“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-FARLEY 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 fam
ily 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 HOUSEHOLD: 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 MEATS. FRATUCCI’S IRON WORKS. 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.
“Daddy says the neighborhood’s changed a lot since he was a kid.”
“Your father grew up here?” I asked.
Devon gave a knowing nod. “Daddy was born in our house. And when Grandma Francesca died, she gave it to us. But then Ma had Daddy fix it up, and afterward he said it looked nothing like when he grew up there.”
And then I started to see: Peppered among the older Italian storefronts, there was an upscale-looking coffee shop. A clothing boutique that looked like it belonged in SoHo. A yoga studio.
When we reached her school, Devon said, “The final bell rings at two twenty-eight. The parents and nannies usually wait here in the lobby.” She pointed to the smudged map. “If you want my advice, I wouldn’t follow that if I were you. It’ll only make you more confused.”
When I retraced my way back to 646 Thorn, I pried off my heels and undid the confining top button of my blouse. Beth was probably right—I’d have to get some comfortable clothes. Then I flopped onto the bed. I expected to be met with the same firm resistance of my mattress back home, but this bed absorbed my impact. I opened The Mazer-Farley Household: A Primer, and I was only on chapter two by the time I had to pick up Devon.
Devon took me on a different route home, through a quiet residential stretch with the occasional pop of a commercial storefront. I passed a candy store, a faded pharmacy. I passed old men sitting in aluminum chairs outside an unmarked building. Then a grocery store that looked like an old Gothic church. A distinctly Korean-looking man was talking into his cell phone, pointing at the store’s roof. I wondered if he knew Sang.
Devon was brimming with news of her first day back. She was not the only fifth-grader to “take issue with” the summer reading list, and the literature teacher would now compile a supplemental list for the winter break.
Devon pulled me along by my arm. “This is Gino’s,” she informed me. We were standing in front of a hybrid pizzeria–coffee shop. “It’s where we get our Italian ices after school. My favorite’s rainbow. What’s yours?” She looked up at me with sweet, adoring eyes.
“Mine’s rainbow, too,” I said. It was. The last time I’d had an Italian ice was at the place on Roosevelt that served kimchi pizza. But that had been more than ten years ago. I indulged each of us in a treat.
That night I lay in my new bed listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the house settling. Suddenly I heard a squeak from Beth and Ed’s room next door—a telltale squeak, like the springs of a mattress. I willed the sound to go away, hoping it was just one of them shifting in the bed—but no. It was followed by another, then another. Please don’t let them be getting it on. How would I ever look them in the eye the next morning? And then I heard Ed murmur, “My wife . . . my wife.”
I placed a pillow over my head, trying to drown out their sounds. Eventually, long into the night, the squeaks ebbed. Reader, one thing seemed certain: Ed Farley was really into his wife.
* * *
With each passing day, I tried to learn the rhythms of the Mazer-Farley household. My once hyperactive nunchi dulled, grew disoriented. At 646 Thorn it was do ask stupid questions. Do act like you’re special. Instinct was becoming overridden. Lose the nunchi. Maybe Eunice had it backward; maybe the nunchi loses you.
Slowly I made my way through the primer. Its opening pages detailed the backstory of Devon’s “
alternative birth plan.” She was three when Beth and Ed had adopted her. “When I think back on that first day in that Beijing hotel lobby, this little girl scared and shivering in my arms, it breaks my heart,” Beth wrote. The other pages of the section were filled with official documents in both English and Chinese.
But it was hard to make much headway through the book—it was bloated with information. In some chapters the footnotes took up more than half the page; I had to squint to read the tiny text.
I took Devon to her daily roster of after-school activities. Mondays she had art club. Tuesday was violin. Wednesday was swim team. For so young a person, Devon had a very busy schedule.
On the fourth day of my Brooklyn sojourn, the phone rang. Sang’s voice blasted through the receiver. “Why you not come home!”
“How did you know I was here?” No one had any way of calling me—I had not included a phone number in the note I’d left on the kitchen table. That note had read, “I’ll call when I’m ready.” It did not read, “Call me when I’m not ready.”
“What that matter? Uncle keep waiting you come back. But you too stubborn to know you doing stupid thing.”
“I told you that I’d get in touch with you.” My tone was tinged with a whine; I sounded like Devon.
“Why you act like baby?”
“I’m not acting like a—”
“Fine,” Sang interrupted. “Uncle come get you. Even though is inconvenience. Where you are?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“I already know. You in Brooklyn.” His tone became quieter, more solemn. I could hear his mind conflating those three B’s.
“I’m not coming home, Uncle,” I said.
“Why you throw away everything to be nothing but the baby-sitter? Make no sense!” he said. “What kind of people they are, getting stranger to watching their child?”
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