When I could breathe again, I opened my eyes. She was looking at me, a pleased smile on her face.

“Oh my God,” I said, feeling stunned and dizzy, my nerve endings still jangling with pleasure. “What was that?”

“An orgasm,” Kimmie answered promptly, like the excellent student she’d been all her life.

I sat up, reaching for the light down comforter Kimmie kept folded in a basket next to the futon, and pulled it up over my legs. Then I flopped back, feeling delighted, but with a new fear dimming my afterglow. Did this mean I was gay? I’d never even considered it. I’d never looked at a woman with anything resembling desire, just evaluation, and envy of specific body parts — this one’s breasts, that one’s legs. Besides Kimmie, I’d never even considered kissing a girl. . but now, I found, I was very interested in kissing Kimmie again.

I rolled onto my elbow. She was still dressed, in her jeans and her button-front Henley tee shirt. “Let’s see if you got it,” I said, and reached out, brushing her hair behind her ears. She gave me her trickster’s grin, wriggling out of her clothes. Her body, I discovered, wasn’t so boyish after all. . and when I took her in my arms and kissed her, first her forehead, then her faintly freckled nose, then her lips, it felt like I’d been waiting my whole life to end up with her in my arms.


After Kimmie fell asleep, I lay there, sated and content, at ease in my own body in a way I hadn’t been since I was a little girl, wrapped in a towel and warmed by the sun after a morning bodysurfing in the ocean with my dad. Physically, I was at peace, but my mind raced, looking for labels, asking questions about what had just happened, how it would work and whether it could last. Finally, I tried to turn my thoughts to where they usually went at night: to the eggs I’d sold.

They’d warned me about this at the fertility center. The material they’d given me included the number for a counselor to call if I found myself “dwelling” on my donation, and had mentioned that some donors had benefited from talk therapy or the short-term use of antidepressants. I didn’t think I needed any of that yet, but I had definitely found myself thinking about it — dwelling — more than I’d expected.

The process had gone smoothly: I’d donated my eggs in late May and deposited my check when it arrived ten days later. Six weeks after that, my father was in Willow Crest doing a twenty-eight-day inpatient stay, which would include a physical and psychological evaluation, group therapy, individual therapy, music therapy, and art therapy. He’d made me a collage full of pictures cut from magazines — girls running, girls leaping, girls laughing over their bowls of salad — and he’d smiled when I’d told him, straight-faced, that I would cherish it forever.

I knew I wouldn’t be hearing from him for a while. The counselors had explained that residents weren’t allowed to have cell phones or send e-mail. There was one pay phone that was made available for an hour each day, and usually there was a very long line. As my father worked through the twelve steps, they said, he would make amends to those he’d wronged, but I should be patient, should “manage my expectations.” When I’d gone out to Pittsburgh to take him to Willow Crest, he’d come to the door of the apartment to meet me. I’d peered down the dark hallway and glimpsed Rita in the bedroom, but she’d shut the door before I could call “hello.” His hair was clean, cut short, combed back from his forehead, and in the new shirt and jeans he wore he looked better than I’d seen him looking in years.

We had lunch together in the place’s cafeteria, a loud, lowceilinged room that reminded me of a school, with posters on the walls (covered in AA slogans, instead of warnings about Stranger Danger or invitations to the Summer Reading Program), flimsy paper napkins and square cartons of milk. The food, too, seemed intended for children: mac and cheese served on segmented plastic trays; cheap metal spoons and forks, no knives. I’d chattered about my job, turning my pig of a boss into a charming character, telling my dad about the three meals a day they had delivered and leaving out the part about how we got free food because our corporate masters didn’t want us taking longer than twenty minutes for breakfast or lunch. I made much of the Friday-night happy hours, where the analysts would gather in an Irish pub around the corner from our office, a place so generic it could have been plucked from a mall in Minneapolis. In truth, these were grim affairs, marked by too many drinks and ill-advised hookups, and they rarely began before eleven p.m. because all of us worked so late.

“Proud of you,” my father muttered, forking noodles into his mouth. His hands shook as he scooted his tray closer. At twelve-thirty, a counselor wearing lots of turquoise jewelry stopped by the table. “Time to say goodbye now,” she announced. I tried as hard as I could not to look relieved as I walked out into the sunshine.

On the bus ride back to the Port Authority, I’d done my best to reassure myself that it would all work out. Willow Crest had the highest success rate of any place my father could have gone. Besides, he wasn’t a typical addict. He was intelligent; he had people who loved him. People who needed him. Me.

Kimmie sighed in her sleep. Her face was still flushed, her hair a tousled, fragrant mess. I put my hand on her shoulder, shivery with delight. Over our first months in the city, Kimmie and I had spent all of our free time together, reading New York magazine and picking out a restaurant we wanted to try or a play we wanted to see. I was in charge of transportation, using subway and bus maps to figure out the fastest and most economical route, while Kimmie scoured the Internet for coupons and discounts and last-minute tickets, doing such a good job of it that one day, I joked, the performers would pay us for attending their plays, and the waiters would leave tips on our table.

All through July, we’d traded pieces of our history. Kimmie’s parents, Korean immigrants who’d met in an English as a Second Language class in 1975, ran a dry-cleaning shop in Boston. They’d papered Kimmie’s bedroom walls with pictures of every Asian woman who’d succeeded in any field in America. “Michelle Kwan, Sandra Oh, Julie Chen, Margaret Cho, girl in my high school who went to Harvard,” Kimmie had recited as we’d walked to a bookstore in the West Village.

“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.