The Year We Left Home (18 page)

She didn’t cry, just looked wistful. “You must really, really love this stuff, you’re lucky, you know what you want to do with your life, pursue your dream, I don’t have a dream, I just kept taking piano lessons because my parents wanted me to have, you know, an interest. An accomplishment. I wish there was any one thing I was really good at and people would respect me for it. How does it feel to be respected?”

They went to one of the noisy coffee shops that catered to students, students in lumpy hats hand-knit in the Andes, students in cowboy boots, striped mufflers, navy peacoats acquired at thrift stores, all of them hunched over books and intensely reading. Ryan thought he understood what Megan O’Brien was up against. She wasn’t unconventional enough to pass for an artist or a scholar around here. She wore Shetland-wool sweaters over cotton shirts, a parka from L.L. Bean. It
was unclear if she had been outfitted by her parents or had no particular taste or aesthetic of her own. She had a small, puzzled, inexpressive face. She told Ryan she had been adopted as a baby, she’d grown up in Philadelphia, and she had no memory at all of Korea. Supposedly she’d been in an orphanage, but there were stories of parents who’d sold their children, particularly the girl babies, due to poverty. For all she knew, her family, her Korean family, was still back there, peasants grubbing around in rice paddies. She’d never eaten Korean food as a kid and didn’t like it when she’d tried it. She’d grown up as Megan O’Brien, and when she was old enough to ask questions, her parents explained that she had been specially chosen to be a part of their family, that she was a special, special girl and they loved her very much, etc. For the longest time, she thought that
Korean
and
adopted
meant the same thing.

Ryan said he could see how all that would be confusing. She asked him where he was from and he said Iowa. Darkest Iowa. What he always said, a joke to deflect any further inquiry. He didn’t care to discuss his family. They had been bewildered by sadness, by tragedy, and he was no help to them; there was no way to feel good about any of that.

Fortunately, Megan O’Brien wasn’t inclined to stray far from the topic of herself. She said again that she wished she was really, really focused, like he was, committed to what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Ryan was aware that some grade-prospecting might be going on here, some strategic flattering, but that was all right, he had a handle on it. She asked about his thesis, which had yet to take any satisfactory shape, according to his adviser, but in his own mind, and in his recounting of it to Megan O’Brien, it became a magisterial document, a searching examination of identity as experienced by the individual versus political legitimacy as conferred by the state. Wow, said Megan O’Brien. You really are good at this stuff.

At the end of an hour they got up to go and she said that she was going to try a lot harder in class. They walked out of the steamy interior of the coffee shop into a battering cold wind and she said Oh shoot. She was supposed to call her roommate right this minute and tell her
how to sign up for a lottery, a lottery that would determine which dorm rooms they would get next year. She had forgotten all about it. Ryan said that his apartment was just down the street, she could phone from there.

That had been her first visit, a brief one. She hadn’t even taken off her coat, just stood at the kitchen counter to make her phone call. She flicked her eyes over the apartment, taking everything in. The apartment was a mess as usual, newspapers on the floor, an ashtray with a roach he hoped she didn’t notice. A few days’ dishes in the sink. Embarrassing. Neither he nor Zev had current girlfriends of the sort that necessitated housecleaning, or who might be persuaded to clean for them. Ryan waited by the door. He felt an unease, a consciousness of trespass on both their parts. It wasn’t wise to get too buddy-buddy with your students. It was definitely a bad idea to sleep with them. But she was just a sad little girl in need of some extra attention. Maybe he could finally make a difference, be the kind of teacher who mattered to them.

Ten days ago she’d given him the first draft of her paper. It was so riddled with earnest errors, its thought processes so knotted in loops of language, Ryan gave up trying to write notes on it and invited her over after class. This time he cleaned the apartment, filled three black plastic garbage bags with trash. Stored his drug paraphernalia in a box in his closet. They sat at the kitchen table, chaperoned, more or less, by Zev, who kept coming in and out of his bedroom on one or another errand. Megan took notes, clutched at her forehead, despaired of writing anything passable. Patiently, he took her back to her original argument, refined it, made her write an outline and then some sample paragraphs.

The paper was 30 percent of the grade. Eventually he was going to have to disabuse her of the notion that she could possibly haul herself up to an A. But for now she was so grateful. She was sure he had other, more important things to do than help her, she was so stupid and hopeless et cetera.

Now, tonight, she was bringing a new draft. Ryan had already decided not to read it on the spot, but to wait and hand it back to
her with written comments. He intended to be encouraging, while holding back from outright praise. Maybe she could be bumped up to a high B.

The meal was a success, even if Zev complained about the quality of the lettuce in the salad. Out of patriotism or homesickness or both, he felt a duty to complain about all things American. Megan ate in a tidy, ladylike fashion, careful not to get spaghetti sauce on her yellow dress. She laughed at any jokes Zev or Ryan made. It was easy to imagine her reading one of those girls’ magazines that advised them to show an interest, be an active listener. When she finished her wine spritzer, Ryan poured her a glass of undiluted wine.

After they finished eating they opened one of the living room windows and climbed out to sit on the roof. They’d furnished a small, flat space there with cushions and upended milk crates. The sun was gone and with it some of the heat and it was pleasant to sit there watching lights come on in the early dusk. The freeway noise muttered behind them, and a mile away in the other direction was the lake, made invisible by the intervening city blocks. Bites taken here and there by urban renewal, the massive project that made it possible for people like himself to live here. The city in a constant slow-motion process of building up and building down, becoming unrecognizable to itself.

Megan claimed she could see the lake, a dark blue corner of it. Ryan said that wasn’t likely, and she said how did he know what she saw, huh, and punched him lightly in the arm and rocked backward on the cushion so that the curve of her neck rested against his shoulder.

With a combination of stealth and tact, he waited until there was an occasion to move—Zev needing the wine bottle passed to him—disengaged himself, and when he sat back again he shifted himself slightly away from her.

Then everything was OK again. There was an argument—you could call it an argument because of its emphasis and volume, not any actual ill will—between Ryan and Zev about McCarthyism, of all things, the anticommunist hysteria of the fifties. Zev had made quite a study of it, as he had of anything crummy or crazy, anything that
reflected badly on the country. He was living here under protest. Really, the guy had his issues.

Yes yes yes, Ryan said, McCarthy and all that. Shooting the occasional president. But even Zev had to admit that there was something grand, something hopeful, in both the vision and the actuality of the American enterprise, surely Zev could understand that, given his own brand-new and created country? The outlandishness of willing an entire nation into existence. Rough edges and all. Look at the three of them. Genetic material from all over the globe. His domesticated Viking self. Megan, Korean by birth, Irish by accident. Zev, child of Polish refugees, displaced twice over. What an unlikely mix, what possibilities, what tug and pull of human tides allowed them this beautiful evening, this not-quite lake view, their perch on the city’s bright edge?

From which, Zev said, so many had been removed. The poor and the black. Inconvenient people. Yes, Ryan said. They had. And the blacks had replaced the earlier Jewish immigrants. Who had in their turn replaced others, going all the way back to the Indians. One should not forget the Indians. The first big losers. Politics always the story of winners and losers. It was written.

Zev said, “The wine is making of you a bad poet.” He drained his glass and stepped over the window ledge back inside.

A small silence now that the two of them were alone. The roof, the dark sky above them, were still baking hot, but Ryan imagined he felt some ghost or echo of a lake breeze, a wedge of cooler air. He was tired after the long day and the ungodly heat. He should get some reading done. He was slacking off, he’d spent too much time this semester gabbing when he should have been reading, reading when he should have been writing. It was too easy to fall into the pose of being a graduate student. You were impossibly burdened by scholarly labors, intense and exhausting brain work. And then you sat around on your ass, drinking and complaining about all the work you hadn’t done. Megan said, “Zev is so full of it.”

“Yeah.” Then, paying attention: “What do you mean?”

“What you said? It was great. Passionate.” The word, once spoken, seemed to embarrass her. Her shoulders, with their fabric bows, convulsed, as if trying to wriggle out of what she’d said. “I thought that’s what school was going to be like. Was supposed to be like. People passionate about their life’s work.”

“Well, yeah, everybody should be . . . committed to what they do.” Which wasn’t exactly what she’d said. Passionate. He wasn’t sure if he was, or at least, he wasn’t sure if he was what she thought.

Maybe he was only passionate about his own preoccupations, maybe everyone was, and your life’s work was only yourself writ large, and in capital letters.

“So,” he began, preparatory to saying they should call it a night, but Megan hurried to speak over him. “I didn’t bring my paper. I need to do some more work on it.”

Big relief. He wouldn’t have to spend hours going through it. “That’s OK, you have another two weeks. Plenty of time. And you know, you can always go to the writing lab.” That’s where he should have sent her and her murdered sentences to begin with.

Megan waved her wineglass. “More, please.”

“You’re sure that’s a good idea?” He was pretty sure it wasn’t.

“It’s a great idea.”

He refilled her glass and she took a big, punishing drink from it. “If I don’t get all A’s, my parents are going to send me back to Korea.”

“Nobody gets all A’s.”

She shook her head overvigorously. “They’d look at it as, you know, returning damaged merchandise. But hey, it might work out over there. Roots. The Fatherland. Motherland. One or the other.”

A happy thought came to him. He wouldn’t even have to read her paper. He could just turn in her grade, her respectable B. School would be over for the summer and he wouldn’t have to face her. There was still that part of him that wanted to be liked, that made him commit similar large and small acts of cowardice in the service of being liked. Before he could think about it he said, “Megan, you’re not going to get an A in the class. It’s just not going to happen.”

For a moment he thought she hadn’t heard him. She didn’t say anything, and it was too dark to see her face. Then she said, “I don’t understand. I haven’t even written my paper yet.”

“Yeah, but it’s not mathematically possible. There’s a formula, percentages, I don’t have anything to do with it. Even if your paper is an A. You still have to write a good paper for a B, and I can help you some more with that. I just don’t want you to be too disappointed.”

“I don’t understand,” she said again, and Ryan had the dead certainty that she would never understand, and that for reasons of his own vanity and his own weakness, he had gone about everything wrong.

He said, “It’s a course outside your major, you aren’t expected to do as well in those. As long as you try your hardest, I’m sure your parents are going to be just fine.” She said something under her breath. He didn’t hear it and didn’t want to. “They might even be impressed.”

“I wanted you to be impressed.”

Something cold, a current of queasy dread, passed through him. “I am. I’m very impressed by your effort. How important it is to you.”

Megan got up from her seat, walked to the edge of the roof, and holding her wineglass around the rim, dropped it over the side. Three stories down, the glass broke with a tiny, musical sound.

“What the hell?”

Her yellow dress turned away from the roof edge as she regarded him. “Sorry.”

“You could kill somebody like that. Christ, was anybody down there?”

“How about I buy you a new glass.”

“That was just stupid.” Ryan wasn’t sure if she was just being pissy, a pissy little girl having a tantrum, a booze tantrum, he reminded himself—
Shit, good job of getting her drunk, man
—or if she was nuts in some way that hadn’t shown itself until now, and most of all how was he going to backpedal out of it, calm her down, get her feeling all right about things, or at the very least out of his apartment before she smashed up anything else.

“Now look, I know you’re upset, but you are way, way overreacting. It’s just some dumb paper in some dumb course.”

“I guess I’m just some dumb girl.”

“Don’t say that, come on.”

“Sometimes nobody pays attention until you, you know, make some noise.”

“I’m paying attention, Megan. Sure.”

“Sure you are.” She walked over to sit on the sill of the open window. Light from the room behind her polished her thin bare arms and shoulders, picked out the stray hairs growing along her neck in two shadowy triangles. She wasn’t a pretty girl. He found himself thinking this and censored the ungenerous thought.

He said, “Look, I don’t think you should be comparing yourself to other people all the time. You imagine that everybody’s so much smarter and more together than you are and it’s just not true. Hey, I’m not that smart or together most of the time, that’s the last thing I am. I don’t work half as hard as I should, I make stupid mistakes about twenty times a day, I don’t know if I want to go on for my doctorate or even if I do, what comes after that. Nobody has it all figured out, Megan, that’s my point. And when I was your age? Oh man. I had no clue. It was more like I knew what I didn’t want. I’ve got my share of family issues too. You don’t have to be adopted for those.”