“Because you’re leaving.”
“Oh,” Sunita said, softening. “But I’m coming back. Sunny always comes back.”
“What if you don’t?” Todd asked. “What if you stay there, like your parents?”
Sunita rolled her eyes. “I have to come home and graduate. And get a job.”
“What if you get a job over there?”
“Then you’ll just have to move to India with me.”
This seemed to appease Todd.
“What should I bring to the dinner?” Maribeth asked.
“Wine if you want,” Sunita said. “If wine goes with curry. And you can bring Stephen.”
“He’s in California, but can I bring another friend?”
“You’re working three guys?” Todd asked.
“Not exactly.”
THERE WAS A crowd. Fritz. Miles. Two other people from Thanksgiving. Sunita wore a lovely purple shalwar kameez. Todd wore a tux.
“I didn’t know it was formal,” Maribeth said.
“I just came from work,” Todd said. “So many functions around the holiday.”
“He’s just taking on the extra shifts because he’s sad Sunita is leaving,” Miles said.
“Are you jealous?” Todd asked.
“A little,” Miles said. “It’s hard to compete.”
“My husband used to say the same thing about my best friend,” Maribeth said.
“Oh, so now you’re marrying me off?” Todd asked.
“Why should I be the only one?” Sunita joked.
Janice arrived. Maribeth introduced her as a friend from the swim club. If Janice called her Maribeth, no one seemed to notice.
They drank the wine. Sunita laid out a tray of papadum, crispy lentil crackers. “I didn’t make these,” she explained. “I bought them. But everything else, I cooked.”
The entire apartment was fragrant with spices and the tang of onions. “What did you make?” Janice asked.
“Chicken jalfrezi,” she said. “It came out kind of spicy.”
“But you didn’t burn the onions this time,” Todd said. “She really has been practicing all fall.”
Sunita snapped off a piece of papadum. “I haven’t been to India in more than fifteen years,” she said. “It’s scary going back.”
THE CHICKEN WASN’T kind of spicy; it was lip-burning hot. Maribeth and Todd began to guzzle water. Janice, who had made a valiant effort before abandoning the chicken for the rice and bread, told them that water didn’t work. She emptied their wineglasses of the pinot grigio and filled them with milk.
“I feel five years old,” Maribeth said.
“Really?” Janice asked. “I drink milk all the time. To ward off osteoporosis.” She had poured herself a glass, too, and now wore a tiny milk mustache. Maribeth was beginning to suspect that she gave herself those on purpose.
AFTER THEY DID the dishes, Sunita changed into jeans and a sweater. She, Todd, and the rest of their friends were heading out to a party. As everyone said farewell, Maribeth slipped a card for them on top of the TV. Inside were two tickets for the musical production of The Wizard of Oz, which was coming to Pittsburgh in February.
She and Janice watched the young people disappear. Then they went to her apartment. They had business of their own to attend to.
70
My dearest daughter,
This is the third letter from me that you have received. Three letters doesn’t seem like much in the ten years since I sent the first one, or the nearly forty years since you were born. I thought I might take this opportunity to tell you about all the letters from me that you have not received.
I wrote you on your first birthday. It was not an actual card; I was still too sad and heartbroken at that point to commemorate your birth in such a concrete way. But I imagined a card I would send. I wrote, “I love you,” but I never signed it, because I didn’t know what to call myself.
Other birthdays I actually bought you a card. There is one from your Sweet Sixteen. It has a bunch of birthday candles, tied up like a bouquet, and it reads, “Daughter, Sixteen candles. It only gets brighter from here.”
I have bought a card or thought a card on every one of your birthdays, the consequential ones like your big 3-0, and the less ballyhooed ones, like twenty-three. Sometimes I feel foolish buying the cards. And other times, proud. Particularly if the salespeople see the card and make small talk as they sometimes do about you, and maybe their own daughters.
I also write you letters; sometimes they are real and sometimes they are imagined. A few months ago, there was a particularly lovely night sky. A big harvest moon, Venus shining brightly, and when I looked up at it, I thought about you looking up from wherever it is you are. It gave me such comfort to think of the same night sky covering us both. So I came home and wrote you about it.
It is not always happy occasions, I must confess. When my mother died—of old age, you will be relieved to know, longevity runs in the family—I thought of you, of the line of women that continues with you. I wondered if you had a daughter.
I have written to you before of the difficult circumstances that led to my decision to give you up, so by now I expect you to know, if not to fully understand, the kind of home I grew up in and why I could not raise you in that place, and why I was not remotely equipped to raise you on my own. But I have not really spoken of my own mother, who also endured that home. Maybe that was all she could do. Not fight back against my father, not protect me, but endure. In the end, she outlived him. She outlived that misery. She spent her last years in an old-age home. People think badly of those places but my mother had the best years of her life there. She got to do as she pleased. She got to swim again. She got to read a book if she felt like it. Watch whatever she wanted on the television. No one hit her. No one called her names.