“I’ve only been getting—making—enough for one,” Anjali Auntie said, speaking low.
Anita’s huge, pooling dark eyes met mine, and for a precious beat, her entire attention and understanding enveloped me.
She tore her eyes away from me. She would not look at me that way again for a very long time.
“I’ll share,” Anita said to her mother. “It’s Neil.”
She spoke so quickly I almost missed it. It took me years to understand why she said that, that night. The best explanation I’ve come into is that she did not want to live in this mustard yellow house with just the lemonade and her mother any longer. That she had grown lonely with the secret. That maybe she needed me next to her during the strange year that followed.
Anjali Auntie’s brow furrowed. She pressed her index finger to the space where she might have placed a bindi and smoothed her skin. It was a self-soothing gesture, recalling the way my mother massaged Prachi’s head with oil when my sister complained of headaches from sleeplessness. Anjali Auntie closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they looked like tree bark struck by shafts of afternoon sunlight. I realized they were shining from latent wetness.
“You remind me of him,” Anjali Auntie said, looking back at the photograph that had caught her attention a few times that night—the chubby girl and the cheery boy. “My brother. I always thought so. He had those girlish, long eyelashes, just like you.”
All of me clenched, as if to grasp at some invisible atmospheric manliness.
“He passed away,” she added. “Very young.”
Death was terribly distant to me at that point. I never imagined how, during the Lemonade Period, Vivek seemed always nearby for Anjali Auntie, sometimes laughing in the driveway so convincingly that she’d open the door to find, instead, the Waltham boys howling as they attempted wheelies on their bikes. Sometimes she saw him in the sons of the people whose houses she crept through, and sometimes she saw him peering out of my eyes. I didn’t know that during this period she also often thought of Parag, the neighbor boy whose gold fueled her brother to IIT, and who grew into a middling existence as a competent but unbrilliant engineer. How the life the Joshis and Parag’s family had craved for their sons never transpired, and never happened to her, either; how all those unattained lives mushroomed over the Dayals’ den that night, and we were breathing them, feeding on all that had not come to pass, as we began everything all over again.
“Okay,” Anita’s mother said, shaking something off.
* * *
• • •
That night set in motion the rhythms of my sophomore fall. I woke with a headache the morning after and at breakfast admitted I did not feel well—“pounding brain,” I mumbled into my Toaster Strudel—which caused my mother to suspect, yet again, that I had been drinking.
My father had his own theory: “You are socially withdrawn,” he said. I blinked dimly. “That is one of the symptoms of marijuana usage.”
Prachi was invited to give testimony on my behalf. “Mom, I don’t know anyone on the planet who’d give Neil alcohol or drugs. You don’t understand how big a dork he is.”
“Chee-chee,” my mother said. “I think drugs are for dorks.”
When we crossed paths upstairs later, Prachi stopped me. Her eyes fell on my Band-Aid. “You’re not a cutter or something now, are you?” she said.
I shook my head.
“Don’t get all emo this year. It’s only tenth grade—too early for that shit, okay?”
The too much–ness of that initial lemonade took days to fade—I walked around high, restless, practicing the focus Anita had taught me in order to channel what I’d downed. I even started going on runs.
Once school began, I was a new Neil, a Neil containing a mysterious balance of stability and energy. I found myself willing to work harder; I did not want to waste the lemonade. Math and science came more easily, and my abysmal Kumon grades were forgotten. I was buoyant in history class, and my blue books came back to me with ninety-nines, circled and underlined. Shruti’s, next to me, still hung comfortably in the nineties, but often a few points lower than mine. She hid them after the first time I leaned over and said, “I win.”
Anita’s mother doled out new doses of lemonade every few weeks, usually on Fridays, to precede a weekend of homework or a debate tournament. We consumed Shruti’s in pipette drips; a taste of her lemonade could set me up for a solid week of focused studying. Before a big math exam, Anjali Auntie gave me some from Jay Bhatt, former state math Olympiad champion. With each sip, I got better at concentrating—You’re supposed to imagine! Imagine yourself making use of all you took.
I followed Wendi Zhao’s directions flawlessly at the first tournament of the year, in Dallas, and shocked everyone by earning an individual award on top of our team semifinals finish. (“You might be more than just my tool, Neil,” Wendi said begrudgingly as we helped the school chaperone unload the rental car at the airport.)
I leveraged this first success with my parents, negotiating the right to attend driver’s ed before school twice a week. The teacher, Mr. Hudson, a pruny old man who had once been white but whose veins were so prominent beneath his skin that today he resembled something more like a bruise, had been at Okefenokee since “before the out-of-towners”—us. “Y’all all have this thing in your culture, don’t you?” he’d begin, while I was trying to circle the Chick-fil-A parking lot. He would unravel a list of anthropological observations on each minority: the Indian male’s plentiful chest hair and accompanying pungent scent, the composition of the Chinese stomach that allowed for consuming unlikely animals, the Koreans and the satanic rituals he believed to be secretly afoot in their churches. “There was a Nigerian kid here a long while ago,” he said once, sighing. “Tall. Unforchernately, he couldn’t play football for you-know-what.”
I began to spend time at Anita’s once or twice a week, the way I used to when I let myself in to raid the fridge. I’d finish homework and debate practice, then hitch a ride from school back to our cul-de-sac. Prachi was busy with her activities—charity clubs, the dance team, and (I had an inkling) Hudson Long. My parents worked late. So I was managing to hang around the Dayals’ without accounting to anybody about my reasons for being there.
Often, I’d land at their house before Anita’s carpool dropped her home. Her school was almost an hour’s drive away through miserable Atlanta traffic, which meant I spent a lot of time that fall with Anjali Auntie. On the occasions Anita was around, she treated me like her assigned partner on a mandatory school project. The spark of connection that had seemed to revive between us on the night of my break-in had dissipated. I wondered if she regretted letting me in, or if she could sense my want, if it disgusted her.
One early fall afternoon, I was alone in the Dayal kitchen, considering the warm burst of the Japanese maple on the front lawn, when Anita’s carpool arrived. She dropped her new lime green, monogrammed, L.L.Bean backpack in the foyer and looked surprised to find me at the counter, eating as usual—this time her mother’s spicy phodnichi poli. Anjali Auntie was in the bedroom, taking a phone call; the door was firmly shut.
“Do you want me to go?” I leaned against the counter, about six feet from her.
“No,” she said. Her eyes narrowed, perhaps out of exhaustion, but I read annoyance.
“I feel like you’re mad at me. And I don’t get what I did—”
“I’m fucking beat. I’m fucking hungry.” It was not a reply. “Is there food?” A silly question; there was always food at the Dayals’. She edged to the fridge and pulled out a neon orange Gatorade. “I’m up every day at five,” she said, addressing the vegetable crisper. “Do you know that? My mom wants me to do volunteer fundraising for Habitat for Humanity, because being a Habitat officer as a junior means you can be a Service Prefect as a senior, and every Service Prefect for the last five years has gone to an Ivy League or at
least Vanderbilt, so I’m doing that, which means I have to be at Chick-fil-A at six thirty to help buy the chicken biscuits we sell for, like, six bucks each. Oh, and I’ve started eating meat at school, you know, because I couldn’t live on their slimy white-person okra or iceberg lettuce, but even then I can’t eat a chicken biscuit even though I’m standing over them for, like, an hour, because if one of the girls on the cross-country team sees you eating a chicken biscuit she’ll give you this look, you know, just to make sure you know they’ve noticed you have an ass and they don’t—I mean not you, I mean I have an ass. I have to size up on the cross-country shorts; everyone else double-rolls them. And Mary Claire Turner, the other day ‘Baby Got Back’ came on the radio on the bus, and she goes, ‘Is this your anthem, Anita?’ Oh, and on Fridays, I have to do the whole biscuit thing alone, because the other service kids are in Friday Morning Fellowship, praying or singing or whatever, and sometimes I think about going in there, doing the whole parade and accepting Jesus Christ because the only Asian girl they don’t hate is the one who wears this huge cross—well, her boobs are huge, too, and anyway I think she’s only half-Asian. I—I miss sleep.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that Anita might not be popular at her new school; I’d imagined her transitioning laterally from her position at OHS. (It also didn’t seem the time to inform her that there were boobs guys and butt guys, and unfortunately she had enrolled at a boobs guys’ school, but that there were plenty of butt guys out there still.) As I processed, I realized I’d waited too long, and her confession, or expulsion, hung limply in the air, unanswered.
“Uh.” I glanced impotently around the kitchen before trying what Anjali Auntie did in the face of tension. “Do you want masala chai? Your mom taught me how to make it.”
A small, relieved smile spread on Anita’s face as she nodded. I was proud to see myself knowing her so well, giving her what she needed—the chance to release, but also to reclaim her composure.
“With ginger?” she said.
“Sure,” I said. I took out the milk and Anita grabbed the spices from above the sink and began slicing the root. I set about boiling the liquid, covering it with the hairy dark leaves.
“What’s new for you at school?” she asked as we watched the chai burble, as though she’d said nothing at all about her own life.
“I don’t suck anymore.”
“You never sucked. You’re just a little lazy.”
“I still sleep.”
“You always slept.” Her mouth twitched. “Too much.” She reached to switch off the stove as the chai foamed over the lip of the saucepan. Her thumb brushed the hot steel and she yelped. Before my self-consciousness could kick in, I pressed my own cool hand around hers. She let it stay there.
In that instant she almost seemed to flicker back to life. For a brief flash, she was there, looking back at me.
Her mother’s door opened. We split apart, and as the touch broke, I knew I would lose whatever had just happened in the unreal minutes before; Anita would pretend she’d admitted nothing of her life, and I would have to participate in the conspiracy to cover up her vulnerabilities. By the time Anjali Auntie came in, hanging up the cordless, we were on opposite sides of the room, strangers again.
“You made chai?” Anita’s mother stood over the pot and laughed, not unkindly. “It’s overdone.” As she brewed a fresh pot, we got back to the activity Anjali Auntie and I had been engaged in earlier: gossip. At the Dayals’, the gossip my mother so loved—who was winning what, who was engaged in nonsense—translated differently. When my mother gossiped, she was trying to teach herself and us something about who was living America correctly. When Anita’s mother gossiped, the question was: Who might be worth acquiring a little something from?
Anita stood with her arms folded, leaning against the dark wooden cabinets, fiddling with her ponytail. Her skin shadowed as the sun went down.
Suddenly, Anjali Auntie turned toward her daughter as if she was just noticing her. “Ani! You’re filthy!” she cried. “I can smell you from here. Look at you, sitting in Mrs. Kaplan’s car for an hour, stinking, and sweaty, don’t fall asleep like this in my kitchen.”
Anita slunk upstairs. I heard the shower running and wondered what she was thinking about as the sweat dripped away, revealing whatever was the essential Anita that got lost when she entered her Anita-and-adult or Anita-and-classmates script. I felt certain that no one else had ever wondered as intensely as I did about that essential Anita, that she had revealed none of it to anyone else.
* * *
• • •
Perhaps sensing the generational gap between the youth of Hammond Creek and their forebears, my English teacher, Ms. Rabinowitz, an eager Bostonian transplant, decided our curriculum ought to include several short stories depicting the somber reality of the immigrant experience. Through these pieces, we learned that old people looking out windows symbolized nostalgia for their former nations. We learned that images of springtime symbolized youth, and we hypothesized that the changing of the leaves might imply a metamorphosis from Foreign to American, or perhaps from Life to Death. Having inspired us to discern the signs and signifiers that surrounded us, Ms. Rabinowitz told us to interview a family member as inspiration for our own Heritage Creative Writing Project.
Let me nod to my teacher’s intentions: it was 2006, and one of my classmates bore the unfortunate name Osama Hussain. Much of what Ms. Rabinowitz did in that course seemed to be driven by an implicit desire to redeem the nomenclative tragedy. (Osama, for his part, was thriving. He’d recently talked his way out of a few class-skipping charges by claiming he was fleeing Republican bullies, when he had in fact driven off campus to buy weed from his college-aged brother.)
At any rate, I had no desire to interview my parents only to receive premasticated spiels about how much more mathematics they understood at twelve than Americans could grasp at twenty. So I brought the paper Ms. Rabinowitz had given us listing suggested questions for the Heritage Interview to the Dayals’.
“Ani?” Anjali Auntie called when I opened the door. “Oh, Neil, come, come,” she said when I presented in the kitchen. “I was expecting Anita—she’s late after this cross-country meet. We live so far away, poor girl.” She stood behind the stove, pushing along some okra with a wooden spoon in a frying pan. “You look bothered.”
“Can you help me with some homework?” I said.
“Maybe you should wait for Anita—I’ve never been much help to her.” Then she laughed. “At least, not on the page-by-page basis.”
“I have to interview someone,” I said, and explained the assignment. “It’s meant for family, but I don’t think Ms. Rabinowitz would be mad if I asked you.”
“Well. If it’s for class.” She glanced at the clock and sighed. “I have to make up some new lemonade. I suppose we can talk downstairs.”
In the basement, the interview mingled with the action. It was late October, and I’d now witnessed the brewing of the lemonade a few times. The scene: Three plain gold bangles, laid out on the table. The stone basin. Above, weak fluorescence. The last strains of autumn afternoon light ribboning through the glass. Anita’s mother shoving the sleeves of her lavender peasant top past her elbows.
I shuffled for the tape recorder Ms. Rabinowitz had sent home with each of us. “We’re supposed to use these instead of note-taking so we can be present.”
Anjali Auntie raised her eyebrows and glanced at the splay of criminal activity laid out before us as if to say, you want this on the record?
“I mean, I’m the only one who’s going to listen to it,” I hastened.
She lifted a plastic jar full of a clear liquid—flux—to remove impurities. The jar still wore its original label, shree basmati rice. Nearby lay a few other bottles with liquids whose names I never learned; “untranslatable,” Anjali Auntie always said. Everything with the feel of a moonshine job. The f
lux, poured over the bangles, splashing against the sides of the stone basin. The liquid taking to the gold, like watching that old mingling of sugar and lemon, the lick of liquid on solid, the solid yielding to its touch.
I turned to Ms. Rabinowitz’s questions. “Would your life today surprise your ancestors in another part of the world?” I read. “If interviewee is immigrant him/herself, can ask: ‘Would your life today surprise your prior self, if so, how?’”
“Hm,” she said. “Well, sure, my life might surprise a younger me. I have my own business. And I have a daughter who I get along with, or who doesn’t hate me, which is more than I can say for most of the other immigrant mothers around here, isn’t it?”
I drummed my fingers on the table.
“Oh, Neil, I didn’t mean—I’m sure Prachi doesn’t hate your mother—”
“She likes them. They love her. More than me.”
“They love you, too, Neil. I don’t mean to belittle any disagreements you have with your parents, but let me tell you, you would know if they didn’t love you. It would hurt. A lot.”
I shrugged and continued. “Can you please tell me a story about something ancient from our-slash-your heritage that still has meaning to you today?”
“This is the class that’s supposed to introduce you to the finer aspects of humanity?” Anjali Auntie tugged on thick industrial gloves and adjusted goggles on her head. “Tie my apron, will you?” Hands unsteady, I did as she asked, pulling the bow tight against her lower back. “Hm, ancient, huh?” she went on, now adjusting the blowtorch to initiate the smelting. “I heard something the other day. About the Saraswati River.”
“Where is that?”
She shook her head. “It’s a mythical river. We don’t know if it was ever really real. But they say it was lined with placer gold, and whoever drank from it would become immortal.”
“Who’s they? Ms. Rabinowitz says we have to try to chart the way, um . . .” I double-checked her phrasing. “The way stories get inherited.”
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