then, Fitzgerald,” she said in a buoyant public voice. “He was pretending to interview me, Dad. Thanks again, Fitz, take good notes for me.”
At two o’clock Ming called back. “So?” she asked.
“We were friends before, and now it’s the same,” said Fitz.
“And?”
“And you are very honest. I shouldn’t come to Toronto, though.”
“That’s fine,” she said, “I don’t know why you wanted to follow me around.”
“You need to focus on your interview. I don’t want to distract you.”
“I’m curious as to why you think that if you had come, which I agree that you should not, you would have been distracting. We have an agreement. Nothing romantic, and so I’m confused that you would think that I might be liable to be distracted by you.”
“Then we agree,” he said.
—
At three-fifteen, Ming called Fitzgerald again, tried to keep her voice clear. She needed to tell it, the way a scab must, at times, be picked off the body and made to bleed before the finger is satisfied.
“At first it was Karl’s hand on my knee as he explained the periodic table. I didn’t think much of it, although it felt strange—he’s my cousin, after all.”
When she wrote her first perfect exam paper and showed it to Karl before showing her father, he pecked his lips on hers. It was brief initially, but the congratulatory kisses became longer and slower. In the wetness of lips, Ming could see Karl’s weakness in his desire, and began to enjoy this power at the same time that she began to enjoy the kisses. Physical pleasure did not do away with her habit of rinsing and spitting ten times (she counted) immediately after Karl’s departure, or the “letters to self” detailing why she was a filthy slut. She discarded these in the garbage at the bus stop on her way to school. One afternoon before she wrote her entrance exams for Dunning Hall Girls’ Academy, Karl told Ming that he was busy, and might not be able to tutor anymore. Terrified of losing her new academic success, Ming pleaded with him to make time for her, and he agreed to come over that afternoon. She had begun to pretend while they were kissing that they weren’t really cousins, that she was adopted, or he was. That day, she didn’t stop his hand when it slid up her leg, underwear tight at the waist with his strong hand pulling on it. Although this was frightening, she was more scared of losing him, and she liked it that he fumbled, that he wasn’t sure where to go. Later, when he slid the condom off, it looked exactly like a snake shedding its skin. Only then did it occur to her that he had been prepared, that he had brought a rubber. Ming told her parents that she wanted to become a doctor, which was also Karl’s ambition. Pleased, they doubled their severity in urging her to study.
Karl was accepted into medicine in his third year of biology. To celebrate, there was a twelve-course family banquet, the pan-fried lobsters sizzling and turning on the Lazy Susan. Ming’s uncle proclaimed a generation of success, with Ming as the next doctor. She learned of Karl’s failed second-year application from his sister, who whispered of this shame to her. Karl was a whirlpool of family approval whom Ming increasingly feared and hoped to imitate. He dated, and she was jealous. He told her that what they had between them was a special thing, and she tried to believe this.
In Ming’s last year of high school, Karl went away for a month of rural training, and Ming felt cleaner and lighter. She aced chemistry without his help. When he returned, Ming told him that she didn’t need his tutoring anymore. Karl threatened that he could influence her medical school application. He said it with such bravado that she recognized that this was not the first of his lies. The study sessions ended.
Now, Karl was doing his surgical residency in Toronto, and they avoided each other at family gatherings. He had put his hand on her breast once this year, in an upstairs hallway during a birthday party, and she had threatened to scream.
It was four-fifteen in the morning.
She said, “You thought I was so perfect.”
“You seem to have everything under such control.”
“I cultivate that notion. I used to stand in front of the mirror and call myself slut, bitch. Not out loud—I was afraid someone would hear, so I mouthed the words. I felt like I deserved to be called names. Then Karl told me how good I was when we did what he liked, and when I brought home my grades my parents were happy and proud.”
“You were a kid. How could you know what to do?”
“That idea should absolve me, except it also takes something away. I looked forward to seeing him, although he was my nightmare. I got stuck. If I don’t recognize that I enjoyed certain things, even the sex, then I was a stupid lump. No. I was there and made decisions, but was I coerced? Of course. I got things, but only some of them were what I asked for. These thoughts go round and round. You know how I distract myself? I study. Every last little detail, and it fills my head. Karl taught me how to study for marks—how to write all these stupid tests—and now I forget myself by stuffing my head full.”
There was quiet, and then after a little while Fitzgerald said, “You know I love you.” Again silence, and then, “I might as well say it.”
“It may be the same for me, but I’m afraid of it.”
At seven in the morning, when she woke up, Ming realized that she had not asked Fitzgerald whether he was coming to Toronto. Ming’s father delivered her to the train station, the long line of travellers snaking under the black maze of girders. She saw Fitzgerald buying a ticket at the booth. Her father, for whom Fitzgerald was an invisible telephone threat, was oblivious as Fitz walked past them toward the end of the line. At the platform, Ming’s father squeezed her and told her how much honour she would bring to the family if she succeeded. Ming boarded, and sat alone until she had waved her father goodbye. Only then did she find Fitzgerald. At nine-thirty, the soft clanking rhythm of the iron wheels on the joints of the track came quicker and closer as the train escaped Ottawa’s southern suburbs. Exhausted from the sleepless night, Ming grasped Fitzgerald’s hand, and rested her head in the cleft between his shoulder and chest, amazed at the way the sides of their bodies fit together. It was a physical relief for them to touch. He kissed the top of her head and, as she fell asleep, Ming breathed in deeply this sweetly unfamiliar warmth.
—
—
—
THE THREE STUDENTS STOOD BESIDE THE WRAPPED body lying on the metal table. They all wore clean, new laboratory coats that still had creases down the arms and over the breast pockets from being folded and stacked in a box. These white coats were the same size, even though the wearers were of varying build. All three medical students were size medium, but differently framed. Ming had her cuffs rolled up twice.
They had come in from the hot early afternoon of an autumn day, a remnant of summer. They had entered the basement by an unmarked inner staircase,
