4.
Winter ebbed into spring, and the outside world reached my house primarily through my mother’s oversize ears. At dinners, she reported on nonsense. Jay Bhatt’s father had flown up to Ithaca to scold him when he announced he was quitting the math racket to become a film major: “Used to be sooo-so good at calculus and now failing midterms and all.” (“Raghu, this yogurt isn’t bad, just scrape out that greenish bit . . .”) Fourteen-year-old Reema Misra: fair-skinned as a Caucasian, almond-eyed, who had, my mother said, citing no source for her omniscience, “gone round talking about all the boys she practices kissing—tell me,” she demanded of Prachi and me, “is that how all you people are talking?” (“Coconut chutney. Ajji’s recipe. Everyone eat, don’t go wasting.”) Aleem Khan’s oldest sister, Tasneem: hospitalized for alcohol poisoning in Chapel Hill. “What shame that mother must be feeling.” (“Nice mango pickle. Neeraj. Pickle, take.”) Even successes got their due: “That Shruti Patel is smart, I’ll give her that, but her mother won’t leave me alone, asking all kinds of questions every time I see her about Prachi, what SAT studying we—she—did . . .” (“Take less rice, Prachi, who needs such a mountain?”)
And then, one day: “You know what I’m hearing about Anjali Dayal?”
I stiffened. It was early March, and my pattern of attendance at the Dayals’ remained roughly the same: covert visits, private, intimate, cherished.
“Ramya, don’t gossip so much.” My father intervening, a rarity.
“What did you hear?” I asked. I shoved my mouth full of green beans and accidentally bit on a chili. Coughing subsided, eyes watering, I waited, expectant.
“Just some very . . .” My mother eyed my father as if to decide whether or not she wanted to cross him. “White woman behavior.”
My father was eating one bean at a time and examining the ring of flowers patterning his ceramic plate as though he had never before seen these dishes.
“Which Indian people talk divorce-this divorce-that, is all I’m saying,” she muttered.
“Ashmita Pandey’s aunt is divorced,” Prachi said primly.
“Pah. That fellow was a wife beater, very sad.” My mother waved her hand in the air. “Some such cases, yes, they happen. But not this desperate housewife wants to run off into the sunset business, that and all is very strange, you ask me.”
“Last year Anita said they were, like, really close to moving to California.”
When Prachi’s eyes landed on me curiously, I felt hot.
“There’s one woman at my office,” my mother said, poised above the dal ladle, too enraptured in her story to interrogate me. Her mangalsutra swayed from her neck, that gold chain signifying her status as sturdily married. I thought of all that was invested in that necklace, of the artisan who had made it, shaping it to be a blessing conferred upon the wedding, and of all the signifiers of domestic security that had agglomerated upon it through my parents’ long union. I imagined Anjali Auntie unclasping it and coiling it onto her tongue.
“Katherine,” my mother continued. “American lady. Says she’s a Christian-only but she’s lived with three men. Meets them at bars. Can’t keep one around. Then asks me so sweetly so innocently if I had one arranged marriage like she should feel so sad for me.”
“Anita won MTI southeast,” Prachi put in disconsolately. “She’ll be prepping for nationals now.”
My sister was eternally gloomy these days, having had her early application to Duke deferred; she’d been hanging in limbo since winter, and was terrified the definitive rejection was coming in a matter of weeks. Prachi now made a habit of tallying up other brown girls’ victories in her own personal loss column: Anita had a shot at MTI nationals; Imrana Ansari, one of Prachi’s frenemies from the dance team, had won a national essay-writing competition. Worst was Gita Menon, the former Scripps National Spelling Bee runner-up from Northview High School, who had gotten her Duke acceptance in December, taking the one slot Prachi was sure had been hers.
“Aloo,” my father said, reaching for the mushy potatoes.
“Let Anita Dayal prance about. Nothing to be jealous. We are very proud of you,” my mother said.
Preparation for the national pageant—to be held in New Jersey in April—was, as Prachi surmised, keeping Anita busy. Plus, this spring, she was playing tennis and tutoring English as a second language, while also finally turning the chicken biscuit sales into Habitat for Humanity houses. All this kept her late at school and brought her inside the perimeter on weekends.
Sometimes I held the hoops I’d taken from her nightstand in my palm. I wondered what they—she—would taste like. If I could smelt down her powers and mysteries and take them as my own. But for now, I stowed the earrings in my wallet, behind my learner’s permit, where they would remain for a long time.
* * *
• • •
Students on the honors track met with the college counselor once at the start of their sophomore spring. I plodded over to Mrs. Latimer’s office on the ground floor of Okefenokee High School one morning and sat in the hallway, waiting for her to finish another meeting.
I found myself staring at a bulletin board covered with photographs of OHS alumni holding up T-shirts displaying their collegiate futures: Wake Forest and Vanderbilt and UNC; sometimes Dartmouth or Caltech or Yale. The rest of the school was papered with pep rally banners and bake sale flyers; kids chewed gum and made out and bartered cigarettes and Ritalin. But here, in the nonsense-free honors corridors, there was a different currency. A currency that meant the unlikeliest people were rich, as I remembered when I saw who was now pushing open Mrs. Latimer’s door. Shruti Patel stopped in her tracks to see me outside.
“Oh, Neil!” she said, in that scratchy voice. “I always forget you’re an honors kid.”
“What a compliment, Shroots,” I said.
She plonked down next to me. “Mrs. Latimer is making some important phone calls on my behalf right now, so you’re going to have to wait a little bit. There are a lot of people who might want to have me around for the summer. What are you doing?”
Shruti wouldn’t speak to Juhi or Isha or Kartik or even Manu this way. It was me she felt comfortable poking at, and while normally I wouldn’t deprive her of this rare social joy, I was irritable that day. It was the end of a lemonade cycle, and I’d been trudging through precalculus homework feeling laconic and woolly.
“A debate institute,” I said evenly. “In East Lansing.”
She tugged one of her springy locks of hair. Her eyes crossed as she watched it bounce.
“I wish I had a track like you,” she said. “I have to be creative about my summers. Mrs. Latimer’s calling up this Congresswoman—” I tried to close my eyes and ignore Shruti as she painted pictures of her possible opportunities: bustling around Washington, D.C., chasing a House member, or being flown to Hong Kong to participate in a youth entrepreneurship summit, or immersing in a program for math geniuses at Stanford, and she was pretty sure Stanford was practically on the beach, so she’d be solving integrals in the sand. “But I heard from Mia Ahmed that people have tons of fun at debate camp, too.”
“Institute,” I said through gritted teeth, as though that sounded better.
“Mia says there’s this place in Michigan that’ll deep fry a burrito, an Oreo, anything you want. And a shop for dollar pizza. She got drunk in East Lansing last summer. She says there are hobos you can just ask to buy you alcohol. But promise you won’t, Neil, okay? Don’t get drunk in East Lansing all summer, right when you were getting to be so smart—”
“Neil Narayan?” Mrs. Latimer, a graying woman with an air of brutal capability, stepped into the hallway. “Oh, Shruti, you’re still here? I’ll get back to you about Hong Kong. I couldn’t reach that alum.”
Mrs. Latimer spent a few minutes reviewing my file with an air of unfamiliarity. I gathered that she’d heard of Shruti before her
meeting—most teachers had—but that I’d flown under her radar. Without looking up from my transcript, she suggested I begin to define myself.
“Not according to what you think a college wants to hear, understand,” she insisted. “But according to where you see yourself in, say, ten years. So. Any idea? Where you see yourself?”
I said I guessed I could see myself in California. I’d been to the Bay Area once, on vacation, when we visited my uncle Gopi and aunt Sandhya in Fremont. I’d loved San Francisco—the way the gray fog met the gray water, the way the Golden Gate emerged from the sienna mountains. I saw myself roaming amid the pastel homes crowded against one another like uneven smiles, or reading in a bay window with a view of the Pacific. (“You want to live here?” my father had chuckled, noticing the pull the city exerted over me. “You better get rich. Those houses on the water, they’re millions-millions.”)
“California,” Mrs. Latimer repeated. “Well, geography is a start. But how about your interests? What are you passionate about?”
“I’m a debater.”
“That’s your passion?”
Neeraj, you’re supposed to imagine!
“Sure,” I said.
“A debater. So, you’re interested in, say, politics? Law?”
I mumbled a few more sures, and then she began sculpting the fib into a plan—I should consider doing voter registration drives, tackle a column in the school paper, found a chapter of the Young Republicans or Democrats. I should sit for the AP Government exam, though the class wasn’t offered at our school—“Are you friends with Ms. Patel out there?” Mrs. Latimer asked. “She self-studied for the exam last year. Perhaps she could tutor you.”
By the time the meeting ended, I’d become a committed Young Democrat, at least on paper. Though I spent my days throwing around the language of policy and politics, I practiced agility more than advocacy: in one round, I played the neoconservative defender of American imperial policy in Afghanistan; in the next, I argued for diplomacy with rogue states. Sometimes Wendi let me draw on the kritik research I’d done last summer, to argue, for instance, that capitalism was the true cause of the fossil fuel crisis. Sometimes I enjoyed how debate made my mind work. But it was the win I craved, the look of sympathy the judge gave the other team before announcing our victory. What it took to get there was not passion, but lemonade.
What I did love, discreetly—and what I never thought to tell Mrs. Latimer—was history. My AP European History teacher, Mr. Bakes, was a compact, white-haired man, a former lawyer with a Tennessee drawl and a shuffle step who liked to pull me into his classroom when he spotted me in the hallways and ask for my help putting up or taking down the timeline for each unit. (I was, at last, tall enough to be of assistance to a smaller person, having hit a growth spurt over winter.) I think Mr. Bakes may have been waging a private war against Mrs. Latimer, for he never asked what my plans for the future were; instead, he batted around the past with me. He praised my essays—the one where I wrote about the scientific revolution as one of the great optimistic epochs, and the one arguing against the great man theory of history re: Napoleon. But I’d never heard of any alumnus of Hammond Creek going on to study history. Why putter around in the dead past when the future of our community required such ruthless attention?
This was why it so rankled when Shruti Patel turned around at the end of AP Euro to announce that she had been accepted to the Hong Kong entrepreneurship boot camp and to a four-day conference for young leaders in San Diego (which really was on the beach), with scholarships for both. I could conceive of East Lansing, by contrast, only as an oversize parking garage.
I kept thinking about Prachi, pacing the kitchen all Christmas break, fuming as my mother chased her with a bowl of sesame oil, attempting to administer a calming Ayurvedic head massage. “Duke’s already got an Atlanta suburban brown girl who wants to be a businesswoman!” Prachi howled. “They won’t want me! Gita Menon! Gita fu—sorry, Amma, Gita fudging Menon!”
Shruti fudging Patel. A tiny, radical part of me had started to believe, over the course of the Lemonade Period, that one day I might be good enough to be in the kinds of rooms Anita had always planned to be in—the rooms Shruti had begun to unlock. But Shruti fudging Patel—who would want me when they had her?
“Jealous?” Shruti smirked. She did that curl-tugging thing again, and it infuriated me to see the lock bounce on her forehead. Her small marble eyes, which were too wide for her face and set too close together, bore into me shrewdly. I felt violated by the intensity of her attention.
“Not a bit,” I said, but minutes later I was kicking my locker after class. Fewer heads turned than you’d expect; in the honors hallway, people were always kicking things upon the distribution of grades.
Manu passed while I was examining the metal to see if I’d made a dent. “Chemistry?”
“Shruti,” I said.
“Did you apply for her summer stuff, too?” he said gloomily.
I shook my head. “I didn’t know—I had no idea you could do stuff like Hong Kong.”
“Have you talked to Mia?” Manu lowered his voice. “Be careful in East Lansing.”
Then he sighed and went to find Kartik, whose locker was in the normie hallway, with the white kids. He’d joined the lacrosse team that spring as its water boy, and claimed he would list the sport on his college application, therefore standing apart from other Asian applicants. I wasn’t seeing much of Kartik this year. The lemonade provided sharper focus, made me willing to ignore things—and people—that did not seem immediately useful. But I was afraid of wasting all this gold, spending it by kicking a locker instead of becoming something already.
Get it together, I thought furiously at myself. I was still failing to see my future, the way Shruti seemed so capable of doing, the way I presumed Anita must be able to, the way I knew Prachi could. How could it be that Shruti believed in her future self enough to survive the fact of her unpopularity, her date running away from her at last year’s Spring Fling just as mine had, the mocking in basements, the birthday party for which her parents had to issue invitations? Was it because she trusted a future Shruti was waiting, the girl just ahead of her in a relay race, to take the baton and bolt to Hong Kong, and college, and a better life? I lacked such certainty.
“We need more of Shruti’s,” I told Anita and her mother. Another Friday in the kitchen, Anita fresh from tennis.
Anjali Auntie shook her head. “We’ve taken a lot from her already. Two—”
“Three times,” Anita interrupted. I smelled the tang of her unwashed sweat.
“What’s the problem? You’re concerned she’ll notice stuff is missing?”
“That,” Anita’s mother said, lowering her nose to sniff a pot of chana masala. “But also, that we don’t want to overdo it. Poor girl, leave her something.”
“She’s got everything,” I sighed.
Anjali Auntie gave me an odd look, brief, full of some knowledge she might have shared, but that I missed. “There’s no shortage of others.” She turned to her daughter. “Anita, why do you insist on stewing in your own stink like this? You think Neil likes to smell you?”
I blushed.
“Upstairs, shower, please. You have a lot of homework?”
“Just AP US,” Anita said. “It’s a joke.”
“How are they filling up a school year with only American history? Neil has a millennium of Europe to study and this girl has just two hundred years of this strange country.”
* * *
• • •
Anita and I went on in our renewed way, passing more of those afternoons, brewing the lemonade ourselves. She was letting me back in, illuminating the black space that had spooled between us. Her mother was increasingly out, inside the perimeter and around the other suburbs for what I assumed was a combination of legitimate work and acquisitions. On the occasions that she was home,
Anita’s mother was often on the phone, upstairs, padding around, speaking in an urgent voice as we made the lemonade in the basement.
Anita had once been on jobs with her mother, but now she was never brought along. And months into our routine, I was growing impatient with this division of labor. I felt like a lazy, fat lion, remaining at home while the lioness hunted. I pictured myself tearing through the Bhatts’ mansion for Jay’s old coins or chains. Flipping Leela Matthews’s mattress upside down, seeking the lucky gold pinky ring she wore on test days. Most of all, Shruti. I pictured ripping her room apart. Absconding with all that gave her power. Those weirdly set eyes dimming. These impulses swelled in my vision, red and blinding, for minutes at a time before subsiding. Like war rage. Like bloodlust.
“How’s your dad?” I asked Anita one day in the basement. I opened the fridge and pulled out the lemons.
“He’s trying to get us to come to California.”
“In the middle of high school?”
“He thinks the family’s been split up for too long.”
Anita pointed at the drawer where they kept the glassware, indicating I should pull out the pitcher. A sudden dizziness swirled behind my forehead. The thought of the Dayal women departing when they had just begun to remake my world was too much to conceive of. And the lemonade—the loss of the lemonade. It crossed my mind, not for the first time, that I should not rely on these women for my lifeblood.
“We won’t go,” Anita said firmly. “She wouldn’t want to. My dad is not nice to her.” This came more softly.
“Would they—would they get divorced?”
Anita shook her head. “Do you know any divorced Indians? Other than Ashmita’s aunt.”
She didn’t wait for me to answer, just poured flux. I stepped back so she could lift the blowtorch. It was almost as big as her whole torso, but she wielded it confidently. When she recited the string of foreign phrases, I listened, more carefully than I had in the past. I tried to hear them reverberate in my mind, with enough intensity that they would etch themselves there.
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