My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (30 page)

“Time for
me
to get some help? How do you know it’s not
you?”

“Don’t worry,” Gab says calmly. “I’m getting tested too. Fair is fair.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem fair to me that I have to have my ‘struggles’ broadcast to the whole family.” (“Must-see TV tonight! Find out if Gab’s husband is shooting blanks!”)

“Oh, you know my parents. They don’t read what’s right in front of them.”

“But the refrigerator door is where your mom puts all her vital information.” This is true: everything from employees’ telephone numbers to shift schedules and delivery receipts are posted on the refrigerator. And now, I’m afraid to say, so are guidelines on self-lubrication, plus tips on which particular lubricant to use (as if any male over the age of eleven needs to be told this. Who’s coming in for male fertility testing anyway—second-graders?).

I hang up the phone and sit down in the living room of Kay’s empty house. Maybe Gab is right—maybe I should get tested. Should I get it over with right now? I am still in my pajamas, after all, and there’s no one here … 
Oh, for Christ’s sake!
I have to be at the
Review
for a meeting in a few hours, and it wouldn’t be very “professional” of me, would it, to run late because I was doing
that?
That’s the sort of thing George would have understood. (“That’s why you’re late? Of course it’s not a problem. I was doing the same thing!”) But of course George is gone.

Part of me thinks that the problem is just my wife’s impatience; six months is not actually that long for a couple in their thirties to have to wait for conception to take hold. But part of me can’t help wondering,
Is it us?
Could we be somehow mismatched, like those couples you occasionally read about in which one spouse turns out to be allergic to the other? Could it be that on a spermatazoic level a battle of personalities is being waged, pitting my sensitive little overthinkers against Gab’s overachieving go-getters? I’ve begun to worry that my squad of little Bens, with their tendency toward reflection and process-mindedness (Who
gets to ascend the fallopian tube first
, I can see them wondering,
and how does that “privilege the narrative” of the fallopian crossing?)
, are getting distracted from their job. Can a terminally ambivalent and self-questioning personality turn one’s own progeny into the equivalent of a Massachusetts politician’s presidential campaign?

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN
an involuntary mimic. I pick up not only people’s accents but their hand gestures, their speech impediments and, eventually, since language determines our perception of the world, their whole outlook on life. In everyday situations this is problematic enough. However, given the random assortment of characters you meet at the checkout counter of a New York deli, working at the store sometimes makes me feel like Sybil, or at least as if I’m auditioning for a flash improv troupe.
Now be a French diplomat! Now an Albanian hit man! Now a garbage-truck driver from Bayonne!

The key to involuntary mimicry is a feeling that your personality has become unmoored, that you’re an actor in search of a part, that you have no core—which isn’t an uncommon feeling in a deli
late at night. Sometimes things slow down and hours pass without a single familiar face coming through the door. During these stretches you’re in the same place you always are—behind the checkout counter, looking at the door—but there’s a dreamlike quality to it all. Did a shriveled old woman in a camouflage tube top really just spend fifteen minutes talking in Spanish to our selection of cheese? And is there really such a concoction as “whipped-cream-flavored ice cream,” which someone just asked me for? At these moments
anyone
could walk through the door—the president; Donna Ledbetter, my sixth-grade girlfriend; a man clip-clopping on goat legs—and I would not be surprised. I myself could be anyone; I could try on a new accent or give myself a completely different persona. Chemical enhancement of reality doesn’t even begin to approximate the sense of
Why am I here? Where did I come from?
that I feel on some nights. And while I can fight the undertow pulling me into a vortex of trippiness, resistance usually just makes it worse. It’s like A
Nightmare on Elm Street
, where the characters are always saying
Don’t fall asleep! Don’t fall asleep! Don’t …
and then a burn victim missing his face walks into the store, taps the counter with his claw—I mean car key—and calmly asks for a bran muffin.

Of course, for some people the identity crisis at the root of an unmoored personality is a bit more fundamental. Immigrants, for example, have to navigate between the increasingly distant and mysterious world they come from and the just-as-confusing place they come to inhabit. In my case, where I come from isn’t exactly a mystery. Going back centuries I can find out almost anything about my ancestors—where they lived, how many children they had and, most important of all, where they went to college. And these people had a definite
identity
. They were, if not entirely uniform as a group, far more like one another than not. For starters,
their ancestors came from England (East Anglia, for the most part) and made the voyage to America as families, rather than as individuals. That’s important, because the settlers of New England were almost disgustingly pro-family, to the extent that they actually outlawed single people and forced them to move in with other families if they couldn’t form their own. They were also middle-class—tradesmen, artisans, ministers—and superbly educated. But the most important thing they shared was similar worldviews, like that stubborn loyalty to the past and a certainty that old ways were better than new ones. One of the more eye-opening facts about the descendants of the Pilgrims is that after going to all that trouble to get away from the Church of England—you know, prison, exile and crossing the ocean in a leaky ship—many of them converted
back
to it within just a few generations. Some of my relatives even fought on the English side in the Revolution. The point is, despite their newfound freedom to be anything they wanted in the New World, despite the atomizing tendencies of democracy and despite having almost half a millennium in which to change, my family didn’t. Puritan culture remained strong, even after the Puritans themselves vanished.

So how could someone like me possibly have an identity crisis? How could someone so anchored to history feel unmoored, especially after growing up in
Boston?

At least to some extent, Boston
was
the problem. Ethnically, Boston is many things—Irish, Jewish, black, even Armenian. But what it is above all is Puritan. Puritan values ooze from the city’s institutions, its way of life, its customs. No city in America “looks back” with as much ardor as the city with a historical plaque commemorating something on every corner. No city sees itself as constituting “the elect” the way the Puritans did, unless there’s another outlying, midsized city in America I’m unaware of that calls itself
“the Hub of the Universe.” No city is as consumed by education, and very few have the same overall climate of harsh sobriety. Growing up in Boston means that you see things like a hostility to fashion, an aversion to self-promotion and the name Caleb as, well, normal. In order to realize how peculiar such things actually are, it’s better to be displaced, and the more violently the better.

In that sense, the experience I’ve had over the last two years has been a lucky one. First came the disassembly of self, the softening up of an already tenuous psyche. Then came exposure to values—potent ones—that were the opposite of those I grew up with, from the way immigrants tend to look forward and care more about results than process, to the way small business isolates you from the rest of the world, as opposed to being embedded in all that family and history. What I’ve been experiencing, in other words, is not just displacement but a clash of fundamentally conflicting outlooks, that of the immigrant entrepreneur and that of the Puritan: someone moving up and anxious to move up even faster versus the chaperones, the people trying to put the brakes on God’s country of the future.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I’ve gained some perspective, I suppose. And perspective is an important thing; it may even be
the
thing. But some conflicts can’t simply be left at a standoff. Some values, if taken seriously, can’t be reconciled with other values—not in the same body. You have to make a choice. One side has to win, doesn’t it?

IN NOVEMBER, GAB
and I travel to Denver for a friend’s wedding—our first real trip together since the deli opened. And our first night in a hotel. I’m as happy to be in a room drenched in disinfectant and featuring a highway beneath our window as I was as a child. But the best part is that Gab’s fertility cycle, which
she’s graphed onto her weekly planner with minute-by-minute precision, is due to hit its peak the day after the wedding ends. So I’ve delayed our trip home by twenty-four hours and secured a rental car for the purpose of making a romantic getaway to the Rocky Mountain resort town of Steamboat Springs.

In a way, just being in Colorado might help along our efforts. I spent a few years of my life here, and this is my territory, so to speak. The land is sensual and rugged, and this journey up the mountains feels like a chance to conquer this whole issue of overthinkers versus overachievers. There’s something virile about it, a hint of danger and recklessness, or more than a hint if you consider that snow season has just started and some of the notoriously avalanche-prone mountain passes leading to places like Steamboat will soon have to be closed, if they haven’t been already. As we drive up into the clouds and the first of several snowstorms, I feel like I could catch a few wolverines on my own, while Gab looks smaller and smaller, hunching nervously in the passenger seat.
This is even better than I planned
, I think.

We arrive at our hotel with six hours to kill until the Magic Moment. Since ski season has yet to start, Steamboat is devoid of interesting activities other than afternoon drinking at one of the many local bars offering green-chile enchiladas and endless reruns of Jimmy Buffett’s greatest hits. So on the advice of the concierge, we end up making a mad dash before sunset for some irresistible-sounding natural hot springs half an hour outside town.

And that’s where the trouble starts. The hot springs are located at the end of a county road that would have been eminently drivable if snow hadn’t once again started to fall—heavy snow, with flakes so big they seem to have their own gravitational orbits. And now the sun is disappearing behind the steeply bowled wall of the Yampa Valley. At around six o’clock, in conditions that could be described
as either whiteout or blackout, we arrive at the hot springs’ driveway, a series of muddy, unpaved switchbacks proceeding more or less straight up a steep ridge.

“Do you see that sign?” Gab says, pointing to a sharply worded warning to
not
attempt to reach the hot springs under
any
conditions without four-wheel drive, which our rental does not have. She also points out that the car’s insurance will be invalidated the moment our tires leave the pavement.

“I don’t like this,” she says. “We should go back.”

She’s right. After checking my cell phone, I see that we’re out of range. And there hasn’t been another car or house along the county road for miles. We could walk the rest of the way, but even if we could get to the top of the switchbacks in our sneakers and light coats, the springs could be closed. All in all, it seems like an extremely bad idea to proceed.

However, when you’re trying to psych yourself up to consummate an act of passion, to
create life
, after flying across the country and driving up into a black and stormy sky, what choice do you have?

So we start traversing up the switchbacks, and as we do I wonder if I’ve already made that other choice between the values of the immigrant entrepreneur and those of the Puritan. I’m tired of thinking, and thinking about thinking, and being “hung up on the eternal,” as one of my coworkers at the
Paris Review
recently called this ultimately self-defeating point of view. Inwardness can be a good thing, until it becomes involuted and can’t turn itself around. The Puritans were inward, but they were also exemplary when it came to engaging with the world.

And then we’re at the top, having traversed our way to the summit of Mount Switchback, Destroyer of Rental Cars. (Ours is no longer white, but it is still running, thankfully.) Below us, on the other side of the ridge, lie the hot springs, roiling and steaming in
all their bubbly glory. (They’re open, though we’re the only ones here.) We clamber down as quickly as we can and immerse ourselves, soaking for a good hour, which feels even better than I imagined. I’m no New Ager, but if you’d told me that all the stress we’ve experienced over the last year, from buying the store to the cigarette drama and now the pregnancy issue, had turned into solid masses that lodged themselves painfully inside my joints and now are melting away, dissolved by the 104-degree heat, I’d have believed it. Because that’s how good it feels, and heck, in 104-degree heat I’d believe anything. After all, what part of the body does not love being wrapped up in 104-degree heat?

As it turns out, Little Bens do not. There’s little need to worry about Little Bens overthinking or being ambivalent after they’ve been subjected to 104 degrees—they’re cooked. Boiled alive. Or so flaccid with heat exhaustion that they can barely wiggle their tails. (The management should really put up a sign warning people about this. It could even be fun, an enticement, particularly at a hot spring. “Hot springs are an excellent way to reduce your chances of an unwanted pregnancy, especially for you men who can’t seem to get the job done anyway.”)

At the time, though, we don’t know this, and we won’t until Gab gets back to New York and reads it in one of her pregnancy books. Which is good because in Steamboat Springs we were able to enjoy ourselves for once without hiding it, like the grown-ups we used to be and someday will be again.