Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

She wanted to grab Malcolm by the collar with one hand and say, “People would have painted me. If I’d lived in the right century, they would have paid me just to sit there!” But with the other hand she wanted to scratch out her face with a marker or a knife, obliterate every trace of ugliness, of gawky eighth grader, of hope.

Some feminist.

That Friday it wasn’t even Leonard who called her in, but Miriam Kohn, the dean of faculty. Alex was offered a glass of water, asked to take a seat on the soft leather couch. She wanted to compare the experience to being called to the principal’s office, but that had never happened to her.

“So we received a letter from a student named Eden Su,” Miriam said. She had nothing on her desk, nothing at all except her picture frames and her closed computer, and she rested her hands in her lap. “It was a request to drop your class.”

“I think I know what this is about,” Alex said. It had been one of about ten scenarios she’d rehearsed since receiving Miriam’s e-mail, and she felt her best strategy was to turn this into a friendly debate about how hard to push foreign students, and whether the class participation component was out of order.

“I’m not sure you do. Tell me what you know about Miss Su.”

“She does seem borderline depressed to me, although I question whether that’s cultural, just a matter of reserve. She’s not an English major.” Miriam was staring at her, so she kept talking. “I believe she’s a sophomore. Very good writer.”

“Yes, her writing is excellent. Tell me something: You mentioned a cultural issue. What did you mean by that?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it an issue . She’s just very quiet, and I’m sure that’s what the letter is about, that I asked her to speak more in class. I did acknowledge that in her previous schooling she likely hadn’t been asked to speak much. I hope that didn’t upset her.”

Miriam opened a desk drawer and pulled out a paper. It wasn’t folded — so it was a Xerox of the letter, and who knew how many copies were out there, and why. Miriam glanced through it. “In this exchange, did you refer to her schooling in Korea?”

“Right.” And then her stomach turned to a wave of acid. Miriam had asked it so casually, but no, this was the whole point. “Oh God, is she not—”

“No, she’s not. She’s from Minnesota, fifth-generation American. And her ethnic background is Chinese.”

Alex stared stupidly forward. Could she really have mistaken a whispered Minnesotan accent for a Korean one? She started to explain that Eden never spoke, that she looked so jet-lagged, but she stopped herself. It might only make things worse. She put her hand to her mouth to show that she was properly horrified, that she felt terrible on behalf of the girl. When really all she felt was horrified for herself.

Miriam looked at the letter again. “The issue, you understand, is the presumption that a student who looks Asian must be foreign-born. She’s quite angry, and it seems she’s involved the Minority Student Council. She says her father is upset, but we haven’t heard from him yet.”

“Can I ask why Leonard isn’t handling this, on a departmental level?”

“He felt uncomfortable with the situation.” He probably didn’t even understand what the issue was. She’d heard the man use the word oriental on multiple occasions.

“May I please see the letter?” Alex held out her hand.

“Not at the moment, no, I’m afraid not.” Miriam slid it back in the desk drawer. “But you’ll see it soon. And I want you to know that I do understand how we make assumptions about all our students — background, socioeconomic status. If it were up to me, it would end with this conversation.”

Alex didn’t know what to do, and she realized some principal’s office experience would have come in handy. Did one grovel now? Burst into tears? Make a joke? It was hot, so she rolled up her sleeves. In the office of the South Australian Parks Department, she’d just told her story again and again while they plied her with tea and cookies and tried to ensure she maintained a pleasant impression of Australia despite the legal trouble. A cookie might have been nice right now.

“What’s going to happen next is that the dean of students will recommend Miss Su take this to the Grievance Committee, and you’ll just have to do a written statement. I predict that they’ll discuss this briefly and dismiss it. And if there’s no disciplinary action, it won’t come up in your tenure review. That’s my very strong prediction.”

On the way to her car, she called Malcolm and canceled dinner, saying she had a monstrous headache and ten calls to make. She’d just have seethed silently, and she couldn’t bear his asking what was wrong, trying to guess if it was something he’d said or done.

Usually, it was.

That night she drank an entire bottle of red wine, played A Night at the Opera with the sound too low to hear, and attempted to catalog any potentially racist thoughts she’d ever entertained. When she was five, walking in Boston, she’d grabbed her mother’s hand because there was a black man coming toward them on the sidewalk. But she was so young, and she’d grown up in New Hampshire, for Christ’s sake.

More recently, she hated the way any NPR reporter using Spanish words would roll out the thickest accent possible, just to prove to his boss and the listening public that ten years of Spanish classes had paid off and he was down with the people. “It’s going to be a big issue with Ell-a- diiii -no voters,” for instance. In a way he’d never refer to “the Français community” or “ Deutsch immigrants.”

And there was a journalism professor, Mary Gardner, whose creamy brown skin Alex once stared at in a faculty forum, becoming (profoundly, inexcusably) hungry for chocolate.

But that was it. Honest to God, that was it. A resentment of overzealous reporters, a perverse admiration of Mary Gardner’s complexion, a small child’s ignorance.

She hadn’t even been around much overt racism. Once, in college, a girl on her freshman hall had said, “If everyone in Asia is, like, lactose intolerant, then how do they feed their babies? Is that why they’re all so skinny?”

It occurred to Alex, lying drunk on the couch, that if all she could summon up was one incident of someone else’s racism, while she could pin three on herself — no, four, let’s not forget the big one — that made her the most racist person she knew. By 300 percent.

Malcolm called at nine to see how she was, but she was too drunk to pick up. He called on Saturday morning, when she was too hungover, and again on Sunday night, when she was once again too drunk. He didn’t seem terribly concerned about her absence, not even in the Sunday message. “Just checking in,” he said. “Call me later.”

She passed herself in the mirror late that night, and the gin and the bathroom lighting made her look somehow speckled, like a grainy photograph. She gripped the sink edge and squinted, to see how she’d look to a stranger. Interesting, maybe. Striking. From a certain angle, ugly, and from a certain angle, not.

Sometime after midnight, she called Malcolm’s cell phone, knowing it would be turned off. She said, slowly, trying to enunciate, “ Just checking in. I want you to know, Malcolm, that I cannot live the rest of my life being ugly. You need to know that. That is all.”

She drank three glasses of water and passed out.