Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

with school things—composition notebooks, a chemistry textbook, a Folger edition of Macbeth. Above all that was the Harvard shrine that had papered her walls since middle school: a crimson pennant, a beat yale sign someone’s cousin had donated, a page torn from a lookbook featuring a diverse array of students taking in the sun on the Yard. Anita sat up, unclasped her gold hoop earrings, and placed them atop Macbeth before flopping onto her stomach.

“Neil,” she said, more to the pillow than to me. “He doesn’t like me.”

“Who?”

“The guy, the guy, Sam. Sam.” She emitted a kind of horse whinny. “He likes Mary Claire Turner. Em-cee. She has no butt. It’s flat, just shwoop, back there. He doesn’t even see me, he looks shwoop, right through me.”

“Why did you go out with those kids? Your mom would kill you if you’d gotten caught. And where is your mom?”

She shrugged. “I dunno.” A hiccup, racking her whole frame. “She has places she goes places, I dunno, like, she’ll say, ‘I’m not like other moms, I leave you alone,’ but one day I’m gonna drown in all her lemonade.” A hiccup that turned into a gag.

“Do you need to puke again?”

“Never ever ever again.” She shook her head violently. “I hate Mary Claire Turner.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Say you do, too, Neil, say it.”

I considered not playing along, but gave in. “I hate Mary Claire Turner, too.”

“Em-cee,” Anita said, chewing on the inside of her cheeks. I thought she was going to spit Mary Claire Turner’s name right out on the carpet. “She’s spoiled.”

“You’re acting spoiled.”

“Huh?”

“No. Nothing.”

“No, no, like, say what you were gonna say.”

“I don’t know what to say to you, Anita.”

“You’re so pissy at me.”

“Yeah, a little.”

“You’re always so pissy at me.”

“Not always. Just now.”

Her loosened ponytail had fallen on her face. “I feel like I’m gonna explode.”

I had the urge to push up her hair, clear her skin, give her room to breathe.

“You get it?” she said.

Was that all she wanted me to do, get it? All I could do? “I think so.”

“Sam,” she sighed. “You know, I thought sometimes, sometimes, I’m like, hey, lemme acquire something from Mary Claire Turner, you know.” She was turning her face into her pillow, away from me. I just heard her say one thing before I left, before my hand closed around the hoops she had placed atop Macbeth. “But there’s no point, see, because white girls, they don’t even wear gold, white girls, they prefer”—hiccup—“they prefer pearls.”

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