Quarantine: Stories (16 page)

When I sat back down, Don was still looking at the paper, rereading the article. His eyes were wide, his mouth smiling broadly.

That evening, I was sitting in the living room when Don came into the room and said it was time to go to the performance. I was wearing track pants and a sloppy T-shirt, and I was splayed out on the couch, clutching the remote control, my eyes fixed on the TV.

“I’m not going.”

“Why?” Don asked.

I looked away from the screen. Don was standing there in a tailored dress shirt and designer jeans he had bought at Century 21 during an earlier trip. His brow was furrowed. He was holding his wool peacoat in his hands.

There were so many things I could have said.

“I’m feeling sick.”

Don looked at me a moment. I could tell he was considering calling my bluff, forcing me to explain why I didn’t want to go. But then he seemed to decide against it. He kissed me on the forehead, gently, as though I were really sick. “Feel better.”

After Don and our friend left, I considered leaving, too. I could have walked down the block, seen a movie, eaten sushi, bought a chocolate croissant at my favorite patisserie. After all, it was one of my precious few nights in the city—a night to collect acorns. Instead, I got sucked into the television, idly flipping through channels, eventually settling on a marathon of reruns of
Friends
, a show I’d hated when it first started airing back when I still lived here, hated in part for being such a patently false version of a life in New York. But now that it was in syndication, now that I no longer lived here, I found it comforting, even sweet. I fell asleep before Don returned.

In the car the next day, barely out of New York, barreling down the highway past the bland New Jersey suburbs—an endless parade of Targets and Borders and Bon-Tons—I asked Don about the performance. I was driving. Don took a moment. He lowered the volume on the radio, turned his whole body toward me, lifted his hands (Don, ever the dancer, talked with his whole body). He took a deep breath. The way he did this, I could tell he was ready to launch into an animated description of some section he loved, some particular bit of movement that reminded him of why he himself had become a dancer in the first place. But then he exhaled and said, “You know, it wasn’t so great.” I glanced at him. “Really?” He smiled. “I’m sorry to say it: Antwon is overrated.” Don faced front, turned up the radio, and sank back into his seat.

That morning we’d heard on the weather forecast about a blizzard that was expected to develop that evening. The report warned it was going to paralyze the whole region. The first few flakes were just beginning to fall. They hit the windshield—heavy and wet—and the wipers wiped them away. I gripped the wheel and, hoping to beat the worst of it, gently pressed my foot on the accelerator.

W
hen, by the end of the summer of 1990, the summer they graduated from high school, Sylvie had not only
not
lost the ten pounds the modeling agency had wanted her to lose, but she had, instead,
gained
fifteen pounds, she was told she shouldn’t bother coming to New York, the agency couldn’t represent her, they couldn’t find her work. She was told this over the phone by a woman she had met in New York in the spring, an “ugly” woman, Sylvie now said, whom no one could ever find pretty, so who was she to judge?

Sanj saw Sylvie that Sunday night, two nights after she’d received the news, and just three days before he himself was leaving for the University of Southern California—as far from West Virginia as he could manage. Sanj reminded Sylvie that the local community college had rolling, open admission.

“
Community
college,” she said snidely.

“You can transfer somewhere better next year.”

“I’m not going to college.”

“Then lose the weight,” Sanj said. “I don’t understand why you didn’t lose it in the first place. Ten pounds. That’s nothing.”

“It’s easier for boys,” she said.

They were in the wood-paneled rec room at Sylvie’s, watching MTV’s
120 Minutes
: two full hours devoted to alternative music videos—The Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees—musicians never played on the pop rock station in their small town.

Sylvie’s twin brother, Chris, had wandered through twice already, on his way to and from the kitchen. He was a football player. He was on the starting lineup, even though he wasn’t very good. Chris wasn’t very good at anything. His grades were appalling, one year so low he was disqualified from sports. He wasn’t even particularly good-looking. But for some reason Sanj had secretly fallen for him. Maybe it was the way he padded around the house, always in sweatpants, always shirtless, regardless of the temperature outside, his muscles taut and toned. Maybe it was his curly hair, ringlets framing his face, and the rattail he grew in the back, unfashionable even then. To Sanj, part of what was seductive about Chris was the thought that this was the best time of his life. It wouldn’t get any better. He wouldn’t get better looking. He wasn’t skilled enough to go further in football. He wasn’t going to college. This was it for him. For Sanj, being around someone who was living the best years of his life, while Sanj was living perhaps the worst of his, was seductive.

Sylvie’s was a sweatpants household. That’s all Sanj had ever seen any of them wearing, at least at home. Sylvie was the exception. Even when she didn’t need to be, she was stylish. Tonight she was wearing designer jeans and chandelier earrings.

Sylvie and Sanj had been outcasts in high school, each the other’s only friend. They were proud of their status. As far as they were concerned, no one in the high school was worthy of their friendship.

In spring, they’d attended the senior prom together. (“Just as friends,” Sylvie had said. Sanj hadn’t told anyone he was gay, but he wondered if Sylvie had guessed.) Neither had particularly wanted to go, but Sylvie, at the last minute, had said, “What if we don’t go and regret it for the rest of our lives?” Sanj instantly recognized that she was quoting the nerdy character from a teen soap that had been their Thursday-night guilty pleasure. He shot back, “What if we
do
go and regret it for the rest of our lives?” but in the end he relented. He was glad. At the prom, he was proud to have Sylvie on his arm. While the other girls wore tacky pastel confections, Sylvie wore couture. Well, not quite couture, but close: an emerald green Yves Saint Laurent cocktail dress she’d picked up on sale at Bergdorf, where she’d stopped after her interview at the modeling agency. It was an unbelievably extravagant expenditure for her, and she’d had to use all the money she’d saved over two years working part-time at the mall; even then, she’d had to charge the rest to her parents’ credit card. But she’d thought of it as a reward, and reasoned that she would need such clothes for her new life in New York.

During an R.E.M. video—“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”—Sylvie reached for Sanj’s hand and said, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me here.”

Sanj squeezed her hand and said, “I’ll always be here for you.”

Three days later, the day Sanj left for college, Sylvie came to say good-bye. He and his father were almost finished packing his new Jeep Cherokee—a graduation gift—which they would be driving together cross-country to L.A. They had a circular driveway, with a large fountain in the middle. Sanj’s mother was perched on the front porch of the house supervising when Sylvie pulled up in her dented Toyota Tercel.

Sanj saw his mother’s face before he saw Sylvie; he saw her jaw drop, her eyes widen, her arms fold tightly. She’d never liked Sylvie. She didn’t like where Sylvie lived, or what she knew of Sylvie’s brother and parents, not that she’d ever met them. She’d said as much to Sanj, as gently and tactfully as she could manage, coming to his room one evening as he was preparing to meet Sylvie. “Most people around here won’t amount to much. We are not like them.” She’d taken his chin in one hand. “Sanju, beta, find better friends.”

Looking at Sylvie on their driveway, Sanj saw why his mother was clicking her tongue and shaking her head. The last time Sanj had seen Sylvie, her hair was long, luxurious, honey-blond, falling halfway down her back. Now she was completely bald.

Sanj didn’t need to ask her why she’d done it. A few months ago, they’d watched an interview with Sinéad O’Connor on
120 Minutes
. She’d said that before she shaved her head, no one took her seriously; she was too pretty. Her decision, she said, had changed everything.

Sylvie walked up to Sanj and threw her arms around him. He pulled her close, stroking her bald head. “Your hair.”

“We’re both starting new lives,” she said bravely, and for a moment he believed her. Then he noticed she was trembling.

“You’ll get out of here, too. One day soon. I’ll help you. I promise.”

He didn’t see Sylvie again for four years. During that time, he barely even spoke to her on the phone. When he first moved away, she called fairly often, leaving messages on the answering machine in his dorm room. He was always out. He rarely returned her calls. They had drifted apart, it was natural. He didn’t understand why they should pretend to be friends forever just because they had clung to each other during a few miserable years of high school.

So he wasn’t quite prepared for what he saw when he ran into her in the pharmacy. It must have registered on his face. She had gained a little more weight, but that wasn’t what threw him. Her whole being seemed to have changed. Whatever bright light had shone from her in high school was gone. She resembled neither the siren in the emerald green cocktail dress, nor the beautiful bald young woman Sanj had last seen. Now she wore gray sweatpants and a bulky, navy hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with the Mountaineers football logo. Her hair, long again, was pulled back in a ponytail. Sanj wouldn’t have recognized her, wouldn’t have thought to say hello, had she not approached him, saying his name timidly, tentatively. . . . 
Sanj?

“Sylvie?”

“It’s great to see you.”

“You, too,” he said.

“Are you here long?”

“Just a couple of weeks,” he said. “I’m taking care of my grandfather while my parents are in India.” He held up the white paper bag from the pharmacy. “Heart medication.”

“How’s California?”

“I live in New York now. I work for
Vogue
.” Sanj struck a pose from the Madonna “Vogue” video. He saw a flicker of pain flitter across her face. He’d forgotten she’d once dreamed of being photographed for such a magazine.

“I’ve only been here a few days. I’d been planning to call you,” he said, though the truth was that he’d had no intention of getting in touch.

“I’m at the same number.”

He said, “I’ll call.”

S
anj had only been living in New York for four months when his parents summoned him back to West Virginia to stay with his grandfather. At first he’d said no. “I can’t take off just like that. I have a job.”

“Internship,” his mother corrected. “Unpaid.
Vogue
isn’t paying you. Your parents are paying for you.”

“Even so, I’ve made a commitment.”

“He doesn’t need to be taken care of,” Sanj’s mother said. “You won’t have to do anything. I wouldn’t even ask you, except I don’t feel comfortable leaving him alone for so long.” After a minute she said, “Don’t make me beg.”

Later, Sanj called her back. “Fine. Three weeks. That’s it.”

His parents were going to India to close up his grandmother’s house in Rajkot, to sort through and sell her possessions, and to bring her to live in America for good. This was his mother’s mother. The grandfather they wanted him to look after was his father’s father, who had been living with them since Sanj was a child. His mother’s mother didn’t want to come. She didn’t want to leave Rajkot to live—for the first time in her life at the age of seventy-eight—in America, in West Virginia, but Sanj’s parents insisted she was too old to live alone.

Sanj wasn’t exactly living in New York, not in the city anyway. He was living on Long Island with family friends. Chandu had been Sanj’s father’s childhood friend growing up in Gujarat in a village near Ahmedabad. They were like brothers. Chandu and Sanj’s father, Bipin, had immigrated together to America at age seventeen. Literally
together
. Together, they had taken a bus from their village to Ahmedabad, a train from Ahmedabad to Bombay, a ship from Bombay to Spain, a train from Spain to London, a ship from London to New York, and finally, a Greyhound bus from New York to Oklahoma, where they were both enrolled, premed, at the university in Norman. (Later, Bipin told Sanj that his only ideas about Oklahoma, before arriving, were from the movie version of the musical.) Their journey took close to two months. Eventually, he and Chandu would attend different medical schools, do their residencies in different hospitals, settle in different regions, but they always kept in touch and saw each other as often as they could. Over the years, a surprising number of young men from their village ended up immigrating. Now, every four or five years, they’d have a big reunion, in rotating cities where one or the other lived, and everyone would bring their families. Sanj remembered one, years ago. He remembered in particular watching the men—soft in middle age—playing volleyball. They seemed so happy, like they were in the village again, like they were twelve.

Chandu’s wife, Lala, didn’t speak English, which made it difficult for Sanj to communicate with her, since he himself didn’t speak any Indian languages. Almost thirty years she had been living in the United States, and she’d learned barely a handful of words and phrases. Sanj was shocked by this. True, Long Island had a vibrant Indian community, and Lala had plenty of people to talk to in her native languages. And true, Lala had never worked outside the house, and so she didn’t need English for those purposes. But still, how had she passed her driver’s exam? How did she manage while shopping?

Chandu and Lala had three daughters, all a few years older than Sanj. They all still lived at home. They were beautiful, with thick black hair. They were good Indian daughters: practical, responsible, accomplished. One was in med school, one was in law school, and one had just finished business school. Chandu seized every chance to brag about them.

The Princess Jasmine association wouldn’t have occurred to Sanj, except that someone from Gita’s MBA program told her she looked like her, from the Disney movie
Aladdin
. “Isn’t that a little culturally insensitive?” Sanj had said at dinner. “Princess Jasmine isn’t even Indian.” But no one else thought so, and Gita liked the comparison. She thought it was flattering. Princess Jasmine was beautiful, even if she was just a cartoon. The more Sanj thought about it, the more he agreed: she did look like Princess Jasmine. In fact, all three sisters looked like Princess Jasmine. So, privately, that’s what he started calling them: The Princess Jasmines, or sometimes just The Jasmines.

The Jasmines had the entire third floor of the house all to themselves. Each had her own bedroom and her own en suite bathroom. It smelled like hair products up there.

The parents’ room was on the second floor, as was Sanj’s. He stayed in what was usually the family’s puja room, where they did their morning and evening prayers. There was a small mandir with statues and framed pictures of various gods. Sanj slept on a foldout futon.

He liked to sleep late. Mornings, the family members came in, one by one, whether or not Sanj was awake. If he woke up during their prayers, he would shuffle off to the bedroom of whichever Jasmine was already awake and climb into her empty bed to catch a few more minutes of sleep. The parents didn’t like this, Sanj could tell. The father seemed particularly bothered. It was inappropriate, borderline scandalous. After all, Sanj was a young man, and these were young, unmarried women. The Jasmines didn’t like it either. But no one was going to say anything. Sanj was the son of their father’s dear childhood friend. They had traveled together in search of new lives in a new country, and together had weathered difficulties others could only imagine. A few transgressions from Bipin’s only son could be overlooked.