Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  “Can you be both?” John asked. He clutched the bowl of snap pea stir-fry, covered with weeping saran wrap, his contribution to the Christmas potluck. Gopal looked at him blankly.

  “Does she really need a private coach?” Nancy asked. She was a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford.

  “Well, it’s not like they’re in the Red Lightnings anymore,” Gopal said. He held out a silver tray of pakora. Nancy took one. “Soccer is very competitive these days.”

  “We just want her to have the best chances,” Prabha said.

  “Every time we’ve seen her play, she’s been the best on the team. Do you want her to play professionally?” John asked.

  “No, no, no,” Gopal said. “Definitely not. Hema is going to be a doctor. It’s just that we found someone who coaches another of the girls on the varsity team, and we think he’s going to be good for Hema’s chances at getting recruited.” Hema had made it onto the varsity team their freshman year—the first and only freshman ever on the team.

  Hema’s older brother, Kai, was home for the holidays and he had one ear cocked, eavesdropping on this conversation from the cushions of the living room couch with Hema, Kathy, and Kathy’s little sister, Lucy. He turned to Hema. “Hear that? They want to make sure you don’t turn out like me. The gay graduate of a liberal arts school nobody knows the name of. To them, success means selling out for the highest price you can get and preferably a designer degree.”

  Hema shrugged. “Who cares about all that? I just want to be the best.”

  Kai and Kathy looked at each other and laughed. It was like Hema to skip over any untangling of other people’s motives to focus on what she wanted.

  After dinner, they drank hot chocolate swimming with peppermint marshmallows and their parents congratulated each other on how well they’d done with Hema and Kathy. Then Nancy and John went home, and Gopal went upstairs to work on his computer.

  Prabha flicked on the second half of Sense and Sensibility and began cleaning up the detritus of the Christmas feast. Unexpectedly, Kathy teared up as Hugh Grant proposed to Emma Thompson. Furious, she wiped her eyes, hoping nobody had seen.

  “Well, that was stupid,” Hema said. The credits ran. She blew on her fingernails, which she’d just painted with Pulp Fiction polish. “So boring Elinor gets Hugh Grant? That hardly seems likely.”

  “Can you do my nails, too?” Lucy asked Hema, extending her bare feet.

  “I like Elinor,” Kathy said.

  “Nobody likes Elinor. She’s boring and proper,” Kai interjected. He was cooling the chicory coffee made by his mother by pouring it back and forth from a stainless steel tumbler to a smaller dish he called a dabarah.

  “But she’s not silly the way Marianne is. And look at how badly things turn out for Marianne,” Kathy said.

  Hema crinkled her nose as she dabbed nail polish on Lucy’s toenails. “Okaaaay. Wouldn’t you rather just fall madly in love, so in love you actually wanted to be with the person?”

  “No way. Elinor has common sense, and that’s more important.”

  Kai laughed and sipped his coffee. “When you’re my age, Kathy, I’m pretty sure your answer will be different.”

  ***

  Hema immediately wanted to please him. Theo was black-haired, handsome in a vulpine way, stocky and muscular, yet agile, and a little older than Kai. He was French and rode the bench for France’s soccer team in 1998 when they won the World Cup, then played professionally in London for four years before coming to the United States. He wanted the girls he coached—girls like Hema—to be tough and fierce, to be consummate sportswomen.

  Where all the other people in her life wanted her to restrain herself, to be less, he asked her to be more. He wanted her to be as aggressive as he was. He taught her how to commit a foul that a ref wouldn’t call, he schooled her in the psychology of the game.

  “Get in there,” he’d yell from the sidelines at her practices—not in the crazy, anxious way her parents had when they came to her elementary school games, not in the way that let her know how devastated he would be if she weren’t the best after all, but with the confidence of someone who knew she had it in her to win. A commanding and encouraging tone in his voice made her want to do better, to scrap until the very end.

  “You’ve got to pass more,” Theo said to her one day after her game, handing her a bottle of juice as they walked through the parking lot. “Rely on your midfielders.”

  “I don’t know if I can rely on them,” Hema said, still high from the scrimmage, her cleats clipping pavement. “You saw them out there. They just don’t care as much as I do.”

  “Were we watching the same game? I thought they were giving it their all. To function as a team, you have to trust.”

  He held open the door of his beater, a silver Toyota Camry, and she climbed in. “You want to see a video that illustrates this point I’m making about teamwork?”

  ***

  They drove to his tiny studio apartment on El Camino Real. It was three floors up. They entered through a nondescript door with peeling black paint. Inside the single room was a kitchen alcove with the tiniest stove Hema had ever seen, and a couch the pale beige of porridge. Rows of pinkish light sliced through crooked Venetian blinds. Sheets swirled, forming a white rose at one end of the unmade bed. Burgundy pillows, heady with the wintery fragrance of pine trees, were scattered all askew.

  They watched his tape, one of the few World Cup games he’d played in. He brewed a pot of Gen Ma Cha tea. He sat beside her, close enough that she could hear him breathing and smell the fragrance of his musky cologne and the popped rice of the green tea, his warm shoulder against hers, and they watched the match like that for hours, as the street lights of Palo Alto began to glow, and night fell around them.

  ***

  Practice wound down at twilight. The team and its coach were scattered by the bleachers. The air was heavy with the odor of freshly cut grass. From a distance, Kathy saw the dark silhouette of a man and a girl, their heads huddled together, standing apart from the team, in a world of their own against the streaks of gold and pink at the horizon, and for a moment, she didn’t recognize her best friend.

  Theo patted Hema on the back. It was a familiar gesture. He shouted something at the whole team like “Go, team, go!” in his French accent and pumped his fist. Kathy would have left without saying anything, but Hema spotted her in the dusk and called her over.

  “It’s so wonderful to meet Hema’s best friend. Hema speaks about you all the time,” Theo said.

  “Oh, yeah. You too.” Kathy shook his hand, and she could feel herself blushing with the awkwardness, his ingratiating formality. She found his accent comical and his manner overweening. He continued to talk, but she had already stopped listening, and eventually she tugged at Hema’s arm.

  “Isn’t he amazing?” Hema asked as they walked away. “He’s so wise. I could listen to him talk for hours.”

  Kathy didn’t answer. Hema’s rapturous tone reminded her of when they were small and leafing through Hema’s stacks of Tiger Beat, many of which she’d smuggled out of the library because her father didn’t want her reading what he considered trash. They’d compare notes on each issue of the candy-colored magazine, remarking on who was cute, and who wasn’t, who seemed like they might be cool in real life, and who they believed were poseurs. Always, their tastes were different.

  Prabha shared Kathy’s concerns, and this provided Kathy with a small measure of relief. While Kathy was studying in the Sarma living room one Saturday, she overheard Hema talking to Prabha in the kitchen. “Enough!” Prabha said. “You have to think about the future. You have to get a college education, you can’t be a soccer star your whole life.”

  “I could coach,” Hema said. “Like Theo.”

  “Coaching is okay for somebody like Theo.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s not the kind of job we get. You always wanted to be a doctor.”

&nb
sp; “You always wanted me to be a doctor.”

  “Sports medicine,” Prabha said. “We’ll pay for college if you focus on sports medicine.”

  “Why do you get to paint pictures of flowers nobody wants to buy, but I have to get a job I would hate?”

  Hema returned to the living room a few minutes later with a protein bar. Her eyebrows were knit and her smooth cheeks were flushed. “You okay?” Kathy whispered. Hema nodded, but as she settled into the couch, her eyes were closed, a little flame going out inside her.

  Kathy said nothing, but blamed Theo. Why had he gotten her hopes up? Hema was smart, like next-level smart, and talented to boot, and he had somehow wormed his own paltry and unambitious expectations into her brain, persuaded her it was enough for her to be just a soccer coach.

  ***

  “Do you need an ice pack?” Theo asked. Hema was horribly sunburned, but in heaven. The sweetness of the pain and the tang of the orange juice mixed as they always did in the unbeatable high after she’d scored back-to-back goals.

  Hema shook her head, which was propped against the armrest of the porridge-colored couch. He rubbed pink calamine on her legs. Firm but gentle ministrations. She could smell him, the scent of him an intoxicating mixture of freshly cut grass and coconut sunscreen, the smell of endless summer. “I was on auto-pilot for that last goal,” she said. “I shot on reflex when she passed to me. It was all those drills we did.”

  “You were amazing.”

  At that moment, Hema sat up and looked into Theo’s hazel eyes. She kissed him. His lips were warm.

  ***

  Summer before their senior year. The air was strangely humid and sultry. Hema waggled up from below her windowsill, wearing an elaborate red dragon mask and khaki army fatigues. Kathy laughed. After an all-nighter preparing her project for an honors science summer camp, she was ready to remove her contact lenses and sleep. But then Hema took off the mask, pulled up the window, and pointed at the ground, a sign that she wanted to take one of their nocturnal walks by the creek. They shimmied down their respective drainpipes and headed wordlessly into Los Altos Hills.

  Bay quarter horses grazed in the shadowy dusk. The sounds took on a greater intensity in the darkness with so little to look at—cows lowing, the distant buzz of Foothill Expressway.

  “What’s going on?” Kathy asked as they neared the creek, their feet making a crackly shur-shur in the grass.

  “Do you ever think that our lives here are just unbearably small?” Hema asked. “I can’t wait till graduation, till I can just get out of here.”

  “What’s wrong with here?”

  “The definition of success is so narrow! There’s no space, and everyone is so horribly pleased with themselves. I mean, why even live a life if it’s not exciting, if everything is planned?”

  Kathy had no answer to this. The creek swished and kerplunked over stones. As they hiked deeper into the hills, the crickets chirruped.

  “Hey, you remember how you saved Lucy in that sinkhole by this creek?” Kathy asked.

  Hema laughed. “Oh, please, you would have saved her if I hadn’t.” She bent suddenly and picked up a tiny frog, and held him up to the stars, dark and pulsing. “Look at this adorable guy.”

  “I really wouldn’t have had the presence of mind that you did,” Kathy said, stroking the frog’s slimy back with her index finger.

  “I remember how the tadpoles we caught would turn into frogs and go hopping out of my garage, and my parents would never be the wiser.”

  Kathy looked away, her throat catching on all the things she wanted to say. Since Hema had started training with Theo, their conversations turned increasingly to the past, and their friendship had dwindled into a series of remembrances—they didn’t meet frequently enough to make new memories. Next year, they’d go to separate colleges, and they probably wouldn’t do these nighttime hikes anymore. Already, they were too far apart. She said nothing.

  Trekking through fronds of sweet fennel, Hema told Kathy that Theo was critical of the way they’d been raised in Palo Alto, how whitewashed and affluent it was—he called it Shallow Alto.

  Kathy snorted. “And yet, he’s willing to fleece your parents to coach you.”

  “Well, I mean, he has to live, doesn’t he? It’s not surprising so many of the girls he coaches have crushes on him.”

  “Yuck. He’s so old.” Kathy waited for Hema to agree, but Hema bent down and released the frog back into the creek.

  “Run away, little frog,” Hema whispered into the darkness.

  ***

  Senior year blurred: college applications and elaborately decorated dances and self-important student government meetings. Kathy was startled by the arrival of Valentine’s Day. It was as uneventful as every other day, except that a skinny kid in her AP calculus class who was building an app to keep track of homework had handed her a handwritten love letter. She’d glanced through it, mocked a few lines, and tossed it in the trash.

  The high school campus was open, which meant most kids would drive off-campus at lunchtime. Kathy usually met Hema for lunch at Hobee’s on Friday when they both had a free period just afterward. They ordered their usual hash browns and blueberry coffee cake and smoothies from brightly illustrated menus typed in a quirky, curlicue-laden font.

  Hema only shrugged when Kathy told her about the love letter. Usually they would have mocked him together. “He’s not really that bad.”

  “But would you date him?”

  “No, but we have different types. Did I tell you I’m trying out for the under-twenty women’s team this March? Theo says they’re interested.”

  “He’s going behind your parents’ backs? What about college?” Kathy asked. She picked at her hash browns drowning in a cool red pool of salsa and sour cream.

  “I can always go to college later. I won’t always be on a winning streak.”

  “Did Theo ever go back to college?”

  “No, but he wasn’t raised like us. He’s hot, don’t you think?”

  “Gross. He’s got a weak chin and I think he’s losing his hair. He’s, what, twenty years older than us?”

  “No. Only eleven years. He’s twenty-nine years old. When I’m twenty-nine, he’ll only be forty, and that’s not too wide an age gap.”

  Kathy made a face. “He’s even older than your brother.” She pulled the straw out of her smoothie and flecked a purple swirl of smoothie onto Hema’s arm. She noticed then that Hema’s arm, usually hairy, was smooth, waxed. Hema raised an eyebrow and wiped away the smear with a napkin.

  “So? Lots of girls date someone a little older than them. Men mature more slowly than women.”

  “He had a short soccer career.”

  “He got injured.”

  “Unless something’s wrong with him, he probably has a girlfriend.”

  “Well, yes. He was married for a few years,” Hema acknowledged. “But it didn’t work out. She didn’t like how passionate he was about soccer. Can you imagine trying to be married to someone who didn’t get the most basic fact about you?”

  “I don’t get why he’s telling you this intimate stuff.” Kathy put her fork down.

  “He thinks I’m a good listener. What’s gotten into you?”

  Kathy explained. Hema’s patent crush on a man that was so much older was revolting. No good could come of it. But the more Kathy talked, the more adamant Hema was that Kathy just didn’t understand him.

  “We’re dating, you know. I was just trying to figure out how to tell you.”

  “How long?”

  “Since last January.” Hema didn’t seem to have any idea how strange this was. She had swallowed the secret—it had been swimming inside her for a full year—like she didn’t trust Kathy at all.

  “Oh my god. You’re underage, Hema.”

  “We’re seventeen!”

  “We’re just kids.”

  “I’m going to be eighteen in two months.”

  “He’s a predator.”

&nbs
p; “Stop it. You don’t know him.”

  “I know he’s in a position of power over you and he preyed on you.”

  “Let me get this straight. Basically, you want me to be more like you?” Hema asked. She drew herself up.

  Hema’s skin was fawn-colored, glowing and moisturized. Her lips were penciled in with some sort of scarlet pigment. Kathy noticed in that moment that she’d started wearing mascara and a wide line of jet-black kohl around her eyes. Just a few years earlier they had made fun of Prabha for drawing kohl so thick around her eyelids, joking that it made her look foreign and slightly ridiculous, like she thought of herself as some sort of Scheherazade. And now Hema was aping her.

  “No, I just want you to come back. I want you to be the same person I’ve known my whole life,” Kathy said, trying not to plead.

  “Maybe I’m not that person anymore. You’re the one who cares about going to an Ivy League school, about making sure everyone knows how smart you are, how successful you are, how important you are. All that model-minority crap. What do I care about any of that? I want to live! I’m going to live!”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.” Kathy threw a wad of cash on the table. She hurried to her car before Hema could see her cry. She’d never heard Hema use that phrase before, model minority, though they’d talked about it in their AP US History class, which was taught by a white man, a former activist who’d studied Buddhism with Himalayan monks in the 1960s. Everyone in the class, most of them white, with a handful who were Chinese American, Indian American, or Japanese American, had scoffed at the term, which they didn’t need for their AP exam. Hadn’t Hema laughed along with them? Maybe she hadn’t, and suddenly Kathy was deeply embarrassed that Hema had taken that term and applied it to her, thinking she was deserving of this cold, sterile, impersonal term, a term that suggested she—Hema’s best friend, supposedly—was not an individual, but a tool. She drove back to school, leaving Hema to find her own way back.

  ***

  That night was the first they didn’t wave goodnight through their windows. The following week, Kathy ate alone on a bench at the edge of the quad at lunchtime. Hema was nowhere to be seen. It was spring, and all the other seniors were planning the class gift, elaborate ways to ask their sweethearts to the prom, and outings to the beach for Senior Cut Day. They were taking it easy, but to keep her growing anxiety at bay, Kathy continued to work as hard as she had before.