There was always law school. She’d managed to get into Columbia. But her friends’ fathers were beleaguered lawyers—their lives unappealing. Casey’s lawyer customers at Sabine’s, the department store where she’d worked weekends during the school year, advised her, “For money—go to B school. To save lives, med.” The unholy trinity of law, business, and medicine seemed the only faith in town. It was arrogant, perhaps rash, for an immigrant girl from the boroughs to want to choose her own trade. Nevertheless, Casey wasn’t ready to relinquish her dream, however vague, for a secure profession. Without telling her father, she wrote Columbia to defer a year.
Her mother was singing a hymn in her remarkable voice while she ladled scallion sauce over the roasted porgy. Leah’s voice trilled at the close of the verse, “Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light,” and then with a quiet inhale, she began, “Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word. . .” She’d left the store early that morning to shop and to cook her daughters’ favorite dishes. Tina, her baby, had returned on Thursday night, and now both her girls were home. Her heart felt full, and she prayed for Joseph to be in a good mood. She eyeballed the whiskey level in the jug-size bottle of Dewar’s. It had not shifted much from the night before. In their twenty-two years of marriage, Leah had discovered that it was better when Joseph had a glass or two with his dinner than none. Her husband wasn’t a drunk—the sort who went to bars, fooled around, or lost his salary envelope. He was a hard worker. But without his whiskey, he couldn’t fall sleep. One of her sisters-in-law had told her how to keep a man content: “Never deny a man his bop, sex, and sleep.”
Leah carried the fish to the table, wearing a blue apron over her plum-colored housedress. At the sight of Casey pouring her second glass of water, Leah clamped her lips, giving her soft, oval face a severe appearance. Mr. Jun, the ancient choir director, had pointed out this anxiety tic to her prior to her solos, shouting, “Show us your joy! You are singing to God!”
Tina, of course, the one who noticed everything, thought Casey was just asking for it. Her own mind had been filled with the pleasant thoughts of her boyfriend, Chul, whom she’d promised to phone that night, but even so, she could feel Casey’s restlessness. Maybe her sister would consider how much trouble their mother had gone through to make dinner.
It was the water drinking—this seemingly innocent thing. For always, Joseph believed that the girls should eat heartily at the table, grateful for the food and for the care given to it, but Casey habitually picked at her dinner, and he blamed Casey’s not eating on her excessive water consumption. Casey denied this accusation, but her father was on the mark. Back in junior high school, Casey had read in a fashion magazine that if you drank three glasses of water before a meal, you’d eat less. It took great effort on Casey’s part to wear a size 6 or smaller; after all, she was a girl with a large frame. Her weight also shifted by five pounds depending on how much she smoked. Her mother was thin from perpetual activity, and her younger sister, who was short like her father, had a normal build, and Tina disapproved of dieting. A brilliant student of both physics and philosophy, Tina had once scolded Casey when she was on Weight Watchers: “The world is awash in hunger. How could you cause your own?”
Casey’s water drinking at the table was not lost on her father.
At five feet three, Joseph was compact, yet his rich, booming voice gave him the sound of a bigger man. He was bald except for a wisp of baby fuzz on the back of his head, and his baldness did not grieve him except in the winters, when he had to wear a gray felt fedora to protect his head and large-lobed ears. He was only fifty-eight but looked older, more like a vigorous man of seventy, especially beside his young wife. Leah was his second wife. His first, a girl his age whom he’d loved deeply, died from tuberculosis after a year of marriage and before she bore him any children. Joseph adored his second wife, perhaps more so because of his loss. He appreciated Leah’s good health and her docile Christian nature, and he was still attracted to her pretty face and delicate form, which belied her resilience. He made love to her every Friday evening. She had given him two daughters, though the elder looked nothing like her mother.
Casey drained her water glass and rested it on the table. Then she reached for the pitcher.
“I’m not Rockefeller, you know,” Joseph said.
Casey’s father didn’t look at her when he said this, but he was addressing her. There was no one else in the room who needed to hear how she didn’t have a trust fund. Right away, Leah and Tina moved from the counter to their seats at the table, hoping to dissipate the tension. Leah opened her mouth to speak but hesitated.