I said I didn’t need anything.
You won’t let me buy you a gift, snapped Tami. What do you have against Tiffany’s? The implication being what did I have against her.
Wearing something from here makes you legitimate. Status, she said, her silver bracelet jangling on her wrist like a price tag. Don’t be ungrateful, Joannie. When I was your age, I would have jumped at the chance to shop here.
When she was my age, three years ago, at twenty-four, she hadn’t yet met my brother. A short courtship began after their hibachi meal but since the work visa keeping her here was set to expire, a decision was made to speed up the process. I didn’t want to think this but I did. The most American of mentalities crept in. Beautiful and smart Chinese girl from Chongqing meets my brother, steals my brother, and uses him as a means to an end. Overlooking the fact that she was working many hours in finance as well and would for another two years, until she became pregnant with their first child. Overlooking also the fact that she and my brother had similar core values and were very much in love.
Height and physique–wise they were well matched. At five nine, my sister-in-law reminded me of an integral sign or the elegant f-holes of a violin. Fang somehow got the height gene and grew five inches past our father to six one. Then thanks to trainers and a high-protein diet, he bulked up to become the shape of his namesake, a square.
When I finally moved to New York for residency, they had already settled down in Greenwich with their first son, a second on the way. Greenwich, they said, that’s where you’re supposed to move next. To start your private practice, to buy your first home. The boys needed cousins. An aunt and uncle who lived close by. Fang believed that a family should grow in the most normal way possible. Weird was for later. Three or four generations down the line we could afford to be weird.
I lost my brother the day he decided to become my parent.
Obvious, of course. Immigrant father achieves very little and immigrant son, seeking to outdo the father, achieves the level of mind-boggling success that could only happen in America. Soon, Mind-boggling Rich Son starts a family of his own and becomes the new patriarch on this continent and assumes he knows best.
Interrupting my thoughts was the kind cabdriver, who had turned the heater up for me. How we doing back there? he said, shouted over the noise of the fan. Toasty? No rush.
* * *
—
TWICE IN DECEMBER, I heard, then spotted, in my neighborhood a caravan of festive RTVs rolling south down Broadway, then east along 110th. The RTVs were decorated in red and green gift wrap, their drivers were dressed in green onesies, with elf hats, and for a mile radius anyone could hear the song being blasted, Santa Claus was coming to town. Cars and buses made way; pedestrians stopped crossing the street. Then at the very end of the parade Santa Claus did come on the back of a red monster truck with monster wheels, dancing, hip shaking, in traditional red getup, with reflective aviator sunglasses and a full black beard. I was stunned each time I saw this but, like all the parents and children on the sidewalk, waved to Santa both times.
* * *
—
TATER TOTS DAY IN the hospital cafeteria, and I had just scooped a full plate and gone out to find a seat. Reese was at a table eating a sad deli sandwich alone, no tater tots. When I went to sit down next to him, pushing the tray of fried goodness into the table middle for both of us to share, he didn’t greet me like usual but started talking as if I’d been sitting there all along.
Yesterday, he had an epiphany, he said.
About? I asked.
About recognizing some hard truths with respect to his situation. The first being that he didn’t belong at this hospital anymore, or any hospital; the second, more severe—he asked if I was ready for it and I said I would brace myself—the second being that he’s never belonged in medicine to begin with. In hindsight, what was he really doing with his life? All these years trying to fit himself into a mold when maybe he was never meant to fit a mold, but the reverse.
I asked what was the reverse.
That the mold was meant to fit him. That he was the mold.
You’re the mold, I said. Which, when said aloud, didn’t sound quite right and only reminded me of fungi.
I asked if this had anything to do with my raise.
No way, he said. Haven’t thought about that in ages. The deli meat in his sandwich drooped, the lettuce was already soggy.
I said he would get his own raise soon; I could see it coming around the corner.
But from here on out, they’ll give them all to you, he replied. That’s how it works. Once they identify someone, that person reaps all the rewards. When it comes down to it, Joan, you truly belong in this profession, whereas I’m not so sure I ever did. Compared with you, I’ll never be good enough. A terrible feeling, being average or below. I’m sure you’ve never experienced it, so you have no idea what I’m going through, but it’s a gutted feeling right here.
He put a hand on his chest. I lost my appetite for tots.
What else would you do? I asked.
He said he had asked himself the same question, which precipitated another more horrifying epiphany about his lack of a legacy, should he continue down his current path of mediocrity. A man needs a career legacy, he emphasized, whereas a woman doesn’t always have to worry about that, a woman doesn’t have the same pressures.
I said I cared about career legacy; I had the same pressures as he did in that realm and wanted to be more than just somebody’s wife.
He seemed caught off guard to hear me say that. He explained he was using “woman” in the abstract, he didn’t mean me specifically.
Oh, I said, and he continued to talk about this abstract woman as if I had no skin in the game.
A woman biologically is able to reproduce, he said, and should she choose to, her legacy would be secure, without concerns for what else she can offer the world since she has already given it a human being. But a man can’t get pregnant on his own. A man must forge his own legacies and create something out of nothing.
I tried to act surprised by his statements, to lift my eyebrows a little and show that I hadn’t realized this before, that Reese, being a male, didn’t have ovaries that released one egg each month to be fertilized, and if this egg isn’t fertilized by one sperm out of an onslaught, the sixteen-millimeter-thick uterine lining that had readied itself to support the fertilized egg, the zygote, would shred, each month, bit by bit, and come out the uterus like a vine of ripe tomatoes put through the blender.
I said while I didn’t know this abstract woman personally, I imagined that once she met her abstract man, she would probably tell him to fuck right off.
Fuck right off? he asked.
Yeah, like that.
Perplexed but not necessarily offended, he said it seemed too early in the day for swear words and he didn’t quite know what I meant.
* * *
—
DEATHS SOAR THE LAST week of December, and New Year’s Day is consistently the deadliest day of the year. Weather, influenza, car accidents, substance abuse around the holidays, stress of family, of eating, and of constantly having to be jolly, but no verifiable cause has been found.