This place was called Tan Tan, though it would soon be trendy enough to go by a nickname: Tan’s. Maybe Tan’s would become T’s, and then T’s would be identified only by a slight turn of the head or a certain widening of the eyes. After that, the downhill slide in reputation would be inevitable, whether or not the culinary content and quality of the restaurant remained exactly the same or improved. As it was, Tan Tan was a pan-Asian restaurant whose ownership and chefs — head, sauce, and line — were white, though most of the wait staff appeared to be one form of Asian or another.
“Don’t you hate it?” Jeremiah asked. “When they have Chinese waiters in sushi joints? Or Korean dishwashers in a Thai noodle house?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” she said.
“No, think about it, these restaurants, these Asian restaurants, they hire Asians indiscriminately because they think white people won’t be able to tell the difference.”
“White people can’t tell the difference.”
“I can.”
“Hey, Geronimo, you’ve been hanging around Indians too long to be white.”
“Fucking an Indian doesn’t make me Indian.”
“So, that’s what we’re doing now? Fucking?”
“You have a problem with fucking?”
“No, not with the act itself, but I do have a problem with your sexual thesaurus.”
Mary Lynn and Jeremiah had met in college, when they were still called Mary and Jerry. After sleeping together for the first time, after her first orgasm and his third, Mary had turned to Jerry and said, with absolute seriousness: If this thing is going to last, we have to stop the end rhyme. She had majored in Milton and Blake. He’d been a chemical engineer since the age of seven, with the degree being only a matter of formality, so he’d had plenty of time to wonder how an Indian from the reservation could be so smart. He still wondered how it had happened, though he’d never had the courage to ask her.
Now, a little more than two decades after graduating with a useless degree, Mary Lynn worked at Microsoft for a man named Dickinson. Jeremiah didn’t know his first name, though he hoped it wasn’t Emery, and had never met the guy, and didn’t care if he ever did. Mary Lynn’s job title and responsibilities were vague, so vague that Jeremiah had never asked her to elaborate. She often worked sixty-hour weeks and he didn’t want to reward that behavior by expressing an interest in what specific tasks she performed for Bill Gates.
Waiting outside Tan Tan, he and she could smell ginger, burned rice, beer.
“Are they ever going to seat us?” she asked.
“Yeah, don’t they know who you are?”
“I hear this place discriminates against white people.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I heard once, these lawyers, bunch of white guys in Nordstrom’s suits, had to wait, like, two hours for a table.”
“Were those billable hours?”
“It’s getting hard for a white guy to find a place to eat.”
“Damn affirmative action is what it is.”
Their first child had been an accident, the result of a broken condom and a missed birth control pill. They named her Antonya, Toni for short. The second and third children, Robert and Michael, had been on purpose, and the fourth, Ariel, came after Mary Lynn thought she could no longer get pregnant.
Toni was fourteen, immature for her age, quite beautiful and narcissistic, with her translucent skin, her long blond hair, and eight-ball eyes. Botticelli eyes, she bragged after taking an Introduction to Art class. She never bothered to tell anybody she was Indian, mostly because nobody asked.
Jeremiah was quite sure that his daughter, his Antonya, had lost her virginity to the pimply quarterback of the junior varsity football team. He found the thought of his daughter’s adolescent sexuality both curious and disturbing. Above all else, he believed that she was far too special to sleep with a cliché, let alone a junior varsity cliché.
Three months out of every year, Robert and Michael were the same age. Currently, they were both eleven. Dark-skinned, with their mother’s black hair, strong jawline, and endless nose, they looked Indian, very Indian. Robert, who had refused to be called anything other than Robert, was the smart boy, a math prodigy, while Mikey was the basketball player.
When Mary Lynn’s parents called from the reservation, they always asked after the boys, always invited the boys out for the weekend, the holidays, and the summer, and always sent the boys more elaborate gifts than they sent the two girls.
When Jeremiah had pointed out this discrepancy to Mary Lynn, she had readily agreed, but had made it clear that his parents also paid more attention to the boys. Jeremiah never mentioned it again, but had silently vowed to love the girls a little more than he loved the boys.
As if love were a thing that could be quantified, he thought.
He asked himself: What if I love the girls more because they look more like me, because they look more white than the boys?
Towheaded Ariel was two, and the clay of her personality was just beginning to harden, but she was certainly petulant and funny as hell, with the ability to sleep in sixteen-hour marathons that made her parents very nervous. She seemed to exist in her own world, enough so that she was periodically monitored for incipient autism. She treated her siblings as if they somehow bored her, and was the kind of kid who could stay alone in her crib for hours, amusing herself with all sorts of personal games and imaginary friends.
Mary Lynn insisted that her youngest daughter was going to be an artist, but Jeremiah didn’t understand the child, and despite the fact that he was her father and forty-three years older, he felt inferior to Ariel.
He wondered if his wife was ever going to leave him because he was white.
When Tan Tan’s doors swung open, laughter and smoke rolled out together.
“You got another cigarette?” he asked.
“Quit calling them cigarettes. They’re not cigarettes. They’re more like rose bushes. Hell, they’re more like the shit that rose bushes grow in.”
“You think we’re going to get a table?”
“By the time we get a table, this place is going to be very unpopular.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“Do you?”
“If you do.”
“We told the baby-sitter we’d be home by ten.”
They both wished that Toni were responsible enough to baby-sit her siblings, rather than needing to be sat along with them.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Nine.”
“Let’s go home.”
Last Christmas, when the kids had been splayed out all over the living room, buried to their shoulders in wrapping paper and expensive toys, Mary Lynn had studied her children’s features, had recognized most of her face in her sons’ faces and very little of it in her daughters’, and had decided, quite facetiously, that the genetic score was tied.
We should have another kid, she’d said to Jeremiah, so we’ll know if this is a white family or an Indian family.
It’s a family family, he’d said, without a trace of humor.
Only a white guy would say that, she’d said.
Well, he’d said, you married a white guy.
The space between them had grown very cold at that moment, in that silence, and perhaps one or both of them might have said something truly destructive, but Ariel had started crying then, for no obvious reason, relieving both parents of the responsibility of finishing that particular conversation. During the course of their relationship, Mary Lynn and Jeremiah had often discussed race as a concept, as a foreign country they occasionally visited, or as an enemy that existed outside their house, as a destructive force they could fight against as a couple, as a family. But race was also a constant presence, a house-guest and permanent tenant who crept around all the rooms in their shared lives, opening drawers, stealing utensils and small articles of clothing, changing the temperature.