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

We drank, both of us. A swish, a thud of the glasses back on the bar, and I slid mine to admire the rings it made on the dark wood, also so I could have something in motion to look at.

“Tell me about your history work.”

“Uh, well. I don’t know. I’m supposed to be writing about the Gilded Age. But I’ve been messing with some stuff about an Indian dude in the gold rush.” I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t tried to explain Snider to anyone. It felt strange to try to account for what I’d been doing for the past weeks. “But really, mostly it’s the Gilded Age.”

It suddenly seemed that without directly discussing the span of time that had passed since we’d last seen each other, we would, in fact, have nothing to say.

“I watched your video,” I said, before my bravery dissipated. “Your speech.” She squinted, honestly; perhaps she’d given many speeches. “Miss Teen India?”

“Oh, yeah?” She shook her hair so it curtained her face, briefly, then re-parted it. “I got in trouble for that. They gave me three minutes to blabber about tech, and I went rogue.”

I bristled to see that she’d considered invoking Shruti a radical act. “You’re proud of it.”

“I mean, yes. I was given a platform. I wanted to say something with it. I was angry with that organization—it made girls anorexic and anxious, and I didn’t grasp how much damage all the high school messaging had done until I got to college. . . .” She slowed as her eyes flicked across my face. “Huh,” she said, almost disinterestedly. “You’re pissed.”

“Yeah.” I was speaking with an assurance that would have eluded a younger me. And yet I was afraid to push too hard, in case she retreated back to whatever world had possessed her for so long. “You traded on it.”

“What do you think I traded it for?”

My hand shook and beer sloshed. “You don’t think you got credit for being this . . . prophetess of mental health? You didn’t feel hypocritical? You just tied everything up. Like it was all way back in the past.”

“But it is, Neil,” she said sadly. “It is way back in the past. That doesn’t make it any less horrible. But it’s there. It’s too late.”

The bartender was forming a kind of metronome, clinking liquor bottles against each other and stacking glasses. I turned to Anita and was surprised to find her unblinking eyes still on me. All her concentration seemed to be focused on convincing me—of something.

“You think about her a lot, don’t you?” Anita said more softly.

“Most days.” I drew on my beer glass with my pinky. “I’ve never told anyone.”

“Why not? I don’t mean about the lemonade. I mean about— her.”

“How could I have?” I’d considered making Shruti my great confession in college. I wanted to erupt with the unsayable story of her during beer-foamy make-outs. When a girl began to tell me about her trauma, which she had learned to wrap in the language of a white therapist, I considered hissing her name, Shruti, daring the girl to ask further. “There’s no language for what happened.”

“No language? Or language you don’t want to have to use?” The space behind my sternum burned. “Anyway,” she added, “aren’t you quite good with language?”

I had worried sometimes, with Wendi, with Arabella, that my capacity to feel immense emotions—not just grief or terror, but the kind of rich aches that remake you—had died with the end of the Lemonade Period. What they say about addicts: in the end, the brain is fried, and the daily dramas of life become doldrums. But sitting in the Sonora, with Anita’s gaze haloing me for the first time in years, a glimmer of all that returned, and it felt like grace.

“I am sorry,” she said. “For being cold to you for so long.”

“Cold? You ignored me. I had nobody—”

“I couldn’t have helped you. I needed space. And you’d made me feel so dirty, Neil. That night stuff happened with you and me? I could feel her in my bedroom with us as soon as I realized what you’d done. I swore I could just see her glaring at me. She liked you. That’s all I could think about, how much she’d liked you, and I just couldn’t look at you again.”

“Yeah,” I said. It was the first time I had ever been told by someone else what I had done. And I felt less shame than relief, for at least here was someone corroborating the lonely certitude I’d lived with for years; here was one of two other people alive who knew what I was. “I couldn’t look at me, either.”

Anita ran a hand through her bob as though to pull out tangles, but there were none. “I was also mad because I thought my mother pushed me too hard when I was already running myself ragged. And then I thought she forgave you too fast, and that she was doing this thing my grandma did with her kids, like, favoring boys.”

The bartender shook out a new bowl of peanuts. I crammed some into my mouth. “You never told anyone?”

She chewed her bottom lip vigorously. I waited for a zipper of blood to appear on that plump mouth. “I don’t really like having to sit with myself. But I had to go to therapy eventually, and I talked around it there, got some emotional vocabulary, which isn’t a bad thing. And my ex knew the non-gold parts.”

“When did, ah, when did you break up?”

“Which time?” she laughed. “He moved out earlier this year. For good, finally. But we’d been on and off since college.”

“What’s his deal?” My curiosity about how Anita had spent the past ten-odd years overwhelmed the sense of violation that came with hearing about a guy who’d been in and out of her bed for half that decade. And anyway, I had come to understand, through those many beer-foamy make-outs, that telling a story of who you were before a particular moment is