“I decided you were right. If I’m going to lose my Saturdays, I should take advantage of them now.” Pari lays out her towel and gracefully sits cross-legged on it. She’s wearing a bright-red bikini with retro styling. The bottoms are full enough to come to her belly button, but she still has a softness to her tummy that I would absolutely despise on myself. On her it makes sense, because it’s balanced by the gentle swells of her hips and by her breasts. Because, good Lord, what a rack she has. The heart-shaped neckline of the bikini top plumps them into mounds anyone would envy.
My hands sneak over my stomach, and I smash inward just a little. Maybe if I had breasts like those, I wouldn’t mind roundness on me everywhere else. I don’t mind it at all on Pari. She’s richly shaped. Whatever force made her used a wealth of materials and never stinted.
I feel small and spare next to her. Slight. I look up at the sky, at the plain-blue expanse that’s a Southern California day, but I can’t help sneaking glances at her again.
“You surf?” she eventually asks, breaking the silence that squirms between us.
“Mm-hmm.” I push up on my elbows again. The posture scoops my stomach out to look hollow, and I want to pretend I don’t notice, but I do. What I can’t tell is if I want Pari to notice too. “Since middle school.”
“Who taught you?”
I point out at the water, where Nikki is bobbing in the limp surf, waiting for waves that don’t seem to be coming. “Nikki’s brother is five years older than her. He surfed and we kept stealing his boards. At first we were dragging them all the way to the beach just to look cool—how dumb is that?—but then we decided we wanted to learn. So we took turns. We kinda taught each other.”
“Your dedication is admirable.”
I giggle. Then I clap my hand over my mouth. I’m probably blushing, because seriously? A giggle? Talk about an inappropriate response. “There’s nothing about dedication. I’m a half-assed surfer at best. Nikki competes.”
“But you’ve not neglected it.”
“I’d be out there right now if I were serious.” I splay myself flat on the sand and briefly close my eyes. “Instead of thinking about a nap.”
“I don’t have anything I do now that I did in high school.”
“I bet that’s not true.”
“Sometimes it feels true. I live in a different country. I run now. I cook foods I had never heard of before moving here. All my habits are different.” She grins widely enough that I can see the line of her gums above her teeth. Her smile is huge. “I’m even a lesbian here, and I’m not at home.”
“Is India home still, though?”
“Always will be.”
“Where? In particular, I mean.”
“Tamil Nadu.” She slants a look out of the corner of her eyes, as if she’s waiting for something. I don’t know what it is, which makes low-grade panic settle in my chest like a flapping, frantic bird. I probably should know where Tamil Nadu is, but I don’t. Americanized worldview fail. I manage to creak out an encouraging nod so that she goes on. “It’s in South India. On the eastern side. My mother is originally from New Delhi, but her father traveled for business and met my father’s family. Amma moved south when she married my father. I’m lucky that her side of the family is progressive.”
“I know you want to stay now, but did you want to come to the states? Or were you more reluctant?”
Her eyes go wide, and she gives me a half smile. Her hair slips over her rounded shoulder. I want to push it back into place.
“No one’s ever asked me that before.” She doesn’t push her hair over her shoulder. She combs her fingers through the ends instead. On another woman, the gesture would have been flirtatious, but on Pari it seems much more simple. As if she’s actually trying to make sure she has no snarls. “Everyone here seems to assume that of course I would wish to be here. They like their lives, after all, and everyone knows that India is a shithole.”
She says it so matter-of-factly I almost miss it. “But you don’t think that.”
“India is a country, same as any other. It has its beautiful places and its less-than-pleasant places. Most of the people who assume that India is horrible also wouldn’t go into Detroit on a bet. And no. I didn’t want to come here.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty. I came for graduate school, to get my MBA.”
“At twenty. Impressive.”
She shrugged. “I worked hard.”
I don’t know what that’s like, to acknowledge your gifts and capabilities in three little words. I’ve worked hard in my life too, but I’d choke if I tried to say it so simply. I envy her. I want to get closer to her, to find out if some of that assuredness could sink into me. Maybe by osmosis?
Maybe if I was her, I wouldn’t have to be me.
“I’d like you to be with me when I tell my parents that we’re getting married.”
The words compute, but make absolutely no sense at the same time. I stop where I am, in the act of reaching for a water glass. “What?”
“On Skype.”
“Oh. Well that makes a little more sense.” I grab the glass and shut the white cabinet.
Everything is so shiny in her kitchen. Making cheesy toast seems almost inadequate, but it’s what I want for lunch. Slice of bread, slice of cheddar. I have a pile of berries too. All together my lunch comes in around 250 calories. My nutritionist will want more protein included, so I’ll probably grab an ounce of turkey jerky too. Maybe.
I’m such a good little patient that I only get checkups with the nutritionist every three months. This is a vast improvement on the weekly appointments I used to have. I see my therapist, Karen, more often.
Pari slides onto a barstool at the island beneath her beautiful copper pots. She drags a bowl of strawberries closer to her and starts nibbling. “Would you want to visit?”
“India?” I glance at her, then go back to watching my food in the toaster to make sure it hits exactly the right level of melted and bubbly without the edges of the toast getting a step past golden brown. I’m particular about my food. It’s one of my problems. “Sure. I like traveling.”
“Could you get the time off?”
“That’s the benefit of being in a position like mine. I’m kind of nonvital. If I have the time between projects, or if I’m willing to take no pay, I can go anytime.”
“I don’t know that we will, but it might help with my mother to be able to offer a visit.”
She’s fidgeting with one of the strawberries, her nail digging into the stem under the leafy cap. Red juice drips onto the slate-gray top of the island. Her eyes are clouded.
I take my food out of the toaster oven and drop it on my plate. Before I can even think about it, I’m across the room and folding my hand over hers. Her skin is warm. She looks up at me, making the curtain of her hair slide. The heady scent of coconut finds me.
“It’ll be okay,” I say.
She looks at our hands stacked together, then up at me. “You’re a very positive person, aren’t you?”
I shake my head in automatic denial. That’s the outside me, what I do for everyone else. They all deserve good things and to have faith in themselves. That’s not the same thing as being positive. No one hears the way I talk to myself. I’d stop if I knew how.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Pari says, as if she’s assumed my denial is something else. “To be openhearted …”
“Openhearted sounds much better than having my ‘head in the clouds.’”
“Is that what’s been said to you before?”
“A time or two.” I carry my plate and bowl to the island and sit next to Pari. I rip my toast into four squares so that I know exactly what I’m eating. Each square will hopefully take me five bites. “My mom would have had it Sharpied under my degree. And ta-da! She was right, wasn’t she?”
“Alaska doesn’t seem too practical.”
“She works for an oil company.” I pull one of the toast quarters into
two pieces. “Don’t imagine her in a cabin somewhere being all backwoodsy. She’s in as close to a penthouse as Anchorage has.”
“Still, that seems like a lot of negativity to fight through on your graduation day.” Pari’s eyes sing their compassion in a face that’s otherwise so composed.
“Oh, she didn’t come to my graduation.” The nibble of toast sticks at the back of my throat. I swallow it down with effort. “She had a conference that she couldn’t get out of. She was the keynote speaker.”
“I see.” Two little words. It’s Pari’s turn to reach for me.
She touches my upper arm with only two fingertips at first. That’s enough to let me breathe again. When her palm slides up my skin to cup my shoulder, I almost shudder. A soft summer rain of comfort washes over me. This is a different sort of touching than the stuff I get from Nikki or my other friends. The attention slut in me sucks it all up like the chrome off a truck hitch.
My friends are good to me, and they give me bottles of wine and shoulders to cry on when I’m upset, but that’s not the same thing as having someone inside the bubble that is you. I spent so long encircling my bubble with chicken wire in order to hide my problems that sometimes I don’t know how to take it down. Here, in this moment, I’ve let Pari inside.
I’m feeling better emotionally, but I let my head droop a little anyway so she won’t take her hand away from my shoulder. She’s not mindlessly patting or petting me. She’s holding still. I’m holding still. That’s the thing. We’re still together.
Eventually, I can’t help looking up from underneath the fall of my hair and giving her a little smile. I don’t want to take advantage of her, make her give more than she feels comfortable giving. Maybe she’ll be reluctant to comfort me in the future if I manage to drag this out into awkward land.
“It was okay,” I lied. “She sent me a really nice Louis Vuitton purse.”
Pari lifts her eyebrows. She takes her hands back and folds them in her lap. I’m sorry to break the spell. “That doesn’t seem like your style.”
“Oh, it’s not. But I was able to sell it for, like, three grand. Covered a bunch of bills while I was still trying to find a job. Mom was pissed when she figured it out.”
“It’s not your fault she chose so poorly.”
Though Pari’s sniffing disdain is quieter than Nikki’s tendency to drop f-bombs, they have similar opinions about my mom. “I’d offer you a trip to Alaska, but that would just be punishing you. And you’ve been nothing but nice to me. I don’t know why some nice lesbian hasn’t snapped you up already.”
“I have a tendency to choose badly. I have before.” She shakes her head, looking down at her hands. “I have every reason in the world to be nice to you.”
It’s like the world cants. It twists just a little off its axis. She didn’t say anything creepy, she didn’t leer at me. But I know. I absolutely know, like there’s some sort of gravity between us, that she would … she would give anything. To me. If I wanted her to. I’m not even sure that would have been true a week ago, but now it is.
The insides of my elbows tingle. I don’t know whether to giggle or melt into a puddle, which is the strangest thing in the world. I don’t like women. I mean, I hardly like men even, for all the fuss it’s worth, but I’ve never looked at a woman and thought, I’d like to climb all over her. I’m not there now, but I … I could get there.
So I push all this back to where it started. “You don’t have to sweet-talk me. I’ll be nearby when you’re on Skype. Whenever you want.”
She takes a deep breath, and it’s like she sucks the hint of attraction back into herself. Her shoulders straighten, and she’s a new person. “I believe I’ll do it now. They’re still up. The longer I think about this, the more I’ll dread it.”
“Do you have to tell them? I mean, they’re a long, long way away.”
Her laugh is short and bitter. She slides off the barstool, though she snatches the bowl of strawberries to take with her and also fishes a bottle of mineral water from the fridge. “Trust me. For my mother, the only thing worse than a gay daughter is a daughter who’s hidden her marriage. I’m going to call. I’ll let you know when I need you to come in.”
“I’ll keep an ear open.”
I eat my lunch while I wait, first working through my toast. Five bites for each section gives me a sense of satisfaction. I eat one berry at a time, mindful of the way they burst between my teeth and their juices paint my mouth. Nourishment can be enjoyable, I tell myself.
I’m listening for Pari with every cell of my body. I want to be able to rush in there and rescue her, but I don’t even know what I’m walking into. Will her parents be reluctant but generally accepting? Will they curse her? I don’t like that idea.
Long, that’s what it turns out to be. Pari is in her bedroom for more than three hours. Sometimes I hear her voice rise, and sometimes I think I hear her crying, but it’s all in her language. She never asks me to come in, so I don’t feel free to go. It’s as if there’s a spell on me. I go to my room to wait, and theoretically I have my tablet to play games on, but I don’t really see the colorful gems sliding around the screen.
I’m trying to imagine Pari’s face. She’s turning her whole life upside down, even at the same time that she’s just trying to hold the pieces together. I think she’s braver than I’ve ever been. The path of least resistance hasn’t failed me yet. Well, it did for a little while, but then I pulled out of that.
When she finally asks for me, I jump fast enough that my feet get tangled in the throw blanket I’ve had over my lap. I mutter as I kick it away, trying not to curse even though I’m so anxious I’ve got a sledgehammer for a heart.
I pause at the threshold of Pari’s bedroom, a little nervous. Okay, a hell of a lot of nervous. My hands shake when I push open the door.
Pari’s folded in her office chair at the desk. She’s arranged it up against a wall with a window. Though this side doesn’t look out on the ocean, there are still a pretty blue sky and palm trees waving in a breeze. Pari’s desk is sleek maple with cabinets on both ends. Her laptop has two faces pressed into the screen, as if they’re trying to peer through the glass and see me before I even come into view.
Pari has a smile on her face, but she also has her knees tucked up under her chin and her arms wrapped around them. The fingers of one hand circle her other wrist, as if she’s afraid of letting go even the littlest bit. “Hi, sweets. Come meet them.”
Sweets. It sounds odd, but I roll with it. I grab the wing chair next to her bed and drag it over. I’m not going to buzz and bye, abandoning her when she looks so fragile. Her eyes are rimmed in red. I squeeze her foot briefly. “Hi. I’m Rachel Fizel.”
The woman on the other end of the connection scowls. “She said your name. Can you remember ours?”
A test, already. Lovely. I move my mouth into a smile. “Sadashiv Jugnu and Niharika Sadashiv.”
“Her pronunciation is terrible,” Pari’s father says directly to her.
“She tried.”
“I sent you that perfectly nice doctor’s information, and you can’t even try? For me?” That was from Pari’s mother. Niharika is a beautiful woman, and it’s easy to see where Pari gets her bold cheekbones and strong nose from. She has Pari’s eyes as well, though they seem a little more gray than green. Perhaps that’s from the Skype connection.
“I have tried, Amma. Many times.” The skin around Pari’s eyes is so dark that she seems bruised. Maybe that’s on the inside. She rests a hand on my shoulder. “Rachel has a master’s degree.”
“But she works as a secretary!” Niharika screeches.
“At a film studio,” I volunteer. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I should have explained this earlier. Now I’m here living in this woman’s house and I didn’t give her all the information to tell her parents. “Technically my position is assistant producer.”
“What?” chime all three voices at once. They pivot to look at me.
“
You didn’t say it was a studio,” Pari says. Her gaze flicks to the screen and back again. “Just the name of the place. You said they’re in entertainment.”
“They are?” I volunteer hopefully. “Just … the movies kind of entertainment.”
“You don’t even properly know what she does for a living,” Niharika says with disgust in her tone. Her nose wrinkles.
I don’t like talking about this because I’m not where I wanted to be. Where I’d meant to be when I left school. “I got the job through one of my film professors. He knew a friend who was hiring. I’m an assistant producer, but all I do is secretary things. And the studio is work-for-hire. It’s not considered a real studio. Not really. But there’s …” I cough and heat attacks my cheeks. “There’s room for upward mobility. In my field.”
Pari’s eyes don’t narrow, but they … tighten? She’s watching me, and I’ll hear about this later, but for now she’s letting it go rather than interrogate me in front of her parents.
“What good is improvement room if you’re not even taking it?” Sadashiv leans in closer. “I worked from the time that I was ten to give my family a better life. To send Pari to America so she could have what she wants. And what she wants is a wisp of a blonde who has a job far below her studies? Why?”
Pari laces our hands together. It’s only when she lifts them above the level of the camera, to display in the picture, that I realize it’s just for show. I swallow. She brings our combined hands to her mouth and kisses my knuckles. The kiss is as light as fairy wings, and as reverent as taking mass. The way she looks up at me makes my stomach swoop.
“She’s the most positive person I’ve ever met, Papa.” She looks back at the screen. “Not blindly positive though. She’s hopeful even through the darkness she carries with her. You’re going to admire her, Amma. Just give her a chance.”
The darkness I carry? I don’t like that part. Who would? I mean, she’s probably right, but that doesn’t matter as much as making those scowls on her parents’ faces ease at least a little. Which they have.
“When will the wedding be?” Niharika crosses her arms over her chest and asks with an extra handful of displeasure sprinkled over the top.
Far From Home Page 3
