Selina The holiday season dawned, luminescent. Gutters glazed over, white gold with the reflections of elaborate storefront displays, and my eyes passed neutrally over miles of brilliant glass. I’d bought gifts for Jacob, Cassie, and Lyra in August, so as usual, Christmas was largely irrelevant to me. While Kellie and Joyce chatted in the office kitchen about their flights westward and which books they’d ordered for their nieces and n ephews, I stood at the window and watched marshmallows dissolve into cocoa. “What about you, Selina?” said Joyce in her tremulous way. “Heading off anywhere exciting?” “If she were,” said Kellie, “we’d find out about it four years later through an encoded telegram.” I smiled and sipped my hot chocolate. Kellie was right: I wasn’t overfond of the expectation of intimacy and disclosure that spread through the office during the holidays. Still, I had a soft spot for the atmosphere. In the City library, we garlanded the bookshelves and dotted the windows with white removable paint, the only trace of snow in a wet, windsw ept winter. Outside, the temperatures hovered stubbornly above freezing, rain and sleet spat onto the sidewalks, and the subways grew hazy with humidity. As for the feud, I was still staying in my lane, Parker Navarro was staying in his, Lola Xu’s petition had stopped circulating—and Hayden had vanished from City meetings. This seemed ominous. “Scott,” said Kellie one morning, jerking a thumb toward the corner of the library. “Am I allowed to ask where she went?”
“Her most recent email was fairly positive,” said Scott. “Readers seem to like the tip jar. Between that, our ... busy autumn”—his eyes flitted to me—“and the holiday subscription sales, we may have some breathing room.” “Does this mean they won’t cancel the anniversary party?” asked Brandon, one of our junior book critics. “Cancel it?” said Scott. “They love the anniversary party. They’re doubling the ticket prices.” After that, the atmosphere around the office became downright festive. I’d been worried about the anniversary party, too, always a bright spot in the dark gray flatness that was January and an obvious candidate for the chopping block if we were cutting expenses. For Nextward to give us the go-ahead was more than a relief. It suggested that everything I’d done this fall might really have loosened the noose around our neck. “Quit while you’re ahead,” Cassie said one afternoon. “Go on social media and tag Parker Navarro and say the feud’s over.” “What?” I said. “Are you serious? And let him win?” “Told you,” Jacob said to Cassie over his shoulder, halfway through changing Lyra’s diaper. “Dude, come on,” Cassie said to him. “We shouldn’t be enabling this.” “It’s her life,” said Jacob. Cassie looked back to me with a fond roll of her eyes. “Classic.” “Classic,” I agreed. Jacob had always taken pride in having very little sense of judgment. You’d hear him saying sentences like “It’s all the same to me” or “Oh, I don’t know anything about that” with a broad, easy smile. Profoundly unrelatable, but in times like this, he did remind me that some people were blessed with the enviable ability to relax. The nights grew longer, eating away at the back ends of afternoons, so that by the time the City staff left the Baumgartner, dusk was
already nestling among the tops of buildings. Everyone seemed to agree that this was d epressing, but I didn’t mind. New York’s winters had nothing on Minnesota’s. Decembers here were many-colored and loud; they had the decency to fill the gaps. When I detoured to crowded bookshops and grocery stores, I heard people on the phone asking each other about seasonal recipes and how to surprise their friends. Then I’d return to my little apartment and put something quiet on the speakers. Apron up, crack open a grease-stained cookbook. I’d hand-cut ravioli square by carefully pressed square. I had lists of movies from the year I wanted to catch up on; there was always something to do. I climbed a ladder in my front room with my hand sander. I’d almost finished with the crown molding, which meant it would soon be time to paint. And like I always did at this time of year, I texted Auntie Sylvia and my cousins, feeling the cautious limits of their messages. They never asked what sort of footing my parents and I were on, but when Auntie Sylvia said, What are your plans for Christmas this year, the larger question curled around the smaller. Around Thanksgiving, I’d spent some time with my parents’ email and drafted—then deleted—several responses. As Christmas cr ept nearer, the idea of r eplying returned, knocking against some edge in my mind like a piece of driftwood that had bobbed back to the docks. A week before the City offices were due to close for the holidays, I cozied up in bed with a mug of spiced cider and reopened my father’s message. We are sorry to hear about the fight. We want to know how you are handling it. If you call we will talk again. I turned the phone off and let it sit on my chest, warm and sleek and heavy, rising and falling with my breath.
I didn’t think I blamed my parents anymore for the distance between us. At twenty, of course I’d blamed them. During winter break of my junior year, when I’d outlined my career intentions, I’d fantasized about enthusiasm or warmth or, God forbid, some level of belief in my abilities. Instead, my parents had stared at me from across the living room, appalled, as though my decision to major in English literature was equivalent to desecrating somebody’s grave. “You’re going to leave Columbia,” said my father, “with a degree that you could get from any old school?” “No,” I’d said, “I’m going to leave with a Columbia diploma.” “Selina,” my mother said with a frantic edge to her voice. “What are you thinking? Where is this coming from? I can’t watch you throw away such a bright future.” My father had looked to my mother, hollow-eyed. “We should have stopped this in high school.” “I’m sorry. Stopped me reading?” “Stopped you from putting this hobby over everything else!” said my mother. “Make new friends? No, too busy with books. Going and having good experiences outside the house? Too busy alone with your books. What did we move to this country for?” As if I hadn’t tried to make friends. But I had no interest in defending myself to my parents, which would have required admitting what high school had been like for me socially. The small, boring humiliations of going to a football game, a party, a dance, only to stand several feet too far from any given group, holding my elbows in the palms of my hands, trying on jerky little smiles whenever somebody looked my way. The bigger humiliation of discovering that the people I’d considered friends did not consider me a friend. Alternating between too-long silences and terrible honesty that I immediately regretted, between classes, in the gym changing room,
with people I barely knew. My shameful arrogance at fifteen, because I could get a good grade; those poor people who had to put up with me, both students and teachers; the ways in which I had still, somehow, felt injured by other people’s dislike, despite often agreeing with them about the faults in my character. Against all this, books were a refuge. I could not interact wrongly with a book exc ept by failing to give it my attention. “So,” I’d said to my parents, “the fact that studying literature is fulfilling to me means nothing to you? The fact that all my professors and teachers think this is the right decision—that means nothing?” “We aren’t paying two hundred thousand dollars for you to read books!” my father said. I sat very still. I unfocused my vision and let some part of me retreat into a cage in the center of my body. “Why not?” I asked. “What?” said my father. “Why won’t you pay two hundred thousand dollars for an English degree, even though you’re perfectly happy to pay the same amount for prelaw?” “Selina, you can’t be asking that seriously,” said my mother. “Prelaw at Columbia gets you into a top law school, and then, there you are. That’s a good job. A stable career.” “So the issue is that you don’t think I can find a stable career in an English-related field.” “What stable career is there? What? Writing a book?” She laughed. “Writing advertisements or scripts for TV anchors? We don’t want you to be scraping and struggling and unable to build a life when you’re twice the age you are now!”
“But you’re assuming that’s what’ll happen. Even though tens of thousands of people have jobs exactly like the ones you just wrote off, and have normal lives, even if they don’t make two hundred thousand dollars a year. You’re assuming it’s not going to happen for me.” “Why are you assuming it will happen?” my father said. “There are fifty applicants for every one job in—what is it you want to do, publishing?” “Journalism.” Both of my parents shut their eyes as though I’d said “terrorism.” “I’m not being arrogant for wanting to do this,” I said. My voice was beginning to strain. “I’m not being presumptuous for—for having an interest, or for listening to my professors when they tell me I have a valuable perspective.” “‘A valuable perspective!’” my mother burst out. “You know who has a valuable perspective? A lawyer with a good degree and the influence to make other people listen to their perspective!” I sat, rigid, trying to tell myself that we had different cultural frames of reference. I tried to remind myself that they were pragmatic to a fault, and that when I’d received my Columbia acc eptance, the expectation of a high- powered future had been bundled into their delight. I’d blindsided them. I knew that. But I knew, too, that if I never tried to follow this path, I’d regret it forever. “I’m not changing my mind,” I said. “I mean it, Selina.” My father’s face looked as hard and brittle as fired clay. He looked like me. “We won’t be part of this.” “Fine.” They watched me stalk toward the hall, fishing my car keys from my jacket pocket. I was at the door when my mother declared, “We’ll be here when you’re ready to admit you’re wrong. Though, with you, God knows if that will ever happen.”
I would remember those words for the rest of my life. The accusation was a perfect snare. Clawing my way through my early twenties, I would rather have died than crawl back to my parents and tell them that I’d made a terrible mistake. Yet I had to lie there at night, remembering my mother’s words, and acknowledge that no matter what I did, she had still found a way to be right about me, about my stubbornness, my silence. True to their word, from that moment on, they didn’t pay another cent toward my tuition. Naively, I’d thought that after the cutoff, Columbia would consider me ind ependent, and I could get help from the financial aid office. I was wrong. On paper, I was still assumed to have access to my parents’ combined salary of $170,000. My application for a d ependency override, which would have removed their income from the picture, was rejected, because I had no evidence of an abusive childhood. And so I took on eighty-two thousand dollars of student debt to finish my last three semesters. They were a bloodshot blur of work-study hours, shifts at an off-campus job, and caffeinated all-nighters. I stayed in New York during breaks to work. My parents sent innumerable texts and novella- length emails begging me to reconsider, long after reconsidering was a feasible option—begging, as though they weren’t still the ones with every ounce of power over my life. Even stranger to me was that their pain seemed real. They seemed to be undergoing a mourning process for a person I’d never planned to be. They didn’t attend my graduation, which came as no surprise. By graduation we were barely speaking. Well into my late twenties, my relationship with my parents had been a source of de ep angst and extensive therapy. These days, I could at least
understand the knee-jerk worry they’d experienced about my future. Watching the brilliant writers around me lose their jobs, go back to school at thirty-five or forty, retrain in some other, more stable discipline, I understood. Still, I felt that the connective tissue between my parents and me had atrophied fourteen years ago. Our periods of attempted closeness had resulted in endless friction. Their stilted responses to descriptions of my work. My short temper at their enthusiasm over my cousins’ bright futures. But the periods of polite semi-distance—impersonal birthday greetings and holiday script recitation—had made me twice as miserable. Even this attempt of theirs to reconnect made me feel heavy and empty, like a steel box. Cleaner to hold some things at arm’s length. I stood too quickly. Dizzy, I sw ept a book from my nightstand and went for the door, leaving my phone behind. It was nine thirty on a Thursday night, and the Slippery Cork, my neighborhood dive, was half-empty. The bar had installed its usual wooden Santa by the door. This was an eight-foot-high statue with violently rosy cheeks, its blue eyes round and staring, its mouth open in what was probably meant to imply a “Ho ho ho!” But when taken all together, the expression suggested that Santa had seen some dread horror not meant for human eyes. “Nadia,” I said to the bartender as I took my usual stool beside the taps, “have you ever considered just putting up a tree? Some ornaments?” “No,” said Nadia, taking my favorite gin down from the back wall. She was in her fifties, red-haired, with a nose ring and a smoker’s rasp. “People love Haunted Santa.” “You should put him up at Halloween and do something normal for Christmas.”
“I should throw your ass out of here for being rude to him, is what I should do.” Nadia upended a silver cone of lime juice into the shaker and began to pack it with ice. “Just reading tonight, sweetheart? Or are we meeting someone?” “Reading.” I took the advance copy from my purse and flashed her the cover: Juliette Liao’s newest. “Never heard of her.” “She’s a genius.” “I’ll take your word for it.” Nadia knocked the steel cups together with the heel of her hand and began to shake. “It’s been a while, huh? Since you had anyone in here.” For some reason, I didn’t mind when Nadia asked me these kinds of questions. Something about the hard boundaries of our relationship relaxed me. We could clock in and out. She could walk away for hours to tend to other people. Everything was warm, and nothing had to be personal. “Maybe I’m taking my dates to another bar,” I said. “Yeah, right. You’ve got loyalty.” I smiled. Nadia didn’t push the question, but she was right. It had been years since I’d made any attempt at a relationship, since I’d decided that my romantic life would be best left as an entertaining series of flings. And as the flings had become progressively less entertaining, those had petered out, too. I hadn’t gone on a date in over a year. I barely missed the experience, the re volving door of hope and discomfort. But sometimes I did feel sad about my own disinterest. Part of me had acc epted that what I was looking for didn’t exist: a man who was a reader, who wasn’t put off by my career or my opinions, who read and loved women authors. A man who loved what he did, whether that was ornithology or programming or getting under the hood of beater cars. Someone who didn’t mind disagreement, who actually seemed to have fun engaging with my thoughts. Someone who would ask questions about small things in my life as though they mattered. Someone who seemed to like me.
Nadia set my gimlet on a coaster. “Hey. You okay?” “Fine. Yes.” She took my card. “Leave it open?” “Thanks.” I took a determined drink and settled in to read House Hearth Home. This was the main attraction for me this Christmas. A chance to see Juliette Liao, who hadn’t done an appearance in eight years and who was coming to the city right before the holidays. I’d had the event in my calendar since S eptember. Granted, she’d be speaking with Christian Gatehead, which in my eyes was like van Gogh discussing art with a chimpanzee that’s learned to paint with its own feces. But I’d put up with seeing Gatehead again if it meant I got to see her, too. I cracked the book open, and she whisked me away, far from the clinks and chatter of the bar, through centuries, into a cabin in Missouri in the 1810 s. I followed her into the switchgrass and up to the edge of the river. I became somebody else. Somebody better. The best books always convinced me of this: that I was in the presence not of greatness but of goodness, something so warm and expansive that it counterbalanced everything else that people were capable of. Nobody wrote that way like Juliette Liao. Nobody made me feel so close to other people, like I could understand everybody, like anyone could understand me. I paused midpage at the thought. That had come from somewhere. An op-ed, maybe? Something in a journal? I k ept reading, though the thought persisted as I spooned down paragraph after beautiful, delicate paragraph. A hundred pages in, I remembered. To get that response ... it feels like you’re also s eparate from other people. Like other people can’t understand you, or maybe you’ll never understand them. I stirred my gimlet with its straw, listening to the click of the ice, frowning into the glass.
Parker Navarro. What he’d said on that podcast had been percolating in me. Weeks after the Wiseman Festival, I occasionally caught myself thinking about his comments during our panel, too. The way he’d spoken about fiction not as a calling, not as an art, but as a place that your body enters and exits, a fertile, private place. Even a stuck clock is right twice a day, I told myself, but as I sipped my drink I thought of him leaning on the seat beside me at the bar that night. The way I could speak and watch the words ripple into him, his reactivity, his expressiveness. The way he’d looked at me not with the resentment I’d come to expect from authors I’d critically brutalized, but with a hard intensity, as though he were waiting for me to say something specific, as though, if we’d frozen time, he would have waited hours to hear the right words.