Re Jane by Patricia Park

of daily life in Brooklyn. Which included weekly chats up in Beth’s fourth-floor office. She must have been so pleased with my understanding of
The Feminist Primer,
because other books, articles, and journals followed.
    What Beth didn’t know was that at night, long after the remains of dinner were scraped off our plates and into the compost, long after the whole household had retired, Ed and I would meet for a snack. Either he’d wander into the kitchen and find me there with Beth’s articles or I would walk in on him slicing the bread, creating rafts for the filling. They were never the same sandwiches, and they were always the most unlikely combinations—to my provincial palate anyway: gorgonzola, honey, and basil; pork sausage, endive, and Rome apple slices; mozzarella and mint with a drizzle of balsamic reduction. A considerable departure from the original Italian hero, but Ed, he told me, was not a purist.
    We’d sit at that same table where we’d just eaten Beth’s dinners and pore over her articles while Ed peppered his explanations with funny anecdotes from his private school, making the experience of slogging through the scholarship that much more bearable.
    Gradually I began to open up to him. One night I was talking about my uncle’s store and found myself describing our cardboard-box excuse for a back office. That office—all of Food, really—embarrassed me. I’d made it a point not to show it to Beth and Devon when they came to Queens.
    Ed’s reaction? “Cardboard! At
least
get some foam core or something—that would’ve been sturdier. Though I’ll grant the PVC pipes are a nice touch.”
    â€œSounds like my uncle should’ve hired
you
to fix up the place.” Ed had mentioned he came from a family of contractors. He said he probably would have continued down that path if it hadn’t been for a volume of
Leaves of Grass
and a certain high-school English teacher.
    â€œWell, that’s nothing,” Ed said. “When my brother, Enzo, and I were doing work on this house, you should’ve seen. We broke through the walls and saw—”
    â€œMice?” I interrupted. I thought of the ceiling panels with Sang.
    â€œWorse!” Ed shook his head. “Mold. It was a nightmare—you couldn’t salvage a thing.”
    For all of Beth’s attempts to get me to open up to her, it was actually Ed I felt more comfortable confiding in. I didn’t need to
explain
things the way I did with Beth. He just got it. It was uncanny how two and a half months ago I’d been terrified of him; now I was divulging stories I wouldn’t dare share with his wife. Pretty soon we spoke in our own comfortable shorthand. We both came from decidedly unglamorous worlds, steeped in the language of vermin, water damage, building codes. What part would Beth have wanted in any of these “conversations”?
    * * *
    Besides my day meetings with Beth and my night sessions with Ed, Nina and I were fast becoming friends. Not only were we hanging out in the afternoons with Devon and Alla, but the two of us also would occasionally meet after dinner, when I was technically off-duty. We usually went back to Gino’s, where we’d open our books in front of us—Nina with her schoolwork, me with Beth’s assignments—and talk. Nina would tell me about her friends in the neighborhood. There was Angela Fabbricari, Nina’s best friend, majoring in business at Brooklyn College (her father was a contractor and was—according to Nina—loaded). Adriana Panificio, who worked at her family’s bakery on Henry. Marie Macelli worked as a day trader, and her father was a butcher. Valentina Francobolli, a paralegal whose parents owned the notary public/stamp store on Court. From what I could tell, Nina’s life paralleled that of my cousin Mary and her Korean friends back in Flushing: everyone lived at home with his