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I told him about Jake, how easy it had been to slip back into a relationship with him, how marriage was the logical next step, how I managed to keep up the façade until I could not: like Hemingway described bankruptcy – gradual and then sudden. Maybe it was the fact that he had already borne the brunt of the worst of me, this man who had once been my closest friend, but with Nao Kao there was no pretense, only things my brain simply refused to recall – and even now, after hundreds of hours of conversation, I was still coming to terms with the gaping holes in my memory.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“Liss, honey, Dadand I are going to invite a few of the international students in our departments on New Year’s Day. Is there anyone in your program we should invite?”
“Mmmm,” I looked up from my reading.
“Liss, please, I don’t know why you come home if you’re just going to keep your nose in your book all afternoon.”
“Laundry,” I sighed, and my mom laughed.
Even though it could be an ordeal to schlep my dirties home, it still beat washing clothes in the dingy laundry room in the basement of my building. Which is to say nothing of the quarters I was saving or the fact that the clothes actually dried in the prescribed time. I looked forward to my own washer and dryer – in unit – with almost as much fervor as I looked forward to earning a fulltime paycheck.
“I said, we’re inviting international students to a New Year’s open house. Do you know anyone we should include?”
My parents met as graduate students at Michigan State when my mom was studying for her doctorate in European history and my dad was working on his in forestry. I was born not long after my mom defended her dissertation, during which I had kicked her repeatedly in the ribs, as she liked to remind me. They had been lucky to find positions together at Michigan, where my mom had been in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and my dad in at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment ever since.
Their sabbaticals weren’t my only exposure to the wider world. Since before I could walk, my parents had welcomed international students into our home almost every holiday. They relished laying the table with American classics from fried chicken, hunks of buttery cornbread, macaroni cooked with fresh cream and mounds of sharp yellow cheese, and bowls of strawberries sticky with their own syrup buried beneath mounds of freshly whipped cream in summer, to perfectly golden turkeys with pillowy mashed potatoes, green beans specked with salt and glistening with butter, and homemade apple pies at Thanksgiving. Among her other attributes, my mother was a magnificent cook.
From New Zealand and Russia, Haiti and Colombia, China, Israel, and Italy our guests came, not a few of them now lifelong friends whose homes I had shared, whose children I knew, whose stories I loved. My parents spoke five languages between them, six if you counted English, and more than once they had translated official documents in the service of obtaining one or another vital record from far-flung government entities.
“Is Theo coming?” My older brother was home from Beijing where he was studying at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and I was eager to spend as much time with him as I could. Once he returned to China, it figured to be a year before I would see him again.
“He’d better! I’m planning to introduce him to some of the students I’ve invited.”
I rolled my eyes.
“You mean the girls. You’re trying to set him up again,” I said accusingly.
“Well I’d much rather he marries a nice girl who wants to stay in the U.S. than one who lives in China and will keep him there!”
“Did it ever occur to you he might want to stay in China, regardless of whether he finds a girl there?”
My mother narrowed her eyes at me. We had mined this territory before.
“Anyway, I think there’s a guy from Laos in the public policy school we could invite. Nao Kao. He’s taking a couple of education classes, too.”
“What did he do for Thanksgiving?”
I shrugged.
“You could have invited him here, Liss!”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, aware of never entirely living up to my parents’ sociable ideals.
We hosted a baker’s dozen of international students on New Year’s Day 2001, and though it was well after the ball had dropped, and the gathering was billed as an open house rather than a party, my mom had bright, shiny hats and noisemakers for all, along with her usual assortment of muffins and soups. Some half-dozen of each filled the buffet, sweet and savory muffins from corn to cranberry–white chocolate, and soups that ranged from chili teeming with peppers, onions, and wild venison to shiitake mushroom to her special, velvety creamy tomato, but the vat of Hoppin John dominated it all.
“Eating black eyed peas on New Year’s will bring you good luck,” my mother drawled, enlightening our guests on the Southern tradition with which she had grown up. Even after decades in the north, her words still poured out like warm honey when she wanted them to.
“Your parents do this every year?” Nao Kao asked between bites of piping hot Hoppin John, into which he had splashed half a bottle of Tabasco. Even my mother’s Cajun forebears would be impressed.
“Every holiday, basically. Usually not Christmas. But otherwise, yes.”
“This is why you knew where Laos was?”
“Among other reasons.”
My mom wandered over to join us.
