. With her palms she flattened them to a stop. “It's like, all the white kids assume I hang out with only the Asians, just 'cause
I'm
Asian. But then all the ABCs think I'm such a Twinkie. No, worse. At least if I were a Twinkie, they'd get me. They still wouldn't like me, but they'd
get
me.”

She busied herself scooping up the pretzels and returning them to the bowl, where they fell with
ting-ting-tings
against the ceramic.

“And the Korean kids”—she looked up at me in an accusatory way, as if I were a stand-in for every one of them—“they act like they're all that. They're always staring down everyone on the train. I
hate
riding with them. Everyone in that school's so cliquey. Especially Alla.”

So that was why Devon had blanched whenever I suggested we get together with Alla and Nina. “What exactly happened between you two?”

“It's not fair.
She's
different, too, but she gets to fit right in.”

I remembered that day at Hunter, seeing Alla with the other kids. And I realized that Devon was jealous. Devon had grown up in an altogether different environment, a far cry from the homes of her ABC classmates. Immigrant households did not talk about Derrida or the
New York Review of Books.
Conversation was a luxury, rendered in broken fits and starts.

“No one else gets it. Dad just brushes it off, telling me it's only teenage hormones. Mom's exactly the opposite—she makes a huge deal about
everything
, like I'm a baby. Can you believe?” Devon cringed. “Mom wants to head up the Chinese-American Parents' Association. She tracked down all the Chinese parents at school and introduced herself as Xiao Nu's mom. And now she's trying to set me up on
play dates.
Like I'm still in the fifth grade! Why can't she just leave me alone?”

“She can't. Your mom”—I swallowed; my throat was dry from the cooled air—“loves you.”

“I wish she'd stop. It's so humiliating.” She huffed,
blowing the bangs from her face. “Today was the last day of school,” she said, “and everyone was going off to hang out with their friends. But not me.” She traced another tear running down the side of her water glass. “There's no way I'm going back next year. I can't stand five more years of that place.”

“Devon, I'm sorry. I never should have pushed Hunter on you.”

“You shouldn't be sorry about that,” she said. She pushed the bowl of pretzels away. “You should
be sorry about pulling a runner on us. On
me.
You broke our promise.”

Devon looked up at me, and I expected her eyes to be filled with her usual anger. But they weren't. Instead they were soft and gentle. The same way Emo had stared at my mother in the photo of the two of them that I now had framed on my wall.

“You know,” she continued, “it isn't fair. How you left us and went on this big adventure, and now you've got this new life and your own apartment and you're dating my dad. Meanwhile, after you left, my life just went down the drain.”

Homewrecker.
That word came flooding back to me.

Devon seemed to read my mind. “I know what you did, with my dad.”

I stared down at my hands. “I'm sorry, Devon.”

“I mean, I didn't know back then—I was just a little kid. But I figured it all out after you left,” she said. “I was really mad at you,” she said. “I'm
still
mad! I needed someone to talk to, and you weren't there. When Mom and Dad were getting divorced.”

My eyes fixed on a warped floorboard. “I couldn't stay. I only would've messed things up more. You don't know how sorry I am.”

I'd thought leaving New York had been the right thing to do. But now I realized there was no such thing as the right thing. Someone was always going to end up losing out.

“Jane, does it ever get any better? When will I stop feeling so . . . so . . .” She faltered.

“Honestly, Devon? It's still a struggle,” I said. “But you can't keep trying to please everyone else. There comes a time where you just got to be who
you
want
to be.”

Devon mulled over the words.

I reached for the box of tissues. “Let's wash that junk off your face.”

* * *

I took Devon on the train back to Brooklyn, once again cutting a right angle through the city. When we arrived at 646 Thorn Street, the house loomed over me, privy to all that I'd done. I was different now. Just as the house, too, was now changed. There were no paper lanterns strung up in the doorway. The door knocker was gone. Instead there were three lit buzzers:
B. MAZER, #
1
. D. CHANGSTEIN
, #2. E. BUNKER, #3.
The house, once whole, was now subdivided.

I was prepared just to drop Devon off at her door; I had enough sense to know that Beth would not want me roving about in her house. But Devon had asked me to keep her company and assured me that Beth wouldn't be home from work for a few hours yet. She sounded so lonely, her voice etched with pleading, that I consented.

I followed her into the house. Down that same long, dark hallway, but now interspersed among the African masks were Devon's school portraits—the ones that used to hang from the walls upstairs. I'd forgotten what a child she used to be. In the short time since returning from Korea, I had grown accustomed to Devon's older, more mature face. In the photos her cheeks were still chubby and her eyes when she smiled were still bright and shining.

Devon led us to the kitchen. I took my seat at the old solid wood table. It was still unvarnished; the knife cuts etched across its surface had splintered. She poured us Beth's room-temperature barley tea. Devon popped ice into her glass, and the cubes crackled from the shock of the liquid.

We had sat across from each other at this very table through so many meals. Exchanging private glances whenever her mother said something particularly ridiculous. But now Devon and I lapsed into a shy silence. All was still.

The creak of the floorboards cut through that stillness. I remembered the old sounds of the house settling. But then I heard the creaking again, followed by a definitive pounding of footsteps approaching us. I froze; it was Beth in the doorway.

At first she took in only Devon. “Where on
earth
have you been!” she cried. “Do you have
any
idea how late it is? I was worried sick!” Then Beth's eyes alighted on me. “Jane!” she said, startled.

Her clothes were the usual linen and hemp. But her straggling, frizzy hair was now cropped into a neat bob. What was most striking was the transformation to her face—her face! Beth looked
alive
. Her skin was taut and glowing; the sallow tint had faded away, and so had the dark circles that once gathered under her eyes. She looked . . . rested. Like she'd been sleeping well every day for the past year. Her fragrance wafted over to me, and I noticed that it, too, had changed—Beth now smelled of vanilla.

I was so absorbed with studying Beth's changes that I failed to realize the way her eyes grew darker with anger. “Jane. I'll see you out.”

You're a
babo,
Jane.
How could I have thought it was a good idea to come here in the first place?

Devon jumped to my defense. “Mom, Jane—”

“Devon, go to your room.”

“But, Mom—”

“Now.”

Devon got up from the table, giving me a sheepish look before disappearing through the door.