“Ancient history-mystery whatnot.” Anjali Auntie waved her free hand impatiently.
“Did you study it or something?”
“No. No, I just have an interest.” Her shoulders softened, even as she gripped the blowtorch by its neck. “I have a friend—a catering client—who studies all these things.”
“Okay. Okay, so, the mythical river. Gold’s supposed to make you immortal?” I glanced meaningfully at what we had laid out on the table, though kept mum for the sake of the recorder.
Anjali Auntie lowered her voice. “Not this type.” Then she spoke in a more normal tone. “Only pure gold, they say, straight from the earth. Gold that runs in rivers and in soil, et cetera. All other gold that’s been made or owned by humans”—she mimicked my glance at the table—“contains human desire or ambition. But with pure gold, well, then you can live forever. Oh, don’t use this, Neil. I’ll think of some other ancient story for you. Something from the Ramayana, maybe. Can you turn that off a moment?”
I shut off the recorder and helped lift the blowtorch. Over the low roar, she recited something foreign, hoarse, and musical: Asya swarnasya kantihi . . . The blue flames overtook the basin until the fire quelled. Left over: the low gleam of the smelted gold, gurgling thickly, being born. An espresso cup’s worth of the stuff.
“Is that a prayer?” I asked when she was done. I’d been working up the courage to further inquire into the specifics of the ritual.
“Not to God, really,” she said. “More to the balance of forces, time, the elements—we’re asking for a certain power of the gold’s to be surfaced. In this case, the ambition it contains.”
“Can I ask something dumb?”
“Not if it’s something else off that sheet of yours.”
“What is it, really? Gold. What’s the big deal about it?”
“It’s old as the stars. Literally, some of it comes from neutron-star collisions.”
“Really?”
“Some of it. Gold’s old as you can imagine—older than your mind can comprehend. It exists deep in the planet’s core, and some of it came to earth when asteroids struck. Chemically, it’s unique—resistant to most acids. Stuff that would break down even silver won’t harm gold. That’s why it’s been so valuable.”
“And you can’t make more of it.”
“That’s what they say. Too expensive.” She was making her way to the fridge, where the pitcher of lemonade waited. Together, we poured the gold in. Before the lemonade, the broken-down gold smells intense and acrid, nauseating. But when that enchanted gold hits the perfect brew of lemonade, everything changes. There comes the ached-for plonk of something thick and heavy into liquid. The hiss as it diffuses into long dancing columns. The supernatural carbonation igniting the cravings. I still miss it sometimes.
In the weeks after that, Anjali Auntie regaled me with more history of the strange discipline we were practicing. Anita didn’t take much interest in these tales. “Practical to a fault, that girl; doesn’t think much about what goes into anything she’s given,” Anjali Auntie often said. I was a better audience, for I am impractical to a fault. We discussed the strange universality of gold as a cultural fixation—alchemy came to India by way of China and made it as far as Europe—and the persistent Indian obsession with it.
She loved the Western stories, too, like the one about the greedy Roman general Crassus, put to death by drinking molten gold, or the tale of King Midas; Anjali Auntie related the end of the Midas tale, which I’d never before heard. After he turned his daughter, his food, his whole life into gold, he begged for a reprieve, and it was granted. He ran to a nearby river—I pictured a necklace of blue coursing through a sun-yellowed valley of wheat—and plunged his hands into the rapids. The water lifted the curse. The river became speckled with the metal. Thereafter, people panned its waters. Like the American gold rush, I thought. Like the Bombayan.
That day, I went home, new lemonade still slicking my lips, with nothing close to what I needed for my assignment. I brought to class a Wikipedia’d summary of a section of the Ramayana, the part about the golden deer that tricked Sita into following Ravana to Lanka, and to her imprisonment. I claimed my aunt had told me this story over the phone as a caution against greed.
Ms. Rabinowitz looked sadly at me after I shared. “You didn’t find out very much about your—aunt, was it?—on a personal level, did you? What does she miss about her home? What does her heritage mean to her today?” That assignment was the only B I earned that fall.
* * *
• • •
On a Saturday evening in mid-November, I was in the debate trailer, highlighting files with Wendi. We were behind, because Wendi had lately been waffling between debate and community service hours, having decided she needed to augment the moral and civic aspects of her Harvard application. (“Fuck fossil fuels,” she’d wailed the other day while dropping me off at home, as she dialed Jack Kim’s brother. “Can I come by your church? Well, yes, I know I’m not Korean or Christian, Frank, thanks for informing me, but ask yourself, what would Jesus do? He would probably give me a recommendation about a hungry homeless person I could feed . . .”) The trailer sat behind the gym and boasted one grimy window, a pizza-stained couch, and a whiteboard on which so many genitalia had been drawn and erased that there remained a perpetual shadow of dicks and balls beneath whatever text you tried to write on top. Just then it read weapons of mass destruction in a slanty hand over a faded green penile shaft.
We were preparing for one of the larger tournaments of the semester, coming up in Chicago. My mother was going to buy me a down jacket, which she had said might “come in handy” if I went to school in the northeast, which for my parents meant the Ivy League; my grades that semester had made them hopeful.
I was positively thrumming with a recent dose of lemonade, and therefore reading rapidly, connecting arguments, anticipating rebuttals, and feeling the surety that came with the gold. The lemonade powered me through research, yes, but more important, it provided a swagger that laced my speeches, delivered at hundreds of words per minute, and the cross-examinations, held at a slower pace, which nonetheless required as speedy a mind. Who could have imagined the power carried around in the rings and pendants of unassuming desi debaters? Who would have guessed that in such gold (even in the girls’) lay what I must call an intellectual alpha masculinity? Though that strength was borrowed—and temporary—I was drinking enough such that, bit by bit, my private self was coming to resemble the person the lemonade helped me be in the aggressive theater of debate rounds.
I was spinning my pen, reading something about solar energy in Afghanistan, when my red flip phone rang. My parents had not paid for text messages on our family plan, and I didn’t give the number out often. So I was surprised to see it buzzing on the table. I didn’t recognize the voice on the other end at first; it was loopy and sodden.
“You’re, what—? . . . Where? . . . What about your mom? . . . Jesus, Anita . . . You know I don’t have my license. . . . I could ask Prachi—okay, okay, I won’t . . . Where am I supposed to get a car? . . . Fine . . . Say the address again.”
I put my highlighter down and looked straight at Wendi Zhao, who eyed me viciously before agreeing to drive me the forty minutes to Buckhead.
Traffic at eight on a Saturday was light. Wendi merged violently onto the highway and crossed three lanes in a frantic spurt to the HOV side. An unlikely number of tall pines lined Georgia highways, and though it was hardly nature, it still felt like air, like breath, a reminder that something beyond Hammond Creek existed.
Wendi: “This girl—do I know her?”
“She used to go to OHS,” I said, and named Anita.
Wendi shook her head to say it didn’t ring a bell. Then the headshaking grew vehement. “You know what I feel about this, though?” I figured she would tell me no matter what. “Like, just wait a couple of years to d
ick around. I’m going to dick around a lot at Harvard, trust me.”
“Anita wants to go to Harvard, too,” I said. That briefly silenced Wendi. We passed under green sign after green sign announcing another suburb where other Neils and Wendis were waiting. The interstate spat us out in Buckhead, where there were more trees—historic trees, all knotty. We turned onto a wide street where each home resembled a small plantation—enormous white houses with wraparound porches and lawns as well maintained as a golf course green.
I suddenly recalled visiting Harvard when Prachi and I were kids, on a vacation to see cousins in Boston. In the photographs, we are big squished ravioli in magenta and traffic-cone-orange coats. My father holds me up to the lucky John Harvard statue, on which, it turns out, freshman boys have an affinity for pissing. All the hope of the Asian immigrant is crammed into my father’s hands as he lifts me up—though I am too old and too fat to be held—so I can scratch a little good fortune from that urine-drenched talisman.
“Wendi,” I said. “What’s after Harvard?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. You get there. To Harvard. What happens next?”
She looked at me like she had something sour on her tongue.
“Whatever the fuck I want.”
* * *
• • •
You could almost miss the entrance to Anita’s school as you passed by the old-style Southern diner boasting, on a signboard, the butteriest grits in Atlanta and the sweetest tea to boot. We caught sight of the brick gates just in time. Two tennis courts loomed to our right, ringed by old magnolias. A sign in bright orange lettering congratulated the Bobcats on winning the state championship in men’s and women’s cross-country—Anita’s team—and then cycled to add more titles collected that fall: football, robotics, quiz team, show choir . . .
“Maybe if I went to school here, I wouldn’t wait to dick around, either,” Wendi said bitterly as we crossed a small blue bridge running over a creek. My window was down. The water warbled. Campus was dark, but a few lights switched on automatically as we drove.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“This is practically already the Ivy League. She’s got a free ticket.”
I stiffened. “Turn right here, I think,” I said, trying to remember the directions Anita had given me. “She said she’s in the old junior high.”
“She’s not going to barf in my car, is she?”
“No,” I said. “And she doesn’t have a free ticket. She works really hard.”
“Didn’t say she didn’t,” Wendi said, and briefly that puckered face loosened. Suddenly, she slammed her horn, hard. We’d nearly hit a train of figures sprinting across the road.
“Wendi!” I said. “They have security on campus!”
“Security? Why are these kids drinking here on a Saturday, then—” but she shut up as I pulled out my phone and dialed the number Anita had called from. Three rings, four, no reply. “You got a cover story ready, superhero? I’m not taking the fall for this chick.”
“You’re supposed to be the fast thinker,” I snapped.
I tried the number once more, and this time a guy’s voice answered. It was deeper than mine, cloaked in a friendly Southern burr. “Are you Anita’s brother?”
“Brother?”
“She said her brother was coming to pick her up?”
I paused. I assented.
The voice directed me where to come. “Hurry,” he said.
The crowd that awaited us, in a parking lot next to a one-story brick building, was wedged against a broad tree. Two figures peeled away: a guy taller than me, and a girl leaning on him. The guy was white and had dark brown hair that fringed above his ears. He looked annoyed.
Anita grinned at me dizzily. “Neil. Happy happy to see you.”
“Is she okay?” I reached out an arm so she could lean on me instead.
“She didn’t drink that much,” the guy said. “But I don’t think she really knows how to handle it.” He sounded sober. “We’re all trying to get gone, though. We would have taken her home, but she wouldn’t say where y’all live.”
“Far,” I said. “Thanks.”
We found a towel in Wendi’s trunk, and I sat in the backseat with a dozing Anita and laid the towel over her lap in case of emergency. We pulled out of the vast compound and Wendi lowered the windows. The air was fresh but cold and smelled like peeled potatoes.
“Can’t she choke on her vomit?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Wendi said. “Better that than spewing.”
We were minutes from the interstate, on one of those roads with gated houses, when Anita suddenly began knocking on the door. “Pull over, pull over,” I said. Wendi did, and I edged out with Anita. We knelt on the grass by a Keller Williams realty sign, and I caught her hair while she retched. Vomit splattered the sign. After expelling, she inhaled deeply. “Alcohol. It’s fun, everything gets more fun.”
“You’re not making the greatest pitch.” I pointed at the ruined open house sign. I had defended her to Wendi, and I’d meant it—she did work. But I felt betrayed. I’d thought we were both waiting. “Why were you guys drinking at school?”
“Issa cross-country thing. Haaazing.” Her words ran into each other like cramped cursive handwriting.
Anita was wiping her mouth with her hand and picking at the un-vomity grass, and I got the sense from the way she was screwing up her shoulders that she was preparing to release a torrent of pent-up feelings on me the way she had in her kitchen a month ago. I wanted none of it now. I couldn’t win—either she kept me at a distance, which ached, or she drew me close, which resulted in disgust that she’d shown herself to me at all, followed by an even crueler distance.
Wendi honked, unconcerned about disturbing the residents of the nouveau plantations.
“Homeward bound, Ani,” I said, and she giggled. I stood. Anita grabbed my hand and hoisted herself up next to me. She linked her arm through mine and stumbled back to the car while I bore much of her weight. Every touch that might have felt sacred some other time now felt like confirmation that she took me for granted. In the backseat of Wendi’s car, Anita laid her head on my lap, and I hastily shoved the towel beneath her hair to make a pillow, to separate her hot cheek from my zipper.
Wendi surveyed me in the rearview mirror knowingly, rolling her eyes, and switched on Death Cab for Cutie until we reached the Dayals’.
“It was fabulous to meet you,” she said to Anita as we hopped out. “I’m sure I’ll see you at Harvard.”
Anita’s eyes crossed. “You like-like Neil,” she said. “That’s why she’s so mean to you.”
I tugged her to her door, my face burning. As Wendi sped away, I checked over my shoulder—my house was dark. I was still, to my parents’ knowledge, at debate.
“You’re sure your mom’s not home?” I whispered, and Anita laughed, as though the prospect was ridiculous. Inside, I put her in her bed and kept a trash can by the pillow, copying the gestures my mother adopted when someone fell sick. Anita’s nightstand was piled high with school things—composition notebooks, a chemistry textbook, a Folger edition of Macbeth. Above all that was the Harvard shrine that had papered her walls since middle school: a crimson pennant, a beat yale sign someone’s cousin had donated, a page torn from a lookbook featuring a diverse array of students taking in the sun on the Yard. Anita sat up, unclasped her gold hoop earrings, and placed them atop Macbeth before flopping onto her stomach.
“Neil,” she said, more to the pillow than to me. “He doesn’t like me.”
“Who?”
“The guy, the guy, Sam. Sam.” She emitted a kind of horse whinny. “He likes Mary Claire Turner. Em-cee. She has no butt. It’s flat, just shwoop, back there. He doesn’t even see me, he looks shwoop, right through me.”
“Why did you go out with those kids? You
r mom would kill you if you’d gotten caught. And where is your mom?”
She shrugged. “I dunno.” A hiccup, racking her whole frame. “She has places she goes places, I dunno, like, she’ll say, ‘I’m not like other moms, I leave you alone,’ but one day I’m gonna drown in all her lemonade.” A hiccup that turned into a gag.
“Do you need to puke again?”
“Never ever ever again.” She shook her head violently. “I hate Mary Claire Turner.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Say you do, too, Neil, say it.”
I considered not playing along, but gave in. “I hate Mary Claire Turner, too.”
“Em-cee,” Anita said, chewing on the inside of her cheeks. I thought she was going to spit Mary Claire Turner’s name right out on the carpet. “She’s spoiled.”
“You’re acting spoiled.”
“Huh?”
“No. Nothing.”
“No, no, like, say what you were gonna say.”
“I don’t know what to say to you, Anita.”
“You’re so pissy at me.”
“Yeah, a little.”
“You’re always so pissy at me.”
“Not always. Just now.”
Her loosened ponytail had fallen on her face. “I feel like I’m gonna explode.”
I had the urge to push up her hair, clear her skin, give her room to breathe.
“You get it?” she said.
Was that all she wanted me to do, get it? All I could do? “I think so.”
“Sam,” she sighed. “You know, I thought sometimes, sometimes, I’m like, hey, lemme acquire something from Mary Claire Turner, you know.” She was turning her face into her pillow, away from me. I just heard her say one thing before I left, before my hand closed around the hoops she had placed atop Macbeth. “But there’s no point, see, because white girls, they don’t even wear gold, white girls, they prefer”—hiccup—“they prefer pearls.”
Gold Diggers Page 9
