“Eat your dinner,” Foon Wah repeated. “Sit down. Don’t waste your food. Children in China are starving.”
They understood this refrain of hers as a call to order. Jackie slunk back to her seat, and slowly, they picked up their spoons and chopsticks, chewing in silence.
Foon Wah strained to hear, above the clinking of cutlery, her husband’s footsteps on the porch outside. She wondered when he would be returning, and she hoped she would be asleep when he did.
Quietly, Foon Wah pushed back her chair, folded her napkin beside her plate, and took herself to bed. There were dishes to do, laundry to fold, and yet for once, she would neglect them.
She had done them, unthanked and unpaid, for thirty years, and she was tired.
Based on his writing portfolio, Jason was accepted to Columbia University on full scholarship. The news gave Foon Wah and Richard a distraction from their bitterness, and for Jason, it was the best escape. To get from East Flatbush to Columbia, he had to walk half a mile, take a bus, and ride two different trains—a two-hour commute each way. Decades earlier, Robert Moses had ignored a proposal to build a subway line down Flatbush Avenue, forever condemning the residents of East Flatbush to isolation. But Jason didn’t mind the inconvenience. The distance gave him an excuse to stay out late.
The night of the shattered bottle had taught him something. Of course, there’d been a moment when he’d feared he’d fallen into some kind of trap. That his father had conjured the son he’d always wanted—a man’s man, capable of fighting with his fists and toppling chairs to the ground. And yet what ultimately had thrilled him that night was not confronting his father. It was locking him out.
After his mother had left the table, Jason had bolted all the house doors. Three hours later, a summer storm had engulfed the neighborhood, and his father had rung the doorbell. Jason had enjoyed disregarding it. He’d imagined his father collapsing, resigned, onto one of the wet chairs on the porch, sleeping there with his hat overhis face. Or maybe: walking to the subway, hoping to book a Midtown hotel, only to fall asleep on the train and ride it all the way to the Bronx and back. Like a bum.
But the fantasy had been short-lived. His mother had risen to admit his father. Jason had stood at the top of the stairs and watched her: barefoot and frail, wearing her lilac pajamas and without her lipstick and blush. A woman who had come across the world to serve others’ whims, to catch others’ spit.
Jason was indignant on her behalf, but in the weeks ahead, every time he tried to ask how she was feeling, she would change the subject, or nitpick, or send Jason to complete a chore. She would never leave their father, this much was clear. No matter how cruel he was, no matter how belligerent. He hated how easily she accepted this mediocrity. Now knowing the peace of a home without his father, he was loath to be home at all.
Matriculating at Columbia also gave him the opportunity to explore Manhattan on his own. He frequented the standing room section of Avery Fisher Hall, spent hours roaming in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and attended performances of Chekhov and Ibsen in the little black box theaters of the cobblestoned West Village. And he was not alone; people came to New York from all corners of the country and the world seeking songs, poetry, and music, craving a life of the mind.
Of course, the city was also bankrupt. He skirted around the men and women who wore blankets in lieu of coats, whose bodies smelled of urine and who wore the thinnest flip-flops on their swollen purple feet. He never stopped to tell strangers the time, and always avoided the last train car.
In his sophomore year, Jason went to a poetry reading in the Lower East Side. Wishing to delay his return to Brooklyn, he lingered for the after-party in the garden, nursing a half-filled plastic cup of red wine and listening to the poets expound on Neo-Expressionism. Socializing with writers was more difficult than he’d expected. They barely glanced at him, and he wondered if this was because theyassumed he had nothing witty to say. He was adrift in his thoughts when someone poked his knee.
“Smoke?”
He turned. The woman leaning against the fence was young and petite, but with impressively muscled biceps and black hair cropped boyishly short. She wore jean shorts and a tank top that revealed her midriff, including a belly ring with a dangling pendant the shape of the Tree of Life. And she was Chinese, a “jook seing” like him, one hand on her thigh, the other holding out a cigarette.
“Oh. No thank you.”
“I’m Gina.” She took a puff. “You’re new. So where are you from?” She raised a jaunty eyebrow.
Understanding the joke, he nodded. “TheMayflower. You?”
She smirked. “Are you a poet?”
“I don’t know,” he laughed. She blew out her smoke, waited for him to change his mind. “I write, I guess.”
“What did you think of the reading?”
“They were great,” he said, eager now. No one else had asked his opinion. “Like that second guy? Chester. He was so good. Sounds like freaking T. S. Eliot.”
“Is T. S. Eliot your favorite poet?”
“I mean, I don’t know if I have a favorite… Sylvia Plath is awesome. Also Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson…” She was nodding as he listed them, her eyes on a water tower across the street. She kept nodding like he was supposed to continue. “And Rilke… and Ashbery… and William Carlos Williams…”
“What about Li Po?”
“Who?”
She rolled her eyes. “Tell me you know Tu Fu?”
“Tu who?”
“Poor boy.” She sighed and looked disappointed. He was starting to reply when a white man with a mohawk scooped the cigarette from her hand.
“I’m heading back to Beloved,” the man said. From the smell, Jason decided the man’s beautiful, handcrafted patch pants had never been laundered.
