TWENTY
I was curled up on the couch when the phone rang. I stirred and sat halfway up, bleary-eyed. I still didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I let it ring until the machine picked up.
Hey, it’s Ingrid. Leave me a message. Beep.
“Ingrid-ah,” my mother’s cheerful, chirpy voice came through in Mandarin—it was soothing, somehow, and my heart hurt as I thought about how much I missed my parents, how hard it was going to be to disappoint them.
They’d sacrificed so much, coming here from Taipei as grad students with nothing, so many decades ago.
What would it feel like for them to know that I’d had the American Dream solidly within my grasp but had let it slip from my fingers?
I strained to hear my mother’s message. Her voice sounded plaintive, braver and louder than she would have sounded if she’d been calling me at work, but still tentative all the same.
“Ingrid, Daddy and I haven’t heard from you in a little while, and we just wanted to see if everything’s all right.
Give us a call when you can. I know you must be working so hard, as usual.
You must be very busy at work. Love, Mom. ” Beep.
I had to tell them.
I threw off my blanket, picked up the phone, and dialed my parents’ number. My hands were shaking badly enough that I messed up the first time and had to dial twice.
I didn’t know how I was going to break this news to them, but they deserved to know the truth. They were going to be devastated. In my parents’ world, it was a tragedy if the only Ivy your child got into was Cornell.
The phone rang three times before my father picked up. “Hello?” he said. He sounded cheerful, and that made my heart break just a little more.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, as brightly as I could manage.
“Oh, Ingrid.” I could hear him take the phone away from his ear and holler to my mom, “Yan-Mei! It’s Ingrid! Hurry up! Hold on, sweetie, Mom’s coming, we’ll put you on the speakerphone—”
“No, wait, Dad? Actually, don’t put me on speaker—”
There was a loud squawk, and both my parents’ voices came on together. “Hello!” shouted my dad. “Hi, Ingrid!” said my mother’s happy voice. “What a surprise! Only six o’clock! You don’t usually call so early! Did you get to leave work early?”
Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. I nearly laughed.
“Actually,” I began, “that’s sort of what I was calling you guys about.
” And then, without having prepared anything in advance, without having scripted how I’d do it, I just blurted it all out in a big crazy headlong crush of words.
I told them—in Mandarin, so there would be no miscommunication—everything that had happened.
About Marty Adler and Ted Lassiter and Hunter’s horrible skit and the country club and the Diversity Committee and Dr. Rossi and Zhang Liu and the terrible meeting with the client where everything had gone horribly wrong and yes, I even told them about Murph.
I described the horrible meeting in Adler’s office and admitted that I was home now—had been home for many days, in fact, thinking.
I expected that my mother would cry. She didn’t.
In fact, both she and my father were silent for what seemed like a very long time.
When my mother finally did speak, she lapsed back into Mandarin, sounding extremely calm and practical.
Matter-of-fact, even. To my surprise, she actually reminded me of Rachel.
“Well, you’ll come home and get a job here, that’s all there is to that,” she said, with finality. Her voice softened. “Maybe you can talk to Cindy Bai or Susan Wu—maybe they know of a local lawyer here who could use a little help around the office. Just until you get back on your feet.”
Help around the office? Me, who’d been about to become the first female Corporate partner at one of the most powerful law firms in the world? Well, hell, maybe I could, maybe I would. Maybe it had come to that.
“It’s not that easy, Mom,” I said. “I don’t want to rush into anything. I just need to think things through right now.”
There was another pause.
“It’s not too late to apply to medical school,” she said.
I started to laugh. And once I started, it was hard to stop. It felt great to laugh out loud.
My mother sounded annoyed. “Well, I’m just saying, you still could.”
My father interrupted, “I think Ingrid’s right. She just needs some time to think about things, Yan-Mei.”
My heart swelled. Good old Dad.
Then my mother said quietly, “You could come back home, Ingrid. Start over. There are lots of nice places for young people to live in Maryland and Virginia. I’ll help you look.”
I didn’t want to live in a nice place. I wanted to be in Manhattan.
“I’m sure,” my mother continued, “in a different city, no one will even care that you’d been on some bad project with some mean, bad boss at some company up in New York. Maybe they won’t even know of this Valentine company. Maybe no one will even have heard of it.”
I sighed. “They’ll have heard of it, Mom, believe me. They’ll all have heard of it.”
After a pause, I said, “I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to tell you all of this. I wish my news were better.”
My mother sighed, too. “Ingrid-ah.” She paused, and I could tell she was trying to bring herself to say something difficult.
“Your father and I were always so worried about you with that job, living in that lonely apartment, not eating proper meals, working so late every night and coming home by yourself at three in the morning. Maybe”—she hesitated—“maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Please come home. All you need is some time, to try to figure out what will make you happy.”
I sat there pressing the receiver to my ear, stunned. All along, I’d thought that my parents weren’t equipped to hear about when my life turned bad. When in fact, maybe all they’d wanted was for me to be happy.
“Your mother and I raised a smart girl,” my dad said. “You’ll figure out a way. I’m not worried.”
All of this time, I thought I’d been busily protecting my parents. When it turned out perhaps they hadn’t needed much protecting at all. But maybe I had.
“Promise me you’ll at least think about coming home,” my mother said. “Maybe in the fall. Things always seem to look so much brighter in the fall. Remember you used to tell me that?”
I smiled into the receiver. “Yes,” I said softly.
After we said good-bye, I sat there for a minute longer, thinking about what my mother had said.
The fall had always been my favorite season.
There was just something I loved about that sharp autumnal crackle in the air, which I still associated with new lunchboxes and the delicious whiff of spiral notebooks and Magic Markers.
I loved going back-to-school shopping with my mom for new sweaters and skirts at Sears and Penney’s.
Fresh starts, in other words. Fall felt like a fresh start.
One could go away over the summer and come back a totally reinvented self.
Anything seemed possible.