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by Sameer Pandya

  Eva placed the fork and knife on her dinner plate and put her hand on top of mine. “We don’t have to go anymore.”

  She’d liked growing up there, swimming and running around through the long days of summer; she’d wanted to share that with our kids. And she had—the kids loved it. And I loved so much of it too. I looked at her now, her eyes a little glassy. Maybe she didn’t want to go anymore because of me. Not because I felt uncomfortable, but because she did, with me. I pushed the thought away; I didn’t have it in me to explore that too deeply today.

  “No,” I said, “we’re not going to get driven away. I’ll take the boys swimming after school tomorrow. If someone wants to say something, they can. But I think they’re all too scared.” I felt emboldened. “And I’ll call the Browns tomorrow.”

  “That’s their name?” Eva asked, her mood lightening.

  “Yes. The whole thing is absurd. I’m absurd.”

  “How did Suzanne respond?”

  “Who cares about Suzanne? You know she dialed me by mistake today?” I put my phone on the table between us and hit speaker.

  Eva listened to the voice message without saying anything, paying close attention, as if she were trying to crack a code.

  “Who’s she talking to?” she asked when the message ended.

  “I don’t know.”

  “ ‘You know Raj.’ What does that mean?”

  I had been asking myself this question all day. There was such certainty in Suzanne’s voice.

  “She’s either just finished explaining what a horrible racist I am or the exact opposite. Either way, I sent it back to her.”

  “What?” Eva asked. “The message? Are you serious?”

  “I’m not going to keep something that wasn’t meant for me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She asked me to call her. I’m not going to.”

  “I’m not a big fan of hers. You don’t owe her anything.”

  Eva finished her dinner, pushed her plate aside, and started working through the stack of envelopes on the table. I sat with her. She did all the bills, and all she asked in return was that I keep her company while she wrote the checks. The farther in she got, the sharper the look of worry that developed on her face. She didn’t have to say anything. We had become people we didn’t think we would become. We had two different credit cards that were close to being maxed out. We lived in a town where the cost of living was very high, and we simply didn’t have the salaries to keep up with the Joneses or the Blacks, though we also had no interest in keeping up with them. We just wanted to live in our house, buy some organic peaches when they were in season, maybe go on vacation every couple of years, replace our aging minivan.

  “I can pull some more money out of the Do Not Touch account,” I finally said.

  “But we’ll be back to this soon enough. If one of us lost our job, I don’t know what we’d do.”

  “Sell this house, go on the road,” I joked, trying in vain to get her to relax.

  “That may not be so off base,” she said.

  I finished my wine.

  “Go on to bed,” she said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You’ve had a long day.”

  I leaned down and kissed her on the head, then went and crawled into our bed, a queen that my father had bought for me when I started graduate school. He hadn’t been one to buy much for his adult kids, but he’d splurged on the bed; he thought it was important to sleep well.

  I stayed awake for as long as I could, waiting for Eva, but I didn’t make it all that long before falling asleep.

  I wasn’t sure what time it was when I got up in the night, but Eva was with me and I could feel the warmth of her thighs in my hands, the smell of wine on her breath. In our early years together, it had seemed perfectly fine to luxuriate in every corner of our bodies for hours. But now, so many years in, with kids sleeping in the next room and our muscles changing, lovemaking felt nearly too intimate to bear. Somehow these late-night, half-asleep moments allowed us to be free and uninhibited. When we finished, we held on to each other tightly as we fell into a deep sleep.

  Tuesday

  “WHAT HAPPENED?” Eva asked, stepping into the kitchen in the morning, clearly surprised by the tranquil scene before her. I had woken up early, made the kids’ lunches, and fried them each an egg. They were showered, eating, and watching a cartoon on an iPad.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I have no idea.”

  “I slept very well last night,” Eva said shyly.

  “Maybe we can get to bed early tonight,” I said.

  Neel brought his empty dish to the sink. “What’re you two whispering about?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “It has to be something.”

  I pointed to a little plate with his medicine and various vitamins. He quickly took them with a glass of water.

  When they got into the car without my having to plead, I wondered if the fight between the boys, and the crying after, had in fact been therapeutic. Maybe that’s how I would consider moments of peak chaos in the house from now on.

  We were just pulling out of the driveway when I heard a shriek from the back seat. “Wait. I have to get something.” And before I could object, Neel was already out of the car, heading back inside.

  “Are we always going to be waiting for him?” Arun asked.

  Through the rearview mirror, I saw the soft, gummy smile of a child just out of baby teeth.

  “Maybe. When you’re older, are you going to remember all the times you were waiting?”

  “I think so,” Arun said. “But it’s OK. He needs his things.”

  Neel returned with my old iPod, which he’d found a few days earlier in a drawer full of wires. He’d attached it to a small, portable speaker. I had no idea what was even on it, but as he played songs on our way to school—“Wild World,” “Kashmir,” “Lose Yourself,” never letting any one reach past the minute mark—I was drawn right back into my emotional life from a decade earlier, when I’d first learned to download music.

  As we got close to their school, he happened upon Biggie, who always reminded me of our time in New York.

  “Can we listen to this one through?” I asked. “It’ll get us right into the parking lot.”

  We blasted “Juicy” out of that little speaker. The kids were smiling and bobbing their heads in the back seat. I was doing the same in the front. I felt as if we were engaged in an act of moderate civil disobedience.

  Their school was public only in name. The few kids who walked were accompanied by their parents; I couldn’t remember one time when my parents had walked me to school. Most of the students, though, were delivered in cars. There was a drop-off line, a queue of fancy cars and a teacher shepherding the students out and into the playground, to run around before school started. I got into line. No tunnels or buses for these kids.

  “Who’s picking us up?” Arun asked.

  “I am.”

  “What’re we going to do?”

  “Whatever you two want.” I turned to the back seat and squeezed both their hands. Arun seemed perfectly happy. Neel was forlorn; his mood crashed as soon as we’d pulled into the drop-off lane. “Have a great day.”

  The two of them got out of the car. Arun bounded away, but Neel lingered, as if he didn’t know where he was going. He turned back to me and lifted his right arm slightly into an invisible sling, with his hand tucked under his chest. Then he slowly put up his middle finger. After Neel had learned the wide-ranging implications of the gesture, he’d made it his own, using it to convey that we were making him do something he didn’t want to do, but that he was going to do it anyway. There was so much concentrated existential angst in that nubby little finger. I gave him a thumbs-up, and as I did, I saw a parent look at Neel, and then at me, with disgust on her face, as if Neel’s behavior were going to rub off on all the other kids.

  As I pulled out, a white Tesla pul
led in. There must have been twenty different parents who owned that car, but of course it was Suzanne dropping off her boys. We saw each other and I quickly turned away. I could see from the corner of my eye that she was lowering her window.

  “Can we talk?” she mouthed. “Please.”

  I nodded my head and pointed to the parking lot. I could only avoid her for so long. I parked my car, got out, and waited. She walked over a minute later.

  “Hi,” she said, uncharacteristically tired. “I’m so sorry. I hate these phones. Can we go back to no phones at all?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I just wish you could have heard the whole conversation.”

  “So do I,” I said. “I’d really like to know what ‘You know Raj’ means.”

  “Mark called me right after they got home from the meeting on Sunday night. He was livid, and I could hear Jan chirping in the background. They wanted to meet immediately. They said they’d drive to my house, but I said it was too late, I needed to be with my kids. The younger one won’t fall asleep without me. So we agreed to meet in the morning, at Francine’s, for coffee. That’s when I must have hit the call button.”

  “What exactly are they so mad about?” I asked.

  “Mark feels responsible for bringing their friends into what he kept referring to as a ‘hostile environment.’ ” She used air quotes. “Mark said that if you’d said what you said at the hospital, and you worked there, you would have been fired. He wants you to apologize to the Browns. And to them.”

  I laughed, taken aback that Mark and Jan were going to spend their social conscience capital against me. “I’m happy to talk to the Browns. I was already planning on reaching out to Bill. But that’s my business. You can tell Mark that he won’t be hearing from me.” I was surprised by how quickly this was moving. I’d known, of course, that there would be blowback from the TC, but I thought it would percolate for a few more days so that I’d have some time to strategize on how best to proceed. “But why are you upset about this? You said on Sunday that the committee wanted me to apologize too.”

  “Because Mark and Jan are trying to expel you from the TC,” she said. “Apology or no apology.”

  “They don’t have the power to do that,” I said. “No one does.” I was trying to project confidence, but I knew they would find some way to circumvent the rules, or create new ones if they really wanted to.

  “That’s true, they don’t. But that’s not going to stop them from making plenty of ugly noise. I know you only heard that one sentence in the message. I wish you could have heard the other things I said. They don’t know you very well. You know Raj. That’s why I said that—I was trying to give them a sense of who you are. That you weren’t being offensive. That you were joking around. They’re trying to make this into something it’s not. They’re trying to make you into someone you’re not. I’m afraid it’s all getting a little out of hand.”

  I looked away from her as the last of the kids went into their classrooms. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed too absurd that we were in front of a school where our children were given everything they could possibly need and more, talking about my expulsion from a tennis club because a bunch of white people think that I’m racist.

  “I appreciate you telling me,” I said. And I did. I appreciated that, at the moment anyway, she seemed to be on my side. “Mark can do whatever he wants, but he’s going to get a fight from me. And now I need to get to work.”

  Suzanne had a confused expression on her face, as if she’d finally arrived at a situation that she couldn’t fix or order through her own sheer will. I got back in my car and drove away.

  The three days when I wasn’t teaching I balanced between grading endless piles of papers and writing. I still held on to the idea that I was going to write something smart and get my career back on track. I had a doctor’s appointment today, and then I would go home and sit at my desk. I’d checked out a couple of new books of ethnography that had gotten some buzz, and I wanted to read how this newer generation of anthropologists were writing before I dived back into my own work.

  As I was driving, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the caller, but it was a campus number. I picked up.

  “Raj?” The voice was deep and gravelly.

  “Speaking.” It was a response I’d heard my father use for years whenever he’d picked up a phone.

  “It’s Cliff. Cliff Turner. Are you on campus today?”

  Cliff was the department chair, an old-school anthropologist who had done his original fieldwork in West Africa, and in the decades that had followed, had maintained deep ties with the communities that were the basis of his dissertation. He was a beautiful stylist in his writing, well read, and a genuine guy who never led with himself or his many accomplishments. As he neared retirement, his books could fill a small shelf, but he was most famous for an essay he’d written about the male circumcision ritual of a West African tribe, which had the most artful, poetic descriptions of young boys, en route to manhood, in profound pain. A man who could make poetry out of pain was my kind of guy.

  This was the first time in the nine years that I’d worked for him that Cliff and I had spoken on the phone. Our communications were always either in person or via email.

  “I’m not,” I said and then added, “but I can be.”

  “Could you? If you don’t mind. Perhaps sooner rather than later.”

  Cliff seldom made demands of me. And because he didn’t, and because I admired him, I wanted to go see him as quickly as I could. I was wearing jeans, an old white T-shirt, and my flip-flops. It was far too slovenly for the office. But it would have taken me too long to go home first to change.

  “I have an appointment now. But I can be there right after. Say ten?”

  “That’s perfect,” Cliff said. “I appreciate it. I’ll be in my office.”

  Driving to the doctor’s, I kept thinking about what could be so urgent with Cliff. Good news could wait. Bad news had to be delivered immediately, in person. Maybe the university had run out of money to keep me. There was always talk of budget cuts.

  The worry about Cliff compounded the worry I’d been feeling already about my doctor’s visit. A week earlier, I’d gone to my internist for my yearly checkup, and had left thankful that my nagging cough had revealed nothing and that new medical guidelines had kept the lubricated gloved fingers away for one more year. But the doctor had examined the mole on my left heel, one that Eva had asked me to point out to him, and said that I needed to see a dermatologist about it. My internist generally had no affect, but in a rare moment of mirth, he said, with a grin on his face, “When in doubt, cut it out.”

  When I’d called the dermatologist’s office, the receptionist found me an appointment right away. At first, I’d assumed that they just had plenty of openings, but then I started to wonder if the description of the growing mass on my foot was alarming enough to get me in as quickly as possible. And once that thought had entered my head, the anxiety I felt about the mole became outsized.

  I’m not a fan of doctors’ offices. Who is, besides drug reps? But this one seemed innocuous enough as I stepped in. The walls had photographs of attractive women who I assumed had benefited from some of the skin treatments the office offered. There were orchids on the side tables and a tumbler of cucumber water. I filled out some forms and waited.

  “Rajesh Bhatt?”

  A young woman in scrubs had opened the door into the waiting room and called my name. She did a double take. I followed her to an examination room, feeling pretty good about myself. Maybe the casual chic of jeans and a T-shirt could be a new style for me.

  “Professor Bhatt. I had you for Intro to Anthro a few years ago.”

  My shoulders fell.

  “Did you graduate already?” I glanced at her name tag.

  “I did,” Kimberly said. “I got my degree in biology and then started working here. I’m a nurse’s assistant.”

  Is that all it took to be a nu
rse’s assistant? She seemed competent, but if somehow she ended up with a scalpel in her hand, I was going to run out of there as fast as I could.

  We walked into a room and she closed the door behind her. What word would best describe being in an examination room with a young former student of yours? Awkward? Fraught?

  “So, the note says you’re here to have a mole checked.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Anything else?”

  “If the doctor can, I would like a full body scan. Per a request from my wife.”

  When I had originally made the appointment, I had asked to see a male doctor, because Eva had warned me about the exploratory nature of a full body exam.

  “That’s easy enough,” Kimberly said.

  She pointed to a clean, folded hospital gown. “You can strip down to your underwear and put this on.” She didn’t make eye contact as she said this. “The doctor will be right in.”

  “What grade did you get?” I asked, acting out my nerves. “In my class.”

  “An A-minus,” she said proudly. “I was happy with it. It was a challenging class.”

  “That’s good to hear. If you’re going to have to give me a shot, I’m glad I didn’t fail you.”

  At this, she smiled. “I’m an expert with needles. You won’t feel a thing.”