My Year of Rest and Relaxation (65)

By mid-June, it was too hot to wear the tracksuit Ping Xi had left me. I bought a pack of white cotton panties and plastic slip-on shoes from the 99 Cent Store on 108th Street. I liked it up there, almost Harlem. I paced slowly up and down Second Avenue in red or blue gym shorts and oversized athletic tees. I got in the habit of buying a box of Corn Flakes from the Egyptians each morning. I fed the Corn Flakes in gentle handfuls to the squirrels in the park. I drank no coffee.

I discovered the Goodwill store on 126th Street. I liked looking at things other people had let go of. Maybe the pillowcase I was sniffing had been used on an old man’s deathbed. Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler. Goodwill indeed. This was how I refurnished my apartment. One day, I brought the white fox fur coat with me to the Goodwill and handed it to the teenager taking donations through the door around the corner from the store entrance. He took it calmly, asked if I wanted a receipt. I watched his hands smooth the fur, as though he were assessing its value. Maybe he’d steal it and give it to his girlfriend, or his mother. I hoped he would. But then he just threw it in a huge blue bin.

In August I bought a battery-operated radio and carried it with me to the park each day. I listened to the jazz stations. I didn’t know any names of the songs. The squirrels flocked to me as soon as I uncrumpled the bag of Corn Flakes. They ate straight from my palm, tiny black hands crunching into the cereal, cheeks ballooning. “You pigs!” I told them. They seemed perturbed by the music coming out of my little radio. I kept the volume low when I fed them.



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? ? ?

I DIDN’T THINK MUCH of Ping Xi until I saw Reva. I called her on August 19 from the doorman’s cell phone. Despite all the sleep and forgetting, I still knew her number by heart, and recognized the date on the calendar as her birthday.

She came over the following Sunday, nervous and smelling of a new perfume that reminded me of gummy worms, said nothing about the odd assortment of furniture and decorations in my apartment or my six-month disappearance, my lack of cell phone, the stacks of mildewed books lining the wall of the living room. She just said, “So, it’s been a while, I guess,” sat down where I pointed, at the Goodwill afghan that I’d spread out like a picnic blanket across the floor, and rattled on about her new position at her company. She described her boss as a “CIA tool,” rolling her eyes and emphasizing certain technical terms in her description of her duties. At first I couldn’t tell if they were aphorisms about sex positions. Everything about her seemed troublingly pornographic—her matte foundation, her darkly outlined lips, that perfume, the poised stillness of her hands. “Innovative solutions.” “Anatomy of workplace violence.” “Strong objectives.” She wore her hair in a lose chignon, my tiny pearl earrings budding from her earlobes like drops of milk, simultaneously perverse and innocent, I thought. She also wore my white eyelet blouse and a pair of jeans I’d given her. I felt no longing or nostalgia for the clothes. The jeans had frayed at the cuffs, an inch too long on Reva’s legs. I thought to suggest to her to have them professionally hemmed. There was a place on Eighty-third.

“I just read this story in the New Yorker,” she said, and pulled the rolled-up issue out of her enormous purse. The story was called “Bad at Math.” It was about an adolescent Chinese American in Cleveland who bombs the PSAT, jumps off his two-story junior high school, and breaks both his legs. After the school guidance counselor pressures the boy’s family into group therapy, his parents tell him they love him in a supermarket parking lot and they all start to cry and wail and fall on their knees, while all the other shoppers wheel their carts past and pretend like nothing amazing is going on. “Listen to this opening,” Reva said. “‘For the first time, they said the words. I think it pained them more than the cracking of my shins and femurs.’”

“Go on,” I said. The story was terribly written. Reva read aloud.

Ping Xi appeared in my mind as I listened. I imagined his small, dark eyes staring at me and squinting, one pinching shut as his paint-stained hand, outstretched with a brush, measured me for proportions. But that was all I could remember. He struck me as a reptilian, small-hearted being, someone placed on the planet to strike a chord with similar people, people who distracted themselves with money and conversation rather than sink their hands and teeth into the world around them. Shallow, I guess. But there were worse people on this Earth.

“I had studied for months for the PSAT.” Reva read the story in its entirety. It took at least half an hour. I knew she was just trying to fill the air, take up the time until she could go and leave me forever. That’s what it felt like at least. I can’t say it didn’t hurt me that she held herself at such a distance. But to confront her about it would have been cruel. I had no right to make any demands. I sensed she didn’t really want to hear about my experiences in “rehab” or whatever it was she imagined I’d been through. I watched her mouth move, every little wrinkle in the skin of her lips, the vague dimple on her left cheek, the moon-shaped sadness of her eyes.

“‘A black shred of bok choy had dried and attached itself to the rim of the garbage can,’” she read. I nodded along, hoping to make her feel at ease. When she was done, she sighed, and pulled a piece of gum from her purse.