The Invitation

by Anne Cherian

  “Still looking, Sam,” Jay answered.

  “Why do you think I have it?”

  Jay started laughing. “Because, Sam, we’ve been telling you for days and days that we’re going to a big party tonight, and instead you want to have pizza.”

  “Dad!” Sam finally realized he had been had.

  By now Frances and Lily were laughing loudly, though Mandy wasn’t participating. She was pouring syrup on her pancake.

  “And speaking of tonight,” Jay rubbed his hands together, “are you ready to par-tay?”

  “I am,” Sam spoke through a mouthful of pancake. “Will there be Coke and 7UP and Sprite?”

  “There should be,” Jay answered. “You can bet that there will be good Indian food. Yummy in your tummy.” He tousled Sam’s hair.

  “Do they have good Indian drinks?” Sam asked.

  “Of course they do. Lassi and lemonade and even limeade,” Jay counted off. “I’m sure Uncle Vic will have those, as well as a whole bunch of American sodas.”

  “I’m wearing my red shoes,” Lily said with satisfaction.

  “Mandy, are you all set to have sodas and watch your sister dancing in her red shoes?” Jay wanted to include her. She was eating her breakfast with a faraway look. As always when he saw it, he worried.

  “I don’t like dancing,” Mandy stated.

  “Aren’t you looking forward to wearing your new dress?” Frances asked gently. Ever since she had booked their tickets, she hadn’t been getting angry with Mandy. It was easier to put up with her, knowing that soon they would be in another country, where things were going to be different. Mandy was the real American here, and there were many times when Frances let her daughter lead the way. But in India, she would be in charge of everything.

  So when Mandy kept complaining about not wanting to go to the party, Frances hadn’t reacted. Instead, one evening she took her shopping.

  Frances used to long to go shopping with Mama when she was a girl. But because she was the youngest, she inherited most of her clothes. It hadn’t mattered when she was very small. She used to look forward to wearing what Mama said were “hand-me-overs.” But when she grew older, she wanted new outfits. Mama would explain that since the clothes were in good condition, there was no need to buy anything new for her. But the clothes looked old, and she was always hearing that she looked just like the sister whose dress she now wore, and then like the other sister whose skirt now fit her.

  Frances would cry in the bathroom, because she felt that her sisters had gotten everything first. Her oldest sister Gloria was the family beauty; Ivy was the smartest; Hazel had beautiful hazel eyes; and Alba had the best figure. It was almost as if even God, who had forgotten to make her a boy, had neglected to give her something special that made her stand apart from the others. She never wanted her daughter to feel that way, and decided that though it would make the party more expensive, she would buy Mandy a new dress.

  Frances assumed that the other Indian girls at the party would wear colorful, mirror-decorated ghagra cholis that they had either bought in India or ordered online. Mama had never allowed any of her daughters to wear Indian-style clothes. Tight churidars with calf-length kurtas were popular when she was young, but these days the infusion of Bollywood films had started a trend for the fully gathered ghagra skirts that came down to the ankle, along with a midriff-baring choli. She could not imagine Mandy in something so—ethnic—and decided to stick with what she knew, which was Western clothes.

  She had found an off-the-shoulder, floor-length black dress. Mandy tried it on, and even though she didn’t say much, Frances could tell that her daughter liked it.

  “You’ll look beautiful in your dress,” Frances now said.

  “It’s okay, I guess,” Mandy mumbled.

  The phone rang. It must be the Miller connection.

  “I have to get this,” Frances said quickly. She was en route to the kitchen when she realized it wasn’t her cell phone.

  Jay glanced at the ringing phone. They had a rule about not picking up any phones during meals, but Frances had just broken it. Lily was at the age when she loved answering the phone.

  Feeling a little like the God he used to be in Mandy’s eyes, Jay told Lily, “Go ahead, you can answer it.”

  “Hello, Bakshi residence. How may I direct your call?” Lily’s voice was high with happiness at the unexpected treat, her lips bowed in a smile that seemed to go all the way to her ears.

  “Mandy, it’s for you.” Lily covered the phone and said, “It’s your boyfriend, I mean manfriend.”

  Sam chanted, “Mandy’s got a manfriend, Mandy’s got a manfriend.”

  “Sam, not so loud,” Jay admonished his son. “We don’t want Griffin to hear.”

  “You’re so lame,” Mandy told all of them before taking the phone from Lily.

  Jay was surprised that she didn’t go to another room. He had not invited Griffin over for a barbecue, but shortly after he had seen the boy outside their house, Mandy had started working with him. Apparently things were going well, because Griffin came by at least once a week. Mandy didn’t ask to go on dates, or use the car, but Jay figured she was doing things her way.

  Mandy walked over to the sofa and was talking softly, so Jay could not make out any of her words. Lily and Sam were still acting silly, and he told them to clear the table.

  “I thought we had that rule about taking calls during meals?” Jay asked Frances. She had come up with it.

  “I know, I know,” Frances agreed. “It’s just that I didn’t want to miss the O’Sullivans.”

  “O’Sullivans,” Jay said. “That’s a name I haven’t heard since India.”

  Frances stared at him. Did he know? How could he know? She had never told him about Rich O’Sullivan. It had happened so long ago that this morning, when the Millers told her their friends’ name, she hadn’t made the connection.

  “What do you mean?” she forced herself to ask.

  “Enid Blyton,” Jay said, looking a little sheepish. “I know that boys didn’t read the St. Clare boarding-school series, but I was bored one day and read the first few. Didn’t you read them?”

  Frances let out the breath she had been holding in. He didn’t know. He was talking about the O’Sullivan twins who go away to boarding school and have all sorts of adventures.

  “I read the St. Clare series too,” she said. Then, wanting to move away from the subject, she added, “I’ll go make a fresh pot of tea.”

  Mandy came back to finish her pancake and Jay asked, trying to keep his voice friendly, not nosy, “What was that about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Ah, Shakespeare might have written that ‘Nothing begets nothing,’ but in my experience nothing always comes up with something.”

  “Oh, Dad, I’ve heard you say that a thousand times,” Mandy grimaced.

  “Can you imagine how many times I’ve heard it?” Frances placed the teapot on the table and took her seat.

  “I think Dad’s funny,” Lily, ever loyal, took up for her father.

  “Now, Lily, I hope you meant funny as in ha, ha, not funny as in peculiar,” Jay said.

  “Both,” Lily said, thinking she was being agreeable, then she smirked when her parents started laughing.

  “When you grow up, you can be both,” Jay said grandiosely. “I’ll stick with making people laugh.”

  “I want to be just like you, Dad,” said Sam, who didn’t like it when he wasn’t the center of conversation. “I’ll tell people what to do, and they will have to listen to me.”

  Jay felt the rush of love from his son and remembered how once he, too, had wanted to be like his father. He hadn’t come close. Vic’s son, however, must be following his father’s lead. His degree was in computer science. Vic had a company to give his son. Jay shifted in his chair, uncomfortable. He didn’t want Sam to be like him.

  “This is America,” he told Sam. “You can be anything you want.”

  “But you told
me I couldn’t be a stunt man,” Sam reminded his father. He had seen his first James Bond movie and had been riveted by the action, then amazed to learn that most of the stunts had been performed by a double.

  “That’s because we don’t want you to get hurt,” Frances interjected. “Do you remember what you wanted to be at that age?” she asked her oldest daughter.

  Mandy didn’t answer.

  “I remember,” Jay said. “Mandy told everyone that she was going to be just like Mom.”

  Frances recalled the days when people, even strangers, said that Mandy looked like her. She knew that Mandy had Jay’s features, and she often told him, “It’s so unfair. I carried her for nine months and she turns out to be a mini you.” Yet when Americans saw the mother-daughter duo they didn’t look beyond the brown skin, brown eyes, and dark hair, and said they were copies of each other. Frances always loved hearing it.

  Mandy used to try on her mother’s shoes, spray on her perfume, and one time Frances walked in as she was imitating her sales speech, “This is the living room, and it has a very nice fireplace.”

  “Mandy wanted to become a real estate agent.” Frances smiled at the memory of her daughter selling an imaginary house to imaginary clients. She wished she could have taped it, but Mandy had stopped talking as soon as she saw her mother. These days, Mandy rolled her eyes when Frances said that she had saved every tooth that fell out as well as all the notes Mandy had written to Santa.

  “I only said that because I thought it would be cool to see my name all over town,” Mandy shrugged. “I’d rather be a stunt woman than a real estate agent.”

  Frances knew that Mandy was being deliberately mean, knew that she was doing this because she was being forced to go to the party, and after that to India. She felt her happiness plummet, but then she steadied herself. She wasn’t going to let Mandy affect her mood today. She had prepared everything, from Mandy’s dress to the pretty one Lily would wear, and had even found a jacket for Sam in a secondhand store. She was going to recycle the dress she had worn to last year’s Christmas party. It was made of thin wool, a little warm for June, but Vic’s house was close to the ocean and the evenings could get chilly.

  All that remained was to dye her hair.

  For years she had worn her hair in the same short style, the ends curved into the nape of her neck. She sometimes wished she had longer hair, because the gray would not be so exposed, but she loved the sleek, chic cut too much to change.

  She used to have her hair colored at a salon, but now it was just too expensive.

  “I can do it myself,” she told Jay. “It’s so easy, I don’t know why women bother having it done for them.”

  It just required time, and she had given herself plenty of that today.

  “Okay, you four,” she stood up from the table. “I’m going to beautify my hair, so please don’t use my bathroom.”

  “You mean you’re doing that stinky stuff?” Sam asked.

  “Yes I am, Sam I am,” Frances wrinkled her nose. “If you need anything, ask your dad.”

  She squeezed on the dye, starting with her temples and neck, which were the most offending areas for gray hair. She used a toothbrush to spread the dye evenly, then put on a shower cap and waited twice the recommended time suggested on the bottle. She had been very nervous the first time she had kept on the dye for that long. A distraught client had called and Frances had kept talking, conscious that the dye was still in her hair but unable to get off the phone. She had worried that her hair would fall out or turn brittle. Instead, the dye job had lasted longer than usual, so after that she did it routinely. It had given a new meaning to Jay’s adage that there are no mistakes in life.

  It was only after she washed and dried her hair that she realized she had used the wrong bottle of dye. She had meant to return the black one, but had forgotten, and now, in her anxiety to get going, hadn’t checked the bottle. The color was too dark, and, as so often happens with black, her hair looked obviously dyed.

  She stared at herself in the mirror. How could she have been so stupid? Why hadn’t she just gone to a salon for once?

  A salon! She glanced at her watch. It was only 2 p.m. There was time to get it corrected.

  Frantic, she called the nearest Supercuts. She passed by the shop every day, knew that it was only a five-minute car ride away. After six rings, an accented voice told her the next available stylist would take her at 4 p.m. Frances tried another salon. Same story.

  “Saturdays are one of our busiest days, madam,” a woman at the third place reminded Frances.

  This was it. She was stuck with the wrong color. Then she remembered the highlight kit. It would be the perfect solution to her problem.

  There was no need to beat up on herself for making a mistake. No need to taste, again, the acridity of a last-minute failure. This time she could fix the problem.

  She picked up the highlight kit and read it carefully. She wasn’t going to risk making a mistake.

  LALI WATCHED THE bright green lines on the digital clock rearrange themselves from one to two to three. She had not spent such a wakeful night since Aaron left for Harvard the previous year. Aaron was in Boston, packing. Lali suspected that he was keeping away as long as he could. He probably didn’t want to face her while she was still so furious about his announcement to not return to Harvard for his second year.

  “How can you make such a decision without consulting us?” she had demanded when he called with his “news” two weeks earlier that he would take a year’s leave from Harvard and use the time to figure out if he wanted to go back or stay on the West Coast.

  “Because it’s my decision, Mom,” Aaron had responded. “You told me that your parents didn’t want you coming to the United States, but you came anyway.”

  “I had a scholarship,” Lali reminded her son. “And my parents were not opposed to my coming here. They just wanted me to come as a married woman.”

  “But you didn’t, did you?”

  “They were very proud that I had gotten into UCLA,” Lali said, and then added, “If I tell them that you are not going back to Harvard, they won’t understand.”

  She had gone over and over that conversation, tried to figure out what she could have said to make him change his mind and continue on at Harvard. But Aaron was as stubborn as Jonathan.

  She looked at her sleeping husband. Last night they had fought over Aaron—again. Except that this time it wasn’t about forcing Aaron to go back. Lali had begged him not to tell Frances and the others that their son wasn’t returning to Harvard.

  Jonathan had refused. “I’m not going to lie,” he said.

  She had turned her back to him, infuriated by his sanctimonious response. He could afford to be honest. He was used to students switching majors, dropping out, even giving up a degree with only one class left to finish. She had explained that in India, children need to know their career path when they start college. “It’s a big shame to change majors, and an even bigger one to give up a good school,” she had said.

  “Aaron’s not giving up,” Jonathan stated. “He’s simply taking a year off, and if people don’t understand that, it’s their problem.”

  Jonathan had gone straight to sleep, his arms flung over his head, undisturbed by her constant movements.

  Their argument, the upcoming weekend they were to spend in Southern California, kept her awake, and at four thirty she slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom. The shuttle was going to pick them up in an hour for their midmorning flight to Santa Barbara. It was dark outside, too early for the birds to chirp, too late for the nocturnal animals to make any noise.

  Lali turned on the mirror lights and leaned in to get a closer view of her face. No matter what else was troubling her, she needed to look good this weekend. The dark circles she had inherited from her mother—the telltale sign of being an Indian, she explained to her friend Mary—were worse from the sleepless night. Her eyes looked tired and sunken. Now, on top of everything el
se, she was going to look ugly.

  She knew she was obsessed about her appearance, but she didn’t want to go to Southern California looking middle-aged and saggy.

  “I didn’t even worry this much when I was getting married!” she told Mary.

  “You were younger then,” Mary reminded her. “And cellulite was something that happened to other people. But you’re meeting college friends you haven’t seen in more than twenty years. Let me tell you, if we had the money, I would have had plastic surgery before going to my thirtieth high school reunion!”

  Right after Lali mailed off the RSVP in the bright red envelope, she had rushed to the calendar to calculate the number of days she had left to redo herself. She switched to a salad plate and took smaller portions. She signed up for Pilates classes and walked for half an hour on the days she didn’t have a class. Despite all this, she didn’t lose a single pound.

  “You do know that Pilates is about toning, not weight loss, right?” Mary confirmed.

  “You mean I spent all those hours on the mat and the exercise ball for nothing?”

  “Don’t you feel better?”

  “I don’t care about feel. I only care about how I look.”

  Now she scrutinized her neck in the mirror. Along with hands, it was one of the first places to show signs of age. She had bought a black dress with a low, round neck for the party. The beautiful turquoise necklace Jonathan had given her for their fifteenth anniversary would cover her neck, but also draw attention to it. Her neck was still wrinkle-free, thank God.

  She drew herself up tall, and was checking to see how she looked with her stomach sucked in, when Jonathan walked into the bathroom.

  “What are you doing?”

  She had been so focused on the image in the mirror that she hadn’t heard him open the door.

  “I’m getting ready.” She immediately rearranged her pose and reached for her toothbrush.

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” Jonathan said. “Tea for you?” It was a peace offering after last night’s unresolved argument.

  Amma had always said it wasn’t healthy to go to bed angry. She would say the same about starting a journey together.