were in our kitchen dipping fat broken pretzels into a jar of Nutella.
“Biennially,” I said. “Tiny little salads, dressing on the side.”
He examined his pretzel. “So they’re like, what, air ferns?”
“Or vampires.”
“Should I wear a suit tomorrow, you think?”
“God no,” I said. “He’d find it distressingly plebeian.”
Dean laughed, pushing the Nutella toward me.
13
I was at the Catalog early the following Wednesday morning. By nine o’clock there were four of us manning the lines.
“I started out so excited this morning,” said my fellow order-taker chick Yong Sun, stepping into the phone room.
“What about?” I said.
“Well, I was running late, so I caught a taxi to my subway station, and the driver asked if I was Korean.” She took a sip of her coffee.
“White guy?” asked Karen, who was at the desk next to mine.
Yong Sun nodded. “I thought, ‘ Finally, one of you people got a clue!’ you know?”
“I’m so proud, on behalf of my ignorant race,” I said.
“So I asked him how he could tell,” she continued, “and he shrugs and goes, ‘You smell like garlic.’ ”
“Fucking white people,” said Yumiko, across from us. “So fucking stupid.”
We’d had variations of this conversation before, but I still found it morbidly fascinating.
Yumiko’s parents had come from Japan, Karen’s from China, Yong Sun’s, obviously, from Korea.
The three of them spent a lot of time ranking on each other’s respective heritage, explaining the hierarchy to me as Japan first, then Korea, then China, in order of current economic supremacy.
Karen would always snap back in response to that that everyone in the room could kiss her American-born ass, because if it weren’t for China, “ your stupid countries wouldn’t know how to read or write, and we’d all be out of a damn job.”
I always made a point of thanking her for our employment, not to mention fireworks, dim sum, and pasta while we were at it.
Yumiko glanced at an old copy of Vogue someone had left on her desk. “So how come rich fucking white people dress like such shit all the time?”
She was barely five feet tall—a graceful slip of a girl who might have just stepped from the mists of an ukiyo-e woodblock print—but she was equipped with the most superbly atrocious vocabulary I’d ever encountered. Seriously, the chick made me sound like a repressed Mormon.
“Rich white people dress like shit to show they don’t have to care,” I said.
Yumiko gave my crap T-shirt and frayed khaki Bermudas a how-the-hell-would- you-know smirk. “Fucking stupid. You’re all, like, a bunch of fucking freaks.”
“I’ve always thought so,” I said, booting up my computer.
“I mean,” she continued, “how could anyone even fucking kiss a white guy? They’ve got those eyes, you know? All blue and weird shit. Like they’re fucking dead. It’s disgusting.”
“More for me, then,” said Karen.
Yumiko waved this off. “Banana bitch—only yellow on the outside.”
“So, what, you like Japan better than here?” I asked her.
“That’s all bullshit, back there,” she said. “They won’t let you do fucking anything, you know? Like, my cousin used a curling iron on her hair once, for school? The teacher stuck her head in a bucket of water in front of the whole class. Said they had to make sure she wasn’t Korean or some shit.”
“Tasteless fool,” said Yong Sun, bouncing the palm of one hand under her own naturally curly tresses, the gesture of Frieda in a Peanuts special.
“Plus, they think I’m ugly,” said Yumiko.
“You’re a total babe,” I said. “What are they, crazy?”
“My eyes are too big, and I have dark skin—my grandfather calls me Indian Girl. You’re supposed to be all squinty and pale and shit. Fuck that.”
“Well, over here, you’re gorgeous,” I said.
“Over here I have no tits. They think I look like a fucking twelve-year-old boy.”
“Trade you,” I said, pointing at my own abundance of boobulage.
She ignored that. “I go to Victoria’s Secret, they can’t even sell me underpants—both legs fit in one hole. I try on jeans at the Gap, they’re all size zero—like, not even big enough to get a real number. Fucked up.”
“Whine, whine, whine,” said Karen, smiling. “Just like some stupid FOB.”
I knew from previous Yumiko-rants that this acronym stood for Fresh Off the Boat.
Yumiko said, “Shut the fuck up and give me a Marlboro.”
Karen drew a red-and-white soft-pack from her purse, extracted a smoke, and tossed it onto the carpet.
Yumiko stuck it behind her ear, filter forward.
“Pussy chink-ass bitch can’t even throw right,” she said. “No wonder your grandma’s still slopping around rice paddies behind a water buffalo—dog-eating