Strangers at the Feast (10 page)

The thought of losing Ratu set off a disturbance deep inside Ginny.

She asked her department chair, Mark Stevens, to write on his behalf; she contacted two writers’ organizations. She had made a few poet friends, and asked them to sign a petition to the departments of immigration.

“Ginger, you are doing too much for me.”

“I’ll hold a goddamned bake sale if I have to. You’re not getting kicked out of the country.”

“All this help, people will wonder about us.”

Actually, she’d successfully kept their relationship private, despite bringing Ratu to a university mixer—Ginny didn’t know what she’d been thinking with that. Maybe she was tired of all the gray-haired department secretaries asking her when she was going to settle down. Maybe she was tired of the tenured bores in their tweed jackets wondering if she was a lesbian. Maybe she was embarrassed that she’d shown up with a dud at the last university function, a man who managed to devour an entire platter of smoked salmon while texting
God knew who. But the next day, she overheard Richard Longstretch, in the American Studies department office, refer to Ginger and her Polynesian protégé. No one suspected hanky-panky. Or maybe no one imagined a man like that would ever be interested in a woman her age.

In early May, Ratu’s visa was finally approved, and Ginny went to her Tuesday class wearing a yellow sundress and kitten heels, ready to celebrate afterward.

Ratu and Ginny exchanged secretive smiles as she spread out bags of popcorn and a gallon of apple juice. The class went through the usual routine, voting to close the window, which Ratu did, so they could hear everyone read their new poems aloud.

Ginny called on Tracy Manaster, a corn-fed Iowa blonde who was shy about participating in class. Her poems were awkward, suffering from an odd combination of blandness and melodrama. But Ginny was feeling charitable that day, and wanted to send this girl into the world with self-confidence.

Tracy extracted a gray nugget of chewing gum from her mouth and cleared her throat:

Silent, mysterious.

I offer him my stare, but he refuses.

I offer him a book, but he refuses.

I offer him a candy bar, and he refuses.

What can I give you?

You are beautiful, he tells me, offering his smooth shoulder, his warm mouth.

He who can fly.

A leaf he holds close to his hip.

Tagane Vuka.

He offers me—

“Pop quiz!” said Ginny.

“There’s more,” said Tracy.

“Everybody pull out a sheet of paper,” Ginny said as calmly as she could, “and write the first line of six of Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

Ratu did not take out paper; he had taken down his ponytail and was refastening it, looking determinedly and shamefully out the window. Ginny felt her face prickle with humiliation. She had worn lipstick that day, red, and began to wipe it off with the back of her hand.

Richard Ong, beside her, whispered, “Ms. Olson, you feeling okay?”

“No, I’m sick, Richard. Bad poetry makes me sick.” Ginny collected her things. “Leave the quizzes in my mailbox.”

She arrived home to the table she’d set earlier with champagne glasses and dropped them in the trash. Then she lost the energy to even leave the kitchen and sat on the tile floor. How many women throughout history had sat on their kitchen floors feeling as pathetic as she did? She was thirty-three, alone, and the crowning act in her epic history of failed relationships was being two-timed by her own student.

After all the nights she’d spent convincing friends how wonderful Ratu was, how perfect they were for one another despite their age and career disparity, how hardworking and kind he was, she was too embarrassed to call anyone. The depth of her stupidity stunned her. Besides, people would expect her to be angry, to scream.
The bastard. The coward.
But she couldn’t get to anger because grief was in her way.

Brave face, she told herself.

This was worse than the mess with Dr. Blaise Langley in Africa. She had been twenty-two then and believed, even as she sobbed on the airplane home, that she would meet many men and fall in love again. But Ginny had no such faith this time. It had been twelve years since Blaise Langley broke her heart, and in that time, despite scores of dates and boyfriends, she’d met only two men who she truly cared
for. The idea of all the boring first dates and halfhearted relationships that lay ahead filled her with dread.

All around her, she had watched friends and colleagues fall in love, get married, have babies. Ginny had simply assumed it would happen for her, too. It was not that she believed in God, or a fair and ordered universe—studying history had long ago debunked her of that notion—yet she clung to some vague idea that the course of her life, her achievements and setbacks, were, if not regulated, at least
observed,
by something beyond herself. And so for years she had thought:
I am a person who always waits contentedly at the end of the line. It’s my nature to let others go first. That must be what’s happening, on a cosmic scale.

Now something had cracked open in her. What if her turn never came?

She took a bath, slowly eating applesauce as the water went lukewarm, until it reminded her of the pool, of Ratu’s fierce butterfly strokes—she could see his arms slicing forward—and she lurched out. Hair dripping, she grabbed his books, his dental floss and his silly gum device, his brush and the hair bands—scattered on her nightstand like a Venn diagram. She put them in a Jiffy envelope and sealed it. Then she lost her courage, addressed it to herself.

By the time the envelope returned, Ginny had canceled her last lectures, claiming she had something highly contagious. In fact, she’d been camped out on her bed for a week, surfing the Internet and playing an old version of the Oregon Trail. She recklessly shot rabbits instead of bison and let all members of her party die from snakebites. When finally her favorite announcement came on the screen,
You have died of dysentery,
she called it quits.

She had thought, briefly, of calling Ratu and demanding an explanation. But he hadn’t lifted a finger to contact her since that day in class. And she knew it wasn’t only Ratu she had lost. She had lost the feeling that her life was moving forward, that her life was safe. She had always believed happiness was her due. She was a good person,
and had assumed good things would come her way. Suddenly, she was afraid.

Days, years, were churning along and nothing seemed to be progressing. She needed a change of scenery. She needed to do something bold, to strike out. Ginny scrolled through the web listings for international field research. Anthropological surveying in Somalia. A study of Gypsy settlements in Southern France. And then:

Unwanted Girls in India: A Cultural Survey

There are more than 11 million abandoned children in India, about 90 percent female. Last year, only four thousand of those children were adopted, through various governmental and charitable agencies; only a quarter of those placed with families overseas.

Research will be conducted at orphanages in Delhi and Bombay, to document any changes that this new policy may incur. Researcher grants will cover three months of room and board. Sponsor Institutions not required.

Ginny clicked the button:
APPLY NOW
.

DOUGLAS

He’d overlooked one crucial thing: Ginny didn’t
have
a television.

His sister delivered this news with such casualness, such cheery indifference, that it was clear to Douglas she’d ignored that every year on Thanksgiving, Dad, the boys, and he watched the game.

“You’ll live,” she said, chopping the carrots.

“I didn’t know
surviving
the day was our goal.”

A mute orphaned child, a house without a television, a living room full of plywood furniture. Ginny’s obsession with deprivation was like a bizarre medical condition.

“Ginny, where’s the nearest Best Buy? I will
buy
you a television.”

“Doug, I don’t want a television. They tape these things and replay them on ESPN later, right? Or on YouTube? Honestly, it might not be a bad idea to try sitting without your eyes glued to the TV this year.”

“Hon, can you stream it on the Internet?” Denise asked.

“All four of you with your noses pressed to my laptop screen?” said Ginny. “Now, that’s a Hallmark moment. This is a family holiday, the whole point of which is to be together, to interact. I haven’t seen you in five months!”

Douglas knew this was true, and he felt bad about it, but it was also true that the Packers were playing.

“Then watch with us!” he tried.

“Douglas, for God sakes, I’ll
play
football if you want. It’s a nice day and we can run around. But to dull every neuron in our brains with a virtual experience, somebody else’s game, holds zero interest
for me. Not to mention it’s a ritual reenactment of the source of all violent conflict. Don’t you see…”

Ginny could talk circles around him and he wasn’t going to change her mind. He wished he’d brought his hand-held TV. But this was the first day in months away from the dreary Obervell Construction offices; away from angry calls from site-team captains wondering when they could go back to work; away from the growing pile of threatening letters from the state loan commission; away from neighborhood organizers picketing them to clean up abandoned sites. All season he’d been following the Packers, a powerhouse team, a heroic team, a team of mythic achievement. After two terrible seasons and talk of retirement, Brett Favre had thrown his 421st touchdown pass in a game against the Vikings, setting a new all-time record. Whenever there was an update about the shitty real-estate market, Douglas closed his office door and took a midday break to watch online Favre’s eighty-two-yard touchdown pass against the Broncos that October. Favre had made a spectacular comeback and now the Packers were about to wipe the field with the Lions.

“…well, Doug?”

“Huh?”

“Do you or do you not think that children should be raised with a sense of the collective enemy?”

He was confused. He grinned, and put on his best Arkansas accent. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

“Doug!”

“Children,” his mother interjected in her hypnotist’s voice. “Why don’t we all relax in the living room and find an agreeable solution.”

Ginny dumped the carrots into a pot, flicked on the ancient burner, and led Priya out. Denise and Douglas followed. Ginny settled into a rocking chair with Priya on her lap, holding her tight.

“Look, this is my home and as guests here, you’re going to have to make do with what I’ve got. Were you all expecting a multiplex?”

“Maybe Aunt Ginny can’t afford a television,” Laura whispered.

What a considerate and grown-up thought for a five-year-old.

“Aunt Ginny just happens to think the television is the devil,” Douglas said.

Laura’s eyes widened. “I thought the devil had horns.”

“Gin, how do you propose we pass the time while the food is cooking?”

“Ping-Pong!” said Eleanor. His mother, the most unathletic, uncoordinated, noncompetitive woman he knew, was a whiz at Ping-Pong. When they were growing up, she loved to play against them, until Ginny and Douglas got tired of losing to her and snuck games when she was off buying groceries. Thrifty, bordering on compulsively cheap, his mother had stunned them all by buying herself a hundred-dollar Ping-Pong paddle for her fortieth birthday. She was always trying to get people to play, channeling what Ginny called “a lifetime of missed adventure and thwarted ambition” into her every swing.

“I don’t have a Ping-Pong table,” said Ginny. “But I have an idea.”

Oh no, here came Trivial Pursuit. Or what had she gone on about the year before? The women who worked as spies during the Civil War? The Boston Massacre resulting in only five casualties? His sister had been teaching too long, mistaking every room for a classroom. Sometimes, a man just needed to stop thinking.

Ginny pulled paper out of her printer and grabbed a fistful of pencils. She tore the paper into strips and handed them out.

“Think of a person or a character and write it on that.”

His parents both looked stumped, pencils midair as if they were doing a crossword puzzle. The twins folded their papers into miniature accordions.

“Anything!” sang Ginny. “Politician, actor, writer, historian. See? This is what happens when you watch too much television, your mind turns to putty.”

“Have you heard about this book called
Everything Bad Is Good for You
?” his mother asked.

“You want an activity? I’m going to make it really simple.” Ginny pushed up her sweater sleeves. “Dad, give me a name.”

“I thought we were supposed to write it secretly on the paper?”

“This is just an example. Any name that springs to mind.”

“Jackie Limousine.”

“Jackie Limousine?”

“Who’s that? I really don’t want to play a game that’s going to make us all feel stupid,” said his mother.

“Jackie Limousine sounds like a stripper,” said Denise.

“Dad, it has to be a name of somebody famous, a celebrity,” Ginny said.

His mother raised her hand. “Oh, oh, oh. Barbra Streisand!”

“Excellent, Mom. Barbra Streisand. So I look at the paper and start saying,
Funny Girl,
big nose. Maybe I sing. I say, she’s married to James Brolin.”

“Who’s that?” Douglas asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ginny. “If you don’t get the clue, just wait for the next one.”

“I thought Diane Lane was married to James Brolin.”

“That’s Josh Brolin,” his mother piped in, to everyone’s surprise.