The Startup Wife(69)
“We had a fight,” I say. “Did he tell you?”
“He hasn’t said a word to me. He just showed up at the house, Ammoo fed him, and he’s been hiding in the basement ever since.”
“He’s probably meditating,” I say. “Or sticking pins into an Asha doll.”
“I’ve done that—it doesn’t work.”
“Why didn’t you call sooner?”
“Bitch, I’ve been calling you all day. Ammoo wouldn’t let me before.”
I’m going to have to rescue my husband as if he’s an alcoholic on a bender, except instead of being in a dive bar, he’s with my parents, and I am the one who’s drunk. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I could take a cab, but I don’t want to be trapped with someone else’s sad breath, so I start walking to Penn Station.
* * *
The LIRR seats always stick to my thighs, and today is no different. Fluorescent lights, and the announcer whose accent I can only describe as Annoyed Conductor, all reminding me of the hundreds of times I’ve gone home before, the warmth and the feeling of slight dread and the anticipation of food, trying to shadowbox all the questions my mother will ask.
Mira’s car is at the Merrick station. I climb in the back and give Gitanjali a kiss on the forehead. “How’s the baby?” I ask.
“She sleeps all day and screams all night, so, the same. Oh, do you mean your baby? Well, I heard him moving around downstairs, so at least we know he’s still alive.”
After I’ve gazed at my niece’s face for long enough to make me feel human again, I squeeze through and jump into the front seat. “Good. I don’t want to enter a murder scene.” Then I think, Would Cyrus do it, would he off himself? Should I have that fear somewhere in the back of my mind whenever I disagree with him? More things to worry about.
Mira is about to start the car but then pauses to look over at me. “I want to tell you something.”
“You want to stop covering your beautiful head.”
“No. I want to tell you that the only way I can poop right now is to stick my thumb into my vagina and push it out.”
“Why, why the fuck would you tell me that?” I press a button and the window rolls down. “That is the worst thing I have ever heard.”
“Not so loud, you’ll set off Gitanjali.”
“Then don’t make it Halloween in here. Goddammit it, now I’m imagining it.”
“I’ve been awake for eight thousand hours. I smell like yogurt. I weigh two hundred pounds. And even though my tits are fabulous, I can’t let Ahmed anywhere near them because if he even looks at me that way, I want to murder him.”
“I’m an asshole.”
“No, you’re not. You’re the only person who can code that thing that is taking over the world. But you’re also my sister, and if I can’t shit unassisted, you have to hold that in your big brain along with everything else.”
* * *
Cyprus is expecting me. Sitting with his legs crossed as if he’s the Buddha.
“Everything’s approved, Cyrus. We’re going to buy Obit.ly. Ren and I have some great designs for the integration.” I show him.
He nods.
“Can we go home now?” I ask.
Cyrus isn’t done. For the next forty-five minutes, he talks at length about all the ways my outburst was destructive, and I have to admit, yes, he’s right, I shouldn’t have questioned his judgment in front of everyone. And then I try to say that maybe he should’ve given me a little more airtime when I expressed my misgivings in private, and he says yes, maybe, but the important thing is that I have an anger problem and I need to address that.
My mother calls us up for dinner, and I’m hungry, so I just say yes, that’s true, I was angry, and we hug, and I say sorry about a thousand more times.
* * *
“So,” Auntie Lavinia asks, “when are you two going to make us grandparents?”
“Cyrus and I already have a baby between us, a very demanding baby who keeps us up all night.”
“Means you have practice,” she says.
“I think Gitanjali is enough baby for now,” Mira says.
Cyrus is plowing into my mother’s shrimp and okra curry. “Not a lot of white people like okra,” I announce, desperate to change the subject.
“It’s time you stopped calling him white people,” my father says. My father hasn’t had an opinion in several years, so I feel I shouldn’t disagree.
After dinner, my mother leads me into the kitchen, hands me a pineapple, and says I should peel it very thinly, then go around and around and dig out its eyes and cut the whole thing into triangles. This takes me about a year and gives her time to impart some wisdom.
“Your father has his head in the clouds,” she says. “Cyrus reminds me of him.” She’s chopping some green chilies to go with the pineapple.
“Oh, great. So I married my father. That’s not a cliché.”
“I always knew, even when we came here and started a family, that I was going to have to leave him to his dreaming. When you take people like that and force them to carry a job, responsibilities, they don’t always react well.”