They all laughed then, and Lainey said “Probably,” but she bristled, felt aware all at once of how this was her wealth. Margaret had her excess of beauty, and Alice and Ji Sun were both rich, Ji Sun extraordinarily so. Since starting Walker’s class, Lainey had attended two meetings of the campus democratic socialists, but here she was, in her own home, counting the ways in which she didn’t wish to share.
Rachel hadn’t made it home as planned, claiming too much work. When she started graduate school, she became very angry with their parents, though she was always quick to say she was not angry at them, but at the system that made it possible for them to raise other people’s children. Lainey had grown more protective of her parents in the face of Rachel’s fury, let her sister have this crisis for the both of them. The thought of piling on when her parents were so receptive to Rachel’s criticisms, so supportive of her rejection of them, made her miserable to even consider. They were her parents. Before she left for college, Lainey told her parents that even if her own adoption had not been closed, she would not seek out her biological parents. She didn’t believe this, but she badly wanted them to. The information she did have about her biological parents had been distilled for some years down to one strike-through on a sparsely filled out photocopy of a form, which for a time during the second half of high school she trotted out as an anecdote for painful laughs, before putting it away, only to share with people like her roommates, whom she trusted and loved, and knew would let her be more than this black bisecting line. The strike-through came in the Ethnic Background section of the form, where—in handwriting that Lainey’s mirrored exactly, whether through repeated viewing and intentional modeling or biology, she would have to ask Rachel—her biological mother, white, had written of her biological father, Mexican and Chinese, and Chinese had been crossed out, replaced by Vietnamese, in a different handwriting, with a set of inscrutable initials beneath. Her parents assured her that Vietnamese was accurate, and that the caseworker had “verified that bit.” It wasn’t lost on her that her bio father wasn’t there at all, to fill out the form for himself, but she still felt angrier at her birth mother, that she hadn’t known this, or had had to be told, or even, best-case scenario, had remembered later—what this told her about her biological parents’ relationship was too painful for her to contemplate most days, in the house where she lived with two white parents who could trace their lineage down to neighboring shtetls in Poland, and who could have entire arguments with only snorts and sighs and farts.
Other people didn’t know their parents like this, Lainey knew, didn’t pay such close attention. But she’d learned from her parents that attention was a form of devotion, and this was the love they practiced in their home: of careful observation, of seeing and being seen.
Her younger siblings, the twins, Oliver and Edith, were her parents’ biological children, born when Lainey was eight. They sealed the family for her in a way she struggled to explain even to the counselor she’d begun seeing shortly after her mother became pregnant. When Lainey first met the twins she felt they were of her in a way that was almost agonizing, as it was the first she could remember really reckoning with the idea that she was not of her parents in the same way that the twins were. But she saw that this was her sister and her brother, and they were her flesh and blood. She couldn’t understand why Rachel, twelve at the time, didn’t feel this way, and in retrospect seemed to first turn from their parents when the twins arrived home. When their mother had been on bed rest in the weeks before the twins’ birth, Rachel and Lainey had both nuzzled up with her in bed every afternoon, carried in trays of snacks and read and watched their afterschool TV in her room, on a crummy old TV their father had brought up from the basement for just this purpose. The color on the set was off, and you had to stand up to turn the channels, but it was mostly an excuse to be with their mother anyway. Those months before the twins were born, Lainey felt sometimes that her mother was pregnant with her. She dreamed it some nights, and the dream bled into the day in a way that she wished she could share with someone. But curled up against her mother’s body in bed, she could feel the feet and fists of the twins and it seemed selfish to claim that space as hers. She wondered if Rachel understood, with the tender way her sister rested her hand on their mother’s stomach, the way Rachel kept one eye on the round rise of it even as she watched her favorite shows. Who was she guarding? Lainey had never asked.
At dinner, Margaret revealed that she’d never been to a Sukkot dinner, or even a Shabbat, didn’t think she knew any Jewish people in the small town she’d grown up in, too far outside St. Louis to claim the city as she did at school. She explained to Lainey’s parents that no one had heard of Boonville, and Kansas City confused people.
“Well, what a pleasure for us to introduce you to a taste of reform Judaism.” Lainey’s dad winked and gestured toward the challah, unblessed and with a hunk already torn off by Oliver.
“Yeah, but lighting Shabbat candles is like the only Jewish thing we even do,” Edith said. Both Rachel and Lainey had had bat mitzvahs, but it seemed that Edith and Oliver may not. Their parents had never been observant, and Lainey understood her bat mitzvah as at least in part informed by her adoption, as a way to celebrate her membership in a community that she’d since learned some didn’t consider legitimate. After a Birthright trip in college, Rachel had undergone a conversion to become a true Jew, as she’d put it, but Lainey didn’t notice any changes in her sister after that, apart from the fact that she only dated Jewish boys. Growing up, Lainey felt Jewish, but mostly compared to non-Jews. Her parents’ version of Judaism asked over and over how to be Jewish, and more, how to be, without ever providing an answer. Sitting at the table now, she felt how much this latter question had been forged in her bones, and how asking was the only answer. At Quincy-Hawthorn, most of the Jewish kids in her circles wore keffiyeh and Free Palestine patches on their backpacks, and ate at Hillel on Fridays, but mainly because the food was better. They were big into the antiwar movement, and Lainey brought up one of their recent efforts now, as dinner wound down, knowing it would be of interest to her parents.
“Are you all as involved as Elaine in these antiwar efforts?” Lainey’s mom asked her roommates.
“Not as active as Lainey,” Ji Sun said. “But we all show up.”
Alice nodded and Margaret bowed her head.
“I’m not sure,” Margaret said. “I know Lainey doesn’t like to hear me say this, but I don’t know if it’s completely wrong.”
“I’m against the war,” Alice said. “Full stop.” Alice looked at Lainey. “But I understand that.”
“I understand that, too,” Lainey’s dad said, and rubbed his beard. They all waited, as they were used to men lecturing them after claiming understanding. But he only nodded until Lainey’s mom picked up the nod baton and spoke.
“I do, too,” she said. “I think we all do. But how does visiting that same terror on others solve our problems?”
“Mr. Bucholz said there’s no way we can be safe without bombing them into oblivion,” Oliver said, and shoveled a giant forkful of apple cake into his mouth. Lainey knew the cake so well, could anticipate the way the apples, even with so much cinnamon, would still taste the slightest bit of garlic and onion, the way everything chopped on her parents’ ancient cutting boards did.
“He what?” Lainey’s mom slapped her hand on the table, a loud knock softened by the batik tablecloth. “In what context could the gym teacher possibly have offered that bit of insight?”
Lainey’s mother gulped down a slug of wine, and Lainey thought of how Rachel had also of late taken to accusing their parents of being snobs. Lainey had laughed. “Dad has one pair of jeans, Rach. I think you should come visit me at Quincy-Hawthorn to learn what a snob is.”
“Intellectual snobbery, dear Laine,” Rachel had said. “Something of which you yourself may wish to be wary. There are many kinds of knowledge that don’t co
me from institutions.”
“Okay, but aren’t you in graduate school?” Lainey had wished they were having the fight in person, instead of over the phone, so her sister could see her face.
“That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the wisdom we’ve been deprived of by not having access to our family of origin.”
They didn’t have the same birth parents. But Rachel didn’t seem to accept this. For all her obsession with finding her birth parents and righting the wrongs of having been wrenched from them, she couldn’t even acknowledge that Lainey could never do this, didn’t have the option. Rachel’s studies had only made her more resolute in this strange blind spot, referring, as she often did, to their parents as if they were the same people, and not the ones at the table with Lainey now.
“Who is them, though, Ollie? We always talk about ‘them’ like this, like they’re not people! You realize people in Baghdad are having dinner with their families, just like us, right now,” Lainey said.
“Well, not right now, probably, since it’s in the Arabia time zone,” Edith said.
Lainey smiled at her little sister, but thought of the one aspect of her older sister’s research that nagged at her, around intelligence. Just as she envied Alice and Ji Sun their exclusive educations, she fretted over whether the twins would grow up to be much smarter than even Rachel and Lainey, both of whom had graduated at the top of their class, and gotten academic scholarships to college.
“I can’t believe you even talk about all this at the dinner table!” Margaret put her hand over her mouth as if she’d burped. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean for that to come off that way. I just meant that my family . . . well, my mother always said if you look too long down the well you’ll lose the light.”
“Hmmm,” Lainey’s mother said. “I’ve never heard that saying. As I’ve known it, only light can root the darkness out.”
“Yes. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.’” Lainey’s father reached out and took his wife’s hand, and they exchanged a kind of look that made Lainey feel embarrassed but also made her think that someday finding a true life partner might be the only goal worth having.
The sun had gone down completely by then, and the light that remained in the room came from the warm overhead bulb and the flickering beeswax tapers, down nearly to their carved-wood holders now.
The twins got up from the table and started to collect everyone’s dishes. Lainey’s father offered coffee and her mother said they could each have a teacup’s worth of wine if they preferred. Lainey felt a warmth in her belly as if she were already drunk, to have everyone she loved best around one table together, talking about love, and war, and the world, and how they might make it better, or how, at least, they could stop the government from making it worse. Her father had always said Lainey had a fire in her belly, when she’d rage or wail, even when he was the target of her screeds against injustice, and she thought now of how that fire was not cooled, but at this table it felt more like fuel than destruction. That warmth didn’t make her want to sink into bourgeois complacency, but it did make her understand what everyone was so desperate to protect, what they’d fire blind missiles into the sky to save.
Chapter 11
When Professor Walker sang in class, Ji Sun was sunk. His voice, rich and smooth when he spoke, commanding in both its tenor and its near terrifying speed, became thin and tremulous when he sang, like a boy whose range had just begun to change. He sang like a child without much talent who had been given a solo in the hopes it would boost his confidence, and she felt something akin to actual love for him then, standing in front of the room singing so poorly, closing his eyes. The confidence it took, to be so vulnerable! Where did it come from?
Anyone on campus could answer this: from wealth, status, looks, charm, intelligence, privilege, lineage, luck. Anyone who spurned Silicon Valley in favor of the small stage at the front of a lecture hall, even the most ornate one around, was comfortable singing no matter how he sounded.
Ji Sun hadn’t expected the depth of her enchantment. Walker rode a bike to campus, for chrissakes, didn’t he sometimes feel like a parody of himself, removing his sheaf of papers from his leather panier, tucking the newspaper under the arm of his wool jacket, elbow patches, of course, just in case anyone missed the memo that here, boys and girls, was a man of the mind?
Now, eyes closed, hands at his sides, wave of dark hair cresting over his forehead, his voice rang out across the hushed room. He sang the verse to “Ohio,” one hand over his heart, chin jutted forward as though he might direct them to the same well of ardent conviction from which he drew.
Finished, he opened his eyes and broke into a wide smile, dimples and accompanying creases nearly too much to endure.
“I felt so certain you would join in.” He laughed. “Thanks for leaving me hanging. Unless—don’t tell me you didn’t join in because you don’t know the words to this iconic American protest song? Homework. Write this down.” He went to the board and started his wild scribbling, a playlist.
Ji Sun sighed. She felt, as she copied down the list in her neat script, that she was in a film about a star-crossed campus romance. The lecture hall, both dusty and gleaming, made her feel as though she sat inside an antique organ. It smelled of chalk dust and wood varnish. She wore her usual, a black tunic and black creepers, new ones with spent bullet casings embedded in the heels to look like studs. But in her mind she wore a perma-press cotton short-sleeve blouse with a Peter Pan collar, pilled cardigan in deep plum, pleated plaid skirt of the universally agreed-upon least flattering midcalf length, and leather Oxfords with no heels, in oxblood and cream—the uniform from her Seoul primary school days, transposed and updated only in size for this costume in her fantasy.
The students around her wore their usual, too—a smattering of sports sweatshirts, rugbies, and velour tracksuits with the word Juicy on the rear that had inexplicably become not only acceptable to wear outside of the house, but desired status markers. Even Margaret had one, in pale blue, purchased after a fair amount of agonizing since the set cost nearly two hundred dollars. But these students receded easily when she looked at Professor Walker, became background in the story of their romance. Even her roommates were bit players in this film.
He caught her eyes and returned her gaze, smiled. He could feel it, too.
Chapter 12
By semester’s end, Lainey had become cochair of the campus Code Pink antiwar women’s movement, and she tried on a Saturday morning to get her roommates to join her for a peaceful resistance strategies workshop that she’d helped to organize.
“I’m just not sure how this is relevant to us?” Margaret said, which was met with a “WHAT” from Lainey before Margaret could even finish her sentence-question, that upward lift to every line that drove Lainey nuts.
“I don’t mean protesting!” Margaret said. “You know I am against the war. I mean the nonviolent, what-do-you-call-it, the training in peace resistance.”
It was hard for Lainey to know how to answer this, because the idea that the US would go to war in Iraq made her want to do violence. She knew Margaret meant that they probably wouldn’t get into any skirmishes in their pint-size campus protests, but still, it felt disingenuous for Lainey to preach about civility when she wanted to burn the White House to the ground.
“Walker will be there!” Lainey said. She waggled her eyebrows. There would be pizza, too, as they’d had to add to all the flyers, heaven forbid anyone turn up to oppose an unfounded war without the promise of free food.
“He will?” Ji Sun asked. “I thought you said he had a scheduling conflict.”
“He got out of it,” Lainey said. “This is more important, and he knows it. You guys do, too.”
“That’s some mom-grade guilting, Laine, but I can’t miss my Orgo review session. I’m sorry,” Alice said. “Plus I h
ave the worst cramps.” Alice rolled her eyes toward her menstrual cup, which was drying atop its drawstring pouch on the strip of heat vent beneath the window seat.
Lainey looked at Alice’s mooncup and felt washed with the horror of being a woman. It wasn’t horror at this stupid little cup—its tie-dyed pouch, its toasted yellow silicon—it was the horror at her own disgust, its permanence, the way she knew, knew, as long as she lived, no matter how many women’s studies degrees she earned, no matter how radicalized she became or appeared to be, there would be this at her core, this disgust at her own disgust, this discomfort at being made to feel from birth and on some cellular level, horror at her own body, what it was capable of, what it might be meant to do.
Her failings as a feminist felt so acute to her as she considered her roommates now: Alice, with her comfort in her own body, its strength and resilience, the pleasures it afforded; Ji Sun with her insistence on dressing like abstract art, shrouding herself in impenetrable layers and refusing to date anyone until she was twenty-five or secure in her career, whichever came first; and Margaret, with the easy way she showed them love, snuggled up, rested her head in their laps or on their shoulders, brushed their hair, held them like a mother might when they were sad, grabbed their hands and swung them in hers when they walked home together after dinner, this more like a child than its mother, but all of this easy physical affection for women felt to Lainey like more of a feminist act than the ones she herself embraced: affixing buttons to her backpack, shaving the hair on her head in an undercut, leaving her underarm hair unshaved, drinking from a mug that read FUCK THE PATRIARCHY on one side and WITH YOUR STRAP-ON on the reverse.
Lainey was tired of her own performance, too, tired of talking in rooms, talking in bigger rooms, even shouting into megaphones. Code Pink said wearing all pink was about visibility, but who was watching? She should go to New York or DC, join some real protests. But she was as bad as her roommates, wanting to make sure she had time to study, too, and not wanting to miss Walker’s class.
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