Read Online The Collective by Don Lee - Free Book Online Page A

family,” she’d say. She had three sisters and a brother, a plethora of aunts, uncles, and cousins.
    In contrast, my house in Mission Viejo was marked by an unearthly silence. My father would come home from work in his short-sleeved white dress shirt and clip-on tie, fix himself a bourbon and Sprite, and read the newspaper before the three of us sat down to dinner, during which no one would utter a word. I’d look at my father as he cut into my mother’s chicken cacciatore (her stab at Western food, made with Campbell’s tomato soup, yet admittedly tasty), and I’d try to recall any advice he had ever imparted to me, father-to-son, any statement of profundity or wisdom, even a bad joke, and I’d come up with zilch. After we finished eating, I’d help my mother with the dishes, and then they’d go to the den to watch TV while I went to my bedroom, from which I could hear purls of canned laugh tracks, but never my parents’ own laughter. Not a titter.
    Even when my sister visited, the decibel level barely wavered. Rebecca had graduated from Whittier College—Richard Nixon’s alma mater—with a business degree and gotten a job at First Federal Savings & Loan in Hacienda Heights, processing mortgage applications. She was renting a one-bedroom apartment in West Covina and had a Chinese American boyfriend who was in dental school. It was about as dull a life as I could imagine. My father and mother approved of it wholeheartedly.
    Parents believe they have such an impact on their children’s lives, yet I knew, from the moment I had set foot on Mac’s campus, that I’d become a different person, unfettered from whatever gravitational influence they had tried to extend. I’d moved beyond them. They only served now as proscriptive examples.
    One afternoon, while my mother slipped freshly laundered, neatly folded briefs into my chest of drawers, I asked her, “Why don’t we have any books in the house?”
    “What?”
    “Why didn’t you read to me as a kid?”
    “That’s what school is for. Do you want something to eat?”
    “How come you never sang any lullabies to me?”
    “What?”
    “It’s like I was in a coffin of sterility and cultural deprivation, growing up.”
    She stared at me, baffled. “Maybe you should get out of the house. Do something.”
    I drove to Laguna Beach and walked up the pathway bordering the ocean to Heisler Park. It was a weekday, but there were plenty of people about, playing volleyball, basketball, jogging, rollerblading. I passed by a group of twenty or so adults of various ages, sitting in a circle on the grass, and I caught a snippet of what was being said. Only in California would they hold, outside like this beside a beach, in full view and earshot of the public, an AA meeting.
    What I mainly noticed, though, and what made me ache, were all the couples. They seemed to be everywhere, cuddling on benches, spooning on towels, strolling with arms encircling each other, all smiling goofily, brazenly in love. They repulsed me. I despised them, because I knew now the full range of things that couples did behind closed doors, and I was beginning to suspect that Didi might be doing those things with someone else. I wondered if she had lied to me that first night in my dorm room: perhaps she had had another date after all.
    She did not love me—not like I loved her. How else to explain the fact that she did not seem to miss me one iota, that more and more she wasn’t home in Chestnut Hill when she said she would be, and then did not return my messages right away?
    “Where were you tonight?” I asked.
    “Oh, we went to see a movie in Cleveland Circle.”
    “Where?” I wasn’t familiar with the geography of Massachusetts. As far as I knew, she could have flown to Ohio for the day.
    “Nearby. On the edge of BC,” she said, not clarifying anything for me.
    “How far away is Chestnut Hill from Cambridge?”
    “Twenty minutes driving, forever on the T. Why?”
    It was much closer than I had thought, not a distant suburb. “You