Van changed the channel—The Golden Girls starting on Lifetime—and fought the desire to call Miles and tell him that she was going to visit her father. The idea of leaving town and coming back and never saying a word about it to him made her shiver. How would he know where to think of her?
She worried she wouldn’t be able to keep up the lie, at least not with Linny, who might stare her down, narrow her eyes, and in that way force the real story. Van knew, too, something harder: it had been six weeks, and each day meant a greater separation, a further burrowing of the truth. One day, she would have to open her mouth and speak it.
2
Linny
Linny would not dress up her apartment for Gary: let him see the stains in the bathroom grout, the laminate countertops, the Magic Chef range so narrow two of her pans barely fit on it at the same time. Let him lie in her bed strewn with her discount designer clothes, then glance out the windows at the alley and the row of brick buildings whose windows were almost always blinded shut. Here in Wicker Park, hipster girls punked up their hair and slouched in coffee shops while skinny mothers with their Bugaboos ordered chais to go. Linny used to take their orders, standing behind the counter in her assigned apron, five years ago when she quit school and moved to Chicago.
Gary’s house in Lincoln Park took up three stories. The cherry floors gleamed seamlessly, inviting his kids to slide down the halls and crash into each other. The furniture was covered in fabrics with names like faille and habotai that Gary’s wife, Pren, had studied in her textile classes before she switched to art history. In the kitchen, Tuscan tiles bordered quartz countertops, showing off the six-burner two-oven range the nanny used to cook the dinners Linny pre-made at her job. Linny would not compete with that house. She sat in her IKEA lounger and waited a full minute before answering the buzz that announced Gary’s arrival.
For three years now Linny had been working at You Did It Dinners in Oak Park, just west of the city. Each day, moms filled the company kitchen to assemble two weeks’ worth of meals in two hours: chicken enchiladas, spinach lasagna, citrus-glazed salmon, all piled into plastic bags and tin pans ready to be pulled from the freezer and popped into an oven. The owner of the company, Barbara, billed the experience as a social event. You’ll get to know other mothers in the area! her flyers promised. The women sipped wine as they layered chicken breasts with provolone cheese, comparing their kids’ schools and sports and their summer vacations. Linny’s main role was to put together the meals for customers who couldn’t be bothered to make the trek to Oak Park. (“Can we call these You Didn’t Do It Dinners?” she’d asked Barbara.) That was how she met Gary, bringing a new supply of burritos and chicken bakes to his family. As she stacked the pans in his freezer he asked her questions about the company, how she liked it, what her favorite dishes were. They flirted for months until the day she found him at home by himself, the nanny out at the zoo with the kids. Gary kissed her that day, leaning her against the stone counter. Linny, who had just broken up with a boyfriend of a year, found something irresistible in the idea of a married man. The ease, the allure. No chance of commitment. She had only intended to see him a few times anyway. But now, four months into it, the thrill was turning into something like caution. Even when alone she was looking at the clock.
Linny had told Gary that her favorite You Did It dish was the chicken Marbella, with orange rind, olives, and figs, though in truth she didn’t really care for any of the meals. The company aspired more to Applebee’s than Gourmet. It was what the customers wanted, Barbara said decisively. The most popular items were stuffed shells, chili, three-cheese macaroni, and a concoction called taco rice. Even the more high-reaching dinners—chicken tikka masala, apple-rosemary glazed pork tenderloin—tended toward a salty ooze and chew, a flattening out of the palate. Not that Linny felt entitled to highbrow menus; neither she nor Barbara had been through formal culinary training. Alone in the company kitchen sometimes, they traded stories about their mothers’ cooking or restaurants where they’d waitressed. Barbara was divorced, her two sons in college, and she’d started the business after watching a talk show about mom entrepreneurs. She had recently dyed her blond pageboy auburn and changed her last name back to Hull. She was the first boss Linny had ever cared about.
On the days when women weren’t prepping meals in the kitchen, Linny and Barbara formulated new dinner ideas. The ingredients couldn’t be too complicated or time-consuming; everything had to appeal to a family of four; and the foods had to transition well from freezer to oven or stovetop. Fish was the main obstacle, and they had tried out countless versions of salmon, halibut, and the bland favorite tilapia. As Linny had quickly discovered, You Did It’s customers were urban moms with suburban roots. They carried designer bags but coveted old-fashioned stews and macaroni and cheese. Fancy logos they could handle; fancy ingredients, as Barbara said, often intimidated them. So Linny combed through cookbook aisles in used bookstores and flipped through Crock-Pot recipes from the 1970s, jotting down ingredients and ideas in a notebook.
In the past few months Linny’s recipe notes had expanded, reaching toward questions beyond her job. Who bought all of the star fruit in the produce section? What about kumquats? Which herbs had Mrs. Luong preferred in her banh mi sandwiches? Did her mother ever cook with persimmons or only eat them raw? Linny realized she was writing notes toward another anniversary of her mother’s death and it became a comfort, as though she were calling forth her mother, bringing back the hours they had spent in the kitchen together when Linny was a girl.
Though a year younger than her sister, Linny had been the one to take over the cooking duties when they were growing up. When their mother stayed late at Roger’s Department Store to get overtime pay and their father retreated to his sketches and basement studio, Linny made spaghetti, stir-fries, and sloppy joes. She followed her mother in the kitchen on weekends, paying attention to the shape of goi cuon summer rolls and banh xeo crepes. She learned how to cook pho soup, chicken and vermicelli, caramelized beef and shrimp. The directions made logical sense to her in the way sewing also did; every stitch, every ingredient, depended on the others. Linny was hemming her pants and piecing together her own skirts by the time she was ten. After the requisite home ec class in seventh grade in which Linny learned to make cupcakes and potatoes au gratin, she began getting cookbooks from the local library while Van checked out the classics she needed to learn the “canon” (a term that Linny associated for years with the weapon, literature as a threat or death blow). The home ec teacher, pleased by Linny’s interest and by the sewing skills she’d learned from Mrs. Luong, had given her a Home Economics Certificate of Achievement at the end of the school year. It was the only award she ever won in school. Unlike Van, Linny grew picky about what she ate. She had always refused mealy tomatoes in winter and insisted on dark chocolate over milk. She became as fastidious about her meals as she did about her feathered hair and highlighted cheekbones.
One day while Linny got dressed in a room at the Westin, Gary pulled the notebook from her handbag and flipped it open. “ ‘What about kumquats?’ ” he read out loud, falling back in laughter as Linny grabbed the book back. From that moment on the word kumquats became his code word. “Did you bring me any kumquats?” “When can I have some kumquats?” He e-mailed the word kumquats to say, meet me.
They met around Michigan Avenue and in the Loop, in business hotels filled with out-of-towners. Linny especially liked the modern anonymity of the Swissôtel, and the InterContinental for its spectacular Moroccan swimming pool and the bleachers from the days when the Olympian Johnny Weissmuller, the future Tarzan, swam for crowds. Linny had gone up there once to watch golden arrows of sunset slanting into the turquoise water.
She always declined rides back to her apartment, preferring to take a cab or train. She hated saying good-byes in a car, that lingering moment of awkwardness when pulling up to the curb: one could leap out of the car too quickly, or not quickly enough. And she never invi
ted Gary to her place, though he had asked more than once to see it. “Why?” she asked.
“What do you mean, why?” He laughed easily, something Linny had liked about him from the start. “I want to see where you live.”
She brushed off his request. “I like hotels.”
It became almost a game between them, Gary asking to come over and Linny saying no. She cited her messes, the small size of the place, the lack of a king-sized bed. The more he pushed, the more she resisted. She found herself unwilling to give him this, needing to keep something of her own between them.
People who met Linny would not have guessed that she lived in an apartment filled with mismatched housewares from discount stores. She had never managed money well. She could drop hundreds on a pair of shoes but kept a card table in her dining area. The dulled floors in her studio needed refinishing and the exposed ductwork seemed to invite the cold of Chicago winters to linger—but at least the place was hers. She thought of it as protective gear, outside of which her identity could be swayed, up for grabs. There were times, out on a date, sitting in a low-lit restaurant, when Linny had the sensation of just waking up into a parallel dimension, as if she were viewing herself from another place, another body altogether.
Now Gary was walking up the three flights of stairs to see her apartment for the first time because he had something to tell her. “Let me see where you live. Then we can talk,” were the words he used.
Linny’s friend Sasha, the one person who knew about Gary, said it had to be one of two things: he was going to dump her or he was going to dump his wife. Either way, better to be on your own turf, she advised.
Gary kissed Linny as soon as she opened the door, letting the early April chill of his jacket seep into her thin sweater. She stood on her tiptoes, having forgotten to put on her heels. Linny had always preferred tall men. Her senior prom date had been a six-foot-four basketball star. She hadn’t cared that they looked comical dancing together, Linny’s head tilting back so she could see him.
With one quick gaze Gary seemed to take in her apartment’s meager square footage, the wood veneer furnishings, the bare walls save for the one faux-vintage wine poster Van had given her for Christmas a few years back. It showed a woman bursting out of a spray of grapes, a thin vine coiled around the fruit and up her body. Gary sat down on the slipcovered sofa, noticing the stack of Saveur magazines, the old sewing machine that had belonged to Linny’s mother, and the television that took up one corner of the room.
Once in a while, in hotels, he agreed to watch TV with her. He was amused by her penchant for sitcom reruns and History Channel shows about lost civilizations. Television was one of her oldest habits, originating in her first memory of childhood: she and Van planted in front of it, spouting cartoon dialogue to each other, and pretending to be Laverne and Shirley. The television had been a mainstay for the whole family, all of them gathering on the nights Mr. Luong wanted to see Superman or championship figure skating. It had brought more voices into the house.
Gary’s dark brown hair, silvering so slightly that he sometimes appeared to be walking in mist, was getting too long, starting to curl against the cashmere scarf he slowly unwound from his neck. While an El train raced by he spread his arms in a grand gesture and said, “Finally, it is all revealed.”
“Disappointed?”
“Never.” Gary looked around again. “But where’s the bedroom?”
Usually they had sex as soon as possible, as if to get it out of the way. This time, as Linny led him to her room, she decided against it.
He landed himself on the bed, the metal frame creaking. Linny remembered that the bulb in the ceiling fixture had gone out. “I love being surrounded by all of your things,” Gary declared, finding a lace-trimmed camisole lying on the duvet. He held it up to himself. “What do you think? Is this me?”
He grabbed at her and the mattress dipped, the whole bed lurching. Breaking free of his grasp, Linny nearly fell to the floor.
“I had a feeling you’d want to talk first,” he said. It seemed to foretell good news, a spark of hope thrown into Linny’s chest.
“I’m such a good hostess, I even bought a bottle of caber-net,” she said.
In the kitchen Linny opened a cupboard to take out two wine glasses, the only ones she owned. She kept everything on the lowest shelves because, like most kitchens, it was built for someone taller. As a girl, Linny had perfected a method of reaching things—an easy one-armed balance on the counter, the other grabbing a sack of sugar or box of cookies. That was when her father invented the Luong Arm. Though he had never said so, she was certain she had inspired the idea.
Gary stopped at the refrigerator to look at the photos held in place with food magnets—cheeseburgers and sundaes, a wedge of iceberg lettuce—that Barbara had given her. He peered closer at one photograph. “Is this your sister?” It was from two Thanks-givings ago, Linny and Van with their plates of turkey and stuffing Linny had made, while their father stood in the background, staring at something off in the distance. Linny couldn’t remember why she had that picture on her fridge. “I can see the resemblance, but her face seems broader. Rounder. Your cheekbones and lips are fuller. Your eyebrows have shape. I don’t think I’ve ever even noticed eyebrows before.” He finished his assessment. “How much older is she?”
“One year.”
“It’s that turtleneck.”
It was true that Van favored cotton turtlenecks neatly folded over. She had a collection of big square sweaters, sturdy chinos, and cardigans from J. Jill and Talbots.
Sometimes in high school, Linny would see her from the end of a hallway: Van leaning into her locker, reaching up for her books, probably thinking about exams. She was all alone with her binders of equations and symbols, history dates and metaphors. Linny would see her like that and feel sorry for her. And Van, lost in her own world, would close her locker and set off down the hall to her next class. It wasn’t that she didn’t have friends; they were like her—the ones who did Model UN after school and didn’t care about clothes. But why weren’t they ever around when Linny caught a glimpse of her? Why did Van always seem to be so alone, her long straight hair pushed back into a limp ponytail?
Gary said matter-of-factly, “You’re prettier.”
“Am I supposed to say thank you?”
He smiled. “I like this place,” he said instead. “I like how spare and modern it is.” When Linny rolled her eyes he insisted, “No, really. You’ve got everything you need and it’s all yours. Independent. I’m a little jealous.” He put a hand on Linny’s shoulder so that his thumb grazed her collarbone.
Linny pushed the wine bottle toward him. “We’re supposed to be having a talk, remember?” She paused to let the noise of a passing train subside.
“That must get old, hearing the El all the time.”
“I don’t even notice it anymore,” Linny said, a lie. She heard it every time, wakened to it each morning. The familiar rumble, rolling in and out of the station just a few blocks down, reassured her that she wasn’t in Michigan anymore, not in small towns or at state schools dreary with late sixties architecture.
“Let’s go out for dinner,” Gary suggested suddenly, and Linny was surprised. They almost never did that. “Let’s go to that sushi place down the street.”
It was not yet seven. A few miles west of here, the nanny and the kids would have already finished eating—perhaps the vegetable lasagna, or the enchiladas Gary’s five-year-old son loved. Linny knew how many dinners remained, the frozen blocks neatly labeled. Soon she would have to get started on the next round.
Or perhaps Pren was home tonight, taking care of the kids because Gary had already called to say, breezily, audaciously, that he was working late. Linny imagined Pren clearing the table, her honey-colored hair falling into her eyes as she put the plates into the sink. She was almost as tall as Gary, slim, able to retrieve whatever she needed from any cupboard. Linny imagined her thinking of her husband, whose downtown
office faced the lake with its boats in warm weather. His windows darkened with the evening. So many late hours, followed by an inching drive home on Lake Shore. The word traffic, Gary had said, always bought him an extra half hour.
When Linny and Gary walked out into the cold evening, he tucked her arm in his. On Milwaukee some of the storefronts were framed with dotted lights, stringing together vintage shops and cafés, boutiques devoted to stationery, shoes, and angular-looking clothes. As Linny glanced up at the awnings she felt a wayward burst of contentment. It came out of nowhere, overriding the dark mood she had nursed for the last week. She could feel herself being drawn into a self-conscious fantasy—the two of them, out in the open, Gary seemingly unworried about running into someone he or Pren knew.
But the moment evaporated with the ring of a cell phone. Linny’s. When she saw it was her father she dropped the phone back into her bag.
Through some tacit agreement Linny and Gary never asked about each other’s calls, but this time she volunteered, “My dad.” She didn’t explain that he was no doubt going to remind her that she had to return to Michigan for his citizenship party, and that she ordinarily didn’t hear from him unless he had a specific question—when was she next coming home; where could his friend find good pho in Chicago; how would he get spilled Sriracha out of a white shirt. That was how he communicated, and when he did he needed to be answered right away. He hated voice mail and would call four times in a row until she picked up.
A gust of wind blew right through her coat and she paused, breathless. Gary tugged her closer. “Is he calling because of me?”
She laughed. “He doesn’t know you exist.”
“What about your sister?”
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 2