Don Lee - The Collective

“Nearby. On the edge of BC,” she said, not clarifying anything for me.

“How far away is Chestnut Hill from Cambridge?”

“Twenty minutes driving, forever on the T. Why?”

It was much closer than I had thought, not a distant suburb. “You could go visit Joshua. His parents’ house is near Harvard Square.”

“Why would I want to visit Joshua? He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” I said, although Joshua had never expressed anything but indifference or disdain for her.

“What would be the point?” Didi asked. “It’s not like we’re friends or anything.”

I didn’t know what the point would be, exactly. I supposed I was desperate for something to ground her, connect her, to me again. She seemed so removed from me.

“I called twice tonight,” I said. “Didn’t your mother give you the messages?”

“I was going to call you back tomorrow,” she said. “I’m beat.”

“Did you go somewhere after the movie?”

“Hey,” Didi said abruptly, “I was wondering, where were you born? I’ve never asked you. Were you born in Korea?”

“What?” The question befuddled me. “No. I was born here, in Mission Viejo. At Sisters of St. Joseph.”

“Do you speak Korean or English at home?” she asked.

“English,” I said, even more flummoxed. “I don’t know Korean. I thought I told you.” I had explained to her that I was a sansei , third generation. I had assumed she understood. All this time, had she been thinking of me as a fobby, an immigrant fresh off the boat? Was that how she saw me?

“What about your parents and sister?” Didi continued. “Do they speak to each other in Korean?”

“Why are you asking me these things all of a sudden?”

“No reason. I was just wondering.”

“Did someone in your family ask?”

“No, not really. Well, maybe the subject came up.”

“When you told them I’m your boyfriend?”

“I don’t know if I used the word boyfriend,” she said.

“Why not?”

“They’d pester me endlessly!”

“So what? They’ve got to know what’s going on — I call you every day.”

“You don’t know my family. They’re always in my business. They never leave me alone. Nothing’s ever private. I can’t ever get a moment’s peace around here. You have no idea what it’s like.”

“It doesn’t seem to bother you that much. From what I can tell, you’ve been having fun, a lot of fun, being back home.”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” She yawned. “What time is it? It’s late. That movie sucked. We should have walked out halfway.”

“Who’d you go with?”

“Abby and Michael.” Her younger sister and brother.

“Just you guys?”

“We met some people there.”

“Yeah? Who?” I asked, noting the original omission.

“Nina and Sean. Friends from Milton.”

“Is Sean an old boyfriend?”

“Sean? Sean Maguire?” She laughed. “No.”

“He’s not the guy you lost your virginity to?”

She laughed again. “That’s so screwy to even suggest. So to speak. Naw, Sean’s like a cousin to me. That was Kurt, at music camp in Lake Winnipesaukee. He was from Montpelier. I don’t know where the hell he is now. Oh, my God, for a moment I forgot his last name.”

“Sean never had a thing for you?”

“Pamplin.”

“What?”

“That was his last name. Kurt Pamplin. I wonder what ever became of him. He was a really hot guitarist. I bet he’s up in Burlington, in a band or something, playing at Nectar’s. That’s where Phish got their start, you know. They went to UVM. God, I could go for an order of their gravy fries right now. If you ever go to Burlington, you have to go to Nectar’s and get their gravy fries. But you have to get them from the little window outside and eat them standing on the sidewalk. And you have to be drunk, and it has to be, like, two a.m. and wicked cold out. If you eat them inside, it’s not the same thing.”

I did not want to hear about Kurt the hot guitarist, or the band Fish, or the club Nectar’s and the culinary delights of eating their fries al fresco. “Tell me about Sean,” I said.

“What about him?”

“Where’s he go to school?”

“Princeton.”

The fucker. “Have you been hanging out with him a lot?”

“My mom’s best friends with his mom. He’s like my brother.”

First a cousin, now a brother. “I bet he’s always had a thing for you.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Did you tell him you have a boyfriend?”

“I told him I’ve been seeing someone, yeah.”

“ ‘Someone.’ Not anything more definitive than that, huh? Why won’t you tell people about me?”

“I just explained.”

“Are you ashamed of me?” I asked.

“Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

“Why do you want to keep me secret, then?” For the first time, I thought there might be something to Joshua’s lemon-sucker theory.

“I’m really tired,” Didi said. “I’m going to sleep. Let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay?”

We didn’t talk about it, though. She kept skirting the topic, and our conversations devolved into prickles of irritation the rest of the vacation.

Nevertheless, when I got back to St. Paul at the end of January, I had hopes we could somehow go back to where we’d left off at the end of the fall semester.

I met Didi at the airport, flowers in hand, reenacting our reunion after Thanksgiving. She looked wonderful. Gone were the pallor and dark circles and emaciation from finals week. She radiated health — well rested and well fed. I had a surprise planned for her: I had bought new sheets for us, exquisitely soft, with a thread count of four hundred and fifty. But Didi demurred when I tried to take her to my dorm room.

“I have a yeast infection,” she told me.

“A what?”

“The doctor said maybe it has something to do with my sugar levels. I’m not feeling that great. You mind if I sleep in my own room tonight?”

I was certain now that she had been cheating on me. Yeast infections were from sex. Too much sex. Not for nothing was it called the honeymoon syndrome.

The next morning, as I knew she would, Didi broke up with me.

“It’s Sean, isn’t it? You’ve been fucking him.”

“Sean has nothing to do with this,” she said, packing the belongings she had stored in my room.

“That’s not a denial.”

“I haven’t been fucking him, all right? I haven’t been fucking anyone. This is what I mean. I can’t breathe around you. I feel suffocated by you. You’re always all over me. All we ever do is have sex. Have you noticed we never talk about anything? I can’t remember a single conversation we’ve ever had. We don’t have anything in common.”

“You never loved me, did you?” I said.

“This is what I mean. All this talk about love! For God’s sake, we’re eighteen ! Why couldn’t we have just enjoyed ourselves and, you know, been casual about it? Why’d you have to get so serious and obsessive? You want too much. You wrecked it.”

“You were just slumming.”

“What?”

In the liberal protectorate of Mac, she had felt uninhibited, free, but once she went home, she had woken up to our outward differences, and had lost her nerve. She had begun to envision my life on the opposite coast, and had been terrorized by the specter of a bunch of strange Orientals sitting on the floor in hanbok , eating live octopus and hot chili peppers, speaking in unintelligible barks and yips. “People like you,” I said, “when it gets down to it, you’ll always stick to your own kind.”

“What are you talking about? What’s that even mean?”