Miracle Creek(50)

She opened the box with the wok—only the second time ever—and grabbed the instructions/recipes booklet. She flipped through until she found it: the infamous H-Mart note, which she’d hidden away and tried to forget about for the last year.

Today in court was the first time she’d realized that anyone other than Matt, Mary, and she herself even knew about it, much less that its existence was a point of contention. And to think, she’d almost missed when it came up in court today. After Pierson said the protesters were innocent, she’d been preoccupied with thoughts of that night—how she’d seen the protesters driving by Miracle Submarine, what time that was (8:10? 8:15?) and how reliable these “cell tower pings” could be if they corroborated their lies, and, oh God, was there a record of her own cell tower pings somewhere?—when Teresa stood and yelled out, “I saw the H-Mart note.” Janine’s heart had pounded her rib cage and she’d had to rearrange her hair to hide her burning cheeks.

Why had she kept it? She could think of no purpose, no reason other than her supreme idiocy. In the hospital after the explosion, when she overheard detectives talking about finding cigarettes and needing to comb through the woods in the morning, she’d panicked and driven to Miracle Creek in the middle of the night to retrieve the things she’d stupidly left behind. She couldn’t find the cigarettes or matches; the note was the only thing she found, behind a bush near a square area cordoned off with yellow tape (Elizabeth’s picnic spot, she later learned). She grabbed the note and, for some bizarre reason she couldn’t explain, chose to keep it.

Of course, everything she did back then seemed inexplicable now, a year later. But on that day, with the insanity-inducing mix of shame and rage coursing through her, all her actions had made perfect sense. Even the note-in-wok placement—it had seemed strangely appropriate to keep the proof of her husband’s relationship with a Korean girl inside a present from the woman who’d first accused him of having an “Oriental fetish.”

It had happened the Thanksgiving after their engagement, at Matt’s grandparents’ house. After introductions, Janine was returning from the bathroom when she overheard a group of female voices—Matt’s cousins, all perky blondes with Southern accents in varying degrees of thickness—saying in whispers, as if sharing shameful secrets, “I didn’t know she was Oriental!” “What is this now, the third?” “I think one was Pakistani—does that count?” “I’ve been telling you, he has an Oriental fetish, some men are just like that.”

At this last utterance (made by the soon-to-be wok-gifter), Janine padded back. She locked the bathroom door, turned on the faucet, and looked at herself in the mirror. Oriental fetish. Was that what she was? An exotic plaything to quench some deep-seated psychosexual aberration? Fetish implied something wrong. Obscene, even. And the word Oriental—it conjured up alien images of third-world, backward villages from long ago. Geisha and child brides. Submission and perversion. She felt hot shame sweeping through her, head to toe, side to side, each sweep flooding her in torrents. And anger, a piercing sense of unfairness: she’d had white boyfriends, but no one accused her of harboring a Caucasian fetish. And she had friends who’d dated only blondes or Jewish women or Republican men (by coincidence or intent, no one knew or cared), but they didn’t get accused of having a blonde fetish or Jew fetish or Republican fetish. But take any non-Asian guy who’s dated at least two Asian women—well, that was a fetish, he must have wanted them to fulfill some kinky, psychologically aberrant need he had for exotic Orientalness. But why? Who decided it was normal to be attracted to blondes and Jews and Republicans, but not to Asian women? Why was “fetish,” with its connotation of sexual deviance, reserved for Asian women and feet? It was offensive, it was bullshit, and she wanted to scream out, I am not “Oriental,” and I am not a foot!

At dinner, Janine sat next to Matt (but not too close), feeling wrong and dirty, wondering who else thought Oriental fetish looking at them. Her acute awareness of her foreignness churned in her stomach anytime anyone remarked about Asians, even the benignly stereotypical or intended-to-be-flattering comments she normally laughed off: Matt’s kind grandmother saying, “Imagine what gorgeous kids you’ll have. I saw this special on the Vietnam War half-breed kids, and I’m not kidding, they’re just beautiful,” for instance, or Matt’s solicitous uncle saying, “Matt says you’re first in your class. I’m not surprised. I knew some Asian kids in college—Japanese, I think—and boy, were they wicked smart.” (Followed by his wife’s “Half of Berkeley’s Asian now,” then to Janine, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”)

Afterward, Janine tried to forget it, reminded herself it was an ignorant comment uttered by an ignorant person, and in any event, Matt had plenty of non-Asian ex-girlfriends (specifically, six whites, versus two Asian-Americans—she’d checked the next day). But from time to time—when she saw Matt joking with an Asian nurse in the café, for instance, or when a woman she’d never liked said, “You guys should double-date with the new podiatrist and his wife, she’s Asian, too”—she thought of the wok cousin and felt heat sear her eyes and cheeks.

But those times, she knew he’d done nothing wrong and she was being irrationally reactionary. The notes were different. The first one she found—the night before the explosion, while doing laundry, in Matt’s pants pocket—she’d shown to Matt, who said it was from a hospital intern whose passes he’d rebuffed. She’d tried to believe him, had wanted to, but she couldn’t help looking the next morning—through his clothes, car, even the trash—and found more with the same handwriting. Most were short, variations on See you tonight? or Missed you last night, but she came across one reading Hate SAT words! NEED smokes tonight!, and she knew: Matt had lied.