The Taste of Ginger(4)
They all nodded with that side-to-side bobble that to the untrained eye could have been yes or no, but they all understood what was meant by it.
A lump formed in my throat. My mother shifted her gaze toward the worn carpet, a light-tan color that had survived the last couple of decades remarkably well, but that was probably due to the strict no-shoes policy within our home. Her biggest fear was that her friends would find out I wasn’t so different from the girl they were gossiping about, that once everyone knew the truth, I’d be destined to be alone forever. No good Indian family would let me marry their son.
Gita Auntie reached out and cupped my chin with her thumb and index finger and shook my face from side to side. “Our little Hollywood lawyer. When will it be your turn?”
I leaned back to politely break from her grasp. Gita Auntie didn’t believe in personal space, preferring to communicate with her hands rather than her words.
“I work seventy hours a week,” I offered as my excuse.
“You must think more seriously.” She put her hand on my shoulder and then lowered her voice. “You are thirty, no? After that, you know, women lose their luster.”
I bit back the urge to say I had just bought a fancy new moisturizer that promised to keep my “luster” intact for years to come. Instead, I forced out an empty laugh and found myself using Alex’s old coping mechanism. He’d do it whenever he was agitated. It used to drive me crazy, but right now, counting slowly in my head was a better plan than causing a scene and making the day with my mother more uncomfortable than it already was. One, two, three . . .
Monali Auntie must have noticed the troubled look on my face, because she put down her plate and marched over to our group.
“Come. Let me take a photo of you with your family.” She was the only person in the room I would have trusted with my cherished camera. And she knew it.
My mother and Dipti adjusted the pleats on their saris as we stood in a line with my mother in the center. After making sure her clothes were in order, she reached over and took each of our hands, her quintessential family-photo pose. Nothing to give away that she hadn’t spoken to her only daughter in months. After all, what would people think if they knew?
As we stood waiting for the click of the shutter, I could focus on only one thing. It was small. Stupid. I knew that, especially given how the past year had gone. But I couldn’t shake the feeling. She had reached for Dipti’s hand first. Part of me was angry, but another part of me—the analytical side—didn’t blame her. After a long day at the hospital, Dipti still could roll out a paper-thin rotli that puffed evenly when placed on the heat and could dance a flawless twelve-step garba routine. Even if I’d been given a week to prepare, I couldn’t have done either of those things. And she never talked back to my mother. Ever.
I gritted my teeth. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen . . .
It seemed obvious that even though I was the daughter she had, Dipti was the one she wanted.
2
When the party began winding down, I volunteered to do the dishes just as a good obedient daughter should. Being in the room with my mother and pretending as though we were one big happy family had been suffocating, and I needed the escape. The calming sound of running water was a nice contrast to the loud, chirping voices I’d listened to all afternoon. Only a few more hours and I’d be on a plane back to LA.
Back to the apartment I’d dreaded going to since Alex moved out. It still hurt not to see his slightly crooked smile and dark-brown hair framing his pale skin when I came home after a twelve-hour day at the office. Even with Alex’s stuff gone, I could feel him there. There was a black smudge in the hallway from when we moved in his dresser and my end had slipped. And a hard patch on the rug in the living room from when he knocked over a beer while waving his hands at the television during a baseball game. That apartment was full of happy memories as much as my parents’ house was full of difficult ones.
The pain was even more acute because I had no one to blame but myself. Alex had asked me to go with him when he’d found out he had to move to New York for production of the independent film he had written. But I’d been too scared. Not of him or of us. But of the life he was proposing. Him working on his movie, me leaving my law firm job and pursuing photography. The bohemian-chic lifestyle he’d painted was romantic, and idealistic, and completely unstable.
I knew it wouldn’t work out the way he envisioned. My family had been crammed into a three-bedroom town house with three other families when we first immigrated to America when I was seven years old. My parents had struggled from paycheck to paycheck. There was nothing romantic about it. I knew it wasn’t smart for me to give up the security that came with my awful job without having a backup plan for after we burned through the money he’d been paid for the screenplay. My parents had taught me early in life that love wouldn’t pay the bills. And it wasn’t just my bills to worry about. Neel and I were our parents’ greatest investment. Their financial struggles had put Neel and me in a place where we no longer had to worry. And in our culture, the “we” had to be the four of us. Five, when he married Dipti, and soon to be six.
My fingers brushed over a tiny chip on the edge of a plate. The thin white Corelle dishes with the blue flower pattern along the edges were the first ones my parents had bought in America. Over the years, my brother and I had bought our parents new dinnerware sets. Even though the gifts were prominently displayed in the china cabinet my parents had purchased at a garage sale twenty years earlier, they were never used. My mother said the old dishes were perfectly good, so why “waste” the new ones? My parents lived cautiously, assuming financial instability was always around the corner. During my childhood, they’d often been right. But now that it no longer threatened our family, they still couldn’t let their apprehension go. It was as though the stress had become so much a part of them that it defined them.