Re Jane

by Patricia Park

  Ed pulled in to a McDonald’s. The fact that Beth would have hyperventilated if she knew where we were (cf. the primer, “Forbidden Foods,” subsection “McDonald’s = Satan” footnote, p. 166) made our illicit trip all the more delicious. The only other patrons were a couple of men in stained Hanes T-shirts and black pants, hunched in a booth and tucking into their own version of Thanksgiving dinner. I remembered my first meal at McDonald’s, with Sang. The mouse picked clean. I guess he not go to waste. I tried to shut the memory out of my mind.

  Ed and I ordered Big Macs and Devon the Filet-o-Fish. We toasted our cups of soda water and dug into our meals. I was squirting ketchup onto my fries when I looked up and caught Ed staring at me. He leaned across the table and ran a gentle thumb over my cheek. He’d never come so close to me before. The smell of his clean soap gave way to a different scent—a deeper, muskier one.

  “You have some mayo on your face—there, I got it.”

  He licked the sauce from his finger, then reached over and tousled his daughter’s hair. My cheek still tingled. No, I thought. I didn’t want the moment to be over. Devon was absorbed in recounting a story from school— “. . . and then during gym, Sasha Siegler-Chen was like . . .”—but my ears tuned her out, my whole body fixed on replaying the sensation of Ed’s touch. I felt something in my chest—a dull aching. A longing? Forget it, I thought. He’s your boss. I placed my hand to my chest and pressed down, hard.

  But then Ed looked over at me again, locking his blue eyes on mine. The meal, the rest of McDonald’s, faded away, and it was just the two of us. He smiled. It was so unlike the sour smile he seemed to wear daily at breakfast and dinner, where one corner of his mouth lifted up while the other twisted into a frown. It was a rare, real smile.

  Sang would not have approved of the unabashed way Ed Farley was staring at me in that McDonald’s. And he would have been downright ashamed by the unabashed way I was returning that gaze.

  Chapter 9

  The Male Gaze

  It went on like this, through the descent into winter, the rise to spring. Ed and me eating more heroes that Beth didn’t know about. Devon and me studying in secret for her Hunter exam. The morning after our clandestine McDonald’s run, Devon had asked me for help; I did not even hesitate before saying yes. I’d e-mailed Eunice for some tips, and she’d e-mailed back attachment after scanned attachment of practice tests supplied by her cousin, who taught at Chwae-go After-School Academy. I was now colluding with all the other members of the Mazer-Farley household against Beth Mazer herself.

  Beth and I were still meeting in her top-floor office. We’d sit at the low table on the dusty floor drinking toasted barley tea. I didn’t mind being the sounding board for her theories. Whenever she talked about Foucault or Obuheim or Sam Surati, her tired eyes would grow bright with life. But it was when she would venture away from the theoretical—into the realm of her real life—that I would grow uncomfortable. One of the other mothers in CAAA-NY was sending her daughter to a child psychologist specializing in transracial adoption. Beth was thinking of sending Devon, too, but Ed was opposed. “She’s coddling Devon. Back in my day, a kid needed some scrapes and bruises to toughen up. She keeps this going, Devon’s going to grow up like a hothouse flower.” I could see it from both of their perspectives. “Transracial adoption” child psychologists didn’t exist in the world of Flushing either. But maybe if they had, things might have turned out differently for me.

  “Jane, what do you think?” Beth asked.

  “Well . . .” I started, ready to give a noncommittal answer, but Beth was already launching into an account of her own “shitty relationship” with her mother (a Boston socialite, from what I gathered), who was “more intent on grooming me into the world of debutante balls than developing my mind,” according to Beth. Thankfully, she found solace in her father—a political science professor who was from the Bronx—as well as therapy. God yes, therapy.

  But it was when she’d segue into concerns about her husband that I felt the most uncomfortable—and also the most indignant. “We can talk, woman to woman, right?” Beth asked one afternoon. She never referred to anyone as ladies or girls—we were all women or young females. Even Devon.

  What could I do but shrug yes?

  “I think Ed secretly wishes I won’t get tenure. To make himself feel better about his lack of success.”

  “He’s still a high-school teacher,” I pointed out. As if that were such a failure.

  “I think he’s trying to punish me. Sometimes he can be so petulant. And now he’s withholding sex. We haven’t slept together since . . .”

  My eyes swung from the clock to her dusty workstations, looking for something—anything—to use to change the subject. I knew exactly how long it had been—I stopped hearing the squeaking bedsprings through the walls after my first day. My eyes alighted on the bare bookshelves that framed the fireplace. They were floating shelves—suspended in the nook of the walls without the aid of L-brackets or other visual impediments.

  “Those are beautiful. Is that mahogony?”

  “I think. I guess.” Beth’s tone was dismissive. “If Ed had spent half as much time on his dissertation as he did making those—”

  “Ed built them?” The shelves were perfectly fitted in their nook—no gaps, no puckering, no uneven lines. I thought of the trial and error of cutting the boards to size, and getting them just right. “I swear, the way he tinkers around the house . . .”

  I wanted to shout, Then why are you together? I was surprised by the force of my own thoughts, but the words grew louder and stronger in my head with each passing day.

  And just as she was about to send me off with the next week’s readings, Beth would look intently at me. It was a look of pity.

  I didn’t need her pity.

  In fact, I was starting to pity her. It was as if Beth had no girlfriends she could hash out all her problems with. She was the one who needed to go back into therapy. But I could never hope to express those thoughts aloud. So each week I’d endure our sessions up in the attic as Beth rattled on and on, caught in an endless loop.

  * * *

  Nina was my escape from the respective dramas of the Mazer-Farleys, and over the passing months our coffees at Gino’s progressed to mixed drinks at bars. When it was just the two of us, we would volley words across the table—every ping met with its return pong. But when we were out with her other friends—they joked they’d been friends since the womb—Nina and her little circle felt impenetrable. It was the same dynamic Mary had with her friends, who’d known one another for so long that they spoke in a kind of exclusionary shorthand.

  But Nina and her friends taught me what girls our age did with their nights off: They got drunk on candy-colored cocktails and tried to pick up guys. She’d take me to bars along Second Avenue on the Upper East Side, bars named for boatloads of every free-flowing spirit imaginable. With each Jell-O shot or Jäger Bomb came the promise of true love. We’d go out in a gaggle of plunging necklines and stacked platform heels—Nina would lend me the clothes—and nurse our one cheap drink while trying to catch the eyes of men wearing shirts with their collars popped up, the front tips of their hair gelled into stiff peaks that called to mind the crown on the Statue of Liberty. Eventually the men would sidle up to us with neon shots that were literally on fire or fishbowls with two-foot-long straws.

  The men didn’t really talk to me. They focused on Marie, with her frosted highlights; or Adriana and Valentina, with their huge Bambi eyes; or Angela, whose boobs were so big and bouncy they threatened to bust an eye out; or Nina herself, who had the enviable twin traits of slimness and curviness. I’d always end up with the drunk bozo who’d make it clear he was “taking one for the team” by talking to me. I never knew if it was because I wasn’t pretty enough, because I was too Asian, because I wasn’t Asian enough, or because I lacked charm. I wasn’t good at the bar: I couldn’t
think of flirtatious zingers over the blaring music (mostly rap, occasionally classic rock); I didn’t know how to hold my body in any other position but ramrod straight; I didn’t know how to execute a playful slap to a man’s arm or toss a teasing smile over my shoulder. In short, I possessed exactly none of the feminine wiles.

  Don’t get me wrong: I was grateful. Nina didn’t have to invite me out. Not that her friends exactly offered me a warm welcome. The second that Nina stepped away to the bathroom or to the bar to ask for a cup of water, the girls would turn away from me and talk amongst themselves. In those settings I was shy, painfully shy; I felt I had nothing meaningful to insert into the conversation. But then Nina would return with a crack about the frat boy trailing a piece of toilet paper underfoot and we’d all laugh, and I’d almost feel like I belonged again.

  And where, reader, did Ed Farley factor into all this? By this point I felt a very strong pull toward him—it tugged inside my chest and made me feel dull and empty when he wasn’t around. But it was stupid to be infatuated with your boss. At best, Ed regarded me as someone to talk to. Perhaps I fulfilled for him the joint role of nanny and therapist, just as I did for his wife. So I soldiered on, hoping that on one of those lonely nights on the Upper East Side I’d forget all about Ed and meet someone else.

  * * *

  And that would happen, on an unusually muggy night in late spring. Not at an Upper East Side bar but a club in the desolate stretch of the West Twenties. DJ Stixx was spinning again at Twine, and Nina’s connections got us onto the list. She insisted we go shopping in the Village for new outfits. “We’re not going for fancy here,” Nina had advised, “just something cheap and—”

  “Cheerful?” I butted in. Nina shook her head.

  “Cheap and slutty.” As we flipped through the racks at Bang Bang, Nina asked, “So, like, what’s the deal with Beth and Ed? I don’t get it.”

  I never felt I could bullshit Nina. I admitted that at first I thought it was weird, too.

  “No one in the neighborhood can figure those two out. They’re the mystery of Carroll Gardens.”

  “He thinks she’s brilliant,” I said. At least I knew he used to. I suddenly became very engrossed in the clothes on the racks.

  But Nina would not let up. “She could be fucking Einstein. But look at her. Would he still want to hop into bed with that?”

  “Is that all that matters?” I looked up sharply. “So what if she doesn’t want to play to the male gaze?” I couldn’t believe I was aping the words of Beth’s articles.

  “Arright, arright, don’t kill the messenger.” Nina held her hands up. “I’m not saying it’s not fucked up. I’m just saying it how it is.”

  I ran my fingers through the rows of bright polyester dresses. Their cheap fabric felt rough to the touch.

  “Also, since when do you start talking like Beth? What, are you now her mini-me?”

  I didn’t answer. Then, perhaps to lighten the mood, she added, “Also, my cousin Rosie’s been wanting to jump Ed Farley’s bones since they were in tenth grade.”

  I took her comment as the peace offering it was and let out a little laugh.

  Nina held up one of the dresses. It was short and bright red, made of a stretchy fabric. “This is so you.”

  I let out a pshaw. “It is so not.”

  “It could be,” Nina said. “You’ll never know until you try.”

  In the fitting room, the dress was so tight I couldn’t breathe. The material clung to my entire body, revealing the flatness of my chest and my jutting hip bones.

  “You look hot,” Nina said.

  “I look like an idiot,” I said.

  “Stop fishing, Jane,” she said. “We can’t all be waify like you.” She examined her backside over her shoulder in the mirror. She was wearing the same dress in black, but it looked like it was actually built to fit her. “I figure I got a few more good years before this ass”—she gave her bottom a firm slap, and it didn’t even jiggle—“turns fat and saggy like Ma’s.”

  “Look who doesn’t even bother to fish.”

  I laughed when I said it, but I was a little taken aback by how blatantly Nina admired her own form, almost celebrating it. Hannah would have said that Nina had too much of a healthy ego. The young women she hated most at church were the ones who held their heads up high and their shoulders back when they should have been hunched over, lowering their eyes modestly.

  Nina raised a hand. “I think you look good. Bangable. So you’re either blind or in denial. You think I look good, and I know I look good. So let’s just be done with it already.”

  I gave myself another glance in the mirror. Would Ed think I looked hot? It was an awful thought, I knew, but the harsh lines of me in the dress were already softening.

  I let out a feigned sigh. “Fine. I’ll buy you yours if you buy me mine.”

  “Done and done.”

  Each of us $19.99 the poorer, we returned home to get ready for the night.

  * * *

  It was one thing to wear a stretch minidress—in fire-engine red—in the privacy of a fitting room. It was quite another to put it on knowing I was going to leave the house in it. Nina warned me not to bring a jacket so I wouldn’t have to pay for coat check at the club. She also told me not to bring a bag unless I wanted it to get stolen, so my left breast was bumped up to a B thanks to the keys, MetroCard, driver’s license, and two twenty-dollar bills I’d shoved into the cup of my bra.

  Beth was reading in the living room when I made my way down the stairs. She must have caught the glint of red out of the corner of her eye, because she lowered her book and frowned. Forget making it to the street—maybe I wasn’t even going to make it out of the house.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said, shaking her head. “Are you leaving the house . . . like that?”

  I wrapped my arms across my chest. “I’m meeting Nina.”

  She shifted her reading glasses to the top of her head, like a pair of pilot goggles. “I hope you’re not dressed that way out of peer pressure.” Sometimes Beth talked to me as if I were her fifth-grader daughter. “You don’t need to pander to the male gaze.” Wasn’t the choice to wear whatever I wanted being an empowered female? “You are not an object of desire.” For once I wanted to be. (Too bad the male gaze I’d hoped to elicit was out on his nightly five-mile run.) “Men think they can take advantage of attractive, impressionable young women like you.”

  Maybe compared to you. Immediately I chastised myself for being smug. But then I chastised myself for chastising myself. Who did Beth think she was, trying to craft me into a duplicate of herself, a “mini-me,” as Nina had pointed out? And then I was out the door.

  * * *

  When we arrived at Twine, we cut to the front. The people behind us on line shot dirty looks; Nina shot an even dirtier look back. The bouncer—Nina’s cousin’s girlfriend’s little brother—checked our names off a list and lifted the velvet rope to let us pass through.

  The club was a large warehouse with three floors of different music. DJ Stixx was spinning on the first floor. The bass beat pounded in my eardrums. The strobe lights throbbed, making the crowds on the dance floor look like a series of snapshots. We fought our way to the bar and ordered drinks. I was now down to just one bill in my bra cup.

  Nina gripped my arm. “Holy shit,” she whispered, “there’s Joey Cammareri.”

  Nina would occasionally mention Joey Cammareri, the guy that she, along with her whole gang of friends, had harbored crushes on since the seventh grade. His father owned Cammareri Stone Works. He’d gone off to an art school in Rhode Island. Nina had heard from her mother, who’d heard from the cashier at Winn Discount, who’d heard from his mother, that Joey Cammareri was living in some converted barn in Vermont. He was walking toward us now. Unlike the other guys in the bar, with their slick clothes and wet-looking hair, Joey Cammareri wore a thin T-
shirt with a faded print, paint-smeared jeans, and Converse sneakers. His tousled hair was ungelled. He wore a self-satisfied expression on his face that immediately put me off.

  “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.