by Antani, Jay
Nate and I had just been blown off by Emily Price. No matter. There was drinking to do. We retreated to the plastic bottles of vodka and rum and the box of Gallo wine, there to receive us like the harvest. Now, I’d had a beer or two in my time, but I had never drunk as much as I did that night. A switch had been thrown.
I lost track of how long Nate and I were at that party. Partly because of the drinking and partly because of Shannon Halverson. Nate knew her from drama class, and he said, “Shannon, I’d like to introduce you to Vikram here.”
“Vik,” I corrected him and shook her hand. It was so delicate and elegant, like a princess’s or a ballerina’s hand. She said she remembered me from sophomore year history, which was surprising because Shannon sat three rows away, and I sat toward the back. Now and then, I’d steal glances at her, at the honey-blonde hair cut pageboy short, the dark eyes and non-lipsticked lips at once ordinary and sensuous that parted to reveal shimmering braces. What a beautiful contradiction. A sign that she was adorably imperfect—on the outer reaches of attainability.
The braces were gone now, and Shannon had grown her hair out below her shoulders. Lovely and silky and long. Sipping beer from a plastic cup, she leaned against the kitchen counter, talking to me in her brown denim jacket. More a woman now than ever.
I told Shannon what a great job she’d done in the fall play, The Glass Menagerie. I meant it; in fact, I’d gone to the play secretly because I knew she was in it. I asked if I could fix her a drink. She told me no thanks.
“That’s good,” I said, “’cause I’d have no idea how to fix you one.” I regretted saying that—would it seem uncool?—but Shannon smiled and said she’d better be on her way. “Not really my scene,” she said. From her jacket pocket, she took out a knit cap, tucked it over her gorgeous hair and brushed strands of it away from her eyes.
What impressed me was how Shannon didn’t sound the least bit embarrassed about saying something I wouldn’t dare admit out loud: that this wasn’t her thing at all. Not her scene. And she was happy to bail. I admired that.
“Maybe next time,” I said as her shoes tip-tapped on the stone tiles of the floor toward the doorway.
She gathered a cream-colored scarf around her throat and said, “Don’t wait too long.” And that was all. She was gone, and I felt invincible.
By the time we left the party, the buses had stopped running. No choice but to huff it home. It would do us good, we said to each other, a chance to sober up in the late-October air, so we made our way up Monroe Street out toward Odana Road, to the farther reaches of the west side. I had no idea what time it was—surely much later than I’d ever stayed out. I dreaded going home, sensing behind the stupor of booze the fear of seeing my mother still up, waiting for me, stewing with an Indian mother’s shame and rage. But that night a reckless indifference had come over me, maybe the culmination of months or years of a pent-up defiance finally broken through to roam free in the deep suburban night. The recklessness helped to put the fear and dread out of my head and to enjoy its rewards, to be “in the moment,” as they say.
On our walk, Nate started on the subject of life after high school. He said he’d put in an application to Madison, expected he would get in. But it wasn’t college he was excited about. No, he couldn’t wait until August so he could move out of his parents’ house and finally get a room of his own on campus. Where we wouldn’t have to sneak around if wanted to smoke up or have a few beers. I thought what a glorious future Nate had in store.
We huddled in our jackets, walking under the scant streetlights that threw halos of orange on the bare-bone trees. The aftertaste of the booze hovered behind my eyes. Nate grunted and shivered, digging his hands deeper into his jeans pockets, hunching his shoulders.
“How great would it be to get out of this cold-ass place?” he said. “Florida or California or Arizona.” He chuckled. “I’d probably spend all my time playing golf and laying out in the sun.” He shivered again, we both did, and the wind cut through our jackets. “Screw it,” Nate grunted. “You know, I should say the hell with my parents not paying out-of-state. I should pack the car and head out to L.A. I wouldn’t mind, Vik. I really wouldn’t. Get high school over with, get in a car, and head out to California. You in? We can paint houses and make money all the way to L.A., and the rest falls into place, you know?”
Falls into place? I wished I had Nate’s faith. But things had never “fallen into place” for me. Since the sixth grade, I’d moved around from school to school, state to state, almost every year. And getting through sophomore, junior, and senior years had felt like the last leg of a pointless, miserable marathon. All I wanted now was to graduate and put high school behind me. As for the future—what future?
“Another thing about California is the film biz,” Nate said. “You, me, Karl—we could totally write screenplays, you know, make films, start our own studio, man.”
“Look, I just want to get through this high school thing, okay?”
“You’ve got to start dreaming big, man,” he said, slapping his hands together. “Or your ass is never going to get out of here. Don’t limit yourself to, like, today and tomorrow and whatever.”
“Nate,” I said, “get real.”
“Real is what I make it.”
Okay, Nate was getting really irritating now. I wanted to deck him.
Nate stopped in his tracks, and we stood there next to the grassy slope of the Dudgeon School campus, dark and silent. “Gotta take a leak,” he said. Then, just like that, he disappeared, trudging up the slope into the dark. He must’ve been making for the trees halfway up the slope, toward the school building.
I lay back on the slope. Looking upward, I was blinded by the glare of the streetlight for a second. I was feeling drunk again, very drunk, as I made out the silhouette of the branches above. “Real is what I make it,” I muttered and chuckled, still tasting the anger and realizing that the anger was, in part, directed at myself for not being able to share in Nate’s grand plans no matter how pie-in-the-sky. What a rotten feeling. Still, it wasn’t his fault I envied him.
I lay there and let my anger subside, keeping my eyes on the streetlight, and listened to myself breathe. Then, slowly, crazily, the whole world began to tilt, and I was a ship leaning and pitching on storm waves. Up and down, side to side. My vision darkened as if an aperture were closing, and my throat suddenly clenched and my mouth wanted to vomit. On my feet now, I heard myself retch and unwholesome liquid came out, disappearing into the grass. More came out. I braced my hands against my knees. Worse than the vomit was the noise—ghastly, lacerating heaves from deep within the diaphragm that must’ve sent shudders through the entire neighborhood and out of proportion to the liquid trickling from my mouth. The sensation finally eased up, and, in relief, I dropped to the ground, coughing and trying to settle myself down.
And that’s when, from the corner of my eye, I made out the sapphire-bright whirling of police lights. I turned to face the police cruiser, holding a hand up to shield my eyes from the lights. The cruiser, its headlamps spearing my eyes, prowled up to the curb on its tires like some predator. I saw the outline of an officer emerge and train a flashlight on me.
Nate’s feet came scuffing against the grass behind me. “Oh, shit,” I heard him groan.
“You boys want to step over here, please?” came the officer’s voice, hard and authoritative.
As I stepped forward, I felt something, there in the front pocket of my jeans. I pressed my hand there, a bulge, and I made a realization that felt like one breathless leap into a deep hole: It was the weed. Nate’s weed. Wrapped in the cellophane. I realized it at about the same time the officer, his flashlights hitting us both in the face, asked if we’d been drinking. And what it was, son, I had in my front pocket.
* *
A 5 a.m. phone call from the police had woken up my parents. My father told me they’d found me laid out on a cot in a holding cell, retching into a wastebasket placed next to me. He paid t
he fine—it wasn’t cheap—and had to drag me from the station, into the car, and back into the house.
When I woke up a few hours later in my bed, in my room with no idea how I got there, I knew I was in deep shit. I had a throbbing headache, my mouth smelled toxic, and I found vomit stains all over my shirt. Yes. Very deep shit.
“I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed,” my father said over and over again that evening as we faced each other. “You’re a disgrace.”
I stood there stoop-shouldered because my back ached from all the vomiting. He sat before me on the edge of the armchair, his shoulders rounded into a slump. He rested his arms on his knees and kept his head lowered, but I could still see his eyes were bloodshot behind his glasses, under his knotted brows. He sat as still as a practiced yogi.
From the kitchen, I could hear my mother cooking rotis and curried potatoes and dal. She was crying. Her sniffling could be heard over the fusillade hiss of the pressure cooker. It was rough hearing her cry, and my father’s words that I was “a gone case.” But trying to defend myself seemed a terrible strategy: Anything I said would only rile things up further.
But I did want to say something, to apologize for the state in which they found me, laid out in jail like that. I told them I’d never been drunk before, and that was the truth. I told them another truth: The marijuana was not mine. But I said it wasn’t Nate’s either (in all this, I didn’t want them questioning my choice of friends). So I told them a guy at the party gave us the marijuana, someone we didn’t even know. And I’d simply forgotten it was there. Otherwise, I kept quiet. Obedient.
“I just don’t know what to do with you,” my father said wearily, taking off his glasses. He rubbed at his eyes, wiped at the bristles of his moustache. “You’ve got no future. I don’t see it. This on top of your lousy grades.”
My “lousy grades.” I knew he’d bring them up sooner or later. You see, I’d been making straight C’s since tenth grade when we moved to Madison. And that fall, except for the A’s in English and art history, it had been a trail of C’s from first-period trig to last-period Spanish. My father, scanning my quarterly report cards, would bow his head and shake it despondently, like a priest who had failed his parish.
He told me now that I’d never make it, not even as a junior clerk at the JCPenney, and wanted nothing more to do with me.
I said I was sorry. But what surprised me: it came out in a snide sort of way. I was angry—angry at being censured, judged, and criticized by this man, who never seemed to give a damn about me before this weekend. And what really gnawed at me was the suspicion that I was being compared to the kids of all the other Indian families around town.
While he went on about how hard he’d studied in school, about getting into hoity-toity IIT in Bombay and then earning a scholarship so he could come over to the States, my mind wouldn’t budge from thinking of the other upstanding, straight-A Indian teenagers in town. How I resented them, those goody-goody conformists, in their polo shirts and designer jeans, whispering privately to each other at all those Indian-American association dinners. All of them with their math clubs and sprawling west-side homes, their stably employed fathers and extravagant mothers who wore obscene amounts of makeup.
That’s when my mother pounded in from the kitchen on her small feet, in her faded flower-print sari, clutching a rolling pin. The bindi on her forehead was smudged, and her hair looked barely held in place by bobby pins. Her eyes, her face looked ravaged by tears. “Do you know how hard your father worked?” She shook the rolling pin at me then at my father. “Do you know what he went through?” I’d never seen my mother in such a state. “You’ll never know, to finish his Ph.D.? He worked like donkey all those years! One job here, one job there. And you pay him back this way?”
Then a strange impulse hit me by surprise. “You do everything for me,” I shot back. “Everything—I get it. But I didn’t ask for any of this. A year here, a year there. Stupid new school every year. No idea where we’ll be the next year. You ever think what it’s been like for me?”
It hadn’t been easy. That was true. But, deep down, I knew my mother had a point too. My father had had a tough run from the very beginning. He’d come over from India a year ahead of us, and weathered a difficult start at Cornell—broke, alone, and, then halfway into his first semester, finding out his father had suddenly died—a heart attack. By the time he finished his Ph.D., university posts for physicists had run to a trickle, and it seemed my father was lucky to find a job at all. We began hopping around a lot—from Ithaca to Plattsburgh then on to Alabama, Los Angeles, and Madison—from one short-term teaching post to another. Then when Madison fell through the summer after my junior year, my father took a last-minute teaching offer from a small engineering college in Syracuse. By taking the job, he became a transient, glimpsed for a few days on a visit home every couple of months.
Anxiety had always been an unwelcome guest in our home, but—with their finances cut to the bone from running two households on a teacher’s salary—it had become a permanent squatter.
“You think he’s there in Syracuse all by himself because that is his choice?” my mother shouted. She stepped closer, pointing the rolling pin at my chin. “He went there so you could finish your school here. So you and your brother would not have to move again. All for you, he did it.”
“No one’s life is easy,” my father said to me. “Everyone does the best they can in their circumstances.”
“But who lives like this?” I shot back. “No one at school lives like this.” I lowered my head as more words kept pouring out. “So he took the job in Syracuse. I didn’t ask him to take it. Not my fault he can’t find work. I just want to get out of this house!”
There was a silence after that I will never forget. It was the deepest silence, the lull before the storm rose again.
“How dare you?” my father said, shaking his head. “I would never have talked to my parents like that. Never.” The words hung like thunderclouds over me. He didn’t even look up. “I’m sorry, bhai.” There was a long pause. “You need to learn discipline. You will learn it among your own people. This country has ruined you.” Then, shaking his head, he stood up and withdrew to the kitchen.
I watched as he shuffled away, a hand over his scalp as if my presence—my existence—had bruised him there. What could I do? Apologize? No. I couldn’t apologize for saying what I’d felt for years now. I’d meant those words.
I seethed when my parents blamed “this country” on every flaw they saw in their children. Why blame this country? I hated our life, but what did America have to do with anything? I liked it here. And what the hell did Indians ever do that was so right? They’d made a hopelessly poor and corrupt nation for themselves. Their caste system allowed them to treat their own people lower than dirt for thousands of years. And they allowed animals to wander their streets—animals that in any other country would be found only in a farm or a zoo or a cattle yard.
I could hear my parents in the kitchen, whispering to each other above the clink of utensils, the running of the tap. It seemed my father was finished with me—for now. I turned and trudged back up the stairs to my room.
I lay down and tried to calm my thoughts. Unfortunately, something in my stomach wouldn’t settle. It began to rise into my throat, right up the esophagus, and seemed like it would come exploding out. I sat back up, and the feeling receded back into my stomach. I stayed upright. I wasn’t going to take any chances.
From downstairs, I heard my mother’s voice raised once then my father’s raised in reply. The storm of statements and counterstatements thundered for a full hour. Then dead quiet. “You need to learn discipline,” were my father’s words. “You will learn it among your people.” What did that mean?
My father went back to Syracuse two days later, on a Monday. I stayed in my room most of that weekend, and we didn’t say a word to each other after our “chat” on Saturday.
That Monday, I was still hungover, but my
shame and anger had settled down. It was in trig class that something suddenly clicked in my mind: I wasn’t going to let anything get past me anymore. I was going to master every class, every lesson. Ask questions, get a tutor, stay after school, do the assignments, write the papers. I wanted to prove to my father that his son wasn’t somebody to be ashamed of.
By the end of the fall, I was getting straight A’s. What I discovered was that when I applied myself to my schoolwork and got rewarded with better grades, I started feeling more confident, and my social life got a boost. I became a better friend to Nate and Karl; I worked hard on our next film project together, which we shot and edited over Christmas break. The following spring, people invited me—me—to parties. These were smart, bright people—yearbook editors, photographers, actors, people who could play instruments—in whose friend circle I imagined I could never belong. Shannon and I saw more of each other, and we started dating—something else foreign and delightful to me—late in senior year. Of course, I mentioned none of this to my parents, who I thought of as traditional Indians. When it came to Shannon—the subject of girls in general—my policy was silence.
As the months passed, I actually began to contemplate a future beyond high school. I picked up applications from the counselor’s office, started flipping through them in the evenings, whipped up a couple of entrance essays. By that spring, I’d boosted my GPA, but it was still a hair’s-breadth short of the cut-off for Madison. Still, I had a shot at, say, Platteville or Whitewater. I could go there for a year, I thought, and transfer back to Madison where Nate and Karl were both going.
Then, one night in the middle of February, I answered a phone call from my father. It was unusually late for him to be calling. He asked to speak to my mother. She’d already gone to bed, so I had to wake her. It took her a while to pick up her bedroom phone, she was so discombobulated.
I was about to put my own phone down, but my father told me to stay on the line and then asked me to get my brother to pick up the extension downstairs in the kitchen.