“Why do you think that?”
“I just do,” Suzy whispers, sharpening the end of the cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. The ashes fall, and the flame comes alive. Suddenly the orange-red tip of the cigarette looks almost transparent.
With Mom and Dad gone most of the day—sometimes through the night, depending on their job of the moment—the only one Suzy had was Grace. Yet they were never close, never comrades. It is impossible to tell why. It wasn’t even jealousy. Sure, Grace was better in many ways, prettier, smarter, and often wiser. But jealousy would only happen if the sisters were willing to engage with each other. No, their distance has had nothing to do with jealousy. There has never been any room for warmth between the two. They had different friends. Grace knew boys; Suzy didn’t. Grace’s favorite book was Moby-Dick, which Suzy gave up after trying the first few pages, bored and confused. Grace had a life outside school. Suzy could not even fathom where she would go. They shared bunk beds always. Grace on top, because she said that she didn’t want anyone seeing her when she was asleep. When she was not whispering into the phone with one of her many secret boyfriends, she would disappear up there and read. Grace was always reading. Even when Dad got drunk one night and ripped down her posters of Adam Ant and Siouxie and the Banshees, Grace did not flinch but climbed up to her bed with a book. When she was grounded for being found naked with a boy in the back of a car, she repeated, “Sorry, I’ll never do it again,” with not a hint of regret on her face, and read for a month straight. She read just about anything. Novels, newspapers, sometimes even the Sears catalog or a copy of the neighbor’s TV Guide. She would flip through them for hours, which seemed unfathomable. Suzy once made the mistake of buying her a book and spent most of her allowance of twenty dollars for a new edition of Anna Karenina. Suzy could not decide what to pick at first, but she thought that the cover looked mature and that Grace might like the fact that it had originally been banned in Russia. It also looked promising that the volume was impossibly thick, like Moby-Dick. Grace, though, was hardly grateful. She handed it back to Suzy without a word. When Suzy began protesting, Grace said quietly, “I don’t want you choosing my books.” They were only about fourteen or fifteen then. That was the first time Suzy suspected that it wasn’t about books after all. Grace’s obsessive reading might not have had anything to do with books. It didn’t matter what she read, as long as she was left alone. Reading was a refuge, a shield, an excuse to avoid facing the family, and Grace would not let Suzy be an accomplice.
The only regular interaction between the sisters concerned chores, as though they were two strangers with one thing in common—the house rules. Grace, being older, was in charge of most housework, while Suzy helped with whatever was left unfinished: vacuuming, dusting, taking out trash, preparing rice. Grace was quick with everything. The house was spotlessly clean by the time she stood at the door in a skirt too short for a fifteen-year-old, telling Suzy, “The rice is rinsed. Stick it in the cooker in ten minutes. The rooms are vacuumed; make sure you put away the vacuum cleaner in the broom closet. Tell them that I’ve gone to the AP-English study group.” That was the extent of their conversation. Sometimes, in the morning, Suzy would ask her where she had gone on the previous evening. “The study group,” Grace would snap before walking out the door.
Then there was the interpreting. Neither of her parents had spoken much English, which meant that they relied on the girls to break the language barrier. But almost always the job fell on Grace, because she was the older one, and smarter. Grace, since she was little, had to pore over a letter from the bank trying to make sense of words like “APR” or “Balance Transfers,” or call Con Edison’s 800 number for a payment extension. Suzy would sit by her side, scared and anxious. There was something daunting about undertaking what should have been delegated to an adult. Not only was it nearly impossible to understand the customer-service representatives, but often they would not release information unless it was the account holder calling. Grace would plead, to no avail, that her parents were at work and that they did not speak the language. Sometimes Mom and Dad would sit by the phone, dictating exactly what Grace should say. But often such demands did not work, because their request was so anachronistic that it defied translation. After all, their understanding of such transactions was steeped in Korean ways. Finally, Dad would scream at Grace, “Tell them no late fee, they’ll get their money by next week!” Then Grace would look helpless as she repeated, “But he said that the balance was due last week, so next week will be considered late!” At those times, Dad never seemed grateful for Grace’s instant interpreting service. He seemed frustrated, even suspicious. He was certain that if he could speak the language he would resolve all matters with a quick phone call. He seemed to resent Grace for relating to him what he did not want to hear, that the debts must be paid instantly, because that’s what most of those calls were about—money owed in one form or another. But most of all, he seemed angry at his own powerlessness. The ordeal of having to rely on his young daughter for such basic functions humiliated him. He never seemed to forget that humiliation.
Their parents’ lack of English and the family’s constant relocation only made things worse. There were always red-stamped notices in their mailbox. Once or twice a month, Grace skipped school to accompany Mom and Dad to the Department of Motor Vehicles or an insurance company or some other bureaucratic nightmare. They were often gone all day. Afterward, their parents went back to work while Grace returned home alone. Suzy would often notice the red in Grace’s eyes, as though she’d cried all the way. Almost always, upon arriving home, Grace would confine herself to the upper bunk without speaking to Suzy. Or she would stay out and come home much later. Curiously, on those nights, Dad never said anything. He pretended not to notice that Grace was missing at the dinner table. Suzy never asked Grace about the exact nature of those interpreting tasks—because they seemed so scary to little Suzy, and because Suzy felt guilty for letting Grace do all the work.
“You know, I sometimes wonder…” Caleb’s voice turns suddenly low, almost flat, the way it gets when he is serious.
Suzy keeps her eyes on the cigarette burning in the ashtray. The red wine, the plate of cheese, the smoke slowly rising.
“I wonder… why you never talk about your parents.” Caleb is cautious, uncertain if he should bring it up at all.
She had told him about her parents once, briefly. But that was it. Nothing more. No heartfelt anecdotes, no tearful monologues. Suzy avoided the topic, and he had never asked. Instead, Caleb would chatter on about his parents, his lovers, his uncertain careers, and Suzy would laugh. They have grown comfortable with that.
“My parents—I never think about them.”
Suzy holds the cigarette between her index and middle fingers without actually bringing it to her mouth. She is hesitant. She is not sure what else to say, although Caleb is quiet, listening.
She recalls how she had abandoned them in their final years. She recalls the last time she saw them and how Dad had called her a whore, just once, but it was enough to slash her. She makes up little stories in her head about how happy the family would have been had she not run off with Damian, had her parents not been at the store on that final morning, had her sister forgiven her. Yet she cannot remember the sound of Dad’s laugh. She never longs for Mom’s Nina Ricci perfume. She never craves the empty late afternoons when Grace had gone out and her parents were still not home from work. She can barely picture her parents’ faces in daylight; she rarely saw them before dark.