24. Priya
PRIYA
The following Wednesday. Parents’ day at the boys’ school.
I am in my element—the hallways I know, the teachers I’ve met, the small desks and the bulletin boards and the particular smell of an elementary school, which is floor wax and colored pencil shavings and the faintly desperate optimism of an institution that runs on underfunding and dedication.
Dev presents a research project on watershed management.
His voice is steady. His data is organized.
His teacher catches my eye across the room and mouths thoughtful, and I nod, and the nodding contains a pride so large it does not fit in the nod and overflows into my chest, into my hands, into the specific, physical joy of watching your child do something well and knowing that it is his and not yours, that the credit belongs to the boy at the front of the room and not to the woman in the plastic chair whose heart is so full it hurts.
Ravi presents his watercolor series. The street dogs of Chennai, each one rendered with the passionate specificity of a naturalist and a child’s tenderness.
His teacher tells me he is creative and generous.
I believe both of these things. Ravi is my heart walking around in a nine-year-old body with paint on his fingers, and I am never going to stop being astonished by the things he sees and the way he shows them to the world.
We drive home. The boys are in the back seat arguing about whether Hammertime the hedgehog could survive in Chennai, a question prompted by Ravi’s recent Lavender House exposure to Rowan’s fanny pack and his immediate conviction that hedgehogs should be globally available.
Dev is making a climate-based counter-argument.
Ravi is making an emotional one. Both arguments have merit.
Neither will prevail. The argument will continue at dinner, at bedtime, and intermittently for the next three weeks.
I am driving and I am listening to my sons and I am realizing something.
I have been composing, in the back of my mind, all day—during the presentations and the parent-teacher conversations and the drive—what I would tell Margot about it.
The specific details she would want, the ones I have learned, over five months, that she responds to.
Dev’s poise at the poster board, the way his voice dropped half a register when he reached the conclusion of his argument, a vocal shift I recognized because I have heard Margot do the same thing in the research space when she reaches the part of an argument she is most certain about.
Ravi’s street dogs and the Tamil labels and the teacher saying generous and the word landing in my chest like a stone in water.
The particular color of the late-February light through the classroom windows, thin and bright, the kind of light that makes a room full of children’s artwork look like a gallery.
I have been composing these details for Margot.
Not for Marcus, who would listen and comment and consult the chart.
Not for Bea, who would listen and nod and make me a drink.
Not for my mother, who would want to know and who I will call later with the broad strokes, the grades, the teacher’s assessments.
For Margot. Because Margot is the person I want to tell.
It is Margot’s response that I am imagining as I drive—the way she would listen, the way her face would change on the detail about Dev’s voice dropping, the way she would ask a follow-up question about Ravi’s paintings that would be more perceptive than anything I had thought to ask myself.
Because Margot listens like she reads, closely, with attention to structure, catching the thing underneath the thing, and I want her to listen to this.
I want to sit across from her and tell her about my children’s day and watch her receive it with the focused, generous, complete attention she brings to everything she cares about.
I am in love with Margot.
The sentence forms in my mind with the clarity of a scientific conclusion.
It is not a hypothesis, or a theory, not a preliminary finding requiring further investigation.
A conclusion. Supported by five months of data.
Reproducible. Peer-reviewed by Marcus and Miriam and Bea and Deenie and everyone in the Lavender House ecosystem who has been watching me arrive at this conclusion since September with varying degrees of patience and astrological commentary.
I am in love with her. I am in love with her precision and her almost smiles and her system and her blazers and her silence and the way she reads Audre Lorde aloud in a basement at 7:15 and the way she roared, tentative and then real, the window opening.
The boys are still arguing about hedgehogs.
Ravi has escalated to a moral argument—hedgehog access as a matter of interspecies justice.
Dev has countered with a habitat-suitability analysis.
I am driving through the late-February afternoon with my sons in the back seat and my love in my chest and the specific, vivid, complete knowledge that I am going to tell Margot.
Not today. Not over email. Not in the language of also also and late-night research questions and all the careful, boundaried, professional-adjacent ways we have been speaking to each other for five months.
I am going to tell her in person, in the room, in the lamplight, with my voice and my body and the full weight of what I have been carrying since September.
I do not know yet whether it will cost me anything.
I drive home. I park. I open the car door.
Ravi is still talking about hedgehogs. Dev has conceded the moral argument and is now negotiating the terms of a hypothetical hedgehog importation program.
Kali meets us at the front door with the vibrating devotion of a creature who does not know what parents’ day is but who is certain that the return of her people from wherever they went requires a full-body celebration.
I stand in the doorway of my house. My sons push past me into the warmth.
The dogs circle. The house smells like the black bean soup I put in the slow cooker this morning, and the slow cooker was Margot’s suggestion.
She mentioned it once, in an email, the kind of offhand domestic advice she offers without knowing she is offering it and that I implement without telling her I have implemented it.
The slow cooker. The household calendar. The lint roller. The arriving early. The composing of my day in the language she would want to hear it in.
I have been falling in love with this woman for five months. The falling is over. I have landed.