She applies it absentmindedly, staring at the laminated menu, her expensive new phone on the table, but you know her brand of lip balm: the one made from beeswax and menthol. You imagine her lips tingling, made sensate by the menthol and the cool air tumbling from the diner’s thundering ducts. The air circulated by oversized rattan ceiling fans shaped like fronds, shaped like vacations people dream of taking. You imagine that she shares your dissatisfaction with the menu’s selection of salads, this woman whose suit is without shoulder pads, this woman whose hair is well-tended and without bangs, who must be here visiting family or on business. What business that might be you cannot imagine.

It would be so easy for you walk over and say something – Isn’t it funny? or I love that stuff… Zackary tells you that the people here are renowned for their friendliness. It would be so easy to reach out and meet someone new and feel, briefly, like yours is a world populated by chance encounters.

You wait until the waitress comes by to ask if you would like anything else and you hope that your smiling eye contact will distract her from the coffee which has been cooling, untouched on the table, for the past thirty-five minutes. You have watched her attend to other customers and chat flirtatiously with the cook. You have watched him smile crudely and smear clean each of his fingers, one after the other, on his apron. You ask her if she could please bring something a little lighter than half-and-half. And perhaps a glass of ice water.

You come here more often than you would like, when you cannot muster the energy to cook and your loneliness makes the temptation of ordering in like the quick, rattling beauty of the gleam of a knife in the dark.

* * *

All through childhood it was rugs, rugs, rugs. In her pride at her marriage to a successful businessman your mother squared her shoulders and straightened her neck. She read the newsletters, she studied the industry. Daddy tells her to be quiet whenever she offers her opinion or advice, even today, even with her years of calculated interest. Mae Lin calls from San Francisco, laughing at his shrill mimicry of Mom’s voice, his chopstick puppetry. His impressions sound nothing like her. They sound like an abstraction of some other woman, one in great pain, but they work, they shut her up. She gets red in the face and looks down at her plate.

They helped Mae Lin with her down payment, as they helped you and Zackary when his grades and lukewarm recommendations led you both to a clinic outside Bismarck, and now Mom calls every day, some days twice, with ideas and order numbers for rugs. Hardwood floors will not do for their daughter.

“She even tried to make it about me not settling down,” Mae Lin says, laughing. “She says that if I can’t find a man and give them grandbabies, I have to at least support Daddy’s business.” After a few seconds she clears her throat and adds “I really think that she’s finally gone totally insane. Finally totally insane.” Mae Lin knows about the fertility drugs and the waiting lists. She knows that in their disappointment Mom speaks in Cantonese and Daddy does not speak at all.

You know that the best way to deal with Mom is to push back until she is sputtering, until she threatens to call Daddy or, worse, the estate lawyer. Then you give a little. Victory, however diminished, sooths her. Victory makes her gracious.

You tell Mae Lin to wait a week or two, and to then let Mom buy her a rug. Two rugs, at most, you say.

* * *

This was early in the spring of your senior year, just after Zackary decided to attend the Medical School of Wisconsin, just after you decided to follow him there. Zackary wanted to celebrate. You suggested that the two of you drive north out of Ithaca to Montreal; you suggested shopping and taking in a show and eating in a decent restaurant for a change. He suggested camping. You had taught him all about dim sum and everything, he said, and he wanted to show you something that was important to him when he was growing up. You did not tell him that you had not had dim sum until you went away to school, that your parents thought it low class. He knew that it was your parents who were the immigrants, not you, and that whatever differences there were between your upbringings had drown long ago among the semblance. You decided to not reinforce the point.

There had been a few days of unseasonable warmth. You drove away from campus into the Adirondacks. You cooked hot dogs by spearing them lengthwise on thin sticks you found in the underbrush and removed of their tender bark. Zackary joked that, as a future doctor, he was confident the flames and heat would kill any germs or microbes. Oh, honey, you told him, I love it when you speak beyond your capacity. You cooked baked beans by setting the opened can directly in the fire and stirring with the blade of a Swiss Army knife. You drank whiskey and he made fun of your flushed face and you made love and fell asleep.

You awoke chattering. A foot or more had come down, silently, as you slept. The newspaper and kindling was buried and soaked. With the snow Zackary could not tell from which direction you had hiked in. Your eyes hurt to look at it. You packed quickly and set out and hours later had still not found the car. Zackary recommended that you split up and then, seeing your face, suggested that you sit in one place and huddle for warmth and wait for help. You wanted action, decision, violence, something to match and subsume the danger, something to dispel your fears, to put your trust in. But you said nothing. You just looked at him with your arms around your shoulders and your hands pulled into your sleeves until he realized you were saying No. You kept walking to stay warm and after another few hours found an area that had reception and you called 911 and the sheriff sent out a helicopter.

* * *

Some of the signs were in English entirely, and most had enough to makes things clear. You had heard your mother and father whisper and scream in Cantonese, and you could often get the gist of what they were discussing, but you could not read it and the people there, god, there were so many people, used words you had never heard. Mae Lin giggled and told you that they all sounded like cats but your father overheard her and struck her and then struck her again when she set her jaw and sneered.

Years later Mom called and asked if you remembered the hotel and the penthouse level conference room and the buffet. The hotel, she told you, was now a Radisson. China is changing, she said, and Hong Kong is its jewel. Daddy has mentioned that he has thought of moving back, she tells you. There is opportunity there, she tells you.

You remember the hotel. The two of you sat on your grandfather’s lap, too old for such a thing, three years apart but dressed as twins. You were afraid of him because everybody else seemed afraid of him. He pointed out the window and said something to Daddy and Daddy asked you what you thought of all the people scurrying around at street level. You thought they divided and reconvened like bacterium on the watery slides you had handled in class. You said that there were so many people, and that you were sad you could not meet them. The adults laughed at your father’s translation, and you asked if your grandfather knew all the people and Daddy translated once more and your grandfather knew enough English to say “No. No, no, no…” and he smiled and kissed you on your head between your ponytails.

Mae Lin announced that she was going to meet all the people and Daddy hit her again and Mother dragged her from the room by her collar. Grandfather said something and everybody laughed again and your father’s face went grey.

* * *

The procedure terrified you. You did not know anybody else who had had it done and it seemed barbarous and vain and needless to you, but your mother had made up her mind and you were not yet eighteen and the day after you graduated from high school you went into the hospital and were anesthetized and you woke up the next morning and your eyes had been fixed. The only benefit you could imagine was that you might never hear the word inscrutable again.

You were groggy from the drugs and blind from the sutures and the bandages which kept them sanitary but you heard your mom tell you that you would meet a nice man now. Mae Lin asked you how you felt. Father said nothing but you could tell he was there from how Mae Lin and Mom spoke and because the hand you held was knotty and calloused.

Mom and Dad liked Zackary when you finally introduced them. They liked that he was respectful and clean cut and that he would become a doctor, but, despite his name, they were surprised he was white.

“Why not marry a Chinese man?” Mom said and Mae Lin exploded in your defense “What the fuck did you expect, Mom? What the fuck did you expect?”

It was at a talk by the Egyptian ambassador that you met him, and you joked that it would be the only time either of you would ever be inside Bradfield Hall. Months later he told you that he loved you and began to list what it was that excited him about you, what led him to that conclusion. He said that when he looked at you he could never quite grasp exactly what you were thinking and the mystery thrilled him and you told him that if he was smart he would never say that to you again and he never did.

* * *

Mae Lin calls. The rugs arrived. She admits that they will look fantastic in her apartment. You tell her to make sure that Mom hears her say as much several times. With exclamation points, you tell her.

She talks about her two boyfriends, the website designer and the cellist. She says the cellist has been talking about getting more serious but Mae Lin isn’t sure. She tells you about all the time she has been spending in Los Angeles and about the show she is piloting, the one about the corrupt and degenerate family of vintners, and the fun and stress of hiring and casting and working with other writers. She tells you that she had to hire an assistant producer and that she is thankful for her willpower and her personal policy forbidding office romance because he is gorgeous and smart and has a mean sense of humor, which she loves.

“What’s wrong?” she says after a while.

Nothing, you tell her.

She asks again.

“I don’t know,” you say.

* * *

He has made friends through the clinic. Lab technicians, the boyfriends and husbands and brothers of nurses and receptionists, one other doctor, older but energetic and in for a good time and fond of racquetball. He has a monthly poker game from which he comes home stinking of beer and scotch and smoke. He goes to the gym three mornings a week. Sometimes four. In the Spring and Summer and Autumn he plays softball.

At his softball games you sit in the stands with the other wives. You do your best to be friendly, to ask questions and insert yourself into what is being said, but it is so much effort and even if they were not all heavyset and blonde you would have nothing in common. It seems to you that people cheer a little louder for Zackary when he bats and he laughs with his teammates in the dugout and you think of how well-liked he has always been, how quick with a smile and the right thing to say. You think of how nice it is, sometimes, to be the partner of someone like that; and how anguished at other times when people expect the same from you, or at least some complement that justifies the relationship, that makes things clear, and you can see in their faces as your conversations extinguish the same masked surprise you have seen so many times before.

He is in the foyer, his glasses steamed, his face crimson from the cold, he is reaching down to unlace his boots, knobby rubber soles and brown leather lined with fur, and Zackary looks up and sees you on the couch crying, a sweating bottle of chardonnay half-empty on the coffee table. He listens to you and holds you and kisses your eyes and forehead and apologizes for things that are no longer in his control. He says just a couple more years. He promises, and promises again.

He encourages you to get out more. He encourages you to get a job. These are good people, he says.

The school system only needs substitutes during flu season and then only in the middle school where the children are rude to you and cruel to one another and one child whom the others avoid who smells like he has not been bathed or made to change his clothes in weeks calls you a jap. You volunteer at the library to tutor younger children but your patience for their halting mumbling and mispronunciation is as thin as red cellophane and the obviousness that you are only doing this to occupy yourself somehow devalues for you what little you are accomplishing with the children and you give it up after a few months.