He sounded almost whiny. I watched the sun coming through the window, warming the side of my face and Alice’s skin.

“I guess so.”

“Is it cool if . . . Rachel’s there?”

“I mean, there’s probably some stuff we need to process together about you fake-marrying the person I was sleeping with, but yeah, it’s cool if she’s there.”

“Thank you,” he said, and hung up.

“Huh,” I said to Alice, shaking my head.

Minna and I watched G+T with Jillian that evening. As the wacky plot unfolded, I thought about the tendrils reaching underneath all our frantic activities—from Troll Elsan’s meltdown at the Beltane festivities, to gentle Fae Feelty’s journey to find a fawn that she had hugged years ago—and I was at peace.

On her last night before heading to her sister’s, Minna and I cooked dinner with all of Blithe’s fancy kitchen tools. While Blithe was out getting fresh sage for a garnish, I asked how she dealt with her dual family identities.

“It’s not like I’ve made some clinical decision. I grew up closer to the Japanese side and that’s how I generally see myself. My Russian grandparents died a long time ago. How do you deal with your Jewishness and your whiteness?”

I had no articulate answer. “Um, huh. I guess I generally the hide Jewishness unless it’s advantageous. I always wanted to get away from the fixedness of it, from those big-haired, big-breasted girls in my bat mitzvah prep class who were going to marry boys they met at Jewish summer camp and start the cycle all over again. My parents clearly were thinking the same thing when they named me Penfield.”

What hung in the air was that I could turn to whiteness as a protection. My family members who had immigrated from Russia and Romania during the pogroms in 1918 had soon learned to assimilate, to drop the unseemly endings from their names, and buy into whiteness, in food, in dress. I chopped an onion and thought about how the category, Chinese, had formed in my mind. Chinese American restaurants in our suburb growing up, Chinese New Year celebrations at school with paper dragons, vague notions that China was somehow overpopulated and unclean and more repressive than the United States. When I started to transition, I had only sought out work by artists of color. I wanted to remind myself of all the ways that others could been read as complex and nuanced. I found the writer who described the abject yearnings of first-gen Chinese American characters, the bright ennui of adolescent hours and loneliness and the Bushwick apartment building where one family first landed, with a toilet that couldn’t flush large poop. When I first read the book, all the frantic, bouncing-off-the-wall energy of youth reminded me of young Pen, stuck inside Margot’s house all summer while she was at work, even though I could read outside by the pool. My relating to the book was both self-serving and expansive, fucked-up and restorative.