Loathe at First Sight

by Suzanne Park

  Ian walked by my office and backtracked to the door. “Melody, aren’t you coming to the meeting?”

  “What meeting?” I checked my calendar. Nope, no meeting.

  “Oh, I thought I’d invited you.” He looked on his phone. “Here, I’ll add you to the meeting invitation. You should come to it.” The meeting he invited me to, called “Meeting,” would start in one minute. I saw no agenda listed.

  I grabbed my laptop and trailed behind Ian to head to “Meeting.” The only thing I knew about it was that the selfish double-coffee and bagel-eating monster Asher wasn’t invited.

  Around the executive conference room sat ten other people evenly spaced around the table. A few Indian and Chinese developers, our black receptionist, and Kat and me. And Ian. And some cheeseball dude with a loud fake laugh and gray moussed hair, wearing a shiny oxford shirt with damp armpit marks, standing in front of the whiteboard.

  “Welcome! Please take a seat, we were just about to get started.” I looked around for some clue on what this meeting was about. Kat sat on the other side of the room, so I couldn’t ask her. “I’m Rafael. I’ve been brought in by Ian to facilitate diversity sensitivity discussions. We asked for you to join this meeting because you represent a minority group here at Seventeen Studios, and we want to hear from you.”

  My stomach dropped, like I’d just plunged down a roller-coaster hill.

  Ian said, “HR thought we should do this because of the recent controversy around our newest game launch.” He shot me an exasperated look. I averted his glance by looking down at my notebook and writing “Diversity Discussion” in bubble letters.

  Rafael read from a sheet of paper. “According to our roster, we have a wide range of representation in this room. We have foreign nationals from India and China,” he said, glancing at the developers. “We have Asians and Blacks”—he nodded to the receptionist and me—“and we also have LGBTQ.” He looked at Kat.

  “I’m not LGBTQ, I’m straight.” Kat scrunched her brow and leaned forward, like a cat about to pounce. Did they think she was a lesbian just because she had short hair and drove a Subaru? Almost everyone in Seattle drove a Subaru.

  Rafael didn’t know what to do. He looked at Ian. “Oh. Should we cut her loose?”

  Ian thought for a moment. “I really thought she was L. But she’s still a woman. We could use that input.” He scanned the room. “But maybe someone else in here is L, though.” His eyes fixed on mine like a predator spotting prey. “Melody?”

  My mouth dropped open. “I-I-I’m not a lesbian.”

  And with me saying this, you’d think we were done. But no.

  Ian asked, “Not even . . . B?”

  I shot a pleading look at Rafael the moderator. Rather than moderate this cringeworthy dialogue, he looked at me in earnest. He, too, wanted to know if I was bisexual.

  Kat jumped to her feet and flung her chair back. “Oh hell no, I’m way too busy for this fake diversity rah-rah bullshit. We have a game to launch and a trade show coming up soon. If you need me, I’ll be at my desk.” She stormed out, mumbling, “Why do I fucking work here?” She slammed the door hard enough to make the walls and table shake.

  I leaped up too. “Kat and I have the same deadlines. And . . . I’m not bi.”

  Ian shrugged, and Rafael handed me a diversity questionnaire to fill out and mail to him by the end of the week.

  I clomped back to my desk in a hurry and skimmed the three questions.

  Do you feel singled out for being a minority at Seventeen Studios?

  (Yes. Please refer to the bisexual discussion.)

  Do you agree with this statement: “Gaming is for guys.”

  (No.)

  Please explain.

  (I shouldn’t have to.)

  Is there anything Seventeen can do to help you feel more comfortable and welcome at this company?

  (Yes. Put Ian and the rest of you executive idiots through diversity and sensitivity training.)

  What a joke.

  I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash. Walking back to my desk, Kat’s last words played back over and over through my head. Why did I fucking work here?

  Honestly, I couldn’t think of an answer anymore.

  Chapter Seventeen

  My parents weren’t paying attention when I pulled up to the arrivals area at Sea-Tac airport. They were arguing about something. Without even saying hello, they continued their bickering in Korean while I opened the trunk and put their luggage in. My mom sat in the back and Dad got in the front.

  “How was your trip?”

  My dad made a harrumph sound as he pulled the seat belt across his chest. “You ask your mom!” He crossed his arms and stared straight ahead.

  “Um, okay. Mom, what happened?”

  “He mad because he say I forgot to buy his heart medicine. And now we have almost empty bottle. We need to refill here.”

  My dad had a pretty serious heart attack a few years ago, but he recovered like a champ. Since then, though, he had to take daily medication, a blood thinner, to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

  “Dad, why didn’t you refill it yourself? Mom isn’t the only one who knows how to do that at a drugstore.”

  My mom yelled, “Yes! I’m not his maid!” while my dad shouted, “I am older. She need to help me.”

  Yet another one of their pointless fights where they ping-ponged angry words and then refused to speak to each other.

  They needed to cut this shit out. “I think it’s good for you two to discuss this with each other. About why Dad expects you to fill his meds, Mom. And, Dad, why you depend on Mom to do this for you. But you can do this at your hotel room, and not with me in public. I’ll drive you to the hotel and you can check in early. We can eat around there and skip brunch. Too bad, it was going to be at an all-you-can-eat crab place, your favorite kind of restaurant.”

  Mom and Dad looked at each other and came to a quick nonverbal peace treaty. “We want to eat crab.” My dad gave me a sad puppy-dog look, upset that I could so easily yank away this privilege from them. I wasn’t going to reward their bad behavior.

  Mom chimed in. “We not angry anymore, Melody.” She reached into the front seat, grabbed my dad’s hand, and then she swung their arms a little bit. “See? We are friends. Drive us to crab brunch.”

  I picked out this seafood brunch buffet because of the number of high reviews, and because my parents couldn’t get good seafood where they lived in the South. They could eat hundreds of dollars’ worth of Alaskan crab legs in one sitting, so foodwise they’d be in heaven. Whenever my parents went to any buffet, they went straight for the seafood section. They never had salad. Or rolls. Sometimes my dad would have clam chowder. “Salad is waste money,” he’d say, as he cracked open crab shells with his steel-trap-strength teeth, ripping out the juicy flesh with surgical precision.

  The table was ready when we arrived, and the hostess seated us near a bay window overlooking Puget Sound. The hanging fog obscured our view, but at least it wasn’t pouring rain.

  “Waaaaaa!” Mom and Dad oohed and ahhed over the scenery. Seagulls swooped down and around the water, mesmerizing my parents into silence.

  A man’s southern voice boomed a few feet away. “Well, son, this certainly is a treat. What a spectacular view!” I looked up from the menu to see a ginger-haired, ruddy, giant man in a light blue oxford shirt and pleated khakis walking to the table next to us. Behind him was a lovely older woman, maybe sixties, with a blunt brown bob and perfectly applied red lipstick. And behind her?

  Nolan MacKenzie.

  Nolan, with his neatly pressed, tucked blue shirt, perfectly centered silk blue-and-gray-checkered tie, khaki-colored cords, and brown laced Oxfords. He looked like a different person entirely with his preppy, evenly combed hair. While his parents got seated, he walked over to say hello.

  “Hello, Mr. Joo, Mrs. Joo. So nice to meet you. Melody talks about you so much at work.”

  My parents exchanged loo
ks. Mom spoke first. “You work with Melody?”

  He laughed. “Yes, she works hard.”

  My dad tipped his chin up and smiled proudly. “She take after us.”

  “Melody, I’d love for you to meet my parents.”

  I stood up and walked over to their table. Next to me, Nolan whispered, “Should we make a run for it?”

  I looked at him beaming at me and giggled.

  Nolan’s dad took his napkin off his lap and stood to greet me with a knuckle-crushing handshake. His mother remained seated.

  Nolan said, “Mom and Dad, this is Melody.” His father’s firm handshake still lingered on my hand. His mother’s hands felt baby soft and delicate, like she’d never done a day’s work in her life.

  My mom shouted to their table, “Melody-ya! Why we not push two table together? Then we all talk together.”

  Before I could protest, Nolan’s dad said, “Well, what a wonderful idea!”

  My mom and dad jumped into action, pushing our table over to theirs, first with little shoves and then one big heave-ho.

  SC-SC-SC-SC-SCRREEEEECH!

  My parents carried over some chairs and plopped back down, content and exhausted. I sat across from Nolan and bumped his knee. He didn’t flinch.

  Mrs. MacKenzie gave me a once-over. “My, my, Melody, you are very pretty.” A compliment I didn’t hear very often.

  “Melody?” My mom snorted. “She look like monkey when she born. So much fur. But she look much better now. Much more pretty.” That was my mom’s version of praise.

  Nolan gently knocked his knee into mine and gave me a smirk.

  His mom added, “She’s as pretty as a China doll!”

  Nolan’s face fell instantly, and I forced a thin smile. She had meant that as a compliment. My whole life I’d heard things like this. Racial gaffes that had “come out the wrong way.” This time Nolan got a small peek into what it was like to be me. Being nonwhite. Sometimes it outright sucked.

  My mom threw her shoulders back and grumbled, “We are Korean, not Chinese.” Nolan’s mom smiled and appeared unfazed, like she had simply mixed up Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman.

  I introduced my parents. “Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie, these are my parents. My mom, Hyun Joo, and my dad, Sang Jin.” After a round of enthusiastic hand shaking, Nolan said, “This is my mom, Joanna Jean, and my dad, Nolan Senior. He’s Nolan too.” Pleasant laughter filled the air. We were back to a great start.

  “Would anyone like a popover roll?” Nolan Junior held up the bread basket. Bless his heart for trying to keep the conversation going strong.

  My dad said, “Roll is cheap. They try to fill you up with cheap thing.” He ate one anyway. My mom took one, too.

  “I’d love a roll, thank you, sweetheart.” Joanna Jean had such a thick southern accent. She inspected the bread assortment and picked one. “I am so tuckered out from that flight. But we’re so happy to have made it. Where are y’all stayin’?”

  My dad said, “Holiday Inn in downtown. We stay there before. We like it because they have free continental breakfast. And USA Today every morning is no charge!”

  Joanna Jean smiled and cut a tiny sliver of butter and spread it on the top of her crusty roll. “We’re staying pretty close to here actually. At the Fremont Vista Inn.” The Fremont was a Condé Nast Traveler Top 100 Hotel in the World. Sure, it was like number 98 on the list, but still. That place was fancy, like $500-a-night kind of fancy. Luckily my parents didn’t know this. They were really weird about money, and if they figured out that Nolan’s parents booked themselves at a luxury hotel, they’d flip out.

  Joanna Jean patted her husband’s hand. “We had to fly six hours to get here. From North Carolina. I’m so glad that flight is over! Now we can relax on our vacation. I simply cannot wait to sightsee around here and go shopping. We already bought Nolan this tie from our hotel lobby.”

  She lifted his tie, twisting it back and forth so we could see the exquisite shimmery material, pulling it at just the right angle for me to see the Hermès label.

  My mom skimmed the menu. “Waaaa! This place too fancy. You can buy two Red Lobster senior citizen dinner for this meal price.”

  “Well, hopefully no one will order the Dom Pérignon.” Nolan Senior chuckled and wiped his eyes.

  My parents, on the other hand, didn’t laugh. My mom asked, “What is that? Is that the fancy steak that taste bad because there is no fat?”

  “No, Mom, that’s filet mignon. He’s talking about a champagne.”

  All this time I assumed my parents were clueless (and a tiny bit endearing) on bourgeoisie things because they had lived in the outskirts of a major metropolis in the South for a long time, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Joanna Jean and Nolan Senior lived in the suburbs in the South, too, and they sure seemed to know a lot about fancy champagne and first-class hotels, even though they lived in an even more rural area than my parents.

  “Nolan, before we forget, thanks so much for letting us use your frequent-flier miles to upgrade to first class. They gave us lunch and provided the cutest bottles of ketchup.” Joanna Jean brought her Louis Vuitton shoulder bag to her lap. This leather masterpiece from their new spring collection had to have set Nolan’s mom back at least four grand. It was the same one Jane had. Joanna Jean pulled out a tiny bottle of Heinz ketchup that she had swiped from the plane. A truly adorable little bottle.

  My mom snorted. “We take stuff all the time from restaurant and hotel. Melody, remember when we take the basket of cheese biscuit at Red Lobster?” I winced, mortified by her outburst. It was totally true, though. A few years ago, they delivered a whole basket of fresh bread to our table just as we paid our check and we didn’t want to see it go to waste. So my mom jerry-rigged a bunch of napkins together to make a giant sack for the biscuits. We ate them all week. It was shameful, but not wasteful, and so delicious.

  With her mouth full of sourdough roll, my mom semicoherently sputtered, “Is that real LV bag or fake?”

  Joanna Jean ran her fingers through her blunt brown bob and placed her neatly manicured hands over her mouth in surprise. She coughed on the mimosa she carried in her other hand.

  “Heavens me, that’s quite a surprising question. It’s real.”

  My mom scooted up to the table, stood up, then leaned over to get a good look at the handbag in Joanna Jean’s lap. She sat back down and nodded. “If that is fake, the stitching very good.” My dad nodded, as if he, too, was an expert in counterfeit designer goods.

  Social protocol–wise, what are you supposed to do if your mother sort of accuses your work friend’s mom of carrying a fake handbag? It was probably best to move the conversation along in a different direction. Nolan’s parents and mine weren’t going to end up best friends and go on cruises together. If this meal ended immediately, both parties would probably be relieved.

  I clapped my hands together. “I think it’s time to hit the buffet. I’ll stay here with Nolan while the parents go up first.”

  My parents, as predicted, went straight for the crab legs. His parents went toward the soup and salad.

  I whispered to Nolan, “Could this be any more painful?”

  He looked around to make sure his parents weren’t on their way back. “Sorry about them saying all that stuff about the hotel and champagne.”

  This was my chance to bring it up. “Yeah, so, what’s the deal? Are you guys loaded or something?” I laughed nervously.

  “Um, my dad exports tobacco.” He winced. “I know, it’s terrible, so I don’t ever talk about it. But yeah, our family has been in the tobacco business for many generations. My dad’s trying to grow other crops, too, now, but it hasn’t been easy. They live . . . um, comfortably. Uncle Ian didn’t want any part of it.”

  I hadn’t really asked him much about his family’s financial situation but never once had taken him as the tobacco empire type.

  “What does living comfortably mean?”

  “Um, I dunno. They don’t worry
about money.”

  I said the first thing I could think of that could determine a household’s wealth because asking for his family’s net worth would be tacky. “How many toilets do you have in your house?”

  “What? Like, how many bathrooms?”

  “Yeah, how many bathrooms do your parents have in their home?”

  He furrowed his brow and went silent for a few seconds, counting.

  What the fuck?

  “Nine.”

  “You have NINE fucking bathrooms?”

  “Well, there are seven in the main house, and two in the guesthouse.”

  He had a guesthouse? Like a maid’s quarters?

  “They’re coming back. Thanks for never telling me that you were a tobacco czar,” I complained. His degree of wealth was so hugely different from my family’s financial situation, it was hard to even comprehend its immensity. Nine bathrooms. Even Jane’s well-to-do family had only five.

  My mom and dad each carried two plates. Mom had piled her plates high with crab legs and claws. My dad’s extra plate showcased a precarious tower of mussels. They jutted out their chests, as if they’d caught the seafood themselves.

  Nolan’s parents came back with small salad plates and kid-size soup bowls. My mom made the tsk tsk tsk sound. “We paying forty-five dollar each person. You eating rabbit food. That’s bad decision. You should eat crab, or mussel, or shrimp.” My parents dug right in, skipping their usual prayer before meals. They were so enticed by the buffet that they forgot to thank God for his blessings. Like the blessing of seafood buffets with unlimited crab legs.

  Nolan and I had our turn at the buffet, with the goal of leaving the parents minimal time to interact without our supervision. We divided and conquered: he attained the meat and seafood plate, and I got the veggies, fruit, and dessert. We did it silently, with Nolan looking over at me. I wasn’t in a talkative mood, not even chatty about all the breadth of desserts on display, which included a chocolate fountain. We were both seated again in less than forty-five seconds.