The Expatriates Read Online Free

wanted to do so many things. “I don’t know. I’d like to do a lot of things. I’m interested in art. I could work at a museum. Or photography? Or a magazine?”
    “Oh, wow,” Leslie said. “Those are really competitive fields.” She looked skeptical.
    “Well,” Mercy said, “those are my wishes. I don’t know how to make them reality.”
    Leslie looked sad for a moment. “I’m sorry for you,” she said, and she seemed sincere. Then she got up and poured herself another drink.
    Mercy felt better, as if she had whispered a secret into a well, and expected no more, but later Leslie e-mailed her with a lead for a job, and she felt that life was okay sometimes.
    Occasionally, she wished she hadn’t gone to the fancy college with the fancy kids who showed her a different world. She used to go back to Queens and see some of her old friends, still living in the neighborhood, with the same boyfriends, working in their dad’s accounting office, or managing the family beauty salon, and though she didn’t want that life she knew they were happy. But, then, this was Queens, land of immigrant dreams, and there was an equal number of kids who had made it, walking around in the city with their six- or seven-figure salaries, who got quoted in the paper and whose parents mentioned them with every breath at church, as her mom told her whenever she got home on Sundays. “Jenny Choi, she lawyer now. Big law firm. Harvard Law School. Also has Korean boyfriend from Harvard Law. Probably marry next year.”
    Sometimes during the day, when she didn’t have a temp job and was at home by herself, she went to her parents’ room and sat at her mother’s dressing table, with its bottles of Shiseido moisturizer and sunscreen, and she opened the precious small jars as she used to when she was a kid. She dipped her fingers in and brought them to her nose, capped in white cream. She sniffed the cool, viscous lotion, and the scent brought her back to when she was just eight and learning what it was to be a girl, a woman. She’d lain in bed watching while her mother sat on the stool, fresh from her bath, hair wrapped up in a towel turban, face pink and moist. Her mother swirled one finger expertly around the jar and tapped five dots sparingly on her face: forehead, nose, two cheeks, chin. Then she’d make circles around them, radiating outward until she had spread the cream all over.
    Mercy remembered lying on the bed and thinking that her mother was the epitome of grown-up sophistication and beauty, that all she ever wanted was to become like her mother. She didn’t remember when the scales fell from her eyes—when she realized that her dad drank and gambled away most of his small earnings, that her mother was desperately unhappy and it was making her prematurely old and gray, that she wanted Mercy to have a ticket out of this world and was scared to death it wouldn’t happen, that her family was not the happy one you read about in books—but she had been happy as a child. She had loved to watch her beautiful mother put cream on her face in front of a mirror.
    Where had that girl gone? The hopeful, innocent girl who didn’t have to act the clown to keep up. When had it all gotten so complicated?
    She began to think about leaving New York after three years of trying to find a career. She had had a string of temp jobs, answering phones at a record label, being a floating receptionist at Condé Nast, where she ran into an old college acquaintance in the elevator, who worked at
Allure
and asked her which title she was at. Mercy had answered,
Glamour
, and imagined the girl going to check the masthead right away. The masthead she was not on. She had lunch in that cool cafeteria and tried to fit in, but none of those jobs ever turned into anything permanent, although they did for other people. Then, also, she had been told to use the service entrance at the Park Avenue co-op where her friend Pru lived, still, with her parents. She had