I assemble the feast that the younger Mrs. Mehta left for us: garbanzo beans glistening in a dark gravy, green pepper curry, rice, yogurt, mango pickle, sliced cucumbers, burfi for dessert.
She casts a jaundiced eye over the offerings. “Where are my chapatis?”
“Chapatis?” I look in the refrigerator, but there’s only a ball of dough inside a Tupperware container.
She speaks slowly, as though to an imbecile. “She makes them hot-hot, when I sit to eat.”
“That’s not going to happen. Unless you want to make them yourself.”
“You’re the maid. You should be making them.”
I take a deep breath. “I am. Not. The maid.” She’s waiting, so I try to figure out what I am. “I’m your—caretaker, here to make sure you don’t fall down and break your hip.”
Her lips tremble. “But I can’t eat without chapatis.”
I consider telling her that I’m no good at making chapatis, but I’m afraid that revealing this vulnerability would place me at a strategic disadvantage. I dish out portions onto two plates. When she makes no move to join me, I eat, although it’s not exactly a happy meal, with her watching. After I’m done, I wash up, put her plate in the fridge, and say good night. She doesn’t reply. When I leave, she’s still standing at the counter.
I’ve been looking forward to a relaxed, raccoon-free slumber in a bedroom all my own. But when I snuggle under the satin comforter that smells like lavender, I find myself thinking of the old woman: the razor-sharp curve her collarbones made under her skin, the way her arms hung at her side, as though they’d given up.
Confession: I have been disingenuous. I did not inform my employers that on Friday—in a couple of hours—I must go to work. It is true, as Mr. Lawry would say, that they did not ask me about this. However, I feel guilty, and a little worried at having to break the news to Mrs. Mehta.
She’s in the kitchen pulling out pots, making a great and unnecessary din. Of the uneaten dinner there’s no sign.
“I brewed tea,” she tells me, “since you probably don’t know how. This morning we’ll have aloo parathas. You can boil the potatoes, then peel and mash them. I’ll mix in the spices.”
“Can’t. I have to go to work.”
I steel myself for histrionics, but she just looks at me, mouth slightly open. Her lower lip is ragged, like she’s been chewing on it.
“Only for a few hours,” I say. “You’ll be fine—”
She sets down the pan. “I’ll come, too.”
Visions of her sweeping through Nearly, her nose turned up, run through my head. (You work here? she’ll say, ruining the place for me.)
“No.”
She grabs my sleeve. “It’s so quiet. Not one live person, not even on the street, to look at or wave hello. I feel like I’m being buried alive.”
When my mother first moved from India to Northern California, she felt dreadfully alone. One winter day when my father was at work, she walked to a park and sat on a bench, just to get away from the dark, empty apartment. A storm started, but she didn’t move. She sat there in the freezing rain until my father came looking for her. He had to carry her home, her feet were that numb. He made her take a hot shower, rubbed Vicks on her chest, and forced her to drink her first glass of whiskey. In spite of that, she fell ill with pneumonia.
She told me this after he moved out of the house. She said, “He showed me so much love. I wish I’d died then.”
Mrs. Mehta senses me weakening. “I’ll take my knitting bag and sit in a corner. You won’t even know I’m there.” She scuttles upstairs to change her sari before I can forbid her.
It’s only when we’re halfway to Nearly that I notice she isn’t carrying anything.
“Where’s your knitting bag?”
She turns toward me a face as innocent as applesauce. “Oh, my goodness! All this excitement made me forget it.”
“This is not a crèche,” says Mr. Lawry. “This is not a senior center. This is a business.” His voice rises operatically. The entire population of the store—Blanca, Keysha, and two teenage girls who should have been in school—congregate around us. “People come here to buy.” He glares at the bagless Mrs. Mehta.
I consider pointing out that fully three-quarters of our customers never buy anything, and that another 20 percent demonstrate a proclivity toward wandering out with purchases before they’ve paid for them. But before I can jump to her defense, Mrs. Mehta says, “What makes you think I haven’t come to buy?” Houdini-like, she pulls out of her sari-blouse a small cloth purse and extracts from it several twenty-dollar bills, which she waves at Mr. Lawry. “Not that it looks like you have anything I want.” She strides haughtily toward the bed linens. Mr. Lawry glares after her and sentences me to scrubbing the floor.
Mrs. Mehta reappears after a couple of hours. She has sifted through mountains of chaff to discover a fine pair of black pants, a sporty aqua knit top, and a barely used leather tote that I wouldn’t have minded finding myself. When she goes inside the fitting room, everyone gives up the pretense of working and waits.
The Western clothes suit Mrs. Mehta surprisingly well. Along with the frumpy cotton sari, she seems to have shed several years. She takes small, self-conscious steps. I realize that she has never worn pants before. She sees me watching and flashes me a terribly guilty look. I can tell she’s on the verge of retreating to the fitting room and changing back into her old clothes.
I clap loudly and whistle. Blanca joins me. Keysha cheers. A shy, girlish smile breaks out on Mrs. Mehta’s face.
After that, there’s no stopping her. She finds a leopard-print skirt, jeans, a sweater, an embroidered peasant blouse, and a pair of capris, all of which she throws down with an air of triumph on the checkout counter. Mr. Lawry is so taken aback that he charges her the yellow tag price even though none of the articles are on sale.
By now a surprisingly large number of customers crowd the store. Has someone been spreading the news? Mrs. Mehta points them to the corners where she discovered her treasures. “There’s a gorgeous bedspread on the left, by the wedding dresses,” she calls after a bearded man who looks as though he hasn’t been acquainted with a shower in the recent past. When he shuffles back with the bedspread and two pairs of shoes, Mr. Lawry promotes me to cashier. Mrs. Mehta has taken off her glasses. “They were for reading only,” she confides with a grin as she slings the tote over an insouciant shoulder.
I pull her into a corner and warn her not to use up all her money.
“But I haven’t had so much fun since I came to America,” she says. “Everyone here is so real. Even that Mr. Lawry—he is all bark, no bite. I told him he can call me Sonu. It’s my pet name, what my parents used.
“Besides,” she adds, “what should I be saving for?”
She looks at me inquiringly, and I see it’s a genuine question, one to which I have no answer.
During my break, I phone Robert to inform him of the developments.
He laughs, a sound that’s like a sliver of ice on a parched tongue. “A hip Indian grandma! Maybe you should bring her to Victor’s.” He adds, quietly, “I miss you.”
My heart balloons in my chest. I miss him, too, more than I expected.
When I invite her to Victor’s party, Mrs. Mehta’s face scrunches in apology. “Oh, dear. Mr. Lawry just hired me for tomorrow. And you, too, because I said I wouldn’t come otherwise. He says he hasn’t had such good sales since Christmas. Plus, tomorrow Blanca is giving me a haircut.”
“A haircut! What—”
I’m interrupted by Mr. Lawry, who waves as we leave. “Bye, Miz So-noo. Don’t forget our lunch date.”
Things are spiraling out of control. “A lunch date?” I say, once we’re in the car. “Are you crazy? I can’t let you go off alone with him. He’s—he’s—” I rummage my mind for details that will shock her into canceling. “He’s an alcoholic. He cheats his customers. He—”
In reply Mrs. Mehta touches my eyebrow ring, the
one I bought after my father left, a shivery, bird’s-wing caress. It silences me.
Nighttime. Mrs. Mehta and I are making chapatis. My efforts—as always—look like cutouts of various U.S states. But Mrs. Mehta says they are delicious. She eats three of them—mostly to encourage me, I think.
I’d called Robert from Nearly to tell him we couldn’t make it to the barbecue.
“Leave her at the store and come,” he said. “The guys want to meet you.”
“I don’t feel comfortable leaving her alone. She’s like . . . a newborn.”
“You’re going overboard with this. She isn’t a newborn. She isn’t anything to you except a few extra dollars. And here I am, your boyfriend, asking you. Doesn’t that count?”
Words jostled in my mouth. It counted. I loved him. I couldn’t abandon Mrs. Mehta, who was counting on me. She wasn’t just a few extra dollars. I tried to formulate these thoughts into coherence, but all I managed was, “Sorry.”
“Fine,” Robert said.
I called him twice before I left the store; both times I got his voice mail.
Over dinner, Mrs. Mehta tells me of her India days, growing up in a joint family with eleven cousins. They lived in an old house that had so many wings added on that it resembled a warren. They didn’t bother to make friends with outsiders because they had each other.
I’ve never been to India. Never felt the desire to go. But now, as I listen to Mrs. Mehta’s stories, I feel a jab of regret.
Her husband, she tells me, saw her at a Diwali party when she was seventeen and sent his uncle to her parents with a proposal. She didn’t want to get married so soon; she’d been accepted into one of the better women’s colleges. But she gave in—that’s what girls did those days. They were married for forty-five years, mostly good ones. Then one night while they were watching TV, Mr. Mehta slumped to one side. He was gone before she could call the ambulance. Soon after that, it was decided that she should come and live with her son.
Mrs. Mehta pauses. I expect sorrow, or complaints, or, worse, a request for similar confidences, but she says, “Tell me about American life.”
I want to offer her something deep and true—but what? So much that I was sure of has proved undependable.
I tell her I’ll have to think about it.
Mrs. Mehta nods. “We need to sleep, anyway. I have a big day tomorrow.”
In my ocean of a bed, without Robert to protect me, I’m invaded by memories. One of the last times I saw my father was the day he moved out of our house. I remember him walking toward the door, lifting his feet with fastidious decisiveness over whatever was in the way.
Toward my father, whom I’d loved more than anyone ever, my feelings are as unambiguous as a knife. My mother is a more troublesome case. She’s probably still living in the Houston suburb where I grew up, though not in our house, which was a casualty of the divorce. The last time I saw her—just before I dropped out of college—her face had been puffy, the beautiful bones of her face blurred by grief. She hadn’t made the bed or taken out the trash. She poured wine into two paper cups for us. “Chin-chin,” she said, with a gaiety that was worse than tears.
Dressed in her leopard-print skirt, Mrs. Mehta moves regally through the store, wielding the feather duster like a wand. Sales are brisk; she has a talent for saying just the right things to customers. Late morning, she and Blanca go off to the utility area with an armload of fashion magazines. She emerges with a perky bob and a defiant smile.
“Come here,” says Keysha. She outlines Mrs. Mehta’s mouth with her favorite lipstick, Raisin Hell, and stands back to appraise. “Awesome!”
She’s right, but I make a mental note: collect rest of money before letting Mrs. Mehta’s son set eyes on her.
Then it’s lunchtime. Mr. Lawry is wearing, in Mrs. Mehta’s honor, a checkered suit and a matching brown hat. “After you, Miz So-noo,” he intones, opening the door with a flourish.
“Relax, girlfriend,” Blanca says. “They’re just going down the street. How much trouble can they get into?”
To distract myself, I ask Blanca’s advice about what Mrs. Mehta wants to know.
“You can’t tell people about American life,” she says. “You got to show them. Take her a couple places—maybe a club in the Montrose, or the Art Car Museum. Maybe she’d like a massage. You could ask El Roberto for a friends-n-family rate!”
I glare at that suggestion. Then I give in to the longing gnawing at me. This time when I call, Robert picks up, but my efforts at meaningful conversation are hampered by ear-endangering music, raucous shouts, and the fact that he’s had a fair bit to drink.
“You should have come,” he says, his voice truculent. “I was all ready to show you off. You let me down.”
“Next time. Promise!”
He doesn’t respond.
“Tell the guys that I’m dying to meet them.” Not exactly, but this isn’t the time to be truthful and expressive.
He sounds a tiny bit placated. “What time are you coming home Sunday?”
I inform him that it’ll be night by the time the Mehtas return. I fear resistance, but he merely says he’ll stay over at Victor’s tonight, then.
Voices in the background, male and female, are yelling his name.
“Gotta go. Love you, babe.” To his credit, he waits until I say I love him, too, before he hangs up.
Mrs. Mehta and I have spread a map of Houston on the dining table. I point out various attractions: NASA, the Art Car Museum, the gator reserve, but she zeroes in on the blue expanse to the south.
“Is that the ocean? My son didn’t tell me we were so close! I’ve never seen the ocean.”
“Would you like to go for a beach picnic to Galveston?”
Mrs. Mehta informs me that there’s nothing she would like better. She has had some experience with picnics, girlhood excursions with carloads of provisions: potato curry, puris, jalebis for dessert, countless thermos flasks full of tea, a goat for the grandmother, who had to have fresh milk.
“We’re only getting bread and cheese and maybe a salad,” I warn.
She accedes magnanimously. “But of course. I understand. I am in America now.”
Before we sleep, she lays out plans for our future. She will encourage the younger Mehtas—through bad behavior, if necessary—to take several vacations in the coming year. Each time, she will insist on me being her caretaker. We’ll work at Nearly and go on forays into American Life.
I nod, trying not to imagine the fireworks this would cause between Robert and myself.
Our first stop is a department store because Mrs. Mehta insists on swimming in the ocean. Tales of the jellyfish that infest the Gulf have failed to shake her resolve. She hovers dangerously over the bikinis but finally, to my relief, picks a decorous emerald-green skirted swimsuit. She assures me she is a good swimmer; all the cousins learned in the pond behind the family house. But her eyes skitter away, and I make another mental note: keep Mrs. M within grabbing distance. This means I, too, must get in the water.
“We’ll have to stop at my apartment to pick up my suit,” I say.
“Cool. I want to see where you live.”
I warn her that it’s nothing like the Mehta home.
“I should hope not. Will that nice man of yours be around?”
“Robert’s staying over at Victor’s. He probably won’t get back until evening.” But I wish hard for him to have returned home. I want Mrs. M to meet him.
On the way we pick up a feast: French bread, Brie, fruit, a chocolate tart, two bottles of Chardonnay. Mrs. Mehta insists on paying.
“I have plenty of money,” she says. “From my son. He tries to be a good boy, to make me happy.” I think I hear her sigh.
The music hits me as soon as I open our apartment door. Led Zeppelin. Robert’s back! I’m about to call his name when I notice the high heels. The frilly blue blouse, abandoned in a heap halfway to the bedroom door. I glance at Mrs. Mehta, but she’s examining her palm as thou
gh a crucial secret is etched there. On our beat-up sofa, slumped over as though someone tossed it there in a hurry, the raccoon regards me mournfully through its sideways eyes.
We lie on the deserted beach in the dark. We reached Galveston late—it took a while for my hands to stop shaking after I got back to the car. I’d been afraid Robert might come looking for me—or had I been hoping? Either way, he did not appear.
I am sorry that Mrs. Mehta didn’t get to swim or have her picnic. We left the hamper in the trunk. Neither of us was in an eating mood. We did bring the bottles of wine, which now lie toppled between us, mostly empty, next to the raccoon.
Yes. It was the one thing I snatched up before I fled. A shock had gone through me when I grabbed it by the leg, like it was charged with electricity. A furious thrill. My nerves still ring from it.
Mrs. Mehta and I are telling each other stories about the stars. “There’s Kalpurush,” she says. “See his sword. See his crown. He guards the gate to heaven. In exchange for his power, he had to take the vow of celibacy.”
“That’s Hercules,” I say, though perhaps I’m pointing at Ursa Major. I tell Mrs. Mehta of his death at the hands of his wife, who suspected him of loving another woman.
“Should I have confronted him?” I ask. “Should I have been that kind of person?”
“I can’t stay with them,” she says. “They fight because of me. The other day, I heard them mention divorce.” She adds, “Maybe it wasn’t your Robert in the bedroom. Maybe he loaned the apartment to friends for the day.”
I understand. She’s offering me a way out. The stars hang over my head, a blurry, jeweled net. My cell phone rings, and rings again. I reach for the last of the wine and encounter the raccoon. Robert was right. Its fur is soft and bristly at the same time. The tide is coming in; waves break at my feet. The shock I’d felt, standing in the doorway, was a terrible thing. But what was worse was that in a moment it was gone, as though all along a part of me had known that this was where I was headed. That I, too, hadn’t been worth a man’s faithful loving.