How They Met (10 page)

“Just out of curiosity,” he said, resting his hand on a photo of his wife, “did you change your lucky number?”

“No,” I told him. “It’s still seventeen.”

“Good,” he replied, visibly pleased. “You should
never
change your lucky number.”

I made in onto an earlier flight home. At the ticket counter, I was sure to be friendly, and sure to show my wedding ring. I got to our house a little later than I would have from school. Rory’s car was in the driveway. When I got inside, I called out to her. She called back from the kitchen, saying she was on the phone.

I put my bag down, home for the day, and went to where she was. She smiled when she saw me, then went back to talking to a fellow teacher about faculty-room gossip. The phone must have rung as soon as she got in the house. Her shoes were off, but they were still at her feet. She kicked them lightly as she talked. She took off her earrings.

I felt love. Right there, in the kitchen. And I felt relief. Because a part of me had worried that the truth would somehow change things. But now I saw her and knew that nothing had changed. Nothing would change. Only the story would change.

When she was off the phone, I was going to tell her about the beginning we’d never known we’d had.

I was going to tell her a story of how we met.

ANDREW CHANG

I guess I’ll start with this fact: I still to this day have no idea what my father does for a living. I’m sure he and my mother would say that this is a failure on my part. My brother would know, because they would tell him and not me. When I was a kid, I was told that my father was in “import/export.” From what I could tell, the only thing he exported were long-distance phone calls, and the only thing he imported were business partners.

The only way I could tell the difference between the business partners in China and the business partners in America was the amount of static on the phone when they called. And they called almost every hour of the day. Every time I used the phone, my parents looked at me like I was jeopardizing the family business. Whenever the call waiting beeped, I knew I’d have to get off the line. Because it was always Mr. Chen or Mr. Yang or Mr. Wei or some other monosyllabic partner. They never acknowledged my existence—they simply said my father’s name and held there until I got him.

It bothered me without ever interesting me. I would complain to my brother, and he would tell me that there were worse things to suffer than call interruption. He was a year older than me and reading Camus at that point. He had promised my father he’d go to business school, and that was all he needed to get a free pass for the rest of his senior year.

My life and my father’s business would have never intersected, except one night at dinner my father made an offhand comment about Mr. Chang having a son named Andrew who lived three towns over.

“He is your age,” my father said, and the way he said it—as if this was a sign of some kind—made the alarms go off in my head.

“I don’t know him,” I said. “Hey, did I tell you we’re going to Philadelphia on a field trip?”

My brother smiled snidely as my mother picked up my father’s conversational thread.

“You should meet him,” she said. “You could be friends.”

This was particularly special coming from a woman who didn’t seem to believe that any boy I knew could be anything other than a sex-starved boyfriend. Every time one of my male friends called—especially the white ones—she would look concerned, as if a phone call was one short step away from impregnation.

For some reason, I felt that if I simply ignored my parents, the topic would go away, even though there was no evidence of this ever having worked in the sixteen previous years of my life. I started chattering about the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. My brother continued to smirk and my parents waited me out, gazing at me attentively, knowing I had steered myself onto a tangent that could only last for so long.

Right after I dropped the big news that we’d be riding commuter buses instead of school buses on our field trip, I quickly asked, “Can I be excused?”

In answer, my mother said, “He really is a startling boy.”

Startling
could not have been the word she meant to use; I knew that. Still, it startled me into temporary submission. If she’d said
nice
or
intelligent,
I probably would have found the strength to get up from the table and leave.

“We would like you to meet him,” my father said. “The Friday after next.”

“I can’t,” I told him.

“Why not?” my mother asked.

“I’m busy,” I said, sure that I could find a way to be busy with a week and a half’s notice.

My mother stood up and walked to the refrigerator door, where she kept a calendar of her two children’s activities.

“With what?” she asked. “I checked. You are free.”

“Fine,” I said. “Fine.” It took too much strength to argue, and I needed some pluses in my column for future minus situations.

Both of my parents smiled—and, believe me, that was something very rare for my father.

I clung to the hope that it was just a friend thing.

Until, of course, I realized my brother hadn’t been invited along.

I didn’t think much about it. My mother fussed over me in a nicer way than she usually did, and I figured I could definitely use a week and a half of that. When I told my friends about it, I told the story like it was a joke that was waiting for its punch line. I’d already dated a guy named Andrew, so whenever I talked about my date-to-be, I called him Andrew Chang or, sometimes, Mr. Chang’s Son.

Two days before I was supposed to meet him, my mother appeared in my doorway with a garment bag. Since my parents had an open-door policy regarding my room—it was only closed when I was asleep—she didn’t knock or even clear her voice to let me know she was there. She just stood in the doorway for a minute until I looked up from my homework and saw her.

“I have something for you to wear,” she said.

I can’t think of another time that my mother went out and bought me clothes. No, it was important to her to drag me along whenever my clothing was purchased, so she could show me the correct way to shop for and purchase it. It wasn’t fashion she was after, but education. Even at that moment, she couldn’t hand the garment bag over and let me open it as if it were a gift. No, instead she unzipped it herself, pulling out an astonishing blue dress and holding it out in front of me without a word of presentation.

It looked like an ocean—it was that kind of blue. And although the neckline was bordering on a turtle’s, it was sleeveless—something I couldn’t have imagined my mother buying for me before. It was a party dress, a fancy dress. My first thought was that my father had won some kind of award, and that there was going to be a dinner in his honor. I in no way related it to my upcoming encounter with Mr. Chang’s Son until my mother said, “I am sure Andrew will like it.”

“What kind of date is this?” I asked her.

She smiled knowingly. “A special one.”

I was going to protest, but here’s the thing: I really liked the dress. So I kept my mouth shut. I figured I’d already said I was going. I might as well get a dress out of it. And this dress wasn’t cheap.

Later that night my brother came into my room and saw it hanging from the top of my closet door.

“I can’t believe you’re letting them arrange your marriage,” he said.

“Don’t you have business school applications to fill out?” I replied.

He looked at me for a moment like I was the stupidest girl in the world, then said, “Have it your way.”

What I wouldn’t admit to him—what I would’ve
never
admitted to my parents—was that there was a small part of me that actually wanted it to work out. I was already burning out on high school dating, on making poorly educated guesses and committing myself to other people’s commitment issues. Perhaps, I figured, this was the way to do it: no anxiety, no flirting, no friends involved, no falling. Just a simple agreement. It didn’t even occur to me to call or IM or e-mail Andrew Chang and communicate with him before our date. It didn’t even occur to me to ask my parents more about him. I was playing by a certain set of rules, and I obeyed because the rules didn’t ask me to do anything. I simply had to wait. And then, when the day came, I had to make it work.

My mother told me to come straight home after school on Friday. The minute I walked through the door, she pointed me to the shower. When I got out, towel-wrapped and a little tired, she did something she hadn’t done in ages. She sat me down at her makeup mirror and she brushed out my hair. It hurt—there were knots in there that had been tangled for semesters. But she was persistent, and before I knew it the brush was running smoothly through my hair.

At the end, my mother put down the brush, looked at my reflection in the mirror, and said, satisfied, “There.”

I put on the dress. It made me feel grown up, like my own older sister.

As I was finishing up, I heard the garage door open. I figured it was my brother, but instead my father came up from the basement. I heard him ask my mother, “Is she ready?” I did not hear my mother’s reply.

I figured Mr. Chang’s Son was taking me to a nice restaurant, trying to impress my parents. And I figured my mother had gone a little overboard dressing me up, trying to impress
his
parents. But when Andrew Chang arrived at five-thirty in a limousine, I started to think that maybe things were going a little too far.

“What does Mr. Chang do?” I asked my mother after peeking out the window at the black stretch Cadillac. “Is that his car?”

The back door opened and nobody got out. I suddenly imagined a three-hundred-pound boy in the backseat, waiting for me. About thirty seconds passed before Andrew Chang realized he had to come out and get me. He emerged from the back door wearing a tuxedo, looking much cuter than I had any right to expect. He got to our front door and rang the doorbell.

My mother went to get it, me trailing behind. My father took out his camera.

I think my mother expected me to wait in the living room, because she seemed surprised to see me in the foyer when she ushered Andrew Chang inside.

“Here she is,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” Andrew Chang replied. “Should we go?”

He was a little taller than I was, but not by much. He looked handsome, but I couldn’t tell whether that was all the tux’s doing. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with the situation, but he didn’t seem to be welcoming it, either.

My parents didn’t notice. They had us pose for some pictures before they let us leave. My mother was all smiles, my father all nods. Mr. Chang called my father to make sure Andrew had made it. In his loud business voice, my father said Andrew was here and that I looked good. I blushed, but Andrew seemed unfazed.

He had left the limo’s back door open, so he didn’t have to open it for me. Again, I was thinking it was all a little too much, but I also enjoyed the idea of telling my friends that a date had picked me up in a limo.

When I got to the backseat, it all started to kick in. There was a corsage waiting for me.

A corsage.

Andrew Chang joined me in the backseat, and as soon as he closed the door, the driver took us away from my house.

“Andrew?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“For you,” he said. “My mother picked it out. Your mother told her what you were wearing.”

“But where are we going?”

“To the prom.”

From his tone, I couldn’t tell whether he expected that I already knew this or whether he was aware that it was news to me.

“Your
prom
?”

“Yes. Do you like the flowers? My mother picked them out.”

“Andrew,” I said, remembering to keep his last name out of it, “I had no idea we were going to a prom. I thought this was a date. I mean, dinner. Friendship. That kind of thing.”

“Oh,” he said, looking out the window. “It’s a prom.”

I knew immediately that there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t ask him to pull over the car or turn around. I couldn’t get out of it. If I went to my parents to complain, they’d find a way to turn it back on me—I hadn’t asked them if it was a prom, had I? They’d never said it wasn’t a prom, right? I was too stunned to cry and not detached enough to laugh. I couldn’t even speak, and he showed no inclination to speak. So we sat there in awkward silence until we got to his prom.

I know this will sound strange, but after a short while, Andrew Chang and Mr. Chang started to blend in my head. I don’t even know if I’d ever met Mr. Chang. I just had this idea of him as one of my father’s generic business partners—hair slicked back, comb marks visible; an expensive suit that looked average; no enthusiasm for anything but talk of business; a scowl across his face while he thought of new ways to make money. I’m sure there was more to him than that—more to all of them—but from my daughter perspective, that’s all they were. And Andrew Chang was like that, too. Younger, yes. But younger in body, not in spirit.

We sat at our table. He was polite, getting me a soda, pulling my chair out for me when I sat down, then pushing it in. I tried to make conversation. I asked him how long he’d lived in Fairview. He said three months. I figured that was why he didn’t seem to know anyone else at our table, or in the whole room. The other girls at the table were nice enough, complimenting me on my dress, asking me where I was from. But the guys didn’t seem to have anything to say to Andrew, and he didn’t seem to have anything to say, either. When the table cleared out to go to the dance floor, he stayed seated. I stayed seated next to him. I watched the dance floor. He stared off somewhere.

Finally, he said, “You can dance if you want to. I’ll be here.”

He had no idea how ludicrous this was. There was no way I was going to dance alone with a school of strangers.

I compromised and said I would step out to the ladies’ room for a moment. He nodded. I fled.

I didn’t even have to go, but I ended up in the ladies’ room anyway. I stood in front of the mirror and realized I did in fact look good. And that it really didn’t matter. I washed my hands. I looked at myself again. I tried to stay there as long as I could.

Girls came and went behind me, beside me. One girl, drunk, put her hand on my shoulder and asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m Andrew Chang’s date,” I said.

She nodded, swerved away, then swerved back.

“Who’s he?” she asked.

“Friend of the family.”

She nodded again. I wanted her to stay, to ask me something else. But she left to be with her friends.

I returned to the prom but hung in the back, against the wall. It was strange to be watching all these people I didn’t know. At first, I felt like an observer. But gradually it didn’t even feel that interesting. I understood for the first time what the term
wallflower
meant. Because that was what I was. Just hanging there. Nobody noticing. Useless decoration.

I looked at our table and saw Andrew Chang sitting there alone. I didn’t know whether he was simply hiding his misery or if he was somehow able to close himself off from it. He looked like this was work, that this was just something he had to do. I felt sorry for him…but mostly I felt mad that I had been trapped, too.

A guy from our table walked by me, on the way to the men’s room. We’d all exchanged names at the beginning, but I’d already forgotten them. He walked past on the way in, but on the way back he stopped at my spot on the wall and asked me how I was doing.