Re Jane (5 page)

Sang's eyes studied me when I hung up the phone. “Who that is?”

“I got a job.”

His eyes narrowed. “What kind of company calling you nighttime?”

“It's . . . different. I'd be helping a family.”

“Helping family
what
?”

“They have a daughter. And . . . I'd be living with them.”

“What!” Sang dropped the paring knife; it clattered on its chip-proof plate. “This is like bad dream.”

“It isn't,” I protested. “They're a good family. They're
teachers.
The wife is a professor
at a college
.
Imagine how much I'd learn from her.” I tried to speak Sang's language. “It'd be like . . . like getting a free education.”

He wasn't having it.

“So you just want to throw away your everything? To become like indentured servant?”

Sometimes the range of Sang's English surprised me.

“Never this happen you go to Columbia.”

My uncle did this every so often: trace back all my recent failures to my not attending Columbia. I'd gotten in, only to find I didn't qualify for financial aid. I couldn't ask my uncle to spring for my tuition (blame
nunchi
), nor could I justify saddling myself with all that debt. I turned down Columbia and decided on Baruch, which I'd applied to as a safety school. When Sang learned this after the fact, he'd been furious. We fought and fought, our fight devolving into a litany of piddling resentments we'd each harbored over the years. The time the septic tank burst and my profligate use of paper towels (
Use rag and bucket!
he'd shouted) as I helped him clean up. The time I accidentally locked the keys inside the car and made the damage worse with a misdirected coat hanger. Each and every time he favored Mary and George over me. But it had been too late to reverse my decision; I was bound for this “lesser” path. And with that, Sang had swiped the air, taking an eraser to the plans charting my future.

“Uncle know this family?” he demanded. “They Korean?”

“No. American.”

“American!”

“Uncle:
I'm
half American.”

Sang looked stunned, as if the words had hit him square in the face—furious that I'd brought up the side of me he'd been trying all these years to forget.

He reached a point where the English language could no longer contain his uncontrollable emotion, where he had no choice but to switch over to Korean.
“Do you want to end up like your mother?”

On any other day, the invocation of my mother would have had the power to cut right through me, making me shrivel with shame. But that evening was different. I was going to leave Sang's house forever, and now his words flew past me. In my head I was already bolting through the door and out on the street. I was already on the Q13 to Main Street, then down to the subway platform, bound for the next 7 train stuttering out of Flushing.

I
wasn't even one foot in the door when Beth folded me into her arms, overwhelming me with her particular aroma. “Welcome! Jane, you have no idea how happy we are.”

“Thank you for hiring me,” I said. The words felt stiff; I had no natural vocabulary for receiving compliments.

Beth surveyed my clothes. “Don't you look nice today! Doesn't she, Ed?” she said. I was wearing dress slacks, a button-down shirt, and sensible heels. Her husband didn't look over at me, though. “But . . . wouldn't you rather change into something more comfortable?”
Dress for the job you
want,
not the job you have,
they taught us in the Career Services office. I wasn't about to show up on my first day in the kinds of clothes I wore at Food.

Devon pushed her mother out of the way. “Jane!” she cried. “Your room's next to mine. I'll show you!” She tugged my hand, leading me toward the stairs, but Ed Farley stopped her. “Later, kiddo. She just walked through the door.”

“Come
on,
Daddy.” Devon used that same pleading tone Mary used when cajoling her father, the same tone I'd once tried, too, but it only made Sang snap, “Why you act like baby?”

“Oh, come on, Ed.” It was Beth who spoke. They exchanged a private look—I could see only Ed's expression, and he looked exasperated.

As Devon bounded up the stairs with me in tow, I heard him mutter to his wife, “You know you're spoiling her.”

Upstairs we stopped at a door marked
DEVON XIAO NU MAZER-FAR
LEY
with Chinese characters below. “Xiao Nu's my Chinese name,” Devon explained, tracing the lettering across the paper sign.

“We wanted to honor the name Devon was given at her orphanage,” Beth explained. “It's the closest connection we have to . . . to . . .” She faltered.

Ed looked uncomfortable at his wife's outburst, but then he placed a hand on her back. Beth had a strange expression on her face—I swore it looked like entitlement. If I were her, I'm certain I would have stared up at Ed Farley with grateful eyes instead.

“And that's your room!” Devon said suddenly, pointing to the room next to hers, marked
JANE RE
. Below my name was handwritten Korean
lettering. “We looked it up on the computer,” Devon announced. As a child I took Korean lessons after Sunday school, and though my Korean wasn't strong, even to my eyes the letters looked misshapen—I could tell that all the strokes were in the wrong order.

“You did a
wonderful
job, sweetie,” Beth said, now recovered from her earlier emotional slip. “How
thoughtful
of you to welcome Jane in both English
and
Korean.”

Now Ed Farley
was
looking at me. He raised his eyebrows as if to say,
Your turn next.

“Wow, thanks, Devon. This is so . . . thoughtful,” I said stiffly, repeating Beth's word. It seemed I lacked a vocabulary not only for receiving compliments but for bestowing them as well.

At any rate, Devon beamed.

Beth's fingers stalled at the doorknob of my bedroom. “I feel like I should explain. Your room's a touch . . . rustic. But hopefully in just a matter of days it'll cozy up and start to feel like home—”

“There's nothing wrong with the room,” Ed said. His interruption sounded more defensive than rude.

Now it was Beth's turn to give me a look:
Men!
she seemed to say, shaking her head in mock exasperation. And with that, she opened the door.

The room was cavernous, almost double the size of the room I shared with Mary back in Flushing. That room made all too efficient use of space with the effect that the whole room—the whole house, really—was closing in on you.
Tap-tap-hae.
But this room was an airy departure from all that. Rustic, yes—but there was something appealing about its sparseness. The bed, for one, was marooned at the center of the room, when my bed back in Flushing was pushed right up against the wall. When we went back down to the kitchen, I saw that the master bedroom was to the right of mine. I was wedged between all the Mazer-Farleys.

* * *

In the kitchen Beth pointed to the index cards affixed to each cupboard and drawer. “It might be a confusing system here,” she said, “but if you're ever not sure of anything, just ask.”

The family began to prepare for breakfast. Beth asked Devon to set out the place mats. She asked Ed to get the muesli and bowls. She would take care of the beverages. You would have thought these exchanges would be routine at this point—each Mazer-Farley knowing his or her tasks without the need for words. Hannah's least favorite question was “How can I help?” To which she'd always counter,
“Don't you have eyes?”

The family bustled about, but I was made to sit at the kitchen table. It was a large, solid block of unvarnished wood. It looked handmade. A bowl of gnarled fruit, riddled with dents and pockmarks, sat on top. I felt uneasy not being put to work—
they
were the employers, and
I
was the employee.

Guided by Beth's labeling system, I located a paring knife and cutting board. Back at the table, I set to work skinning a pear, just the way Sang had taught me.

Beth was carrying a tray of cups and what looked like a patch of lawn to the table. “Oh . . .” she said, surveying my handiwork, “did you just peel that fruit?”

“Yes,” I said, gathering the paper-thin peels into a neat pile to throw away. “It just . . . looked a little funny.”

“Oh, sweetie. It's supposed to look like that. It's
organic.
” Beth picked up a shaving and stared down at it like it was a wounded bird.

Ed Farley came to the table. “You just peeled away a dollar's worth of fruit,” he said. But he was looking at his wife as he spoke.

“Ed, she didn't know,” Beth said. Then, turning back to me, “It's just because all the nutrients are in the peel. If you're ever not sure of something, just ask. There's no such thing as a stupid question.”

There's no such thing as a stupid question.
We settled around the block table. It did not shake, the way the flimsy card table back home always did.
Lose the
nunchi, Eunice had said to me. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the Mazer-Farleys' way of doing things was exactly the opposite of Sang and Hannah's.

“We might seem like an odd family at first,” Beth said, snipping green stalks from the tray of grass she'd carried over to the table and feeding them through a silver machine I'd at first mistaken for a meatgrinder. No—Beth was making wheatgrass juice. Opaque liquid poured out one end, and a thick, dense trail of grassy by-product was extruded from the other. She passed thimblefuls of the liquid around the table. “But I can assure you there's a method to the Mazer-Farley madness.” As she chuckled, I took my first sip of wheatgrass. And blanched. It tasted like liquefied lawn clippings. Devon blanched, too, and was backwashing the wheatgrass into her glass of orange juice. I was the only one who noticed. When she caught me looking at her, a flash of panic flooded her face. But before I could say a word, she was tugging on her mother's arm, asking for a story.

Beth, oblivious to the whole wheatgrass exchange, immediately brightened. “Oh, I know! We should tell the Tale of Mei Lin.” Beth turned to me. “That's Devon's birth mom—or how we imagine her anyway. It's just a little narrative we've come up with over the years.” Then her voice took on a singsong quality and she began the tale.

“A long time ago, in a land far away . . .” Beth started, stopped. “That's always been a problematic beginning for me. Asserting ‘nearness' and ‘farness'”—her fingers crunched into air quotes—“just
screams
cultural imperialism. As if
our
geographical locale is somehow the normative? Although, I suppose, a counterargument could be made that the Chinese—”

“Ma, just tell the story!” Devon said. “Forget it,
I'll
tell it. A long time ago, in a land far away, specifically in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning, in the city of Dandong, there lived a
beautiful
young woman—”

“A smart woman,” Beth jumped in. “Remember what I always say, Devon: Beauty is a social construct that forces females to pander to the male gaze—”

“A beautiful and smart woman named Mei Lin,” said Devon. “And every year villagers from all over would gather in the square to behold her with their own eyes.”

The tale went on. As I would soon come to learn, tales like these were a fixture at the Mazer-Farley breakfast table. Beth and Devon had a whole repertoire of interactive stories, like a call and response.

Stories of the past were never a part of the dinner fodder at 718 Gates Street. Sang had not been there when that “bad thing” happened; he'd left Korea for America years before. All he ever offered up about my mother's life was contained in three terse sentences: “Long time ago she use to listening your grandpa. Then one day she stop. Now she dead.” He'd always pause before adding, “Is why
you
specially better listening your aunt and uncle.” A whole world of meaning could have been unpacked in those sentences. But no matter what the true story had been, there was one constant the whole family seemed to agree upon: my mother had brought that shame on herself.

Beth went on. “All her life Mei Lin dreamed of having a little girl. A daughter so bright—”

“—she'd make Phi Beta Kappa! And write her dissertation on Victorian conduct books!”

“Or labor rights in China. Or women's empowerment in India, Devon,” Beth said. “The world is truly your oyster.”

“It was with a heavy heart that—right, Ma?—Mei Lin left her baby girl in the care of Happy Fortune Orphanage.”

“That's exactly right, Devon,” Beth said. She made no mention of the culture's preference for boys—a protective shielding from the truth that I found touching.

And what was Ed's role in the storytelling? He had gotten up to leave the room. He returned holding a thick set of bound computer pages. He cleared his throat. “Ladies, look at the time.”

Beth looked annoyed. “Ed, you know I hate that word.”

“And lose the alliteration?” Ed said. “Females, look at the time.” He shook his head. “It's not nearly as poetic.” His voice assumed a soft lilt.

Beth took the book from Ed's hands and handed it to me. The cover page read
THE MAZER-FARLEY HOUS
EHOLD: A PRIMER (LAST
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2000).
“Just a little something I typed up, to help you get acquainted. You'll find a map to Devon's school. It was page fifty-four of the old edition, but now I can't remember the new paginations. Any questions—just ask! My office number is listed in Appendix C.”

Beth kissed the top of Devon's head, fluttered her fingers at Ed and me, and flew out the door.

After his wife was gone, Ed suddenly drew closer, and my nostrils filled with his soap smell; I tensed up. But he was only leaning across the table to tap the cover of the primer
in my hands. “Better get cracking. That book's not going to read itself.”

And just as abruptly, he left for work.

Then it was only Devon and me. “So!” I said, flipping through
The Mazer-Farley Household: A Primer,
trying to find the map. “Are you excited about your first day back?”

“I don't know,” Devon said. “Ma and I weren't really impressed with the summer reading list this year. I'm going to have to have a conversation with my literature teacher about it.”

The map was not on page fifty-four, or anywhere near it. “Well, what about your friends?”

Devon frowned. “My best friend in
fourth
grade was Carla Green-Levy, but over the summer her family moved away to
Park Slope.
” Devon's tone made it sound as far away as Siberia. “I only saw her once
since school ended, and now she's starting a brand-new school.”

“Maybe you'll make a new best friend this year.” Thanks to the index in the back of the primer,
I finally found the map, on page ninety-seven.

“Maybe,” Devon said. “Maybe not.”

Beth had drawn a fuzzy map with a smudgy felt marker. A stick figure with a bowl cut was standing in a grassy field, holding either a lunch box or a suitcase. A dotted line swerved past X's indicating landmarks (their names illegible through the ink smears), leading to an isosceles triangle sitting on top of a square marked “Carroll Prep.” There were no street names or mile markers. The map was not at all drawn to scale; if it had been, then Devon's head would've been bigger than the roof of her school, for one thing. There was little hope that this map was oriented to true north. There was even less hope of my finding the way to Devon's school.

Devon stared down at her mother's drawing. “I don't even know why it's called Carroll Prep when it's technically
in Cobble Hill.”

“Devon, do you know how to get to your school?”

She gave me a look like,
Duh.
“For the next edition, I'm going to ask Ma if
I
can draw the map.” Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Ma's
terrible
at drawing. But can we keep that a secret between you and me? I don't want to hurt her feelings.”

Devon led the way down Thorn Street. Number 646 was the only brownstone on the block with no wrought-iron grates on the ground-floor windows. The look of Brooklyn was still so new to me. My eyes kept anticipating the aluminum-sided, wood, or redbrick two-families of Flushing. It was hard to believe I'd left Queens only a few hours earlier.

We turned onto Court Street—a street lined with low commercial buildings. The storefronts read
CENTRELLO
'
S BAKERY. BARBUTI
'
S MEAT
S. FRATUCCI
'
S IRON WO
RKS
. Clearly Italian. The pedestrians regarded one another with a certain familiarity. Despite the difference in architectural façades, Carroll Gardens had a quaintness that reminded me of Flushing.