#ch: daisy feng

[motownfiction]

historic

August 14, 2017. One of those historic days, as far as Emma O’Connor is concerned. If she ever got the chance to go back and see a day in her life play out, that’s the day she would choose. She wouldn’t want to do it differently. She’d just want to watch it like a movie. August 14, 2017. One of the most special days of Emma’s whole life. It’s the day she met Daisy Feng. 

As a kid, Emma was never very good at making friends. When she was very little, she tried – asked other kids to play at recess, sat down at lunch tables she wasn’t even invited to, brought Scooby-Doo fruit snacks to school because that’s what all the other kids ate. But it never really worked. She knew she was faking, and they knew she was faking. Nobody wants a faker for a friend. Even fewer people want a friend who watches reruns of Newhart in the 2000s.

And all her life, that seems to be the consensus. Emma O’Connor is too weird to have friends, too smart, too different. Every now and then, people like her, but they’re really just looking for help with their homework or an in with Mom at CCNY. Mom says her life would have been like that if she hadn’t moved to Michigan and met Sadie. The thought sticks in Emma’s brain, and she’s determined to find her own Sadie. She decides it’s one of the most important goals in life, much more important than finding a husband one day. Mom is who she is because Sadie loved her first, probably even before Daddy (though it would break Dad’s heart to hear it said). Elenore didn’t have a Sadie, and look what happened to her.

It seems like all hope is lost. Emma’s twenty-two now, the holder of a bachelor’s degree, and she still has no real friends to her name. No Sadie of her own. Mom shakes her head and says that’s ridiculous. She doesn’t need her own Sadie because she’s already friends with the real one. Just because she’s my friend doesn’t mean she’s not yours, Mom says. She’s trying to be kind. She’s trying to be understanding. But if she only knew how hard it is to strike out on your own. Emma shares all this, and Mom just draws her close and says she hopes that when she starts at Columbia next month, she hopes Emma finds a best friend who likes eating raw cookie dough, listening to the Easy Rider soundtrack, and looking at the moon. It seems impossible.

And then, like nothing, it’s August 14, 2017. Emma’s first day at Columbia, where she’ll earn her master’s degree in film studies. She’s shuffled into an office with another new student in the program, Daisy Feng. Daisy is a year older than Emma, four inches taller, and a million times more gregarious. When Emma opens her door and finds Daisy there, she looks at her from behind purple-rimmed glasses and smiles like they’re old friends. And somehow, even with her guard up high above her head, Emma knows it’s OK. Knows she should look at Daisy like they’re old friends, too.

Turns out to be the right choice. There’s nobody in the world cooler than Daisy. Her last name means phoenix, and she’s fond of saying she rose from the ashes (a year off between her bachelor’s and master’s, where she worked in a bakery and accidentally burned a few too many loaves of bread, on account of listening to the radio and getting distracted). She’s from Toledo, Ohio, land of Spaghetti Warehouses and some of the world’s most overrated sundaes. At least, according to Daisy, who couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. She studies sixties counterculture in Hollywood movies, and her favorite movie soundtrack of all time is Easy Rider. When Emma asks her why, Daisy just nods and says, “I, too, had too much to dream last night.”

It’s not a lie, either, and you can tell. Daisy always looks like she’s this close to snapping her fingers and telling you she has magic powers. Her wit is incredible, but once she decides you’re her friend, that’s it. You’re her friend for life. Mom says she’s a combination of Daddy and Sam that way, which Emma’s proud of. If you can’t find your own Sadie, she thinks, might as well find your own Sam.

Before long, Emma O’Connor and Daisy Feng go everywhere together. Out for coffee. To the movies. To weird trivia contests upstate, where they take home the prize money every time, much to the townies’ chagrin. When Emma thinks she could fall in love with the second-year student in their women filmmakers class, she tells Daisy even before she tells Elenore; when Daisy finally kisses her bartender crush from that place upstate, she calls Emma into the bathroom and squeals with her about it. Before long, it’s a given. Wherever Emma goes, she knows Daisy goes. The best friend she’s always been looking for. Not a Sadie of her own. Not even a Sam. Just a Daisy.

Thank goodness.

[motownfiction]

contact

Emma and Daisy aren’t really sure what they’re getting into when they register for a class called “Major U.S. Directors, Minor Films,” but they know they weren’t expecting to watch Robert Zemeckis’s Contact. In the end, it was OK. Aside from the fact that poor Daisy blushed every time she had to look at Rob Lowe, they made it through. But by the end, all Emma could take away was boredom.

“I just don’t understand why we couldn’t have watched I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” she says. “Nobody’s ever seen that movie. I don’t even know if you’ve seen that movie.”

“When my grandmother went to London on business twelve years ago, I made her buy me every Beatles record at Harrods she could find,” Daisy says. “You think I haven’t seen that movie?”

“Right. Sorry.”

“No need. Anyway, I kind of liked it.”

“You say that about everything we’ve watched in this class.”

“Well, yeah. Because I know how to keep an open mind about stuff. I don’t go into every movie thinking I’m going to hate it. Unlike some people I know.”

Emma sighs over her empty bowl of popcorn.

“I like going into things with low expectations,” she says. “That way, I feel justified when the movie is bad, but if it’s good, I’m pleasantly surprised.”

“That is a sick way to live, my friend,” Daisy says. “Come on. Isn’t it fun to like things?”

“Of course it’s fun to like things. When they’re good and not just distractions from the goal.”

“What’s ‘the goal?’”

“I don’t know. It changes. Shifts. But whatever it is, I need to keep my eyes on it. I don’t need anybody else taking it from me.”

Daisy begins to laugh into her pizza.

“What?” Emma asks. “You know I only like to be funny on purpose.”

“Nothing, nothing,” Daisy says. “It’s just … you’re well aware that you sound exactly like Jodie Foster in the movie we just watched, right?”

Emma makes a face.

“I do not!” she says.

“Relax,” Daisy says. “It’s not a bad thing. You’re just … obsessively driven by a singular goal, whatever it is. And you don’t let anything hold you back. Not even if Rob Lowe is in the room.”

“OK, I don’t really think that’s the reason Jodie Foster’s not into Rob Lowe, but carry on.”

“It’s just … you’re always exactly who you are. You do exactly what you want to do, and you really don’t care about who likes it.”

“I can’t tell if you’re complimenting me or insulting me.”

“I’m obviously complimenting you.”

“It’s not obvious if I can’t tell!”

“Well, I’m complimenting you. So, accept it. It’s awesome that you’re so focused. That you’re always who you are. I’m not like that. I just absorb the personality of whatever movie I like most.”

“Is that why you still like to dress like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider?”

“The very reason.”

Emma takes another slice of pizza from the box. Maybe she’ll accept her fate as a goal-focused, too-intense kind of woman. In fact, she thinks she maybe kind of likes it. Her phone lights up with a text from her mother, wondering if she survived the minor Zemeckis film. Emma smiles with pepperoni between her teeth.

She learned it from the best.

[motownfiction]

mire

From the age of six, Daisy’s father tells her the same thing all the time: Your penmanship will mire you down.

She’s probably the only kid in kindergarten who knows what the word mire means, but if you asked her to write it out on a piece of paper, it wouldn’t look a damn thing like any language. Her M’s look like bats hanging upside down in Dracula’s castle; her capital B’s look like snowmen on an operating table. Her teacher pulls her aside and gives her a special folder – one with purple Lisa Frank kittens on it – and tells her the papers inside are just for her. Very special handwriting practice. Daisy, of course, sees right through it.

Come on, Daisy! her teacher sweetly pleads. Don’t you want to write neatly? Don’t you want people to read all your good ideas?

Daisy considers it. She does have good ideas. In half-day kindergarten, she thrives in the dress-up area, directing little plays for her friends to perform in. One of the student teachers says she’ll be a great Dungeon Master when she grows up, which sounds cooler than it ends up being (at least, sometimes). But as hard as she tries to make her writing look like everyone else’s, it just doesn’t work. She can’t muster the patience.

My hands work too slow for my brain, she says, and she keeps it up until junior high.

Mercifully, in junior high, she’s allowed to use a computer, and all her good ideas are suddenly legible to everyone else. But there are still those times when she needs to write things out with her hands. As she gets older, her handwriting gets a little better, but it’s still much messier than the average person’s. In school, people still snicker about it. Nobody wants to read Daisy Feng’s paper “because they can’t read it at all.” Around the time she’s sixteen or seventeen, she’s convinced it’s an excuse not to talk to her. Very few people want to be friends with the girl who’d grow up to make a great Dungeon Master. Her penmanship mires her down, but in ways her father the linguistics professor never could have imagined.

And then, there’s graduate school. Columbia. A gaggle of film nerds whose brains work just as fast as Daisy’s does, and yet, they all have much neater handwriting. She’s looked around the seminar table. One evening, she’s leading the discussion on Roger Corman and The Wild Angels, and she has to write on the whiteboard. She panics, and it all comes out in scribbles. There come the laughs again.

From everybody but Emma.

Emma can read what Daisy’s writing. What’s more, Emma can talk about it. And Daisy’s never felt more thrilled in her life. Thank goodness for Emma.

Sometimes, she thinks, people were just born to be your best friend.