Sometimes Nina and I ventured to the few bars in our neighborhood, and I’d help her try to pick up men. We’d size up the smattering of potentials—compared to Manhattan there just weren’t that many young people in Astoria—and scheme ways to throw her into their sight line. But more often than not, we’d talk about the course of our days. Nina loved and hated her job. Her showings were in Murray Hill, Midtown East, and the Upper East Side. She loved the sales aspect—at her core she was a people person—but anytime she’d try to voice her ideas for enticing more clients to her superiors, she’d be met with, “Yeah, we’ll look into it,” followed by no follow-up. Yet she could not pilot innovations on her own without having a superior first sign off on them. She was one of hundreds of brokers at her company; it was a large, clunky boat that was slow to change direction.
I felt more ambivalent than Nina did about my administrative job. In the first month, I was completely disoriented—I was just dropped into the thick of it all and expected to navigate on my own. (My boss was the opposite of Sang—he was entirely hands-off.) I was now starting to fall into the rhythm of things, and I felt that in a year’s time I would probably master everything I needed to know and could thereafter coast on a kind of autopilot. While my boss relied on me to look for cost-cutting measures, whenever I suggested we look into new ventures—doing an e-mail marketing campaign or hosting investor seminars to promote the company name—he’d shy away. He was risk-averse. It quickly became apparent that the mentality of the company was “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Could I see myself in this job forever? No. But still, a job was a job, and as Nina had said, you kind of felt lucky to have one at all.
Some weekends I’d help Sang out at the store. It would just be for a few hours here or there, filling in when he or my aunt had to run an errand or attend a church function. Then Sang would send me off with a bulging bag of fruit and vegetables—and never the moldy stuff.
But my nights always ended with Ed. I’d let myself into his apartment—he gave me a key—and would arrive to the warm, yeasty smell of bread baking, the sizzle of garlic in the frying pan. And there was Ed—standing in the kitchen, welcoming me with one of his rare smiles.
Freed of Beth’s imposing culinary restrictions, his cooking now flourished. It was uncanny to witness. Ed’s heroes—no simple preparations in themselves—metamorphosed into elaborate stews and roasts and desserts. He’d make a leek soup from a broth of seared pork bones, a slow roast of pork shoulder marinated in white wine and lemon, accompanied by a salad of shaved fennel and citrus slices and finished off with a chocolate mousse that bore hints of lemon peel. The way each course was built upon the previous one reminded me of Ed’s handmade bookshelves back in Brooklyn. His rich meals were a hearty comfort during an unrelenting stretch of cold.
Afterward, we’d go to bed, and it was so different from that first time; my body, anticipating his touch, rose to meet his. Then we’d lie together in the dark, our arms and legs still woven together in warm, loose braids. We’d stare up at the cracks on the ceiling as if they were a constellation of stars, until we drifted off to sleep.
“Don’t let him fatten you up!” Emo would write in our e-mails back and forth. Emo being Emo, she wanted to know all about my dates with Ed. But even more than that, she loved hearing about my nights out with Nina. She found Nina’s rotating cast of love interests fascinating—there was the insurance salesman, the firefighter, the disk jockey—her dates unfolded like Emo’s episodes of TV dramas. “Oh, to be young and pretty and living on your own in New York City! All the things I never got to do. After everything with your mother, your grandfather wouldn’t dare let me out of his sight. This is such an exciting time for you, Jane. Promise me you’ll enjoy it. Before it passes you by.”
* * *
But in the middle of the night I’d wake up to the cold panic of finding myself abandoned in an unfamiliar room—Ed no longer beside me, his warm arms no longer draped over my body. He didn’t sleep well—which explained all our late-night sandwiches back in Brooklyn. It always took me a minute or two to reorient myself, to realize Ed had skulked off to work on his dissertation.
There was a stack of multicolored files that occupied a prominent spot beside his computer, which Ed jokingly called “The Thing.” One night I got up from bed and found Ed at his desk, scribbling furiously in a notebook. He was surrounded by a mess of newspapers and books. The radio hummed in the background. At the far end of the room, the television was paused midscene, casting a blue glow on the videocassette tapes scattered on the floor. But when my eyes fell on the bound stack of dissertation files, it was shunted off to the far corner of his desk. The same bright green file lay at the top of the pile.
“What are you doing,” I asked.
Ed, startled, looked up. “What? Oh . . .” He was still scribbling; he held up his other hand to signal, Hang on a minute. Then he put down his pen. “Sorry, just had to finish off a thought. WNYC was doing this segment on androids. It gave me a great idea for my next class—we’re doing ‘The Wasteland.’” Ed was constructing a lesson plan on technology’s effect on modern man, which he hoped would contextualize the poem. He gestured to copies of 1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, which were all flagged with multicolored Post-its. As he spoke—with gusto—his eyes lit up. Ed’s approach to teaching shared the same interlinking construction as his dinners, as those bookshelves.
“So that explains Blade Runner,” I said, nodding at the TV screen. It was Eunice Oh’s fourth-favorite movie. “But how’s . . . The Thing?”
As his bright blue eyes fell on the file stack, they darkened. Whenever Ed spoke about his dissertation, a shadow would fall over his face. It was the same burdensome expression he used to wear whenever he spoke about Beth over heroes in Brooklyn. “Every minute I spend on that thing is another minute I can’t spend lesson planning. Honestly, it’s so far from my mind right now.”
“But . . . don’t you need to finish that”—nunchi told me to keep my tone light—“in order to get tenure?”
“If I keep working on that, I won’t have time to build a new course prep, which will guarantee a teaching spot next semester. And course proposals are due in a week.” Ed let out a sigh. “Believe me, Jane. I know I should keep working on The Thing. But it just doesn’t feel right right now. Or maybe not ever.” Recognizing the growing tension of his tone, he lifted his shoulders into a What are you gonna do? shrug. “Ah! The glorious life of an adjunct.”
Sometimes Ed’s dissertation felt like a holdover from an earlier life—life with Beth.
“Well, you know what the economists say,” I told him. “Forget sunk costs, focus on the marginal.”
“So you’re saying I should cut my losses and move on?”
I shrugged. “Only if you think you’re investing all this time and energy”—and hope—“into something that’s no longer working.” But I knew Sang would have disagreed with that—he could not bear to see even the most far-gone of investments to go to waste.
Both our eyes fell again on the dissertation, bound in a tight stack.
Pretty soon The Thing was relegated from the desk to the shelf, from the shelf to somewhere tucked out of sight. We never spoke about it again.
Chapter 26
A Bad Family Education
It 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 sa
t 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.
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