Listen to Karin Lin-Greenberg read this excerpt.

The paint had rubbed off Cornelius Crawford’s nose again, and I knew it was going to be my responsibility to repaint it before I went home. Two months before, I’d pointed out the missing paint on the very large nose of our animatronic Cornelius Crawford, who greeted visitors at the beginning of their tour of Crawford Caverns. Overalls-clad Cornelius sat in an old rocking chair and told tourists the tale of how he discovered the cave on his property in 1840. He’d noticed his cows gathering at the same spot on his farm day after day during an exceptionally hot summer. He walked past his cornfields to his cows and saw they were standing near the mouth of a cave, where cool air blew out. Cornelius crawled into the massive cave and discovered a world of limestone and stalactites and stalagmites—and a few bats—and two years later, Crawford Caverns opened to the public and soon became one of the top tourist destinations in the state of New York. Each day I was grateful that animatronic Cornelius told this origin story because it meant I didn’t have to as I guided packs of tourists through a mile and a half of underground tunnels in Crawford Caverns.

Children liked to reach up and touch Cornelius’s nose as they moved from the room where he spoke at the beginning of each tour to the elevators that lowered us one hundred and sixty feet into the cave. The children were drawn to the nose’s largeness and bulbousness, leaving Cornelius a grayish proboscis, paint rubbed away, grease from many small, grimy hands rubbed on. And so every week I got a cotton ball, soaked it with alcohol, rubbed the grease off Cornelius’s nose, then painted on a fresh layer of nose I created with a mixture of yellow ochre, cadmium red light, and titanium white, one of the formulas I learned for painting Caucasian flesh tones in my painting class my sophomore year of college.

When I turned in the receipt for reimbursement for the paints and a paintbrush, my boss, Dale, said, “Why’d you buy three paints for one nose?”

I told him the paints mixed together made a good color match for the rest of animatronic Cornelius’s face, and Dale squinted at me as if I’d done something suspicious, like the fifteen dollars and forty-two cents I was asking for in reimbursement for three tubes of student-grade acrylics and one paintbrush was going to put Crawford Caverns, top tourist attraction in the shadow of the Helderberg Mountains, out of business. As if the sale of one lump of fudge from our gift shop wouldn’t put that money right back into the coffers.

“There wasn’t a tube of paint for skin color?” Dale said.

“Actually,” I began, but then I stopped myself because my younger sister, Felicity, told me one of the worst things a man can do is begin a sentence with the word actually. Besides, what I was planning to say about the fact that skin does not come in just one color would be something Dale, son of upstate New York, man who’s probably never left the little hamlet where he was born, wouldn’t appreciate hearing. In Crawfordville, skin pretty much does come in one color. My sister and I, with our peach undertones from being half Asian, provide some much-needed, let’s say, local color.

“Well, it’s your job now,” Dale said, “to paint that nose when the gray shows through. Since you brought it up, I notice the gray all the time.”

I nodded, despite his accusatory tone, as if making someone notice something beyond the end of their own nose was a crime.

After I finished wiping and painting Cornelius’s nose, it was only four o’clock, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I went home. Or to my parents’ home. I didn’t expect that I’d be calling my childhood home my home again at twenty-two, after graduating from college, but let’s blame a struggling economy and my theater degree from a small liberal arts college for the predicament I found myself in. My college roommate and best friend, Nico, said I could share the apartment he’d found in the East Village. He could go to his job at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and I could go to Broadway auditions, and we could split the rent fifty-fifty. If I gained anything from my four years of expensive liberal arts education, it was critical thinking skills, and I knew auditions were just auditions, not actual jobs, and Nico’s actual job would bring in actual money and soon enough I’d be the type of roommate who was more charity project than equal contributor. So I went home and the only job I could find was as a tour guide at Crawford Caverns. Sadly, it seemed I was perfectly suited for memorizing facts about the Caverns that no one who visited cared about, and I could even deliver the corny jokes and puns that were part of the tour script convincingly. During my interview, I was able to spin my theater degree as strong preparation for the tales I’d tell visitors about stalactites and stalagmites and how Cornelius’s wife, Mrs. Clarissa Crawford, used to play piano six nights a week in the hotel built above the caves. In the evenings, the tourists returned from an eight-hour tour—remember, there were no elevators or lights in the caves back then so it was imperative they moved slowly—and emerged aboveground with Cornelius, all toting the whale oil lanterns that had lit their way. To greet the returning tourists, the cows—the same cows that had discovered the caves—had been herded to the field outside the hotel and would moo a plaintive chorus as Clarissa Crawford played “Moonlight Sonata,” while the tourists, famished from their explorations, dined on roast chicken, au gratin potatoes, pickled beans and beets, and baked apples with cream.

At home, I found my sister with her iPhone in a ring light, holding the mallet my father sometimes used to smash chicken breasts into something he called paillards. Felicity brought the mallet over her head and shouted, “Smash the patriarchy!” and pounded the mallet into a black bottle of yogurt drink, and yogurt splashed onto the table, the walls, and her Crawfordville Calves Softball sweatshirt. The yogurt was a dark bluish purple and looked like an otherworldly sludge.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said.

“God, Felix, I’m recording. Or I was,” she said, dramatically reaching over and stopping the recording on her phone.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“Well, you talked, so now I have to see if I can edit your voice out. If you talked while I was saying, ‘Smash the patriarchy,’ then I’ll have to do it over again, which means I have to buy more yogurt.”

“I don’t get how smashing a bottle of yogurt drink has anything to do with the patriarchy,” I said.

Felicity picked up the flattened bottle and held it up to me. “This is yogurt for men.” The bottle was black, and the text was silver and looked like pieces of steel soldered together to form letters. The flavor was Blueberry Bomb. Across the bottom of the bottle, large red and orange letters that appeared to be aflame spelled out the words EXTRA PROTEIN.

“It’s a dumb advertising thing,” I said. “I don’t feel like it’s anything to get so mad about.”

“You would say that.” She ripped a paper towel off a roll and dabbed at her sweatshirt.

“You think I’m the ideal consumer for yogurt for men? You think I’m obsessed with my protein intake?” I knew what I looked like. I’d been called shrimpy before. Once, I overheard a director of a college play describe me as elfin.

“You’re a man. The world is built for you.”

“Oh, right. I’m on top of the world. Absolutely. Living it up at Crawford Caverns.”

“I’m just saying that everything is made for men in our society and women are an afterthought, so it’s offensive to create gendered products like this stupid yogurt.”

“But you bought it. You paid money for it, then you smashed it so you can’t even drink it, so who wins and who loses?”

“I win when I get an A on my advertising analysis project in my media literacy class.”

“You’re getting an A for flattening a bottle of yogurt?”

“I always get As.” She said it with such certainty, but she was always certain. She had not yet been crushed by the world, had not been flattened into a paillard of a person. She was born strong and wide-shouldered and confident. She was built to throw a softball with great speed and accuracy. I was born elfin and delicate, more Santa’s helper than leading man.

“You have yogurt in your hair,” I said.

She reached up and touched her hair. “I have to shower before practice. Can you drive me?”

“Softball’s in the spring. Why are you practicing in the fall?”

“The charity game?” she said.

I’d forgotten that the week before Halloween every year there was a game between the Crawfordville Calves, Felicity’s team, and the Summerton Stalagmites, from the neighboring town. Summerton had their own cavern, but it wasn’t as impressive as Crawford Caverns and they had to pretend aliens had once landed outside the cave in order to get people interested. It was the cut-rate cave that thrifty tourists visited, and their tour was only thirty minutes since there was hardly anything to see. At each year’s charity softball game, spectators paid ten dollars each, and most people dressed up to support their team. Fans from Crawfordville dressed up as either Cornelius, Mrs. Crawford, or one of the cows. Fans from Summerton wore enormous handmade foam hats that looked like stalagmites and blocked the view of people behind them. The crowd got overly excited about the whole affair, screaming and cheering in the bleachers as if they were at the World Series. All the proceeds from the game went to the animal shelter that was situated right on the border of Crawfordville and Summerton and the funds supported their yearly Halloween campaign to get black cats—who they insisted were not bad luck—adopted. All of this was part of my life growing up and yet I’d somehow let it all slip out of my mind during my years away.

“You’re practicing one time after an entire summer and fall of not practicing and that’s going to be enough?” I said.

“No one’s expecting greatness at this game. We’re not professional softball players.”

“Who is?” I said.

“There are professional softball players. You didn’t know that?”

“I just mean softball isn’t like baseball. You can’t make a life out of it.”

Felicity glared at me. “Can you drive me or not?”

“I’m exhausted. I gave tours all day.”

“I’ll be late if I shower and walk, and I don’t want to go through practice covered in yogurt. You know, I thought it was going to be fun to have you home, but it kind of sucks, and I have to share the bathroom again, and I think the least you could do is give me a ride.”

“Fine,” I said, “although I don’t appreciate the guilt trip.” But secretly I was glad to take her, to have somewhere to go, somewhere to sit and stay for a while, and I’d insist on staying, saying I might as well drive her home after practice too . . .

To read the whole story, purchase a copy of NER 44.2 in print or e-book.

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