We Are Not Ourselves(201)
She was led to the dining room table and directed to sit. Thomas and Vijay shut the television off and made their way to the table with murmuring contentedness in their voices.
“Do you like Indian food?” Thomas asked, breaking the spell as Anabel slipped into the kitchen. Eileen froze in terror. She’d sat already, had begun to arrange her napkin in her lap, so there was no way out. The last thing she wanted was to act discourteously to these people, but the truth was that she hated Indian food, hated the very sight of it—its little lakes of earth-toned sauces, its hillocks of meat in blasted landscapes of mud. She had smelled the spices but thought of them as an inevitable detail—a tribal marker, not part of the daily routine. She had somehow failed to consider that the Thomases actually made Indian food at home. Wasn’t the way forward to assimilate? She didn’t know how to read these people who blended in but didn’t, who were like her but weren’t, whose kids got where her own kid got, or even beyond, but started somewhere else entirely.
How could she say she hated their food? She would have to explain everything—how she’d come to feel about the neighborhood, about her life, about the world as she’d wanted it to be: simple, predictable, familiar. It wasn’t about their food. It was the smell, the spices, the strangely proliferating condiments, the mystery of its preparation. It was the fact that she’d had no choice about it. So many Indians were there all of a sudden and so many of her friends were gone. At some point all the restaurants in the neighborhood had become Indian restaurants. Then the last of her friends had left, and the Indian restaurants had remained and seemed to multiply. She couldn’t stand the sight of the stuff, and now she was about to be served it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had it.”
And that, finally, was the truth. For all her revulsion, for all the times she’d insisted she couldn’t take a single bite without gagging, she’d never actually tasted it. It had been easier to say she had, because there had been less to explain. It had been easier to say, “I don’t like it,” instead of, “I’m too angry to try it.” But you couldn’t lie to yourself forever.
Her throat was constricted and dry. She took a long drink of water, almost the entire glass.
“You’re in for a treat,” Thomas said upon the entrance of his wife bearing platters. He listed names of dishes; Eileen was too keyed up to register them. He spooned out a plate for her as Vijay passed her a bowl filled with bread that resembled thin, soft mattresses. After she had her plate, the others filled theirs in turn, and the scent wafting up at her was not as offensive as she’d imagined it would be; there was a sweet pungency to it. The mound on her plate was the color of Mars. There was no turning back.
Thomas said the name of the dish again, and she speared some on her fork. As she bit into it, she registered that it was chicken, and also that there was tomato in the sauce, and cream of some sort, as well as some indeterminate spices. There was something complex and contradictory about it, a mildness and a stoutness that competed for primacy, and on top of these a pleasing fullness in the mouth, the medley of textures bolstered by stray grains of rice. She was aware of how she had no competing memory with which to dull the vibrancy of this experience. If to taste forgotten foods was to reanimate the past, then a different kind of reminder, a reminder of future possibility, waited in unfamiliar flavors. She was making a new memory. She was eating Indian food. She’d never thought she’d live to see the day.
“It’s good,” she said, trying to be measured, until she couldn’t hold back. “It’s really very good.” She placed her fork on her plate, straightened up in surprise, and saw them looking at her warmly. It was only then that she registered that they were sitting in the same arrangement she and Ed and Connell had sat in in that room—the father nestled into the table’s head, his back to the window, the boy with his back to the mirror, the wife across from him, ready to shuttle dishes. Eileen was in the seat that had often gone empty at her own table. She’d looked at it in the middle of meals and thought how nice it would be to have someone drop in unannounced and bring the world to her. She’d never imagined the scene from the visitor’s vantage point, how complete a picture of life it might have presented, how much it might have looked as if everything that mattered in the world was there already.
“I didn’t know what I was missing,” she said, and because there was no way to say what she was thinking without telling her whole story, she picked up her fork, took another bite, and hoped they’d see something more than mere politeness in the smile that was spreading across her face.
Epilogue
2011
The day had been a muggy slog, everything moving at half speed. He had the windows open and the fans on, but the air just sat in the room, menacing them. The looming final exam made him rush through the lesson, lecturing more than he liked to. Ordinarily, once the weather turned this warm, sophomores would do anything to avoid the indignity of actual learning, but the extreme heat had sunk them into a state that resembled attentive silence. It was also the class period before lunch. They didn’t draw chalk-dust penises on loose-leaf paper and slap them on each other’s backs, or put on goofy accents when asked to read, or read unbearably slowly on purpose, or read the last word of every sentence in unison. He used to love these muggy days at the beginning, but now that he was a veteran, now that he commanded respect and attention, they were the days he enjoyed least, because he could feel the limits of his craft. There was always room for improvement. He felt almost pleased when Carmine Priore threw his book in the air and told him to end the charade and let them out early: at least it was a sign of life.