“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
