Dixieland Sushi Page 2

  Michelle is wearing sparkling chandelier earrings, which are catching the light and the spider monkey’s attention. I told her not to wear shiny jewelry today. I definitely told her.

  “Aren’t you a cute little thing,” Michelle says to the monkey, but the words come out sounding forced. Michelle often complains loudly about her disdain for animals and small children, even though she also believes she has a gift for relating to both. She believes she’s Snow White, but in reality she’s far closer to Cruella De Vil.

  “The earrings,” I breathe, just as the spider monkey leaps to Michelle’s shoulder, grabbing one of the dangling mobiles of crystal jewelry and giving it a hard tug. Michelle lets out a high-pitched shriek, which causes the monkey to panic, drop the earring, and scream. In its haste to untangle itself, it only wraps its paws deeper into Michelle’s hair, probably because there is enough styling mousse in her curls to cement a half-block of new city sidewalk.

  There is more wailing, and Michelle leaps up from her chair, struggling with the monkey, flapping wildly at it with her arms. In mid monkey-dance, she falls sideways in her chair onto the studio’s blue carpet. Mr. Vulva/Vul-vay, in a panic, jumps up to help, only to get kicked hard in the shin by one of Michelle’s pointed gray heels. The monkey, still shrieking, leaps over Michelle and to Mr. Vulva/Vul-vay’s now-empty chair, where it jumps and squeals as if it’s the host of its own talk show.

  And that’s when we go to commercial.

  This, I think, putting my head in my hands, is no way to get promoted.

  “HOW am I supposed to work under these conditions?” Michelle asks after the show, as we both sit in the office of our boss, Assistant News Director Bob Marcus.

  Bob is a grizzly bear of a man who rose through the ranks of television news back in the days when there was one woman in the entire newsroom and she sat at the front desk and made coffee. His eyes flick back and forth between Michelle and me. He has that panicked look of a trapped animal who is trying to decide whether it’s best to stay and wait or chew off its leg to escape.

  “Michelle, I realize that you’re upset,” Bob starts.

  “UPSET?” she fumes. Michelle’s eyes are flashing. She has the same sort of steely determination that I once saw in the eyes of the mother from Texas who hired a killer to knock off her daughter’s number-one rival in a cheerleader competition. “This is well beyond upset, Bob. On Good Morning, Utah!, nothing like this would happen.”

  Michelle is always referencing her last morning anchor gig in the much smaller market of Salt Lake City.

  “We would never have stooped to having animals on the show,” Michelle says. “My last producer knew about good tele-vision.”

  “The fact is, we had two cancellations this morning, and Mr. Vul-vay generously agreed to fill in for us on very short notice,” I argue.

  “And that brings up another point,” Michelle says. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to properly address guests if there is no phonetic spelling in the scripts.”

  “Technically, there was a phonetic spelling,” I say.

  “Well, I don’t know what kind of dictionary you are used to using, but mine has those things in parentheses, you know, with the upside down e’s and whatever they’re called,” Michelle fumes.

  I cough loudly.

  “Okay, Michelle, I think I understand,” says Bob, rubbing his temples. “Why don’t you let me talk to Jen for a few minutes alone?”

  “I want this documented,” Michelle demands.

  “It will be,” Bob says, nodding, as Michelle picks herself up from her chair and walks out the door. She gives me a triumphant look on her way.

  “Close that,” Bob commands me, which I do.

  Bob has on his stern face, and I wonder if he might start shouting now. He’s hotheaded and unpredictable, and even though we get along, I’m not sure just how far I am in his good graces. Bob is from the old school of journalism, the one in which drinking on the job was encouraged, and he’s amassed a reputation for being a bulldog who makes interns cry. But I am one of the few people in the studio who’s not afraid of Bob. He reminds me of my dad, Bubba, who is a good old boy. They both speak in Southern twangs, love to swear, and spend every weekend they can bass fishing.

  “Jen, I am disappointed in you,” drawls Bob, showing his best stern face.

  At least he isn’t yelling. Yet.

  “Don’t you know you shouldn’t book monkeys for the show?” Bob pauses, then adds, “We have enough of them running loose through the studio as it is.”

  I snicker.

  “No laughing!” Bob commands, leaning over his desk. “Michelle must think that I’m scolding you, and she’ll never believe it if she hears you laughing.”

  “Sorry,” I tell Bob.

  “You’d better be. You know I hate to have Michelle in my office. She reminds me too much of my first wife.”

  Bob has had three wives and is working on a fourth.

  “That being said, you know that it’s your job to help keep the anchors happy so they don’t come bothering me,” Bob says, sounding stern. “So, you’d better kiss her ass awhile so I don’t have to hear any more of her whining.”

  “Yes, Bob,” I say, nodding.

  “You’re slipping, Jen. Something like this wouldn’t have happened six months ago.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been distracted,” I say. “Family problems,” I add. That’s just vague enough to be truthful.

  “Family!” sighs Bob in disgust. “You know real news people don’t have time for families.”

  This is true. Bob, and the fact that his daughter from his first marriage doesn’t speak to him, is living proof of this.

  “You’d better get it together if you want what I think might be an opening at the ten slot soon.”

  The ten o’clock news is the top of the food chain at any local station. This would be a significant improvement in stature. Not to mention saying goodbye to the graveyard shift.

  “Really?” I ask, excited.

  “You just work on keeping Michelle happy, and we’ll see.”

  Without warning, Bob bangs his hand hard on the desk and tosses one of his stress balls at the window behind my head, causing me to jump.

  “For effect,” he tells me. “Now, when you leave here you’d better not be smiling. I have a reputation to protect.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, giving him a mock salute. “You old softie,” I tease.

  “Who are you calling old?” Bob says, but he smiles at me.

  Back at my desk, it looks like a bomb exploded. There are press releases, faxes, old printouts of scripts, and two now-empty cups from Starbucks. It’s always a mess at the end of a shift, the result of the panic that invariably precedes a newscast. I sit down and try to get organized, but it feels like trying to tidy up a landfill.

  I like my job, even though directing news sometimes feels no different from directing reality TV, except that instead of Survivor challenges you have press conferences and weather reports.

  My mother says I’m one step away from being Diane Sawyer, but then, she doesn’t know how the broadcast business works. I’m about a million steps away from a broadcast network anchor seat and not just because I could never pass for a real blond.

  Before I went behind the cameras, I tried being an on-air news reporter. It was a disaster. For one thing, there’s something about having a camera pointed at me that makes me lose all sense of grammar, time, and place. The “on-air” light goes on, and I suddenly forget how to speak English. I start sounding like Anne Heche when she’s translating for aliens.

  And because the networks are always in desperate need of minority faces on air, my boss (then at News Eleven in Little Rock) kept telling me to try to “look more Asian,” since at the time we didn’t have any Asian reporters. He was also the one who said I should go by my mother’s maiden name (Nakamura) instead of my father’s name (Taylor).

  But I’ve never felt comfortable playing up my Asian half. Like Tig
er Woods, if I embrace one half of my heritage over the other it seems like I’m playing favorites. Besides, I don’t even look Japanese—a fact that was pointed out to me on the playground by other kids who didn’t believe me when I told them my background.

  I look as if I belong in the same family with Vin Diesel. My father, Bubba, is blond and pale-skinned, and my mother, Vivien, is clearly Japanese, with dark, thick hair and almond-shaped eyes. I am some mix of the two: dark hair, wide eyes, and skin that tans even in the shade.

  So it’s difficult to take advantage of race when you don’t even really look like the race you’re supposed to be exploiting, which explains to a degree why I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable about race.

  In college I had to take a multicultural appreciation seminar, which was required of all freshmen. The seminar spotlighted a different minority group each week, and most of the discussions in class always boiled down to how white, mainstream America was always trying to conform or control minorities by co-opting culture clues and then sanitizing them. Rap being a prime example. There were two classes devoted to the evil effects of Vanilla Ice (beyond the sheer annoyance of hearing “Ice Ice Baby”).

  It was in this class that the professor, a white woman who wore a traditional African head wrap, talked at length about the wrongheadedness of metaphors like the Melting Pot. “America,” she said, “is far more like a tossed salad.”

  I wrote a paper on Mr. Miyagi as a Japanese American culture icon and got a C. The instructor said that next time I should pick a cultural hero who wasn’t “a fictional character created by the white Hollywood screenwriter responsible for Lethal Weapon 3,” and that perhaps I should spend more time trying to get in touch with my “authentic” Japanese self.

  Meanwhile, my roommate, Carrie O’Brien, got an A on the paper she turned in called “The European-American Experience: Being the Ranch Dressing in the American Salad.”

  I look up to see Michelle standing in front of my desk.

  “I want you to know that there aren’t any hard feelings,” Michelle says. “I just want us all to get better, and we can’t do that unless we’re properly challenged, you know?”

  I give Michelle a closed-lip smile.

  “I hope you know that I think you have a lot of potential as a producer,” she says, sweetly. A backhanded compliment. This is Michelle’s tactic. She completely tears you apart in front of your boss but in private she tries to make nice with fake, semi-snide compliments.

  “Thanks, Michelle,” I say, all the while thinking be nice, be nice, be nice.

  “Oh, and I need a favor,” Michelle says, dropping her four news assignments on my desk. “I didn’t get to these, and I’ve got a waxing appointment I just can’t miss,” Michelle says, her eyes big and pleading.

  I stop short of asking her what she plans to have waxed. I imagine that she, like trolls and other quasi-evil creatures, has hair growing in her palms and on the balls of her feet.

  “Could you finish them up for me tomorrow?” Michelle asks me.

  I want to tell her what she can do with her work, but I remember Bob’s warning. If I want my promotion, I need to keep Michelle happy.

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Great, you’re the best,” Michelle chirps, practically skipping off to her desk, where she grabs her purse and heads straight for the elevator.

  “Bitch,” Anne, my assistant, hisses when Michelle is out of earshot.

  “And then some. But she’ll probably be anchoring on MSNBC before the year is out.”

  “Why don’t I stay and help?” Anne offers.

  “No, that’s okay. Go home. You’ve been staying late all week.”

  “So have you. You’ve had two colds this month, and if you don’t go home and get some sleep you’re going to be working on a third.”

  Even though I am her boss, Anne has a mothering instinct toward me. This is because she is a year older and has two kids at home. She can also cook casseroles and quiches, whereas I only know how to dial for takeout. “You really ought to go home and sleep,” she cautions.

  “I can sleep when I’m a producer on the Today show.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, after I’ve done Michelle’s work, I stagger home. My condo, which I proudly bought with a down payment I saved after two painful years of depriving myself of department store makeup, vacations, dinners out, and digital cable, is a one-bedroom (technically a studio, except that the half-wall between my bedroom and the kitchen means that it’s marketed as a one-bedroom). The best part of my condo is its view of the Chicago River and downtown, and the fact that after ten years of scraping together quarters for the laundromat, I finally have my very own washer and dryer.

  By Dixieland standards, my space is ridiculously small. It could, for instance, fit practically in the living room of my parents’ house, and for what I paid for it, I could’ve bought a three-bedroom Victorian house in Arkansas. But it’s all mine, and I remind myself that I may live in a small condo but I’m two blocks from Michigan Avenue, and that makes all the difference.

  Of course, my twinge of pride at returning to my condo is always tempered by the fact that I spend so much time working to afford it that I rarely have time to clean it. On the whole, my place is a sty.

  There are piles of old magazines, dirty clothes, and a few empty cans of Diet Coke on the counter. And, I notice sadly, my third ivy in as many months is dried up and dead on my windowsill for lack of watering. Even the cactus, the plant the nursery owner swore to me I couldn’t kill, is looking dangerously close to passing on. It’s drooping to one side like a deflated balloon.

  Anne says I should get a cat to keep me company, but it would just be one more thing I wouldn’t have time to take care of.

  The only things thriving in my apartment are dust bunnies, and they’re multiplying at an alarming rate.

  I once saw a news report in which a man died in his apartment and it took people days to get him out because his body was sandwiched in between giant stacks of old newspapers, magazines, and books. He had a psychological disorder that prevented him from ever throwing anything away.

  I have enough old copies of Time and People to make a nice funeral pyre already. The thought of someone finding my body on top of stacks of old Cosmos with articles like “Give the Perfect Blow Job” or “Pick the Right Swimsuit For Your Body Type (Small on Top! Big on the Bottom!)” dog-eared, makes me pick up a trash bag and start to make a clean sweep. I don’t get very far before I sink into my sofa and kick off my shoes. I flip through my TiVo listings and settle on the last episode of American Idol. I’m a reality TV junkie, and while I’d never admit it in public, I’ve watched every single episode of The Bachelor.

  Even though I should at this moment be sleeping, I know I’ll have difficulty, as always, falling asleep. It takes me an hour or two or four to unwind from the nervous energy I always have when leaving a shift at the station.

  While I fast-forward through the title credits, I half-heartedly try to attack the pile of mail on my coffee table. It’s a towering stack of neglect. Bills that need to be paid. Birthday cards from last week I forgot to open. Pleas from my old college to send money. Magazines and catalogs that I probably won’t have time to even glance through.

  I make it two letters in when I find my cousin Lucy’s wedding invitation. I rip open the envelope. It’s thick embossed candlelight paper complete with vellum paper overlay. It’s just the sort of invitation I would have wanted, if I ever had time to even think seriously about dating, much less getting married. Getting married was always something I thought I’d do “next year” like my plan to go to Italy or France. My target age for marriage was twenty-five, and then when I turned twenty-five, I moved it to thirty, and when I turned twenty-eight, I moved it to thirty-five. I always think, when my life slows down, then I can think about dating and traveling and doing those things I want to do, like learn how to cook. The only problem is that my life never seems to slow down.

/>   I run my fingers over the name Kevin Stuart Peterson and remember that when I was ten, I used to write my name over and over again on my Hello Kitty spiral notepad—Jen Nakamura Taylor Peterson.

  But that, I think, was a long time ago.

  I toss the invitation on top of the pile and then lean back to watch TV. I fall asleep to the hum of the television and find myself dreaming of Dixieland.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

  Balance is key. Balance good, karate good. Everything good. Balance bad, better pack up and go home.

  1980

  My first crush ever was not Kevin Peterson. It was Brian Carlisle, who sat next to me in first grade. According to Vivien, I liked Brian Carlisle because he wore a T-shirt with the number five on it, and at the time, my favorite cartoon on earth was Speed Racer. Apparently, to me, Brian Carlisle and Speed Racer were interchangeable. They both had black hair. They both liked the number five. Brian Carlisle drove a Big Wheel instead of a race car, but his Big Wheel was red, white, and blue just like Speed Racer’s car.

  My crush on Brian Carlisle, however, was short-lived. It ended the day he rolled his Big Wheel up on our lawn, pointed one dirty finger at me, and sang, “You’re adopted! You’re adopted! You’re adopted!”

  He was referring to the fact that I did not look much like my blond father, Bubba—who was sitting on the porch swing at the time.

  Still, I took Brian seriously. I thought maybe he knew something that I didn’t—maybe my life was an Asian version of Diff ’rent Strokes. I was Arnold, and my older sister was Willis, and instead of being adopted by Mr. Drummond, we’d been adopted by my dad, Bubba Taylor and his Asian wife, Vivien.

  Then, I saw The Empire Strikes Back with my sister, Kimberly, after waiting in line on a rainy day in May, and I started to think, at age six, that maybe I did have a “real” father out there somewhere. That Bubba was just a stand-in, like Luke’s Uncle Owen.