by Anne Cherian
ALSO BY ANNE CHERIAN
A Good Indian Wife
For the women who help me see the glass half-full:
Elsie, Claudia, and Selma.
Also,
Oona Aven, Anju Basu, Barbara Bundy,
Soo-Young Chin, Julie Connery, Ellie Miller,
Lady N, Mary O’Sullivan, Marie Stael von Holstein.
And always, Cole and Reid,
my two miracles.
CONTENTS
An Invitation Arrives
Preparing for the Party
The Party
The Invitation
The Responses
FRANCES TURNED AROUND and waved to the gray-haired couple standing in the doorway. She smiled happily, her palm moving energetically through the sticky afternoon air. The elderly Millers had finally agreed to an offer for their home. It was her first sale in a year, and Frances was anxious to fax their acceptance and make it a done deal.
She recalled the day the Millers had walked into the office the previous July. It had been just another slow Thursday, and the two seemed a little lost. So she had offered them chairs, tea, and coffee. Houses weren’t mentioned for quite a while because Mr. Miller guessed she was from India and told her he had been there during World War II.
“It was for a week only,” Gene Miller acknowledged, “but I still remember the bright colors, the warm rain, and the most delicious mango I have ever eaten.”
Frances had enjoyed his memories, so different from those of other Americans who revered India as “an amazing, spiritual place” she did not recognize, or, conversely, sighed about the dense crowds and spicy food that beleaguered their stomachs. She had also been relieved that she did not need to provide the usual explanation of her origins.
There were many Indians in Los Angeles, but very few lived in the San Fernando Valley, and she was constantly having to clarify: “No, I’m not Armenian, you know, and I’m also not from the Middle East. I’m Indian by way of Portugal because my ancestors came from there, hence my name, Frances Dias.” Her husband, Jay, had come up with the punch line she typically finished with: “I’m from Goa, and I’m goin’ to sell your house for you, so don’t worry about a thing.”
She had promised the Millers that she was goin’ to sell their house in Burbank, but the weak market meant that it attracted very few people during the open houses she had held diligently for two months. The Millers weren’t in any rush because they were planning to move into one of the units in an apartment building they owned. But after four months of no activity at all, even they grew a little anxious. She explained the down market, the difficulty of getting loans, and they nodded, though she privately continued to worry that the house might never sell.
Last month they reluctantly gave in to her recommendation to move some of the heavy furniture to the garage, making the rooms, as she had hoped, look larger and lighter. Frances brought in flowers and potted plants, and gently reminded the Millers that they would probably have to lower their asking price.
Then today at noon, on a morning that was already clammy at 9 a.m., another agent in the office, Susan Hayman, had placed the offer on her desk. The buyers were prequalified, and were putting down 30 percent.
“Any wiggle room?” Frances knew she had to fight a little, because the offer was $40,000 below list price.
“Nope,” Susan said firmly. “This is the best they can do. But they’re serious, and ready to sign.”
So Frances called the Millers and immediately went to their house. She had expected they would make a small fuss about the lower offer, and Mr. Miller had pointed out that the house across the street had sold for more than its asking price.
“That was three years ago, you know,” Frances reminded him. “This offer isn’t that far off from what you want,” she pressed her point, and, miraculously, a short while later, they had signed.
Now Frances started the car and decided to drive home. It was closer than her office, and she wanted to fax the letter quickly. The Millers didn’t look like the sort who changed their minds, but after being in the business for fifteen years, Frances knew that anything could happen at any time, for any reason.
There was hardly any traffic—just another wonderful thing about the day, she thought happily. She hadn’t had time to tell Jay, but she knew he would be very pleased that she had finally sold a house. Her mind fast-forwarded to dinner; she would order a pizza to celebrate. Her younger two, Lily and Sam, would love the unexpected treat. Amanda liked pizza too, but she was too diffident at seventeen to show enthusiasm for anything.
The air-conditioner slats blasted in cool air, while outside, a smoglike haze shimmied above the asphalt. She disliked such moist, breeze-free days. When she arrived in the office in the morning, she had grumbled that this was April, that the Valley wasn’t supposed to begin boiling until later in the year. But now she didn’t care. Even the slow driver in front of her didn’t generate her usual curse word, harami. She simply changed lanes and pressed down on the accelerator.
She had just parked the car in the driveway and called out, “Hello,” to their neighbor Lucy Margolis who was planting the bright red ranunculus she put in every spring, when the cell phone rang.
“You haven’t sent the offer yet, have you?” Mr. Miller asked.
Frances glanced at the side of the house, at the bedroom that doubled as her office, the fax machine ready to go. “I’m just about to,” she said.
“Don’t. We want to stick with the original price,” Mr. Miller stated.
“Are you sure about that?” Frances forced her voice to be calm.
“We’re absolutely positive. We’re not in any hurry, and my wife reminded me that the market is supposed to pick up in a few months.”
“If you’re sure, then, I’ll let them know,” she forced out the words through her closing throat.
“Good,” Mr. Miller said, and hung up.
Frances slipped the phone into her purse, not bothering to place it in its usual pocket. The good feeling, that indisputable belief that even the traffic lights had been on her side, evaporated.
She knew from experience that it wasn’t productive to wonder why the Millers had changed their mind. Once, long ago, she had even called back a client, trying to convince him. But it had backfired on her. The client had felt hounded, and she learned how easy it was for someone to switch real estate agents. She just had the one client. That client, however, had a roster of agents to choose from.
She got out of the car, her purse heavy on her shoulders, the briefcase with the signed contract clasped uselessly in her hand.
Jay would say, “Nothing always happens for a reason.”
But his take on idioms no longer amused her.
The twelve months of inactivity had affected her confidence. She had been the top salesperson until three years ago, when the market took a dive, along with her income. They could not survive on Jay’s middle-manager salary, and because the computer company he worked for was small, he was stuck in his position until his superior resigned, or he found another job. There were entirely too many nights that Frances lay awake, calculating the month’s expenses, worrying what would happen if they used up their savings before she started doing better.
“You’re home early,” Lucy called out.
Frances looked at the kind face, aware that her neighbor, retired and living alone, always enjoyed a chat.
“Have to make dinner for the family, you know,” she said, and walked quickly toward the front door. On most days she enjoyed catching up with Lucy, who kept Frances informed about what was happening on their street.
“A coupon for pizza was in the mail today,” Lucy told her, and Frances simply said, “Thanks,” before shutting the door.
She
put her purse and briefcase on the buffet table and went straight to the kitchen. Mandy had made a snack for her younger brother and sister, as she was supposed to do, but she hadn’t bothered to clean up. The gob of peanut butter that rimmed one corner of the sink, the bread crusts on the cutting board, the ants blackening the dollop of red jam added to the general grubbiness of the kitchen. She had just been in the Millers’ renovated kitchen, and her own, with the original 1950s cabinets and dented stove, added to her despondency.
Jay and she had bought this house precisely because it was a fixer-upper. They had made grand plans to tear down one wall in the kitchen, put in an island, polish the hardwood floors. But once they moved in, they never had the money, so the kitchen drawers were rickety and uneven, and no matter how much she scrubbed the mustard-yellow linoleum floor, it always looked dirty.
Frances sighed. She picked up the sponge, then dropped it. This was Mandy’s job, her only job around the house, and she should jolly well do it. Her daughter must be listening to music in her room—as usual.
As Frances walked through the living room, she heard noises in the backyard, a sure sign that Lily and Sam were playing outside. At ten and eight years of age, they didn’t have much homework, and still enjoyed the jungle gym she had bought at a garage sale years earlier. Frances glanced out the sliding glass door and saw them, not on the bars as she had anticipated but bent over the exposed roots of the ficus tree.
Frances strode up to Mandy’s room and opened the door, ignoring the enter only if invited sign. Her daughter was crouched over the computer, fingers traversing the keyboard, body moving to the music being piped into her ears from her iPod Touch. The pale yellow duvet was bunched up at the foot of the bed, clothes and books competed for space on the carpet, and the closet door was ajar because it was too crammed to close.
Frances tapped her daughter’s bony shoulder.
“Mandy, I’m home.”
Mandy closed her laptop computer quickly.
“Don’t you knock?”
“Even if I did, you wouldn’t be able to hear me,” Frances reasoned. She looked at the computer, immediately wary. The agents in her office often anguished about finding undesirable sites on their children’s computers. “What were you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Then let me see that nothing.”
“Mom, this isn’t India where children have no rights. I’m almost eighteen. I shouldn’t have to remind you that I need my privacy.”
“I pay for that privacy, you know.”
“You also pay for my clothes. Do you want to wear them?”
“They’re not my style,” Frances said, wishing Mandy’s tone weren’t so nasty. She remembered her daughter’s excitement the first time she fit into one of Frances’s aprons. In those preteen years, Mandy enjoyed cooking with her mother and begged to wear her earrings for special occasions. But all that remained of those mother-daughter times were the videos Jay had taken. These days, anything Frances said deteriorated into just another argument.
Frances recalled the sticky mess in the kitchen.
“You didn’t clean up, and now there are ants.”
“I was going to get to it, but I thought you’d want me to finish this paper that’s due tomorrow.”
This was another Mandy maneuver. She knew Frances put schoolwork above everything else.
“Let me see it, then.”
“It’s not done yet.”
“Now.”
With a great sigh, Mandy slowly flipped open the computer. A few clicks later, the screen was filled with the heading “The Good Earth,” followed by paragraphs. Except that Frances wasn’t sure if Mandy had, in a few strikes from her fingers, exited a site she wasn’t supposed to be on, to the Word document containing her paper. Jay had meant to put in one of those parental-control programs when they bought Mandy the computer at the start of high school, but, like so many things around the house, that, too, hadn’t happened. She opened her mouth to confront Mandy but knew that this time she was partially responsible. She should have insisted that Jay do it. Besides, she already knew how Mandy would react, and was too out of sorts to add a squabble to her day.
“I’ve told you a hundred times that ants are hard to get rid of, you know.”
Mandy rolled her eyes. “Bad day at work?”
Frances immediately shook her head.
She had never wanted to be one of those mothers who got angry at her children because of work problems. But an upsetting day like this took her right back to the early years when she had felt so vulnerable, unsure how to succeed as breadwinner and breadmaker—while keeping both lives separate.
She had been raised by Mama, who, like other women of her generation, had stopped working as a nurse when she married. Even housework was easier in India, because everyone, including middle-class families like theirs, had a servant. Mama never had to leave in the morning for the office, then return home to a teenage daughter who believed in having rights, and two small children who thought that dinners magically appeared on the table.
The first time Frances encountered working mothers was in the Anthropology Department at UCLA. The graduate students never complained; they simply dropped off their children at day care. She was too new to the workings of an American university, where she had to write papers (instead of take exams) and teach undergraduates (some of whom were older than she), to look beneath their easy smiles. Back then, it never occurred to her that she would end up like them.
After all, her sisters were married, had children, and were not doing anything different from what Mama did. The only woman in their small town in Goa who had a job was the one with the sickly husband. But everyone was aware that the poor fellow could not keep a full-time job, which was why the nuns had taken pity and given his wife a position in the school office.
When Frances married Jay, she was midway through a PhD in anthropology, and a job was a faraway notion, something the older students obsessed about. She still had course work to complete, PhD exams to take, the long and painful process of a dissertation to embark upon, and even though Jay joked that he was a portable husband, that MBAs could get jobs anywhere, she wasn’t close to giving job talks.
Then she got pregnant, and they both agreed that she needed to stay home the first year with Mandy. They bought a house in Sherman Oaks, and the distance from UCLA, along with the constant demands of the baby, kept her from doing any schoolwork. She didn’t miss the university, and one morning woke up with the knowledge that she no longer had the ambition to keep going. It made her a little sad that she wasn’t going to be the first PhD in her family, the one Jay said was “a Fud, a nonmedical doctor who will soothe me with stories instead of pills.” As she and Jay discussed, the degree would take at least another five years to complete, and his salary wasn’t enough if they wanted to have more children, move to a bigger house, drive nice cars.
She had to get a job, so she was delighted when she came up with the idea of becoming a real estate agent.
“It’s perfect, you know,” she told Jay. “I can work weekends while you’re home with Mandy, I’ll still have flexible hours during the week, and best of all, I have the potential of making tons of money.”
“Too bad we already bought our house,” Jay said. “We could have saved on the agent’s fees.”
She studied for the real estate exams while Mandy napped, and, once she started working, explained her change in career by saying, “I’m using my anthropology studies in a real way, the real estate way.” It always generated appreciative laughter, and at the same time neatly highlighted her almost-degree, letting people know she had an academic pedigree.
It was only after she entered the world of buying and selling houses that she realized the immense costs attached to having her name on people’s lawns, with the sold or in escrow sign touting her success. It was entirely different from her previous—and only—job as a teaching assistant in the Anthropology Department. Then she had been in charge,
and her students had looked up to her as the authority on Indian churches. But real estate agents, she quickly learned, were a little like servants back home, dependent on the kindness, and cruelty, of the memsahib. Though most of the people she worked with were nice, she had acquiesced to ridiculous demands and listened to long, unfair diatribes, just to keep a listing.
The flexible hours she had counted on turned out to be unyielding. She still felt guilty, still could not believe that she had once left a bronchitis-weakened Mandy home, alone, because a client insisted on meeting her, and Jay was out of town. Then there were the many Tuesdays she had sent the children to school with low-grade fevers because she could not miss “tour days.” She had lived in fear of the phone ringing and the school telling her that she had to come right away and pick up the children, code for being a bad mother.
The other mothers in the office just accepted such decisions as a way of life. They had grown up expecting to be a two-income family, and they often said, “It’s easier to come to work than cater to the children’s every need.”
Frances, however, had loved being at home with her children. It was one of the reasons she had agreed to have Sam. Jay had wanted to try for a boy; she had looked forward to taking time from work, cradling her son as he fell asleep at her breast.
Things got a little easier when Mandy became a teenager and was able to look after her younger siblings. But Frances had never gotten used to this unexpected life, what she regarded as the only negative side effect of living in America.
But she never burdened her children by telling them how she truly felt about her job, just as she never, ever let them know the many bad moments she encountered in her workday.
Now, instead of telling Mandy about the Millers’ last-minute change, she told the other truth, “Busy day at the office.”
“I need to finish my paper,” Mandy said, turning back to her computer.
Frances gazed at her daughter’s taut back, head tilted to the left. Was Mandy really concentrating?