by Jung Yun
“I suppose you’re another newcomer,” the one with the mustache finally says.
“No. Not exactly.” She suspects that being from North Dakota will help her with these men. “I grew up in the area.”
“Not in Avery, you sure didn’t.” The mustached one says this with certainty, as if he’s been around long enough to know who belongs and who doesn’t. His reaction reminds her why she hates small towns, why she was so glad to leave her own nearly twenty-five years ago.
“Well, I grew up nearby, in Marlow.”
The men laugh as if they’ve never heard anything so funny, doubling over and slapping their thighs.
“Marlow?” the other one whoops. “Who are you kidding? You might as well be talking about Minnesota. Hell, you might as well be talking about the moon!”
Her hometown is only an hour and a half east of Avery, in the central part of the state. The reference to Minnesota—long regarded as North Dakota’s more liberal, urbane neighbor—is something she’s never heard before, but she finds it annoying. Offensive, even. She had a hard time growing up in North Dakota. It feels like he’s telling her she didn’t. She drinks her coffee and glances at the boy lurking behind the counter, still waiting for the woman and her little girls to order.
“So let me guess,” the mustached one says. “Your father must have been in the military.”
She nods, irritated that a stranger can correctly assume this about her based on where she lived. But Marlow is a company town, similar to Redmond, Washington, or Armonk, New York. The company just happens to be the US Air Force instead of Microsoft or IBM. If a person of color lived in Marlow back in the seventies and eighties like she did, chances are, they were stationed there, or someone in their family was.
“And I bet your father probably spent some time in Korea?” Mustache grins. He seems pleased with himself for knowing what kind of Asian she is.
“That’s right.” Her voice spikes with enthusiasm, overcorrecting for her worsening mood. “He met my mother when he was stationed there.”
Her parents, Ed and Nami, spent the early years of their married life on US Air Force bases in South Korea, first at Kunsan in the south, and later at Osan, near Seoul. It was a big deal, Nami once told her, snagging a handsome American serviceman like that. The bases were luxurious compared to the fishing village where she grew up. And the PXs sold things that she and her family had never had access to before—electronics and cosmetics and well-made American clothes. When Nami got pregnant with Maren, Ed arranged for a transfer to Marlow, a Strategic Air Command facility near his hometown. Nami’s relatives and neighbors rejoiced. She hadn’t been born so pretty for nothing, they said. To them, all of America was “America.” They didn’t know the difference between North Dakota and New Jersey. They also didn’t know that Ed had shipped off to Korea with the intention of bringing back an Asian wife, someone quiet and obliging who would be grateful to have a comfortable home.
Mustache finishes his coffee and wipes his mouth on a balled-up napkin. Then he proceeds to tell her that both sides of his family have been living in the state since the Homestead Act. His father even hauled cement to Marlow when the base was being constructed in the 1950s. It seems like he’s playing a strange game of chicken with her, trying to establish that his ancestors were around long before hers were, as if only one of them can remain standing. By now, she’s used to this. She’s half-white and half-Asian. For as long as she can remember, people have been pushing her out of one circle or another, making her feel less American, less Korean, and now even less North Dakotan than she thinks she is.
“So your father drove trucks?” she asks, picking up on the most benign thread she can. “That’s interesting.”
“Why’s that?”
“I just thought most people around here farmed back then.”
He looks at her like she’s an idiot. But it’s a reasonable assumption, she thinks. The main industry in this part of the state only recently shifted from agriculture to oil.
“My father was a farmer and about ten other jobs that almost broke his back,” he says. “That’s how he hung on to his farm long enough to pass it on to me.”
Mustache is one of those people who talks with the full weight of the chip on his shoulder. The part of her that’s curious wants to know what that chip is about, where it came from, if it’s possible to ever get past it. She considers asking him about his farm when the two little girls begin whining and banging loudly on the glass doughnut case, prompting their mother to squat down and meet them at eye level. Elinor can’t hear what she’s saying, but she recognizes the low, threatening growl of an impatient parent. When one of the girls smacks the case defiantly, leaving a greasy little print on the glass, the mother grabs each of their hands and jerks them out of the store.
The conversation drops off again after they leave. Elinor eats one of her doughnuts, forcing the dry crumbs down with swigs of coffee as she steals glances at the second man’s fingers. He has a gnarled red nub where his right thumb should be. A farming accident, probably.
“So what brings you to Avery?” The thumbless one grins. “You’re not dancing over there at Pandora’s, are you?”
Pandora’s must be one of the strip clubs she recently read about. “Gentlemen’s clubs,” they call them here. They’ve been reproducing like mushrooms on the outskirts of town since the boom started. She tries not to bristle at the suggestion or act on her growing suspicion that these men aren’t just old and surly, as she initially assumed. They’re intentionally being rude. “I’m writing an article for a magazine called the Standard. Have you heard of it?”
The two men look at each other knowingly.
“What?” she asks.
“All those articles do is convince more people to come,” the thumbless one says. “We don’t need one more person in this town who don’t belong here.”
She opens her bag and rummages inside. “Would you mind if I quoted you?”
When she places her notebook and pencil on the counter, both men shake their heads. “You just put those away,” Mustache snaps. “You don’t have our permission to write down anything we said. We were just sitting here, trying to mind our own business before you came along.”
She shrugs and slides her notebook back into her bag, trying to appear unrattled. It’s not the first time she’s been turned down for a quote, but usually, people are more decent about it. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you.”
Heat floods her cheeks, quickly spreading to her ears and neck. She angles her face away, hoping she doesn’t look as red as she feels. The men are like ornery wasps now, disturbed from their nest. When they stand up to leave, the thumbless one mutters to the other about not being able to have a cup of coffee in goddamn peace anymore. He says it just loudly enough for Elinor to hear.
6
The shop is quiet for a while. Elinor picks her second doughnut apart, reducing it to a pile of uneaten crumbs that she pinches between her fingers. The boy behind the register glances at her from time to time. His changing expression—curious at first and then increasingly impatient—suggests that she’s wearing out her welcome. He probably wants her to leave so he can light up again. After overworking the doughnut crumbs into a sticky yellow paste, Elinor collects her things and walks toward the door, zigzagging with indecision. Stay or go. Stay or go. Ever since she arrived, she’s been thinking about getting high, although she promised herself she wouldn’t. Not here, not while she’s working on this article. But her conversation with the old men stirred up something inside her. Elinor feels angrier than she has in a long time. She wants to feel something else. Her first meeting is five hours from now. An eternity, as far as she’s concerned. Against her better judgment, she stops at the register just as the fan behind the boy blows toward her again. She breathes in deeply, trying to recapture what little remains of the dank, earthy smell.
The boy hops off his stool and waits for her to order. “Another doughnut?” he asks after a
n awkward pause.
She forces herself to think about the plane, the Restoril, the kinds of things that can happen when she makes bad decisions. But she’s not convinced that weed is in the same league as sleeping pills. Weed is just a palliative, after all. Maybe it can even help her forget what happened on the plane for good.
“You need a warm-up, maybe?”
“Yes, thank you.” She pushes her half-empty cup toward him for a refill, even though she has no intention of finishing the rest.
“Anything else?”
Although it’s not a good opening, it’s the only one she has, so she leans forward and smiles. “Would you mind … this might sound kind of strange, but would you mind telling me where I can buy some weed around here?”
The boy needs a haircut. His mouse-brown hair hangs in his eyes, which are hooded no more. “W-w-hat?” he asks, his expression owl-like.
“Weed. I was hoping you’d tell me where I could buy some.” She can see the denial building up inside him, expanding like a balloon. “I’m new in town,” she says reassuringly. “I just flew in last night. Obviously, I couldn’t bring any with me on the plane.”
He swivels his head around the store, as if there are hidden cameras tucked away in the grimy light fixtures, the grainy black-and-white photos of the original Donut Hut, the framed one-dollar bill that she assumes was the store’s first.
“I heard you tell those guys you’re writing an article. That makes you what? Some kind of reporter?”
She didn’t realize he’d been listening. Having a witness to that exchange just makes her want to light up even more. “This has nothing to do with what I’m writing,” she says. “This is just for me.”
Richard was the one who reintroduced her to weed. A few unmemorable attempts in high school had left her indifferent to it, but he insisted that even a single drag could make food taste better and lift the clouds hanging over his prose when he was trying to write. She didn’t experience the same effects that he did, but she liked how smoking relaxed her, quieting her misgivings about returning to school at her age. Occasionally, she snuck in a hit or two before class to lessen her anxiety about interacting with her younger, seemingly better educated classmates. It helped that Richard only smoked expensive weed, purchased from an organic grower who made weekly deliveries in his Toyota Prius. She has no idea what kind of product a kid working at a doughnut shop might have, but she recognizes that she’s the beggar here. She can’t also be a snob.
“I’m sorry to come right out and ask you like that. But I swear—I’m not a narc or anything.” She pauses, not certain if teenagers even use the word “narc” anymore. “It just hasn’t been a good day.”
The boy cocks his head at her, frowning. But he’s not saying no. The shop feels warm all of a sudden, as if she’s standing under a white-hot spotlight. She takes off her cardigan and ties it around her waist, figuring a teenager won’t mind her tattoos. With her arms exposed, the boy looks at her like she’s a different person. His posture loosens; the tightness in his jaw disappears. His eyes graze her inked skin, hover over her small breasts, and then return to her face. To her relief and alarm, he seems to like what he sees. He walks toward the window and looks outside. Then he locks the front door and turns the hanging sign from OPEN to CLOSED.
“Okay. C’mere,” he says, tilting his head toward the back.
“Where?”
“Just c’mere.”
Slowly, she follows him through a long galley kitchen that smells like vanilla and yeasty bread. On the wall, there’s a whiteboard with schedules for the week and a reminder, written in bright green marker: TYLER, MAKE SURE YOU TURN THE LIGHTS OFF WHEN YOU CLOSE! She wonders if that’s the boy’s name. Tyler. That’s exactly what he looks like. Pimpled complexion, a mouth full of metal, a jelly-stained shirt too big and blousy for his frame.
Tyler unlocks the back door, which opens to an alley filled with junky wood pallets and a dumpster buzzing with flies. He looks cautiously in both directions before removing a small zippered bag from his back pocket. Inside, there’s a pipe and some loose weed that resembles dryer lint.
“Come back tomorrow with twenty bucks if you want a dime bag,” he says, packing the bowl. “For now, you can have some of mine.”
He offers her the pipe and a lighter, which was actually what she was hoping for, more so than the promise of a dime bag later. She accepts them gladly, aware that she’s doing a stupid, stupid thing. But the nervous flutter in her stomach hasn’t gone away yet. She feels unsettled and agitated; she has ever since she arrived in town. And now she can’t stop thinking about the two old men, how they suggested she wasn’t really from here, that she had no reason to even be here except to shake her tits in some strip club. She raises the lighter to the bowl and watches the amber flame catch as she inhales, filling her lungs with smoke. It’s not high-quality weed; she knows this immediately. It’s terrible, in fact. But she takes two long hits anyway before passing the pipe back. Tyler sits down on a plastic milk crate and glances at the empty one beside him. It seems like an invitation, so she sits down, leaning her head against the brick wall as she exhales.
“So where you from?” he asks.
“New York.”
“Damn.” He touches his tongue with his fingertips, removing a stray bud and flicking it into the alley. “That must be hella exciting.”
She tries not to smile at his use of dated slang, which doesn’t sound right coming from his mouth. She wonders if he always talks like this, or if he’s trying to impress her. “Have you ever visited?”
He shakes his head. “No, but that’d be the place I’d move to if I could.”
She remembers thinking the same thing at his age. Every teenager growing up in a small town probably did. On the base in Marlow, her mother used to get her hair cut by a woman who’d lived in New York in her early twenties. Elinor always tagged along to Nami’s appointments so she could flip through the woman’s fashion magazines and listen to her stories about seeing the Empire State Building light up at night or strolling past the big department store windows during the holidays. Whenever she described her time in New York, neither Nami nor Elinor could take their eyes off her, as if they were both committing the details to memory for future use.
“I bet it’s nice there,” Tyler says. “Nicer than this, at least.”
It’s not, she thinks. It hasn’t been nice for a while. The subways are too crowded. It smells in the summer. Anyone who’s not a millionaire is getting priced out. She lives as cheaply as she can off her savings, but if she hadn’t purchased her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen when she was still modeling, she wouldn’t even be able to rent in her neighborhood now. She doesn’t have the heart to mention any of this to Tyler, whose romantic ideas about New York remind her that she once had some of her own. He should hang on to his for as long as he can.
“So, how old are you?” she asks.
“I’ll be seventeen next month.”
She wonders how old he thinks she is. Unlike her father’s side of the family, pale Norwegian farmers who wrinkled prematurely under the sun, she inherited Nami’s good skin. People are often surprised to learn that she’s in her early forties, which isn’t necessarily a blessing. Twice, she catches Tyler staring at her with too much interest, so she leans away, hoping he understands that she’s old enough to be his mother.
“Did those hurt?” he asks, pointing at her tattoos.
She shrugs. “Some. Not all.”
The pattern on her arms is similar to a maze, with the lines drawn black and thick. When she turns toward Tyler, waiting for him to pass the pipe, she notices that he’s staring at her again. It looks like he’s moving an invisible ball through the maze, searching for an exit. She pulls on her sweater, forcing him to stop.
“You know, those guys you were talking to, the Daves”—Tyler takes an extralong hit—“they’re real assholes, in case you were wondering.” He tips his head back and exhales a thick column of smoke into the ai
r.
“The Daves?”
“They’re both named Dave. I can’t remember what their last names are. They come in for the special every day, always talking shit about people. Roughnecks, mostly.”
“I got the sense they weren’t exactly the Welcome Wagon.”
Tyler returns the pipe to her. He seems confused by the term.
“I can tell they don’t like all the new people in town,” she explains.
He looks over his shoulder, making sure they’re alone. “It’s mostly just the Blacks and the Spanish they got a problem with. You should hear those two when they really get going. It’s all ‘nigger’ this and ‘spic’ that. I wasn’t really sure how they’d take to you at first. I was halfway expecting them to leave when you sat down.”
Elinor sits up straight. The rough texture of the brick pokes into her back. She hasn’t heard anyone say these words out loud in a long time, except in a movie or on TV. Each instance feels like a blow to the chest, a reaction that must register on her face because Tyler is quick to clarify.
“I’m not the one who calls them that. I’m just telling you what the Daves say. I don’t think they’re used to being around different kinds of people.”
There were census summaries in the research file, microscopic ones that she had to magnify again and again in order to read. The population of Avery was nearly all white before the boom, while towns on the neighboring reservation were mostly Native American. Other races barely made up a fraction of a percent, something she remembers from the years she lived nearby, when seeing another Asian face was rare. Then the boom dropped what one writer memorably described as a “diversity bomb” on the western Dakotas. Suddenly, job seekers of every race and ethnicity were arriving in the area. Upon first read, she thought “bomb” was a nice bit of descriptive flourish to account for the scale and suddenness of the changes, but now it occurs to her that bombs destroy things. Bombs are never good.
Elinor is about to take one last hit when she notices the time—11:45, and all she’s consumed today is sugar and caffeine, which is making her light-headed. “Thanks for this,” she says, returning the pipe as she stands up to leave. “I really appreciate it.”
