4. Priya
PRIYA
The thing about Kali is that she has never once, in five years of cohabitation, demonstrated any evidence of learning from experience.
I say this with love. I say most things about Kali with love, even the things that are complaints, because Kali has the quality of a natural disaster you’ve grown fond of: you know it’s coming, you know it will cost you something, and you have stopped trying to prevent it because the prevention would require a fundamental reorganization of the laws of physics.
The empirical data is extensive. The cerulean paint incident.
The sourdough loaf she ate whole off the counter and then regarded me with the bottomless vacancy of a creature who has not yet connected the bread to the stomachache, and will not connect it tomorrow, and will eat the next loaf with the same conviction and the same regret.
The backyard squirrel she has been chasing since we moved in.
The same squirrel, I am almost certain, a wiry grey one with a notch in its left ear who sits on the fence and watches Kali approach with the weary patience of a prey animal that has long since stopped taking this particular predator seriously.
Moti, by contrast, has learned everything and chosen to do nothing with the information.
He observes. He judges. He lies on his enormous bed, the bed I bought for a Great Dane because the store was out of the Lab-sized ones and Moti accepted the upgrade without comment.
He sighs. The sighs are philosophical. They contain a complete worldview organized around the principle that effort is overrated and naps are undervalued.
The boys call them both “the destroyers,” which is technically unfair to Moti but the name stuck because Ravi coined it at seven, and Ravi has a gift for the irreversible declaration.
Tonight the destroyers are underfoot while I attempt to make dinner.
The kitchen is small, too small for a woman and two dogs and two boys and the accumulated evidence of a family that cooks every night and cleans up most nights and has, over four years, established a layered archaeology of spice jars and school artwork and charging cables and one mysteriously persistent oven mitt that no one will claim ownership of but that reappears on the counter every morning like a small domestic ghost.
The house is a Victorian, a hundred years old, in the historic part of Millhaven a few miles from campus.
I rent it. When Vikram and I divorced, we sold the family house and split it down the middle, and I started renting this one while I looked at places to buy.
Then the boys decided they loved it, and the neighbors turned out to be the kind of people who collect your mail and watch your kids and refuse to be paid for either, and at some point I just stopped looking.
“Amma, can Ben come over Saturday?”
Dev is at the kitchen table with his homework spread across the surface in a formation that suggests organization but is, I have learned, a performance.
He is actually doing three things at once: the homework, eating an apple, and negotiating about his weekend, and none of these is receiving more than a third of his attention.
He is twelve. He has his father’s bone structure—the narrow face, the sharp jaw that will become more prominent.
And my inability to sit still. His right leg is bouncing under the table.
It has been bouncing since he sat down. It will be bouncing when he gets up.
“What’s happening Saturday?”
“Nothing. That’s why Ben can come over.”
“Is your room clean?”
“It’s clean-adjacent.”
“That is not a real state of being.”
“It’s a spectrum.” He takes a bite of the apple. “It’s fine. Ben doesn’t care about my room.”
“I care about your room.”
“Your room has three stacks of papers on the floor and a dog bed you said you were going to move two weeks ago.”
He is not wrong. The stacks of papers are research, or were research, and are now research plus mail plus a handout from Ravi’s school about picture day plus the receipt from the vet’s cerulean paint consultation.
The dog bed is Moti’s secondary bed, the one he migrated into my room over the course of several weeks using a strategy so gradual I did not notice until it was fully established and removing it would have constituted a breach of implied contract.
Ravi appears in the doorway holding a tablet and an expression of urgent need.
He is smaller than Dev, compact, still holding the softness of childhood in his nine-year-old face and his hands, though his hands are never clean.
There is always something on them: paint, ink, graphite, the residue of whatever medium he has most recently used to render his understanding of the world.
His school shirts have permanent stains in the chest area where he wipes his brushes.
I have stopped trying to remove the stains.
“Amma, I need poster board.”
“I thought we handled the poster board.”
“That was for the other project. I need time to create, Amma.”
Dev, without looking up from the homework he is not doing: “You need time to procrastinate and then panic.”
“That’s my creative process.”
I serve the pasta. The kitchen fills with the smell of it.
Garlic, basil, the earthy warmth of tomatoes that have been simmering for an hour.
I serve it with bread from the bakery on Foster and the mango pickle Vikram’s mother sent from her favorite shop in Chennai, arriving wrapped in so much tape that opening it required scissors and determination and Dev holding the bottle while I cut, both of us laughing, Ravi documenting the process in a series of increasingly dramatic watercolors he titled The Opening of the Pickle.
The boys eat. Kali positions herself beneath the table in the spot that maximizes her chances of receiving an accidental drop; she has mapped the trajectory of food from plate to mouth across years of dinners and identified the optimal coordinates with a precision that would be admirable if it were applied to literally any other endeavor.
Moti waits in the living room. I will bring him something. I always do.
Over dinner, I realize I have been talking about my new collaborator for six minutes.
I don’t realize this on my own. I realize it because Dev puts down his fork. He is looking at me with the steady, evaluative patience of a boy who misses very little and comments on about half of it.
“Is she your friend?” he asks.
“We’re colleagues.”
“You don’t talk about colleagues like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like they’re interesting.”
I consider this. He is not wrong. I talk about colleagues the way I talk about departmental infrastructure, that is, with respect, with occasional frustration.
I do not, as a rule, spend six minutes at the dinner table describing how a colleague organized a bibliography.
I do not describe anyone’s approach to organizing a bibliography unless I find the approach either brilliantly efficient or catastrophically wrong, and Margot’s was— I am searching for the right word here and the right word is somewhere between impressive and beautiful and neither of those is appropriate for a bibliography.
“She’s very precise,” I say. This is both an answer and not an answer.
Dev turns it over. “What does that mean?”
“It means she organizes things. Her thoughts, her work, her space. Everything has a place. Everything is considered.” I take a sip of water.
“She has a system for arranging the books on her shelves that involves thematic categories and chronological sub-ordering. She described it as if it were perfectly normal.”
“That sounds like you with your field notebooks,” Dev says.
“My field notebooks are organized by ecosystem and date. That’s standard.”
“You color-code the margins.”
“That’s also standard.”
“Amma. Nobody else color-codes their margins.”
Ravi looks up from his pasta. A grain of orzo is stuck to his chin. He has not noticed it. He will not notice it. “Is she nice?”
“She’s— I’m not sure yet. I think she might be, underneath.”
“Underneath what?”
“Underneath... the precision.”
Ravi processes this. For him, underneath is a physical concept. “You should invite her over. We can tell you if she’s nice. We’re good at that.”
“You invited Dominique over and told her that her shoes looked like they were angry,” Dev points out.
“They did look angry. Those were angry shoes.”
“She was nice, though.”
“She was nice with angry shoes. Those things can both be true.” Ravi scrapes the last of his pasta from the bowl. “Is she like Dominique?”
The question lands casually, in the easy way of a child who has grown up watching his mother date women and men and has never once treated this as remarkable.
Is she like Quinn? he asked when I started seeing Morgan two years ago.
Is she like Morgan? he asked about Dominique four months ago.
The taxonomy of Amma’s romantic life, organized by a 9-year-old with excellent observational skills and a belief, apparently, that every person I interact with for more than five minutes is a potential romantic candidate.
“She’s very different from Dominique,” I say.
“How?”
“Dominique was warm.” I stop. I hear what I’ve said. “Margot is warm too. Differently warm. Warm underneath.”
“Underneath the precision,” Dev says.
“Yes.”
“You keep saying underneath.”
“I keep saying underneath because that’s where the interesting things about her are.”
A silence. The boys exchange a look. Years of shared existence have given them a private communication system that operates at a frequency I can detect but not decode. Whatever passes between them constitutes an agreement, because they both return to their food without further questions.
After dinner I wash the dishes. Dev dries. Ravi negotiates screen time with the passionate specificity of a labor organizer at a contract hearing. I grant him 30 minutes. He accepts, magnanimous: his opening position was 45 and 30 was the target all along.
The house goes quiet by 9:30. I check on both of them because I check on both of them every night, standing in their doorways for a moment the way my mother stood in mine, just long enough to hear the breathing and confirm the fact of them.
I get into bed. Kali arrives approximately eleven seconds after my body hits the mattress—the Kali coefficient, perfectly maintained—and settles across my feet with the density of a sandbag and the warmth of a furnace.
The room is dark. The house ticks.
I think about Margot.
I think about the three frameworks she ranked in persuasive order and the way she reached for her pen when I said something she wanted to record.
The pen was black, fine-point. She drew it from the interior pocket of her blazer with a motion so practiced it was almost unconscious, except nothing about Margot is unconscious.
The pen, the pocket, the angle of the nib on the page.
She wrote my words down. Something that doesn’t know it’s serving two audiences.
I watched her write it and I felt— what did I feel?
The specific pleasure of having said something that a very precise person found worth recording.
A warmth in my sternum. The feeling you get when someone you respect turns their full attention on you and you realize their attention has weight.
I think about this for slightly longer than the professional dimensions of the problem require.
Then I set two alarms for tomorrow morning. I will sleep through the first and bargain with the second and I know this and I set them anyway because the setting of the alarms is an act of faith, or optimism, or the kind of hopeful self-deception that gets me through most mornings.
Kali shifts on my feet. Outside, the neighbor’s cat has stopped and the house is still.
I close my eyes. I’m not thinking about Margot Voss.
I am asleep before I finish not thinking about her, which is probably for the best.