I stick out my hand to shake. She lets go of the armrest long enough to take it, and her hand is so small by comparison, it feels like a child’s in my ginormous paw.
“Nice to meet you, Amy Ellis. And what were you doing in Switzerland that makes you so homesick?”
“I work for a software company,” she says, seeming to unwind a tiny bit as she warms to the idea of conversation. “And they sent me to Basel for what was supposed to be a six-month assignment to sort out our European office, but that was a couple years ago, so…” She shrugs. “At this point, I don’t know how long I’m going to be there. Fortunately, I get the European-style six weeks of vacation every year, instead of the American-style two, so I get to go home for a few weeks every year. But anyway — what about you? I’m surprised to see you headed state-side, given that it’s the middle of the season.”
“Yeah. My team’s not exactly happy with me, but… Family stuff,” I conclude gruffly. There’s a silence that threatens to get awkward, so I fill it with, “So are you from Ohio?”
“No. Went to college there, but I was an army brat, so I don’t really claim any roots anywhere. But I’ve got an old friend from college who’s getting married this weekend. So I’m stopping off in Ohio to see her and be there for the wedding this week, then I’ll do a bit of traveling after that — see some friends and family in different parts of the country — and then it’s back to Basel.”
I open my mouth to ask Where are you traveling to, but the intercom crackles to life and our captain comes on.
“Folks, this is Captain Paul Snider from up here in the cockpit, and I’m joined tonight by First Mate Georgia Halston. We’re just about at our cruising altitude of twenty-two thousand feet… Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had to fly through a few storm cells this evening and we’re dealing with a pretty strong headwind. Wish I could say that’s the last bit of turbulence we’ll have this evening, but it’s looking like it might be a bit of a rocky ride to Cleveland tonight… That’s the bad news. Good news is, it’s a short flight; we’ll have you there on time or even a little ahead of schedule. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight.”
Amy blanches at the captain’s news.
“Guess you were right about the storm,” I say lamely. I wrack my brain for something else to say but come up empty, and so, a little reluctantly, I say, “Well… I guess I should let you get back to Alex’s book.”
She manages an almost-smile as the plane rolls like a ship out at sea. “Not a chance. Sitting next to Anika Singh in person? That’s so much better than anything I could read about. Besides, if I tried to read right now, I’d probably lose my dinner.”
I smile, a little embarrassed. When we won back-to-back national championships in college, I got used to being in the lime light, occasionally getting recognized in public. (And I do mean “occasionally;” this is women’s basketball, people.) That recognition faded when I was in the WNBA; it ratcheted back up when Alex and I both played for team U.S.A. in the Olympics and took the gold medal, but since moving to Switzerland, I’ve gotten used to invisibility again.
Well — as invisible as you can be in Switzerland when you’re a fucking six-foot, three-and-a-half-inch Godzilla Amazonian who’s half-black, half-Nepalese, and a hundred percent loud-mouthed American. The stares I get don’t have anything to do with playing basketball, trust me. I wish they did.
So Amy recognizing me… it’s unexpected, to say the least. Unexpected, but not necessarily… bad.
The plane suddenly drops again, enough to earn a chorus of “Oh!”s from people around us. Amy looks absolutely terrified, and this time I can’t help myself — I do pat her on the shoulder.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I tell her. “At least there’s no motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane.”
She gives me an odd look.
“Sorry — Samuel L. Jackson? Snakes on a Plane?” When her face doesn’t light up in an Ah, yes, of course recognition, I silently kick myself and forge ahead with, “And it’s like the captain said — it’s a short flight. Right?”
“Right,” she says, but there’s no conviction in it. After a few seconds, she turns her head my way. “Hey — Anika?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you tell me a story? — to distract me, I mean.”
“A story? What, like ‘Once upon a time, in a galaxy far fucking away…?’”
She lets out a nervous laugh again. I kind of like the way it sounds.
“No, not that kind of story. A story about you. Something that’s not in Coach Woods’s book.”
I think for a few seconds, trying to remember what Alex did and didn’t say about me in the book. “Does her book say how we pranked Coach Tynan sophomore year, superglued a basketball to his ass?”
She nods. “Yeah. That’s in there.”
“What about the prank when I told Alex she — ”
“No,” she says again, emphatic and commanding this time. “About you. Your life. Not about pranks.”
I get back to thinking, trying to come up with a story that doesn’t reveal to Amy how much I hate playing basketball in Switzerland, or how much I miss Alex, or how much I’m starting to feel like my four years at Rosemont might’ve been the high point of my life and my career. God, I never wanted to be one of those people, pining for their high school / college glory years that were already well past, but maybe that’s exactly what I’m becoming.
And in particular, I’m trying to think of a story to tell Amy that won’t remind me of Jenny. Being reminded of my ex-wife — especially when I’m about to go back to our hometown, where everything reminds me of her — is the last thing I want right now.
“How about your family?” Amy suggests when I don’t come up with anything on my own after a minute.
“What about them?”
“Well, what are they like?”
“I don’t know. They’re just… a normal family.”
Her eyebrows lift and she gives me a skeptical look. “There’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ family. Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“Yeah. One older sister, two younger brothers.”
Amy lights up, turbulence suddenly forgotten. “Seriously? Same as me! Well — I mean, my older sister is actually my step-sister, but… wow. So we’re both the second of four, two girls, two boys? Crazy. Are you close to them?”
I shake my head. I refrain from saying, Close to them? Why the hell do you think I live in Europe? and instead I say diplomatically, “Not really. This trip home will be the first time I’ve seen them in a while. And my baby brother, Gerry… it’ll be the first time I’ve seen him in a couple years. He’s kind of the black sheep. Or the Blasian sheep, I guess.”
“Blasian…?”
“Yeah — black and Asian. Blasian. That’s what we call ourselves.”
She nods. “That’s right, I remember that now — it’s in the book. Coach Woods says your dad was an immigrant from Nepal — ”
“Yep. It’s true.”
“ — and he married an African American New Yorker. But yet you grew up in Ohio? Now that sounds like a story I’d like to hear.”
I nod, smiling, thinking of all the times I’ve heard one of my parents recount the story of how they first met, fell in love, and moved to Ohio. They tell it differently, of course. I can almost hear Momma shouting “That’s not how it happened, Pathik!” in the background just thinking about it.
“It is a good story, actually,” I say, and I launch into it.
Chapter 5: This is how my parents met.
My mother’s from New York City. East Harlem, to be exact. Grew up there in the 70s and 80s, surrounded by Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Cubans, along with black folk and a smattering of Italians, long before anyone had ever seriously considered putting the words “gentrification” and “Harlem” in the same sentence. East Harlem hadn’t exactly been a “good” neighborhood for a long time — actually, lots of it had been pretty crappy for
a while — but at least where my mom lived, it wasn’t… well, it wasn’t absolutely-fucking-awful.
She lived on a block where people sat outside on stoops on nice evenings, gabbing and laughing and bitching about whatever nonsense was going on in the neighborhood at the moment, playing cards, rolling dice, listening to music, spitting sunflower seed husks onto the sidewalk and telling each other things like, “Where little Jimmy at? I heard he broke up with Maria last week,” and, “Your Momma still sick? You tell her she been in my prayers,” and, “Nah, what I heard was that he was messing around on her, and she came home one day and chased him right out the ’partment with a broom!” and then everybody would cackle and pass a pitcher of lemonade or a beer can or a pack of Kools or whatever they were sharing that day.
And then the crack epidemic hit in the mid-80s, and everything went from “mediocre-bad” to “really fucking shitty.” It isn’t noticeable at first; it starts with little Jimmy not coming home one night, then turning up on the street a few weeks later, disheveled and stinking of stale urine, clothes a mess and lips chapped, face ashy, pockets clinking with empty vials and a glass pipe, begging for money.
Then other things happen. People who’d always had steady jobs all the sudden can’t keep them. Kids get this haunted, wide-eyed look on their face when momma disappears for a few days at a time. Young dudes wearing oversized parkas stand on street corners with 40-ounces in brown paper bags in one hand, baseball bats in the other hand to keep customers in line, and they’re loud and they’re feral and they’re posting ten year-olds on the corners as lookouts.
New York got bad. East Harlem got worse. It became the kind of place where you had to pretend not to see some of the things you were seeing unless you wanted you or your family to be the next drive-by victims.
People stopped hanging out on stoops.
Well, some people still hung out there. But they weren’t the kind of people you really wanted to spend time with.
#
1984 and my mother was twenty-two years old, working a stable job at the Port Authority, the kind of lady who sits behind plexiglass for eight hours at a time, selling bus tickets to locals and giving out directions to tourists.
That’s where she was when my father found her. Six years older and six inches shorter than my mother, Dad followed his sister and his brother-in-law from Kathmandu to New York City, wooed by tales of easy riches and abundant jobs and a stable government. It was still ten years before the Maoists in Nepal tried to overthrow the government and ended up embroiling the country in a fucked-up civil war that lasted a decade, but even before the war, Nepal was isolated and corrupt and lacked opportunity. And for an ambitious young guy like my dad, who, entranced by the rock ’n roll and the wandering white hippies who’d just started filtering into his country, the United States seemed like a fairy-tale land, a place where anything could happen. A place where a man could make a mark on the world. So a year after his brother-in-law whisked his sister away to Queens, Dad followed.
Black woman from East Harlem. Tall and thick and tough, not willing to take nothing from nobody.
Shrimpy Nepalese guy fresh off the boat. Skinny and smiley and sheepish about his broken English, speaking and moving in halting stutter-steps, like he’s afraid that at any moment, somebody’s going to tell him he’s doing it wrong.
When people meet my parents, they’re like, “Wha —? How the fuck did they —?” And then they do things like shrug and look skyward, as if to say, “Heaven only knows how your parents got together. Clearly some people really are destined for each other.”
But me, I don’t bring destiny into it. I get my parents. Anybody with a few brain cells who thinks about it for longer than a fucking minute can get them.
To get the weird mismatch that is my parents, you just have to think about Kathmandu and East Harlem. Because, really? Those two places, at that particular moment in history, they weren’t that different in the end. Take a poor city, get its own government to neglect it, bring in outsiders to exploit it, leave the locals feeling angry and hopeless — that kind of environment, it’ll produce a certain kind of person. And Mom at twenty-two and Dad at twenty-eight, they were both that certain kind of person — each in their own way. They were these strong, stubborn, passionate young people who went back and forth between being pissed off at the world and being determined to turn it on its head.
To hear my dad tell it, the story of their love was an epic tale, a fucking Frank Sinatra song come to life, a remake of West Side Story minus anything resembling tragedy or Italians.
This is how it happens for him:
He sees her behind her plexiglass window, and boom, something clicks into place inside him. Like he’s been working on a fucking jigsaw puzzle his whole life and finally found the missing piece that’s been caught beneath the rug this whole time.
He’s in love from moment one.
He makes his way to the front of the line, asks about bus tickets. She answers him. He’s not ready for the conversation to be over, so he asks her more questions. She starts to answer again, but he interrupts, saying what he needs to say slowly and as clearly as he can, trying to keep his accent out of the way:
“You’re beautiful. Please, let me buy you dinner.”
He asks this because he loved American movies long before he loved America, and from the movies, he knows a little about American dating, and he knows this is what you say when you ask a beautiful woman out on a date. You invite her for a drink, or for dinner, and since this is America and not Nepal, if you’re polite and you’re funny, she’ll let you take her hand, let you help her take off her jacket, let you walk her to her door at the end of the night and maybe even give her a kiss.
This, I imagine, is what he’s thinking as he asks my mother out the first time.
Ask Mom, she’ll tell a totally different story. There’s no love at first sight in her version. In fact, mainly what she remembers is this short little Asian guy annoying the hell out of all the customers in line behind him as he takes up her time with a bunch of stupid-ass questions she can barely understand thanks to the thick plexiglass and his thicker accent. And when he asks her to dinner, her whole face scrunches like she’s sucking a lemon and she says:
“Hell, no. Get outta my line. Next!” And she dismisses him with an annoyed wave of her hand.
But he comes back the next day with a bundle of daisies he bought for three dollars on the street. He’s working as a bus boy at a restaurant that belongs to his brother-in-law’s brother. He’s earning enough to get by, but it varies from week to week, sometimes not even hitting minimum wage. And everything’s under the table, off the books. Three dollars is a small fortune, but he spends it on this beautiful woman he’s going to take to dinner.
And she’s surprised but still annoyed to see him back, won’t accept the flowers, shoos him away while her coworker grins behind her hand. He leaves the daisies on the counter.
Comes back the next day with tulips.
The day after that it’s a single rose.
Then another bunch of daisies.
On the fifth day — I know, it sounds like fucking Genesis, right? — on the fifth day, there’s a plastic vase taped to the countertop with a handwritten sign above it that says “FLOWERS” in black marker and has an arrow pointing down at the vase. He puts his mums in the vase, waits to see if Sheronda (he’s learned her name, at least) will turn around, but she’s fake-busy with fake paperwork, back to the plexiglass, and the only person who will look at Pathik (that’s Dad) is Sheronda’s coworker, who’s grinning behind her hand.
Day six is daisies again, day seven lilies, day eight peonies.
Day nine he doesn’t show up. Sheronda’s kind of disappointed, and disappointed that she’s kind of disappointed.
Day ten she asks him where was he on day nine, and he hangs his head and tries to explain about the other bus boy being sick, and how he himself wasn’t feeling great, and he worked even longer that day, and
he’s sorry — he’ll bring extra flowers for day eleven to make up for that. And what Sheronda thinks about his story is, “He’s got a job.”
Day eleven he brings extra flowers like he promised.
Day twelve she smiles at him, and he tells her she is a living goddess.
Day thirteen the plastic flower vase and the handwritten sign that says FLOWERS is gone, leaving only half-scraped-off Scotch tape behind on the plexiglass, and Sheronda tells him about how her supervisor came by, and was upset about the vase, and Pathik really has to stop doing this. Really. He has to stop coming by every day like this, bringing her flowers and trying to talk to her.
On day fifteen, she asks him, “If I let you take me to dinner, will you promise to stop?” At first, he doesn’t understand the question; she has to rephrase it a couple more times before he nods in understanding. He beams at her; he swears she’ll never have to see him again after they go out. It’s the happiest day of his life. He will be back at the end of her shift.
Sheronda says, “Okay, fine. Five-thirty.”
He walks away on bouncy steps, on top of the fucking world. Sheronda only sits down on her side of the counter with a sigh. But when Sheronda’s coworker keeps grinning at her behind her hand, Sheronda swivels and snaps at the woman, “What?”
“Nothing,” says the other woman. “That Chinaman, he really like you.”
Normally, Sheronda would never go out with a man immediately after work. She would go home, she would take a bath, fix her hair, put on something nice, add some jewelry. But she has every intention of blowing Pathik off as quickly as possible, feigning a headache or a stomachache halfway through dinner and insisting she can find her own way home. She plans to be home by seven-thirty tonight. Eight at the latest. And then no more harassment from Pathik.
(Who, she knows, is from Nepal, not China. People can be so ignorant.)
He’s back at exactly five-thirty, clean-shaven and smelling of a shower, and when he walks her away from the Port Authority, he runs ahead to open doors for her; when they make it to the sidewalk, he walks on her outside, between her and the street; and when a crackhead comes too close, begging for change, he positions himself between the crackhead and Sheronda, puffing out his narrow chest and ordering the man away in English that doesn’t stutter.
Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain: A lesbian romance (Rosemont Duology Book 2) Page 3
