Viji was not. It was at this point that she started to rub away her makeup—at least, that was how it looked to Avi.
With her fingertips she rubbed at the black lines below her eyes. Her cheeks flamed pink and she tried to rub this away, too. She pawed at her face and looked at the table, brushing at her cheeks and then her chin and her nose.
George’s clapping petered to a halt. Avi watched him swallow hard, then place a hand on Viji’s arm. A runaway tear sprang down her cheek. She was absolutely silent. And within seconds, everyone at the table was silent, all except for Stan, who carried on with the especially long birthday song, clapping in the air now, like the waiters. Once, when Avi was in fourth grade, his reading teacher had started bawling in the middle of class—real sobs, loud and jagged. She’d run from the room immediately, her shoes clip-clopping down the school corridor, her cries audible until she reached the bathroom. After five minutes, she came back and picked up her piece of chalk, and it was as if she hadn’t been crying at all.
But Avi’s mother didn’t run from the table. She sat where she was, fenced in by the buttocks of waiters, wiping wordlessly at her cheeks. He looked to Kieran, who stopped singing and sat back down. He looked at Babygirl, who toyed with her fork and stared into her lap. The seconds passed slowly and erratically, like drips from a leaky tap. “Looks like it’s someone’s birthday,” George said, finally. “That’s nice, isn’t it?” He cleared his throat. Nobody responded. Only Viji tried to smile, that alien, curling smile that took away her lips. In the din of the restaurant, their table alone floated in silence. It was a thick silence that filled Avi’s mouth and nose. It reached down into him and fished around with its imbecile hands.
He pushed his plate away and felt sick. If he could throw up, really vomit, this might bring her back, she might scold him or clean him up and become his normal mom again. He pushed down hard on his stomach, but nothing came. So he sat and watched with the rest of them, hoping, more feverishly than he’d ever hoped for anything, that the tears would simply stop. Behind Viji, the waiters shouted something, and threw their fists in the air, and then were gone, scattered back to their stations, refilling drinks and taking orders, their buttons gleaming in the light of the ceiling lamps.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Clichéd to the point of nausea, George thought. Lecherous professor, rakish young academic with flexible office hours, a sofa by his bookcase, and a lock on the door. Evening seminars for his most promising students, extra supervision in the name of research. Wine, splendid. Buttons undone, glasses off, massaging tired eyes. It’s getting late, but. Tired shoulders. If you have any other ideas you’d like to discuss.
His university office. Before him sat a wood sprite of a girl, black hair, Asiatic eyes, and a jawline that could slice butter. A muse. Amuse. Her last name was something hyphenated and Italian. She sat cross-legged on his office chair, arms wound around the back of it, chest thrust forward. This was her modus, then—the feet-on-the-table approach. Irreverent and sexy, plan C from the teen magazine. She’d been arguing the drawbacks of sculptural uniformity, but George was fuzzy on the details, distracted by the triangle of white that peeked out from the tightly pulled fabric of her skirt. She had a large head, as did a number of his female students. It must have been a specific birthing method in the late sixties that produced such croquet mallets. He wondered if it affected their posture, caused headaches or neck aches, or if their muscles adjusted as they grew. Surely fellatio was a brutal physical ordeal for such girls.
How many of his colleagues would take advantage of the situation? It was almost an unwritten obligation, like chairing a student group. How many men in general? Probably all, at least once. More, if they were Stan. Like so many sons, George saw his father and wanted to be different. He used to hear the ladies behind the post office counter. She seems all right with it, actually. It’s an arty thing, isn’t it, to be all right with that sort of thing. Takes all kinds. He used to smell the perfume in his father’s cab, too pungent to be just a passenger’s, heavy with a significance that went beyond a lift and a fare. She’s an artist, you know. Different strokes and all that. Wild cackles when they discovered the pun.
But she did mind, George knew she did. He saw it where her head met her neck, in the tilt of her long, sad hair as she waited up for Stan, reading at the kitchen table, sketching her next sculpture. If only he could have made a sculpture of her.
The nymphet nattered on, smiling now at the sheer wickedness of her latest theory. George was in a funk. He wasn’t going to listen. Like a VCR on search, he watched himself in backward hyperspeed. Backing out the office door, ass-first into the car, in reverse through town, past traffic that didn’t seem to mind, spitting out his breakfast, getting back in bed, a night of fluttering eyelids, brushing the food back into his molars, down the hall to the kitchen and back to the table where his father sat waiting. George, happy you are, is thing The. Let Stan ask again. This time he’d have an answer. He’d have a list. What I Love About My Wife.
“Anyway,” she said, propping a foot, right on cue, upon his desk, bare leg gliding into open shadows.“I guess that’s all I have to say. What’s your research been like lately?”
George slumped back. “It’s been smashing,” (here he paused, forgetting her name). “Plugging along, as always,” he lied. “But must needs! Time to get on with it. Thanks for coming in,” (Andrea!) “Andrea.” He stood and she stood. Slow turn, a gaze back over her shoulder, heavy lids. He watched her until she was halfway down the hall, then closed the door and turned the lock.
It might have been the weather, the rain stammering against his office window. He watched the empty glistening street outside, its only companion a rusty Honda. Rusty cars. He never saw rusty cars in Sacramento; it never snowed enough. It never snowed. The car must have come from the East. Maybe from New York or Connecticut. He imagined this automobile setting off from a brick row house in Brooklyn, driving across the plains, the salt flats, the low rumbling ranges, to end up here, in Sacramento. He watched the rain some more, and it hit him that his life would never, ever be anything like a Woody Allen film. No chance encounters on a busy sidewalk, impromptu cups of coffee, or wandering in dusky, cramped bookstores. He would never have dinner in a cluttered loft apartment, or say I read a poem of you and thought of his last week. He would never have a chance or a reason to say anything like it. Outside, the streets of Sacramento stretched wide and barren, the sidewalks pristine. He welled up with longing, the sort of heartache that autumn often stirred in him.
The door opened and Amaré walked in. She looked him up and down, as she always did, and sniffed.“Your wife called,” she said. The hand on the hip made it known that she did not intend to function as an answering service.
“You could have put her straight through?” George ventured, regretting the words even as he spoke them.
“Mm-hmm,” she said, “I could have, except that you were in a meeting with that student.” She flicked her head toward the door, making it obvious enough how she felt about such meetings.
It was a Friday. Fridays meant television for the children, and sometimes pizza. There wasn’t much to do on a Friday in Sacramento, aside from a movie or a trip to a restaurant to eat basket after basket of free bread until everyone was too full for the main meal. As soon as George got home, he retreated to his study.
At four that afternoon, the doorbell rang. Nobody answered it, though he heard footsteps and voices all over the house. The bell rang again. He growled, words even he couldn’t decipher, and got up from his armchair.
It was the Mehta girl.
“Hi there,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Where’s your mum?”
“I walked over.”
“It’s a little dark out there, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. “Can I see Babygirl, please?” Upstairs, Anisha sifted through Babygirl’s stack of jelly bracelets. She tied them into a chain as long as the bed. “Jelly bracel
ets are out,” she announced.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean no one likes them anymore.”
“I like them.”
“I don’t.”
“Then why are you playing with them?”
Expertly, Anisha rolled her eyes. “That’s not the point.”
Babygirl picked up her chain of purple bracelets and began to undo them. “So what do you want to do, then?”
“Are your brothers home?”
“Yeah. They’re just doing Legos or something. I don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Oh.” Anisha perked up and stood. “Want to go for a walk?”
Babygirl didn’t see the point of going for a walk. She wanted to stay home and draw. She hadn’t invited Anisha over, though clearly someone had. Probably her mother. “We can draw pictures if you want.” She knew this made her sound like a child, but it was what she wanted to do.
“Think your dad would drive us to the mall?”
“Um…no.”
The girls sat and looked at each other for a long time. Babygirl willed Anisha to leave. “I have to stay here tonight,” Anisha said, as if she’d overheard. “I don’t really have a choice.”
“Oh. That’s okay. I’m not allowed to share my towel, though.”
“Oh.” Anisha cast a long glance sideways.
“But we have more towels.”
“Okay.”
“How come you have to stay over?”
Anisha shrugged.“My mom’s having dinner. Or something.”
“Oh.”
“She was, like, making this big dinner. And she cleaned the whole house all by herself.”
“Maybe she’s having a party,” Babygirl said.
“Some party.” Her eyes flickered then, and a smile climbed up her face.“I guess your parents weren’t invited.”
“So? They probably didn’t want to go.” Clutched in Babygirl’s palm, the stack of purple rubber rings grew moist. She stared at the wall and felt bad. She felt bad that her parents weren’t invited to Kamla Aunty’s great party, that jelly bracelets were no longer desired, and that she’d have to spend the rest of the day and night with Anisha.
“What’s the matter?”
She shrugged, and silently cursed the tear that was collecting in her lower lid.
“Don’t feel bad,” Anisha said. She moved to the bed, sat next to Babygirl, and fingered the stack of bracelets in Babygirl’s hand. “I think—I think it was a really small party,” she said quietly. “I think it was only for two people.”
“Oh. Okay.” The tears retreated and leaked into Babygirl’s nose. She sniffed them back in, storing them away for some other time.
Then it was Saturday. Saturdays meant waking up very early to watch cartoons at a very high volume. If there was a sleepover, Saturdays meant pancakes. Which meant that George was making breakfast at seven in the morning, because George, as a rule, was the maker of pancakes.
“Could I have chocolate chips in mine, please?” Anisha asked.
“We don’t have chocolate chips.”
“My mom does them with chocolate chips.”
“We don’t have chocolate chips.”
“Oh. What do you have?”
“We have syrup,” he said. She cocked her head, not impressed. “And we have butter.”
Avi perked up. “Hey, remember the time Kieran sneezed on his pancake and this big fat string of snot was hanging out of his nose and mixed in with his butter?”
The table exploded in laughter and George grimaced. His children were disgusting. He wondered how they could eat around themselves. There had been a time, when he was young, when butter was a delicacy. It was kept in a butter dish, and to him it tasted as sweet as any chocolate chip.
The kitchen sounded like a monkey cage as each child yelled over the next, clanging on their plates for attention, talking with their mouths full of masticated pancake. He had given them platefuls of syrup-drenched carbohydrates with large glasses of sugary orange juice. Their voices rose, booming through the room and against the cavernous walls of his aching head.
And then silence fell, broken only by the tinging of Viji’s prayer bell, far away but unmistakable.
“What’s that?” Anisha asked. The triplets looked at each other.
“What’s what?” Kieran said. He shot a sly glance at George.
“The ringing sound?”
“I don’t hear a ringing sound.”
“It must be the neighbors or something,” Babygirl said.
“Yeah, I think it’s definitely neighbors,” added Avi.
“No, it’s here inside the house. What is it?” Anisha began to squirm in her seat. Her brows rose with growing anxiety. She turned to George. “What is it?”
“Hmm? Oh! Nothing. Just my wife.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Just…” He looked at his children, their pleading eyes. “…testing the smoke alarms.”
“Oh.” Anisha Mehta considered this. “Do we have to do a fire drill?”
“No, no fire drill.”
“Oh.” She jabbed at her pancakes. There, done, a conspiracy concocted without words. If they were embarrassed by Viji, they hadn’t admitted it before. George flipped a pancake. Inside, a small, runny bit of him sank.
And then, spurred on by who-knew-what, Babygirl spoke up. “But really it’s my mom praying.” The boys stopped midchew to look at her.“Doesn’t your mom pray?”
Anisha shrugged. “She doesn’t make noises like that.”
“How come?”
“What do you mean?”
“Doesn’t she ring the bell?”
“I guess not.”
“Oh.” Babygirl stared openly at her friend. Anisha was obviously like her. She was brown, after all, browner than the triplets and with black hair. But neither Anisha nor Kamla Mehta were like any of the Indians she’d seen before: the man at the gas station who tried to speak to Viji in Hindi, or the lady with the hair down to her knees who ran the Baskin-Robbins, or the very very dark man at the park who slammed his tennis racket to the ground and yelled, LIVING SHIT!
Kamla Aunty put chocolate chips in her pancakes. And she let Anisha shave her legs, and Babygirl was sure, sure, that Anisha was allowed to wear lipstick. Babygirl believed she would never be allowed to wear lipstick. Kamla Aunty wore high heels and had red and blue and green cereal bowls. And she’d sent her husband packing, or so Babygirl had heard her tell Viji. And, most certainly, she didn’t pray with a bell.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
This was the night that would change things.
A white cotton dress, packed away for twelve years, developed brown lines along its creases. She was half-sorry that they vanished in the wash. Slowly, she ironed the dress, smoothing away any traces of the past, careful not to burn any new lines in. The dress was a relic of a time before things were so very certain. Warm, creaseless, supple as age, willowy as chance. She wore it over a slip, brushed her hair, and waited for the doorbell.
Oblivious to what would set this Thanksgiving apart from all others, aside from the fact that the children had made hats, Viji tipped a colander of cauliflower into a pot of boiling water. Cauliflower was acceptable at Thanksgiving, she assumed. They must have had cauliflower in Vermont or Massachusetts or wherever that first one was. Viji had never been to the East. She held a can over a serving dish and waited for the pull of gravity to coax the purple cylinder from its home. It plopped down. She sliced along the depressions left by the can. Cranberry sauce.
It was hard to say what, precisely, set off the events that would become that night. It might have been the cranberry sauce. It might have been the pilgrim and Indian headwear the triplets had made at school, or the record heat, eighty-one degrees on the third Thursday of November. It might have been the effect of the record heat on the gravy from the green packet or the mashed potatoes from the box of powder. It was more likely the four brimming glasses of wine that Stan sailed through, or his Gu
atemalan girlfriend sucking politely at her fork, or the doorbell, an eight-note melody, its fifth note missing, a chime pulled off by Avi and never reattached, that now coaxed Viji from the kitchen.
Around the table: Stan and Lupe, resplendent in hisand-hers tracksuits (an early Christmas gift), the triplets, each wearing a headband with a feather poking from it. “We’ll be Indians,” Kieran said. “And obviously Dad and Grandad are pilgrims,” handing them two pyramids of black construction paper with buckles painted across the front. “Lupe’s a pilgrim too,” Avi said.
“But she’s not white,” Kieran argued. (From here followed a lengthy debate about the whiteness of Lupe, whether she was more Indian or more pilgrim, made longer by a lesson on colonial history from George. In the end, by virtue of being Stan’s girlfriend, she became a pilgrim.) Next to Kieran sat Anisha Mehta, just then scraping her toe up the side of his shin, making him wish for a genie that could make him disappear. Then came Kamla: Indian, Viji: Indian.
“Mom, you get to be Squanto,” Babygirl said. “Thank you, chellum.”
And finally, George, one of three pilgrims. “I’m beginning to feel surrounded.”
On the table: the cauliflower, sulfurous and warm. The cranberry sauce that spread across its plate like a vivisected slug. The mashed potatoes, a mountain of fluff in a bowl. Kamla had picked up the box of potato powder when she came in, and made a joke about laundry detergent. George had laughed and offered Kamla a drink. Salad. Wine, nearly half gone. Bread rolls, store-bought. Stuffing, from a premade mix because it tasted better that way. Gravy, au paquet vert. Overseeing all was Lupe’s bounteous bust, propped on the table, sitting attentively between her knife and fork. And finally, the turkey waited solemnly at center stage. Tom Turkey, Viji had named him after a children’s cartoon she’d seen. After she’d reached up his behind for the giblets, she had felt the need to apologize. Tom Turkey, she whispered, I’m sorry.
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