Re Jane (8 page)

I wasn't hip enough to know who DJ Stixx was, and I wondered if I imagined the flicker of judgment in Nina's eyes. As she launched into her retelling of last Saturday, I couldn't help but feel a pang of envy. Same old stuff people our age were
supposed
to do. After she wrapped up, she asked, “So what do you do on the weekends?”

It was my turn to shrug. It used to be Food. Church. Dinner at 718 Gates Street, followed by fruit peels and tea. Occasionally I'd go to the movies with Eunice Oh. We used to go to the Quartet on Northern, and afterward, on the walk back to her car, we'd hurry past the Galaxy Café, making sure not to be caught peering in. That was where all the Korean kids hung out, when they weren't sneaking into clubs in the city. But I had never been inside.

If I shared those details, Nina would have thought I was a complete loser. Instead I pointed to Beth's book. “You're looking at it.”

“Well,” Nina said, “if you ever need to be saved from it all, give a holler.”

We both laughed, but Nina didn't know just how close to the truth my comment actually was.

* * *

Late that night, after the whole house had gone to sleep, I crept down to the kitchen with Beth's book and a stack of index cards. I knew that Beth expected me to read
The Feminist Primer
and would be very disappointed if I didn't make
some
effort to finish it. Why did I do it? Well, for one—she was my employer. But there was something else. After I'd left her attic, I remembered the way her eyes flooded with concern. It seemed genuine. Sang and Hannah never had “conversations” about my feelings. And in truth—I wanted to impress her.

I sat at the unvarnished table, staring into the book's pages, the text growing blurry before my eyes. All was still, until I heard a creak of the floorboards. This old house was still unfamiliar to me, its groans and utterances so foreign from the sounds of our house in Flushing.

But then I heard that creak again, followed by another. I tightened. It wasn't just the house settling; something or someone was definitely roving about.

Quietly I got up from the table and peered through the doorway down the darkened hall. I could just make out a slight movement. It stopped in its tracks, turned toward me. I flattened myself against the wall. When I peered again, the light streaming from the kitchen struck the figure. I saw a glint of golden hair, the chiseled cut of cheekbones. It was Ed.

I breathed out with relief but drew in my breath again as he strode toward me.

“Jane!” he cried. “What are you doing up?”

“. . .” I faltered. Ed had that effect on me, especially after he took the blame for the Italian ices. I preferred it when we would simply pass each other wordlessly in the hallway.

I started again. “Beth gave me a book to read.”

“How you liking it?”

Beth's book was terrible. But I didn't want to insult his wife's reading taste. And I didn't want to lie either. Then I noticed the pile of papers, file folders, and books in his arms. So I deflected. “What are
you
doing up?”

Ed looked sheepish. “Heading downstairs.”

“To do laundry?”

To my surprise, Ed laughed. “To work,” he said. “Hey, apparently that's how Stephen King did it.” He stared down at his load of books. “Not that Stephen King's ever written a dissertation.”

There was an ease with which he spoke—more relaxed than the way he crafted his words around Beth.

He peered over my shoulder, at the mess of papers and index cards spread across the kitchen table. “You still didn't answer my question. What do you think of Beth's book?”

“To be honest . . . I'm having a little trouble understanding it.”

“I can give you a hand.” Ed paused. “If you like.”

“But I don't want to hold you up. . . .” I gestured to the pile in his arms.

“I could use a little break,” he said, taking a seat at the kitchen table. He picked up one of my index cards. “‘Metaphysicality,'” he read. He flipped it over; it was blank. He rustled through the others. “They're all blank.”

“So what I actually meant was, I'm having a
lot
of trouble understanding it.”

Ed laughed. It was a rich laugh, with a heft and a boom to it. It was an interesting counterpoint to Beth's high-pitched titter.

As Ed talked me through the various vocabulary words (“intertextuality,” “hegemony,” “post-structuralism”), their meanings began to untangle. He was not like Beth, who spoke in obsessive, inefficient circles. Nor was he like Sang, who barked one-word explanations, expecting you to read his mind. Ed's tutelage was somewhere in between. He spoke to me in terms I understood; I felt encouraged by his guidance.

“Don't let this stuff intimidate you, Jane,” Ed said. “I had this one tenth-grader who was just daunted by
Gatsby.
He got the book—or so he thought—until he read all this critical theory, and it kept tripping him up. The theory completely shook his confidence. So we went back to the novel. Delved in, did close readings of his favorite passages.” He beamed. “Just last week I got an e-mail from him, out of the blue. Little Wesley Smith just landed a book agent.”

As he spoke, his eyes lit up. It seemed to stir a passion I hadn't seen in him before. “That's so great, Ed,” I said, but he waved my compliment away. “My point, Jane, is that academics love bandying their own language about. You just have to learn to speak it. That is,
if
you choose to.”

Ed got up from the table. I thought he was going to leave me for the basement, but instead he offered to make us a hero.

“You like prosciutto and figs?”

“Who the heck puts fruit in a hero?” The words flew out of my mouth before I could stop them. I hadn't meant to sound so judgmental—or so ignorant, for that matter.

“I first thought it was weird, too.” It was a very gracious thing of him to say. “But actually the sweetness of the figs brings out the saltiness of the prosciutto. Their contrasts, Jane, are what make them all the more delicious.”

I let Ed's words sink in.

“Beth doesn't like it when I bring meat into the house.” I knew that according to the primer
Beth had been a lacto-ovo vegetarian since 1983, before converting to veganism with lacto-ovo tendencies three years ago. “But we compromised.” Ed offered a rueful smile. “I get one drawer.”

He was rooting around in that refrigerator drawer now. He held up a bag of fruit, smushed and rotting. Sang's fruit. “I swear, the things that end up in here . . .” Ed dumped the bag in the trash.

As he set about making the sandwiches, I studied his movements. Most mornings I tried not to look in his direction, for fear of being caught staring at him. But his sharp contours were now growing familiar. I watched as he sliced a baguette lengthwise. He scooped out the bread's fluffy innards and split the halves, forming two hard-shelled boats that he layered with prosciutto and fig slices. Then, using a paring knife, he shaved off peels of parmesan as if he were whittling away at a block of wood.

Ed returned to the table with our heroes, open-faced. “I meant to tell you this earlier, Jane. I know we have a lot of rules here. They might seem arbitrary, but they mean a lot to Beth.” I told him I understood. Ed went on. “She's working on a very important book while gunning for tenure. It's enough to make anyone a little loopy. And”—he cleared his throat—“I'm not one to tend toward hyperbole, but Beth . . . is brilliant.”

I couldn't speak. My mouth was full of the first bite of Ed's hero. He was right: the combination was perfect.

L
ate summer had given way to a chilly autumn, and I was falling into the rhythms of daily life in Brooklyn. Which included weekly chats up in Beth's fourth-floor office. She must have been so pleased with my understanding of
The Feminist Primer,
because other books, articles, and journals followed.

What Beth didn't know was that at night, long after the remains of dinner were scraped off our plates and into the compost, long after the whole household had retired, Ed and I would meet for a snack. Either he'd wander into the kitchen and find me there with Beth's articles or I would walk in on him slicing the bread, creating rafts for the filling. They were never the same sandwiches, and they were always the most unlikely combinations—to my provincial palate anyway: gorgonzola, honey, and basil; pork sausage, endive, and Rome apple slices; mozzarella and mint with a drizzle of balsamic reduction. A considerable departure from the original Italian hero, but Ed, he told me, was not a purist.

We'd sit at that same table where we'd just eaten Beth's dinners and pore over her articles while Ed peppered his explanations with funny anecdotes from his private school, making the experience of slogging through the scholarship that much more bearable.

Gradually I began to open up to him. One night I was talking about my uncle's store and found myself describing our cardboard-box excuse for a back office. That office—all of Food, really—embarrassed me. I'd made it a point not to show it to Beth and Devon when they came to Queens.

Ed's reaction? “Cardboard! At
least
get some foam core or something—that would've been sturdier. Though I'll grant the PVC pipes are a nice touch.”

“Sounds like my uncle should've hired
you
to fix up the place.” Ed had mentioned he came from a family of contractors. He said he probably would have continued down that path if it hadn't been for a volume of
Leaves of Grass
and a certain high-school English teacher.

“Well, that's nothing,” Ed said. “When my brother, Enzo, and I were doing work on this house, you should've seen. We broke through the walls and saw—”

“Mice?” I interrupted. I thought of the ceiling panels with Sang.

“Worse!” Ed shook his head. “Mold. It was a nightmare—you couldn't salvage a thing.”

For all of Beth's attempts to get me to open up to her, it was actually Ed I felt more comfortable confiding in. I didn't need to
explain
things the way I did with Beth. He just got it. It was uncanny how two and a half months ago I'd been terrified of him; now I was divulging stories I wouldn't dare share with his wife. Pretty soon we spoke in our own comfortable shorthand. We both came from decidedly unglamorous worlds, steeped in the language of vermin, water damage, building codes. What part would Beth have wanted in any of these “conversations”?

* * *

Besides my day meetings with Beth and my night sessions with Ed, Nina and I were fast becoming friends. Not only were we hanging out in the afternoons with Devon and Alla, but the two of us also would occasionally meet after dinner, when I was technically off-duty. We usually went back to Gino's, where we'd open our books in front of us—Nina with her schoolwork, me with Beth's assignments—and talk. Nina would tell me about her friends in the neighborhood. There was Angela Fabbricari, Nina's best friend, majoring in business at Brooklyn College (her father was a contractor and was—according to Nina—loaded). Adriana Panificio, who worked at her family's bakery on Henry. Marie Macelli worked as a day trader, and her father was a butcher. Valentina Francobolli, a paralegal whose parents owned the notary /files/01/46/52/f014652/public/stamp store on Court. From what I could tell, Nina's life paralleled that of my cousin Mary and her Korean friends back in Flushing: everyone lived at home with his or her parents, and on the weekends they headed into the city to the bars and clubs. Whenever I'd run into Nina and her gang on the street, we'd only exchange a quick hello; she'd never stop and introduce me to her friends. I knew it was because I wasn't part of the in group.

One night at Gino's, Nina looked across at my book. “What you got over there this time?” she asked. That week's reading was written by a scholar named Sam Surati, Beth's adviser at Columbia, who'd since been wooed away by Stanford. Its title was
Could You Please Pass the Smelling Salts?: An Examination of the Victorian Faint.

“You know,” I said, “same old.”

Nina snorted. “I don't know what's more unbelievable—that your boss gives you homework or that you actually do it.”

I shrugged my shoulders like,
Whattayagonnado.
“Want to trade?” I said. Nina was reading yet another book on real estate. “Sure, why not.” She took the book from me and began to read aloud.

“‘We cannot discourse on the faint without first beginning our discussion with constructions of the feminine. What is “the feminine''? To liken it to, if you will, the lapping tides of the Long Island Sound on a breezy afternoon in the heart of the North Fork wine country would merely perpetuate stereotypes of female subjectivity (mercurial, as moody as those shifty waves, as intoxicating as a cabernet franc), as well as to objectify the female form entirely. Nor can we discourse on the feminist movement—in all its wrought history—without first discoursing on the problematic tradition of desire and the male gaze (cf.
Surati,
A Thousand Times “I Do!”: Commodification of Female Chastity in Nineteenth-Century Puritanical England,
p. 147).'”

“The hell is that shit?” Nina said, putting down Sam Surati's book.

“My uncle's English is better than that,” I said.

“So's my
nonna
's! Why's a dude writing about feminism?” She looked at the book's cover. It was pink, featuring a picture of a tulip with quivering petals. A knowing smile spread across her face. “Oh, I know why.
Bom-chikka-bow-wow!
”

I let out a hearty laugh. “Ed says Sam Surati likes to think he's quite the authority on
every
subject.”

Actually, Ed Farley thought Sam Surati was “a self-quoting, womanizing, pompous ass.” That I learned over tuna, red-pepper flakes, and shredded jicama.

“You've been quoting a lot of Ed Farley lately,” Nina mused.

I stopped laughing and quickly added, “And
Beth
says Sam was her greatest mentor.”

Nina tapped the cover, her finger aimed at Sam Surati's name
.
“Just watch. You're totally gonna have a pop quiz waiting for you tonight.”

* * *

Nina wasn't all that far off. It would be more like an oral examination, with the author himself—Sam Surati was coming to New York. “He's here on his lecture circuit, and I've invited him over for dinner a week from next Thursday,” Beth said at the dinner table that night, clapping her hands together. “Isn't that wonderful?”

“But, Ma,” Devon said, “that's Thanksgiving.”

According to the primer,
the Mazer-Farleys spent their Thanksgivings getting vegetarian dim sum in Chinatown, because the family didn't want to impose a Western reading on an already exploitative Western holiday.

“It was the only day he was free, sweetie,” Beth said. “Plus, I know he's dying to meet you.”

Ed pushed his plate away. It was Bitter Greens Casserole Night. (On BGCNs, Ed was always doubly hungry at our sandwich sessions.) “Doesn't the man have his own family to spend the holidays with?”

Beth bit her lip, as if she were about to hold back on making a retort. Then her voice went light, airy. “Jane! What a wonderful opportunity this will be for you. You'll finally meet the man behind the words. I hope you have some good questions planned!”

I hadn't made it much past those first few pages of
Could You Please Pass the Smelling Salts
?

Beth got up from the table and returned with a legal pad and a pencil. “If I'm remembering correctly, Sam is allergic to garlic. . . .” And she set about sketching a holiday menu plan.

That menu plan consumed Beth both day and night: thick cookbooks showed up in all corners of her office, opened to recipes for spice rubs and purees marked in different-colored pens, a million tiny Post-it flags waving from their pages. Crumpled legal-pad sheets overflowed from the recycling bin and littered the floor of her study. Beth's attic was becoming a madhouse.

On Thanksgiving morning Devon and I were dispatched downtown to the Chinese bakery. “So I guess you really like moon cakes, huh,” I said as we boarded the subway into the city.

Devon wrinkled her nose. “I
used
to,” she said. “I've only told Ma like a thousand times I don't anymore. But Dad says it's just because she's up for tenure next year. Then after that she'll be back to normal.”

What kinds of conversations did she and Ed have when Beth wasn't around? Just as Ed and I were meeting for late-night sandwiches, Devon and Ed must have had their own set of secrets they kept from Beth. I felt a pang of something inside—jealousy? selfishness? I shook my head clear of such petty thoughts.

We got off the subway at East Broadway and joined the jumble of pedestrians on Canal Street. We dodged men pushing hand trucks stacked with boxes of produce. In the restaurant windows, hanging duck carcasses glistened from their hooks. We cut through the shouts and murmurs of shopkeepers and customers mid-negotiation.

“It always feels weird to be walking around here,” Devon said, clutching my arm so we wouldn't get separated in the crowds. I thought of Northern Boulevard and the Koreans spilling out of shop doors and churches. “All the real Chinese kids live here.”

“As opposed to fake?” I said.

Devon looked sheepish. Yet we both knew there was a difference. “It just doesn't feel the same with my CAAA-NY friends.” CAAA-NY was the New York chapter of the Chinese-American Adoptee Association, to which the family belonged. “It's like we all go to Lion Dance class and we meet for Lunar New Year, but sometimes it feels like we're just doing it because, like, we're supposed to.”

“Have you tried talking with your mom about it?” I asked.

“Ma's already got so much on her plate right now, I don't want to bother her.” She hesitated before adding, “Plus, she's so
clueless.
”

I wondered if, for Devon, “clueless”
was synonymous with “lacking
nunchi.
”

As we continued down Canal, Devon told me that a bunch of the kids from her Chinese school—the “real” Chinese—were going to apply to Hunter College High School. “Have you ever heard of it?”

Eunice Oh had gone to Hunter for junior high. She'd attended Chwae-go After-School Academy since the second grade to prepare for Hunter's entrance exam. Your fifth-grade standardized test scores determined whether you were qualified to take the exam, and you had your one shot in the fall of sixth grade to pass the exam. The school was grades seven to twelve.

“You're thinking of applying?” I asked Devon.

She nodded slowly, the way she did when she was in serious mode.

We'd reached the bakery at that point, and the bell chimed as we pushed the door open. “&%$*%#@,” the shopkeeper said to us.

“Sorry, I'm not Chinese,” I said. My automatic response whenever I was greeted in Chinese.

He looked over at Devon.

“& . . . % . . . $*% . . . #@,” she said haltingly.

The man then let out a fast string of words, punctuated with a lot of
sh
and
wuhr
sounds, and based on the growing look of confusion on Devon's face, I could tell she didn't follow. “I'm not . . .” she started, but therein lay her dilemma: She
was
Chinese. At least in the man's eyes she was. She didn't have the luxury of saying otherwise. My heart ached as I watched her standing there—embarrassed? humiliated?—her eyes now glued to the floor.

“Do you have moon cakes?” I asked quickly.

The man threw a last confused look at Devon before turning his attention to me. “We got many kind. What your favorite?”

I was about to ask Devon, but her body was doing a one-eighty, her toes pointing toward the door. Her tiny hands curled into fists. “Whatever's most popular,” I told the man hastily.

After we left the store with the cakes, I turned to Devon. “Hey. What happened back there?”

“Nothing,” she mumbled, eyes fixed to the pavement.

“Come on, tell me.” Beth would have said,
Let's have a conversation.

She kicked a bottle cap on the sidewalk. “You don't understand.”

“
I
don't understand?” The words just came pouring out; I couldn't stop myself. “I got the opposite problem from you. I grew up half Korean. In
Flushing
. You saw what that place was like. I stuck out like a sore thumb.”

Growing up, I often felt I would've been treated better if I were a hundred percent one or the other. If I were all Korean, I could have just blended in. If I were all white, I wouldn't have been met with the same curious stares—
What
are
you?—
the same assumptions about my mother's past. To be
almost
seemed to be worse than being
not at all
.

“I didn't know you were only half!” Devon's eyes went round with disbelief.

“Only” half
. “Well, now you do,” I said.

I thought of Carroll Prep, where most of Devon's classmates had hyphenated last names. All white or white and something else, like Alla Peters. One or two other adoptees like Devon. Her subset of Brooklyn looked very different from Nina's and her father's.

Devon held tight to my arm as we approached East Broadway. The sidewalk was lined with hefty trash bags filled with who knew what—fish guts and rotting fruit peels from the smell of it. It was a foul scent, with a sweet finish that followed us until we ducked down into the subway station below.