We Want What We Want

by Alix Ohlin

  * * *

  —

  Nicole lives with me now. She is not herself, but she is not not herself either. She is herself but more forgetful, herself but meaner. She laughs less than she used to but when she does it’s loud and startling and violent. At Sam Postelthwaite’s funeral—he died in his sleep, at home, and my father, who found him, said it was peaceful, but that’s what he would have said regardless—she sat in the back and her shoulders shook with strange, dramatic grief. For some reason she hates to wash her hair and it hangs lank and tangled around her shoulders. There’s something different about her face, not the features themselves but how they sit in repose, never quite settling, which doesn’t mean that she isn’t still beautiful. She is still beautiful. She has a job, answering the phones at a real estate office, which is good because she tires easily, and needs to sit down. She doesn’t miss teaching kindergarten, she says. “I always hated kids,” she says, and it’s hard to know if she’s just being honest or whether it’s the brain injury talking. I always like to say “It’s the brain injury talking,” as if the injury were a force separate from my sister, an outside agent whose involvement one day can be curtailed.

  This is a small town; people take care of her. If they see her lost in the grocery store they help her find her way home. The local news came to do a story on her recovery and she spat at them and sent them away. Our father shook the reporter’s hand and apologized, and then he and Noriko made Nicole some tea. Nicole will tolerate both of them, but only for a limited time. She will tell them to get out, she’s sick of them, and our father will say mildly, “That’s not very nice,” and my sister snorts with derision. I see in my father’s face, at these times, a pained expression that is achingly familiar from my childhood, and I see how Noriko stands next to him; I see them drive home together.

  Sometimes Lord comes over; he prays with Nicole and they talk about AA, and he is kind to me too, in a careful way that continues to embarrass me. I have understood that when he visits my role is to step aside. My sister listens to him pray, a frown on her face, and I’m not sure what she thinks about God now, if anything. She’s hard to read. When I told her about our mother, her reaction was stony. Whatever need she had to find her seems to have folded itself away, inside the jumbled crevices of her brain, and I don’t know if it will ever emerge again. I’m glad she lives with me. In the early mornings I wake and drink coffee, read the paper, watch the sky. I stand outside her room and listen for the ragged rise and fall of her breath.

  Service Intelligence

  I’ve been mystery shopping for six months, ever since my epic flameout at school, and it already feels like forever. Sometimes while I’m driving to a store—well, Aunt Ava drives while I listen to music on my phone—I think about my philosophy class last spring, which I actually liked and kept attending after I’d quit the rest, and this thing we learned about called the trolley problem. It’s a famous conundrum involving whether you’d kill one person to save a bunch of others. There are all these questions associated with it—would you pull a lever and divert a runaway trolley to save five people, knowing that the trolley would hit one person on another track? Or: Would you push a fat man over a ledge so that he’d land in front of the trolley and stop it, in order to save those five people?

  I’m not even kidding, the fat man variant is a famous illustration of this problem and we were supposed to write a paper on it and everything. All these stories about the runaway trolley bring up questions about ethics and utilitarianism, but the fat man variant made my class explode.

  “Why is it a fat man?” this one girl wanted to know. “Isn’t that fatist?”

  “He has to be fat enough to slow down the trolley,” a boy in the back answered. He was one of those practical people who kept asking how philosophical ideas applied in the real world. “It’s pure logistics.”

  “Fatist is so not a word,” a girl in expensive jeans said. “The whole concept is made up by people who don’t want to exercise and eat right.”

  “Oh you did not just say that,” the first girl said.

  “What I’m wondering is why the company didn’t maintain the trolley properly in the first place,” said the pre-law guy who wore button-down shirts to class.

  Soon they were debating corporate liability and body image instead of where the trolley went and how you made your decision about it. People in that class had a lot of opinions and wanted to share them because participation counted as part of your grade. I didn’t say anything; I was already failing, and I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself than necessary. I never turned in my paper, either; by the time it was due I’d stopped going to class and pretty much stayed in my room watching old episodes of Boy Meets World.

  I don’t know why I think about the trolley problem so much, other than that the scenarios are entertainingly gruesome. I don’t hold anybody’s life in my hands. But of all the things I learned or failed to learn at school, this is the one that sticks in my mind: the fat man standing by the ledge, not suspecting anything, taking in the view. How much pressure would it take to push a guy who weighed, like, three hundred pounds? Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about it. How powerful you’d be to make that choice. How shocked he’d be to find himself falling through the air.

  * * *

  —

  Aunt Ava doesn’t like the term mystery shopping, even though that’s what everybody else calls it. She prefers the corporate language, which is service intelligence. When she first suggested I become her partner, I thought it sounded cool, like being a spy—I work for the Service Intelligence Agency is a little joke I made to myself—but it turns out to be mostly driving and paperwork.

  Even mystery shopping sounds more intriguing than the reality. We go into stores and make purchases to test whether individual stores are adhering to laws and company policies, evaluate customer service, etc., etc., whatever. I found out pretty quickly that Aunt Ava wasn’t being generous by finding me a job; she could make more money if we did it together, since the most lucrative shops have to do with adult media content, cigarettes, and alcohol. The good thing about me from Aunt Ava’s perspective is that I look younger than my age, which is twenty-one. This usually bothers me, but for service intelligence it’s ideal. If I can get somebody to sell me cigarettes or booze without being carded, then the store gets a reprimand once we file our report.

  By the way, Aunt Ava isn’t even really my aunt. She’s lived next to my parents ever since I was little and she and my mom are super close. When I got home from college in the spring it was Aunt Ava and my mom who were sitting in the living room waiting for me. My dad is an airline pilot so he isn’t home much, which my mom says suits his desire for emotional distance from the family perfectly. She’s supposed to say these things to their therapist but he’s always missing appointments so she emails them to me instead. In April, I came in quietly, put down my bag, and sat on the edge of the armchair across from them, holding my clasped hands over my knees as if my legs might fall off without a good grip to keep them there. I was waiting for my mom to either yell at me or hug me and didn’t know which one I dreaded more. I’d messed up in so many ways that semester, and one of them was waiting until well past the point of tuition refunds before withdrawing from classes. Karen, the counselor at school, had told me not to worry about my parents’ finances—well, “You have to take care of yourself first” was actually what she said—but I knew from my mom’s emails that money was another one of my parents’ zones of negotiation.

  I also knew she’d ask me why I hadn’t come home earlier, and why I hadn’t mentioned that something was wrong during all the emails and texts and calls we’d had. “Mom, I wanted to,” I said, and burst into tears. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I sat stone-faced, looking at my shoes. Lately when I’m in an uncomfortable situation, I go away inside my head, thinking about the trolley problem or Cory and Topanga from Boy Meets World or
whatever, and so I don’t even know what she said about dropping out of school. When I zoned back in, Aunt Ava was talking about service intelligence and how I could work with her while I figured things out, and apparently I’d already agreed.

  So most mornings we head out in her Camry and she tells me what the shops are and then turns on the radio. She’s obsessed with traffic reports, because some of the shops are gas stations where she fills up then gets reimbursed, and she wants to maximize the efficiency of the route to use as little gas on work as possible. Aunt Ava is single and thrifty. She’s in her fifties but looks younger, with shiny, straight hair and zero wrinkles. She’s Chinese-American, and my mom is half-Chinese—this is one of the things they first bonded over—and I’m a quarter. Everybody says I look more like my dad, who is tall and German and fair, but I’m short and small boned like my mom. Cassie Kranz, pint-sized German. In high school I did gymnastics and diving and I used to think I packed a lot of power into a small package, but I don’t think that anymore.

  The morning is cool and I shiver a bit in my shorts and T-shirt. Aunt Ava always wants me to wear something youthful, so I’ve dug out my old camp T-shirts and my hair is in two long braids and the whole experience is pretty infantilizing, which isn’t the worst thing for an experience to be, in case you’re wondering. We hit some electronics stores, and I get carded for trying to buy some video games with adult content and the middle-aged lady cashier gives me an amused look, which I try not to be embarrassed by but still am. After she turns me down I go find Aunt Ava and we sit in her car and fill out the reports.

  Next we go to lunch at a burger restaurant, the kind of fake-homey place with fake-old black-and-white pictures of the restaurant on the walls and fake-handwritten menus advertising things like “homemade extra-loaded double-stuffed potato skins.” I don’t know anybody who makes extra-loaded double-stuffed potato skins at home. We order them, because we have to order something. Aunt Ava orders an iced tea, and I smile at the waiter, who is a paunchy, overwhelmed guy in his forties trying to keep track of too many tables at the same time, and ask for a beer. He glances at me for a second, then at Aunt Ava, then says he’ll be right back. Once his back is turned, Aunt Ava looks at me and raises her eyebrows.

  Procedure dictates that we finish our meal and pay before doing anything.

  I don’t want the beer, but it would look weird if I didn’t drink any of it so I sip around half and even that makes me feel sleepy and dull. Aunt Ava spends most of lunch scrolling on her phone. At the beginning she used to try to make conversation with me, but when she didn’t get anywhere she gave up and now she reads celebrity news and only talks if there’s a story so salacious she can’t contain herself.

  After she pays, she asks to see the manager. This is also procedure, as specified by the company’s own paperwork. The waiter says nervously, “Was everything all right with your meal?” and Aunt Ava smiles neutrally and asks again.

  The manager is significantly younger than the waiter, probably not much older than I am, and he’s wearing a spotty, unconvincing beard and a white shirt so thin it’s see-through. I mean I can actually see two or three sparse tufts of his chest hair through the fabric. He comes at us with a scared, placating smile, and when Aunt Ava identifies us as service intelligence I can see from his expression that he has no idea what this means. Soon enough it becomes clear to him as she shows him the paperwork, and then there’s a moment of awful surprise, for all of us, because, according to the paperwork, this company requires that he fire the waiter immediately, since he served me without asking for ID.

  “Oh, but wait. Wait,” the manager sputters. His name badge says lance, which somehow makes the whole thing more terrible. I don’t want to know that his name is Lance and he has sparse chest hair. He probably went to my high school.

  The waiter keeps glancing over at us, but he also has a bunch of other tables and a group of four ladies in the corner is bombarding him with questions about fat calories and gluten.

  “You don’t understand,” Lance says. “We’re understaffed today, because a girl called in sick—”

  Aunt Ava tells him she doesn’t make the rules, which is something I’ve never heard somebody say unironically before.

  Lance lowers his voice to a whisper and hisses, “He’s my uncle.”

  Aunt Ava says nothing.

  “He’s been out of work for months and my dad said to hire him here. He has three kids. I can’t fire him. I mean I literally can’t fire him.”

  Mentally I turn over whether this is the correct use of literally or not, and I can’t decide. The crazy thing is that the guy hasn’t even done anything illegal—I’m twenty-one. But company policy is to ask for ID for anyone who looks under thirty-five, and he’s in violation.

  Aunt Ava says, “If you don’t fire him, somebody else will, and probably you, too.”

  Lance goes paler than his shirt. The waiter comes over then, and when Lance won’t tell him what’s going on, Aunt Ava does, in detail, showing him the paperwork. She’s like a killer in a movie, the kind of icy but long-winded villain who has to explain everything to the victim before finishing him off, because it’s important he understands why he’s going to die. The waiter, who’s older than I thought at first, lays a hand on Lance’s shoulder and says, “It’s all right, son, it’ll be all right,” and then I realize they’re both crying, both of these men, and Aunt Ava shoves a stack of paperwork in Lance’s hands, which he refuses to take, so it lands on the table in a puddle of condensation from her iced tea, and when we get back in the car she turns up the air-conditioning and the radio and I see her hands are shaking.

  I say, “I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”

  But Aunt Ava lives in a house she bought herself with money she made selling funeral plots to old people over the phone. She’s never been married and got rid of her cat after it brought her a mouse as a gift, its little body wreathed in saliva but not quite dead, and she had to kill it herself because it was too far gone to save. My mom says there’s a thing called a tiger mom which means women who are really hard-core and strict with their kids, but Aunt Ava doesn’t have any so I guess she’s just a tiger.

  She says, “Too bad.”

  * * *

  —

  Still, we take a few days off. I don’t do much with it—I don’t sleep well at night anymore, and during the day I mostly lie on the couch and watch TV while my mom’s at work. My dad comes home for twenty-eight hours and takes me to a baseball game, and that’s the only time I relax because my dad is the one person in the world who wants to talk about stuff less than I do. The Phillies lose.

  Then he takes off again. He’s on a Singapore route these days and sometimes he sleeps in a hotel room in Newark instead of coming all the way back to the house. Before he leaves I make a joke about him having a second family somewhere and he gives me such a dark look I wonder if it’s true. What if my dad had a second family? Do they know about us? Does he choose them over us, then us over them, over and over again, back and forth, switching from one track to the other, like some bigamist version of the trolley problem?

  No, I decide, there’s no way he could handle a second family. He can barely keep up with the problems in ours.

  Karen from the counseling office sends me an email. I just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing. Drop me a line when you get a chance. When you’re back to campus I hope we can continue our conversations. I can’t decide if Karen is being optimistic or dense, thinking I’m coming back to school. I delete it without answering.

  Unlike Karen, my mom’s given up checking in. At first she asked a lot of questions, and when she didn’t get satisfactory answers she made me go to therapy with her. The therapist, Fern—who is their marriage therapist, by the way—was wearing a pale blue shawl cardigan and her office was decorated with pictures of flowers and windswept dunes that were meant to be soo
thing, I guess, and later I saw one of these prints at Target when I was picking up toilet paper and detergent for my mom, and it struck me as relaxing and I almost bought it before remembering where I’d seen it before, so she must be onto something. When she asked me to talk about what had happened at school my tongue lay thick and flat in my throat and I couldn’t say anything.

  In the car, my mom said, “Well, you proved your point. I just wish I knew what the point is.”

  Now she lets me do my own thing, but I know she’s angry at me. I hear her on the phone with Aunt Ava, talking about how I used to be such a great student and what about my lost potential and all this over a boy, because she thinks I got my heart broken and couldn’t concentrate on school. “She’s always been so secretive,” she tells Aunt Ava, and that’s true. I’m like my dad; we both file the important things away for safekeeping. My mom puts them on display.

  She’s wrong about me, and if I could bring myself to talk about it I’d tell her so. But the thought of talking to her about G and the smell of chlorine from the pool and Red Bull and rum shuts my brain down. What makes it worse is I know G never stopped going to class and stayed in his room watching TV; he’s probably walking around campus like everything is fine, which for him, I guess, it is. He can have that life, I’ve decided, that college life with quizzes and papers and dining hall food and the trolley problem. My life is service intelligence. Most of the time, it’s not so bad.