Joss and Gold by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558617117
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2016-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Five

Meryl was groggy getting up on Sunday. Usually she liked Sundays, when they looked like a pair of castaways, Chester in his flapping striped pajamas, a patient who’d just escaped from a maximum-security psychiatric hospital, and she in navy blue tattered robe and scruffy slippers, the bag lady who sat at the corner of Fifth and Fifty-seventh, the Bonwit Teller lady, as Kate called her.

It was the only morning in the week that they shared, and they always sat in the dining room with a pot of tea and a pot of coffee and read the Times. That was when she told Chester about Parks and he told her where she was doing things wrong.

Today it was almost eight when she woke. Chester was still sleeping. He’d been sleeping a lot since Friday and complaining about being tired.

He came into the kitchen and stood by her shoulder as she was pushing the eggs around with a wooden spoon. She scrambled eggs the way her mother taught her, thick custardy lumps that she could heap on toast without getting the bread soggy. Chester had been crazy for them when she first moved in with him. He’d ask for them for lunch and dinner.

She couldn’t wait for the eggs to set, so she ate a slice of cinnamon raisin bread while she was turning over the curds.

“How many eggs?” he asked.

“Six.”

Meryl was thinking about last night and the hundred people at the dinner. It was amazing how quickly people ate, even when the food wasn’t good.

She was glad she had been scheduled to speak after dinner. Her mother always said people were better behaved after they’d been fed. She thought the eating would take two hours, but coffee and ice cream were served within an hour and then Vernon Chatswick stood up and introduced her.

“Make eight eggs?”

It was nauseating how much food Chester could put away. He should either be slowing down or putting it on, but nothing showed on him.

Doris had been crazy over his body; it was so tall and lean among the foreign students who hung around them that year. She could have killed Meryl the first time she saw him coming out of the bathroom in his Jockey shorts. Doris knew what the score was then.

Life isn’t fair, Meryl had told her.

“Too late. Get me your plate.” She divided the eggs, piled them in a mound on the plates and took the bread out of the toaster.

“There’s something in the Times on you.”

“No! What page?” She was nervous and didn’t want to believe it.

“Third page of the “Metro” section.”

The eggs were getting cold, but she wasn’t hungry anymore. She got up and read over his shoulder.

“A Future for the Parks.” The byline was Bertha Tandy. She knew it was Bertha, but she checked anyway. Bertha had been at the dinner.

“Sock it to them,” she’d whispered, giving Meryl the eye.

Big Bertha. Funny, Meryl had never marked Bertha for an important future when she trailed Meryl everywhere in her senior year, just a fat freshman with a crush.

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