The Invitation

by Anne Cherian

  Julia Carnahan, the agent who had the desk behind her, had only started working when her youngest went to college, because she believed children most needed their parents during high school. “People think stay-at-home kids fare better than the ones dropped off at day care,” Julia had told Frances. “But think about it: kids love playing with other kids and the worst that can happen is they get colds and fevers from each other. The silver lining is that they build up immunities, get stronger. Teenagers are the ones who really need their parents around. I was always at home, listening in to conversations, checking backpacks, snooping around their rooms.”

  It made sense to Frances, and she wished, again, that she could finish her work by the early afternoon. But since most of her clients worked, she often had to meet with them in the evenings, which meant she relied on Mandy to look after her siblings. She had long lost count of the number of evenings when she only had time to kiss her children goodnight, hoping they had done their homework.

  “I know you remind her about her homework,” Jay said. He sighed. “She isn’t depressed, is she?”

  This was something else they had fought about. The school counselor thought that Mandy’s poor grades might be the result of depression, and she had recommended a therapist. They had made an appointment right away and had taken Mandy out of school for the first session. The therapist, citing patient confidentiality, had refused to tell them about the session, which had agitated Frances. He did, however, inform them that Mandy was acting like a typical teenager and refusing to cooperate.

  “What does that mean?” Frances and Jay had asked at the same time. They both felt like illegal immigrants in the book-lined room with no couch. This was not a place where they had ever expected to end up. The therapy was not covered by their insurance, and they hoped that Mandy wouldn’t need too many sessions.

  “It means it’s going to take a little longer to get to why she is suddenly getting bad grades,” the therapist had said.

  After three appointments, Frances decided it wasn’t working.

  “We’ve spent $300 and there’s been no change,” she told Jay. “And Mandy makes a great fuss before every session. I’m going to tell the therapist we’re taking a break for a while.”

  Jay knew that she wasn’t talking about a temporary break, and he told her she was wrong, that Mandy should keep going.

  “It’s about the money, isn’t it?” he accused her. “How can that be more important than our daughter?”

  “I spend more time with her than you do, you know,” Frances had pointed out, her voice singed with hurt. “Mandy doesn’t have any of the symptoms. She eats, she doesn’t cry all the time.”

  Even Jay could not deny that the only visible difference in Mandy was her grades. The keeping to her room and rudeness had been going on since tenth grade. So Frances had stuck with her decision and kept vigilant watch over Mandy to see if there were any changes.

  “Like I said,” Frances responded now, “she’s the same.”

  Silence.

  Outside a cat yeowled, and they heard the sound of something scurrying along the ground. It was probably the opossum that lived in their yard. Frances had seen it just once, though it left little piles of black poop all over the garden.

  Frances could not stop herself from saying, “I wonder if Vic went through any of this with Nikhil.”

  “I doubt he’ll tell us. Maybe Nikhil is like his father, totally self-motivated.”

  “Well, Vic certainly did something right. Nikhil is an MIT graduate, and even Lali’s son just started Harvard.” Frances always thought of Lali in connection with Vic. The four had met as graduate students at UCLA, and though they kept in sporadic contact with each other, the old relationships always surfaced for important events.

  “I guess we have to make the best of what we have,” Jay sighed.

  Was this Jay’s way of giving up? “We didn’t come to this country to make the best of what we have, you know,” Frances said sharply. “We came here to excel, to give our children opportunities they would never have in India.”

  “You can lead the child to class, but you can’t make her top brass.”

  “Please, please stop with all those sayings. They really annoy me.”

  Jay moved closer to the edge of the bed. She used to enjoy his rearranged aphorisms, used to be proud when he’d proffer them at parties.

  Frances felt the mattress quiver.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m tired,” Frances said. “And disappointed. There was a great offer for the Millers, but they pulled out at the last minute.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I really wanted this sale, thought it might be the start of more, you know.”

  “Do you think you should change jobs?”

  “In this economy?”

  This wasn’t the first time Jay had suggested she find another job. It felt as if he was telling her she wasn’t doing anything well. But she knew that he, too, was concerned about their finances, that he always took his lunch to work to save money, and he hadn’t bought a new suit in years.

  She circled back to the red card, the equally bright RSVP envelope.

  “Vic’s still the old cheapo, you know. The invitation had more gold than a wedding saree, but he didn’t put a stamp on the RSVP.” Frances knew that they always agreed about their friend’s stingy nature.

  “If it was someone else, I’d say he forgot, but Vic never believed in paying when someone else could,” Jay smiled into the dark.

  “Remember how he’d come empty-handed to those parties? I can’t tell you how many times I’d call and suggest he buy the $4 Gallo wine, but he never listened.”

  “He’d act like this was India, that bringing something would insult the hosts, make them feel they could not provide stuff for their guests. It was a cop-out, but I have a feeling he really believed it.”

  “He never cared about fitting in. Remember his thick glasses, rubber flip-flops, and those ratty kurtas he kept recycling?”

  Vic was probably the first member of his family to be educated, to speak English. It was precisely because he was lower middle class, with parents who said “Yumrica” instead of “America,” that she hadn’t been intimidated by his brains. Oddly enough, he never hid the fact that he was on a scholarship. He worked every summer at jobs that paid well, but continued to radiate the village air he had brought with him.

  She would never have gone out with someone like that.

  Jay was the total opposite of Vic. She had liked everything about him, even his name, Jayant, the two syllables so different from the more common Mohan, Prakash, Ram—boys’ names she was used to hearing. His family owned a large estate in northern India, and he had attended a boarding school in Darjeeling. He had done his BA in his father’s alma mater, St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi, before heading out to UCLA for his MBA—funded by his parents.

  Jay’s father had inherited vast holdings, and Jay had told her that part of his mother’s dowry had been a couple of racehorses. His father had tried to breed the horses, but they hadn’t taken. “I guess Papa should have looked the gift horses in the mouth,” he had laughed, and she had marveled at how easily he spoke of things she had only seen in films and read about in books.

  Jay’s trajectory, as well as his family, had set him apart from—and above—her. Like all her friends back home, she had walked up the road to the local convent school run by the brown-garbed Carmelite nuns. Then she had gone to college in dinky Hyderabad, a town that was no comparison to cosmopolitan New Delhi. Her parents barely had enough money to send her there. Dada taught math and science at the local Jesuit school for boys, supplementing his income by tutoring.

  She had been very nervous when she finally met Jay’s parents three years after they were married. She had never met upper-class Indians before. For the first time she was actually embarrassed by being Goan. And Catholic. Jay’s family had been Brahmin for centuries, wealthy for generations. Their name had a signif
icance she had always claimed hers had. Frances Dias, she used to believe, was far better than plain and simple Sita Gopal, Rani Choudhry, Malini Nair. That changed when she walked into Jay’s large house, where his mother served her sweets from a silver platter (“It wasn’t that I was born with a silver spoon,” she recalled Jay telling her, “it was just that my family preferred silver to other metals for all our dishes and flatware”), and numerous servants bowed and salaamed the prodigal son.

  She, of course, was the reason he was a prodigal. Jay hadn’t asked his parents’ permission before marrying her. He had known they would say, “No.” She had worried that, like some Indians, his parents might look down on Goans as upstarts who had given up their religion and names to join forces with the Portuguese. Jay’s parents only had to see her name to know that she was the wrong sort.

  Then there was the sticky issue of her career. She was studying anthropology, with an emphasis on India. “Why would you need to go to America to study how the services in the Catholic churches in India have changed in the last two hundred years?” her father-in-law, who had read philosophy at Oxford, had raised his palms in surprise.

  She had been asked the same question when she came to UCLA. Her roommates had shrieked with laughter when she told them that she had always wanted to come to the United States, so what better way to ensure herself a spot in a university than to apply fully prepared with language, culture, and a project? She was aware the rationale that had made her sound so canny to her friends would make her father-in-law think she was too stupid to study anything else. She had looked at Jay, who quickly started asking about his younger brother’s plans after college—a sore subject in the house. But she knew that Jay’s parents were disappointed in every way that he had chosen to marry her.

  But choose her he did, proposing two years after they met at an orientation party.

  She had gone to the party only because her roommate Katrina had dragged her there. She had clung to Katrina until Jay approached, outstretched hand holding a glass of wine for her, his worldliness a contrast to how mousy and out of place she felt. Vic had been slouching in one corner, and the president of the university, who had visited India while he was a student, brought him over to them. Lali was the last member of the “Gang of Four,” as they took to calling themselves. Lali told them that she had come to the party because her adviser assured her she would meet all sorts of new graduate students. “And what did I find there? A bunch of other Indians whom I could have met if I had never left Bangalore!”

  Though they were in different disciplines, the four kept in contact with each other, because there weren’t many Indians on campus in the early eighties. When Frances told that to her clients, the younger ones looked shocked, saying that these days it was impossible to go anywhere at UCLA without finding an Indian. “I guess the Indian is out of the cupboard, you know,” she’d laughingly agree, referring to the book The Indian in the Cupboard, which Mandy had read in first grade.

  The last time the four had been together was at the dinner celebrating Jay’s graduation. Vic and Lali, too, had walked in their caps and gowns, but it was Jay, naturally, who put on the dinner.

  Frances had been especially happy because Jay had asked her to marry him a week earlier. She could not stop looking at her ring, which felt bumpy—but so right—on her finger.

  Sitting next to Jay, holding hands, Frances had felt that her life was finally perfect, with no last-minute setbacks. Jay already had a job, and they had just signed the lease on an apartment they would move into after they got married. There was no hurry for her to finish her PhD, Jay had assured her. She could take her time to do research, write the best dissertation. Jay told people that they were going to be a power couple—he in the business world, she in academia.

  Lali was going off to San Francisco—alone—to begin work as a copywriter. Vic wasn’t sure whether he was going to stay in LA, move north to the Bay Area, or go farther south toward San Diego. Vic didn’t have a business plan, or seed money, and he mentioned vaguely that a few people were interested in his idea for a start-up computer company. “The poor bloke is going to fail miserably,” Jay had prophesied. Frances had believed him and had secretly worried that Vic might come asking them for money.

  Instead, Vic had started VikRAM Computers at just the right moment. The next time they met him was at a dinner in his Newport Beach house. He wanted to introduce them to Priya, the woman his parents had arranged for him to marry. Priya spoke English as though she were allergic to the language, but she was wearing a Rolex watch that matched the one glinting on Vic’s wrist. It was clear that he was already doing well and had money to spend.

  Frances still could not believe that Vic, who said “COM-puter,” instead of the American-accented “com-PUTE-r,” would end up living in a huge house with a master bath with his-and-her showers, as well as a specially designed pool with a lap lane so his son could swim his way to many championships—and MIT. Vic, the bumbler who told everyone he had almost missed his flight to Los Angeles because he had been riveted by the escalator in the Amsterdam airport, had become the most successful member of the Gang of Four.

  But she didn’t want to think about Vic anymore. All the ascendancy she used to feel in the old days was gone, and she was left wondering how it was that she and Jay, the golden couple, were struggling.

  “It’s 11 p.m.,” Frances looked at the scratched face of the alarm clock they kept meaning to replace, but, as Jay said, it still worked, and wasn’t nearly as important as a new kitchen, roof, and paint job. “I’ll check on Mandy.”

  “No, I’ll do that,” Jay said quickly. He had sensed her irritation when he asked about Mandy and wanted to show that he, too, worried, cared about their daughter.

  In another second he returned and said, “The light’s off. She must be asleep.”

  “Did you look into her room? Sometimes she turns off the light and sits at the computer in the dark.”

  “It’s all good,” Jay said obliquely. He didn’t want to tell an outright lie but at the same time didn’t want to nag Mandy to go to bed when she was about to do so anyway.

  “Goodnight, then,” Frances yawned, pulling up the covers.

  Jay closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But the invitation refused to let him rest. It was, as his buddies back in India would scornfully agree, jaal, the gold as tacky as wearing too much aftershave, the ornateness a pathetic show of new money and tastelessness. Yet the irony was that Vic, whom Jay had always thought of as out of sync with America, had chosen an over-the-top invitation that was, in today’s market, very in. Along with the son graduating from MIT.

  Jay considered the labyrinthine passages of his life, the twists and turns that had brought him to this bed, in this house. He had been born into the expectation that his every step would bring him closer to bigger and better successes. Instead, it was Vic who had chosen wisely.

  He had started out feeling sorry for Vic but after a while realized that his friend did very well on his own, in his own way.

  Vic had asked for help in buying a suit before going on “money-asking” junkets, because he knew that Jay was more familiar with everything in the west. He liked the one Jay selected but thought it was too expensive, and wanted to bargain with the salesman at Macy’s.

  “You can’t do that in America,” Jay told him quickly in Hindi. “Besides, it’s on sale, so it’s marked down anyway.”

  “Let me handle this,” Vic said, and Jay had stood by, uncomfortable, worried that he would also be viewed as a cheap immigrant.

  Vic hadn’t haggled the way people go back and forth in India, the price a tennis ball that stops being hit only when one person gets the point. He had simply shown the salesman an irregularity in the material, and Jay had watched in amazement as 10 percent was taken off the sale price.

  “See, you never know until you try,” Vic had shrugged his shoulders as they waited for the suit to be wrapped.

  Jay had gotten used to Vic’s od
d habits, and, as with the Macy’s experience, even learned from them.

  He had never encountered anyone like Vic at St. Stephen’s, where all his friends were city raised and city smart. He wrote them amusing letters about the dehati he had met. They, in turn, marveled that a country boy was living so close to Hollywood. But in spite of what he told his friends, Jay found himself bonding with Vic as two Indian males in a country where people saw them as more alike than different.

  Which was why, late one night over drinks, he had told Vic he was uncertain about Frances. He had been dating Frances the entire two years it had taken him to get his MBA, and in true Indian fashion, they had held hands and kissed but never slept with each other. But he knew that as the months kept moving toward June, and graduation, Frances would be wondering why he wasn’t proposing marriage.

  “It’s make-or-break time,” he had confessed to Vic as he ordered yet another beer from the bartender. “And the problem is, I don’t know which one to choose.”

  “No, the problem is that you went out with her, and now you do not want to do the right thing.”

  “Easy for you to say, Mr. Seedha Rasta.”

  “I know you think of me as a straight road. But you see, that is how I arranged my life, because I did not want any complications.”

  “I guess you didn’t get lonely, then.”

  “Not too much. It’s always easy to find someone in America to make you less lonely.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you telling me you have girlfriends?”

  “Not girlfriends. Never a single girlfriend. But I did have some girls.”

  “You?” Jay had been disbelieving. Vic had always deferred to him when there were girls around, and Jay would joke and ask him, what exactly was it about the opposite sex that rendered him mute? “How come I never saw you with anyone?”

  “I always told them I was only available for our mutual comfort. I was very upfront with them.”

  “You were never tempted, then, to stick it out with one of them?”