With ten minutes left in class, Mr. Stone announced that it was time to spar. The other boys broke into pairs, facing each other in two neat lines. They leaned back on their right feet and brought their fists into fighting position. Siddharth looked down and thought about going to the bathroom or asking to leave early.
Mr. Stone placed his warm, strong fingers on Siddharth’s shoulder. “Kaufman, why don’t you break in the new guy? But go easy on him.”
Marc Kaufman was in a corner putting on padded red gloves. He punched them together and took his place across from Siddharth. Mr. Stone grunted, and all the boys started bouncing on their back legs, making blocks and punches. Marc just stood still and stared him down.
Siddharth definitely regretted being here. Wasn’t karate just another sport?
Marc flicked his hair out of his eyes and then made a kick, but Siddharth managed to step back and avoid it.
“Nice work, bodhisattva,” said Mr. Stone.
Flicking his hair again, Marc came in closer. He pulled his fist back, then landed a hard punch on Siddharth’s chest. He fell backward and hit the rubbery green floor.
For a few moments, he couldn’t breathe. He saw Mr. Stone standing over him but couldn’t hear what he was saying. Marc held out his hand, and Siddharth used it to pull himself up. He suddenly noticed that the other kids had all stopped fighting and were watching him.
“You okay?” asked Mr. Stone.
“I think so,” he said.
Mr. Stone started clapping. All of his students followed suit.
Siddharth wanted to smile but didn’t want to seem uncool, so he just kept quiet.
* * *
After class, he sat alone on the curb, using a stick to create a smiley face in the gravel. Only a few cars remained in the parking lot, and he was sitting close to a burgundy Saab 900. A gaggle of five or six boys stood by a green dumpster a few feet away from the black Camaro. They were practicing moves on each other and seemed to be having fun. He wished he were hanging out with them but would only go if they called him over. He grew bored with his gravel drawing and started rating the cars. If he had to drive one, his first choice would definitely be the Camaro, and his number two would be the Saab. Arjun would have chosen the gray Acura in the corner, even though it had a dent in its rear door.
Mohan Lal had told him to bring his jacket, but he’d refused. He rubbed his arms to keep himself warm and stared at the one-story building across the street, a bar called the New Warsaw Café. Above him, the setting sun had streaked the sky with pink and orange, and some seagulls were circling. One of them swooped down, snatching a piece of trash from the dumpster. A kid from karate class picked up a stick and chucked it toward the bird, and the gull leaped back into the air.
Mr. Stone emerged from the academy wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket. He patted Siddharth on the shoulder, saying that he had done well. Then he headed toward the Camaro, pushing a button on his keys that caused the car to squawk, and said, “Boys, if I find even a single scratch on her, what ensues will be unpleasant and nasty.”
The boys laughed.
Mr. Stone got in his vehicle and peeled out of the lot.
Cars kept pulling in, and boys kept leaving. Siddharth wondered when his father would get there. He was tired, but not the way he usually was. He felt kind of good actually. Soon the only other kid left was Marc Kaufman, who walked over to him and sat down on the curb.
“What’s up?”
Siddharth shrugged. “Pretty good.” As soon as he said those words, he bit down on the inside of his cheek again. Only an asshole would say pretty good when someone asks what’s up.
Marc bet Siddharth a dollar that he could hit the insignia on the hood of the Saab with a single stone. He chucked a rock but missed by ten inches. “You try,” he said. “Double or nothing.”
Siddharth picked up a gray stone that sparkled with mica but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“Don’t worry,” said Marc, “it’s my mom’s.”
Siddharth took a deep breath and threw the stone, which landed an inch away from the target.
Marc whistled. “Close. Now we’re even.” He chucked three more stones, and the second two both clanked against the target. “By the way, I’m Marc.”
“I know,” said Siddharth.
“You know? Why, what did you hear about me?”
Siddharth shrugged.
“Well, don’t believe everything they say.”
A gull let out a cry and again dove for the dumpster.
Siddharth wanted to say something cool but didn’t know what. He threw a stone at the bird, and it soared back to the sky. “My name’s Sid.”
“No shit.” Marc held out his hand. “I know your name. My mother told me all about you.”
“Your mother?” Siddharth’s brow furrowed as he shook Marc’s hand.
Marc smiled, revealing a gap between his two front teeth. “That redhead? The crazy woman from your school?”
“Who?”
“Not too long ago, the famous Ms. Farber used to be Mrs. Kaufman.”
Siddharth stared down at his Nikes and noticed the beginnings of a hole near the big toe of his left foot. He felt a surge of loathing for Ms. Farber. She shouldn’t have been talking about him to other people. She’d said that everything they discussed was completely confidential.
“She told me what happened to you.”
Siddharth knew what he meant. He tossed another pebble at the Saab, this time with much more force.
“That must have really sucked,” said Marc.
Siddharth prayed that his father would get there soon. In a little while, he would be back home. He would throw on a movie. He wouldn’t have to come back to karate if he didn’t want to.
“Let me tell you,” said Marc, flicking his bangs out of his eyes, “divorce is no Sunday drive either. It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to a kid, after a parent dying.”
Siddharth had no idea that Ms. Farber was divorced. The truth was, she knew a lot about him but he barely knew anything about her. This fact seemed totally unfair.
A bell jingled, and he turned to his left. The front door of the beauty salon had opened, and Ms. Farber stepped outside. Siddharth had a rock in his hand; he wished he could throw it at her. Instead, he dropped it and waved.
She looked different, having straightened her normally curly auburn hair. She walked toward them smiling her big toothy smile, and his eyes honed in on the triangle of flat, freckled skin below her neck. She was wearing her gold chain with a star on it, the kind that you drew with two overlapping triangles. “Hi, boys,” she said. “Siddharth, how’d it go?”
He shrugged. “Fine. I’m not really that good.”
“Oh, come on,” said Ms. Farber. “I bet you knocked their socks off, honey.” She headed to the Saab and unlocked its front door. “I see you’ve met my Marc.”
“Yup.”
She winked at him. “I don’t know why, but something tells me you guys might hit it off.”
“Oh, yes, mother,” said Marc. He got up and dusted off his uniform. “Sid here is a splendid young fellow. We’re gonna get along just fine.”
6
Sleepover
The phone kept on ringing one Friday night in early December. First it was Arjun. He was calling with flight details for his upcoming trip home, the first one he’d make since moving out to Michigan. Then came a call from Ms. Farber’s son Marc. He said, “Yo, Sid, you’re spending the night at my house tomorrow.” Marc was a seventh grader at the Woodford branch of Eli Whitney Junior High. He was grounded for what he had done to the blue mailbox with his father’s Jeep, so he wouldn’t be allowed to socialize until summer. But Ms. Farber bent the rules of his grounding for Siddharth, who had already been to their house after karate on several occasions.
These first two calls put Siddharth in a good mood. Then the phone rang for a third time. It was Barry Uncle. Fourteen months had passed since Mohan Lal had had a real co
nversation with Barry Uncle. Eighteen months had passed since the last time they’d stayed up late drinking Scotch and eating pink pistachios, getting louder with each passing hour, talking trash about Gandhi and Nehru, calling them British stooges. Just the other day, Siddharth had remembered a joke Barry Uncle once told about a Sikh man who didn’t know how to use a modern toilet, so he wrapped his shit in a bedsheet and flung it out the window. This joke made Mohan Lal laugh so hard that tears started trickling from his light-brown eyes. Siddharth wanted his father to laugh like that again. He had Marc Kaufman now, and he wanted his father to have someone too.
He tried passing the phone to his father, but Mohan Lal gave him a wide-eyed glare, a look of death usually reserved for Arjun. Siddharth said, “Don’t look at me like that.” Mohan Lal told him not to stick his nose in other people’s business. Siddharth said, “Dad, it’s my business if you’re all depressed all the time. It’s my business if you’re gonna be such a loner.”
Mohan Lal raised his hand behind his ear. “What did you call me? Listen, it’s okay for someone at my stage to keep his own company. You’re the one I’m worried about. You’re the one who’s lost all his friends.”
That night, as Siddharth tried to fall asleep, he felt a strong sense of loathing toward his father. He wished the man had actually hit him. Mohan Lal had hit Arjun a few times, and Siddharth thought that something about the pain might make him stronger. As he tossed and turned, he made another wish. He wished that he could disappear for a few days, just so his father could get a small taste of life without him.
Waking up in the middle of the night, he suddenly regretted these horrible thoughts. He regretted saying such horrible things to his father. He imagined Mohan Lal all alone on the sofa, sipping Scotch and staring at the television, his eyes glassy and dazed. Meanwhile, Siddharth would be out having fun with Marc.
In the morning, Siddharth watched cartoons by himself and woke his father up at ten. He served them Pop-Tarts and orange juice for breakfast as a way of making up. As they ate in the dining room, Siddharth declared that he was canceling his sleepover.
“But you’ve made a commitment,” said Mohan Lal. “A man must honor his commitments.”
“Just forget it, Dad. You can’t force me.”
“It’s your life, son. If you want to ruin it, it’s your decision.”
Siddharth grunted. “Fine. But at least put on some real clothes. You’re not dropping me off in those stupid sweatpants.”
* * *
Before they left for Marc’s, he flipped through the TV listings and drew little stars next to programs that might interest his father. Mohan Lal told him not to bother. He said he would use the peace and quiet to work on his book. As they headed down Route 114 toward Woodford, Siddharth found comfort in his father’s words. Mohan Lal was supposed to be working hard on his book, but he’d barely devoted any time to it lately. Maybe it was a good thing that Siddharth was going out. Maybe he was actually doing his father a favor by hanging out with Marc. The van skirted Foster Farm, the second oldest farm in the country, and his fear and guilt began to fade. He was growing excited for his time with Marc Kaufman. The kid was undeniably cool, and it seemed that he liked him—or at least didn’t think he was a total loser.
For almost eight weeks now, the two families had been carpooling. On Tuesdays, Mohan Lal picked up the boys after their karate lesson, dropping Marc off in Woodford so that Ms. Farber could attend a meditation class at the Jewish Community Center. On Thursdays, Ms. Farber drove Siddharth straight from Deer Run to the dojo, picking up Marc from her house en route. Thanks to this arrangement, Siddharth got to spend one less day per week at his hellish after-school program.
He was jittery the first couple of times he walked toward Ms. Farber’s Saab in the Deer Run parking lot. What would people say if they saw him cozying up to the school psychologist? Would they think he’d gone crazy? And there were other worries too. It was one thing to talk about his mother in Ms. Farber’s office. But what if she brought her up on the way to karate? Fortunately, Ms. Farber just asked him innocent questions about his father’s job or his brother’s classes, or they drove in silence, listening to a Top Forty station or a boring program on National Public Radio.
When karate class was over on Thursdays, Ms. Farber dropped him off around five thirty, and he watched television and made himself pasta as he waited for his father to return from work. After a couple weeks of this routine, however, Ms. Farber said there was no reason for Siddharth to be spending so much time alone. She insisted that he have dinner with her and Marc when Mohan Lal had evening classes. She wasn’t a great cook, but Siddharth began to look forward to Thursday evenings.
In some ways, Marc and Ms. Farber’s single-story home was strange. She had started some renovations awhile back but never actually finished them, so parts of their house were in a state of limbo. Their formal living room had new wooden floors, but its walls had a few holes where you could see tangles of wire and copper piping. A bathroom beside the kitchen had a small sauna that wasn’t actually functional, and its oversize sink seemed like one that belonged inside a janitor’s closet. But Siddharth loved this house so much more than his own ordinary home. It was made of real redbrick, not shabby wooden siding. The place had a grand entrance hallway, with marble floors and an ornate chandelier. The bedrooms had tall ceilings, and most of them had bathrooms—even Marc’s. All of the house’s light switches were the flat modern kind, and Siddharth felt a small thrill whenever he pressed one.
His favorite part of the house was the basement. Unlike the Aroras’ dim concrete basement, this one was finished with parquet floors and gray carpeting. Marc had everything down there—ping-pong, bumper pool, and a floor piano like the one from the movie Big. On one of his first visits downstairs, Siddharth spotted the six-foot-long GI Joe aircraft carrier. He had seen thousands of commercials for it when he was younger and had wanted one so badly, but Mohan Lal called it a “made-in-Taiwan piece of crap.” His mother simply opposed such violent toys.
He asked Marc if they could play with it, and Marc said, “I guess we could do that. If we were, like, six.” Marc then walked over to the aircraft carrier and pulled out a plastic compartment that contained a stash of Playboys. From that day on, whenever they went downstairs, they just sat around comparing the breasts of centerfold models. Siddharth knew that his father would kill him for looking at the pictures, but he couldn’t get enough of them. He was particularly fond of a blond Miss April from 1984. She was wearing nothing except striped socks and an open pink bathrobe. He started thinking about her before falling asleep at night, pressing his erection into his springy mattress. Marc occasionally loaned Siddharth a magazine, or a picture of a naked woman, and when he got home, he tried copying these images into his sketchpad. Drawing these women was fun. But it also made him wonder if he was some kind of perv.
Usually, when Mohan Lal picked him up from Marc’s, Ms. Farber went out to the driveway to chat with him. At first, they just talked about the boys and karate, but much to Siddharth’s dismay, Mohan Lal started telling Ms. Farber stories. He told her about his student who had made it to America as a stowaway on an oil tanker, and how the son of the great Igor Sikorsky had once given Arjun violin lessons. Ms. Farber told Mohan Lal about her broken muffler and the junky Greenwich Village apartment she had once rented while struggling to make it as an actress. She discussed her dissatisfaction with the public school system, which piled her up with paperwork that got in the way of her actual work. In a few years, she said, she would quit her job and go into private practice.
“Why wait?” said Mohan Lal.
Ms. Farber folded her arms across her chest. She peered up at the sky. “Well, the bills for one thing. Insurance, taxes.”
Mohan Lal told her to make a good business plan and take a calculated risk. He said that it was a proven fact that the universe rewards risk takers. Siddharth was dying to tell his father to mind his own business. But he didn’t want M
s. Farber to get the wrong impression about them, so he just bit his lip and stared out the window. He also kept his mouth shut whenever Mohan Lal complained about his own job, which he did with more frequency as autumn turned to winter.
Mohan Lal wouldn’t shut up about his dean, and he even bored Ms. Farber with the details of the dean’s new book. In this book, the man argued that new advertising specifically designed for children would mold them into more productive citizens. Mohan Lal wanted to publish a paper refuting him, one that exposed the corruption of the FCC under the Reagan administration. “It’s the corporations,” he said. “The government used to protect youngsters from the Madison Avenue serpents, but then the corporations got into Reagan’s bed, and poof—everything vanished. Mark my words, Ms. Farber, there will be consequences. These bloody advertisers will undermine the intelligence of an entire generation.”
Having heard these diatribes hundreds of times, Siddharth sat there digging his fingers into his temples. Normal people didn’t use words like bloody or serpent. He wished his father would try to be more normal.
* * *
They pulled in front of Marc’s brick house just before noon, and the mere sight of it filled him with adrenaline. Mohan Lal said he would walk him to the door, but Siddharth told him not to bother. “I’m not five, Dad. Ms. Farber’s a busy woman. Leave her alone.” Kissing his father on the shoulder, he jogged up Marc’s front steps, where a few unread newspapers were stacked in a messy pile. Mohan Lal reversed out of the driveway when Marc came to the door. He gave Siddharth a high five and told him to take off his shoes. “Rachel finally mopped the floors. We don’t want her going ape shit on us.”
“Where is she?” asked Siddharth.
“My mom? Being a loser.”
Marc led him to the family room, which formed one enormous, uninterrupted space with the sleek, modern kitchen. He sat down to finish up a video game, something with guns and jungles. Siddharth didn’t mind video games, but there was no point in competing with Marc. So he just sat quietly, swallowed by the plush leather sofa. He stared at his new friend, who was frenetically pressing the controller’s buttons while jerking, rocking, and swearing. Marc was wearing sweatpants, but the cool kind with zips down the side. His bangs dangled over his eyes, which today seemed red and small. Had he been crying?
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