The Explanation for Everything A Novel by Lauren Grodstein

Author:Lauren Grodstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-07-24T21:00:00+00:00

NINE

The girl’s name had been Anita Lim. She was the daughter of Korean immigrants who had established a small grocery store in Brooklyn during the first year of the Reagan administration, and who had hung by their shop’s front door a large framed photograph of that president, along with a reasonable facsimile of a handwritten note from him, thanking them for their good wishes in the wake of his shooting. It spoke to how well the Lims were liked in their part of Brooklyn that none of their friendly and pushy customers ever gave them shit about that photograph, even as the old conservative Italians died out and were replaced by tattooed mothers pushing fancy strollers and novelists buying cigarettes at two in the morning.

As the years went on, the Lims sold fewer cans of tomatoes, more boxes of organic soy milk, and continued to do a brisk trade in cat food, toilet paper, and soap. They remembered their customers’ names and preferences, never ran out of Progresso chicken noodle for Chris and Julie Butler’s boys, never ran out of energy bars for Catherine Marcello, the marathoner. They had fresh flowers out front, seasonal and expensive, and a wide variety of craft and regional beers in the coolers in the back.

The Lims lived in an apartment above the store, which they had secured, rent-controlled, for three hundred dollars a month when they moved to Brooklyn from Pusan, and which they eventually bought when their landlord, a cranky old Italian, announced a sudden and hasty move to North Carolina in 1982. What was he going to North Carolina for? The Lims never found out, but they rallied their family in Korea, took out some loans, bought the building, watched its value rise precipitously during the first years of the century, and paid back their family with interest.

In 1979 and ’80 they had their children, who, because the Lims themselves were always working, seemed to grow up in the store, between the shelves of soup and the shelves of macaroni. Eddie and Anita attended the public school down the block from the store when the school wasn’t considered particularly good, and attended the Bethany Presbyterian Church in Sunset Park even though there was a bigger, fancier Korean church in Manhattan. But the Lims liked Bethany, its homey feel, its pastor practically an old neighbor from Pusan. Eddie, their elder child, did them proud by believing the Word of God. Anita, on the other hand, did not believe, and in fact often refused to go to church at all, but although this rejection made her parents sad they agreed with each other, at night, when Anita’s light still burned from behind her bedroom door—my goodness, how many hours could that girl study without wearing out her eyes?—that she was such a marvelous daughter, such a credit to them in so many ways, that truly they could not be too saddened by her. Besides, were they really going to force her to go to

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