Free Food for Millionaires

by Min Jin Lee

  Leah smiled at Tina, then Casey. In her heart, she, too, was praying, Dear God, let there be thanksgiving, because at last, we are together.

  Before anyone could eat, Joseph spoke. “So what are you going to do?”

  Casey stared at the steam rising from her rice bowl. “I thought I’d try to figure it out this summer. No one’s hiring now, but on Monday, I’m going to the library to write some cover letters for jobs starting in the fall. Sabine also said I could get more hours during the week if someone leaves. Maybe I could work in another department if she—”

  “You know the options,” he said.

  Casey nodded.

  “A real job,” her father said. “Or law school. Selling hats is not a real job. Making eight dollars an hour after getting an education worth eighty thousand dollars is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. Why did you go to Princeton to sell hairpins?”

  Casey nodded again, pulling her lower lip into her mouth. The blood left her face, making it paler.

  Leah peered at Joseph’s expression. Was it safe to speak? He hated it when she took the girls’ side.

  “Graduation was just last week,” she ventured. “Maybe she could rest a little at home. Just read or watch terebi.” Her voice was faltering. She smiled at her daughter. “Casey had all those exams.” She tried to shore up her voice and sound as if it were the most natural thing in the world for someone in her family to graduate from college and then to figure things out. Casey was staring at her rice bowl but didn’t pick up her spoon. “Why don’t you let her eat?” Leah said carefully. “She’s probably tired.”

  “Tired? From that country club?” Joseph scoffed at the absurdity.

  Leah shut up. It was useless. She knew from his face that he wouldn’t hear her, nor would he let her win any points in front of the girls. Maybe Tina might say something to help the conversation along. But she looked as if she were somewhere else entirely, chewing her rice with her lips sealed. Even as a child, Tina had been a good eater.

  Casey studied the white walls. Every Saturday night, it was her mother’s ritual to wipe down the glossy painted walls with Fantastik.

  “Why are you so tired?” Joseph asked Casey, furious that she was ignoring him. “I’m talking to you,” he said.

  She glared at him. Enough, she thought. “Schoolwork is work. I’ve always worked hard. . . just as hard as you work at the store. Maybe harder. Do you know what it’s like for me to have to go to a school like that? To be surrounded by kids who went to Exeter and Hotchkiss, their parents belonging to country clubs, and having a dad who could always make a call to save their ass? Do you know what it’s like to ace my courses and to make and keep friends when they think you’re nothing because you’re from nowhere? I’ve had kids step away from me like I’m unwashed after I tell them you manage a dry cleaner. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have people who are supposed to be your equals look through you like you’re made of glass and what they see inside looks filthy to them? Do you have any clue?” Casey was screaming now. She raised her right hand as if to strike him, then she pulled back, having surprised herself. She clasped her hand over her heart, unable to keep from shaking.

  “What? What do you want from me?” she asked at last.

  “What I want from you?” Joseph looked confused. He repeated himself. “What I want from you?” He turned to Leah. “Do you hear what she’s saying to me?” Then he muttered, “I should just kill her and me right now, and be done with it.” He cast about the table as if he were searching for a weapon. Then he screamed, “What the hell do I want from you?” Using both hands, he shoved the dinner table away from him. The water glasses clinked against the dinner plates. Soup spilled over the bowls. Joseph could not believe his daughter’s nerve.

  “What do I want from you?”

  “Dammit, that isn’t what I meant.” Casey tried to keep her voice from quavering, and she willed herself from dissolving into tears. Don’t be afraid, she told herself; don’t be afraid.

  Leah shouted in Korean, “Casey, shut up. Shut up.” How could the girl be so stupid? What was the point of being good at school if she couldn’t understand timing or the idea of finessing a difficult person? Her older daughter was like an angry animal, and Leah wondered how it was that she hadn’t been able to prevent her from becoming so much like Joseph in this way. A man could have so much anger, but a woman, no, a woman could not live with that much rage—that was how the world worked. How would Casey survive?

  Joseph stood up. “Get up,” he said, gesturing with his hand for Casey to rise.

  Leah tried to pull him down. “Yobo. . .” She was begging him, and her fingers caught the belt loop of his slacks, but he swiped her hand away and pushed her back to her seat.

  Casey rose from her chair, tucking aside the loose hair that had fallen over her face.

  “You stupid girl, sit down,” Leah cried, hoping that of the two, Casey might be reasonable. “Yobo,” she pleaded. “The dinner. . .” She wept.

  “Come here,” he said, his voice calm. “What?” he began, his shimmering eyes unblinking. “You think you know more about life and how you should live?” He’d long feared that his college-educated children might one day feel superior to him, but he would never have held them back from any height they wanted to scale. Still, he hadn’t anticipated how cruel it’d be for his child to condescend to him in this way—to consider herself equal to him in experience, in suffering, in the things he had seen. He could hear his Korean accent muddying his English words, and he regretted having told them always to speak English at home. He’d done this for their benefit—so they wouldn’t look stupid in front of the Americans, the way he did. Joseph regretted so many things.

  Tentatively, Casey shook her head from side to side, not quite believing what an asshole he was. He was so unfair.

  Tina pressed the fine features of her oval face into her folded hands. From behind her seat, she could feel the heat of Casey’s long body moving toward their father. Ever since Casey was in high school, she’d fought with Joseph once or twice a year. And each year, her sister’s anger toward their father grew, compacting into a hard, implacable thing. In ninth grade, Tina went on an overnight school trip to Boston, and there, at a museum, she saw a real cannonball. Tina could imagine such a thing lodged in Casey’s belly, sheltered between the fingerlike bones of her ribs. But no matter what, Tina adored her sister. Even now, as Casey stood in front of their father, awaiting a painful judgment, there was an obvious grace in her erect posture. All her life, Tina had studied Casey, and now was no different. Casey’s white linen shirt hung casually on her lean frame, the cuffs of her sleeves were folded over as if she were about to pick up a brush to paint a picture, and her narrow white wrists were adorned with the pair of wide silver cuffs she’d worn since high school—an expensive gift from Casey’s boss, Sabine.

  Tina whispered, “Casey, why don’t you sit down?”

  Her father ignored this, as did Casey.

  Joseph lowered his voice. “You don’t know what it’s like to have nowhere to sleep. You don’t know what it’s like to be so hungry that you’d steal to eat. You’ve never even had a job except at that Sook-ja Kennedy’s store,” he said.

  “Don’t call her that. Her name is Sabine Jun Gottesman.” She spat out each part of her boss’s name like a nail but kept herself from saying, How could you be so ungrateful? After all, Sabine had given his daughter a flexible job, generous bonuses that helped pay for her books, for clothes—all because Sabine had gone to Leah’s elementary school in Korea. Sabine and Leah had not even been friends back then—they were merely two Korean girls from the same hometown and school who’d by chance run into each other as grown women on the other side of the globe—of all places, at the Elizabeth Arden counter at Macy’s in Herald Square. It was Sabine who’d offered to hire Leah’s daughter for her store. And over the years, the childless Sabine had taken Casey on—the way she had with many of her young employees. She’d bought her
rare and beautiful things, including the Italian horn-rimmed eyeglasses she was wearing now. The glasses had cost four hundred dollars, including the prescription lenses. Sabine had treated Casey better than anyone else had, and Casey hated her father for not seeing that.

  “I had to work for Sabine. I had no choice, did I?”

  Joseph looked up at the ceiling tiles above their kitchen. He exhaled, stunned by the child’s meanness.

  Casey felt bad for him suddenly, because for as long as she could remember, they never had any money, and her father was ashamed of this. Her paternal grandfather was supposed to have been very rich but had died before her father had any real opportunity to know him. Joseph believed that if his father had explained to him how a man made money, things would have turned out differently. In truth, Casey had never blamed her parents for not being better off, because they worked so hard. Money was something people had or didn’t. In the end, things had worked out for her at school: Princeton had paid for nearly everything; her parents paid whatever portion they’d been asked to contribute, so she didn’t have any college loans. The school had provided her with health insurance for the first time in her life and, with it, cheap birth control. For books, clothes, and walking around money, she’d taken a train to the city every weekend and worked at Sabine’s.

  “I. . . I. . .” Casey tried to think of some way to take it back but couldn’t.

  Joseph looked her squarely in the face, studying her defiance. “Take off your glasses,” he said.

  Casey pulled off the tortoiseshell horn-rims from her face. She squinted at her father. From where she stood, not quite three feet away from him, she could still see his face clearly: the wavy lines carved into his jaundiced brow, the large, handsome ears mottled with liver spots, and his firm mouth—the only feature she took after. Casey rested her glasses on the table. Her face was now the color of bleached parchment; the only color in it came from her lipstick. Casey didn’t look afraid, more resigned than anything else.

  Joseph raised his hand and struck her across the mouth with an open palm.

  She had expected this, and the arrival of the blow was almost a relief. Now it was over, she thought. Casey held her cheek with her left hand and looked away, not knowing what to do then. It was always awkward after he hit her. She felt little pain, even though he had used great force; Casey was in fact watching herself, and she wished the person who was watching her and the body she inhabited could merge and come to a decision. What to do, she wondered.

  “You think good grades and selling hats is work? Do you think you could survive an hour out there? I send you to college. Your mother and I bring lunch from home or share one sandwich from the deli so you and Tina can have extra money for school, and all you learn is bad manners. How dare you? How dare you speak to your father this way?”

  Leah wanted to stop this, and she rose again from her chair, but Joseph shoved her back down.

  Joseph then struck Casey again. This time, Casey’s torso weaved a bit. A sound rang in her ears. She regained her balance by firming her jaw and balling her fists tighter. Why was he doing this? Yes, he didn’t want her to talk back to him. As her father, he deserved respect and obedience—this Confucian crap was bred in her bones. But this ritual where he cut her down to size had happened so many times before, and always it was the same: He hit her, and she let him. She couldn’t shut up, although it made sense to do so; certainly, Tina never talked back, and she was never hit. Then, as if a switch clicked on, Casey decided that she’d no longer consider his side of the argument. His intentions were no longer relevant. She couldn’t stand there anymore getting smacked. She was twenty-two, a university graduate. This was bullshit.

  “Say you’re sorry,” Leah said, holding her breath, and she nodded encouragingly, as if she were asking a baby to take another bite of cereal.

  Casey drew her lips closer still, hating her mother more.

  Joseph grew calmer, and Leah prayed for this to be over.

  “This girl has no respect for me,” he said to Leah, his eyes still locked on Casey’s reddened face. “She’s not. . . good.”

  “She is sorry,” Leah apologized for her daughter. “I know she is. Casey is a good girl, and she doesn’t mean any of those things. She’s just so exhausted from school.” Leah turned to her. “Hurry. Go. Go to your room, now. Hurry.”

  “You spoil the children. You let this happen. No wonder these girls talk to their father this way,” he said.

  Tina got up from her seat. She rested her hands lightly on her sister’s thin shoulders, trying to steer her away, but Casey refused to follow. Their mother wept; she had cooked all afternoon. Nothing was eaten. Tina wished to rewind time, to come back to the table and start again.

  Tina murmured, “Casey, Casey, come on. . . please.”

  Casey stared at her father. “I’m not spoiled. Neither is she,” Casey said, pointing to Tina. “I’m sick of hearing how bad I am when I’m not. You won the sweepstakes with kids like us. Why aren’t we good enough? Why aren’t we ever fucking good enough? Just fuck this. Fuck you.” She said this last part quietly.

  Joseph folded his arms over his stomach in shock, unable to accept what she was saying.

  “And why am I not good enough right now? Without doing another damn thing?” Casey’s voice broke, and now she was sobbing herself, not because he had hit her, but because she understood that she had always felt shortchanged by her father. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t tried.

  Joseph took a breath and swung his fist, hitting her face so hard that Casey fell. Her eyeglasses ricocheted off the table and skittered across the floor. Tina hurried to pick them up. A nose pad was broken, and one of the sides had nearly snapped off. Casey grabbed the table for support, and the Formica table with its cheap metal legs toppled, and she slipped, falling amid the crash of bowls and dishes. A bright red flush spread over Casey’s right eye, adding color to the handprints shadowing her left cheek.

  “Get up,” he said.

  With her fingers splayed across the green linoleum, Casey pulled herself off the remaining dry patch of floor. Somehow she was standing in front of him again. Blood trickled inside her cut lip, the metal taste icing her tongue.

  “You going to hit me again?” she asked, her tongue sweeping across her teeth.

  Joseph shook his head. “Get out. Get your things and leave my house. I don’t know you,” he said, his speech formal. His arms hung limply against his body. Fighting was useless now. He’d failed as a father, and she’d died as someone to watch over. He left the kitchen, stepping across the broken pieces of a white ceramic water pitcher. From the living room, he turned around but refused to look at Casey. “I sent you to school. I did what I could. I’m done now, and I want you gone by morning. It makes me sick to look at you.”

  Leah and the girls watched as he walked into his bedroom and closed the door. Casey sat down in her father’s empty chair. She stared up at the ceiling tiles, unconsciously counting them as she used to do at meals. Tina smoothed her hair in an effort to comfort herself and tried to regulate her breath. Leah sat still, her hands clutching the skirt of her dress. He had left the room; he’d never done that before. She believed that it would have been better if Joseph had stayed in the room and slapped Casey again.

  2 CREDIT

  THE CHILDHOOD BEDROOM Tina and Casey had shared until Casey went away to school was far smaller than any of her dorm rooms in Mathey College or Cuyler Hall. The girls’ bunk beds were pushed up against the length of the room, blocking a dirty window that could not be cleaned from inside. Above the laminated headboard of the top bunk where Casey slept hung a faded poster of Lynda Carter dressed as Wonder Woman, her arms akimbo. Within the framed space of the bottom bunk, Tina had taped up a free Yankees poster from Burger King that she’d gotten when she was in primary school. Barely eighteen inches from the bed were two mismatched plywood desks and a pair of white gooseneck lamps from Ohrbach’s. Above the desks, the girls had papered the walls wi
th unframed certificates of excellence from their school years: Among their many awards, Casey had received recognition for photography, music, and social studies; Tina, for geometry, religion, physics, and BC calculus.

  Casey didn’t notice the awards anymore, their curled edges stuck down with yellowing Scotch tape. Nor did she notice the uncomfortable scale of the room or its lack of natural light. In the first years of visits back from school, she’d compared the glorious working fireplace in her suite in Mathey, the wood-paneled classrooms, and the stained-glass windows with the Dacron blue pile carpet in her Elmhurst bedroom and the bulletproof glass in her apartment building lobby, and she decided that she could not afford to look too critically at what was home, because it hurt.

  Following the fight with her father, Casey went to her bedroom for the sole purpose of retrieving her Marlboros, and as soon as she got them and a book of matches, she walked out the front door.

  She hiked three flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator because there was no other way to get to the tar-paved roof. From memory, she keyed in the security code—4-1-7-4, the birth date of Etelda, the building superintendent’s only daughter. For years, Casey had helped Etelda with her schoolwork, then later tutored her for the SATs. In consideration, her father, Sandro, gave Casey free rein of the roof. When Etelda got a full scholarship to attend Bates College, Sandro bought a metal café table and two matching chairs from a hardware store in Paramus with his own money and left the gift along with a glass ashtray on the roof for its sole visitor.