Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  “Wait!” June holds out her phone. “I have this app for real-time translation. Say again?”

  The woman tries again. Also louder this time.

  “Oh my God.” I urge June out of the way. “She’s going to Columbus Circle. She’s speaking English. We’re such morons.”

  I give her directions to the R and W, showing her the map on my phone.

  “Yellow line.” I pull out a pen and write on her paper R/W to 57th Street. Columbus Circle in tidy capital letters in case she needs to show someone else on her trek.

  The woman smiles again as featureless as a fist and nods appreciatively before leaving. She merrily jaywalks at a diagonal, far from the crosswalk.

  “Columbus Circle? What the hell is she going there for?”

  I shrug.

  “I would have put money on East Broadway or Flushing,” June says, shaking her head. “When did I become so racist?”

  I turn to my sister, ready to tell her she’s always been racist, when I stop. June has dark smudges under her eyes, and her hair’s stringy. It startles me. I recognize her so essentially that she may as well be an avatar. She’s sick. I hadn’t known that June can be sick. I’m overcome with the urge to touch her.

  “You know, I’ve never seen a recycling lady on a train before,” she muses, watching the woman go. I stand next to her, nudging her shoulder slightly with mine.

  “Me neither.”

  The observation reminds me of all the times I’ve wanted to call her over the past two years. The list of things in my phone that I know June would love to weigh in on.

  “You think the churros lady at Union Square takes the train?” I’ve never seen her haul the cart downstairs.

  “No way. Her man drives her. He has to help with the stairs. She gets up at four in the morning to make them, and she sells them, too, because he bitches too much about all that standing. He has to make up for it by driving.”

  We keep watching as the recycling lady gets small. “I’ve never seen a recycling lady at night,” I tell her.

  “Really?” My sister turns to me. “I’ve never seen one during the day.”

  I imagine the woman on the train, clutching the subway pole because no one will give up their seat for her. I want to fight them all.

  “Don’t you kinda want to go with her? Make sure she gets where she’s going.”

  “Yeah.”

  The canner seems so small yet certain. She turns the corner. I’d hoped she’d look over and wave.

  “How are you gonna keep all this from Mom?” I ask June finally. I haven’t seen them in over two years, but June talks to her every day.

  June smacks my chest with the back of her hand, laughing. I turn in surprise. “Mom would be so fucking pissed that you thought of her because of that old-ass woman.”

  I shove her back, smiling.

  It’s true.

  chapter 6

  I stare at the other passengers in our shared jaundiced lighting. There’s no equalizer greater than the F train. There’s a heavyset blond dude in a lime-green rugby shirt across from me.

  Next to him, with her legs stretched way out, is a youngish girl in an enormous hoodie and platform sneakers. Her teen-spreading is so surly, I can’t help but smile at her. I wonder what their deals are. It’s absurd that there are so many people walking around who aren’t sick.

  And still so many others who are. I googled it. There are seventeen million new cancer cases every year. I don’t know how to conceptualize that number. I don’t even know what one million looks like. The teen rolls her eyes at me behind her stringy bangs. I shift focus to outside the window.

  Several bluish skyscrapers dot the horizon. If I’m honest and if I had the money, I’d probably live in one too. I’ve always felt safer off the ground.

  I unlock the metal gate at my apartment. My knees throb from the boots and my back aches from sucking in my stomach. I can’t wait to get out of these fucking jeans. All I want to do is peel off this costume, step into the shower, eat the world, and go to bed.

  Something tells me to listen for noise before I insert my keys.

  Quiet.

  Good.

  When I open the door, all the lights are on.

  Fuck.

  I was so certain he’d stay out. He being Jeremy.

  There are two glasses on the kitchen counter with inky remnants of red wine and an unfamiliar orange leather tote. It has a blue-and-white ribbon stripe running up the center of it.

  I check for her shoes by the door but spy only his New Balances and my sandals. I can’t believe he’s letting this bitch wear shoes in my house. I’ll bet they’re expensive, too.

  My keys dig into my palm as I tiptoe to the bedroom. The mattress is just about flush on all four walls. And it’s only a twin. Before I can press my ear to the door, I hear it. Laughter. Rage clutches my throat tight. I taste bile.

  For the record: I know that Jeremy has never been my real boyfriend. We were hooking up and then we weren’t. But he still lives here. If you ask him, he’d tell you that we found each other on Craigslist. That he’d answered my ad for a roommate.

  That’s not exactly true.

  I’d seen him before. The summer I moved to New York, I knew no one. June loaned me money for the mattress and I’d found an airless room in a three-bedroom apartment with two other girls, Megan and Hillary, who’d been best friends since high school. It felt as though they were locked in a contest to see who could be less interested in me. It was a dead heat. I’d seen Jeremy outside of a coffee shop in Bushwick with his cream-colored bike. And when he introduced himself, extending his hand, I was as stunned as if a painting had spoken to me. I’d spent weeks longing for anyone to address me. My roommates went everywhere and did everything together. At first, they were civil. Until I made the mistake of buying the wrong trash can liners and then it was a bonanza of crisp, passive-aggressive Post-it notes remunerating my failings. They’d pointedly ignore me when I dared enter the living room. So, I went everywhere people my age—art students, design students, aspiring musicians, actors—gathered. I’d sit near them with a book and wait to be invited.

  He asked me to watch his bike while he grabbed a coffee because he’d forgotten his lock, and I did. When he thanked me and rode away, I was bereft.

  He wore this white shirt that billowed behind him like a cape, and I was fascinated that he didn’t seem to carry anything while I lugged around chargers and granola bars and novels that might provoke conversation. All Sally Rooney Everything. A little poetry.

  When he rang my buzzer four months ago—almost two years later—and I watched the top of his head ascending the stairs, it felt like kismet.

  I was stuck in a kind of constant, rambling bewilderment that life wasn’t perfect in New York. It wasn’t solely my roommates’ chilly dispositions. I’d search every face for any sign of rapport. A knowing eye roll, a bemused smile, but in their absence, I convinced myself I was doing it wrong. College was impenetrable. The dorm kids forged quick loyalties. Design students flocked by major. And the hard-faced girls—real New York natives—with their artfully applied makeup, the ones who knew where the parties were, clung only to each other. I was a marketing major at fashion school living an hour outside of campus. Fashion Avenue, which is what they call Seventh, wasn’t glamorous at all.

  I remember little of the first year beyond how the cold never left my bones. My second year, I started going out. I met Ivy at a dive bar famous for their free personal pizzas with any order of a drink. She sat by me, promptly complimented my Telfar tote since she had the same one in green, and proceeded to point out all the people in the dark, dank room that she’d slept with. Ivy’s twenty-three. She has bleached blonde hair, brown eyes, and is the kind of pale where the blue tributaries of her veins are so close to the surface that her forehead reminds me of those glowing babies in fetal development pictures. Free pizza is the perfect metaphor for our friendship. It’s an anemic facsimile for the real thing, but whe
n I’m drunk, it’s a miracle.

  This is the kind of person Ivy is: under her bed she keeps a trash bag filled with duplicates of crap—bedside lamps, milk frothers, hair dryers—disposable flotsam she scams off Amazon by telling them they sent the wrong thing.

  We partied every night. It was easy. I wasn’t even sure she knew my last name. It’s my fault that when my roommates kicked me out, I was surprised that Ivy didn’t text me back for a full week. It’s not my fault that those vicious harpies turned on me so fully. I was stunned by Meg and Hill. Or Mean and Hell as Ivy referred to them when she finally called.

  I couldn’t ask for June’s help. By then we hadn’t properly spoken in over a year. The roommates gave me a week and I didn’t fight them, I was so cowed by the hostility that pulsed off them like heat. In a frenzy, I searched Craigslist, Street Easy, and dubious message boards for shared apartments but eventually landed on the cheapest one-bedroom I could find. And even then, I’d need a roommate to occupy the living room. The photos were a grainy Google Earth satellite photo of the entire block and an inset thumbnail of the Pepto-colored bathroom sink. I called the phone number, met a rangy Latino man named Frankie wearing a mesh vest in South Brooklyn with a deposit borrowed from what Mom and Dad had given me for fall tuition. I was told not to make any complaints and that if anyone asked, we were distant cousins.

  In hindsight, it’s a miracle that it wasn’t a scam.

  Jeremy wore the summery white shirt again that day, and a thin gold chain glinted at his throat. It held a delicate rose pendant, a keepsake I decided on the spot that his grandmother had given him because he was her favorite. He had three brothers, I surmised, and he was the youngest, as I was.

  Turns out Jeremy is an only child. An only child who carries nothing because the kindness of strangers never fails him.

  He’d found the necklace in the bathroom at the bar where he works and made no effort to return it.

  Since late May, Jeremy’s been staying with me in fits and starts. I don’t know where he goes on the nights he’s not here, and I pretend not to have noticed when he returns. Sometimes while he sleeps, I mouth I love you to his closed eyes to see how it feels. We haven’t had sex in a month, but I find myself searching for signs of improvement.

  More laughter. Then the smear of a moan. Followed by the insistent, unmistakable thumping of mattress against wall.

  I don’t know where the humiliation ends and the rage begins or if those two sentiments are ever unlinked.

  I want to hurl myself against the door. Rip it off its hinges. Tear into him and her, kicking them both out of my home. But failing that, I’m too embarrassed to make a sound.

  Perversely I keep listening. Who is she? Does she know me? What if she’s someone important? It has to be Rae. The conviction that it’s beautiful, willowy Rae who’d matriculated at Oxford fucking University, bucks at my chest. I’m startled that he’d bring her here. To this dump, where for the past few weeks, we’ve been wearing our coats to bed when the heat fails and the summer brings roaches with wings.

  I can’t stand to be in my skin, be behind my eye holes. And I can’t bear to signal my presence. If they catch me, I can’t pretend to be someplace else. Like a bandit in my own home, I mince and scrape and quietly wash my hands and face. Take off my pants. Put on a dirty T-shirt and some shorts. I think of June’s washer and dryer. What she’d think of me if she saw how I live.

  I climb onto the couch, folding myself up on my side so I can fit onto the love seat. I don’t know anything about Jeremy’s finances. The first month he lived here I gave him a pass since we immediately fell into bed together. That second month too, since it was agonizing to discuss. Eight weeks ago when I was convinced we’d get evicted, he Venmo’d me seven hundred dollars. His half for August. I was sitting on the floor and he was standing above me with his sunglasses on, halfway out the door. He pushed a few buttons on his phone. No big deal. He may as well have thrown crumpled bills in my face. He sent the flamingo pool-float emoji as the note. Later that night, he brought someone home.

  My stomach rumbles. I need to drink water. The orange purse throbs in my sight line. It’s expensive. Probably Clare V. I try to recall if there’d been a bag slung on Rae’s chair. I’m intimidated by this handbag. It’s whimsically hued, which suggests one nice purse among many. A Wednesday tote for eight hundred bucks.

  The purse goads me, and without thinking, as if guided by invisible wires, I get up, walk toward it, peer over the rim before grabbing both upright handles and jawing it open.

  Predictably, there’s a laptop, the teeny MacBook Air in a purple leather sleeve. Tempting but bad karma. AirPods, sunglasses case, keys with a neon-pink rubber charm that reads GIRL BOSS in white, and a patent-leather Tory Burch wallet. Heart pounding, guts clenched, I glance at the door and flip the billfold open. A freckled brunette with a heart-shaped face squint-smiles at me from her California ID. I’m both relieved that it’s not Rae and affronted that it’s someone else.

  Someone basic.

  Her eyes are dishwater gray, and on the day the photo was taken, she made sure to match her lipstick to her sweater exactly. Her last name is hyphenated, which to me means she’s rich, that she’s a horse girl with vacation homes. My heart sinks. She weighs twelve pounds less than I did this morning even after I went to the bathroom.

  I return the purse and spy a slouchy velvet makeup pouch. I unzip it, its belly moving in my palm like a live animal as a feeling of calm bleeds into me. As if easing into a thermal bath. I pluck the half-full bottle of perfume with its steel cap, Flowerbomb by Viktor & Rolf, girly and pink, and return everything else. I drop it into the trash can, where it plummets past the soiled paper towels on the top, and then I return to the couch.

  I want to set shit on fire.

  I try to count the five things that I see around me. Acknowledging the articles that will ground me in this room, in this time and space.

  One: fridge.

  Then I fall asleep.

  chapter 7

  The alarm jolts me awake. My phone is on 15 percent and my mouth tastes furry. Acid clambers up my windpipe. I’m somehow more fatigued than when I went to sleep. I rub my eyes and blearily register that the orange tote is gone and the bedroom door is open.

  I stumble over to the bathroom, turn on the hot water for the shower, and sit on the toilet to pee. As the steam builds, an acrid, rancid sourness barely masked by the air freshener hits my nose, jolting me into memory. Shit. Right. I have to take care of a few things before school. Things to replace. Acts to undo.

  Somehow it’s always my latest first class that I have the most trouble getting to on time.

  I wash my hair. I can’t detangle the knots fast enough and tug impatiently, breaking all the ends. I dry myself hurriedly, throw on a bra and sweatshirt, pull on jeans, jumping up and down to get them over my thighs, and grab the plastic bag I’d shoved under the couch in a haze early this morning, away from prying eyes. I open it, survey its contents to confirm that it’s real, that I did it again, tie the handles up in a double knot, and shove it deep into the garbage.

  A pinprick of pleasure weasels its way through my self-loathing as I recall what else is in the trash. The bitch’s perfume.

  I wonder what she looked like naked. If she had better boobs, a flatter stomach. I drink water from the tap, promising myself that next time—which there won’t be a next time—I will stay up the requisite enamel-preserving half hour and remember to brush my teeth before passing out.

  I smear on liquid liner in case the hot deli guy’s working the register and dash to the far bodega. There’s one on my corner, but they’re dicks, so I leg it across the street and down the block. But of course it’s not the hot guy but the old one. He adds a convenience fee when you charge your groceries to a credit card, which the hot guy doesn’t. I wish I were the type of person to confront him about it, but I’m not.

  I tear down the aisles, say hi to the black-and-white deli cat, grab the me
dium-size box of Cheerios, a jar of Nutella with a regular label—not the seasonal one—English muffins, which I don’t even like, and a thing of turkey cold cuts. It’s the wrong brand, but it’ll have to do. Honestly, he’s lucky that I’m even making the effort. I also grab a cup of coffee, black.

  Back in the apartment, I replace everything in the fridge and cupboards, tipping half the bag of Cheerios into a ziplock baggie so that the level will match up, and shove the surplus cereal into my dirty clothes pile.

  Before I leave, I grab the shower cleaner from the back of the cupboard. I keep two back there. Jeremy hates the smell of ylang-ylang. He says the floral citrusiness reminds him of getting carsick in his father’s overly air-freshened Volvo. It’s triggering, he tells me. You’re triggering, I want to say back. And your face is triggering.

  I spend precious moments dedicating myself to bombing the ever-living shit out of the bathroom far more diligently than I did last night. I pump ylang-ylang deep into the bathmat, grinding it in with my foot and drenching his towel before closing the door firmly behind me.

  My hands still smell of flowers on the train. I wipe them on my jacket and stare out the windows. I like the aboveground part of the commute best. They demolished a building just before I moved here, smashing it into a mountain of rubble that they’ve been removing bit by bit. I try not to think about how quickly things change. Whenever people complain about neighborhood businesses shuttering or how their favorite bakery’s now a Citibank, I feel a tremor of panic. As if the ground beneath my feet isn’t reliable. How can I ever get to know a place that changes so quickly? I’m late enough as it is.

  I thumb through Instagram. I almost exclusively follow people who make me feel bad about myself.

  Models, photographers, influencers, aspirational fitness entrepreneurs, actors.

  My heart stops when I see someone I know. Someone I actually know in life. Not even New York life—my real life.

  It’s Patrick.

  His tattooed arm is flung around a fashion designer who makes animal-print fleeces that cost six hundred bucks. I’m astonished by the happenstance, but it’s him. He looks almost the same as he did when he was fourteen. Slightly less skinny but not by much. He’s pointing at the sky with his mouth wide. He appears to be singing.