Strangers at the Feast (22 page)

The next day he asked Spider what Miss Macy had mean by “we all know where he came from.”

Spider told him what all the folks in the neighborhood knew. The summer after Kijo was born, his mother fell in love with a man named Sunny who worked at Rye Playland. Sunny ran a small-time drug operation out of the Haunted House. He bought Arlette jewelry and steak dinners, gave her drugs. They drove around town in his red convertible, sometimes with baby Kijo in a car seat, and she told people she was studying be a tap dancer. But Sunny soon broke her heart, and after that, Arlette was only interested in the pipe.

Grandma Rose fought like crazy to keep her daughter decent. This was before they tore down Southfield Village, when dealers still worked the corners of Freedom Avenue, when a man named Lullaby ran the show. Arlette began lying and stealing, whoring herself out in abandoned cars. She came home one night trying to get money
from Grandma Rose, waving a knife. Grandma Rose wrestled the knife away—which is how she hurt her hip—and called the cops. She hadn’t heard a thing from her daughter since.

Some said Arlette was hooking in Bridgeport, some said she ran off with Kijo’s father; there was debate as to who he was. A high school classmate, a man who got rough with her one night. Maybe even Sunny. No one knew exactly when they met. Kijo liked to imagine it was Sunny; it gave him a name, a story.

“We’re goners far as the neighborhood’s concerned,” said Spider, whose father was serving life in the fed pen for cutting up a Mexican outside a bar. “It’s like they reserved a cell for us in prison.”

Kijo then understood why Spider had become his friend, why he didn’t mind his stutter or his clumsiness.

They both had bad blood.

Somehow this new understanding of his parentage allowed Kijo to speak clearly. This knowledge of where he’d come from relaxed his tongue. He stopped stealing candy and street signs, stopped making mischief. He combed his hair, tucked in his shirt, and shined his shoes.

He could now see it in his grandma’s eyes, the watery fear that had been there all along:
Where you been, boy? Where you going out to?
When she gripped his shoulders, she shook him like she was shaking out the devil.

She never spoke of his mother or father.

As he grew older, Kijo watched his body change, taking on the shape of a stranger. His hands were thick-fingered and large, his feet long and narrow—they belonged to a man he’d never seen. He felt like clay being shaped by unseen hands. His nose widened, a nose unlike any other in family photographs. He was darker, too. Coffee-bean black. If he passed his father on the street, he wondered, would they know each other?

The mystery of his nature became a sour taste in Kijo’s mouth. A loose tooth he couldn’t let alone.

As his voice deepened, he imagined hearing his father’s voice, a rumbling laugh from some dark corner of a movie theater;
that’s him
. Then Kijo could see who the man was, understand what was forming inside him.

How else would you know what might wake up inside you one day?

DOUGLAS

Before he met Denise, Douglas had been dating Sumi Kitamura on and off for six years. They’d met at Duke. She was Japanese-American, and her father was a physics professor at the university. Her father wanted her to be a physicist, and there was no denying Sumi’s natural ability with science and math. She won practically every university prize, and the lacrosse coach had arranged for her to tutor players in their weaker subjects. She helped Douglas with physics and chemistry, two subjects she cared little about since her heart was set on being a painter.

She’d appear at their tutoring session hugging a canvas; then she’d set it against the wall and ask him to lift off the sheet.

“Gorgeous,” he’d say.

“Be more particular.”

In truth, Douglas thought her paintings looked off balance, colorless, depressing. Sickly flowers in cracked vases. “Well, what do the art teachers say? I’m no critic, ask people who really
know
art.”

“They’re all friends with my father. They’ll never encourage me against his wishes.”

She told him about how the great women painters of the Renaissance—Lavinia Fontana, Marietta Tintoretto—had, in fact, been trained by their fathers. She gave Douglas paintings, which he hung all over his dorm room and, after graduation, in his New York City apartment. Her father never hung any.

“Hey, why don’t you make him a painting of something physics related. E equals MC squared.”

“I’m done giving him anything!”

This rebellion against her father was the crux of Sumi’s life, making her alternately angry and sulky, prone to fits of crying. They’d be out at a party, giddy and tipsy, and then, on the host’s bookshelf, her father’s textbooks would catch Sumi’s eye. Within seconds her drink was down. “We’re leaving.”

Douglas’s family wasn’t much help, either. Whenever he brought Sumi home, his mother, who usually cornered his friends in the living room and excitedly interrogated them about their studies, would feign a dramatic yawn. Before disappearing into her bedroom, she would suggest a few restaurants they might enjoy. His mother said he could date whom he liked, it was no business of hers, but she was quite certain he wouldn’t be with Sumi for the long haul.

“Douglas, can’t you see how awkward it is for me? I can see what the girl wants, that she’s hoping I’ll embrace her as a mother-in-law. I simply cannot lead her on.”

Who knew where things with Sumi were headed, but he sensed his mother’s discomfort stemmed from Sumi’s Japanese descent.

“Maybe I can spend the holidays with you this year,” Sumi suggested. “I’m sick, sick, sick of my dad. He keeps giving me books on painters who committed suicide.”

“The holidays, isn’t that family time?”

“You don’t want me there?”

“
I
do. It’s my mother.”

“Well, she probably doesn’t think any girl is good enough for you. Remind her I won the Fermi Prize as a freshman.”

“I think… I think it might be the Japanese thing. My mother’s from Massachusetts. She’s barely left New England. The big thrill of her week is her gardening club. All her friends are, well, clones of her.”

“And you think my father wants me to marry some white boy from Connecticut?”

“Who said marry?”

After that, Sumi insisted they go only to sushi bars and noodle shops. At the movies, she’d pretend to miss lines of dialogue, lean in, and ask him to please explain what was said. She showed up one night wearing a red-silk kimono.

“Sumi, this is ridiculous. What’s next, chopsticks in your hair?”

“I won’t deny my heritage for you or your mother. I will not play WASP.” She tightened her kimono belt in one sharp tug. “You’re the first guy in history to date a Japanese girl and turn out to have a Caucasian fetish.”

“Sumi, I love you.”

“You should,” she said. “I’m ten times smarter than you.”

He went camping with friends to think things through and when he got home, he told her they were too young to be serious. He started going to parties on his own, asking girls for their numbers. He met Denise at a work conference: Consulting for the New Millenium. Tanned and petite, Denise stood behind a table of sandwiches, directing the flow of food like an air-traffic controller. She wore a red chef’s hat that said
DISHES
.

As Douglas reached for a ham-and-cheese, she said, “Nuh-uh. You look like a foie-gras man. Take this one instead.”

“Delicious.”

“I made them.” She slid her card into his shirt pocket. “If you ever want more.”

The catering was just a weekend gig. Her real job was in branding. She made up names for cars, bottled water, bras, and software. She was part of a small team of young women who scoured thesauruses and atlases and encyclopedias of Greek mythology for obscure names that would bait people into buying things. The Cleo Xj2000, Aquamor, Swansol.

In the mornings before work, Denise ran three laps around the reservoir, then she pinned her toes beneath her paint-cracked radiator and huffed out fifty sit-ups.

“Jesus, you make me feel lazy,” he said.

“Some people, people who have met with unfortunate ends, have called me high-strung.”

“You’re industrious. And it’s totally hot. You’re like the love child of Jessica Rabbit and the Energizer Bunny.”

“Well, I’m not a trust-fund kid. Poverty really lights a fire under your ass.”

Two years out of college and she’d already set up her own 401(k).

She came from a family of three brothers in Pittsburgh that she didn’t like to talk about. Douglas loved her no-nonsense, I’ll-arm-wrestle-you-for-it quality. Where Sumi had been angry and despairing, waking in the middle of the night once a week threatening to break up with him, Denise booked airline tickets early and requested bulkhead seats. She read road maps,
accurately
—while rubbing his thigh! She didn’t waste time politely refusing telemarketers:
Hi, I’m calling from the…
Click, call over. If the maître d’ gave them a bad table, if her steak was overcooked, she made her displeasure politely but clearly known.

Once, when a grocery-store bag boy put the eggs at the bottom, she began brusquely repacking it.

“Denise,” Douglas whispered, gesturing to the boy, who clearly had Down syndrome.

“I need a big time-out,” she said outside. “I feel crazed. I have two jobs. I’m trying to have a relationship. And frankly, I wonder where that’s even going. I’m investing a lot of time in you.”

“Well, maybe you should ditch the catering gig.”

“That, jackass, wasn’t the question.”

They’d been dating a year, and Douglas had known it was only a matter of time before she started gauging his long-term potential. He was in love, but the idea of settling down made him anxious. His
future seemed murky. Ardor Consulting certainly wasn’t the right job for him; there was something else he was meant to do, but it hadn’t come to him yet. In the meantime, couldn’t they enjoy late nights of martinis and karaoke? Smuggling panini into action movies? Bowling and batting cages? Couldn’t they be young and carefree? Denise charted her daily runs, planned her lunches on a calendar, laid out outfits the night before. And now he could see it coming—she was going to plan his whole life.

Douglas canceled some dates. He and Sumi had stayed in touch and around that time he called her. One night, in the middle of a storm, she showed up at his apartment grappling with a dripping umbrella. Her face was pink from drinking. She began crying, saying Douglas couldn’t let his mother keep them apart.

She spent the night. In the morning he realized she’d stayed awake making a portrait of his face; it looked terrible. She had put on one of his old lacrosse jerseys and she stumbled toward the bathroom in his slippers, hungover. She made a mess of the toothpaste, gargling loudly, and left the cap off the mouthwash. She began to talk once again about the struggle with her father.

Douglas thanked her for the portrait and whisked her out. At the office, he looked around at all the junior partners and vice presidents; he’d met their wives at the annual holiday party and July Fourth picnic. Sharp, practical women. Planners.

“I want to cook you dinner tonight,” he told Denise on the phone.

“You don’t know how to cook.”

“Which makes it all the more romantic, right?”

He boiled spaghetti and oversaw a splattering skillet of tomato sauce as Denise sipped at her wine, looking around his apartment. She plucked a pair of earrings off his nightstand.

“Rhinestones? Tacky.”

“Oh, I found them under the bed and assumed they were yours. Maybe they’ve been here since I moved in.”

The water frothed over the pot and he lowered the flame. He lit
candles and shook out her napkin for her, waiter-style, and said she looked beautiful. He suggested they get away for a weekend, maybe to the Adirondacks, or to look at old bridges in Connecticut, all the while trying to detect any distrust in her eyes. But Denise twirled her spaghetti, said his cooking wasn’t half-bad, and then complained about a coworker who chatted all day on the phone with her sister in Spain.

They went back to spending a couple of nights a week at his apartment.

It couldn’t have been more than a couple months later that she called him at work one afternoon.

“We should talk soon,” she said. “In person. I have some news.”

GINNY

Ginny had returned to the kitchen and was staring out the window, utterly bored. All the planning and preparing was over; Priya was happily watching television with her cousins. Her mother and Denise were examining a cookbook with the fervor of biblical scholars, muttering about “brilliant substitutions.” She wished she’d brought some reading. Standing around the kitchen with women really wasn’t her thing.

“I might just sneak upstairs for a quick nap,” said Ginny.

“It’s the middle of the day!” her mother cried.

“Twenty minutes, just to reboot.”

“Have some coffee.” Denise gestured toward a restaurant-style espresso machine/coffeemaker.

Figuring she’d caused enough upset for one day, Ginny made her way across the slick burgundy marble floor. She was surprised, given Douglas’s alarmist attitude, that they didn’t spend their lives worrying they would fall and crack their heads open.

Beside the doorway hung a shiny red fire extinguisher and a defibrillator. Somewhere, undoubtedly, hung a framed plan of the electrical wiring.

Chrome stockpots and kettles gleamed from the stove. Six stools flanked a long island in the center of the kitchen. On it sat two large blocks of Henckels knives and an array of devices for every culinary impulse—garlic press, apple corer, electric can opener, juice machine, electric chopper, lemon zester. All the sharp-edged stuff
you were supposed to tuck away in childproof cabinets. But Denise had bypassed the need for ugly childproofing clips by simply dividing the house into child-free zones. She had trained the children as to where, exactly, in that massive house they could and could not go. Whenever she said “training” it reminded Ginny of dogs with electric collars; she was always waiting for one of the twins to walk through the doorway and go
Zaaap!