Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [61]
“Margaret Cho the comedian? Isn’t she kind of X-rated?”
“They don’t care. All they know is that she makes a lot of money.” Kimmie and her parents and her sister had lived in an apartment above the dry-cleaning shop that was always steamy and smelled like chemicals, but she’d never worked there. Her parents had decided early on that she’d never set foot in the family business, that she and her sister, Lisa, four years younger, were meant for better things. It had just taken them a while to determine which things those would be.
“We both had skating lessons,” Kimmie began, lifting one slim finger.
“How’d that work?”
She giggled, shaking her head, long black hair brushing her shoulders. “I used to ditch and go to the movies. Then—oh, let’s see. Special science enrichment classes, in case I turned out to be gifted in science...”
“Which you are,” I pointed out. Kimmie had been a Presidential Scholar and a Westinghouse Science finalist. After graduating from Princeton with highest honors, she’d enrolled at Columbia, where she planned on getting a master’s degree in biochemistry before heading south to Johns Hopkins for an MD/PhD.
She shrugged off my compliment. “Not as gifted as they thought I’d be.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Another shrug. “They were disappointed that I wasn’t more musical. That it didn’t come more naturally. My mother had been a violinist. Before they came here.” I knew, because she’d told me already that Lisa was a gifted cellist, a senior in high school currently deciding between Juilliard and Harvard. I knew, also, that Kimmie believed (correctly, I thought) that Lisa was their favorite, that even with a summa from Princeton and three more prestigious degrees to come, they still regarded Kimmie as a bit of a letdown. Nor had they been thrilled when she’d brought Chet home. He was Christian, and that was important to them, but they’d expected her to marry a Korean boy, preferably one whose parents they knew.
“What about you?” Kimmie asked me as we lay spooned against each other on her futon, with her air conditioner humming in the window.
“What about me?”
“Are your parents proud?”
I didn’t answer right away. My father had been proud, of course. He’d graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, the first in his family to go to college, the first not to work in a factory or on a farm. He’d been the one to fuel my dreams of the Ivy League, describing the schools, their history, their grandeur, the brilliant, world-changing graduates they’d produced. It was the photographs of Princeton that made up my mind—a girl, her long hair in a ponytail, perched on a window seat in a dorm room that had a fireplace. I was enchanted by everything I saw—her shiny hair, the dark wood of the window seat, the many-paned window, the fire crackling away.
My grades and test scores were solid, but I knew that it was my essay that had gotten me into Princeton. “The Addict’s Daughter,” I’d called it, and I’d told myself that only a handful of people would ever read it, and my father wouldn’t be one of them.
Parents aren’t supposed to have favorites, I’d written, and probably children shouldn’t, either, but my father and I have always shared a special bond. The first thing I can remember is the two of us reading together—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I’d read a page, he’d help me sound out the hard words, and then we’d go to the kitchen to make his coffee and my hot chocolate. My father taught English to eighth-graders. He loved being a teacher, and his students loved him, and I felt lucky to have as much of his time as I did.
When I was a freshman in high school, he was arrested for drunk driving after he ran a stop sign and smashed into a car carrying a woman and her young son.