by Min Jin Lee
4 DEFICIT
CASEY WALKED WEST TOWARD MADISON AVENUE—a street she loved for its polished glass storefronts and impossibly choice wares. It was past midnight, but safer on Madison than many streets in the world, because here the shop owners had secured their costly inventory, and by default, Casey was protected, too.
Virginia Craft lived one avenue over, on Park, but no one was home for the summer, and even if Virginia’s elderly parents were in, Casey wouldn’t have shown up at this hour. The elder Crafts were kind people, and they would have asked her to stay, but Casey couldn’t imagine what they’d say seeing her in this condition—or, worse, what they would never say. They didn’t have outward conflicts with their only child—adopted from a dark-haired Mexican seventeen-year-old who’d had an affair with a gringo ne’er-do-well who’d refused to marry her. The Crafts had gone to collect Virginia in Texas when she was two days old. Virginia once said about her adoptive parents: “I feel neutral to positive about Jane and Fritzy, who saved me from poverty and obscurity. But I sense that I’ve let them down.” Virginia’s long-limbed parents with coin-worthy profiles had a detached manner of speaking that trained you to follow them accordingly. Their mode of conversation encouraged restraint. To them, her father would be criminal. Her boss, Sabine, who lived less than five blocks away from the Crafts, would’ve called the police on Joseph.
Casey stopped at the Carlyle Hotel. There was no doorman in front of the revolving door. Virginia’s grandmother Eugenie Vita Craft stayed here whenever she came to town. Old Mrs. Craft was a pleasure. She wore her white hair short and wild like a tropical bird. On her flat waist and narrow hips, she wound multiple scarves, and wherever she was, men sought her glance. Venetian rings with colored stones glistened on her freckled fingers. She was thrilling, but her only son, Virginia’s father, was a disappointment. After years of therapy, Virginia analyzed him: “Grandmother’s irrepressible nature blocked Fritzy from being a grander person. There isn’t enough room for him in the world. Poor baby.” Virginia speculated that to avoid repeating the mother-son dynamic, Fritzy picked Jane for his wife—a woman who disliked books, sports, art, drama, fashion, sex, and politics. Naturally, Virginia and Casey discounted Virginia’s parents and worshipped the grandmother.
Casey pushed her way into the Carlyle, and at the front desk, she called on her best imitation of the old Mrs. Craft. “I find myself in New York for the night. Could you possibly spare a quiet room?”
The man tried not to stare at her face. He was originally from Glasgow, and long ago when he first came to New York, he’d tried to pick up a straight man in the Lower East Side and had gotten badly beaten up. That she was wearing a ridiculous hat and ski glasses and trying to sound posh made him feel more sorry for her. He considered asking if she needed medical assistance but instead offered her an excellent room at a corporate rate.
The next morning, Casey woke up enveloped in crisp white bedding. Her hotel room was large, with lovely striped wallpaper, a green wool mohair armchair, and, beside it, an inviting reading lamp. Beneath the Roman-shaded window, there was a lady’s writing desk and, in the drawer, embossed stationery. She dashed a quick note to Virginia: “Thrown out of my parents’ casa. I am pretending to be Lady Eugenie for a night at the Carlyle until Fate determines my course. Explanation(s) to follow. Will send return address.” She’d post it later when she found a stamp.
Afterward, Casey realized that she hadn’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours. From the In-Room-Dining menu, she ordered Irish oatmeal, lemon ricotta pancakes, and bacon. Fresh-squeezed orange juice and a large carafe of black coffee. When the food arrived, she tipped the waiter on top of all the additional in-room charges. She told herself to disregard the cost. Casey sat down and ate with gusto. Everything tasted so wonderful.
In the bathroom mirror, she saw that the swelling in her face had worsened in spots, and the colors of the bruises had deepened. It would’ve been better if she’d iced it last night. Not much could be done now. It would heal, she told herself. She steeped in the deep white tub, sampling every bottle of bath gel, shampoo, and conditioner. To dry off, she went through four fat bath towels just because she could and used up all the lotion. This was her first time in such a place, and she decided she never wanted to stay anywhere else. Yet in her head, Casey envisioned a meter, like a taxi meter—clicking, clicking, clicking speedily ahead.
She dressed herself in a pair of faded linen slacks, a worn white polo shirt, and white tennis sneakers with no socks. This was what she wore when she was a guest at a summer house. Over the years, through Virginia’s family and Jay’s wealthy friends from Lawrence-ville and his eating club, Casey had been invited to Newport, South Hampton, Nantucket, Palm Beach, Block Island, Bar Harbor, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cape Cod. The visits had taught her a great deal about manners and dress.
At the writing desk, Casey read her Bible chapter for the day, and afterward, she jotted down her verse. She’d begun this practice during her freshman year after an office-hour visit with the esteemed religious studies professor Willyum Butler—an atheist who converted to Catholicism in his late thirties. Butler was a West Indian from St. Lucia who had been educated at Cambridge. He reviewed her mediocre paper on Kant and Huxley, and sensing the student’s awe and fear of the subject matter, he asked her plainly, “Casey, what do you really think of what they are saying?” Casey swallowed and confessed an attraction to agnosticism. God’s existence, Casey said in a stammer, couldn’t be proved or disproved. It was easier to reconcile her life with Huxley than Presbyterian orthodoxy—the passionate belief of her joyless parents.
Willyum nodded encouragingly. “So you are a determined fence sitter.”
“Yes, I mean. . . Am I?” she answered.
Willyum laughed, and then Casey did, too.
Willyum liked his student’s earnest face and admired her willingness to talk about her faith. Her seriousness reminded him of his early beginnings at university. He felt compelled to give her something—to tell her a bit about his struggle. But he didn’t want her to think that he was proselytizing, because he didn’t believe in that, and it would have been wrong to do so in his capacity, he thought. He loathed thumpers as much as he disliked ex-smokers. But he also believed that if there was a cure for cancer, how could he withhold such a thing? “I think. . . if a mind can. . . a mind must wrestle before declaring victory. Really wrestle. Do you understand?” Willyum did not release his frown.
Casey nodded, not knowing what to say.
“It’s your soul you’re fighting for.”
She wanted to know what he thought of the soul—obviously, he believed that it existed. But she didn’t feel entitled to ask any more questions. There were other students waiting outside the closed door. At times like that, Casey felt like a bumpkin, and his kindness and humility affected her deeply. In longhand, he drafted a short reading list for her. That afternoon, she would go to the bookstore and buy Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Chesterton, Lewis, de Beauvoir, and Daly—blowing most of a paycheck from her weekend job at Sabine’s. As she gathered her things to leave, she couldn’t help herself from asking: “Do you still struggle? I mean. . . wrestle?”
“Every day, I read a chapter of the Bible.”
She nodded—her father and mother did this, too.
“And every day, I find a verse I cannot stomach, make peace with, or comprehend. I write it down on my calendar.” Willyum opened his leather-bound diary and showed her his scratchy writing. That day he was reading Ecclesiastes. “I pray for clarity,” he said, but did not mention being on his knees, hands folded, head bowed.
Casey rose from her chair and shook his hand good-bye, but in her mind, she was busy tucking away his proffered scrap of personal history like a jewel.
Then, in the second semester of her junior year, Professor Butler was killed in a car accident with his fourteen-year-old son, and Casey went to a memorial service attended by hundreds of mourners. Seated in a back pew with no one she knew, Case
y could not stop weeping. Prizewinning poets flew in from all over the world to read in his honor. The university president and the janitor who cleaned Butler’s office eulogized him. Casey regretted not having told him that each morning since their talk, she read a Bible chapter for ten minutes and took an additional minute to scribble down her verse of the day. It wasn’t wrestling exactly, but more like approaching the mat. After he died, she began going to church each Sunday, though she told no one. She still didn’t feel comfortable around people who identified themselves as Christians. But she discovered an unexpected dividend—her anxiety diminished for a while, and for that, she felt grateful.
In her block print, Casey wrote out her day’s verse from the book of Joshua: “When I saw in the plunder a beautiful robe from Babylonia, two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels, I coveted them and took them.” What was a shekel worth today? she wondered. She closed her Bible and notebook and stored them away in her messenger bag. She checked her face. There was little she could do except pull down the brim of her beach hat and wear her sunglasses. Lipstick seemed beside the point, but she applied some anyway. It was June in the Upper East Side of Manhattan—she kidded herself—perhaps the hotel staff might attribute her appearance to rhinoplasty. She decided to go shopping.
Clothing was magic. Casey believed this. She would never admit this to her classmates in any of her women’s studies courses, but she felt that an article of clothing could change a person, literally cast a spell. Each skirt, blouse, necklace, or humble shoe said something—certain pieces screamed, and others whispered seductively, but no matter, she experienced each item’s expression keenly, and she loved this world. Every article suggested an image, a life, a kind of woman, and Casey felt drawn by them. When things were difficult—and they couldn’t get much worse—Casey went to buy something to wear. When she had very little cash, purchasing a pair of black tights or a tube of lipstick from the drugstore could help her get through a slump.
Casey and her college friends were ashamed of shopping. Smart girls who read books weren’t supposed to be materialistic (her fellow economics majors pegged consumers as mollified idiots, and as for religion, they invoked Marx’s phrase the opiate of the masses), and although female intellects cleverly discussed sensuality and tactility in art, smart women were not supposed to like culling or gathering more dresses. But Casey knew well from having been on both sides of the counter that even bookish girls liked to go to shops and be thrilled by a red tweed skirt or a black cloche. And equally true was that smart girls wanted to be beautiful in the way beautiful girls wanted to be smart. Size fourteen bibliophiles could love clothes as much as size two heiresses who shopped to fill their time. Everyone scrounged for an identity defined by objects.
That morning, Casey went to Bayard Toll, though her budget recommended Lucky’s, a discount warehouse. What she wanted was an image of something to wear for a job interview, and the notion of combing through the round, bulky clothing racks of Lucky’s depressed her, although at other times she’d relished the challenge of finding the treasures passed over from last season’s styles. Today, she wanted luxury. She wanted to be someone else.
Bayard’s third floor carried collections of modern designers. Casey shopped efficiently, and within half an hour she’d picked up a pair of black slacks—cut narrow and made from a fine summer-weight wool, a gray skirt with parallel kick pleats on the sides, a white Sea Island cotton shirt with exaggerated French cuffs, and a navy lightweight jacket that she could wear with slacks or a skirt. These were work clothes, and they were what called to her.
A petite saleswoman named Maud relieved Casey of the clothing slung over her arm. She glanced at Casey’s face, the canvas hat and mirrored sunglasses, and gave her a clipped nod. Casey returned the nod. Maud’s detached manner was amazing. As a fellow retail salesperson, Casey recognized that Maud’s response was exactly right. Maud spoke plainly—without false intimacy. She was in her late fifties, dressed in a gray modernist sweater, slim gray pants. Her pouf of curly gray hair was streaked with even ribbons of pure white. She was a classic column. Around her neck, she wore reading glasses strung on a canvas cord, giving her an intellectual authority Casey found irresistible.
Casey normally avoided salespeople. At a store like Bayard’s, the salespeople parted the pool of customers into two segments: those who wanted a best friend or those who wanted a silent servant to ring up the sales and deliver the packages to the proper address. Casey was pretending to be the latter, because she did not want to be found out. At most, she could afford to buy a garter belt on sale.
Maud brought her to a large dressing room, then hung up her selections on the forged iron rack. She looked them over.
“You’ve made good choices,” she said. Maud’s tone was deliberate, not fawning, and the comment meant something to Casey, although she heard this kind of thing often. Her taste was well developed for someone so young (Sabine’s exact and slightly aggressive words), but it did not make Casey feel better about not being beautiful. She recalled Jay with the two girls and wished she were prettier, her waist narrower, her breasts fuller, her skin more luminous. Her thoughts embarrassed her.
Maud rested her pinkie on her lower lip. “I have something for you.”
Casey nodded, pleased by the attention, and in no time, Maud brought her a suit by a German designer, the color of bitter chocolate—with a long jacket and a knee-length skirt. The fabric was wool, much like the material used for a man’s suit. The jacket opening was asymmetrical and double-breasted; the price was four figures. Size thirty-six.
“I didn’t see this on the floor,” Casey said.
“It wasn’t on the floor.” Maud smiled. “Try it.”
Crystal sconces brightened the peach-colored dressing room with a flattering light. Casey slipped off her street clothes and let the suit cover her pale figure.
There was a large-size pair of high heels kept in the room to try on with the clothes. Her hat off, but her sunglasses still on, Casey saw an impenetrable young woman in her mirror reflection, utterly shockproof. She crossed her silver-cuffed arms with her hands fisted tightly against her chest to make an X, taking her Wonder Woman stance. This used to make Tina crack up, but Casey didn’t feel like smiling now.
The other pieces fit perfectly. Normally, she made a discard pile when she tried things on, but this time there was nothing on the dressing room floor. Each piece of clothing felt essential to her new life, whatever it would be. The least expensive of all was the shirt, and that was three hundred dollars.
With exquisite care, Casey hung each piece on its hanger, taking the most time with the brown suit, and she tallied the figures in her head. Not including tax: four thousand dollars. Among retail salespeople, of which Casey was a member in good standing, it was a point of honor never to pay retail—that was for the customers. The salesgirls at Sabine’s termed those kinds of customers “Wilmas,” short for willing mamas. You were supposed to look down on Wilma. You gave her your best advice, took her commissions, yet you hoped if you were ever in her situation, you would not be so foolish. But there wasn’t a girl working the floor who didn’t want to have Wilma’s choices.
Casey sat on the plush tufted ottoman. She couldn’t imagine starting her new life without these beautiful clothes—they were made for her. In the past, she had put items on hold, never to claim them. As she’d exit the shop, she’d think of who she was—the daughter of people who cleaned clothes for a living. She had no business at Bayard’s. Maud rapped on the door quietly. Casey put on her hat.
“Would you hold these things for me?” she asked.
Maud kept her expression blank, knowing what was up. “Your name and number?” she asked with a courteous smile.
Casey gave her name, then sputtered, “The Carlyle. . . Hotel.” She was looking through her handbag for the hotel room key—thinking there might be a phone number on the key folder—when she felt the tap on her shoulder. It was Ella Shim.
Ella was a girl she knew from her parents’ church. She and Casey were born almost a year apart, but they were in the same grade. Ella’s father, Dr. Shim, was an ophthalmologist at Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat and a founding member of Casey’s parents’ church in Woodside. Once a month, Dr. Shim and Joseph Han, both elders, and Leah, a deaconess, served on the hospitality committee and visited bedridden and ailing congregants. Ella and her widowed father lived in a grand Tudor house on Dartmouth Avenue in Forest Hills. They played tennis Saturday mornings at the Westside Tennis Club, where he was its first Korean member. Ella had gone to Brearley with Virginia Craft, who thought Ella’s dullness was proportional to her exceeding beauty. Casey disliked Ella for no good reason and resented how she was always popping up. Ella had a bone white complexion, small, unpierced ears, Asian eyes with the desired double fold, dark curving eyelashes, and a deep pink mouth. She had a charming left dimple and the innocence of an infant. Years ago, during Sunday school classes, Casey used to stare at Ella’s long, tapered fingers. Ella’s hair was jet colored, and she was often compared with the Chinese actress Gong Li.
The women at church pitied Ella since her mother died in childbirth, and they admired Dr. Shim, who never remarried after his wife’s death—to them, he was a romantic ideal. At church, the mothers of sons rubbed their hands in anticipation of Ella’s graduation from Wellesley—hoping that the pretty, reserved doctor’s daughter might one day be theirs. But the sons did not feel comfortable around the silent beauty; in fact, few people sought her out. Hers was a beauty that alienated—she was not cold exactly, but she did not offer warmth or ease. She possessed a kind of eerie solitude.