Like a Bird, page 3
This Sunday, Mama, in a bid to not feel isolated from her husband’s roots, was hosting a bunch of Indians for dinner. She didn’t dare cook, but had the entire event catered by a chic young Indian chef, Shriya Rao, whom she had met downtown at a New Museum mixer. Mama wanted to show (desperately prove) that she had perspective, that she wasn’t just another balmy white woman, incapable of showing depth. She knew she had it, and she relied on her faith, to a certain degree.
Like most young Jewish New Yorkers, she had a relatively positive experience with Judaism; she went to temple, had a Bat Mitzvah, and was raised with the teachings in an intellectual way. She didn’t agree with everything (least of all her parents, whom she found stuffy and incongruently racist), but she found respite in the Torah, in her people, in the struggle for justice. She read Susan Sontag and Vivian Gornick avidly and looked to them as a certain class of intellectual mentorship she longed for. She wanted to show these Indians that she understood the violence of white supremacy. Because, on some level, she did.
Baba and she had a shared sense of winning. They saw their marriage as a component to strengthen themselves, separately and together. An Indian and a Jew unite to make a better future for each other and their children. It was romantic, we (as a family, a unit) became a political statement. Except neither of them had the verve to carry this on with much intentionality. It was easier to pretend than to become. I witnessed this, in the ways they held their friends accountable for standards they were too lazy to unlearn. They slid in and out of political radicality, but for the most part, they got lost in the fumes of a desire for a good life. Because, in more ways than one, they both wanted proximity to whiteness. Which is why their self-hating qualities were so egregious and strong. Besides, when wealth became palpable, both from an inheritance for my mother (which included, among a lot of money, a brownstone in the Upper West Side) and their joint income as tenured professors at Columbia University (Mama was also a curator), they became upper middle class in a stealth way. They hated the idea of the rich, without acknowledging they themselves had joined the ranks of the class they hated so much. It went against their principles—oh, how garish and pompous were the wealthy!
They loved each other, which is why they could put up with this farce together. Both each other’s protectors, comrades, partners in an innocent crime. It didn’t seem so bad to be fake, to not stand behind your values in a total way. They were human, they were allowed to have faults—everybody had a black hole of foibles. In order to keep up with the charade, it was important to have someone to rely on, someone who would reflect only the most shiny parts of yourself back to you. So they needed the other. It was a weird, mild obsession. I knew it was rare to witness this kind of love from parents, and in that regard, I was lucky.
But, still, I personally felt like an add-on. I began to understand the dissonance of my being in this family in my early teens. But at that point, what was I to do? I knew they shared a love and devotion with Alyssa, but not with me. Not for a lack of trying, but I just wasn’t like her. I was made with more mistakes. She was Michelangelo’s David, marble bodied and toned. I was an Uffizi’s David, a mere replica. Without distinction of my own, I was doomed to a life of comparison. It sounds dramatic, and it was. In so many ways not being like Alyssa haunted me.
Mama had warned Alyssa and me ahead of time that we were responsible for cleaning up the house before the Sunday dinner. She said, “Don’t test me!” with a grave look I suppose every mother had a variation of. To me, it felt a task both reasonable and valuable, two things I liked. So I agreed.
I came downstairs, out of my private sun-time read, to help. Alyssa was on the couch, her headphones sucking her ears in. Her legs across the leather or the headrest like a slope. I tried to get her attention, but she was in her own world, so I skulked around Mama, awaiting instruction. A little anxious, I hated not knowing where to stand. Mama, slightly caustic, sighed passed me and I stayed silent, waiting for a signal. When she had her head in the pantry, I made my move.
“Ma, I’m here.” Sometimes, even English, or language itself, felt foreign to me.
“I can see that Taylia.”
“What can I do?”
“Hang on a second.” Her tone was already annoyed.
I looked toward Alyssa, legs still sprawled across the sofa like a fan, chewing gum. I bit the inside of my cheek, a rubbery sole. Inhaling shortly, to minimize crying, I exhaled fast. “Okay, Mama.”
Eventually she told me diligently, as if I were applying for a job. I ended up doing everything (cleaning the downstairs family room and the guest bathroom, vacuuming all the floors), as Alyssa had helped for roughly only ten minutes, feigned an excuse, and left. When I eventually told Mama all had been done, she looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “Please don’t wear anything tight today, you’re looking a bit lumpy right now.” In response I didn’t say anything, maybe in shock, and walked away.
I always wondered what it was about me that felt so abstracted next to my sister. I understood I was pretty, to a certain degree, but maybe it felt blurry next to Alyssa’s definitions. My parents didn’t help in that regard, either. In many ways, I was voluptuous in a way Alyssa wasn’t. I had tits and an ass, I had form. I knew that was seemingly attractive on others, but on me it felt like an excess. I didn’t wear it well. Mama would add to this by watching my body with a glaring awareness that pivoted to perpetual critique. As if all I needed to do was embrace x, y, and z—and I would be beautiful. “Just lose a bit of the baby fat,” or “Don’t walk so heavily on the stairs,” or “Eat less at night.” Mama became a weight checker and reprimander. Alyssa seemed to have perfect form, the kind of metabolism models have. Thinness felt like another passport I didn’t have.
In her own ways, Alyssa tried to confront this, using her tools of persuasion against our parents. She wasn’t the type of person who enjoyed being put on a pedestal. It annoyed her, and in that shared frustration, we formed an alliance. Things changed in our relationship when she decided to protect me. It was subtle, but we both knew. Sisters can be the worst, but with a shared goal, we could be powerful.
Zeina, though not Indian, was a perfect pawn in Mama’s night for hosting the Indians. I watched her as she elegantly entertained a crowd of captivated women. Simon’s parents, Rakesh and Marissa, were in attendance, including a few others who had teen kids who didn’t come. Unsurprisingly, Simon had. Since I had cried earlier from Mama’s comments, my focus that night was a bit blurry, though I do remember Alyssa and Simon walking in from outside looking sedated, eyes glazed, a frightening strung-out look of glee stuck on their faces like clown paint. They looked suspicious, but that night I didn’t really care. I watched Zeina with mild reverie, the way she walked around the house, a giraffe, head to toe in a perfect brown beige, hair sleek. Mama looked like she was having fun, talking to Shriya, her pixie-cut-having, boy-band-member-hot chef friend. Shriya had served modern-style French-Indian cooking like crab curry bouillabaisse and chicken tikka masala mousse. Everyone seemed to enjoy the pretentiousness, including me, and Mama loved collecting cool Brown tokens, proof that she was more evolved than her own parents, at the very least. Baba looked bored for most of the pleasantries, like he gave about no fucks to begin with. But then, in a quick second, he’d look mildly alive—ffred up like a birthday sparkler—as he debated Rakesh, the way best friends who were bitter rivals did.
Later, everyone but Zeina had gone. Baba, a splendid brat as usual, had left the dishes to the women, and Mama acquiesced because she loved him. She found humor in his latent, and arguably lazy, misogyny. A habit, and advantage, of being the only son. It’s not as if his mother, Dadi-ma, had spoiled him, but his culture deffnitely did. It propped up his intelligence above any woman’s, and like many unspectacular men, he believed in the bullshit to save his ego.
Alyssa was eating ice cream, Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked, right out of the tub. I could tell Zeina was enamored by Alyssa’s elegance, as so many were. It was her eyes, but also her entire demeanor: slightly coquettish, yet composed, with wisdom. It was less seductive and more alluring.
“My God, honey, you really are a beauty,” Zeina exclaimed, a New Jersey accent emerging from the depths.
Ma sighed, taken, suddenly, by her eldest daughter’s beauty, a sincerely perfect combination of hers and Baba’s. Alyssa looked uncomfortable, shuddering at the attention. She sucked on her last spoonful of ice cream.
“Honestly,” she muttered after a few moments, gulping down the last slime of cream, “Tay’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.”
Up until then I had been staring at Zeina’s perfect moonshaped cuticles, wondering why mine didn’t look the same. Pulled out of this thought, I was launched into the center of attention. One I hadn’t asked for and, yet, I was moved by. Both Mama and Zeina were staring at me, smiling in the fake indulgent way people smile at you sometimes. Alyssa repeated herself, but this time to me: “You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.” Thing is, I believed her. Maybe that’s why I loved her, she saw me. She validated me, even knowing I had hair on my lower back and bumps on my legs and arms that I had recently found out was keratosis pilaris.
Mama and Zeina smiled and carried on, moving through the weirdness of conversation, but a little drunk. Alyssa was dancing, tapping her toes on the Persian runner in the hallway as Alice Coltrane’s Reflection on Creation and Space played, and we all, in our ways, languidly cleaned up the mess of the night’s unravelings.
7.
Baba had been acting more erratic these days. His anger—once a collected fire that had limits, that knew its own terrain—was now a thick bloom of smoke, billowing over. Months after the loss of Alyssa, he was forgetting words (which made him angrier), stumbling on details. Phone numbers he once could recall with an impressive fastness he now no longer remembered. Simultaneously he forgot the names of friends back in India, of the colleges he went to, and the stores he used to love to peruse. His memories were fading, maybe as a protective measure, for all the pain he couldn’t quite grasp anymore. But it scared him, and it scared Mama, too.
I saw her begin to worry, to shiver with subservience. She had never been a subservient wife, just a loving one. Still, she had during our childhoods put up with his mood swings, the fresh spark of his sometimes megalomaniacal anger that would eventually cool with time. Now, it was a different, more reserved kind of anger, and she was visibly gaunt from the stress, from the pressures of sadness. I could see that her emotions tugged at the idea that she and her husband would get through this together. That they could reconstruct their past, that their home should not be a tomb. At times, I saw her be strong for the both of them, but it frustrated me that she didn’t understand that Baba was a broken trolley with an inclination to steer only toward what he deemed right. He never liked asking for advice, especially not now.
Since taking a break from college, I’d been spending hours in my room alone, remembering, revisiting, thinking what else I could have done or seen in advance. Suddenly, my mother knocked at the door. She never knocked, never beckoned, never called my name anymore. It’s as if knocking was acknowledging the absence of Alyssa. I cracked the door open, but only just.
“There’s a phone call,” she whispered. “It’s Simon Sharma.”
“For me?”
She nodded. There was a lightness to her I hadn’t seen in months. I took the phone from her hand and cumbersomely brought it to my ear.
“Hello?”
I watched my mother as he said hello back. We were both frowning, wearing the same expression of nervousness. He asked if he could see me. I said yes. He asked when. I said any time: “I’m always free.” I knew that it echoed desperation, but I had never had a man call me at home before and I was hungry for that kind of love, for Mama to see me receive it. But I also felt silly thinking Simon Sharma could love me. He wanted to get drinks, “possibly dinner. Tonight?” I said of course. Of course I said of course. He gave me a time and I said sure, then with determination he hung up. I still held the phone to my ear, listening to the sound of an empty line. I looked Mama in the eye and she smiled. It was the first smile I had seen in months.
After what happened to Alyssa, I knew I had to do something, anything. It wasn’t like me to watch my mother deteriorate. I had so many memories of them together—her pride of Alyssa blazed through her like beams of light, and Alyssa’s filial piety shone like its beacon. Through the two of them, I was able to conceptualize the real strength of maternal love.
Simon picked me up at eight o’clock sharp in an Uber. Mama loved a punctual man. He stood and charmed her outside as I leaned against the base of the stairs, entirely nervous. Lately everything had been stunted, dimmed. At last, despite the nerves, I felt the air around me sharpening, the colors changing into brighter hues. I could smell the liveliness and I became excited, having forgotten entirely that I had the ability to feel that still.
We careened through the Friday night traffic with nothing much to talk about. Music, curated by the Uber driver, played to fill in the gaps of conversation, but I didn’t mind. I was always more fond of conversational silence than I was of actual conversing. The air inside the car was stale and climatized, and my legs were cold inside my clothes. Another chill rose as I felt his hand on my biceps. “How are you doing over there, Ms. Always in My Head?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” I said, reacting fast, laughing it off. I was uncomfortable by the tease, but angry at my uneasiness. I brushed it off and didn’t indulge him with more of an answer. Instead, I watched as the tiny bulbs of city light moved across and around me. I was so captivated by the rhythm of my surroundings that the sound of a car door opening startled me as I realized we had arrived. Bracing myself, I took a few moments to open my own side, but by the time I reached over he had already come and opened it for me. Again, I felt uncomfortable, but I let it go, not knowing how to dissect the feeling in real time. I imagined I was just being dramatic, or a wuss. We walked into a wood-fired pizza place and it was crowded. I felt myself recoiling from the eyes on us, but I also wanted to stop the mental gymnastics of anxiety, so focused on shutting my mind down. I wanted to enjoy this, I reminded myself. Shifting my focus to Simon, I immediately noticed the glances from women nearby and the waiters at his feet.
As we were finally ushered to a table, I sat down and looked around meekly, feeling, for the most part, undeserving of his time.
“You’re wondering why I asked you here, aren’t you?”
“I can’t say I haven’t thought about that…” My smile was crooked. Grateful for the chance to be transparent.
He smiled back, saying nothing. After a break in the conversation, he changed the tone, abruptly, intently: “I am sorry about your sister.”
“Oh.”
“I really liked her.”
I stared down at the fork lingering in my hand.
“I did it for Alyssa.”
“For Alyssa?”
Today marked the second anniversary of her death. Did he know? Did he remember? He didn’t answer me, but smiled.
“You always act so embarrassed,” Alyssa admonished me days after seeing Simon on the street downtown. I was baking, attempting to make a flourless chocolate cake. She sat opposite, slurping on a tart cherry Popsicle, chastising me.
“I do?” I asked, already embarrassed.
“Girl, you know you do.”
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, greasing the cake pan with butter.
She leaned over the counter and flicked me on the side of my left shoulder, right near the bone. “Stop apologizing for everything.”
“Okay, first, ow. Second, what the fuck else am I supposed to do?” I didn’t know all the answers like her, I didn’t have all the answers like her.
“You act like you don’t know shit.”
I didn’t know how to tell her that I didn’t know shit. “I’m not like you, okay? I don’t have fancy good taste. I’m not confident…”
I paused and looked up. I felt like I was lying, like I was playing a role that had been assigned to me; subconsciously I had deemed Alyssa superior to me, and I felt like I served her at times. It’s as if I baited her to feel sorry for me, to take pity. But I also wanted her to feel powerful, and I was feeding her. I was feeding her ego. I almost apologized again, but before I could she stopped me. “Yes, maybe you’re right. Maybe I do have it easier…”
“I mean, just a little.” I didn’t want to enumerate all the ways she really did have it easier. I also didn’t want to burden her with all the ways in which she benefited from her access to whiteness. So instead I just made a cake, pouring the batter diligently into the circular tin. I passed her the blue speckled bowl that had all the leftover batter, to dip our fingers into like Dadi-ma when she cooked, edging her pointed, fat finger, using it as a spatula to taste. We shared the moment, with batter in between, staring into the divide of our beings, all the things that separated us. These were moments that stuck out to me, when she tried to understand me. Nobody had ever tried to do that before.
Simon was evocative in the strangest way. There was an unnerving quality to his handsomeness, like a shrill, penetrating hostility. His eyes were shrewd and discerning, and an inexplicable sen sation lingered in my gut every time I saw him looking my way. They were so gray, and at moments near the light, I saw them flicker with an emotion I couldn’t place.
