Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  “Were they a . . . ?” I groped for the phrases my mother used to categorize other people’s marriages. “A love match?”

  Anita laughed with a nasty maturity. “They weren’t arranged,” she said. “Not by their parents. But I don’t think my mother ever really loved him. He doesn’t even seem like he likes her. That sounds sad, doesn’t it?”

  I said I didn’t know. I had never thought of my own parents as in love like in movies, but it didn’t make me sad.

  “It feels sad to me,” she said. “But maybe that love stuff is just American shit.”

  And then I was sad, at Anita’s cynicism. I had not realized before then that I was a romantic, but I saw how Anita seemed more engaged with a kind of crude sensate reality. She was perhaps more correct about the world. But I have, constitutionally and inevitably, always preferred the blur of mystery to the assuredness of empirical facts.

  Upstairs, Anjali Auntie’s footsteps came even and rhythmic. The contours of her life were inconceivable from where we stood. Love was a subtle want, to be known by more discerning minds.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was not explicitly planning anything. No great heist in the works, no Big Idea. I was just going about my life, head down, earning A’s, taking direction from Wendi Zhao. It was Shruti who presented herself to me. In the hallway, after history. She asked me, leaning with a practiced nonchalance against my slightly dented locker, blinking those marble eyes, and I said yes, and when I went home, I IM’d her—shr00tzinb00ts09—saying that on the evening of the Spring Fling dance I would like to pick her up from her house, skip all the picture parties. It was meant to sound intimate.

  I ignored Prachi’s raised eyebrows when I asked her to drop me off at Shruti’s before heading to her own party. In the driveway of Shruti’s house, Prachi said, “This is . . . nice of you.”

  That weekend, Anita was in coaching sessions with the pageant expert her mother had hired in advance of nationals. I’d told her nothing about Shruti or the dance. Anita seemed to have forgotten the old rhythms of Okefenokee High School.

  I’d met Shruti’s parents and ten-year-old sister at parties, but never been subjected to them the way I was in her living room that night. I tapped my foot and smacked my dry mouth, looking at the mantelpiece, where the Patels kept a single black-and-white image of two people in sari and kurta staring out at the camera, stiff and unsmiling.

  “My parents, wedding day,” her mother said, following my gaze. The sister, squeezed between the mom and dad, wore a smocked dress that made her look four years younger. Her hair was in pigtails. Her mouth hung slack as she stared at me, this weird, foreign creature, a boy.

  “Neeraj,” Mrs. Patel said. “Why this dancing needs dates and all?”

  “It’s an American thing, Auntie. It doesn’t mean dating, dating, like . . .”

  I thought I might be sick.

  The father interrupted, waving his hand to dismiss his wife’s questions so furiously that he nearly elbowed his small daughter in the face: “Have you taken SAT?” He pronounced the test not as ess-ay-tee but as the past tense of sit.

  “Uh, not yet,” I said. “I guess I’ll study for it next year.”

  “I’m only taking it next year, too!” squeaked the girl. Her fobby accent surprised me.

  “You are?”

  The mother clarified. “There is one camp, Neeraj, see, they take only very talented students, you have to have taken SAT”—once more, sat—“in sixth grade only. You did not go for this?” She looked terribly concerned, if not for me then for my parents, who clearly had missed some memos on the opportunities available to aspiring geniuses. “Right now, Hema, she studying for spelling bee, you did not do that either?” Shruti’s mother spoke each s and sh sibilantly, like a steaming kettle requesting attention.

  Then, like some blessing from above, my “date” arrived in the living room, wearing a pink dress that made her look like a Publix bakery cupcake, tulle around the hips and frightful tissue-paper-like flower blooms on the shoulders. Her hair had been straightened. It seemed like it might have taken hours to get it as flat as it now hung, which was depressing because it looked like an ironed squirrel’s tail, tamed but twitching. She had smeared something over her acne scars. Her mouth was switching rapidly between a contorted smile and an expression of terror, like one of those tragicomic dramatic masks. Her chickeny legs—long and skinny, unevenly shaved—stretched into high silver heels, on which she wobbled.

  Her parents were not waiting for her with a camera, not waiting for me to put a corsage on their daughter’s wrist—I had not brought one, anyway. There were no protocols for what happened when Shruti Patel was actually taken on a date. (Last year, she had met Manu at the dance.) Protocols would have made it easier—a churlish Southern father with a shotgun, threatening me. I conjured other scripts from television, from white culture, and wished to belong to any of them. Instead I stood as she took a shaky step onto the hardwood from the carpeted stairs. And I saw that in her ears were two large pearl studs. Around her neck was a silver chain with another pearl pendant. Probably not even real pearls.

  She was not wearing a single piece of gold. I had miscalculated.

  I said I needed to use the bathroom. Before anyone could point me to a room on the main floor, I was marching up those stairs, which smelled like cat, though there was no cat in the house. I pushed open one door and found myself in a child’s room full of stuffed animals. They piled high on the bed: a twin set of bright pink teddy bears wearing bowties, a lavender elephant, a bulge-eyed green frog. I had gotten the little sister’s room. I went back to the hallway and opened the other door to find a pale yellow bedroom housing shelves and shelves of porcelain dolls. The duvet looked like someone had vomited doily. There was no difference between age ten and age fifteen in this house. I was at a loss.

  I heard Shruti’s voice downstairs saying, “I’ll tell him, Mummy,” and “ouch,” and “I’ll take them off, hang on,” and the sound of bare feet climbing the stairs, and Shruti, watching me standing at the fork of her hallway, the doors to both bedrooms wide open.

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to go. I guess I knew . . . it wasn’t fair to ask you.”

  “Oh, god, no,” I said. “I just . . .” My hands were raised. I was still reaching for both doorknobs. “Which room’s yours? Dolls or stuffed animals?”

  She didn’t blush. “Dolls,” she said. So, my gut had been wrong. So perhaps I couldn’t find my way to her jewelry box on my own.

  “Show me around,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “I want to see where the magic happens. Where you beat me at all the tests.”

  Giggle. “Not recently.” She gulped. “I’m sorry I said I forget you’re an honors kid. It wasn’t true. I don’t. Um. Forget.”

  “I’m not as stupid as I seem, Shroots.”

  “I never thought you were stupid,” she said.

  I was hot. Sweaty. I had to keep talking or I’d wuss out. “Can I see? Unless your parents have some kind of rule about me being up here.”

  Shruti laughed, and her ironed hair tried to join in, crinkling awkwardly but too murdered to really engage, and she said, “They wouldn’t think to make rules about . . . boys.” She seemed more embarrassed to pronounce the last word, to acknowledge what I was, than to find me lurking in her space.

  There were many white dolls and one Native American one with a long braid and face paint, whom Shruti said she thought she best resembled, and whom she had christened Kalyani—the name she always wished she had been given.

  I took each doll as she proffered them, even rocked one a bit. I stepped closer to Shruti when she opened her closet, and she shouted down to her mother, “Coming, Mummy,” and then began to giggle.

  “Wait. Can I see your jewelry?” I whispered.

  “Hey, Neil,” she sai
d. “Are you, um, gay?” She blinked those uncannily set eyes several times, and I realized what could happen: the next time she was cornered, mocked, she could say this to everyone; you needed a way to reroute the cruelty when it descended on you.

  “Fuck no,” I said, and the panic drove me to do something else: I put my lips on her mouth, which was slick with something sticky. I withdrew. I had done it wrong. I thought of my one prior kiss at camp last summer—it had been rough, and too wet, doglike. I had overcompensated this time, with reticence. I said, “Still think that?”

  Her face grew pink. The second time, she lifted the back of her hand to her mouth, wiping away whatever lip gloss remained, and leaned into me. It was neither dry nor slobbery. If I concentrated, I could forget who she was.

  She pulled back. I was supposed to say something. What had I said to the camp girl before, or after? You’re hot, I’d muttered.

  “You’re smart,” I said. “You’re really, really smart.”

  The wrong choice, for now she was going in again, and then I felt her hand on my wrist, guiding me to her pink cupcake breast, and I felt it—the first breast I’d ever touched, and I was repulsed. I stopped. In her expression I saw confusion—Is this . . . isn’t this . . . what people do? She had overestimated my experience and tried to catch up by stealing second base. Her mother’s voice came again, and she shouted back, “Hang on, Mummy.”

  I moved quickly toward her closet and reached for a pink box on her shelf, next to the row of floral blouses with flappy collars. I opened it. I knew I was right this time, because the heat of the room was guiding me to the box, and when I saw the thin chain, I said, “That’s gold?”

  She nodded.

  “Can I keep it?”

  “My mom would be so mad, I lost this ring she gave me—”

  I leaned in again, cutting her off—a fourth time. When I withdrew, she nodded. The wondering expression—Is this what people do? There was still suspicion in her face, but it was combined with stupefaction, and most of all, ignorance. I needed to bookend the scene, to make her certain that what she had just given me made sense according to the transactions of boys and girls our age, that it was some sort of love token. I went in one final time. I told myself it was good practice.

  I pulled back, my tongue wet with hers—she’d gone very French that time. And there Shruti Patel stood in her room full of dolls, all of their bead eyes on us, all of the eyes of her childhood watching her as she took a great step toward what she thought was adulthood.

  * * *

  • • •

  That I abandoned Shruti for Manu and Kartik and Aleem and Jack and Abel at the dance; that I ignored her studiously for the week thereafter; that I managed to move my assigned seat in Euro from the place by the window, next to her, to the back chalkboard, telling Mr. Bakes (not untruthfully) that I was suffering migraines and couldn’t handle the light; that I ignored, too, the hoots about Spring Fling, until they subsided into a consensus that I had gone with her out of kindness . . . all this caused the incident to abate with dangerous ease.

  I had thought originally that I would need to have some sort of conversation with Shruti, explaining the merits of friendship over romance at this stage in our lives, but on the first day I saw her after the dance, kneeling by her locker, her eyes narrowed to suspicious ovals, and all I could mutter was a hi. I shuffled past. She seemed unsurprised. Normal reality had subsumed her once more. She only cast a few injured looks at me across the history classroom before stubbornly turning back to her notebook. I heard her speaking to Mr. Bakes after class about some must-read books on Hong Kong. I’d become just a silly incident in her past.

  Wendi Zhao commented on my glum mood over the following weeks: “Kid, don’t fuck up when I need you most.” She’d been wait-listed at Harvard, and the coaches had suggested that if they could tout a nationals win, she might be shifted to the “Z-list,” meaning she would be offered a chance to take a gap year and enroll the following fall.

  My family noticed as well. I was dull at dinners, dampening the celebratory mood—for despite all the heartache and cursing of Gita Menon over the past few months, Prachi had in the end received her glorious fat envelope in the mail. My father, never a drinker, had made a toast with his water glass several nights in a row, while my mother’s eyes welled up, and I hmmed a congratulations gamely through a mouthful of saaru.

  Passing my room to get to the attic after one of those toasting dinners, my father paused. “You can do what Prachi did, too,” he said.

  I thought I’d heard him wrong. “What?”

  “We are feeling like our decision to come here makes sense, with you two doing so well.”

  I almost wished for him to revert to his old suspicions.

  I had, if you counted it out, what I needed to not fuck up debate nationals. I took a regular dose from our competitors—Soumya Sen, and one of Anita’s Bobcat classmates whose earring and anklet she had nabbed from the PE locker room, just for me. But I had come to understand that brewing the perfect lemonade was not a matter of taking luck or specific talents from another person and drinking those down. I needed whatever it was that had caused Shruti Patel to so effectively move on when I had done to her worse than what Anita had done to me the previous year. I needed her belief, her faith, and the thing that ignited both in her. I needed something to get me through tomorrow and tomorrow, tomorrow—when I would finally, finally be able to begin the process of becoming a real person.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days before she left for New Jersey, Anita’s instant messenger avatar reappeared online for the first time in months. She must have unblocked me, at long last. I found the conversation in adulthood, archived in my old email. I can’t remember what I felt like during or after the chat. It is like one of those artifacts of history I studied later as a graduate student—the thing the people experiencing it missed, the thing that might have changed the rest. When we handle such artifacts, we condescend about how ignorant the denizens of the past are. But we forget that the past is a blind, groping place.

  neil_is_indian: sup

  anibun91: guess whos gonna be in new jersey this weekend

  neil_is_indian: uh u?

  anibun91: other than me!!

  neil_is_indian: ur mom ba doom chha

  anibun91: *sigh* sam

  neil_is_indian: o shit

  anibun91: im like:OOO

  anibun91: hes visiting his cousin or something

  anibun91: who goes to rutgers

  anibun 91: n then his parents r gonna take him to see princeton lol w/e

  anibun91: not that he could get into princeton (!)

  neil_is_indian: thats rando

  anibun91: ok ya

  anibun91: but then when i mentioned the pageant he was like o maybe ill come

  anibun91: (!?!!?!!?!?!?!!?!?! whaaaaat)

  neil_is_indian: the brown ppl will trample him

  neil_is_indian: “one of these is not like the others”

  neil_is_indian: “kill outsider”

  anibun91: im so embarrassed

  neil_is_indian: no ur not

  anibun91: what do u mean of course i am

  neil_is_indian: ur gonna win its gonna be fine

  neil_is_indian: & he likes u even if he is an asshole

  anibun91: who says hes an asshole?

  neil_is_indian: u did?

  anibun91: w/e no he isnt

  anibun91: but actually im like so sick of this pageant and all the fobs

  anibun91: and sick of being only

  anibun91: like

  anibun91: pretty for a brown girl

  anibun91: hey u still there

  anibun91: ??

  neil_is_indian: ya sorry @ debate

  neil_is_indian: wendi on my ass
r />   anibun91: oooooooooh

  neil_is_indian: not like that shes anal

  neil_is_indian: also not like that

  anibun91: w/e u have yellow fever

  neil_is_indian: ???????

  anibun91: melanie, wendi, lol

  neil_is_indian: theyr both twinkies and im a coconut so nothing counts

  anibun91: um literally ur screen name

  neil_is_indian: its IRONIC

  neil_is_indian: g2g

  anibun91: ok bai

  neil_is_indian: good luck

  neil_is_indian: this weekend

  neil_is_indian: w the pageant i mean

  anibun91: i might not like him

  anibun91: like im not totally sure now?

  neil_is_indian: sam?

  anibun91: ya

  neil_is_indian: who do u like then

  anibun91: who says i *have* to like someone?

  neil_is_indian: okok

  anibun91: now i g2g

  neil_is_indian: actually wait

  neil_is_indian: can i talk to u about smthg

  neil_is_indian: kinda important

  anibun91 has signed off

  * * *

  • • •

  The weekend Anita and her mother were in New Jersey—which was also the weekend before debate nationals—I let myself into the Dayals’ house early on Saturday morning using the key beneath the watering can.

  In the basement, I set about performing the routine I had been memorizing for months.

  Shruti’s chain piled into itself in the basin. Was this how the forty-niners felt—sweaty, exhausted, sick with themselves, having left behind all that was familiar for this gleaming element? Flux, sloshing. Goggles, the rest of the ill-lit basement obscured through the plastic.

  I started to recite the string of foreign phrases—Asya swarnasya kantihi shaktir gnyanam casmabhihi praapyataam—but I stumbled. I started again. I watched the gold almost throbbing in the basin, like it was daring me to take it. “Fuck,” I muttered. Then I clamped my hands over my mouth, afraid for a moment that I’d polluted the enchantment with my cursing. I took a great heaving breath, began again, and got through it that time . . . and at last, there was the liquid, my shot of gold, the same as it had always looked at the end of this process and yet completely different—because this time it was all mine.