“No, we don’t,” the waitress said. “We have Sprite though?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick with tap.”
I checked my phone while my mom scanned the menu. Laura still had not responded to Suzie’s email, but she did post a few pictures of her travels. She was spending Thanksgiving in Avignon. Geography was never my best subject; I had to look up where Avignon was. I put my phone away when the waitress came back with our drinks.
“Have you heard back from any of your applications?” Mom asked.
“No, not yet.” I hadn’t planned on lying. I just couldn’t propel the truth out of my mouth.
“I’m sure you’ll get in somewhere great. You worked so hard for it.”
“Would you be disappointed if I didn’t?”
She paused. “I would be disappointed because you were disappointed.”
“But let’s say that I didn’t get into any good law schools. Let’s say my only option was a school that was just barely accredited. How would you feel?”
“Of course I would feel a little disappointed that you weren’tliving up to your potential. But if that were genuinely what you wanted and it made you happy, then I would be happy.”
“Wouldn’t you feel like all your sacrifices went to waste though?”
“Sacrifices?”
“Moving to the US, not going back to China with Dad, all of that. Living far away from your family for all this time. You guys both moved here to give me a better life. What if I don’t achieve a better life at all? What if I have to move back in with you?”
She shrugged. “Yes, I would feel disappointed if you didn’t succeed. However, I know that’s not even a possibility. You’re so hard on yourself. I don’t need to be hard on you.”
“But you would be disappointed.”
“I would be disappointed that you weren’t living up to your full potential and achieving what you want to achieve. If you had asked me when I was younger, yes, maybe I would have felt some level of failure on my part too. But I’ve long since realized that I cannot project my own identity onto how you live your life. I think that’s something Americans have gotten right—that children deserve to form their own identities, that not everything is about saving face and bringing honor.” She took a sip of water. “To answer your question, yes, I would be a little disappointed, but only for your sake. It’s not about what I want. It’s about what you want.”
“But what about Dad? Do you think he would be disappointed? Well, maybe not Dad now, but Dad when I was younger. If he knew that someday I’d grow up and completely fail at my career and have to move back here with you, he would probably be pretty disappointed, right?”
“Yes. But that’s his problem, it’s not yours.”
“What do you mean? He’s my dad.”
“Yes, he had high hopes for you. But if I had to guess, if you asked him today, he would also have come around to my mindset. A lot of his expectations from before came from the disappointment with his own life. He wanted more from you to prove something to the world about himself.”
“And you don’t need me to prove anything for you?”
“No,” she said. “I can do that on my own.”
—
After lunch we drove bythe house my parents had bought together. Whenever I was home, she’d simply ask, “Should we drive by the old house?” and I would nod, and we’d head to Clover Street. We never spoke about how it made us feel. The house had the classic double gable roof that was popular in the area. The exterior was almost completely white with the exception of brick fixtures framing the garage. When we still lived there, my mom thought the white made the house modern and clean, like a fresh start, so my parents left the walls inside white as well. When I turned ten, I asked my mom if I could paint my room a robin’s-egg blue. I showed her the exact shade that was available at Home Depot, and offered to use my allowance to pay for it. She immediately said no.
“Why would you want to paint it a different color? White is practical. It goes with everything. It makes everything seem brand-new.”
After my dad left, she sold the house with its unpainted walls and we moved to the small apartment with ants. During the day she took accounting classes and at night she waitressedat the Chinese restaurant. After she graduated, she quit the waitressing job and found a position as an accountant at a tax preparation company. She was promoted quickly. “I was never good at math,” she told me. “But I realized being a good accountant doesn’t mean you have to be good at math. It just means you have to be good at details.”
Eventually, she saved up enough to put a down payment on a house, and we stopped living in the small one-bedroom. It was smaller than the first house we lived in, but in a good neighborhood and close to my school. This time, she didn’t want to leave the walls white. We closed on the house in June, and for all of July my mother and I spent the weekends at Home Depot analyzing swatches, arguing over whether we preferred cerulean or blue nova or cornflower or turquoise for the master bedroom, fawn or taupe or British tan for the living room, lilac or amethyst or mauve for my room (I had moved on from blue to purple), considering whether a certain shade suggested more coziness than another, whether another one was too garish or just garish enough. It was the first moment in my life that I felt like a real adult. Unlike the times in restaurants when she insisted she wanted to eat exactly what I wanted to eat, or the times at the movie theater when she insisted she wanted to see exactly what I wanted to see, when we talked about paints, she’d argue with me like an equal—almost like I was my father. “No, I far prefer this lighter shade,” she would say. “It will brighten up the room.” After we reached consensus, we filled up my mother’s Honda Civic with supplies: plastic sheeting and drop cloths and brushes and, of course, the tubs and tubs of paint. We prepped the walls and opened the windows while wearing baggy T-shirts. It took us all of July to prepare and all of August to paint.
—
On my last day inBrookings, I finally got a reply from Laura to Suzie Ehrlich’s email.
Hi Suzie! So nice to hear from you. I’d be more than happy to help with your essays. And of course you don’t have to pay me! I love doing favors for fellow Zebras! Do you mind sending over your current draft? The next couple days are actually not too bad for me so I’d be happy to take a look ASAP.
