I was thirty-nine, sitting inside the Satay restaurant on Washington Street sipping a chilled bottle of Amstel Light. The hostess had shown me to a table in the back corner next to a man chopping mint leaves for a mango salad. I loosened my tie and checked my watch. I was ten minutes early for my meeting with Jing, but she was late. It was a characteristic she’d adopted from my younger brother. I’ve never really spoken to my brother. We’ve had our differences.
A waitress walked up to me, said her name, and asked me what I wanted. She was wearing yellow eyeliner that reminded me of canary feathers. I told her I was waiting for someone and asked her to come back.
The smell of soy sauce carried over the ledge where the chef was sautéing a pan of prawns and onions. A portable Sony FM radio played beside him. The DJ announced the weather: 40 degrees and slightly overcast, after which Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” started playing.
The bell rang twice, and Jing walked in with the collar of her navy blazer hitched to her earlobes. She scanned the room until she saw me, and walked to my table.
“Hey,” she said, dropping her canvas backpack under the table and sitting down. “God, it’s hot in here. They should open a window.”
“It’s from the kitchen. How are you? How was school?”
She slipped out of her blazer, the golden crest on the breast-pocket half visible under the lapel, and draped it over her chair. She rolled up the sleeves of her navy wool sweater, which also bared her school’s crest, to right below her elbows. Then she unbuttoned the collar of her shirt still crisp from Sunday’s dry cleaning.
“I’m alright. I got detention for not wearing my blazer in the hallway. I had to stay in DeMacy’s classroom and wash chalkboards. I could hear the choir practicing for the advent concert. You should hear them. They’re like an army.”
The waitress came back, and Jing ordered bubble tea. I looked at my empty beer bottle and asked for a glass of water. When the waitress left, Jing started to flip through the menu.
“Did you see that?” Jing asked, “It looked like she switched a highlighter for her eye pencil this morning.”
“What do you want to eat?”
“I want something with peanut sauce. Which one has peanut sauce?”
I shrugged.“Forget it. I’ll just have the patay chicken. That sounds good.”
The waitress returned with Jing’s bubble tea and my water. Jing ordered her patay chicken with a bowl of brown rice, and I ordered mussels in curry sauce with white rice. While waiting, I took sips of water, and Jing twirled her straw around the brown tapioca pearls three times.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “Asceneth said it would be better if I tried talking to you every so often. She said our main problem is a lack of communication.”
“I see.”
Jing adjusted the brown plastic headband in her hair.
“I’m supposed to set goals for myself. She wants me to be more positive; you know, accept people for their flaws and eventually accept myself. By talking I can learn to be more honest with you. She wants me to tell you how I feel.”
“How do you feel?”
“Apathetic,” Jing said.
“So it’s not working?”
“Well, therapy can’t guarantee results, but I feel much better with Asceneth. I’m not mental or anything. I asked her about that on our first session. I told her about my psychology class and how we were discussing personality disorders. I thought I was antisocial, or maybe manic. She told me ‘people can have aspects of a mental disorder, but that doesn’t mean they have one.’ I guess I just need someone to talk to who is unbiased about things. Don’t you feel that way?”
“Not really.”
“Well, anyway, we should get to know each other. How was Germany? You were there last month for work, right?”
I nodded.
“Frankfurt,” Jing said, pointing her fork at my face.
“Actually I was in the suburbs. Metzingen. I took a two hour train from Frankfurt and then a taxi to get to the hotel.”
“How was it over there?”
“Cold. They drink a lot of carbonated water.”
“That’s interesting.”
She didn’t interrogate any further. I would have tried to move the conversation along, but there wasn’t much to say. I was working for a small German-based company in Metzingen, and all I was doing was learning how to install solvent recovery units. Not exactly something that would interest a teenage girl.
Ella Fitzgerald’s “Why Was I Born?” started playing on the radio, and the waitress returned with two entrées balanced on her forearm. There was a pile of shredded red cabbage on each plate with paper umbrellas propped in the center.
Jing swallowed each bit of food with speedy efficiency: she was holding down the strips of marinated chicken with her knife, and tearing them into edible pieces with her fork. She wasn’t left handed; she just had difficultly understanding common dinning etiquette. This irritated me.
“Slow down. You’re acting like you’re starving. It’s embarrassing,” I said.
“I need to gain weight. I want a bigger ass.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“And it doesn’t matter anyway.” She wiped sesame seeds from her mouth. “Everyone’s looking at us.”
She was right. A group of four office workers sitting in front of us threw suspicious glances at me. I guess they had a right. A teenage girl eating with a middle-aged man was strange.
“They probably think I’m dating you.”
Jing leaned back, propping her arm over the back of her chair.
“I bet you’re proud of that, too.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I said, feeling the collar of my shirt and giving it a little tug. “It means I still look young. That’s a good thing.”
Jing averted my eyes and looked out the window.
“Disgusting,” she muttered.
We continued eating in silence. I stacked the empty gray shells on the side of my plate. Jing had gone through half of her food, and shreds of red cabbage spilled around the edge of her plate. I took my fork and shoveled them back up, but she didn’t notice.
I paid the bill, and the waitress left packets of tamarind-flavored candy on the black tray with the check. Jing took one, popped it in her mouth, and handed the other to me. As we passed the hostess’s podium, she took a handful of candies and stuffed them in her pocket.
It was already dark when we got outside. The restaurant windows along the street were glowing with atmospheric lighting, and hostesses in black jeans and starched blouses were shuffling couples inside. I asked Jing if she wanted to walk along the waterfront. She nodded, withdrew a headset from her backpack, and plugged it into her ears. She walked behind me kicking acorns with her navy Converses.
“What are you listening to this time? The Clash again?” I asked.
“No. Yo La Tengo,” she said.
“Yo La Tengo,” I repeated.
“They’re based around here, you know. Here,” She came up next to me and placed one of the earpieces in the shell of my ear. “Listen.”
“What is this?”
“‘Sugarcube’,” Jing said, “I’m not a big Yo La Tengo fan or anything, but this is a really good song.”
I listened to Jing’s underground music; the song triggered nostalgia from my college years. It was the kind of song that would play in the background while I was riding my motorcycle around campus with her mother. Not that I was an asshole with a racing bike like a Suzuki or a Honda. I had a second-hand red Modena from a relative’s farm. It was stolen by the end of the semester, two months before Jing was born.
“I like it,” I said.
“Well, that’s good.”
We walked side by side with a pair of white headphones in our ears. The temperature dropped slowly, and I wondered just how cold Jing felt wearing a thin wool skirt and opaque tights. She walked close beside me, leaving about half an inch between our shoulders. I reached out to hold her arm, but she moved away. The earpiece popped out of my ear, and dangled at the hem of her skirt. I realized she wouldn’t take my jacket even if I offered it.
“It’s late. I’ll bring you home,” I said.
We crossed the street back to Washington. Her mother’s apartment was close to a drugstore and a bookstore that only sold magazines. It was a brownstone with the name “Rose” painted above the entrance in faded cerulean. It was nice to think that Jing lived in a building called Rose. It had a nice ring to it. Rose.
“You’re flying out to Puerto Rico on Wednesday, right?” she asked.
“Yeah, another business trip.”
“Do you think it worked?”
“What?”
She pulled her blazer tighter around her chest. “Us talking. Have we connected?”
I scratched the bridge of my nose and looked at her. “Of course. It was fun. We can do it again when I come back.”
Jing stopped walking. “I think I understand. You don’t share your feelings. Maybe you’re afraid. You think the world is against you, but it’s not.”
“What are you talking about?” I walked passed her.
“You keep things to yourself, and blame them on me. Well, I want to tell you I’m not going to take that anymore!”
Jing stood beside the window of a restaurant. A few customers watched.
I turned around. “Don’t make a scene. You’re always making scenes. You’re just like your mother. Insane.”
“No! You’re insane! We’re both insane! Your whole side of the family is insane!”
She looked away, covered her eyes, and moaned. I grabbed her arm and waved shyly to the group of people sitting inside the restaurant in front of us.
“I’m not your enemy,” I whispered, pulling her along behind me, “Let’s go. Your mother wants you back.”
It must have been an odd sight for observers. An old man like me pulling his daughter by the elbow, daughter following grudgingly, and occasionally letting out a low, animalistic growl.
Jing slammed her apartment door in my face and I walked back to my silver BMW 530. The meter was empty, and a ticket fluttered under the windshield. I stepped into the leather driver’s seat and started the ignition. Tuesday I worked in the office, and Wednesday I had a business trip. Hot air blew out of the vents. I reached into my jacket pocket for the tamarind candy, tossed it out the window, and drove home.