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

“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.

“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