The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  “That’s not how the waitlist works,” Ji Sun had said, and even knowing this, Lainey was steamed that Ji Sun hadn’t made the same offer.

  Ji Sun was skeptical that Walker would be all he was cracked up to be, but when she entered the lecture hall, she gasped. He stood in silhouette in the front of the room, an enormous Jenny Holzer slide illuminated behind him: ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.

  Ji Sun had hung her treasured wooden PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT postcard, a gift from her sister, on the gallery wall she and her roommates put together earlier in the week. One panel adjacent to the window seat was randomly painted lilac, and last year they’d hung snapshots from parties and postcards from high school friends there. But they wanted to show they’d grown. Their walls weren’t just bulletin boards, and their dorm room was their home. Jenny Holzer was Lainey’s favorite artist now, too, along with Barbara Kruger, whose postcards Lainey had contributed to the wall.

  “Hey, it’s Holzer,” Lainey said now, and elbowed Ji Sun lightly, but Ji Sun was too transfixed to be irked that Lainey would think Ji Sun wouldn’t know.

  It wasn’t that Walker was beautiful, though he was: tall and shaggy haired with perfectly tailored pants and a crisp Oxford shirt in the only shade of blue that Ji Sun found an acceptable alternative to white. He stood before the line of students waiting to talk to him, flanked by teaching assistants who alternated between staring at Walker with open adoration and shooting glares at the students who no doubt wished to make the case that they alone deserved to come off the waitlist. But more than Walker’s beauty, it was a wash of feeling: Oh, this is what college is supposed to be like! The late summer light streamed in, painted gleams on the dark wood molding in this, one of the oldest and most stately rooms on campus, retrofitted with modern implements that could slide out of view like Murphy beds and send the students back to earlier eras, when they might have come to college not just as a launching pad to their professionalization, but to be awakened, politicized, even radicalized. This is what Walker promised with his course, Protest Songs: American Unrest from Vietnam to Operation Enduring Freedom. They admired even the course title, that he was so willing to engage with the war that was barreling down on them, the one they all felt there had to be some way to stop, with this bumbling pet monkey of a monarch mixing up countries in the Middle East, forsaking any global goodwill left over in the wake of September 11, when the four had just been finishing high school, Lainey and Margaret terrified to leave their hometowns just as the world seemed ready to collapse around them.

  In Lucerne in 2001, Ji Sun had stood alongside her American classmates for an international moment of silence, and she’d spoken to her mother and sister that morning, knew they were doing the same in Seoul and in Brussels. What a show of love, from everywhere! What would it feel like to be on the receiving end of that, Ji Sun wondered, eyeing the Americans, most of whom stood, huddled together, faces streaked red, clutching one another as though even here they were under siege. Surely, Ji Sun thought, after their grief wore off some, the Americans would be jarred into a recognition that they were part of an entire planet of people, some of whom, her own parents included, had been facing fears of buildings falling out of the sky for many years. But it seemed September 11 had had the opposite effect, and the Americans she knew became more obsessed with their Americanness than ever before, with what America meant, what America would do, and what that would mean (for America). The rest of the world was mere audience, at best, waiting to be gifted with American pop culture exports, or expected to offer sympathy, support, or troops for whatever war, or “operation” (who cares on what country!) Dick Cheney was drumming up next.

  Bush had made Ji Sun Axis of Evil–adjacent during the previous semester, and Ji Sun had stopped being stunned that even Quincy-Hawthorn students would still sometimes look at her hangul askance, unsure of her allegiances.

  So her heart lifted when Professor Walker asked them, “What is America?” and after listening to their volleys, laughed, said, “You’re all wrong. America is a corporation! And its current CEO is not fit for the job. And this place,” he gestured around the beautiful room, his palm open as though he carried something fragile there, “this place is a corporation, too. Are you the customers? Am I the product? Who is getting rich?”

  Walker would know. He’d made millions creating an election-results-prediction algorithm and website, selling a majority share of both to Google. That he’d had extraordinary luck in a dot-com boom that few understood made his success still more dazzling. Most people who made that kind of money quit teaching, moved west. That Walker stayed gave him credibility as an intellectual, devoted to shaping young minds when they were still malleable, plus the wholesome patina of a family man, having said in interviews that he stayed in part for his young family. He talked about the worth of a liberal arts education, what a gift it was to work at an institution that not only helped advance human thought, but welcomed, even encouraged, interrogation and dissent from within.

  The university couldn’t dip his form in bronze fast enough. His dark fop of hair appeared all over Quincy-Hawthorn’s website, a snapshot of him lecturing in the banner on his department’s page; his headshot popping up often on the News page; even a candid of him and his wife, a Japanese-American ceramicist, and their beautiful hapa babies on the Campus Life page.

  “Q-H has such a boner for this dude,” Conner had said when they’d told him they all got spots in his class.

  “Everybody has a boner for this dude,” Lainey said. “Me included. You included.”

  “Not really my type,” Ji Sun had said then.

  “Listen to him talk,” Lainey said. “He’s everybody’s type.”

  They had all heard the rumors, of course. But they seemed fuzzy and unfounded, and were mostly met with jokes.

  “I’d like a little of that sexual harassment pointed in my direction,” someone would say, and even Lainey, who was starting her second year of work-study at the campus women’s center, would laugh.

  On the walk home they floated in the postlecture glow, talked about neoliberalism and Walker’s hair until Margaret stopped on the sidewalk.

  “Do you think it’s true? What people say about him?” Margaret asked.

  “What, that he’s magnificent?” Lainey asked, smiling.

  “Not that,” Margaret said. “I mean, that he sleeps with his teaching assistants.”

  “Of course not!” Alice answered. “He wouldn’t have a job!”

  “Oh, right. No! I don’t know.” Margaret sat on the low brick fence beside the bike rack and the others stood around her. “I just thought about it today, with the way some of the TAs were looking at him.”

  “It’s not illegal to have a crush,” Lainey said, hand on her hip. “And besides, even if he did sleep with a graduate student, which I am positive he did not, I’m sure it was consensual, and only problematic because it’s outside the bounds of convention.”

  “But he’s married!” Margaret said.

  Lainey rolled her eyes. “That’s what I mean. Who knows what arrangement he has with his wife!”

  “Have you seen her?” Ji Sun asked. “She’s quite striking.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Lainey asked. “Ugh. These rumors persist as a way to undermine the work he’s doing at Q-H, which, like, obviously has its detractors.” Lainey hitched up the straps on her backpack and looked around at the stream of students passing to their next class. Freshmen made furtive glances at their folded maps, and Lainey thought how much smaller the campus had become to them after just one year, the entirety not visible from the base of the big hill, where they sat now, but feeling nearly so.

  Margaret nodded. It was unusual for her to disagree with Lainey, whose confidence and smarts always won Margaret to her side. “I don’t know, though, isn’t it against the rules anyway? Even if it is consensual? What do you think, Alice?”r />
  Lainey scowled.

  “I dunno.” Alice looked at her watch. “I guess it’s frowned upon. I’ve got to run, though. See you for dinner?”

  “I might have a meeting,” Lainey said, looking at Margaret.

  “Yeah, okay,” Alice said. “Well, I’ll be at the D-hall by six. Let me know where we land on this guy, ’cause I should probably have the info before I fuck him.” She winked. She didn’t even think Walker was as dreamy as the others did, but they were grateful to her for making a joke that let them laugh and leave for their next classes feeling that they all desired the same thing, and that they would be okay whether or not they got it.

  Chapter 10

  Flames had begun to lick the leaves outside their picture window, and Lainey felt their heat in her limbs. As it cooled into fall, she grew electrified, molted the sluggishness of late summer, felt on fire to become. Become what? Become what? Become what? And when would she know? She wasn’t even sure she wanted to act anymore, and theater had been one of the few things she’d come to college certain about. Her Improv Activism troupe had stalled and then imploded. Their most recent efforts—impromptu antiwar sketches staged in library reading rooms—had been met with strident shushes and the wrong kind of laughter, and Lainey had told the troupe they needed to use everything at their disposal to break students from the trance of myopic apathy disguised as ambition. But the men in the group only wanted to recite long passages from Marxist philosophers, and the women only wanted to perform their slam poetry. Everyone wanted drums. At the last meeting, the group’s founder, Shane, had begun to wonder aloud whether the invasion of Iraq was, while a terrible thing, perhaps an unavoidable and even necessary one, and the night devolved into wails, accusations, and breakups, including Lainey’s with Shane, whom she’d been seeing all summer since they met as ushers at the theater-in-the-round. She was pretty sure the troupe was disbanded, at least for now.

  At home, the change from summer to fall was marked by shopping for school supplies with her siblings, and she’d received a small package from her big sister, Rachel, the second week of school, filled with sheets of stickers Lainey remembered from the desk in their shared childhood room: scratch-’n-sniff food cartoons from their cafeteria, neon puffers of 1980s cartoon characters, tiny animals and flowers smaller than her pinky nail. Found these at home last visit & thought of you. Maybe you want to mix up some of your damn-the-man paraphernalia, keep the man on his toes. Love you the most, xR. Both of them had been sticker hoarders, preferring to file their stickers away rather than stick them into the albums that were popular with their peers. Scarcity reserves, her sister called it, when Lainey had called to thank her for the stickers, and all adoptive kids had it, according to Rachel, who said it was passed down in their genes. She studied genetics at the University of Pennsylvania, so she should know. But when Lainey wondered aloud what, specifically, their respective biological parents might have lacked, her sister had huffed.

  “The means and agency to raise their own children, for one,” Rachel said.

  “I meant which stickers,” Lainey said. Her sister hadn’t laughed.

  Lainey had tucked her stickers away not because she wanted to keep them, but because she’d been waiting for the right place to put them. What sense did it make to move them from one sheet in a drawer to another on a shelf? They should be seen and enjoyed, and she shared them with abandon now, putting them on Post-it notes about her whereabouts that she stuck to the whiteboard, or on little mash notes she slapped on their mini fridge. The stickers delighted Alice and Margaret, who remembered similar ones, and Ji Sun loved them, too, though of course she had known more impressive stickers in Korea, knew the best of everything, it seemed, and Lainey would admit that Ji Sun’s office supplies did make their stuff look like garbage.

  The note from her sister was written on the back of one of their mother’s old recipe cards for seven-layer sour cream taco dip. When it was discovered that both Lainey and her older sister were lactose intolerant, her mother found dairy substitutes before it was easy to do so in upstate New York, and learned to use her cheesecloth to make nut milks. Their dad had once driven fifty miles to buy a pint of ice cream made from coconut milk that advertised itself as even more delicious than the real thing.

  What more did her sister want from them? Rachel looked to attribute most of her own problems, and all of Lainey’s, to their both being adopted. Lainey had long accepted that being adopted had real bearing on her peripatetic sense of identity, and her parents had put her and her sister in counseling specific to adoptive issues starting when Lainey was in second grade. But Lainey was sure in a way she was about few things that she’d be even more of a mess if she’d grown up without two parents who supported her in every way, knew this better now than she had before college, now that she’d met Alice’s parents, and Ji Sun’s. She hadn’t met Margaret’s, but she’d heard enough to know she’d never wish to trade. They had a study break that coincided with Sukkot, and her parents had suggested she visit and bring along these roommates they’d heard so much about.

  Margaret’s friend Mac, a law student with an obvious crush on her, let Margaret borrow his car, a cream Saab, and the four filled it with enough junk food for a journey five times as long as the three and a quarter hours it took them, Lainey at the wheel, all of them hollering along with the mix tapes they’d scavenged, windows down and heat cranked up. Driving through Saratoga Springs, Lainey felt a lick of shame at wishing her parents lived there, or in one of the other chichi enclaves that she knew people at Quincy-Hawthorn pictured when she said she was from upstate New York, imagining, as they likely did, second homes and trains into the city, not the dinky nowhere town where she’d grown up.

  Pulling into her driveway, that longing vanished, replaced by one for her parents, even as they stood there, a longing so pronounced that she had to catch her breath. There was some new layer of pity folded into her love for them, something about her being so clearly at the start of her life, arriving home with a carful of her college friends, and her parents, disheveled and grinning, at the door to the house where they would likely live out their days. They had a good life, Lainey knew; they loved their life. But so much about it was already determined, and from her vantage now, this seemed too painful to consider. She shook her hair, aubergine for fall, and got out of the car, took the stairs in only two steps, and nearly knocked them over, let them hold her in their arms.

  * * *

  • • •

  After they’d had breads and spreads, Lainey’s favorite childhood snack, and tea with her parents and were alone in her old room, Ji Sun described Lainey’s house as a museum exhibit for wholesomeness.

  “Yeah, it is incredible how cozy it is here,” Alice had said.

  Lainey felt defensive at first. Did they mean shabby? Her parents had a rambling Victorian, large but crowded with books and plants and threadbare antique rugs. She knew it was smaller than Alice’s or Ji Sun’s houses.

  But as the weekend went on and her roommates accepted every offer of cocoa, wrapped themselves in her mother’s afghans, laughed at her dad’s corniest jokes, and delighted in the books and puzzles and VHS tapes in the den, Lainey could see that their enjoyment was genuine, and she relaxed, began to savor how at home they were here, in her home.

  “I am so freaking comfortable,” Alice said, laid out on the overstuffed orange corduroy couch. “I’ve never napped so well in my life.” She stretched her arms above her head and knocked over a framed photo of Lainey that sat on the end table.

  “Oh, my God, look at little goth Lainey!” Alice held the portrait in her hands and sat up, passed it to Ji Sun.

  Lainey knew the photo: her outfit from Hot Topic in the mall, her bleached bangs and black nails. For all of sophomore year of high school she’d powdered her face porcelain and raccooned her eyes black.

  “It’s hard to believe all that,” Ji Sun tapped the pictu
re, “emerged from all this.” She gestured around the living room, fireplace roaring, music playing, Lainey’s parents singing along, voices audible over the sounds of their cooking dinner together in the kitchen. In Ji Sun’s other hand was a mug, hand thrown by Lainey’s dad at the ceramic studio at the local high school. Ji Sun clutched it close, near her heart, even as Lainey noticed it was empty.

  “It’s wonderful here,” Margaret said, snuggled up in the basket chair in the corner that Lainey and her siblings called the jungle, surrounded as it was by hanging plants, a ledge of aloe and medicinal herbs, and a giant pencil cactus that poked at the closest bookshelf and into the chair’s wicker weave. “I don’t even want to go back to school! Do you think your parents would adopt me?”