Page 86 of Bad Words

“Nothing.” I turned back to my computer. “It’s good to be back.”

I made my now-routine morning pass through social media. Random House had won a bidding war for a novel imagining the life of Milly Bloom, the daughter of the main character of Ulysses. A blockbuster romantasy author had been given her own imprint at Bloomsbury.

I clicked over to my mentions.

@LolaXu: @SelinaChan Got my hands on this. It’s everything you promised and worse, lol.

She’d attached a photo of an advance copy of High and Dry.

I winced and hit Reply, but after several minutes of halting beginnings, I still hadn’t found what to write. This was my mistake. I’d stoked Lola’s investment in the situation with Parker, and I’d never responded to that petition in November. I’d assumed my silence would make it clear what my thoughts were, but maybe I should have been explicit that I didn’t consider it a prosecutable offense for a fiction writer to write a piece of fiction.

Before I could decide what to say, my phone chimed in my desk drawer. My personal email.

I pulled the drawer open and grabbed up my phone—but the email wasn’t from Parker.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Sent: Jan 03, 9:18 AM

Subject: Re: Author fight

Happy New Year Xiao Yan. Yes we had a very nice Christmas. We used your mother’s iPad to call your Yeh Yeh. Then Lao Lao and Lao Ye. All healthy. Auntie Sylvia is spending some time in Tianjin until end of CNY. then back to Seattle. All asked after you. We were happy to pass on how you are doing well. But, your mother has been reading the posts you make online recently. Is this really part of your job, to make people so angry? Is it not better to solve arguments in private? We were always afraid of this, in such a negative job. What will happen if you say something you cannot take back? From Dad and Mom.

I read the email twice, feeling as though I were shrinking. In that moment, I was standing on the porch steps of our house in Minnesota, duffel bag on my shoulder, gathering the courage to ring the doorbell. I was twenty-eight, visiting home for the first time in eight years. I would leave again two days later, promising myself never to return.

Yet here I was, somehow surprised.

I wondered why I still cared about my parents’ opinion of my work. I felt as though I’d spent my entire adult life waiting for some scrap of validation from them, and that was childish, wasn’t it? To continue to care?

Earlier on, their worries about my career had at least made sense. After Columbia, I’d strung my life together on freelance article writing and waiting tables at a French bistro, which combined had me earning $45,000 a year—just about enough to cover my debt payments and Brooklyn’s cost of living. I was paying $750 in rent to live with three roommates in a semi-functional garden apartment in Crown Heights. Not that I ever admitted this to my parents, but my so-called career had felt aimless and frightening then, an ever-turning carousel of rejection—a threat that my mother had been right.

But small stepping stones led me through my twenties. At twenty-four, I landed a part-time assistantship at a now-defunct literary magazine called The Long View, and at twenty-five I had my first real break as a critic: I sold an essay to Guernica reviewing a small run of nonfiction books about gun violence. That day, I spent an extravagant twenty-one dollars on a bottle of wine and texted my parents in triumph. Their muted response maddened me.

But I could feel the momentum building that year. I found new rhythms in my writing. I finally felt that I’d read enough books to have a real intertextual well to draw from. Several months later I placed a review in Ploughshares, and the following year, when I was twenty-six, City accepted one of my freelance pitches for the first time. Soon they added me to their bank of contributors, and when I was twenty-seven, Joyce emailed to tell me that an assistant editor position had opened, and that, if I was interested, she would pass my resume to Scott.

My parents and I were in one of our periods of closer contact, then. When I got the job, I texted them with something between joy and spite. I used exclamation points. I had won.

I had won; so why, every time I spoke with them, did I still feel so defensive?

It was in this state that I’d planned the trip home. In my mind, working for City would fix everything. They’d wanted stability? Here was stability. They’d wanted an impressive career that they could mention to the extended family? Here I was, writing for one of the best magazines in the country.

But I arrived home in Minnesota to a barrage of doubts instead. Was I sure this magazine was a safe bet? Was I still living in that tiny, run-down place in Brooklyn? They kept reading about newspapers shutting down. What if I used these skills to transfer over to something more reliable?

It astonished me how they couldn’t admit that they’d been wrong, that I’d done everything I’d meant to. And now, six years later, here was the same relentless quest to poke holes in my life. I read the email a third time. Of course they’d made no acknowledgment of the feud helping City—the main point I’d conveyed in my last email.

If I replied I would become bitterly angry, I could feel it already. We would fall into this again: that they still couldn’t conceive of the person I’d become, as though they still saw some veil hanging in front of me and, projected onto that veil, a glowing vision of what they could have had.

I was a fool for failing to anticipate this. I never should have taken my father’s call in that bar.

I dropped my phone back into the drawer and closed it.

Three days since New Year’s, then four. I waited for the anticipation of Parker’s next message to fade, but the feeling stuck in the back of my mind, an unreachable itch, and by the time the weekend arrived, I felt deeply irritated with myself. I’d known that my back-and-forth with Parker had an expiration date: the moment when the people whose company we enjoyed reentered our lives.

I hadn’t expected this problem to arise: that I did enjoy Parker Navarro’s company. That, in fact, I found him consistently funny and his opinions continually surprising. That the idea of never learning more about him frustrated me.

That Saturday, Jacob and Cassie invited me over for brunch. Usually I could count on these to be calming experiences. Cassie would sing along to Japanese pop music while cutting strawberries, and Jacob would thumb through their bottomless catalog of teas. We’d chat about some movie that Lyra had watched six times on repeat, or about the interpersonal politics of Cassie’s lab, or about the megalomaniac director at Jacob’s nonprofit, whom Jacob steadfastly described as “not that bad.” This week, I knew the conversation would be different.