“Of course, guys all around.”
“Got it. Go on.”
“Keith fancied himself an architect. Ninety-nine percent ego, one percent questionable talent.”
Sean laughed. “Harsh, aren’t you?”
“But true. Thought he was the next Le Corbusier. My ass. Everything Keith designed looked like a matchbox that would roast people in the summer and freeze them in the winter. But what he lacked in talent and ability, he made up for in ego.”
“That’s it? You know, Fi, score on the loser scale is usually inversely proportional to penis size.”
I threw my head back and laughed loudly. God bless Sean.
“You might be right. Keith was a major loser. He believed he was special because he thought of himself as a hippie. Because he was not ‘mainstream.’ What a retard.”
“Awww, gross, Fi. I hate hippies. Nothing special about surviving on rabbit food and not showering. Doesn’t make you special, just stupid and disgusting.”
“Oh my God, no shit. He had to eat all organic food. We’re not just talking tomatoes here. From bread to cookies to rice to the onions he put into his stir fry. And you know what I noticed? If organic food is so damn good for you, why did all the people who shop at those organic markets look so bad? They all looked wrinkled and dirty. My God, the chemicals must be doing something good for us.”
“Hippies. What did you expect? Well, at least he cooked.”
“I wished he didn’t. He was such a loser. He got fired from a proper architectural firm because he couldn’t play well enough with others. So he decided to start his own firm in the back room of his apartment. He didn’t make enough money to feed himself properly because he insisted on eating organic everything. So he starved half the time and wanted me to do the same. That and every time he made dinner, we both got diarrhea. And I finally found out why. He was a big believer in composting...”
“PULL!”
Crack.
I watched as the shattered pieces fell into the lake.
“Oh no, I’m not sure that I want to hear the rest of this story.”
“Too bad. I’ve already started. Composting. Good idea in theory, not in practice. It just stinks and you have to be really careful or you’ll just contaminate your food and poison yourself. Well, you’ll never believe where he kept his compost heap.”
“Where?”
“In the bottom shelf of his fridge, next to uncovered food.”
“Aw, Gawd. Disgusting. No wonder you guys had the shits. How long were you with this loser?”
“I’m so embarrassed. Four months, four months too long.”
“Four months and you didn’t sleep with him?”
“Nope.”
“See? No libido.”
“Whatever. I wasted enough life on him.”
“Why? Because you liked him or because you were hoping to land a husband to please your dad?”
“Honestly, I have no idea. I wanted to shove cat shit into his mouth every time he said ‘organic.’”
“What did your dad think of Keith?”
“Nothing. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Let me guess, lots of all-nighters at the office?”
I laughed. Sean was sharp as ever.
“So you said Frank Gehry wannabe ate cat shit?”
“He did. He had two cats, but never cleaned his apartment. So there was hair everywhere all the time. Like an inch thick. And he put both litter boxes next to the fridge. The dinner table was in the kitchen. So in the middle of dinner, our food would sometimes smell like cat shit when the cats came in to do their business.”
“Oh God. You know. If you smell it, you’re eating it. So you were both eating cat shit.”
“Thank you, Sean. That helps so much.”
“You’re welcome. So two shit-eating weirdos and no more Asian guys for you, huh?”
“Christ. How many, then? Two was two too much.”
“They can’t all be that interesting.”
“Well, I guess I’m about to find out, aren’t I? Daddy has several of them all lined up for me, I imagine. Sunday is only the beginning. You just wait and see.”
“Oh, I will.” He grinned.
When Sean dropped me off at my house, I suddenly remembered something.
“Hey, Sean. So what ever happened to Darrell?”
“Oh, he had a little accident.”
“Sean.”
“Fi.”
“Sean, what did you do?’
“Nothing. He was smoking in bed, which of course is a big no-no. He fell asleep and set himself on fire.”
I stared at Sean.
“What? He did, Fi.”
“Uh-huh. Did he survive?”
“No, regrettably, Darrell the rapist did not make it.”
“Why am I not surprised, Sean?”
Sean stared straight ahead with his hands on the steering wheel. He smiled out into the view in front of him.
“Because you know me too well.”
CHAPTER
SIX
MAYBE IT WOULDN’T have been so bad to be a nun.
Three meals a day, decent housing, uniform wardrobe, no need to keep up with ever-changing fashion. No need to outshine the other nuns with a snazzier habit. You could even hide a bad haircut or a nasty hair day under the veil. Imagine all the money a girl could save on makeup, hair products, jewelry, and shoes.
And the only thing you had to do was to pretend to love Jesus all the time and deal with bratty children every day.
In exchange, no man would ever expect you to put out no matter how many times you smiled at him. After all, you’d be married to Jesus. Only an idiot would dare to piss off Jesus.
And no man would ever expect to see you in four-inch pointy-toed stilettos on a date.
Ever.
Women bitch to other women abut how much their feet are killing them because misery loves company. Women bitch to men about how much their feet are killing them to get a foot rub or to initiate foreplay.
Not me.
If stilettos didn’t hurt so much, I would never wear them. I actually like what the pain represents. The physicality of life. The feeling that an actual soul inhabits this shell of flesh and bone.
When you are in good health, you don’t feel your body. You walk around inside it, but you don’t feel it. It’s only when something is wrong that you feel anything. I can’t blame the folks who like to cut themselves. Probably jolts them out of numbness.
But I don’t like razor blades. Too sharp. Too painful. Too disfiguring. Too ghetto. Too big a risk of infection—even though you can boil them in water to sanitize them. And all those cartoon germs, waiting and ready to slither in through the cut and devour the body from inside out. It’s not like I can inject myself with Listerine.
I’m also too vain to blemish my milky white skin.
Milky white skin, the hallmark of Asian beauty. You can be as fat as Dom DeLuise. You can even look like Dom DeLuise and sprout some facial hair. If you have white skin, you’re considered beautiful.
Just ask my cousin Katie.
Katie lived in Los Angeles. I visited her for Christmas one time.
“You’re too dark and too fat,” Katie told me. We were still at the terminal at LAX.
Me at one hundred five pounds. Five foot three inches. Shade NC25 in MAC Cosmetics. Too dark and too fat.
Katie at ninety pounds. Five foot five inches. Shade C15 in MAC Cosmetics. She bleached her skin. Her skin was so white it had a tinge of lavender to it. She also fainted all the time.
It costs four hundred and fifty dollars for half an ounce of Japanese skin lightener. And that’s the low-end stuff. The really good stuff with pure mulberry extract will set you back at least eight hundred and fifty dollars. Whiteness doesn’t come cheap.
Katie’s face resembled a pork bun the size of a stop sign. Big, round, doughy, flat.
My face is more angled. I have a more distinct jawline. My eyes are larger.
&n
bsp; But Katie was considered more beautiful. Because she bleached her skin with eight hundred and fifty dollar skin lightener.
I don’t bleach my skin.
I don’t cut myself with razor blades.
Instead, I wear painful, pointy four-inch stilettos day in and day out. The perfect combination of beauty and pain. Stilettos accentuate my legs, hips, torso. They give me height to hold my too-dark-unbleached face up to the world. My constant foot pain reminds me that I am indeed alive inside my body.
And because it’s a lot more sanitary than cutting.
The pain is really quite exquisite.
I love the way my toes jam into the narrow toebox, the excruciating crunch they suffer for the price of fashion and beauty. I love how my arches flex up almost beyond their capability. I love how pain shoots up my ankles, calves, knees, and thighs with every pounding step I take on the pavement, grounding me in my physical body.
I also like that it’s my secret pain. Crammed in Jimmy Choo, Prada, Dior, Louboutin, Sergio Rossi, Versace, Manolo Blahnik, Via Spiga. Private, delicious, designer hell connecting me to this earthly plane.
So I wear stilettos. Even when I’m not on a date.
It’s the modern version of Chinese footbinding.
Bound feet captivated Chinese men for almost a thousand years despite the awful smell it produced. I wonder if I walked around the Financial District screaming, “God, my feet are killing me! My feet are killing me!” what would happen. Maybe some handsome man would throw himself at me. Then maybe my father wouldn’t have to set me up on dates with Chinese boys like Freddie.
FREDDIE.
On Sunday evening, I slipped into a silk, maroon halter dress and a pair of four-inch Roberto Cavalli stilettos. I knew that I was overdressed for a man like Freddie. I just wanted to flaunt what he could never have in his face.
“So can you cook?” Freddie asked.
Freddie. Five foot seven inches. Twenty pounds overweight. Pock-marked. Skin darker than a donkey’s ass. Broken English. Napoleon Dynamite glasses. No joke. My father could really pick them.
“So what do you do, Freddie?”
“I like to play video games.”
“No, what do you do? For a living.”
“I work in a computer store.”
“Like Comp USA?”
“No, smaller.”
Freddie continued to stuff pan-fried noodles into his pockmarked face. My father had set us up in his favorite hole-in-thewall Chinatown café. Perhaps he didn’t think Freddie could afford to take me anywhere else.
Freddie looked up.
“Why aren’t you eating?” he asked with a mouthful of noodles. One fell, slipped out of his mouth and back onto his plate.
“Oh. No appetite.” One look. I was already full.
“So do you cook?” Freddie asked for a second time. “Do I look like I can cook?”
“I need a woman who can cook. Like my mom.”
I need a man who I can tuck away in a drawer. Like my Mr. Happy.
“Do you do laundry? My mom says you can do laundry.”
“No. I soil laundry.”
“Because I need someone who can do laundry.”
Of course a man like Freddie needed someone to cook and to do laundry. He wasn’t going to get to level thirteen on Final Fantasy IV all by himself.
“So what do you like to do, man?”
Freddie winced. “You don’t talk like a lady.”
Asshole.
“Let me guess, dude. Video games. Mahjong. Jade Channel melodrama.”
Jade Channel 360 on Comcast. The Chinese cable channel that shows Hong Kong mini-series about ungrateful sons, struggling mothers, and unrequited love. My parents live on Jade Channel shows.
“Why, yes. What’s wrong with that?”
“Oh, nothing, Freddie. So do you have any pets?”
“What?”
“Pets. Little animals you keep for fun.”
“Oh, I have a pet turtle.”
“The little quarter-sized ones from Chinatown fairs?”
“Yup. Aren’t you going to eat some more? Fiona, right?”
“Yeah, dude. I’m working on it. So what’s your turtle’s name?”
“Fei. Because it sounds like my name, Freddie. You have a pet?”
“Yes, I have a parakeet, Pepito.” Because it didn’t sound anything like my name.
“Oh, I hate birds. Noisy and dirty things.”
I just stared. Stared at the bird-hating lump of a man.
You go to hell, man. You go to hell and you die. Pepito is twice the boy you are. Pepito has a foot fetish. He’ll shrimp my toes, nibble on them, shit on them. He’ll give me ample foot pain in beak-sized bites, you motherfucker. Go home and eat your mother’s goddamn wonton soup. And drop dead.
Freddie pushed his chair back and got up.
“I have to go to the bathroom. And step out back for a smoke.”
A smoker to boot. How lovely.
Freddie walked towards the back of the restaurant.
Twenty minutes.
Still no Freddie. All he left behind was an empty, oily plate and the check. The bastard probably snuck out the back way.
I threw down a twenty-dollar bill and left the restaurant. Outside, a light rain had started to fall. I wrapped my long, wool coat tighter around me and wished that I had checked the weather before I left the house.
A horn honked, and I turned around. I saw Sean waving at me from inside his car. God bless Sean. Perfect timing. Sean always seemed to have perfect timing. Just like the day we met. Just in time to rescue a damsel in distress.
“You need a ride, Fi?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
“I thought you were on a date. Where is he?”
“Gross, don’t even remind me. Someone should crown him Head Loser. Said he went out for a smoke. Never came back. What an asshole.”
“Well, it’s his loss. You look nice.”
“Thank you, Sean.”
Sean dropped me off at home. I thanked Jesus that night for making Sean show up like that outside the restaurant. I didn’t ask myself why Sean was there. But more importantly, I didn’t care.
THE NEXT MORNING, my father came into my room.
“How was your date?”
I peeked out from under my covers, bleary-eyed and groggy. “Huh?”
“Fiona, how was your date?”
“Dad, could you possibly have picked a bigger loser?”
“You are too picky.”
“His face was pitted. His reason for living is Final Fantasy. I’d rather be dead.”
“Fiona, what did you two do?”
“Do? I watched him slurp down his noodles. Then he left.”
“You must have said something rude.”
Yeah, me. Rude.
“Dad, why don’t you phone Freddie’s mother and ask her? I’m sure he gave her a full report. It’s Monday. I have to get ready for work.”
My father got up and left. I heard him outside on the phone.
“What? No, Fiona is right here. She’s fine....” My father’s voice trailed off. I turned over to steal five more minutes of sleep before starting my ninety-hour billable week.
But I was denied the luxury.
“Mrs. Kong said Freddie didn’t come home last night.”
“Maybe he finally left home and decided to get a life.”
“Fiona, it’s not funny. What did you do? Did you say something to upset Freddie?”
“Dad, please. Me? What could I possibly have said?”
“You probably scared him off. I told you to wear lipstick.”
“Yes, Dad. That would certainly have made a big difference.”
“When I showed Mrs. Kong your picture, she said that you were too dark. You need to bleach your skin and wear some lipstick. You’ll look more like a lady. And whiter.”
Christ. Mrs. Kong needed a major enema.
“Dad, I’m going to work.”
“Not until you tell me
where Freddie went.”
“I don’t know, Dad. He ditched me at the restaurant with the bill, no less. Yes, I had to pay for my own meal.”
“What?”
“Yup.”
“You had to pay?”
“Yup.”
My father got up.
“To hell with them then. I’m going to tell Mrs. Kong to go to hell. And to take her cheapskate son with her.”
Go, Daddy.
The boy not paying for my dinner. You get hell for that.
I REALLY SHOULD READ the news. It’s good to know what’s happening in your own city. If it only weren’t all so depressing. But if you’re meant to hear a piece of news, you’ll hear about it one way or another.
“Bad news. Freddie’s dead. They found his body out behind that restaurant. Someone slit his throat for his wallet,” my father told me later that night.
“Really?”
I suddenly felt giddy. Asshole had it coming. I hoped that the bird-hater was rotting in hell. Maybe Satan’s crows were picking out his eyes right now.
Then I remembered his pet turtle, Fei. I wondered if it would miss Freddie. I wondered who would feed Fei now, change its water, tell it that it was the best little turtle in the world. Maybe Freddie didn’t tell Fei that. That would be one more reason why Freddie should rot in hell.
And then I felt bad. For Fei.
“Yes, Fi. You’re a lucky girl that you were not with him outside.”
“Yeah, guess I was destined to pay for my own food.”
“I never liked his mother anyway. Forget Freddie.”
Done. So done.
“You have another date next Sunday, Fi.”
Hai, Daddy.
“And Fiona?”
“Yeah?”
“Wear lipstick.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
SEAN ALWAYS KNEW HOW to make an appearance.
At St. Sebastian’s, he always waited until the last minute before the bell rang to make a mad dash into homeroom after recess, lunch, class change. Tom Cruise Risky Business-style. He’d skid right through the door, straight into Sister Maria’s desk.
“Sorry, Sister. I was finishing up penance. Twenty Hail Marys. Five Our Fathers.”
“You went to Confession at lunch, Sean?”
“Yes, Sister. I felt bad for using the Lord’s name in vain. Because it hurt Jesus.”
Hello Kitty Must Die Page 5