Sister Mischief (22 page)

“Um,” I sputter, trying not to laugh in her face. “Maybe.”

“My mom cooked a
ton
for you,” she says. “She’s a really good cook. That’s why my dad married her.”

“Really?” I ask. I notice how much more makeup Lakshmi wears than Rowie.

“Yeah.” She takes my arm and leads me down the hall into the kitchen. “You should ask them about it — they really like telling the story.”

Before I can solicit more information, we’re in the kitchen, where Dr. Priya Rudra has assembled the most awe-inspiring spread of food I’ve ever seen — all kinds of meats and vegetables bathing in a spectrum of aromatic sauces: green, yellow, orange, oranger, red. Seeing me, she throws down the basket of naan she’s holding and comes to embrace me. Raj is sitting at the table, watching us from a short distance.

“Esme!” She squeezes my shoulders. “I hope you came hungry.”

“Sure did.” I smile, masking my cheddar-jack regret. “Where’s Rowie?”

“Ah! She’s downstairs trying on a beautiful new sari my mother sent from Bangalore.” She leans down the hall. “Rohini! Come up and show me!”

“Is Esme here?” the voice calls back.

“She wants to see, too!” Dr. Rudra calls back, winking at me. “Come up!” I’m not totally sure, but I think I hear a groan from downstairs.

“Can I do anything to help?” I ask.

“Don’t be silly!” Dr. Rudra insists. “Sit down.” I obey, planting myself at Raj Rudra’s right hand.

“Glad you could join us,” he greets me. “Chicken?” He offers me a piece of chicken from a pile he’s working through.

“I’m good, thanks.” I eye his half-masticated wing. “So Lakshmi tells me you married your wife for her food.”

He bristles slightly. Lakshmi has an impish look on her face. Did she bait me? Priya turns around with a look of surprise.

He clears his throat. “My younger daughter likes to tell stories.” He smiles sternly — I didn’t know such a thing was possible, but he does — in Lakshmi’s direction. “Yes. It is true. The first time my wife cooked for me, I knew I could not marry her sister.”

The story sounds juicy but is interrupted by a flash in the door: Rowie. She’s swathed in the most breathtaking sari I’ve ever seen: deep cerulean, with sequin-patches of aqua. She looks stunning, much older than I’ve ever seen her look, and much more, I don’t know, Indian.

“Aha!” Priya spots her, bustling over to adjust the length of sparkling fabric draped over Rowie’s shoulder. “It fits!”

“It’s too girly. I’d rather just wear the salwaar kameez Dida sent me last year,” Rowie whines. She sees me at the table and blushes. “Hey, dude.”

“Hey.” I try hard not to blush. “You look — God, you look amazing. Who’s Dida?”

“My grandmother,” Rowie says. “It’s Bengali.”

“My sister’s daughter is getting married in January,” Priya explains, and — do I imagine it? — looks at me queerly. “My mother sent this to Rohini for her to wear to the wedding. And I don’t see why having a lovely new sari is such a bad thing. You look marvelous.”

“Whatever,” Rowie says, plunking down at the table. Raj barks something to her in Bengali. Rolling her eyes, she gets up and begins to unwind the length of fabric from over her shoulder and around her waist. I see the curve of her waist between blouse and skirt gleaming like a violin in the dinnerlight; I struggle not to gasp. She sets the twinkling fabric aside, tucks a napkin into her sari-blouse, and leans back.

“Feed me,” she orders her mother.

“Feed yourself!” Priya retorts. “It’s all ready. Esme, our guest, please help yourself.”

I sidle up to the island and dabble a little bit of everything onto my plate, having a limited idea what I’m eating. Rowie senses my ignorance and appears over my shoulder to narrate the buffet.

“Lamb korma, chicken tikka masala, mattar paneer, aloo gobi, garlic naan, regular naan,” she lists, smirking. “She made totally Americanized Indian food for you. She hardly ever cooks meat, and no self-respecting Bengali actually makes chicken tikka masala at home.”

“Hush, Rohini,” Priya scolds her. “Don’t make her uncomfortable, you rude girl.”

“I’m just saying, you never cook meat, even when Dad wants you to.” Rowie pops a bite of cauliflower in her mouth.

“It’s true, I didn’t even know how to cook meat until we came here, really,” Dr. Rudra says apologetically. “But here most people eat it, so there, I learned.”

“Huzzah,” Rowie’s dad says through another bite of chicken.

“No, I appreciate it,” I say, sitting back down with a heaping plate. “It looks delicious, Dr. Rudra. I’d marry you for your food.”

Rowie throws down her fork. “Mimi”— she punches Lakshmi’s arm —“you’re such a turd.” She turns back to me. “She likes to make us all sound like total FOBs in front of unwitting guests.”

“Luckily, Esme is like part of our family.” Priya smiles gracefully. “I will tell you the whole story. My husband was supposed to marry my oldest sister, Anjali. He was already living in America, and he’d come back to Bangalore to find a wife. My mother told me I had to cook the dinner for when he came to meet her, so I did. I was only eighteen. And then he came and ate with us.” She smiles at Raj, nodding for him to continue.

He clears his throat again. “I thought it was the most delicious meal I had ever tasted, even though there was no meat. When I finished, I asked who had prepared the dinner. Her mother said it was Priya, the youngest. And I said that was the daughter I would marry. But her parents said no, the eldest had to be married first. So I said no, I would not marry Anjali, Priya’s sister, and that if they would not let me marry Priya, I would choose a wife from another family. They were offended; they thought I was a very rude dentist to refuse their eldest daughter.”

Priya leans forward, her hazel eyes glinting minerally. “But instead, he went back to St. Paul and opened his dental practice and began to write to me. He told me that he was saving money to send to me to come to him. And at first I said no, that I could not disobey my family’s wishes for an older man I hardly knew. But then I fell in love with his letters. We wrote to each other for four years while I finished university in India. And then I was accepted to American medical school and I came.” She pats his hand and smiles. “It was a love marriage that was the casualty of an arranged marriage.”

“So romantic,” Lakshmi sighs in wonder. She obviously loves the story.

“Her family did not speak to us for another three years. But when Rohini was born, they relented,” Raj finishes simply. I catch my jaw hanging open and snap it closed. He looks back at his plate and resumes eating, scooping up scraps with a hunk of naan.

“Wow,” I say. “That’s a heckuva story.”

Raj’s face breaks into a whole smile for the first time. “I love the way people exclaim in Minnesota. It took me a year to figure out how to use
uff-da.
”

I crack up. “Yeah, that’s a tough one to explain.”

“There weren’t very many other Indian families in Holyhill when we moved here,” Priya says, nodding. “We were like thumbs.”

“Sore ones?” I ask.

“Yes.” She nods solemnly. “We were the sorest thumbs.”

“We still are,” Rowie mutters.

“Do you know that when she was six, Rohini told her friends that she was adopted?” Priya laughs. Raj says something else in Bengali; I notice he always admonishes them in his own language. “Raj-ji, it’s just a funny story,” she soothes him. “I said, ‘Rohini, why on earth are you saying that? You are my daughter. I should know. I’m a doctor.’”

“And I said, that’s not what
adopted
means.
Adopted
means you were born somewhere else. Like Asia,” Rowie says.

“I was so horrified. And tickled,” Priya remembers. “I tried to explain that
adopted
means that you were born to one family and raised by another, and that what she was is Indian. And do you know what she said? She said, ‘But Mommy, I don’t look like anyone but the adopted kids.’”

Rowie gives a strange smile at the memory. “And you said, ‘Neither do I.’”

“So, Esme. Are you looking at colleges?” Raj steers the conversation away before I can respond.

The abrupt redirection jars me. “A little bit, mostly smaller liberal arts schools on the East Coast. I’m trying to decide if I want to go same-sex.”

Rowie chokes, making a noise so grotesque that her mother immediately gets up and springs into Heimlich position.

“Rohini!” she exclaims. “Are you choking?” She puts both hands to her neck in the universal choking gesture. Rowie shakes her head, getting it together enough to swallow.

“I’m all good,” she says, coughing. “Went down the wrong tube.”

“I meant — I’m trying to decide whether I want to go to a women’s college or not,” I offer lamely.

“Yes,” Raj responds, his eyes darting back toward Rowie with concern. She pounds some water and mops up the rest of her dinner with her last bit of naan.

“Are you done?” she asks me. I look down at my empty plate and nod.

“Oh, my goodness, look at the time,” Priya says. “I have to get to work. Leave the dishes. I can clean them up when I get home.” How can Rowie’s mom work so much and do so much to take care of all of them? I wonder.

“We’re going to go check the elections.” Rowie pushes back her chair and rises, dumping her plate in the sink. “C’mon.” Her sari-skirt swishes as I follow her out.

“Dinner was fantastic. Thank you so much,” I tell Dr. Rudra.

“You’re very welcome. Do you want a blanket to take downstairs? I went down to wash some recently and I couldn’t find the extra ones that are usually in Rohini’s closet,” Dr. Rudra says.

I freeze, waiting to see how Rowie will play it, knowing all those extra blankets have been out in the treehouse for at least a month.

“No, we’re good,” she says. “I know where they are.”

“Let’s hope we have a state senator who isn’t Herb Baumgarten by the time you get home from work,” I say, smiling brightly.

Raj says something else in Bengali, but this time he smiles at us. I turn to Rowie.

“What did he say?” I ask.

She pulls the napkin out of her sari blouse, crumples it up, and tosses it affectionately at him. “He said, ‘Write big songs.’”

After about an hour of watching TV downstairs, Rowie leads me back upstairs, where I make an audible show of leaving. The door is open a crack in the master bedroom, from which we can already hear the early throttles of Raj’s snoring. I walk out the door she holds open, exchanging good-byes, then roll my bike around to the back of the house, hide it, and make my usual labored push through the treehouse door. She brings out her computer to stream audio coverage of the election. We don’t talk for a while, processing dinner.

She broaches it first.

“So, you haven’t, like, told anyone about us, right?” Rowie asks later in the night.

“No,” I reply, winding a little rope of Rowie hair around my finger.

She shakes her head, loosing the strand. Pauses. “Can we not?”

“Can we not what? Tell anybody? Ever?”

“Yeah.” She stares at the clapboard wall.

“I mean, yeah, I know you don’t want to tell anyone, you tell me that, like, every five minutes. But why are you so hung up on it?” I say, touching her chin with one finger, trying to tilt it back toward me.

“Look, you don’t know how it is,” she says with an edge of panic in her voice. “There’s no way you can understand what it would be like. Kids get thrown out of their houses, just shut the fuck out of their families.”

“It’s not like that doesn’t happen to some kids here.”

“But it’s not going to happen to
you.
”

“It seems like,” I say, “it seems like when you say ‘my parents,’ you mean your dad. And it doesn’t seem like your family would turn you out on the mean streets of Holyhill.”

She gets quiet for a long time.

“How would you know? Maybe you’re right. But you need to know I’m not necessarily — choosing this.”

It stings. “Does it really feel like something you chose?”

She slumps over. “No, you’re right — it just happened. It chose us. But it’s different for you. You don’t hate yourself for being — whatever.”

“Jesus, Rowie, you shouldn’t either.” I try to touch her shoulder; she flinches.

“I don’t know if I’m actually, like — I mean, I’ve never — with a guy,” Rowie mutters, avoiding me. “You tried it.”

I recoil. “Well, I can’t help you there, but it’s not like anyone’s trying to lock you down for life.”

“I just never — I never thought this would happen to me. That like, a girl — would happen to me.”

“I never thought you’d happen to me either.”

“But it’s
different
for you,” she rasps, whispering as loudly as she can, exasperated. “You knew you wanted it to happen, or something. You were ready.”