by Anne Cherian
She mentally flipped through hundreds of “Mandy studying” images. Nine-year-old Mandy curled into the sofa, giving the answers even before Frances finished asking the questions. Mandy in middle school, not requiring any help with homework except for some big projects. Once Mandy got her computer, she stayed in her room, her drive to become a neurologist keeping her up late at night.
Frances had no idea where her kindergartner daughter had come up with that ambition, announcing at the same time that she was going to Harvard. Both Jay and she marveled that Mandy even knew about Harvard, and they were amused when she got annoyed because their neighbor, a Yalie, teased her, saying, “There are other schools out there.”
They were long accustomed to her straight-A report card, until this year, when it was C’s and D’s. Mandy provided no apology, just a shrug followed by, “It’s better than failing.”
Frances immediately worried that another student was being mean to her, that she didn’t understand her teachers, but Mandy insisted school was the same. “I guess I didn’t know the answers,” she always claimed.
After that, every time she saw her daughter studying, Frances desperately hoped that it would translate into the old A grade. But it never did.
She wasn’t going to let Mandy use school to get out of her only chore.
“The kitchen,” she said, just as she heard Lily’s voice.
“Mom, you’re home!” Lily yelled loudly from the living room. “Something bright red came for you.”
“What is it?” Frances hurried toward the high, reedy voice.
Lily was still young enough to get excited when she came home, still could not sleep unless Frances kissed her goodnight. Now she rushed up to Frances and gave her a hug. Frances held the thin body, knowing that soon Lily, like Mandy, would ignore her. Sam had never felt the need to hug or kiss, which Jay, approvingly, said was manly.
“It’s a very pretty red envelope with gold all over it,” Lily said. “I put it on the dining room table. I know you don’t like it when the mail is on the carpet.”
“Lily’s the good daughter,” Mandy noted as she walked past Frances to the kitchen.
“Is Sam still outside?” Frances ignored her older daughter’s comment.
“He’s looking for crystals. They found a few in the yard at school, and he’s sure we have some too. He wants to sell them on eBay. Look, Mom, this is so pretty,” Lily held up the oversize envelope.
Frances guessed it was probably another wedding invitation. These days many Indians were taking advantage of the Internet to have their invitations designed and printed back home. Their circle of Indian friends had been steadily shrinking, because new ones were hard to find, and they were too busy to keep in regular touch with the old set. But people invariably found their much-crossed-out address books for weddings, and in the past few years, she and Jay had been receiving invitations for children they had last seen as toddlers. Both agreed that they could send their regrets to most, and she usually tossed away the invitations, though Lily had cut one up for a school project.
“It’s from Vic and Priya Jha,” Frances said, reading the address on the upper-left corner and starting to open the envelope. “Their son must be getting married.” Nikhil was only four years older than Mandy. It was a little young for a boy to marry, but perhaps Vic had gone the traditional route and arranged a bride for his son, the way his parents had for him.
She looked down at one of the most garish cards she had ever seen. Bright yellow mango-and-flower patterns were embossed on a red background meant to represent doors. The two leaves were held together with gold thread, and when she pulled it open, the pale gold inside had a pocket containing the invitation.
“Oh, he’s not getting married.”
“Maybe he’s getting divorced,” Mandy remarked archly as she headed back to her room, then added, “The ants are gone.”
“It’s a party for Nikhil. He’s graduating from MIT.”
Frances stared at the red paper in her hands, for one second imagining her daughter’s name on the invitation: Please join us as we celebrate Amanda’s graduation from Harvard.
Frances wanted to be happy, purely happy, for Vic, but her insides whirled with resentment, sadness, and jealousy that she would never be able to send out such a triumphant card.
Mandy, the little girl who knew how to use the phrase “It’s my mandate” correctly at the age of three, was supposed to do better than Nikhil.
But Mandy had shut the door to her room, closed herself off from any such chance when she started doing badly in eleventh grade, the very year that was important for college applications.
“Mighty Indian Triumph,” Mandy rolled her eyes.
Her daughter’s indifference, her brazen insolence, incensed Frances.
And with that rage came the familiar, sickly feeling that while she always got close to her wishes, they were invariably whisked away at the last minute.
Her entire life, Frances felt, was a series of good beginnings and bad endings, starting with her birth. Dada had been so optimistic when he took Mama to the hospital, sure that after four daughters, he was finally going to get the son he longed for, and for whom he had already chosen the name Francis. Then the doctor announced, “It’s another girl,” and Dada changed the i to e, and turned it into a nice story.
She knew she should be used to reversals. Instead, the blank white door to Mandy’s room mocked her, reminding her of the many other doors that had been slammed in her face at the final moment.
If only Mr. Miller had called a few minutes later.
If only Mandy had continued doing well in school.
“You think graduating from MIT is a joke?” Discontent and anger added decibels to her words. “You can barely get C’s, you know, and you have the nerve to make fun of someone who has done so well?”
Frances knew her daughter was already plugged into her electronic world, but she could not stop herself. “He’s graduating summa cum laude. That means he’s a 4.0. Something else you want to make fun of, huh?”
“What’s going on?” Jay opened the front door. “I could hear you from the driveway.”
It wasn’t like Frances to shout, and Jay was relieved that no one was passing by their house. At work, when the other men grumbled about middle age, mortgages, and falling stocks, Jay liked to add, “What about a menopausal wife and a teenage daughter?” But as with so many witticisms, it wasn’t really funny.
“Nikhil is graduating from MIT, and your daughter thinks it’s hilarious,” Frances handed him the invitation.
“Daddy, isn’t the invitation pretty?” Lily asked.
“It’s very pretty,” he said overenthusiastically, grateful for the distraction.
“You don’t have your glasses on,” Lily remonstrated. “You can’t even see it.”
“I can now,” Jay held the invitation at arm’s length. “It’s yellow and red and pretty and see here at the very bottom?” he pointed with his finger. “We have been instructed to wear ‘elegant attire.’ ”
“What does that mean?” Lily asked.
“It means the men have to wear tails.”
“Like peacocks?” Lily wondered.
“Not quite,” Jay patted at the velvet bow that held her ponytail together. “Tails are a certain kind of suit.”
Frances knew that Jay was, as he would say, seeing the brighter side of this unexpected, unwanted invitation. She wished she had the same ability.
“Vic will act like a peacock, that’s for sure,” Frances said. “Why the elegant attire?” she asked, finding fault with yet another part of the invitation.
“Oh, Vic probably picked up the phrase from bar mitzvah invitations. The Jews in Newport Beach must be as swanky as the ones in Studio City.”
“Everyone in Newport Beach is rich-tzy,” Frances quickly changed her word choice, because Lily looked too interested. She had recently taken to asking disturbing questions like, “Why don’t we have a pool?” and “Why did Daddy change his job?”
Sam came running in, shouting, “Look at this sapphire I found!”
“Let me see, let me see,” Lily begged.
“Dad, how much do you think I can sell this for?”
“Hmmm,” Jay considered the stone. “Nothing?” he raised his eyebrows.
“No way!” Sam protested. “Sapphires are expensive.”
“That’s right, Sam, sapphires are expensive. This, I’m afraid, is just a plain old blue stone.”
“Go do your homework, Sam, Lily,” Frances instructed, putting the invitation facedown on the piano so that she knew it was there but didn’t have to see it glaring at her all the time.
But the bright red invitation kept popping into her head, taunting her. Vic, who, like them, had come to UCLA to study, had truly achieved the immigrant dream of having it all. She was used to thinking of him as the rich CEO of his own computer company. Now she had to add a son who was graduating from one of the best universities in the world. Vic was holding the party at what Jay called his “big man-sion,” while the 1,500 square feet they called home could only accommodate a small number of people.
Later that night, when Lily and Sam were asleep, and a strip of light under the door indicated that Mandy was still awake but probably engrossed in her beloved computer, Frances brought up the invitation.
“We have to go, you know,” she stated. “We didn’t attend his high school graduation because Mandy was having her wisdom teeth pulled that day. We can’t stay away twice.”
“I agree. Anything we say now will seem like an excuse, like we just don’t want to go.”
“I guess we should treat it like a wedding and give a hundred bucks,” Frances sighed, thinking of their bank balance. “Don’t forget to mark June eleventh on your calendar.”
They lay in bed, bodies parallel, faces staring up at the ceiling.
She opened her mouth, then closed it. It had been a while since she had turned to Jay for comfort.
When had this abyss first appeared between them? She remembered, clearly, nostalgically, the chatter-filled beginnings of their marriage, when they preferred dinner dates to movies because they needed to tell each other about their days. Then Mandy came, and Frances felt pulled apart as she drove daily between work and day care. Evenings were a rush to get dinner cooked and Mandy to bed, and weekends became the time to finish chores, not relax. She had just started thinking she had made peace with being a mother, wife, and working woman, had achieved a livable balance, when they had Lily and Sam in quick succession. She became a time-bound dervish, whirling from appointment to appointment, and hadn’t noticed that Jay and she no longer talked.
“Everything’s fine,” she always told the other agents when they sat around grumbling about their marriages. “I have a wonderful, supportive husband.”
Mama had taught her children to keep problems to themselves. Mama always pretended that they were doing fine, would not dream of confessing, even to the priest, that her family often had to eat plain rice and dal at the end of the month, because there was no money for meat or vegetables.
Besides, she wasn’t lying to her officemates. Frances and Jay had the usual problems associated with having a house and children, but nothing traumatic, like a foreclosure, cancer, or a third person ready to step in and ruin their family, she always thanked God. Had she not noticed the silence because it had grown gradually, the way one looks at a puppy and suddenly realizes it is a full-size dog?
Then the Mandy situation erupted, and for a brief time they had talked every night. Perhaps that was when the great gap between them cemented, for though they spoke together in the same room, their responses put them in different countries.
“I can’t believe how American you’ve become, you know,” Frances had told Jay. “You really think Mandy’s just going through a rebellious stage?”
“I think you are being ridiculously Indian,” Jay punched back. “What do you suggest we do? Lock her in her room, force her to study twenty-four hours a day? Parents can do that sort of stuff back home, but here they realize that children make mistakes. I’m sure Mandy will straighten up eventually.”
She had hoped Jay was right, that their American daughter was going through something no one in India had the luxury to experience. As Jay said, “This is a forgiving country. People are always given second chances.”
But the miracle Frances prayed for never came.
Instead, they received the invitation to celebrate Nikhil’s grand achievement.
Frances turned her head and eyed Jay. She knew that there was no one else who would understand how she felt about Nikhil’s success when her own daughter was slaloming down the failure slope. The agents at work always acted happy at other people’s good fortune. Frances had long wondered if it was genuine, if Americans did not feel jealousy because they lived in a land of plenty and didn’t have to fight for anything, from a place on a bus to a good job. Or, as Jay had told her, she was too much the immigrant to pick up their green-eyed signals.
Did Jay feel the same way that she did about the invitation? She used to be able to read him so well in the old days. Now all she could sense was his rigid body.
She thought back to that tableau in the living room. Jay had shrugged off the party, made a joke of the small print. But that was typical Jay. Jay the Joker, they had called him at UCLA.
Jay watched the blades of the fan turn in the dark. When they first switched off the light, he had not been able to see anything. Now each blade was clearly visible. If only life were like that. If he stared enough at Mandy, would he be able to figure her out?
Everyone told him that Mandy looked just like him. She had his eyes, his hair, the shape of his head. But for quite a while now, he had worried that she had inherited more than his physical features.
Was she becoming like him?
He, too, had been an excellent student, hardly needing to study in order to ace exams. His abilities had gone beyond books, and the blokes in school had admired how easily he jammed on the guitar, wielded the épée, hit a tennis ball. He had enjoyed that idolization, and, perhaps because of it, had kept darting from interest to interest. So what if he could strum but not pluck the guitar, and could not read music—which was the reverse of French, which he learned to read but not speak? Papa used to yell and tell him to learn one thing to completion, but in those days Jay had thought his father was too much the stick-with-it sort, a man who could not possibly understand an eclectic son.
But he knew why he never became an expert. He always stopped at the very moment things got difficult enough for him to have to really try. “It’s a bore,” he would lie with a shrug. It was just luck that schoolwork was so easy, and of course, his teachers would have contacted his parents if he slacked off.
Mandy’s American teachers just left her alone. Students here did not suffer from the same sense of shame that failures endured back home, where the blokes who got a Third Class were scorned. Never mind if they were excellent cricket players; they were academic zeros, and in India, that mattered the most.
Had Mandy given up doing well because her classes suddenly got difficult? When she started high school, she was in every honors class and finished her homework so quickly she always had time to read the piles of books she brought back from the library. Frances had said that recently Mandy had even stopped reading. These days, she just listened to music.
“She gets it from me,” Jay had informed Frances when she told him of Mandy’s latest love. “I was the music guru in my school.” He had made the same claim whenever Mandy dazzled in something new. She had played the piano, then moved onto swimming, winning a few cups before deciding she no longer enjoyed it. Then she gave dance a try. She won the main role in the school’s yearly performance but didn’t take it. “Too many practice hours,” she had said, shrugging off the coup, and because this was America, they could not force her.
Now he worried whether incompletion was a gene one could pass on.
Jay heard his
wife’s uneven breathing, knew that she was awake.
“How is Mandy doing in school these days?” he asked softly, not sure why he was venturing into fractious territory. When they had discussed and dissected Mandy’s unexpected, unacceptable grades, Frances had insisted that they be stricter, force her to study more, while he had advocated a “wait and she’ll go back to her old self” approach.
“The same,” Frances responded flatly. She had made many novenas, had prayed every night, and had resisted believing that this was God’s answer to her.
“Perhaps we should get her a tutor.”
Frances realized that Jay was taking a step toward acknowledging that she was right in her assessment of Mandy.
“I already asked her, you know. She acted as if I was forcing her to get married.”
“Is she handing in her homework at least?”
One of the frustrating things about Mandy was that she would “forget” to give the teachers her homework. She would get an A in a test, which always got them excited, then deflate them with a final C grade because of all the incompletes she received for homework.
“I ask her,” Frances said.
“But do you remind her?”
“Of course I do.” Anger flared in her, and she wanted to tell Jay that it was easy to ask questions about Mandy rather than speak to her directly. But it was no use to think like that. They had decided that because he had the nine-to-whenever job, she was in charge of schoolwork. Jay helped when he could, but it was an exception, not an expectation.
Was he blaming her for Mandy?
Years ago, Frances had been furious when he suggested that she should have noticed Lily could not say her r’s before the teacher had to call them in to recommend speech therapy. “What, you don’t have ears?” Frances had demanded. “Why is it that every time something goes wrong with the children you turn to me, but when they do well, you think it comes from your side?”
But this time she did blame herself, wondered whether Mandy would be a different student if she had been a more present mother. Had Mandy stopped asking to be quizzed before tests because there were too many evenings when Frances simply hadn’t been able to do it between client calls, dinner, and bedtime for Lily and Sam?