by Min Jin Lee
“I know, I’ll ask Daisy to make you a salad, too,” offered Judith. She’d take the high road. Her mother used to say that whenever someone hurt her feelings: “Take the high road, Buttons. Always take the high road. Can’t go wrong with that.”
Casey glanced at Judith, feeling bad about being unable to include her in the lunch. If she only knew how ambivalent Casey felt about these meals, tucked away in the boss’s office. Recently, someone had written in a stall in the staff cafeteria bathroom, “So what do Queenie and Principessa do in that office together anyway?” When informed of this development, Sabine had laughed and asked, “Oh, am I queenlike?”
However, Sabine’s office was in many ways an ideal sanctuary from the noisy cafeteria and the crowded main floor teeming with holiday shoppers. To get there, you had to walk through a stark white hallway lit with halogen lights that led to a reception area where Sabine’s assistant, Melissa, was perched on an uncomfortable steel chair; then you’d finally reach a pair of maple doors that hinted at the seamless wood paneling of her fifteen-hundred-square-foot office. As in her apartment living room, on each side of the office, she displayed enormous floral arrangements—her essential luxuries, she termed them. Near the flowers were a pair of abstract paintings with green and yellow swooshes made by impossibly large paintbrushes. All the furniture in the room was upholstered in cream-colored wool mohair. Sabine said the fabric cost four hundred dollars a yard. Therefore, only clear drinks were served in Sabine’s office. The office was broadcasting the occupant’s unimpeachable sense of aesthetic; the visitor had to bow to it. The story went that Lagerfeld had once walked into her office, surveyed it with his careful eye, sat in a slipper chair, his back straight, and pronounced it “very good.”
Sabine was on the phone with a manufacturer in Hong Kong. She waved Casey in and quietly tapped her thumb and fingers together to mimic a person who talked too much. Silently, Casey set the conference table where they normally sat for lunch with their water bottles and identical chicken sandwiches on whole-wheat bread. She pulled open one of the maple-wood panels to reveal a wall-size mirror. Casey adjusted her hat, tucking her long black hair behind her ears. For the store, she dressed differently than she did for her office job. For one thing, she wore hats to the store—the styles were fairly conservative and flattering (nothing too weird, since that would frighten the customers), but she chose hat body colors and trimmings that were a touch surprising to be visually pleasurable. On her weekend subway rides to and from work, she stood out a little, but she didn’t mind; it was a relief from her Monday through Friday dress. From the corner of the mirror, Sabine was studying Casey’s reflection.
As soon as Sabine got off her call, she lit another cigarette. She smoked two packs a day (a pack more than Casey), and whenever Casey popped by her office, they shared a smoke. Several years back, they had tried to quit together, but it had been unbearable for everyone. Isaac threw up his hands, rationalizing that his wife was more lovable with her cigarettes and two evening cocktails. She had no real vices, he said, shrugging. Her French designer friends viewed Sabine’s attempts to quit smoking as a puritanical Americanism that she should resist. A life without pleasure blocked creativity, they argued. To make their point, a few of them sent her cases of Gauloises or Gitanes Blondes.
“Is that a new hat?” Sabine asked.
“New being a relative term. Not really,” Casey replied.
“Oh?” Sabine dragged deeply. “How much?”
“It’s not from here.”
“I know that,” Sabine said. She reviewed every purchase order from each department. Her perfect recall of the store inventory shocked the buyers who initially placed the orders.
“You don’t like the hat?” Casey frowned like a child.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You like it, then?”
“I’d like it more if you could afford to pay for it.”
Casey looked at the sandwiches. “Hungry?” she asked Sabine.
“No.”
“Okay.” Casey lit her cigarette. “Me neither.”
“Did you call for the applications?” Sabine asked. She left her desk and took a seat at the conference table. Her voice had mellowed a touch.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“My life isn’t so bad right now.” Casey wanted to keep it light. She liked Sabine. She was cool, and even though she was older than her mother, Sabine was young to her. In a way, she was a role model, mentor, what have you—someone Casey looked up to—but it could get to be a bit much. That’s why it was so tricky to accept anything from Sabine, because it was accompanied by a knotty string.
“You can’t stay a sales assistant at Kearn Davis. And you certainly do not want to end up like Judith.”
Casey looked up, her shoulders tightening. “What’s wrong with Judith?”
“Nothing.”
“Why did you say that, then?” Casey felt she should say something in Judith’s defense.
“Judith is a nice person. She is a great weekend manager. She is a loser. Think of all that money she inherited. And what does she do with it?”
“Uh, make you rich by buying stuff from you?” Casey raised her hands in annoyance. “She’s not hurting anybody.”
“Wrong.” Sabine put out her cigarette. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Casey picked up her wrapped sandwich and flipped it like a pancake. It made a small thud sound, so she did it again. And again. The stack of B school applications were on the card table she was using as a dining table back in her apartment. She’d already spoken to Ted briefly about B schools at one of Ella’s brunches, and he’d minced no words in telling her that she had no chance at Harvard or Stanford. “The only schools that mattered,” he’d said. “Maybe being female might help. Being Asian: no.”
Her GMAT scores were respectable, but from the viewpoint of a business school admissions office, her actual work experience was neither interesting nor challenging. She was up against the Jay types who’d busted ass for three years at a bulge bracket firm in the banking program, and even he’d been dinged by those schools that Ted valued. After all, it had been Isaac’s call after Jay was wait-listed that had gotten him another interview at Columbia, which then pushed his application over the hump to an acceptance. In two and a half years postgraduation, Casey had somehow put limits on her future. Law school was out of the picture—her dated acceptance letter was meaningless. The top two business schools were near impossible. But it was hardly a tragedy. Casey flipped the sandwich faster and faster.
“Cut it out.”
“Huh?” Casey stopped, suddenly aware of her movements. “Oh. Sorry.”
“So you like being poor?” Sabine rested her cigarette on her jasper ashtray.
“Love it.” Casey smiled. “It suits me. It’s familiar, comforting.” She adjusted her hat again, crinkling her eyes in false amusement.
“Ha, ha,” Sabine scoffed. Her phone buzzed, and she took the call. She raised her index finger to gesture that it would take only a moment. Business always came first.
Casey pushed the sandwich away from her. She hated looking at it. The sandwich was like everything else she ever bought on credit—it was uglier or less pleasurable when she possessed it, because the thing she’d bought reminded her that she was out of control, selfish, destructive, greedy. Despite all of Sabine’s good intentions, Casey had wanted to throw the sandwich at Sabine for asking her such a mean question. Does she fucking like being poor? No! she had wanted to scream. But how did a person become rich anyway? The methods seemed inscrutable to her.
It was no longer acceptable to her to be so broke, to have an apartment furnished by pieces picked up from street corners and the Salvation Army. Even Ikea was too expensive. Nevertheless, not having the cash in her wallet or bank account didn’t keep her from charging another round of drinks when she went out with the millinery girls or friends from school. Her debts fretted her, but there was one other thought that too
k chunks out of her well-being: If her parents or younger sister ever needed her support, she could not offer them carfare. There were no sons. She was the firstborn. In her current state, she was worthless to them, and there was no one to blame but herself. She’d had to turn down another of Virginia’s offers for her to visit her in Bologna because she was so tapped. No one in her family had ever gone to Italy. Bologna would always be there, she supposed.
Virginia was a graduate student in a foreign country, earning no money, yet she was living quite the life. Businessmen bought her dinners, and painters furnished the sex. Here and there, boyfriends bought her clothes and took her on trips. There was no self-consciousness in the way she wrote about her life: “Marco and I left his flat in Turin because it was too quiet, and spent a week at his villa in Lake Como.” Marco was the boyfriend of the month, and Sabine later explained to Casey that Lake Como was the loveliest resort town in Italy, adding that it cost lire to breathe its air. Virginia wrote about her friends, too, from Ivy and Brearley, and for some of them, especially the attractive ones, life after college was a long glamorous adventure. Casey was the first person in her family to go to college. Years ago, Virginia had argued that they were in the same camp since her biological mother probably hadn’t finished junior high school—and who knew about her biological father, the white American cad dad? But whatever Virginia’s genetic heritage, they were not in the same camp now, Casey thought.
For two and a half years, Casey had been trudging along the road, and here she was—at the damn fork again. What Sabine, Hugh, Walter, and her parents had tried to tell her were things she understood instinctively: Decisions had to be made, actions committed. But there was no guarantee, was there? Of getting into school, landing a job, of safety. People were also fired all the time, too. At Kearn Davis and at Sabine’s, she’d witnessed countless people being let go. Let go—it sounded like freedom. But Casey had not forgotten what it was like to stay at a friend’s apartment, being ashamed of grabbing an egg to thicken your thirty-nine-cent ramen noodle soup.
Sabine hung up the phone. Her expression was cold—her gaze all-knowing and silence icy. Flicking her platinum lighter, she lit another cigarette. Her frustration was palpable. She looked at her watch.
“Is it time for me to go?”
“No.” Sabine winked at her. How could she help this girl? she wondered.
“You’re not done with me yet.”
“No.”
“Okay. Lay it on me, sister.”
“Are you applying to B school?”
“I don’t know, Sabine. I just don’t know.”
“I hate it when you say ‘I don’t know.’ It makes you sound stupid. Or depressed.”
“Of course it does.” Casey thought about it. She worked seven days a week. Even her immigrant parents who did not finish high school took Sundays off.
“Get off your ass already. Don’t you have just a week to apply? You have to send in your applications.”
“Kevin thinks B school is a place to fill your Rolodex. And that networking is for the untalented.” Casey chuckled at this last bit.
“You’re not Kevin.”
Sabine meant that he wasn’t a Korean girl from a poor family. Despite her own marriage to an American, she routinely said stuff like “Most Americans think Asians are insects. You’re either a good ant, a worker bee, or a roach you can’t kill.” But it wasn’t as if she were a Korean nationalist, either: “Ignorant Koreans. Bunch of bumpkins with designer clothes,” she’d muttered after reading a magazine piece that cited Korea as having the highest number of female-infant abortions in the world. Sabine believed that in America, a kind of blended natural selection could operate: If you worked harder, thought more independently, knew who your rivals were, and had the right guides and necessary support, success was inevitable. In some ways, she was irrationally optimistic. She also thought God was bunk.
“I want you to do it this week. Come on, Casey.”
“Can’t we talk about how great my hat is?” Being around Sabine, a permanent grown-up, made Casey feel juvenile by contrast. At Kearn Davis, she was the young den mother, ordering brokers to get on planes, scheduling conference calls, ordering food for brokers, and snapping towels at them to get them to behave. But in Sabine’s office, she felt like a teenage girl, worried about her lip gloss clashing with her hatband.
Sabine tried to smile at Casey. Was she being too hard on the girl? But did anyone ever benefit from coddling? She twisted off the cap of her green-glass bottle of water and swigged from it like a boxer readying for another round.
The look frightened Casey. She got up to turn on the radio, keeping the volume low. A woman sang, “Yeah, you’re human, but baby, I’m human, too.” Jay had given her that excuse at one point about the girls—he was only human. After she took him back, agreed to marry him even, it struck her how she could know that he loved her and understand that he’d made a mistake, yet she could not erase what she had seen him do, or forget it. The image was tattooed in her brain, and the colors never faded. Every time they made love, she could imagine him doing things to her that he had done to women he had no real feeling for. And she had done the same before she’d met Jay. For a few weeks, she had carried a fetus—resulting from sex with a man whose last name she did not know. She wasn’t better than Jay. No. She wasn’t a better person. Her back to Sabine, Casey turned off the radio and then faced Sabine again. She felt like an indulged child, and for that, she was grateful to Sabine.
“Change is easier than you think, my darling.”
“Okay,” Casey said.
“I want you to take care of the credit card debts, too,” Sabine said.
Their sandwiches were still wrapped. Casey stared at the congealed balsamic mayonnaise between the bread and the meat. She poked around her purse for her packet of Pall Malls. The sight of the jolly cinnamon-colored package made her happy. It was like finding a candy bar.
“Aren’t those unfiltered?”
“I know you aren’t talking to me about—”
“Fine.” The line of Sabine’s mouth grew straighter. “I wish someone had taken me aside to tell me. . .”
Casey nodded, anticipating another dismal theory about life and humanity.
“Listen, Casey. . .” Sabine talked faster and louder because the girl’s attention was slipping. “Every minute matters. Every damn second. All those times you turn on the television or go to the movies or shop for things you don’t need, all those times you stay at a bar sitting with some guy talking some nonsense about how pretty your Korean hair is, every time you sleep with the wrong man and wait for him to call you back, you’re wasting your time. Your life. Your life matters, Casey. Every second. And by the time you’re my age—you’ll see that for every day and every last moment spent, you were making a choice. And you’ll see that the time you had, that you were given, was wasted. It’s gone. And you cannot have any of it back.” Sabine tilted her head, her eyes full of worry. “Oh, my darling. Do you see that?”
Casey couldn’t lift her chin. She wanted to argue for her choice to work in these jobs that her parents, colleagues, and Sabine found so beneath her abilities. Damn it, it was her decision not to choose law or medicine like Tina. Why couldn’t she take her time? Why couldn’t she fall on her face? That’s what you were supposed to do in America—find yourself, find the goddamn color of your parachute.
“I’m not hurting anyone,” Casey said.
“No. You’re wrong. You’re hurting you. I’ve been saying that all along.”
Sabine reached across the table to cover Casey’s hand. “I’m not saying you can’t fuck it up. I’m just saying you should be making the mistakes as you head toward your goals. Okay?”
That was the ending of the speech she’d give to the other salespeople who needed a hard shove out of the nest. It was the line she liked best.
Casey’s head felt heavy. She longed to rest it on her forearm like a child taking a desk nap. She removed her hat,
finger-combed her hair.
“I will pay for B school.” A horizontal wrinkle formed in Sabine’s otherwise creamy brow, as if it had been hiding there all along, waiting to reveal itself.
The offer didn’t move Casey. A part of her had hardened. It felt like more pressure.
“Why?”
“I can sell you Sabine’s.”
Casey laughed. “You’re hilarious. I can’t afford this sandwich.”
“I’ve spent a lifetime studying shoppers. You behave like a rich housewife.”
“That’s funny, too. You’re doing stand-up during my lunch hour.”
“If you made the hard choices and tried to live by them, you’d be at greater peace with yourself. All this spending is a substitute for what you really want. All this overspending is merely addiction.” There was a burst of confidence in Sabine’s tone of voice.
“I see your shrink has been working overtime.” It was no secret that Sabine went to Dr. Tuttle, and he was supposed to have saved her marriage to Isaac when she was getting bored with him. “So you’re basically a dealer. Selling poor little rich women things that won’t ultimately nourish them.” Casey raised her eyebrows, craving a little bit of triumph in this miserable lunch.
“For some customers, yes. But should we close all the wine shops?”
“And you want me to follow in your footsteps.” Casey was suddenly enjoying the fight.
“Only if you want to. Casey, you don’t have to be unhappy.”
“Like it’s a fucking choice?”
Sabine nodded.
“Well then, I’m happy.” Casey crossed her arms. She put her hat back on. She didn’t see herself as someone who was unhappy. Virginia had been on antidepressants since she was eleven and had never stopped seeing therapists for her depression and eating disorder. It was Virginia who was always commenting on Casey’s even temperament, which Casey took as a great compliment. Sabine was moody, yelled all the time, and it made sense that Sabine needed a shrink. It was Sabine and Virginia who were unhappy. Her parents were joyless, poor, and stoic. They never talked about feelings. Casey was a study in composure and fun by contrast.