Super Sad True Love Story (31 page)

EUNI-TARD:
Hi, Sally. Did you hear LNWIs took over the Kang’s plunger business?

SALLYSTAR:
No. That’s terrible.

EUNI-TARD:
That’s all you have to say?

SALLYSTAR:
What do you want me to say?

EUNI-TARD:
Do you want to get burgers? You can have a little red meat if you promise to just do vegetables and yogurt for a week.

EUNI-TARD:
Hello? Earth to Sally Park.

EUNI-TARD:
You must be busy. You still haven’t told me what you think of Lenny.

SALLYSTAR:
Everyone’s concerned about you.

EUNI-TARD:
They’re CONCERNED? That’s really nice.

SALLYSTAR:
Mommy and Daddy just don’t want you to rush into anything.

EUNI-TARD:
And you’re their Media spokeswoman now?

SALLYSTAR:
We’re not a perfect family but we’re still a family, right?

EUNI-TARD:
I don’t know. You tell me.

SALLYSTAR:
We have to get new carpeting for the living room and new runners for the stairs. Do you want to come to NJ and help us pick it out?

EUNI-TARD:
Can I bring Lenny?

SALLYSTAR:
You can do whatever you want Eunice.

EUNI-TARD:
I was kidding.

SALLYSTAR:
So you’ll come?

EUNI-TARD:
I’ll come. But I’m not going to sit next to Dad or say anything to him. Lenny uses the word truculent. Dad’s like a truculent child, it’s best to ignore him.

SALLYSTAR:
Cut him some slack. He’s trying. He’s not completely well inside and that means we have to forgive him.

EUNI-TARD:
Whatever.

SALLYSTAR:
Seriously. You will feel so much better if you forgive him, Eunice. Then you can focus on what’s happening on the rest of the planet. Maybe you can help me set up a food distribution committee for the tent cities we’re doing with Columbia and NYU. Things are getting really bad at Tompkins Square.

EUNI-TARD:
How do you know I’m not helping out already?

SALLYSTAR:
Huh?

EUNI-TARD:
Nothing. I’ll forgive Dad when he’s 70 years old and Uncle Joon has gambled all his money away and he’s this raving homeless man who turns to me and Lenny for help. Then I’ll be like, you treated me and Mommy and Sally like shit, but now here’s some money so you don’t starve.

SALLYSTAR:
That’s so horrible. I can’t believe you would even think that.

EUNI-TARD:
Hey, I’m kidding. Sense of humor?

EUNI-TARD:
Sally, are you still there? I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I really miss Myong-hee. Last time I was in LA I tried to braid her and she was squealing “No, Eunice emo!” like leave me alone, you’re not the boss of my hair!!! She’s such a cute little oinker. I bet next time we see her she’ll be like four inches taller. I don’t want her to grow up.

EUNI-TARD:
Sally? Come on! Was it the thing I said about dad?

EUNI-TARD:
Fine. My BOYFRIEND is almost home and we’re going to make a branzino together.

EUNI-TARD:
Sally, do you love me?

SALLYSTAR:
What?

EUNI-TARD:
I’m serious. Do you really love me? I mean like a person. Not just an older sister you’re supposed to look up to.

SALLYSTAR:
I don’t want to talk about this. Of course I love you.

EUNI-TARD:
Maybe I didn’t do enough.

SALLYSTAR:
What are you talking about? Would you please just SHUT UP ALREADY. I’m so sick of you. THE PAST, THE PAST, THE PAST!!!

SALLYSTAR:
Hello? Eunice.

SALLYSTAR:
Eunice?

SALLYSTAR:
Hello.

ANTI-INFLAMMATION

JULY 20

Dear Diary,

Noah told me there’s a day during the summer when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic, unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear at the edge of your vision, and that when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day. He made it sound like an urban rapture, his aging face taking on a careful glow, as if he was borrowing some of the light of which he spoke. I thought he was emoting when he said it, but his äppärät was at standby, he wasn’t streaming: This was real enough. We were sitting in some crappy St. George café, oddly moved by the fact that there were still cafés out in the world, much less on Staten Island. “I’d love to see that,” I said. “When does it happen exactly?”

“We missed it,” Noah said. “It was late in June.”

“Next year then,” I said.

And then, like a perfect Media drama queen, Noah told me he expected to be dead by the next year. Something about the Restoration Authority, the Bipartisans, the price of biofuel, the decline of the tides—who can keep up anymore? That kind of ruined the effect of what he was saying about the light hitting the avenues just so. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to strain for me, that I liked
him exactly as he was: perfectly above average, angry but decent, just smart enough. I thought of Sammy the Elephant in the Bronx Zoo, his calmly depressive countenance, the way he approached extinction with both equanimity and unobtrusive despair. Maybe this was what Noah was jabbering about when he followed the light across the city. The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief it can’t even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful.

Speaking of the light, I had one luminous moment with Eunice this week. I caught her looking at my Wall of Books with some curiosity, specifically at a washed-out old cover of a Milan Kundera paperback—a bowler hat floats over a Prague cityscape—her index fingers raised above the book as if ready to tap at the
BUY ME NOW
symbol on her äppärät, her other fingers massaging the book’s back, maybe even enjoying its thickness and unusual weight, its relative quiet and meekness. When she saw me approach she slid the book back on its shelf and retreated to the couch, smelling her fingers for book odor, her cheeks in full blush. But I knew she was curious, my reluctant sentence-monger, and I chalked up yet another victory—the second after what I thought was a very successful dinner with her parents.

Life with Euny has been okay. Exciting, sometimes upsetting. We argued daily. She never backed down. A fighter to the very last. This is how a human being is forged after an unhappy early life. This is the independence of growing up, of standing up for yourself, even if against a phantom enemy.

Mostly we fought about social commitments. She’d be fine with her Elderbird friends who just moved back to New York. They seem like decent girls, effervescent but unsure of themselves, lusting after big-ticket items and some measure of identity, confusing one for the other, but basically in no great hurry to grow up. One girl who actually ate food scored only in the low 500s on her Fuckability, so the other girls would give her tips on how to lose weight. They’d reach over and pinch her all the time, coat her in creams until she glowed
sadly on my living-room couch, and weigh her as if she were a prized albacore hanging over a Tokyo wharf. Another girl was going for that new Naked Librarian look, very little covering her body except glasses as thick as my storm windows, which I thought was funny because even a fine institution like Elderbird had recently closed its physical library, so what the hell was this girl even referencing? Then they’d get trashed on rosé out on our (our!) balcony, those cute, bloated, drunken faces of theirs, as they told these long, circular stories that were supposed to be funny but instead proved highly disturbing, narratives of a cheap, ephemeral world where everyone let everyone down as a matter of course and women sometimes got pissed on in front of others. I felt both jealous of their youth and scared for their future. In short, I felt paternal and aroused, which is not a good combination.

I had told Eunice, offhandedly and wearing my cutest platypus grin, that the next two weeks would prove busy on the social front. Joshie had been begging to meet her and expected us on Saturday at his house. Grace and Vishnu were having a party in Staten Island on the Monday after that to officially announce Grace’s pregnancy. “I know you’re not, like, the biggest socializer,” I said.

But she had already turned away from me, the angry spires of her shoulder blades staying my comforting hand.

“Your boss,” she said, “wants to meet
me
?”

“He loves young people. He’s turning into a teenager himself.”

“That bitch Grace wants us over? Why? So she can laugh at me some more?”

“Are you kidding? Grace loves you!”

“Probably wants to be my big sister. No thanks, Len.”

“She does care about you, Eunice. She wants to find you a job in Retail. She said her Princeton roommate might know of an internship at Padma.” The three times we had briefly, tangentially, touched upon the subject of Eunice procuring employment and helping out with the escalating air-conditioning bill ($8,230 unpegged, just for the month of June), she had mentioned working in Retail. All her Elderbird friends wanted the same. No big surprise there.
Credit for boys, Retail for girls
.

“You don’t under
stand
, Leonard.”

The phrase I hate the most in the world. I
do
understand. Not everything, but a lot. And what I don’t understand, I certainly want to learn more about. If Eunice ever asked me to I would take an entire week off from work, claim some family-related emergency (which is essentially what this is), and listen to her talk. I would put a box of tissues and some calming miso broth between us, take out my äppärät, write it all down, pinpoint the hurt, make reasonable suggestions based on my own experiences, become completely versed in all things Park. “I’m broke,” she said.

“What?”

“I have nothing to wear. And my butt is fat.”

“You weight eighty-three pounds. Everyone on Grand Street stares at your ass in wonder. You have three closets’ worth of shoes and dresses.”

“Eighty-six. And I have nothing for the
summer
, Lenny. Are you even listening to me?”

We fought some more. She went to the living room and started teening, legs crossed, the dead smile on her face, forceful sighs, my entreaties rising in pitch. Eventually we reached a kind of compromise. We would go to the United Nations Retail Corridor and buy new clothes for the both of us. I would contribute 60 percent of the cost of her outfits, and she would cover the rest with her parents’ Credit. Like I said, a compromise.

I’d never been to the UNRC. I’ve always been intimidated by Retail Corridors, and this one was supposed to be the biggest yet. When I went to the Corridor they carved out of Union Square two years ago, everyone looked better and way younger than I did. I love going to these little offbeat boutiques in Staten Island with Grace, even if the clientele is older and grayer, folks who came of age in the grand Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and who have now been forced to retreat to Staten Island.

I started panicking the moment we got to the UN: the crush of humanity pouring out of the seven layers of underground parking; the
floor samples emitting info that flooded my äppärät with impulsive data; the Debt Bombers singling me out for my impressive Credit ranking; the giant ARA “America Celebrates It’s [sic] Spenders” banners, which now featured this girl Eunice actually knew from high school who finagled all these Credit lines and managed to buy six spring collections and a house.

The afterglow of the setting sun rushed through the glass roof of the UNRC, the steel trellises hundreds of feet above us gleaming like the ribs of a fearsome animal. I think this is where the Security Council used to meet, although I could be wrong. Since my sabbatical in Rome, it seems that America had learned her lesson on overhead, had shuttered her traditional malls. These thrifty Retail Corridors were supposed to mimic North African bazaars of yore, their only purpose a quick exchange of goods and services, minus the plangent cries of the sellers and the whiffs of tangerine sweat.