Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  New York’s never been for lightweights. It takes a tax. Eloise was chill if you related to a six-year-old asshole living at the Plaza, but that was never the romance for me. Give me the Hotel Chelsea any day. Growing up, I’d moon over Tumblr pictures of Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Basquiat, Daang Goodman, Anna Sui, Madonna hanging out like it was no big deal. Diane Arbus’s haunted children. Tavi, a literal child, front row at New York Fashion Week on her own merit. Max Fish. Lafayette Street. That the cofounder of Opening Ceremony was a Korean girl, Carol Lim.

  There were promises here. A young, loose-limbed Chloë Sevigny plucked from SoHo retail to star in that movie Kids. Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and Timothée Chalamet all going to the same fucking high school. That’s the energy.

  I love it all so hard, but just as much, I love that the guys at my deli know my coffee order. That I know to avoid an empty subway car as confidently as the closed mussel shell in a bowl.

  The car stops.

  I even love how it takes sixteen minutes to get to June’s house in a taxi and thirteen if I’d just taken the F at Second Avenue. Nothing makes sense and it’s perfect.

  I have a vague idea of where June lives, but I’m unprepared for the glass turret. And that her apartment and my school are separated by 1.5 long blocks.

  The lobby is as silent as a museum, with recessed lighting, dark walls, and enormous artwork bigger than a life-size floor plan of my entire apartment. There are tasteful sitting areas and hardcover art books on the coffee table that are ripe for stealing by anyone other than the people who can afford to live here.

  As I wade out onto the gleaming marble, approaching the front desk, I hold my right heel high to keep the tinny clack of the exposed nail in my worn-down boot sole from ratting me out as poor.

  “You sisters?” asks the younger doorman in a pale-gray uniform when I speak her name. Feels racist even if it’s true.

  He’s dressed as if manning the bridge of a spaceship. All high collars and embroidered insignias.

  There are two door dudes. Both white with brown hair. One young, one old. I wonder if younger door dudes grow up to be older door dudes. Or if you need one of each at all times.

  “Can you just tell her I’m here?” I’m annoyed that I’ve been summoned. Annoyed that I’m related to someone so basic they’d live in a testament to architectural phallic inadequacy. Even one with a Chipotle a block over and a grocery store literally inside the building.

  They let me by. I pass the mailroom and a mixed-race couple wearing matching puffer vests with a shih tzu. I barely have to glance at their faces to know he’s white and she’s Asian.

  My ears pop in the elevator.

  June works in hedge funds. Which means she devises high-stakes gambling schemes for despots and oligarchs, and this is what she gets for her soul.

  The overheads in the hallway light up when you approach. It’s cool. Also creepy. Like the type of building that tries to kill you when the security system becomes sentient.

  Thirty-four F. Two floors shy of the penthouse. It’s petty, but I’m happy that there’s at least something for her to work toward. I stand outside her door for a moment. If she didn’t know I was already here, I’d leave.

  I ring the doorbell. Wait. Hear nothing. Wait for another moment. Ring again—nothing. I knock.

  “I’m coming,” says June tersely as she unlocks the door.

  “Sorry,” I say just as she opens it. We stand there.

  “Hey.” Absurdly, she seems surprised to see me. She’s changed. Now she’s wearing a pale-gray silk bathrobe, the diamond of her neck and chest exposed. It’s strangely sexy. A TV booty-call outfit.

  “Hey.” I clear my throat to not giggle from the awful awkwardness. “I’m here.”

  “Come in,” she says, leading me into the kitchen behind her.

  There’s a formalness neither of us can shake. I take forever removing my shoes. I don’t recognize any of hers except the sad clogs I saw her in earlier. There’s a pair of shearling boots similar to ones I’ve been eyeing, but they were over a hundred bucks and I’m willing to bet these are fancier.

  “Do you want anything?” she asks, padding over to the brushed-silver fridge. It’s the kind with an ice machine and water right in the door. The cabinets are skinny and white, and there’s a matching kitchen island with two barstools that separates the kitchen from the rest of the living room.

  “Water?” She looks over at me. “I have sparkling. Wine?”

  It takes everything for me not to roll my eyes. I feel as though my sister’s masquerading as a dynamic careerlady from a Hallmark movie. I want her to cut the shit immediately and tell me what’s going on.

  “Yeah, I’ll take a glass of wine.” Mostly I want to see what happens when I ask for one. We’ve never had a drink together.

  That’s when I remember her ID in my wallet. Fuck. This is a trap.

  I walk farther into her apartment, into a morass of tasteful beige and oatmeal furniture. The entire back of her apartment is glass, and her view is spectacular.

  “Red or white?” she asks.

  “June,” I deadpan. “It could be fucking blue. I don’t care.” Across the way, in an office building, I watch two women separated by a cubicle type into black monitors. I wonder if they’re friends. Or if they’re locked in an endurance contest to see who leaves first. I wish I had binoculars.

  I never get to be this high up, and it’s wild how June’s New York has nothing to do with mine. Sort of how some people’s news is the opposite of yours or how their phone configurations are alien even if the icons are the same. Part of me is proud that she gets to have all this—knowing that we come from the same place and that she’s earned it. Another part of me wonders if she’s secretly Republican.

  I take a seat on her tufted beige couch, staring at the matching love seat. I’ve never met anyone in New York whose living room can accommodate two sofas.

  She hands me a glass of white wine. “The red’s nicer,” she says.

  We both look at it. I can never tell if she’s fucking with me.

  “I couldn’t find the bottle opener,” she explains, and sits down across from me. I feel like I’m in therapy.

  I turn the wineglass in my hand. I’m tempted to snap the delicate stem in my fingers. If she brings out a cheese board and throws on smooth jazz as the lights dim, I’ll bolt.

  “Thanks,” I tell her, taking a sip. It tastes like grass. “Your place is nice. That’s how I guess you know you’ve made it, right? When nothing’s IKEA.”

  “Yeah,” she says, with an anemic little chuckle. “Thanks. And you’re still in…?”

  “Windsor Terrace.”

  “Is that Queens?” I watch her for any hint of a joke.

  “Brooklyn.”

  June tilts her head. “Right, you live out by that cemetery.”

  “It’s closer to the park.” She’s definitely spying on me. I’ve never told her where I moved to. I couldn’t risk her telling Mom I slept near corpses. I take another sip of wine. “We have a park in Brooklyn, you know. It’s older than Central Park. Plus, they didn’t raze a Black-owned neighborhood to build ours.”

  June knows everything there is to know about a handful of subjects. On everything else, she’s wildly indifferent. For the longest time June said “intensive purposes” and not intents and purposes, claiming I was the asshole for correcting her because everybody knew what she meant.

  “So, you’re good?” she asks. I’ll give her two more questions before I break.

  “Yeah,” I tell her. “Good. Work’s good. School’s good.”

  “Mom was saying how last semester—”

  “Last semester was last semester,” I interrupt. So that’s what this is. Mom’s guilted her into checking up on me. Fucking narc. Firstborns are the goddamned worst. “This year’s better. There was this one teacher, Hastings, total pervert—he really had it in for me. And everyone who was on my group project was an absolute nutcase. Flakes and drug
addicts basically. This semester’s…” I wave her off.

  “I hated group projects,” says June sportingly. “Always ended up doing everything on my own.” She takes a sip from her water glass. I briefly wonder if she’s pregnant.

  Fuck. That would be so weird.

  “Yeah.” I sit up straighter and set my wine down on the broad, mirrored coffee table. “And my job’s going well,” I continue. “Honestly, it’s much better this year. It’s fine.” I hate how defensive I sound. Having a genius for an older sister, who scored a full ride to Columbia, has not been optimal for my professional self-esteem. “Look”—I cross my arms—“it’s fine. Tell Mom to calm down.”

  June winces and shoots me the stink eye. See, there. That’s the June I know. “Who said anything about Mom? I’m the one asking. You’re smart when you focus. I’m tired of people giving you a pass because you’re emotional.”

  I stare at her long and hard. She’s like Mom when it comes to mental health stuff. June thinks anxiety is for pussies. That you can banish it with intestinal fortitude. According to her, depression is laziness that can be fixed by high-intensity interval training and caffeine.

  “What do you want, June?”

  She sits up and leans in. I lean in too. Monkeying her.

  “I’m sick,” she says.

  “Yeah, well, what kind of sick?”

  “I have cancer.”

  chapter 4

  My mouth snaps shut. I vaguely sense that I’m smiling. It’s a horrible tic. A placid little placeholder while my brain catches up. “What?”

  My scalp prickles. Everything else is numb.

  Cancer.

  My sister is going to die.

  I wonder if in a few years this will have been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Or if things get worse. If this moment defines me as an adult, I need to know right now by how much. My sister died, I imagine myself saying. My sister died. Well, my sister died. I wonder if a sister dying is worse than a mother dying. I’m deciding it is.

  I imagine the viewing. I’m dressed in a vintage Dior suit I don’t own. My sister’s gleaming casket on the pulpit above us, me turning to Mom, her unseeing face wild with grief as Korean hymns swell around us, the flower-perfumed air coating my throat.

  Fuck.

  My therapist, Gina Lombardi, says I need to name five things I can see, feel, and hear when I catch myself losing it.

  My lungs expand with as much air as I can hold.

  I tap the cool glass in my hand with a nail.

  Black socks against cream carpet.

  Fuck.

  I make it as far as my sister’s lap. Her hands are gathered there. My gaze retreats, skittering to the window behind her.

  Christ, this is unbearable.

  I yank my attention and force it to land on her face. I’m trying not to blink. I’m momentarily terrified that I might yawn.

  “I might have cancer,” she says crisply. “I’m pretty sure I have cancer.” My sister nods several times with grim finality. As if it’s settled. As if she decides what’s cancer. “I have cancer,” she tries again. “I just don’t know how much.”

  “What?” I rise to my feet. She stands too.

  I pound the rest of the wine, tilting my head way back. “So, do you have cancer or not?” I can’t feel my arms.

  “Well,” she says. “We’re still hoping it’s something else. Like endo or PCOS.”

  I don’t know what any of these words mean or who “we” refers to.

  “So, your doctors think it might not be cancer.”

  “They’ve been telling me it’s not cancer since I was eighteen. We thought it was polyps or fibroids or—”

  “But they think it’s cancer now?”

  “They’re looking into whether it’s cancer.”

  I sit back down. She does the same. “Um. Is it, like, I had a weird pap smear, or are there clusters of shadows all over the X-ray or whatever—the scans?” I’m running through every episode of Grey’s Anatomy I’ve ever seen.

  “There are masses,” she says.

  “The fuck does that mean?”

  “They won’t tell me,” she finishes. “They want me to see an oncologist first. But it’s cancer. I can tell.”

  The thing to remember is that my sister is a known psycho. Her convictions are stigmata level. Her palms would bleed at will to win a fight. For a week in third grade, she decided that daylight savings was bullshit and showed up an hour late to everything. She took it all the way to the principal, saying the administration was infringing on her First Amendment rights and her freedom to exercise her beliefs. She served a full week of detention before they threatened her grades, which is when she finally gave up.

  My sister stares me straight in the eye. “I swear on Mom’s dead baby I have cancer.”

  That shuts me up.

  It’s been a long time since June’s sworn on Mom’s dead baby. Since either of us have, as a matter of fact. When we were really little, we used to do it several times a day. Instead of I’ll bet you a billion dollars, it was I bet you Mom’s dead baby. We’d swear on it like the Bible. It was the biggest deal we could think of. We did it until the time we accidentally did it in front of Mom. She stiffened visibly even though we never think she’s listening when we’re talking in English.

  The baby was a girl. Older than me, younger than June. I’ve often thought she was the missing link. The middle bit of the Venn diagram that made me and June make sense. That almond shape, the eye, is called a vesica piscis. I think about her all the time. I imagine her being everything that June isn’t.

  “Don’t tell Mom,” she says. “About any of this.”

  I flinch.

  “Promise me.”

  “Jesus, I would never.” I’m insulted. “Why would I start calling her now?” I haven’t talked to Mom in over a month. And I know better than to drum up a whole boondoggle that’ll send her straight to church, lighting candles and browbeating every Korean Catholic in the hundred-mile radius into a prayer circle.

  “Okay.”

  “So, what do you know?”

  “I had a pelvic exam, a transvaginal ultrasound, and a biopsy. They shove this insane bendy stick in you and scrape…”

  The other thing about June is that there isn’t a surgery reality TV show that she doesn’t love. Me, not so much. I let out a shaky breath.

  “So, it’s in your uterus?”

  “Or my ovaries,” she says. “Or both, I guess.”

  I imagine the goat head that is the female reproductive system in all the diagrams I’ve ever seen. It’s hugely embarrassing, but I couldn’t tell you if the ovaries are inside the uterus or around it. Probably around like those behind-the-head earphones that asshole runners mostly wear. I’ll google it later. That and what a womb even refers to.

  “What happens now?”

  “A bunch more doctor’s appointments.” She seems eerily calm. I try to imagine what my sister would look like with cancer. I wonder whether she’ll lose her hair. She’s always had a better face than me. With an aquiline nose that came out of nowhere. She’d look good with a pixie, which means she’d probably look good bald. You have to have very specific bone structure for that. I feel an old twinge of jealousy followed by a large transfusion of self-loathing. I’m not allowed to be jealous of my sister’s cancer.

  She’s staring about middle distance into her own living room. Her eyes are like a shark’s, her hands clasped together between her knees.

  A searing sensation rises into my chest as I stand. My heart is liable to burst out of my sternum. I grab my phone.

  “So, you’ll let me know when you know more?”

  She nods. “I’ll walk you out.”

  We don’t say anything in the elevator.

  I almost pat her arm but don’t. I breathe through the rolling panic, watching the elevator display change as we hurtle toward the ground, trying to exhale without making a noise.

  chapter 5

  “I
’ll just take the subway; it’s faster,” I tell June in a stage whisper. I’m keen to let the people in the lobby know I’m with a resident. In the same way I always make sure I have my purse if I’m carrying a plastic bag so that no one mistakes me for a delivery person.

  “Okay,” she says. June’s thrown her trench over her robe. If she had curlers in her hair, she’d look every part the suburban mom in a sitcom waiting for the school bus, and the visual churns my guts. I wonder what womb surgery means for having kids. June’s an asshole sister, but she’d be a good mom. At least she wouldn’t be worse than ours.

  “Okay.” I give her a little wave.

  “Okay,” she says.

  I don’t move. I don’t even know what I’m waiting for. It’s not as if we’re going to hug. “Thanks,” I tell her, which is entirely the wrong thing. “Um, keep me posted.”

  “Thanks for coming by,” she says, and just as I nod stiffly and turn around, I almost bodycheck a woman with an enormous clear trash bag filled with recycling slung on her back.

  “Whoa,” I yelp. She’s tiny, a hundred years old, and bent over to boot. The dimensions are surreal. It’s mostly plastic bottles and cans, but the load is twice her size. She’s like old-lady Asian Santa. Or Atlas. With veins purpling the hand clutching the neck of the sack. She smiles and extends her other palm. She’s holding a piece of paper. She’s closer to me but dismisses me to talk to June.

  “Kalambosewko,” she says, extending the note and nodding. Everyone asks June for directions. It’s a thing. The woman’s eyes disappear when she grins, and her mouth is so puckered she looks like she’s missing all her teeth. Her hair’s pulled back into a bun.

  “I don’t read Chinese,” says June, enunciating as if volume is helpful. Mom made us take Mandarin because it was the “language of the future,” according to Korean Christian radio. We took it for three years before she gave up. We retained astonishingly little.

  “She’s probably going to East Broadway, right?” June asks me.

  “I’m sorry.” I shrug, smile apologetically, and show her my palms in the universal sign for total uselessness. The woman bobs her head a few times, still smiling, and turns to leave.