Chapter I #2
He shakes his head. ‘They will eventually, and the penalties will be harsh.’
Why are we talking about my loans? ‘Will you miss me?’
‘Of course.’ He sees my face. ‘A lot. Come here.’ He scootches over on the bed.
I lie down next to him. I stroke his chest and he puffs it up, exaggerating the barrel of it, something I tease him about.
‘I will come find you as soon as I graduate,’ he says.
I want to go, though I don’t want to leave him or our nights of honeymoon Hincomb and the little red suit.
He holds me tight and says until then we can write each other sexy letters like Henry Miller and Ana?s Nin.
At the end of the semester I skip my graduation and we drive to Knoxville. We don’t stay with either of his parents. He doesn’t want their scrutiny. We stay with his friends EJ and Marni.
I’ve heard a lot about EJ, one of Yash’s best friends since elementary school. He and Marni started dating in eighth grade and when she got pregnant senior year they got married. Now they have a four-year-old and a two-year-old, and recently bought a house.
‘EJ will be withdrawn when he first meets you,’ Yash tells me in the car.
‘Marni will do all the talking. Once we’ve had some drinks EJ will crawl out of his shell and Marni will let him shine.
If you stay too long EJ will get morose, then belligerent.
We’ll slip off to bed before that. He’s a good guy, but his demons are always circling. ’
‘Because of his dad?’ EJ’s father died of a heart attack in front of him when he was nine years old. He was the only one home. They were making hot dogs.
‘I think he had them before that. Even as a little kid he always thought you were trying to rip him off. I think things were fucked up in his house. He complained about his dad, but once he was gone he was a saint. He always loved Marni. He was obsessed with her. It’s good they’re together.
She’s good for him. And those little girls. You’ll love them.’
We pull into their driveway and the little girls come running and screaming out of the house, the littler one crying because she can’t reach Yash first.
They call him Gas and he calls them the pigeons. He scoops them both up in his arms and they put their faces close to his and everything he says quietly to them makes them squawk and howl and kick their legs.
Marni is on the stoop and I introduce myself and shake her hand. She is our age, twenty-two, but I feel ten years younger beside her. She asks about the drive and I ask about the new house. She’s watching Yash and her girls over my shoulder the whole time.
We all go in. We follow her through the kitchen to the living room with the pull-out we’ll sleep on.
The girls tug Yash into their room. She asks us to hang out with the girls while she finishes dinner.
EJ will be home from work soon, she says.
She’s the first person my age I’ve ever met who has kids and a husband who will be home from work soon.
The girls want to make a fort out of the couch cushions and the blankets from their beds, and inside the fort they want to play a game called Prance, which Gas invented. It involves making your first two fingers do various movements and you have to guess the word for it.
‘You can’t do “prance,”’ the older one says to me. ‘That’s the only rule. No prancing.’
Yash goes first and puts both fingers into the palm of his other hand and shoots one finger out straight before they both scream, ‘Russian folk dancing!’
We all crack up. Yash says, ‘I may have a slight advantage, having taught them a few concepts already.’
The younger one holds up her little palm and makes her fingers jump up and down. ‘Jump,’ I say. ‘Bounce. Leap. Hop.’ I wait for the other two to join me but they are smirking. ‘Catapult. Gambol,’ I say. The little one shakes her head.
‘Saltate!’ the other girl says then collapses laughing.
I could stay in this fort under these blankets all night. The little girls and their fat fingers and the words Yash has taught them. Everything is funny.
EJ follows the pattern Yash predicted. He becomes delightful halfway through dinner and he and Yash and Marni tell stories I’ve already heard but with fresh details. I don’t want to get up and go to the bathroom in case I miss something. I never want to miss one single thing Yash says.
When Yash goes to the bathroom EJ says, ‘He’s never brought anyone home before.’
I nod, to confirm I knew this.
‘No. This is a bigger deal than you understand.’
‘EJ.’
‘No, she needs to know.’
‘What does she need to know?’
Something shifts in the way he looks at me. I have a volatile father, and I understand we’ve just made the turn Yash warned me about. Down the hallway the door to the bathroom opens. ‘Do no harm,’ EJ says in a low voice.
Yash recognizes the change and says he’s beat from the drive and we quickly do the dishes and sneak off to the sofa bed, which is comfortable even when, by five a.m., there are four of us in it. By six we are up and on a walk to feed the horses at the end of the road.
We go to his mom’s for breakfast. She’s picked up seasonal work at a department store downtown and has to go in at ten that morning.
She’s so young, only eighteen years older than us.
She has long hair and bare feet with purple nail polish and gives us both long tight hugs.
This is the house where Yash was raised.
He points through the window to Arlo and Bean’s house across the street—‘She’s a doll but the husband is a waste of blood and bones,’ his mom says—and at the Sullivans three doors down with nine children and the McDaniels at the end of the street with eleven.
‘Big breeders on this street,’ Yash says.
‘My poor mom with her one strange Indian boy.’
She looks at him, displeased. ‘Yashie. Don’t say things like that.’
His mom has put out a big spread of food and he gives her a hard time about spending money trying to impress me.
‘I wasn’t trying to impress her. I just want to feed your bony self.’
We sit and he clams up and she talks about transcendental meditation and the tiny parking lot of the new market that has opened up. ‘If you find a spot good luck trying to get out. It’s tight as a tick in there.’
Every word out of her mouth annoys him. But she keeps trying. Even when it’s clear she’ll be late for work, she is offering us more food, coming up with new topics. Yash is holding up her coat and purse.
‘You’re gonna get fired, Peggy Lynn, if you don’t hightail it right this minute.’ He says this in a Deep Southern accent and I hear the boy he once was.
She gets up and lets him slide her coat on, hand her the purse and open the door. ‘It was a real pleasure, Jordan. Hope to see you again, honey.’
From there we go to see his dad—Jordan is the kind of girl you divorce—for lunch.
He and his wife, Paige, live on a farm thirty minutes outside the city.
Yash always said his father left India far behind, but I didn’t expect the ten-gallon hat or the slow Southern drawl.
He works in whiskey. He owns a distribution company and it’s all he wants to talk about: value chain, cost base, centralized buying, disintermediation, wallet share.
The only time he veers from the topic of work is to tell Yash he knows about his mother’s new boyfriend, Bud.
‘That poor fellow has no idea what he’s hitched his wagon to,’ he says.
Paige breaks in with many questions after that.
He doesn’t hide his impatience with these side conversations.
Yash is humorless and docile. I don’t recognize him.
It’s a great relief to get back in the car.
We spend the afternoon with his uncle Percy and his aunt Sue, who are easy and delightful.
They are raising their little grandson, Jared, who loves Yash as much as the pigeons do.
We eat pie at their kitchen table and play games with Jared in the yard.
I watch Yash slowly unwind from the visits with his parents.
That night we cook dinner for EJ and Marni. The girls are our sous chefs. We urge their parents to go have some alone time in the living room but they stay at the kitchen table and watch us.
Late that night, after we’ve had stealth sex on the sofa bed, nervous the girls would bust in at any moment, we hear arguing. At first we can only hear EJ, low and forceful, but as he gets louder, Marni’s responses become audible. She seems to alternate from combative to placating.
‘Well, we avoided it,’ I say. ‘But Marni didn’t.’
‘I don’t think she ever does.’
It stops abruptly a while later and the house is silent. Yash falls asleep. I stay awake a long time. Only after the girls crawl in beside me around three do I give in to sleep.
Yash drives me to the airport the next morning. It is early and we’re quiet most of the way.
My hand is on his leg but his face is rigid and he doesn’t look over. I wonder if he’s angry I’m leaving.
‘What’s going on?’
He takes in a deep breath. ‘I just wish I could keep driving, back to school. I don’t want to be here for another week.’
‘Come home with me.’ I’ve already asked him. He’s already said no.
He stops outside the terminal. He says they fine you if you get out of the car, so we say goodbye right there in the front seat of the Nova. I cry and he doesn’t. He seems so far away, out of reach already, and that makes me cry harder. It feels like a mistake to leave.
‘Hink,’ he says, ‘you’re going to miss your flight.’
I pull my big suitcase out of the back of his car. I lean into the front and kiss him and I tell him I love him and he says it back, but he has disconnected. I shut the door and he pulls away. I wave and he waves though he is looking straight ahead.
I fly to my mom’s for the holidays. Yash and I talk on the phone a few times. Once he gets back to his place on MacDougal Street, he sounds more like himself. He says he’s wearing the red suit and won’t take it off until he gets to Paris.
The day after New Year’s, I leave for France.