Girl Most Likely To (23 page)

“I had a really nice time. This was fun,” he decided, as if I had been his first attempt at Speed-Dating. Then he came closer for a kiss that my grandmother would’ve deemed chaste. Well, maybe not
my
grandmother. But
somebody’s
grandmother.

“Yes, it was.” I laughed nervously. His facial expression melted from warmth into concern and he leaned in close before asking me what was wrong.

“Nothing!” I claimed too enthusiastically, shaking my head as if I could swat the thought away.

“It’s not nothing. You’re thinking something. What is it?”

“Really! It’s nothing.” I avoided eye contact by rummaging around inside my purse, as if the answer might have fallen inside. He wasn’t about to settle this one out of court. So I gave in and decided to oblige his curiosity with what turned out to be a particularly horrendous display of verbal diarrhea.

New rule: No more Merlot around any man who is sexy, sensitive and able to lift my entire body above his head with one hand.

“I just…It’s no big deal…I just…It’s weird. Normally,
I
pull away from a guy. I’m the
girl.
That’s what I’m used to. And you’ve been so nice. I don’t know if it’s manners or being old-fashioned. I’m not complaining. I just…I guess I’m used to a guy being a little more aggressive. But we had such a fun evening, and…oh, my god. I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

What the hell was wrong with me?
He looked as if I had stunned him with a tazer and he might be about to tip over. I considered moving out of the way, only I didn’t know whether a bear fell forward or backward after being shot with a stun gun.

“I guess it’s weird to me that you find me so…resistible. Oh, dammit! That’s not what I meant to say. That makes me sound so arrogant and that’s not what I meant.”

Maybe if I concentrated really hard I could dissolve into liquid form and make my getaway through those accursed metal grates or some of the cracks in the sidewalk. Like some sneaky comic book character. A superhero. Or a super villain. A dating supervillain who ruins romantic moments by saying inappropriate things and then disappears before she can be held accountable!
They will call me The Datinator, and I will wear a red cape with delicate Indian embroidery, and occasionally hit people over the head with a bottle of Dom Pérignon.

I couldn’t stop myself. “Wow. I’ve made a perfectly lovely evening completely awkward, haven’t I? I swear I’m not normally this bizarre. Um…yeah. Listen, maybe we should say good-night.”

Finally, consciousness returned, or, maybe
goodnight
was the secret word, because he grinned and decided to put me out of my misery.

“Vina, you are probably the funniest woman I have ever met. And no, for the record, I do
not
find you at all…what was the word you used?
Resistible?
”

“Thanks, but could you please not look directly at me right now?” I resumed groping in my purse for my keys.

“I didn’t want to come on too strong,” he said and took my hands in his, forcing me to look him in the eye. “At least not unless you gave me some sort of a green light.”

He reached a hand along my neck and slipped it tenderly into my hair, pulling my face toward his. Within moments I was kissing him so passionately that I even surprised myself. As if winning a similar intensity from him might make up for the ridiculousness of my outburst, I persevered. And it worked. Thankfully for my ego, he seemed to think this was fun, and we spent the better part of the next half hour leaning against the stone facade of my building, sucking face like a couple of teenagers racing against a curfew. At one point, he pulled away and smiled at me, semibreathless and covered from chin to nose in traces of my lipstick to ask, “Wow. Do all the girls from Long Island kiss like that?”

“I don’t know,” I blurted without thinking, high on his pheromones and cocky at my face-sucking prowess. “I don’t kiss that many of them.”

Wait a minute. Did I just imply that I
did
kiss
some of them?
Thank God for men who knew when to shut me up with a kiss. Because for the first time I wasn’t thinking about anything other than that moment.

I
pulled the comforter tight around my body to savor the clash of the warmth with the crisp October morning chill sneaking in through the edges of the windows. Rolling onto the half of the bed that Nick recently left behind, I took a deep breath of something that had started to become so familiar. It was the scent of the pancakes cooking in the kitchen. Chocolate-chip pancakes, to be specific, since it wasn’t hard to detect a hint of burned chocolate wafting through the air. There were no chips in the fridge the night before, so the sweetie-pie must have snuck out early to get them before I woke up. On our fourth date, he brought along four roses and asked if we could see each other exclusively. On our three-month anniversary he told me that the only thing he would be willing to accept as a gift was something I wrote just for him, because my heart would be contained inside it far more than it could ever be in anyother object. And when the tears streaked down my face as I explained that it would be difficult for me to let him into my heart after having been hurt so deeply before, he listened quietly and literally kissed them off of my cheeks.

Dropping my head back onto the pillow, I gazed in the general direction of the kitchen, and I smiled. Exposing myself had been the right move this time, no matter what happened next. He would never know how much he had healed me. Right about then, my cell phone rang….

“Heeeeeeeey. Are you as hung over as I am?” Cristina asked in a hushed voice.

“
Nobody
is as hung over as you are,” I told her. “But we did have an early night. We didn’t drink much after the restaurant. By the way, your new boyfriend’s amazing.”

“Francois is not my boyfriend.”

“Does he know that? Considering the way he was nibbling on your elbow last night…”

“I kicked him out an hour ago. I swear, I spent all night listening to him talk, and I didn’t hear anything I hadn’t heard before, you know?”

“Yeah, yeah.” I swallowed to stop my mouth from watering at the scent of the pancakes.

“Isn’t Nick annoying like that? Aren’t you bored of him?”

“Not really. Maybe he’s blinding me with food and sex. Either way, I’m still interested.”

“You’re such a married couple,” she complained.

“I am not a married couple,” I said a little too loud, and then smiled at the sight of the framed diploma that always reminded me of the first time I woke up in Nick’s apartment. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’m sniffing all the milk in my fridge to see if there’s anything that hasn’t gone bad yet, so I can have some coffee. How about you? Do you want to get brunch?”

“I literally just woke up. I’m still in bed,” I answered, piling one pillow on top of the other behind me. “And Nick’s making chocolate-chip pancakes, I think.”

“Okay. I’m hanging up.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I know.” I heard her roll her eyes. “You’re a lucky woman.”

“And he’s a lucky man.”

“And he knows it. Talk about nibbling on
my
elbow. Nick still doesn’t seem to notice that there are other women in the room. My prediction? He’ll propose within a year.”

“Whoa there, trigger-happy! I don’t know about all
that.
I’m happy with him, but…”

“But what,
chica?
I don’t know what to tell you. You’ve got your life back. You’ve got a wonderful new man. And he makes
friggin’ chocolate-chip pancakes
for you, even after he saw you in that hideous dress last night.”

“Hey!”

“Look, I told you that brown is not your color. It was almost as bad as what we had to wear to Chris’s wedding. And if I’m not honest with you, who will be? Anyway, where else are you going to find a guy who’s so superficially pleasing, but so not superficial? It’s an elusive balance.”

“I know, I know.”

If meeting most women’s parents is the emotional equivalent of taking the SAT (no matter how much you’ve prepared, you’ll never know all the answers, so you just thank God that they’re judging on a curve), then meeting my parents is the equivalent of the MCAT tailored for trilingual engineers. No one ever passes.

Meeting most men’s parents, on the other hand, has been a piece of cake for me. And I’ve come to pride myself on it, since, aside from being able to limbo far lower than is natural or necessary, there are few things that I can do better than most other women. Christopher thought the fact that I could sense and tell each parent exactly what they wanted to hear made me an emotional prostitute. I thought the fact that he was traditionally attracted to men on the rebound made
him
emotional toilet paper.

Maybe the former girlfriends of my former boyfriends had been such disasters that the parents were simply grateful I wasn’t sporting track marks. Or maybe my boyfriends were so bland that the time I spent with them, before meeting their parents, left me starving for the adult conversation. Whatever the reason, I would often delay breakups for fear of losing my rapport with the’ rents. I worked well in an artificial environment—the meetings were always planned weeks ahead, everybody knew everybody else’s allergies and
Do-Not-Touch
topics and there was only the example of
the women who had hurt their son in the past
for me to compete with. I shined like a bottle cap resting on top a trash heap in the sun.

The keys to success in winning the hearts of the people whose sons you have bewitched include:

• 1. Dress for church, or temple, or mosque, or whatever.
  Up (like it’s an occasion to be excited about), but also conservative (like you always assume God’s watching). Nothing below the collarbone or above the knee. Makeup like his mother would have worn at your age, which you should know because you asked him in advance. Jewelry that’s classy but affordable. You should be good enough for, but not better than, their son.
  
• 2. Give ’em a little bit of your dwarky side. The wider and goofier the smile, the better.
  There’s a reason why a certain relatably quirky redhead is a hit across all cultures and demographics. Laugh at yourself when you do or say something silly, and his parents will laugh with you. Maybe even glance shyly over at their son for reassurance, and make sure that they see this, but also make sure that they don’t see that you see that they see this. It will remind them that he already loves you, and make them want to find reasons to approve.
  
• 3. Don’t talk too much. Answer their questions and ask more.
  His parents aren’t interested in falling in love with you. They’re only interested in accepting you. The intricacies of your emotions are his cross to bear. Well, his, and your therapist’s. One of the parents always wants to be the center of attention. Figure out which one, and help them. Even if you don’t give a damn about Dad’s stamp collection, or the summer Mom spent in Dijon during college.
  

Since my parents always assumed I would be meeting men through them, as opposed to the other way around, at least a year of a relationship would pass before I’d even bother to mention my man to them. And if he wasn’t Indian, it was a disaster-recovery mission from the start. You assume a certain number of casualties, some carnage, tears and recurring nightmares for everyone involved. That might be another reason why I spared most men the indignity of it for as long as I did. I was hoping to give them as much positive reinforcement as possible in advance, since it was virtually impossible for
some stranger who just walked in off the street, some meathead whose family they didn’t even know
(my father identified way too well with the ’70s sitcom
All in the Family
)to win the early approval of the people whose offspring he was attempting to steal. He was lucky if he left without his self-esteem deep-fried and seasoned in a doggie bag.

I knew it was a bad idea, but Nick insisted just a few months into the relationship that I allow him to meet my parents. When I called to invite them over for lunch, my mother interrupted to tell me that she had decided not to make any new friends until after my wedding.

“Am I engaged and nobody told me?” I asked, smiling conspiratorially at Nick as he crossed my living room.

“No, darling, of course not. But surely you will be within the next few years.”

“Mom…”

“No pressure, no pressure. I am just planning my affairs accordingly.”

“So
why
exactly can’t you make any new friends before then?” I tried to keep my composure while he lifted my hair and began nibbling on the back of my neck.

“Because,” she began as if she were explaining to me for the fifth time why I wasn’t allowed to wear my pajamas to school, “any friends I have will be offended if I do not invite them to my daughter’s wedding. And limiting guest lists is always a difficult thing to do. Everybody is so petty.”

“Why don’t you tell everyone we plan to have a very small wedding?”

“Why don’t I just go and have a liposuction?”
she mocked.

“What?” I rose to my feet, causing Nick to nearly tumble off the couch.
Sorry,
I mouthed, before walking toward the window.

“Vina, you know us better than that. There are certain things which are not done. And what’s more, you know things don’t work that way in Indian society. We cannot change traditions to suit ourselves. I don’t want to make new friends right now, and then have to alienate them within two years because of the wedding.”

“Oh, so now it’s two years?”

“Vina, calm down. I am only talking, that’s all.”

“Okay, so what you’re saying is that my
not
being married is now directly cramping your social life.”

“That is not what I said.”

I knew she hadn’t.

“Why are we talking about this? Listen, it’s time for you and Dad to meet Nick. He has offered to make lunch for all of us at his apartment on Sunday.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because…we might be hungry?”

“Don’t make fun, Vina. Anyway, you father is not going to like this. But I’ll try to convince him. I think it should be fine. So you are…umm…very serious about this…Nick?”

“Mom.” I was as stern and declarative as a grammar-school headmistress. “I am
not
inviting you to this lunch to announce an engagement. You’re meeting him. That’s all. Calm down. And please tell Dad not to be mean.”