Love by the Numbers

by Karin Kallmaker

  After shucking her damp, grit-spattered clothes and slipping into comfortable jeans and a blouse, she stepped out onto the porch to listen to the hissing rain.

  Kate looked up from her paperback. There was a sly edge to her tone as she said, “Vindaloo. I know how much you love fucking vindaloo.”

  Nicole waited to see if a reprimand for Kate’s language would be forthcoming from the kitchen. There was none, which continued to confirm her long-held theory that their mother’s exceptional hearing extended only to Nicole’s voice. Kate, a very pretty topez-blonde with skin a natural deep caramel a beach volleyball player would envy, had always been an American girl, a modern girl. No arranged marriages, no father’s brothers trying to dictate her future. Their mother had not despaired of Kate’s casual ways until Kate had arrived home four weeks ago, another college abandoned, still single and nearly five months pregnant via a liaison with a married professor.

  The resulting maternal breakdown had been epic.

  Nicole wasn’t unsympathetic to her mother’s distress, but what did her mother expect when Kate had always gotten everything she wanted by either flattery or pouting? Nicole had still not ascertained whether she herself was now in better maternal standing—she was also unmarried, and nearly eight years older than Kate. She had refused all attempts to marry her off to a relative from India, which was what the uncles on both sides of the family tree believed right and proper. It didn’t matter to them that Nicole had been born on American soil, and adopted at age four by a placid American businessman who’d fallen hard for the young, exotic widow with a child. Nicole’s blunt, repeated refusals had not endeared her to any of her Indian male kin. They, in turn, chastised her mother and it all rolled downhill, back onto Nicole’s plate.

  “I won’t have vindaloo for several months.” She glanced at her sister. “You’ll have to eat my share.”

  Kate’s reply was predictably foul, and Nicole watched the rain dancing on the driveway while she planned how to broach with her mother the topic of traveling alone. Contrary to her childhood fears, her mother did not read minds. And that was a good thing. She was going on this speaking tour. She would have the privacy she required.

  All that was left was making her mother like it.

  * * *

  Nicole smiled with what she hoped was sufficient gratitude for her heaping plate of rice and vindaloo. It was the only dish her mother made spicy to the point of pain. Memories of previous vindaloos had already set her tongue to tingling, proof of the cognitive-neurobiological connection.

  Her mother carefully replaced the ladle in the heavy ceramic crock that had served so many curries that the inside was stained yellow by turmeric and saffron. “I had a phone call from Betty Creedy.”

  Indira Hathaway was a magnet for gossip, and it wouldn’t surprise Nicole to learn that her mother already knew about her assistant’s departure. Nicole had received a call once about winning a prestigious research award, and immediately called her mother with the news only to discover that her mother had already heard it at a garden club meeting from a department secretary.

  In any discussion with her mother patience was better rewarded than curiosity. She gave her attention to her dinner. The pork, potato, peppers and carrot curry had been her stepfather’s favorite dish, and Nicole had heard many times about the marvel of her mother’s vindaloo, so wonderful that he had married her.

  She cut into a carrot, hoping to spread the mild flavor into the searing heat of the curry sauce and spare her taste buds. It never worked but she never stopped hoping it would. It would seem that her mother’s vindaloo brought out a form of mental illness.

  Kate, who had patted her stomach and said in a wan voice, “Just rice for me,” asked the obvious question. “Why did Betty call you?”

  Nicole took a big bite of carrot, winced and chased it with rice.

  “Nicole’s latest assistant apparently left something behind when he checked out.” The hawk-like brown eyes turned to Nicole. “Did he leave, Nicky?”

  She knew it was foolish, but when her mother called her Nicky she felt like the child who had once believed her mother could see through walls. A foolish childhood fear, she reminded herself. “Yes, he left. He was inappropriate to the job.”

  “Who is going to go with you on this tour, then? You cannot travel alone. It isn’t right.”

  There was no point yet in mentioning the possibility of someone new arriving in the nick of time. If that fell through her mother would be even more upset. The best long-term strategy was to win the important point that she could travel on her own.

  Nicole knew better than to make a flat declaration. That was Kate’s style. It worked for Kate, or so Kate thought. This conversation would follow their predictable pattern.

  She soothed with, “Mom, I’m very sensible.” She expected her mother to next fret and predict mayhem and scandal.

  “I don’t know what I would do if you were harmed. What will our family say?”

  She ventured a gentle point of fact, knowing she’d be chastised for her disrespect. “Our family in India has no spy here. They won’t know your unmarried daughter is traveling by herself unless you tell them.”

  “Maybe these are the old ways, but your blood is pure Indian, as is mine. I respected tradition and I am happy and blessed even though I have had the sad misfortune to bury two husbands. Each left me a daughter and I am comfortable in my means. All because I listened to my father when he told me to marry your father. My father also agreed to let me marry dear Robert.”

  Nicole did not remind her mother that Robert Hathaway had overcome objections to his American nationality by arranging work visas for a dozen or more family members over the years. His generosity had included air tickets and start-up money for their burgeoning small businesses. Her mother was very close to being a bought and paid for bride, and such were the revered old ways. But she didn’t say any of that because Robert had done it for love. Based on the tone of her mother’s voice when she said his name, and her happier demeanor when he’d been alive, Nicole believed her mother had returned his feelings. He had been the only father Nicole had ever known and she still missed him.

  It would also be unproductive to point out her mother’s hypocrisy in insisting adherence to Indian customs for women when her mother was the one who had decided little Nicole would speak only English and then join Robert’s church. She understood that her mother had been intent on reducing the impact of being “other” in a very white community. It had worked, up to a point.

  Around a hearty mouthful of rice Kate said, “Mom, Nicole is thirty-two, and she’s American. Born here, raised here—her DNA is red, white and blue. When are you going to let her have a life?” She gave Nicole a sour look. “When are you going to actually speak up for yourself? Or do you enjoy being perfect?”

  “There’s no point to pushing water,” Nicole answered her. Kate’s support, as usual, came with a heaping helping of criticism.

  “Your sister is now famous. Famous! The whole world can see her name and picture at Huffington Post and Amazon. She’s in Wikipedia. And there will be news from all these famous places she is going, and they can find her on Google and there she will be, single and traveling by herself.” Her mother concluded with her habitual, weak gesture of helpless confusion.

  “Mom, the publisher is trying to find another assistant. But if they don’t I’m still going or it will cost me a lot of money and the publisher a lot as well.” There, her best card was on the table. She would see the world, more of it. And be less perfect—fine, if that’s what Kate thought she was. Kate had no idea how less than perfect she had been in college and since, away from their mother’s watchful gaze.

  She supposed she proved her mother right. Away from scrutiny, she had misbehaved. Spectacularly, by her mother’s standards. Nicole tried to smile her way through a bite of vindaloo, though her eyes watered. Pearl onions soaked up all the heat from the chilies and ginger. Her ability to accurately taste so
urs and bitters would be compromised for at least the next two hours.

  There was a long silence punctuated with fitful sighs. A small, steady breeze from her mother’s continual shaking of her head stirred the steam still rising from the vindaloo.

  Toward the end of the meal her mother said, “I suppose my independent daughter isn’t interested in the names of her cousins in London.”

  It was the expected olive branch. “I am interested. I could meet them for tea,” Nicole answered. If that was all it took to put an end to the objections, she could handle it. Besides, if they were her age, they had no time in their lives for tea with a stranger. She’d pick someplace inconvenient to transit at the worst time of day and the cousins would decline. Issue solved.

  Kate finished her rice and rose awkwardly. Nicole realized that the baby was suddenly showing a lot more. Kate’s hands were swollen. “I’ll be right here. Pushing a basketball out my cervix.” She picked up her dish and a few stacked plates and waddled to the kitchen with their mother following quickly after her.

  Since it wasn’t her night to help with the dishes she went to change into her gym clothes. Tonight was her last chance to have a good workout before she left—tomorrow night would be stressful and rushed with packing—and she needed to claim the contents of her gym locker.

  The long hallway that led to her end of the house echoed with rain drumming on the roof. She passed Kate’s open door and didn’t have to look in to know it was a mess. Clothing would be strewn across the bed, and a pile of empty coffee mugs and soda cans would be stacked at the end of the dresser. It was hard sometimes to believe they were half-sisters.

  By the time she reached her own door the aromas from dinner were distant. The house’s two wings rambled, and her portion had perhaps been added on for a not much liked mother-in-law in the hopes of keeping her away from the rest of the family. There was a bath with a shower, space enough for two large wardrobes in her bedroom, and her own sitting room that looked out on the long garden. She liked her view of the apple trees, the lone maple at the end and the rows of trellises covered with the climbing roses that were her mother’s pride and joy. The last of the blooming season’s petals were dusted over the white gravel walk like pink and red polka dots, rinsed off the plants by the rain. Likewise, the planter boxes were speckled with purple petals from the rhododendrons.

  She would happily work in this lovely room but for her mother’s constant interruptions. She’d tried it once for a few days one summer and her mother had found a pretext every hour to knock on the door. She knew her mother was lonely in spite of her involvement with a number of community groups in town, but it wasn’t a void she could fill every day. She’d gotten nothing done because her mother didn’t think that reading or tapping at a keyboard was a kind of work that couldn’t be interrupted. After three days of continually broken concentration, she’d gone back to her little office on campus. Her productivity there was impressive enough to have drawn half-humorous rebukes from some colleagues and frequent suggestions that she consider “getting a life.”

  She had a life, which she was under no obligation to justify to anyone. It was busy, productive and…useful.

  She quickly changed into boy-style gym shorts and a worn long-sleeve UCNH T-shirt. She’d cut the sleeves back just above the elbow and it was her favorite. By the time she returned to the living room, Kate had turned on the television and clicked over to one of the celebrity gossip programs that added no value to the world, at least that Nicole could see.

  “Must you?”

  Kate scratched her nose with a prominently extended middle finger. “I must. Besides, it’s your only contact with the outside world.”

  “Sorry, but I’m off to the gym.”

  “Then what do you care?”

  “My niece or nephew could absorb that drivel in utero.”

  She ignored Kate’s second one-finger salute and escaped the din of the television program, which had gone from salacious dismay over a rocker’s drug overdose to a weepy red-haired heiress surrounded by microphones.

  The drive to the gym was through wet streets and around double-parked tourists clogging the Daniel Webster in the vain search for parking near the restaurants. The facility was actually one town over in Center Harbor, which gave her just enough distance that she was unlikely to cross paths with anyone in her mother’s circle of acquaintances. She’d been avoiding parental radar since she was sixteen and supposed that some day she ought abandon the habit. She was no longer a teenager. But right now it was just…easier. Quieter. Simpler for certain aspects of her life to stay off her mother’s view screen.

  She signed in and headed past the weight room where the evening grunt-off between steroid divas was underway, in spite of the prominent sign that read, “As a courtesy to others, keep noise to a minimum.” She could be on the Stairmaster with headphones playing Pink and still be able to hear the guttural unh and gee-ezh followed by long, exaggerated exhales.

  She started with simple yoga stretches then moved to the elliptical machine and finished with hard cardio on the stairs. Then, because it would be so long before she had access to the equipment again, she braved the male zeitgeist of the weight room and did a full upper body workout. The gym was her safe place and no one paid her any attention as she flexed and strained.

  Here, she rolled up the sleeves as far as they would go. Her mother would have a conniption if she got a good look at her biceps and abs, but she loved them. She’d honed the long, lean lines and loved the feeling of power and control. At the gym she wasn’t Robert Hathaway’s adopted daughter, not a professor, not a beleaguered daughter with an overprotective mother, not a first-generation American living her part of the Indian diaspora. At the gym she was just another body, looked over and overlooked based on how she moved, how much she lifted, how long she sweated.

  The last arm curl complete, she mopped her face and neck on her way to the shower stalls. A quick rinse later she wrapped herself in her towel and surveyed the contents of her locker. She wasn’t confident that if she left something in it that it would still be there months later. She would take it all home—it wasn’t that much. Besides, the most valuable thing in the locker she was taking on the trip. It always traveled with her.

  Dressed in fresh shorts and a faded red T-shirt, she glanced around the locker room before pulling the black leather jacket out of the locker’s depths. Butter soft, with square shoulders, the sleek cut was exactly what a virtuous, perfect, obedient daughter and staid scholar did not wear.

  She couldn’t help herself—she slipped it on, loving the way it melted onto her shoulders and encased her hips. She felt strong in the jacket. The scent of the leather triggered memories of the music, the lights and the heat of the last dance before graduation. She’d known then that future trysts would be scarce, and that night she had lived like it was her last. As far as her subsequent encounters were concerned, that had been mostly true.

  She kept the jacket on as she headed for the door, telling herself that she was about to embark on a long, stressful change to her routine, and the endorphins that the jacket released would bolster her resilience. She stopped at the counter to put her membership on hiatus. The twenty-something blonde who had helped her several times in the past gave her a second glance this time. Or rather, she gave the jacket a second look.

  “You’re all set, Nicole,” she said, her fingers tapping on her keyboard.

  The jacket was the symbol of how she successfully bifurcated her life between her public face and her sexual necessities. She was taking it with her and would wear it—unaccompanied by any assistant—in cities where it was a passport to meeting other women like her. On occasion, as she did now, she indulged herself in the whimsy of blaming the jacket for what she said and did. “Actually, I prefer Cole.”

  The young woman smiled, looked at the jacket and finally her gaze traveled up to Nicole’s face. “Cole,” she repeated. “It suits you.”

  “Thanks. See you in
a few months.”

  The slow smile didn’t really mean anything, but Nicole walked away satisfied by it. It wasn’t an invitation she would ever pursue. It was too close to home and gossip reached her mother at speeds that defied all physical laws. Cole’s dalliances had always been and were going to be far from home, quick and anonymous. Just the way she liked them.

  Chapter Two

  After spending a frantic night packing what little was left of her possessions and the following day loading them into her Uncle Damon’s hired van to be taken to the storage locker, Lily Smith had told herself she really could leave the country for weeks and weeks and not have to worry about anything. She had nothing left to worry about.

  She glanced in the rearview mirror of her rental car and realized she could no longer see the skyline of New York City. Just like that, it was gone. She was on her own. Only the future ahead, she told herself. As the miles clicked off the built-in navigation system, she tried to focus on the next few days, but she kept checking the rearview mirror as if New York would suddenly reappear—or a pack of paparazzi would zoom into view in pursuit of Lillian Linden-Smith, celebrity miscreant. It was a bitter mix, feeling glad to have escaped from the only place she’d ever called home.

  Look on the bright side, Lily. You could take advantage of Uncle Damon’s spur-of-the-moment offer of a job because everything else you owned of value was sold in the auction. Visiting the storage locker gave you the chance to get your travel gear. Voltage adapters are expensive and now you don’t have to buy a new one. You kept the Givenchy travel collection. Wasn’t it great that you refused to sell the Kors little black dress, the Manolos and the two pairs of Bruno Maglis? No matter what being an “author assistant” means, you won’t be an embarrassment. It all worked out for the best.