by Min Jin Lee
“Hey, cheer up.”
Casey raised her head and grinned, not having expected him. The housekeeper usually let her in. Isaac looked like a tall bear—his towering frame, large open hands at his sides, the faded beige corduroys and camel-colored sweater. It was a relief to see him. Isaac liked her and wanted nothing from her. Jay Currie used to call Sabine her fairy godmother, but it was really Isaac who felt like the godparent, not by what he gave her in terms of things or experiences, but by his acceptance of her. It was a form of wealth bestowed upon you when a good person took you in like that.
But it had been a long week, and she was exhausted. She had left her job as a desk sales assistant precisely because she was too old to run errands like this. Lately, she’d been feeling that her servitude to Sabine had gone on for too long. Even if Sabine handed her the retail empire of Sabine’s for a fraction of its market value, the option she would expect in return was a binding indenture enforced by gratitude. How did you quantify that? Would she forever be delivering packages on the weekends, having meals with Sabine when she didn’t feel like it, and canceling the wishes of loved ones if Sabine didn’t approve of them? Unu would likely have a bowl of cereal tonight if he remembered to eat at all, she thought sadly.
Isaac kissed her cheek and hung up her jacket, but Casey held on to the package. She wouldn’t stay for dinner, she decided. She would hand off the package to the queen herself, then beg off.
“She’s in her bedroom,” he said, looking at her glum face.
“I’m sorry, Isaac. Hey. . .” She smiled, remembering her manners. “How are you? It’s always so nice to see you.” He smiled at her warmly, and Casey swallowed, feeling as though she might cry for no reason. There had been three people who had this effect on her just by their kind glances: Mary Ellen Currie, Jay’s mom, Ella Shim, and Isaac.
Isaac opened his arms to give her a hug, and Casey allowed herself to be tucked into his big chest.
She could feel his closely shaven chin on her forehead. He smelled wonderful, like cedar chips, musk, and orange peel. No one else smelled like that. Sabine had his aftershave custom-blended by a master perfumer in Paris. The bottles were labeled “I.A.G.” for Isaac Antonio Gottesman.
Casey pulled away first, feeling shy and tearful.
Isaac put his hands on her shoulders. She had gotten skinnier, he thought, not in a good way, but as if she weren’t getting enough to eat.
“Young lady, did you know that we’re giving away a free lamb dinner tonight for the first person who walks in here with a FedEx box?” His eyes shone with amusement. This was his usual shtick, playing Monty Hall on Let’s Make a Deal. The first time she’d met him, he’d asked her in a serious voice, “Ma’am, if you have a Band-Aid in your purse, I’ll give you ten dollars.” It had taken her a moment to get that he was joking, but there was another time she’d dug out a safety pin from her cosmetics bag at his request, and he’d given her a fiver on the spot.
“Miss, why, of all the luck! Is that a FedEx package in your hand?”
“Yes, sir,” Casey said, keeping it straight.
“That’s too crazy! Because tonight we’re also giving away a panna cotta with chocolate sauce if you have a beautiful smile.”
Casey grinned, but in her mind she was still stumbling to find a way to say no to dinner without lying outright.
“Miss, do you have a hat?”
Casey nodded, raising her fedora to his eye level. She felt like a girl joking with her charming uncle.
“Well, tonight we’re trading one ladies’ hat for a pair of Italian-made shoes and a matching bag!”
She burst out laughing. “Now you’re talking.”
“Now, that’s a real Casey smile. You okay?”
“I’m fine. Don’t you worry about me.”
“Oh, I don’t worry about you, Casey Han. I don’t have to. You are good at doing what needs doing,” he said. Sometimes saying a thing could make it so.
Casey’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, I don’t know, Isaac.”
“But I know.” He nodded gravely, wanting her to believe him. Isaac regretted not having given his own children this kind of assurance while they were growing up when he’d been too busy chasing deals and skirts. He remembered being around Casey’s age, how the world appeared full of possible conquests. It saddened him to think of how his own children had no wish to fight, no larger desire to win. As though they had nothing to prove or could prove nothing even if they tried. Casey had so much fight in her, but she seemed always to want to fight it alone.
“So, where’s the boss?” Casey asked. She took a deep inhale.
“In her bedroom.”
“Oh yes, you said. She’s resting?”
“She’s awake. She wants to see you.”
“I could just leave this if she’s resting.” Casey held up the package.
“No, no. Don’t be silly. She asked for you to come in. She’d love to see you.”
“Oh.” Casey put her hat on the bench in the foyer. “Okay.”
“You know where, right?” Isaac pointed up the stairs. “Maybe you can get her to join us for dinner. She said I should give you dinner after she spoke to you. You’re staying?”
Casey nodded. This was how successful people got what they wanted, she thought. They just forced outcomes. She gave a small wave to Isaac and went up the stairs.
In college, she had known a boy named John Pringle whose engineer father owned some sort of chemical company. John’s dad, the son of a mechanic and a housecleaner and the youngest of six children, had attended Rochester Institute of Technology on full scholarship; and after making his first million dollars, he went on to make several hundred more. At a Cap & Gown party, John Pringle smoked a Dunhill’s blunt filled with high-quality grass, and he told Casey and Virginia that his two older half-brothers from his dad’s first marriage worked for the old man. John had made air quotes when he said the word worked. He also called his brothers Limp-dick I and Limp-dick II. His brothers laughed at their dad’s off-color jokes, said nothing when Dad talked too loudly at sporting events, and looked away when Dad habitually stuck his finger in the back of his mouth to clear the food stuck in his molars.
At the party, John was higher than the Empire State Building, and by that time, Casey and Virginia had dried up two bottles of Asti Spumante. Virginia had asked John, “So you”—her words were slurry, her pretty face flushed from the sparkling wine—“and what. . . what are you going to do with your life?” And John had replied, “I’m gonna fuck around as long as I can, and then take it up the ass like my brothers. Cut my hair, put on a suit, marry a Connecticut blonde with big tits who will bear the fruit of my loins. And I will carry Dad’s bags to the airport and laugh at his fart jokes.”
That evening, Casey was wasted, which had the effect of making her sleepy and patient, but she had listened carefully to John’s family story. And though she’d always thought this thin, freckled boy who lived on the floor above hers during freshman year—the boy who’d gotten into Groton instead of Andover, the one with the handsome roommate whose attention both Casey and Virginia had failed to enlist—was a phony and not terribly interesting, she’d ended up feeling a little sorry for him. He genuinely seemed to believe that he had no choice in life but to follow his brothers’ bitter-sounding path. It was nonsense to think that he of all people had no choices in life, but having spent the evening with him, Casey was beginning to understand that what mattered was not what you could do, but what you believed you could do.
But in her Elmhurst apartment building, there had been Sonny Villa, her neighbor. When Sonny finally got his trucker’s license, his parents threw him a party because they were going to be rich if Sonny became a Teamsters truck driver. During dessert, as he cut up pieces of a Fudgie the Whale cake from Carvel, Sonny took long sips of Michelob, wiping away the foam from his dark mustache. He swore to everyone there, his lovely black eyes glittering with liquor, that he’d own an eighteen-wheeler by the time
he was twenty-five. At such a bold pronouncement, the guests gathered their breath like children before the candles of a birthday cake. Within a year, Sonny got addicted to speed, which he’d started using to stay awake for his late night drives. After two accidents, he lost his job and got a post working security at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This was what Casey wanted to know: When life didn’t go your way, was it because it wasn’t meant to or because you didn’t have the faith, or was it that you couldn’t make it so by the labors required of you? On Van Kleeck Street, the stories mostly had the same crap endings, and whenever Casey was feeling particularly low, she feared her own conclusion might inevitably be a shitty one.
The high walls of Sabine’s bedroom were papered with a chinoiserie pattern—hand-painted hummingbirds and rare flowers on a silvery peach background. With the bedroom lights turned down low and the shades drawn, Sabine looked like a beautiful bird herself, perched on her bed wearing a quilted silk bed jacket, propped up on three square European pillows.
“Helloooooo, darling.” When Sabine said “darling,” the “r” disappeared, and it had the effect of a forties Hollywood film voice rather than the mispronunciation of an immigrant. “Come here, baby girl, and sit by me.”
Casey kissed her hello on both cheeks and sat on the armchair near the standing lamp.
“No,” Sabine whined, touching her right temple. “Come sit on the bed. There’s lots of room here. Come snuggle with me.” She drew Casey in with her sinewy arm.
“I brought you your package,” Casey said quietly with her boss holding her close.
“Oh yes.” Sabine took it from her and cast it aside by the bed cushions.
“Are you okay?” Casey asked. Close up, Sabine looked exhausted—fine lines fanning around her eyes.
Sabine stared hard at her. “I just have a headache. But you look miserable.”
“No, I’m good. Really.” Casey tried to sound upbeat. “I just got a summer job at Kearn Davis.” She wouldn’t take this well, Casey surmised. Sabine had been after her all spring about working for her as a management trainee this summer—just the two of them in an informal program—but Casey had been evading the issue by saying she needed new kinds of business experiences. “For investment banking.”
“You used to work there. What’s the big deal?” Sabine sat up as though she were getting ready to fight. She took her arm off Casey’s shoulder and crossed her arms against her chest.
“I’m not going back as a sales assistant. This is different. I even got turned down for its undergraduate program when I was at Princeton. You can’t imagine what the other finance majors at Stern would do for this.” Casey couldn’t mention how she got the interview.
Sabine closed her eyes dramatically and did her yoga breathing. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” she said finally.
Casey stared at the package that she had carried from the store. How could she explain her desire to flee from the very person who had helped her so much? It seemed so ungrateful, even foolish.
“I was going to take you to Paris, Milan, and Hong Kong this summer if you had come to work with me. Don’t you have a little friend in Italy? The one you’re always writing to?”
“Why would you take me to those places?” Casey didn’t want to talk about Virginia with Sabine. She was jealous of her friends.
“And why do you give me such a hard time?”
“What? Sabine? It’s Saturday night, and I took a subway and a crosstown bus to bring you a package. Which you haven’t even opened.”
Sabine massaged her temples with her index fingers. “Don’t raise your voice at me, little girl. I haven’t seen you in two weeks. Where have you been?”
“I go to school full-time, and I was at work.” Casey’s steam was building. “You haven’t come in on Saturdays for the past two weeks, and you don’t work on Sundays when I do! And when I was working this past Thursday night, you were in a meeting so I didn’t bother you.” She loaded all her pronouns with as much shrill emphasis as possible. She couldn’t believe she was reporting her schedule to her. Her own parents never knew what she was doing, and they no longer even asked. Lately, she spoke to her mother maybe once every six weeks.
Sabine picked up the FedEx box with both hands gingerly and made a show of trying to open it. She had trouble with the tab string, and Casey pulled it for her.
“Here.” Casey handed her the open box.
Sabine pulled out the sample of the long-sleeved T-shirt. “This is going to be our store-brand shirt.” It was a simple, long-sleeved shirt of very fine jersey cotton. “I’m getting four colors done. It’s going to be the most expensive T-shirt in America.”
Casey nodded. Sabine didn’t look as though she had a headache anymore.
“Why don’t you come down for dinner?” Casey said, not wanting to fight anymore. She hated arguing more than anything, and it never made her feel any better afterward. “Isaac looks like he’s lost downstairs.”
“You told me that Kearn Davis didn’t interview at NYU business school.” Sabine gazed at Casey; her eyes looked hard and brilliant, like onyx.
Casey blinked. Sabine had a scary memory.
“They don’t interview at NYU. My friend Hugh helped me set it up.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in asking for those back-scratching favors. Isn’t that why you never asked Isaac for a letter of recommendation for Columbia? If you had gone there, then you wouldn’t have had to ask Hugh. You’d rather have a stranger do a favor for you than a friend.”
“Hugh is a friend.”
“And I’m not?”
Casey sighed and dropped her head into her hands.
“Life is filled with many complicated tasks, and no one, Casey, no one can do things alone. It’s very slow going if you choose that path.”
“You did things by yourself.” Casey was shouting now.
“You couldn’t be more wrong. No one person helped me,” Sabine said, more convinced than ever that the girl was too proud. “Many, many, many people helped me. The bookkeeper who gave me a discount on filing my first returns, the diner owner who let me have free breakfasts when I couldn’t pay, manufacturers who gave me credit when I had no right to expect it—so many, many people helped me.” Sabine was screaming. “I can’t even begin to remember all their names. Why do you think I help people who are having a hard time? It all goes around, little girl. That’s the whole point of it, goddammit! Why must you be so stubborn?” Sabine’s black pupils disappeared into the darker pools of her irises, filling quickly with tears.
“And why do you act as if poor people shouldn’t have any choices? Must I always take what’s offered? Must I always be grateful?” Casey brushed the hair away from her face. Her voice was trembling. “Listen, Sabine. I need to try this thing. I need to know if I can make it as an investment banker, make real money, pay back my school loans. I need to see if I can do it on my own. On my terms. And I didn’t know that Columbia would make a big difference. All right? I didn’t know how the world worked. I was full of shit. You were right. Good for you. For fuck’s sake, I’m twenty-six years old, and I don’t have it all figured out. I’m not like you.”
Sabine pulled back and grew calmer. Her expression was metallic, as though something had gone steely inside her when Casey talked about the poor not having choices.
“I told you that I’d pay for your tuition,” Sabine said. “No strings. You didn’t even have to pay me back. And it isn’t like I’m making you come and work for me afterwards. It’s not like the army, you know, I’m not sending you off to war.”
Isaac walked in, his face contorted with worry. “Who’s going to war?” From the hall, he’d heard both women screaming. The young girl was sobbing and looked a lot worse than when he’d opened the door for her. He smiled at her genially, but Casey just looked at her hands.
“My love, have we offered our guest a drink?” Isaac said to Sabine, raising his eyebrows sternly, all the while smil
ing at her.
Sabine sighed, softening a little. Casey made her feel crazy sometimes, and she had not, in fact, offered her a drink.
“I better go,” Casey said, but Sabine took hold of her hand.
“My darling Casey and I were having a quarrel, but it is all right now. Isn’t it?”
Casey said nothing. She imagined John Pringle toadying behind his father, clutching Dad’s briefcase, and Sonny Villa boasting about owning a shiny truck one day to anyone who’d be dumb enough to listen. And she recalled Virginia’s slurry question to John, “And what are you going to do with your life?”
What had she accomplished, anyway, Casey wondered, with all of her stupid pride?
“Baby girl, if you stay for dinner, I’ll even come downstairs,” Sabine said, feeling bad for not having thought about the drink.
Isaac chuckled. “Are we trying to make her stay or leave?”
Sabine threw a small pillow at him and clocked him on the head.
“Oh, my head.” Isaac acted as if he were stumbling back from the blow.
Sabine still held on to Casey’s hand. She would have to stay, Casey realized. If she left now, the damage would be even harder to repair.
The cook had made a delicious dinner with all of Casey’s favorites. At the table, the two women tried not to disagree about anything at all. Isaac told stories about indulging his grandchildren, and Casey laughed while Sabine pretended not to find the anecdotes funny. Isaac, who was semiretired, occasionally picked up his grandchildren after school in his chauffeured car and took them to eat French fries, chocolate egg creams, and half-sour pickles at his favorite diners in Brooklyn and Newark. His adult children were not crazy about this, especially all the greasy snacks, but they didn’t prohibit him from doing so.
Dessert was served, and Isaac poured tea for the women.
“Casey has an internship with the Kearn Davis banking program,” Sabine said confidently.
Casey smiled at Isaac, not knowing what to expect next.
