The Vibrant Years(15)
Binji looked thoughtful. “That’s a fair point. But at least you know that. So you can start undoing your own conditioning sooner. You don’t have to wait until you’re at an age when your breasts need prosthetic support.”
Suddenly it was clear to Cullie why her grandmother had moved out of the house she’d shared with Cullie’s mother after her parents’ divorce. Binji was making up for a lifetime of FOMO.
“But isn’t the purpose of undoing conditioning being able to do what we please? I already have everything I want.”
Binji made a face. “You’re twenty-five years old, Cullie! Your whole life is ahead of you.” She didn’t add that work wasn’t everything, but Cullie heard it all the same.
“We don’t all have to want the same thing, Binji!”
“Actually we do. We all want to be happy. And we all owe it to ourselves to try and find out what will make us happy. Even if focusing on what we can control is easier.”
Cullie dragged herself to her kitchen and poked an annoyed finger into her blameless coffee machine, which was coded to give her the exact strength of brew she desired. “Again, what does any of that have to do with dating?”
The coffee machine let out a commiserating gurgle.
“What we find attractive about love interests says more about us than about them,” Binji said in the wise grandmother voice she rarely accessed.
And it made Cullie stop in the act of reaching for a cup. She ran back to her room and picked up her iPad. Her heart was racing again. More importantly, her brain was racing. She wrote down Binji’s words. “Go on,” she said.
Binji winked. “I see going out with men as a journey of self-discovery. It’s about finding us, not them. Think about that for a moment. And the next time you use Hot Steve as an excuse to write off all relationships, consider that you might really be writing yourself off.”
Cullie wrote all of that down. Then deleted the last part about Steve. Yet again, her Binji might have found a way to save her.
CHAPTER SIX
ALY
When I first told her about Poornima, I asked her if she knew what it was like to want something so badly it defined everything you were.
She met my eyes the way only she ever did, slipping inside me through them, and answered, simply: “No, but I feel like I’m about to find out.”
From the journal of Oscar Seth
We need to find a way to get Cullie home.” Aly’s mother-in-law was one of those women who thought “I have a feeling about it” was reason enough to do anything. Without even asking, Aly knew that would be the answer if she asked Bindu why she thought Cullie should come home.
So instead, she said, “Aren’t you the one who keeps telling me to get used to the fact that my daughter is an adult? If she needs to come home, she knows to come home.”
They were grabbing lunch at Cullie’s favorite Iranian place in downtown Naples. Under the bright Florida sun, a plate of khoresh bademjan sat on the wrought iron bistro table between them, almost all gone. The butter-fried eggplant layered on slow-cooked lamb was delicious when it went down, but now it sat heavily in Aly’s belly, making her wish for the siestas of her childhood summers when she visited her grandparents in Goa.
“If only it were that simple. Cullie is your daughter and my granddaughter. So, you know . . .” Bindu trailed off with all the drama of a film star. God knew she looked the part in her chiffon blouse over slim-fit linen pants. Those erstwhile Bollywood actors Aly’s parents idolized had nothing on her mother-in-law.
“She’s inherited that Desai pride,” Bindu said in the perfectly husky voice that always made the broadcast journalist inside Aly envious. “And then there’s the Menezes ego from your side.”
“Why is it pride when it’s your family but ego when it’s mine?”
Bindu made a sound that was an eye roll turned into a scoff. It was all very sweet and dandy that her mother-in-law had chosen Aly over her son in the divorce, as she loved to declare, but recently Bindu Desai had changed so much that Aly was starting to think that this new avatar was best consumed in metered doses.
Nonetheless, Aly’s Catholic guilt jabbed a brutal spike inside her. Bindu had never led Aly wrong when it came to her daughter. She had an uncanny sense for what Cullie was going through. Something that often eluded Aly.
“Fine. I’ll call Cullie as soon as I’m done with my editorial meeting. I need to focus on the story I’m working on. I think this one’s going to be it.” A curl popped out of her chignon, and she pushed it back into place. Joyce was still “working on things,” so Aly was pretty sure she hadn’t been able to make contact with Meryl’s people to poach the interview from her.
“You sound excited,” Bindu said, tone careful.
Aly knew it was concern, but she needed rampant faith right now, not care. Aly’s own parents thought she was a fool for harboring what they called her impossible dream. Well, she’d harbored it for ten years. And she’d lost her marriage over it—something her mother found downright sinful—so she was never giving it up.
Bindu and Cullie may have had their doubts about Southwest Florida News ever letting a forty-something Indian American woman be anything more than a correspondent for diversity stories, but they at least seemed to understand that Aly had the right to want what she wanted.