“What’s this from?” Stan asked. He picked up the earring, a blue gem stud.
“It’s the buried treasure,” Babygirl said, and snatched the earring from Stan’s palm.
“I’ve seen it before, though. Is it your mum’s?” Babygirl ignored him. Avi looked at him and shrugged. She placed the earring between the napkin ring and the cuff link.
“It’s just an earring, that’s all.”
Behind them, the sliding door hushed open and George stepped out. He wore yellow swim trunks. His chest was bare and white, his arms brown from the elbows down. He nodded to Stan and walked barefoot to the pool, wincing with each step on the scorching pavement. When he jumped in, water splashed out, sizzled on the cement, and dried.
“Let’s put this away,” Babygirl said, “Now! Before we lose something.”
“But we haven’t showed Grandad yet.”
“Yes we have.” Babygirl grabbed the calculator from Kieran and chucked it back into the box. With shaky fingers she wrapped the twine around it and tied a bow.
“What’s going on over there?” George called from the pool.
“Hurry,” she urged, “he can’t see.” Her voice trembled. “She’s right,” Avi added. “It was supposed to be secret.”
Stan stood. “I’ll tell nobody,” he said. “Gentleman’s code.”
The triplets pushed the soil back into the hole until the gathered mound was gone. Hurried hands smacked the dirt into place. When Babygirl turned to look, her father was underwater.
It was Labor Day Monday, the only day of the year that George remembered to swim. The next day, the triplets would start school again. They had bought their supplies the week before—notebook paper, pencil cases, sharpeners, fresh pink erasers. They would have to use last year’s pencils. The sun still hung high, but the air cooled slightly as evening settled in. The end of summer always came too soon. From surrounding backyards wafted other people’s Labor Day barbecue:, the relentless aroma of grilling meat, the smell of woodsmoke, distant splashing. The triplets squatted over the pool and dipped their fingers in, flicking the soil from their nails. They watched George swim a length, sifting currents through the water, slowly and rhythmically, never pausing. And then, slick as tadpoles, they dove in after him. Circling him, breathlessly treading water, they were as comfortable in the deep end as in the shallow. Babygirl slung her arms around George’s neck and swung onto his back. He glided across the pool with her. And then, of course, it was Avi’s turn, then Kieran’s, and then the again-agains and the last-time-Ipromises. But George didn’t mind; he liked to feel the weight of them, the underwater slipperiness of their hairless skin, the ownership of their arms around his neck. They carried on until the sun squinted meekly through the trees and dimmed the lights on their game, and when they could no longer deny that it was dark, they toweled off, shivering, and went inside.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Viji dipped a cotton ball in oil and rolled it between her fingers into a wick. This she arranged on the rim of the second oil lamp. Match hiss, flame. The room and the house were utterly quiet. She began her prayers, mumbling to herself, a tentative melody dipping and rising again.
‘“Sing louder, girl, I can’t hear you.” Deepa, light of her younger days. Deepa, who had taught her how to braid hair.
“Come on, now. You sing like a drowning mouse.” Deepa had come from the West Indies to Viji’s school in Madras. She was Tamil, but spoke like no one Viji had ever known.
Leave me alone, Viji said. I’m praying.
“Praying. You won’t get nothing praying like that. What you got to pray for, anyway?”
None of your business.
Viji smiled, her eyes still closed. Deepa clicked her tongue.
“Hmm. Keeping secrets from me. You praying for a boyfriend, I bet”
Nonsense.
“You praying for a new dress or something? A lovely sari with gold zhari?”
Yes, Deepa. That’s it. That’s what I’m praying for.
“What you want a sari for? You can’t wear the thing round here, you know. Who you know that wears a sari?”
I know someone now.
“Who’s that? That Kamla? She trouble.”
You’re just jealous.
“She trouble, all right.”
What do you know?
“What do I know? What do I know? I know everything, that’s what I know. And what you going to do, put on your saris and drive to the Arden Fair Mall? Buy some frozen yogurt in your pattu silks?”
Viji opened her eyes. Deepa vanished. Viji missed her immediately. It was leukemia that had taken her, or something like it. Diagnoses in those days were never very clear. After school ended, Deepa was married to a Tamil doctor and sent back to Trinidad. She wrote Viji a letter every week, and Viji wrote back as often as she could, but university took up most of her time. And somehow, with all she had to tell, her letters were never as wonderful as Deepa’s. Her friend told her what it was like to be married, to live with a man she hardly knew, getting to know his sounds and smells and the minute mechanics of his mind. But behind the jokes about her husband’s penis and demands that Viji visit her, Deepa was speaking of something else: loneliness, wanting things to be as they once were, the vertigo that comes from living someone else’s life. After two years, the letters slowed to a trickle. After the third year, they stopped.
Downstairs, the house spread silently before Viji, dark inside despite the sunny morning. Breakfast had already been tidied and the trappings of lunch boxes put away. Through the sliding glass door she saw Stan, roasting on a deck chair by the pool. Viji had never seen such dedicated sunbathing. Every morning he went out, oiled his saggy chicken legs, and lay back with his eyes closed. Where was the need for such things? Already the old man was dark as that girlfriend of his. Who, Viji noticed, had left her sweater on Stan’s bed. The woman had been in his room the previous day when Viji had returned from the supermarket. Correction: the woman had been in Kieran and Avi’s room, sitting on Kieran’s or Avi’s bed, giggling loudly enough to be heard through Kieran and Avi’s wall. Dirty man. Sitting among his grandchildren’s toys, defiling the memory of his wonderful wife with the likes of a lowclass cleaning lady.
“What do you mean, defiling?” George had asked.
“You know what I mean George. Carrying on with this woman as if your mother had never lived.”
“Viji,” George said, “I’m sure if my mother were still alive, there would be no Lupe. But since she isn’t, he’s trying to get on with his life.”
“And to do this he has to defile your mother’s memory? You have nothing to say about it?”
“No I don’t.” George was firm. “And this isn’t the first time he has defiled her memory.”
“Well, I hope when I die I won’t have to come back as aghost and see you fooling around with other women.”
“My guess, darling, is that you’ll have to do nothing of the sort.”
She didn’t like this smile of his.“Fine,” she hissed.“Then I hope I do come back .so I can haunt you until you stop.”
George laughed.
“I’m not joking. I’ll stand at the foot of your bed.”
“Fine, Viji. You have it your way, my mother will have it hers. I reckon she isn’t spinning in her grave.”
Viji winced. “She’s a pretty lady, this Loopy.”
“Lupe”’ George corrected.
“What?”
“Lu-pay.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Short for Guadalupe.”
“Lupe?” she asked.
“Yes. Lupe.”
Plumper than the other women in Maple Grove, this Lupe had two dimples and a wrinkle-free complexion. But she laughed louder than she needed to and talked too much. Viji didn’t like women, or men, for that matter, who spoke pointlessly. But most of all, most of all, it was the way the woman smiled at Viji. Knowingly. As if the two of them shared some hidden purpose, some sisterly bond. Viji was
the daughter of a magistrate, the wife of a professor. What did she have in common with a Mexican housekeeper?
“She’s Guatemalan,” George corrected.
“Then what is she doing here?”
George paused, looked confused. “Working here. What else?”
Viji hadn’t considered that Guatemalans would want to come to California as well. She really had no idea where Guatemala was, but she assumed it was close to Mexico.
It seemed to be coming at her from all sides, this pretend solidarity. Just the other day, she’d taken the children shopping for school supplies (never mind that they still had a box full of pencils and notebooks only half used from the previous year). At the checkout counter was a black woman, hair in tight braids with small beads at the ends, like that blind singer on television. She’d paused when Viji had handed her a check. She looked tenderly at the triplets, then smiled at Viji. “You black?” she asked. Viji thought she’d misheard. “You black?” she repeated. Her name tag read: Yolanda.
“No,” Viji said. “I’m Indian.”
“Oh, yes”’ Yolanda sighed. “Indians. Beautiful black folk.” Avi giggled first, and then Kieran and Babygirl. Viji held out her check.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Beautiful black folk!” the triplets mimicked, once they’d left the store. It became the chanted refrain of the car ride home. Beautiful black folk! Beautiful black folk! They were children. They had no idea what black meant, or Indian or Chinese or Mexican or Guatemalan or white. This was what Viji told herself as she drove home, trying to drown out the triplets’ ruckus. The closer she got to her neighborhood, the more white people she saw in shiny sedans. Among them were dusty pickup trucks with lawnmowers piled in the back. These were driven by Mexicans or maybe Guatemalans—who knew? She saw no black people, though she could picture the cars they drove—long, like roving gazelles, with gleaming paint and wide fenders. She wondered if other people thought she was black. She wondered if her neighbors thought she was black. Or Mexican?
She would speak to George that night. She was curious to know how long, in fact, his father planned to live with them. She was curious to see whether George knew the answer, or even cared to know.
“Why don’t you talk to your father?” she’d asked the night before.
George was brushing his teeth at the time. Suds dripped from his lower lip when he spoke. “About what?” He was using her toothbrush. Hers was the purple one, his was the orange. But he was using the purple one. Always the purple one. If she switched to the orange, he would switch, too.
“About what? About anything. I never see you talk to him.”
George shrugged. “What’s there to talk about?”
“I don’t know. What does anyone talk about? The children. England. Cricket. Beer. That girlfriend of his. When he plans to leave.”
“We don’t really talk like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like…that.” He spat out a final strand of foam and saliva, hunched over the sink like a sick person.
“Can you please ask him how long he plans to stay? Can you do that for me, my love?”
“Yes, darling. That I can do.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.” He leaned over to kiss her, but the white lather was still smeared across his lip and she backed away. “Hmm,” he said, dabbing at the wrong side of his mouth. “Sod off, then.” He tapped her bottom, pleased with himself for a reason Viji couldn’t fathom.
Viji felt a faint thread of guilt work its way through her. Stan was an old man trying to be happy. He was the father of the man she loved, the grandfather of her children. If sniffing after Mexican maids made him happy, it shouldn’t bother her. If roasting himself like a turkey made him happy, she should be glad for him. If it had been her father, she would have let him stay forever. But her father would have acted differently. This much she knew.
Kieran made a point of collecting his eraser shavings in a pile at the corner of his desk. This way, when Anisha Mehta looked over, she would see that he, unlike the rest of the class, was not your average slob. Kieran Armitage would not sweep his rubbery shreds to the ground for someone else to pick up. Nor would he slump down with his chin on his desk, blowing at the shavings, like Jason Schaffer, who spent most class periods digging the wax from his ear. Nor, worst of all, would he let them lie scattered like massacred insects.
They’d placed him in seventh-grade reading because he read too fast for sixth grade, which meant that Avi and Babygirl would be reading Old Yeller that year and Kieran would have to read Ivanhoe. But it also meant that he’d get to spend an hour each day sitting next to Anisha Mehta, who smelled of strawberry candy.
Kamla Aunty had brought her to the house two days before school started. The triplets had been out front, helping Viji turn on the sprinklers. Anisha Mehta was taller than the triplets, a year older, and stood with her hip cocked to one side. She looked them over, one by one, updown, up-down, up-down. She turned to Babygirl. “Have you got a pool?” She had a raspy voice, like she had a cold and too much mucus in her throat. Without another word, the two girls walked around the house and to the backyard, leaving Kieran and Avi squinting into the sun.
Kieran wondered if Anisha Mehta had just sucked on a strawberry candy, if she was in fact always sucking on strawberry candies, or if the way she smelled came from a glass bottle with a spray nozzle attached. Maybe, like Marcia Brady, she brushed her hair a hundred times each night. She was almost taller than Kamla Aunty. This Kieran could tell even when she was sitting, particularly when he dropped his pencil by her desk and had to stoop to pick it up, as he did now, bending down past the length of leg that flowed from her navy skirt, and rising up again. He glimpsed her knee, pinker than the rest of her leg. He wondered if she shaved her legs, or if they were just naturally smooth as caramel chews. They weren’t the legs of a girl. They made him think of the woman in the cigarette ad, the one who kicked her bare legs into the air while smoking. He slid Ivanhoe, opened to the third page, from his desk into his lap.
Pervert. She looked at him now. Creepy perv. I’m gonna tell on you.
Kieran looked to the front of the room, where Mrs. Valentine was drawing lines across the board.
Did you hear me? she whispered.
Kieran nodded. He glanced over. She wasn’t reading Ivanhoe.
You’re sick, you know that? she said. Her text was in her lap, but open within it was another, smaller book. Someone had brought Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, and it was making a round of the classroom. He whispered back, I’m gonna tell on you. Pervert.
I know what you’re reading. You’re the pervert.
As if. He wished she would just clear her throat. He raised his hand. Freak, she whispered. Quit it.
He actually had no idea what the book was about, only that it had been inciting intense discussion and significant gazes from a huddle of female classmates in the lunch yard, and that the cover featured a teenage girl sitting on her bed and smirking into the distance. This image alone suggested all kinds of dirty possibilities. Mrs. Valentine’s behind jiggled busily as she wrote. You’d better put that hand down.
Kieran shook his head and kept his hand up. He was breathing hard now, the weak wind of his nostrils scattering, particle by particle, his mountain of eraser shavings.
Stop it or you’ll be sorry.
Mrs. Valentine turned around.“Yes, Kieran?” The class turned to look at him. He normally never spoke. Jason Schaffer blinked. Someone’s chair was creaking.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?” She smiled at him like he was a baby.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
The teacher looked at Anisha, then turned back to the board.
Anisha kicked him hard. Then again. And again. Kieran didn’t move his leg. He felt a bruise warming to the surface, and moved his foot closer to hers. She kicked him again, softly, and then stopped.
Kamla came for tea the next Wedne
sday, and by the following Monday she and Viji were old friends. Kamla smacked her on the shoulder when she laughed, grabbed Viji’s forearm to make an urgent point.
“You need to get out more,” Kamla observed one day, as she watched Viji pick the crusted food off her potholders. “Come walking with me.” And so Viji and Kamla began their daily walks. Viji would walk to Kamla’s house on Ladino Lane, broaching the winding walk that led from the street to the door of a bungalow, white, with dark green shutters and a small porch, a tree swing hanging from the oak out front. It was smaller than Viji’s house, but big enough for Kamla and Anisha. There was no hint that anyone but an American lived inside.
One afternoon, when they both returned to Viji’s house, Stan stood at the kitchen window. He wore his fishing hat. He held a banana in his hand, a chunk of it still in his mouth, puffing out his cheeks and upper lip. Kamla laughed, and Viji couldn’t help but smile.
“Oh, pretty laaaaaaady,” Stan called in a nasal American accent, as they walked through the front door. “Oh pretty laaaady.”
Viji felt the heat rush to her cheeks, and smiled. “Silly man,” she said to Kamla. When they entered the kitchen, he said it again— “Oh, pretty laaaaaaady”—and wrapped Kamla in an exaggerated hug, swinging her slim frame from side to side.
“Oh, Stan!” Kamla laughed and slapped him on the chest. “You big joker.”
Viji walked silently to the fridge and took a bag of grapes out of the fruit drawer.
“Jerry Lewis!” Stan said. “You must know Jerry Lewis, he’s American.”
“Silly man, I’m Indian.”
“Let’s see your passport.”
“I’m Indian, just like your daughter-in-law.”
“Yeah, but you’re gorgeous.”
“Stop that, now.”
“I can’t help myself, love.”
Kamla walked over to Viji, who held a colander of the grapes under the running tap. She picked a grape off its stem and popped it into her mouth.
“Shall I make you tea, darling?”
“Marry me,” Stan answered.
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