Harold actually listened to me. He took those ideas and he applied them in an educated, methodical way. He made it happen. But still, I remember, it was my idea.

petunias, potting soil $14.11

Harold starts to get up, but I say, "No, Ill go see."

"Im cold," I say.

And now that my mother is here—she is staying for a week, or until the electricians are done rewiring her building in San Francisco—we have to pretend nothing is the matter.

He shrugs his shoulders, amused. "Suits me."

"I just dont think you should get credit for your ice cream anymore."

Arnold would shoot rubber bands at my legs whenever I walked past his building on my way home from school, and one time he ran over my doll with his bicycle, crushing her legs below the knees. I didnt want this cruel boy to be my future husband. So I picked up that cold bowl of rice and scraped the last few grains into my mouth, then smiled at my mother, confident my future husband would be not Arnold but someone whose face was as smooth as the porcelain in my now clean bowl.

"Thats not the point!"

Light Fixtures $87.26

"Doctors were at first baffled by the disease, which they report is extremely rare and generally attacks children between the ages of ten and twenty, months to years after they have contracted the measles virus, " read my father. "The boy had had a mild case of the measles when he was twelve, reported his mother. Problems this year were first noticed when the boy developed motor coordination problems and mental lethargy which increased until he fell into a coma. The boy, age seventeen, never regained consciousness.

Harold puts his magazine down, now wearing his openmouthed exasperated look. "What is this? Why dont you say whats really the matter?"

"I just think we have to change things," I say when I think I can control my voice. Only the rest comes out like whining. "We need to think about what our marriage is really based on…not this balance sheet, who owes who what."

Harold looks at me, as if I, too, were speaking Chinese and he could not understand.

The door is open, but the room is dark, so I call out, "Ma?"

When we got married at city hall, he insisted on paying the fee. I got my friend Robert to take photos. We held a party at our apartment and everybody brought champagne. And when we bought the house, we agreed that I should pay only a percentage of the mortgage based on what I earn and what he earns, and that I should own an equivalent percentage of community property; this is written in our prenuptial agreement. Since Harold pays more, he had the deciding vote on how the house should look. It is sleek, spare, and what he calls "fluid," nothing to disrupt the line, meaning none of my cluttered look. As for vacations, the one we choose together is fifty-fifty. The others Harold pays for, with the understanding that its a birthday or Christmas present, or an anniversary gift.

Then he bit my neck and said in a rush, "Nor anyone whos as soft and squishy and lovable as you are."

"No, she never eat it. She doesnt like."

I found the opportunity. The same week my mother told me about the rice bowl and my future husband, I saw a shocking film at Sunday school. I remember the teacher had dimmed the lights so that all we could see were silhouettes of one another. Then the teacher looked at us, a roomful of squirmy, well-fed Chinese-American children, and she said, "This film will show you why you should give tithings to God, to do Gods work."

So I stammered out my love. "You…you…could do new theme eating places…a…a…Home on the Range! All the home-cooked mom stuff, mom at the kitchen range with a gingham apron and mom waitresses leaning over telling you to finish your soup.

He didnt die right away. In fact, it was some five years later, by which time I had become quite thin. I had stopped eating, not because of Arnold, whom I had long forgotten, but to be fashionably anorexic like all the other thirteen-year-old girls who were dieting and finding other ways to suffer as teenagers. I was sitting at the breakfast table, waiting for my mother to finish packing a sack lunch which I always promptly threw away as soon as I rounded the corner. My father was eating with his fingers, dabbing the ends of his bacon into the egg yolks with one hand, while holding the newspaper with the other.

"Im full," I say.

After dinner, I put clean towels on the bed in the guest room. My mother is sitting on the bed. The room has Harolds minimalist look to it: the twin bed with plain white sheets and white blanket, polished wood floors, a bleached oakwood chair, and nothing on the slanted gray walls.

My mother had looked in my rice bowl and told me I would marry a bad man.

"What use for?" asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. "You put something else on top, everything fall down. Chunwang chihan."

And she looks at me and frowns but doesnt say anything. She goes back to reading the list, this time more carefully, moving her finger down each item.

I love my work when I dont think about it too much. And when I do think about it, how much I get paid, how hard I work, how fair Harold is to everybody except me, I get upset.

And he nuzzled my neck and whispered, "I dont think Ive ever met another woman, whos so together…"—and I remember feeling a hiccup of fear upon hearing the words "another woman," because I could imagine dozens, hundreds of adoring women eager to buy Harold brea9９ｌiｂ.nｅｔkfast, lunch, and dinner to feel the pleasure of his breath on their skin.

Harold and I were lucky to find this place, which is near the summit of Highway 9, then a left-right-left down three forks of unmarked dirt roads, unmarked because the residents always tear down the signs to keep out salesmen, developers, and city inspectors. We are only a forty-minute drive to my mothers apartment in San Francisco. This became a sixty-minute ordeal coming back from San Francisco, when my mother was with us in the car. After we got to the two-lane winding road to the summit, she touched her hand gently to Harolds shoulder and softly said, "Ai, tire squealing." And then a little later, "Too much tear and wear on car."

"I dont know…. I dont know. Everything…the way we account for everything. What we share. What we dont share. Im so tired of it, adding things up, subtracting, making it come out even. Im sick of it."

That was the night he decided to "go for it," as he put it, which is a phrase I have personally detested ever since a bank I used to work for adopted the slogan for its employee productivity contest.

She can see all this. And it annoys me that all she sees are the bad parts. But then I look around and everything shes said is true. And this convinces me she can see what else is going on, between Harold and me. She knows whats going to happen to us. Because I remember something else she saw when I was eight years old.

"Why you do this?"

I considered that probably nothing would happen to Arnold, that he might not get leprosy, move to Africa and die. And this somehow balanced the dark possibility that he might.

And at the same time, I hated myself for being mean-spirited, for thinking Harold deserved this torment. Yet I couldnt help myself. I was mad at Harold and he was exasperated with me. That morning, before we picked my mother up, he had said, "You should pay for the exterminators, because Mirugai is your cat and so theyre your fleas. Its only fair."

And before I even do it, I know Im starting a fight that is bigger than I know how to handle. But I do it anyway. I go to the refrigerator and I cross out "ice cream" on Harolds side of the list.

"Careful, its not too sturdy," I say. The table is a poorly designed piece that Harold made in his student days. Ive always wondered why hes so proud of it. The lines are clumsy. It doesnt bear any of the traits of "fluidity" that are so important to Harold these days.

She put my bowl down. "I once know a pock-mark man. Mean man, bad man."

Harold had smiled and slowed down, but I could see his hands were clenched on the steering wheel of the Jaguar, as he glanced nervously in his rearview mirror at the line of impatient cars that was growing by the minute. And I was secretly glad to watch his discomfort. He was always the one who tailgated old ladies in their Buicks, honking his horn and revving the engine as if he would run them over unless they pulled over.

Road gravel $19.99

"This, you do not share!" exclaims my mother in an astonished voice. And I am startled, thinking she had read my thoughts about Mirugai. But then I see she is pointing to "ice cream" on Harolds list. My mother must remember the incident on the fire escape landing, where she found me, shivering and exhausted, sitting next to that container of regurgitated ice cream. I could never stand the stuff after that. And then I am startled once again to realize that Harold has never noticed that I dont eat any of the ice cream he brings home every Friday evening.

Gas $22.00

My mother has a wounded sound in her voice, as if I had put the list up to hurt her. I think how to explain this, recalling the words Harold and I have used with each other in the past: "So we can eliminate false dependencies…be equals…love without obligation…" But these are words she could never understand.

"All right. If you think Im being unfair about the exterminators, well both pay for it."

Bathroom stuff $5.41

And he said, laughing, "Half? Boy, thats love."

"Could you close the windows, please."

Car stuff $6.57

(see shop list) $55.15

Now that Im angry at Harold, its hard to remember what was so remarkable about him. And I know theyre there, the good qualities, because I wasnt that stupid to fall in love with him, to marry him. All I can remember is how awfully lucky I felt, and consequently how worried I was that all this undeserved good fortune would someday slip away. When I fantasized about moving in with him, I also dredged up my deepest fears: that he would tell me I smelled bad, that I had terrible bathroom habits, that my taste in music and television was appalling. I worried that Harold would someday get a new prescription for his glasses and hed put them on one morning, look me up and down, and say, "Why, gosh, you arent the girl I thought you were, are you?"

"What is this writing?" asks my mother in Chinese.

So really, were equals, except that Harold makes about seven times more than what I make. He knows this, too, because he signs my monthly check, and then I deposit it into my separate checking account.

"Who needs another brass and oakwood bar and grill?" I said. "Who wants another pasta place in sleek Italian moderno? How many places can you go to with police cars lurching out of the walls? This town is chockablock with restaurants that are just clones of the same old themes. You can find a niche. Do something differe九_九_藏_书_网nt every time. Get the Hong Kong investors who are willing to sink some bucks into American ingenuity."

"Whats that?"

None of our friends could ever believe we fight over something as stupid as fleas, but they would also never believe that our problems are much, much deeper than that, so deep I dont even know where bottom is.

Harold jingles the car keys and says, "Im going down the hill to buy stuff for dinner. Steaks okay? Want anything special?"

During dinner, Harold keeps the conversation going. He talks about the plans for the house: the skylights, expanding the deck, planting flower beds of tulips and crocuses, clearing the poison oak, adding another wing, building a Japanese-style tile bathroom. And then he clears the table and starts stacking the plates in the dishwasher.

"So it seems. Shes always on a diet."

"Lena cannot eat ice cream," says my mother.

"Were out of rice," I say, discreetly nodding toward my mother, whose back is turned to me. Shes looking out the kitchen window, at the trellis of bougainvillea. And then Harold is out the door and I hear the deep rumble of the car and then the sound of crunching gravel as he drives away.

chicken, veg., bread, broccoli, shampoo, beer $19.63

Lena St. Clair

Meanwhile she asks over and over again why we had to pay so much for a renovated barn and a mildew-lined pool on four acres of land, two of which are covered with redwood trees and poison oak. Actually she doesnt really ask, she just says, "Aii, so much money, so much," as we show her different parts of the house and land. And her laments always compel Harold to explain to my mother in simple terms: "Well, you see, its the details that cost so much. Like this wood floor. Its hand-bleached. And the walls here, this marbleized effect, its hand-sponged. Its really worth it."

He gave me his adoring smile, the one that said, "I love it when youre so naive." And I adored his looking at me like that.

"And maybe…maybe you could do a novel-menu restaurant…foods from fiction…sandwiches from Lawrence Sanders murder mysteries, just desserts from Nora Ephrons Heartburn. And something else with a magic theme, or jokes and gags, or…"

And I shouted back, laughing with him, "More than half! Youre that good. Youre the best there is in restaurant design and development. You know it and I know it, and so do a lot of restaurant developers."

And now I dont know what to think. What am I saying? Whats he saying? We sit in the room, not saying anything. The air feels muggy. I look out the window, and out in the distance is the valley beneath us, a sprinkling of thousands of lights shimmering in the summer fog. And then I hear the sound of glass shattering, upstairs, and a chair scrapes across a wood floor.

So instead I tell my mother this: "I dont really know. Its something we started before we got married. And for some reason we never stopped."

But still, I said to Harold, "Harold, I want to help you go for it, too. I mean, youre going to need money to start this business."

So I think I deserve someone like Harold, and I mean in the good sense and not like bad karma. Were equals. Im also smart. I have common sense. And Im intuitive, highly so. I was the one who told Harold he was good enough to start his own firm.

During our brief tour of the house, shes already found the flaws. She says the slant of the floor makes her feel as if she is "running down." She thinks the guest room where she will be staying—which is really a former hayloft shaped by a sloped roof—has "two lopsides." She sees spiders in high corners and even fleas jumping up in the air—pah! pah! pah!—like little spatters of hot oil. My mothers knows, underneath all the fancy details that cost so much, this house is still a barn.

And when I got into the car, I still had the glow of that feeling and I touched his hand and said, "Harold, I love you." And he looked in the rearview mirror, backing up the car, and said, "I love you, too. Did you lock the door?" And just like that, I started to think, Its just not enough.

"Thats right! Christ, thats great," exclaims Harold, laughing, relieved in thinking my mother is graciously trying to rescue him.

Garage stuff $25.35

And we just continued that way, everything right down the middle. If anything, I encouraged it. Sometimes I insisted on paying for the whole thing: meal, drinks, and tip. And it really didnt bother me.

I start to cry, which I know Harold hates. It always makes him uncomfortable, angry. He thinks its manipulative. But I cant help it, because I realize now that I dont know what the point of this argument is. Am I asking Harold to support me? Am I asking to pay less than half? Do I really think we should stop accounting for everything? Wouldnt we continue to tally things up in our head? Wouldnt Harold wind up paying more? And then wouldnt I feel worse, less than equal? Or maybe we shouldnt have gotten married in the first place. Maybe Harold is a bad man. Maybe Ive made him this way.

"Thats a wonderful idea," I said immediately, knowing how embarrassed he was to have to ask me that way. I was so deliriously happy that it didnt matter that the rent on my studio was really only four hundred thirty-five. Besides, Harolds place was much nicer, a two-bedroom flat with a two-hundred-forty-degree view of the bay. It was worth the extra money, no matter whom I shared the place with.

Ice Cream $4.50

"Oh, nothing really. Just t九*九*藏*书*网hings we share," I say as casually as I can.

Lately, however, this business about being equals started to bother me. Its been on my mind, only I didnt really know it. I just felt a little uneasy about something. And then about a week ago, it all became clear. I was putting the breakfast dishes away and Harold was warming up the car so we could go to work. And I saw the newspaper spread open on the kitchen counter, Harolds glasses on top, his favorite coffee mug with the chipped handle off to the side. And for some reason, seeing all these little domestic signs of familiarity, our daily ritual, made me swoon inside. But it was as if I were seeing Harold the first time we made love, this feeling of surrendering everything to him, with abandon, without caring what I got in return.

Photo developing $13.83

And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I cant see her face.

"Its true," I say evenly. "Ive hated ice cream almost all my life."

The way things are going this week, Harolds already spent over a hundred dollars more, so Ill owe him around fifty from my checking account.

And I feel embarrassed, knowing what shes seeing. Im relieved that she doesnt see the other half of it, the discussions. Through countless talks, Harold and I reached an understanding about not including personal things like "mascara," and "shaving lotion," "hair spray" or "Bic shavers," "tampons," or "athletes foot powder."

"Whos ready for dessert?" he asks, reaching into the freezer.

Car Smog Check $35

This would have been a funny incident to remember from my childhood, but it is actually a memory I recall from time to time with a mixture of nausea and remorse. My loathing for Arnold had grown to such a point that I eventually found a way to make him die. I let one thing result from another. Of course, all of it could have been just loosely connected coincidences. And whether thats true or not, I know the intention was there. Because when I want something to happen—or not happen—I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.

And then she set the film projector clattering away. The film showed missionaries in Africa and India. These good souls worked with people whose legs were swollen to the size of tree trunks, whose numb limbs had become as twisted as jungle vines. But the most terrible of the afflictions were men and women with leprosy. Their faces were covered with every kind of misery I could imagine: pits and pustules, cracks and bumps, and fissures that I was sure erupted with the same vehemence as snails writhing in a bed of salt. If my mother had been in the room, she would have told me these poor people were victims of future husbands and wives who had failed to eat platefuls of food.

And we still argue about Mirugai, the cat—not our cat, or my cat, but the cat that was his gift to me for my birthday last year.

I wanted to protest. I wanted to say, "No! Im not really this way about money, the way weve been doing it. Im really into giving freely. I want…" But I didnt know where to begin. I wanted to ask him who, what woman, had hurt him this way, that made him so scared about accepting love in all its wonderful forms. But then I heard him saying what Id been waiting to hear for a long, long time.

The list says "Lena" and "Harold" and under each of our names are things weve bought and how much they cost:

"Shit," Harold says. And then he sighs and leans back, as if he were thinking about this. Finally he says in what sounds like a hurt voice, "Well, I know our marriage is based on a lot more than a balance sheet. A lot more. And if you dont then I think you should think about what else you want, before you change things."

None of it seems right. Nothing makes sense. I can admit to nothing and I am in complete despair.

And I thought she could see through me and that she knew I was the one who had caused Arnold to die. I was terrified.

"I guess I assumed you were just trying to lose weight…. Oh well."

To this day, I believe my mother has the mysterious ability to see things before they happen. She has a Chinese saying for what she knows. Chunwang chihan: If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold. Which means, I suppose, one thing is always the result of another.

Movies & Dinner $65

"Why do you have to be so goddamn fair!" I shout.

Harold

And just after my father died last year, she said she knew this would happen. Because a philodendron plant my father had given her had withered and died, despite the fact that she watered it faithfully. She said the plant had damaged its roots and no water could get to it. The autopsy report she later received showed my father had had ninety-percent blockage of the arteries before he died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-four. My father was not Chinese like my mother, but English-Irish American, who enjoyed his five slices of bacon and three eggs sunnyside up every morning.

I see it right away: the marble end table collapsed on top of its spindly black legs. Off to the side is the black vase, the smooth cylinder broken in half, the freesias strewn in a puddle of water.

And I think that feeling of fear never left me, that I would be caught someday, exposed as a sham of a woman. But recently, a friend of mine, Rose, whos in therapy now because her marriage has already fallen apart, told me those kinds of九-九-藏-书-网 thoughts are commonplace in women like us.

One time when I was growing up in San Francisco, she looked at the way our new apartment sat too steeply on the hill. She said the new baby in her womb would fall out dead, and it did.

And my mother nods and agrees: "Bleach and sponge cost so much."

But my mother sighed. "Yesterday, you not finish rice either." I thought of those unfinished mouthfuls of rice, and then the grains that lined my bowl the day before, and the day before that. By the minute, my eight-year-old heart grew more and more terror-stricken over the growing possibility that my future husband was fated to be this mean boy Arnold. And thanks to my poor eating habits, his hideous face would eventually resemble the craters of the moon.

I leave my mother in her room and go back downstairs. Harold is opening the windows to let the night air in. He does this every evening.

And weve had philosophical arguments over things that have gray borders, like my birth control pills, or dinners at home when we entertain people who are really his clients or my old friends from college, or food magazines that I subscribe to but he also reads only because hes bored, not because he would have chosen them for himself.

Harold and I work at the same architectural firm, Livotny & Associates. Only Harold Livotny is a partner and I am an associate. We met eight years ago, before he started Livotny & Associates. I was twenty-eight, a project assistant, and he was thirty-four. We both worked in the restaurant design and development division of Harned Kelley & Davis.

"Oh my, listen to this," he said, still dabbing. And thats when he announced that Arnold Reisman, a boy who lived in our old neighborhood in Oakland, had died of complications from measles. He had just been accepted to Cal State Hayward and was planning to become a podiatrist.

"Lena, youre really extraordinary," Harold said after six months of dinners, five months of post-prandial lovemaking, and one week of timid and silly love confessions. We were lying in bed, between new purple sheets I had just bought for him. His old set of white sheets was stained in revealing places, not very romantic.

The thought that I could have caused Arnolds death is not so ridiculous. Perhaps he was destined to be my husband. Because I think to myself, even today, how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites? Why did Arnold single me out for his rubber-band torture? How is it that he contracted measles the same year I began consciously to hate him? And why did I think of Arnold in the first place—when my mother looked in my rice bowl—and then come to hate him so much? Isnt hate merely the result of wounded love?

And with that, I swooned inside, caught off balance by this latest revelation of love, wondering how such a remarkable person as Harold could think I was extraordinary.

And even when I can finally dismiss all of this as ridiculous, I still feel that somehow, for the most part, we deserve what we get. I didnt get Arnold. I got Harold.

"At first I thought it was because I was raised with all this Chinese humility," Rose said. "Or that maybe it was because when youre Chinese youre supposed to accept everything, flow with the Tao and not make waves. But my therapist said, Why do you blame your culture, your ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because its all diminishing returns after a certain age."

"Aii, Lena," she had said after that dinner so many years ago, "your future husband have one pock mark for every rice you not finish."

When Harold returns from the store, he starts the charcoal. I unload the groceries, marinate the steaks, cook the rice, and set the table. My mother sits on a stool at the granite counter, drinking from a mug of coffee Ive poured for her. Every few minutes she wipes the bottom of the mug with a tissue she keeps stuffed in her sweater sleeve.

"Didnt you know that boy?" asked my father, and I stood there mute.

Maria (clean + tip) $65 groceries

"Then why you dont stop it?" asks my mother.

"She become so thin now you cannot see her," says my mother. "She like a ghost, disappear."

She said, "I want you to think about a nickels worth of candy money, or however much you eat each week—your Good and Plentys, your Necco wafers, your jujubes—and compare that to what you are about to see. And I also want you to think about what your true blessings in life really are."

He wouldnt hear of taking any money from me, not as a favor, not as a loan, not as an investment, or even as the down payment on a partnership. He said he valued our relationship too much. He didnt want to contaminate it with money. He explained, "I wouldnt want a handout any more than youd want one. As long as we keep the money thing separate, well always be sure of our love for each other."

"It doesnt matter," I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. "I knew it would happen."

And its such a simple question.

"Actually, you could help me out if you moved in with me. I mean, that way I could use the five hundred dollars rent you paid to me…"

"Fallen down," she says simply. She doesnt apologize.

"What are you talking about?"

And now Harold smiles and looks at me puzzled, expecting me to translate what my mother hashttp://ｗwｗ.９９lib•neｔ said.

"Whats going on here?"

And after my talk with Rose, I felt better about myself and I thought, Of course, Harold and I are equals, in many respects. Hes not exactly handsome in the classic sense, although clear-skinned and certainly attractive in that wiry intellectual way. And I may not be a raving beauty, but a lot of women in my aerobics class tell me Im "exotic" in an unusual way, and theyre jealous that my breasts dont sag, now that small breasts are in. Plus, one of my clients said I have incredible vitality and exuberance.

But she does not predict when earthquakes will come, or how the stock market will do. She sees only bad things that affect our family. And she knows what causes them. But now she laments that she never did anything to stop them.

After seeing this film, I did a terrible thing. I saw what I had to do so I would not have to marry Arnold. I began to leave more rice in my bowl. And then I extended my prodigal ways beyond Chinese food. I did not finish my creamed corn, broccoli, Rice Krispies, or peanut butter sandwiches. And once, when I bit into a candy bar and saw how lumpy it was, how full of secret dark spots and creamy goo, I sacrificed that as well.

"Then tell me, please, what is the point?"

At Livotny & Associates, I procure the theme elements. For one restaurant called The Fishermans Tale, one of my prized findings was a yellow varnished wood boat stenciled with the name "Overbored," and I was the one who thought the menus should dangle from miniature fishing poles, and the napkins be printed with rulers that have inches translating into feet. For a Lawrence of Arabia deli called Tray Sheik, I was the one who thought the place should have a bazaar effect, and I found the replicas of cobras lying on fake Hollywood boulders.

"This is shame," said my mother, looking at me. "This is terrible shame."

The only decoration is an odd-looking piece right next to the bed: an end table made out of a slab of unevenly cut marble and thin crisscrosses of black lacquer wood for the legs. My mother puts her handbag on the table and the cylindrical black vase on top starts to wobble. The freesias in the vase quiver.

We started seeing each other for working lunches, to talk about the projects, and we would always split the tab right in half, even though I usually ordered only a salad because I have this tendency to gain weight easily. Later, when we started meeting secretly for dinner, we still divided the bill.

My mother and I are alone in the house. I start to water the plants. She is standing on her tiptoes, peering at a list stuck on our refrigerator door.

When a plumbing and bathroom fixtures store opened up across the street from our bank, my mother said the bank would soon have all its money drained away. And one month later, an officer of the bank was arrested for embezzlement.

He looks at me, sighs and smiles, pulls the windows shut, and then sits down cross-legged on the floor and flips open a magazine. Im sitting on the sofa, seething, and I dont know why. Its not that Harold has done anything wrong. Harold is just Harold.

I remember this ability of my mothers, because now she is visiting my husband and me in the house we just bought in Woodside. And I wonder what she will see.

"You were the one who wanted the cat."

That night, in my room, I gorged myself. I had stolen a halfgallon of strawberry ice cream from the freezer, and I forced spoonful after spoonful down my throat. And later, for several hours after that, I sat hunched on the fire escape landing outside my bedroom, retching back into the ice cream container. And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.

And today Livotny & Associates is a growing firm of twelve full-time people, which specializes in thematic restaurant design, what I still like to call "theme eating." Harold is the concept man, the chief architect, the designer, the person who makes the final sales presentation to a new client. I work under the interior designer, because, as Harold explains, it would not seem fair to the other employees if he promoted me just because we are now married—that was five years ago, two years after he started Livotny & Associates. And even though I am very good at what I do, I have never been formally trained in this area. When I was majoring in Asian-American studies, I took only one relevant course, in theater set design, for a college production of Madama Butterfly.

And I thought of a mean neighbor boy who had tiny pits in his cheeks, and it was true, those marks were the size of rice grains. This boy was about twelve and his name was Arnold.

Lenu

So within the year, Harold and I quit Harned Kelley & Davis and he started Livotny & Associates, and I went to work there as a project coordinator. And no, he didnt get half the restaurant clients of Harned Kelley & Davis. In fact, Harned Kelley & Davis threatened to sue if he walked away with even one client over the next year. So I gave him pep talks in the evening when he was discouraged. I told him how he should do more avantgarde thematic restaurant design, to differentiate himself from the other firms.

When we were still working at Harned Kelley & Davis, I said, "Harold, this firm knows just what a good deal it has with you. Youre the goose who lays the golden egg. If you started your own business today, youd walk away with more than half of the restaurant clients."