Re Jane

by Patricia Park

  “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.

  Chapter 8

  Thanksgiving

  Late 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 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 Y
ou 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.

  * * *

  Sam Surati was one hour late for Thanksgiving dinner. By the time he did arrive, the family had devolved into various sour moods. Ed had been making snide comments all morning about Sam. Beth was frazzled; her “feature entrée” was not “taking shape” the way she’d hoped, and both oven and stove were “in cahoots” against her. When I offered to help, she shooed me out of the kitchen. Devon harbored an unarticulated annoyance at something—the moon cakes, the whole trip to Chinatown. I was somewhere in between—after hearing the man built up by Beth (and knocked down by Ed), I was actually pretty curious about meeting him.