Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  As I witnessed very young, feeling favorably yet detached about one’s life was a parent’s province. To be wild about one’s family while longing for the occasional interlude was inevitable because, for someone like Baba, the older he gets, the more disbelief about his everyday and deep ache for his own parents accrues. Unlike my mother, the act of missing provides him with purpose: reverence for what came before, for his roots, despite feeling uprooted. For his Jesuit school days at St. Xavier’s, for so many friends from Jadavpur University—many of whom are long dead. For those who are alive, whom my father can reunite with in Kolkata and tease. Isn’t it lovely to tease old friends? To neglect the past’s insurmountability and simply poke fun.

  Striking up conversations with strangers, waiters, cabdrivers, and, in recent years, our dog, is, I’ve estimated, how my father both shakes off and communes with his ghosts. Unlike my mother, who does things in time—wonderfully exonerative time—who might peel two clementines and make a cup of tea before unpacking her groceries, who seems nourished, beyond what is normal, by some core system of replenishing ease, my father, like me, indulges, perhaps even self-indulges, in a sense of emotional hazard.

  We’re the types who keep from joining everyone outside, or rather, we enjoy-with-skirmish an autumn sunset’s afterglow, anticipating instead the quick tide of darkness that comes next. Doom’s ricocheting effect presses us and we’re already back inside turning on lamps, commissioned by what feels intestinal. Still today, when afternoon light dapples and silver-streaks my stuff, exaggerating my pen’s worth by extending its shadow across my desk or reflecting the right angles of my window in the round bowl of my wineglasses as they sit by the sink, drying from last night’s dinner, even this sort of magic feels—I wish I knew why—somehow morbid to me. Perishable. Nobody ever teaches you how to be a person torn-between. How to shape your breaths so as to accommodate both the solitude and the stampede.

  The morning we found the squirrel, my mother was tasked with skimming the pool and retrieving its body because by then my parents had separated and my father was living nearby in an apartment, not far from the bowling alley where friends would throw birthdays. I was too young and selfish to appreciate all the ways my mother was now attending to things she had otherwise expressed no interest in prior to their separation. That she was also perhaps reacquainting herself with what I realize now were purely playful articulations of happiness—discovering a new shade of lipstick called Brick, for instance, which she still wears today, or reclaiming from her closet a cropped silver jacket she’d only ever worn on holidays but was now throwing on because, for whatever reason, Wednesday called for a cropped silver jacket. Back then, these adjustments were somehow threatening. Extremely suspect. My bad attitude was burgeoning and that silver jacket was aggressively too festive.

  I was angry. Noxiously rude to any man my mother spoke to. I gagged with great effect when they’d ring the doorbell and relished how defenseless they seemed when taking off their shoes in our house, standing somewhat uncomfortably in socks.

  I was a pest with very little patience for anyone who seemed laid-back around my mother; anyone whose baritone would carry from the kitchen to the second floor; who’d thumb through our CDs, crack open a case, and assume any of us were interested in listening to the Beatles.

  It was around this time the word idiot lost its funny. I’d say it with my teeth clenched and something wicked. I was a girl upstairs in her room with the door closed, growing hostile. Impenetrable and uncertain. A combination that only seemed to accelerate matters and freshly renew my sensitivity to other families, mostly white, and their mountain-topped superiority. Their pantries with ready-to-eat snacks and incredibly practical junk drawers with seemingly no junk; wrapping paper and various colors of ribbon—new and spooled instead of recycled from old gifts. In my mind, these families were an avatar for goodness. Well-organized thoughtfulness. My envy churned thick since I wasn’t yet teenage, and happening upon the translucent blahs that arrive with those years.

  More and more, my mother’s colleagues from the college where she taught were around, in our home, casually resting their hands on surfaces as they talked and laughed. Folding their jackets over the backs of chairs, leaning against our banister with one leg propped on the bottom step, and noting after using the bathroom, the spiced, earthy smell of our Mysore sandalwood soap. They somehow managed to occupy space in largely inconspicuous ways that drove me mad.

  At first it was strange to hear adults I didn’t know say my mother’s name: Dolores. Their delivery had a tone I attribute to the formal informality of colleagues. Duh-lore-iss. Proper but acquainted. Or with a trace of French Canadian: Do-lo-riss. These colleagues knew her and saw her in ways I never had. Proctoring exams under the fluorescence of classroom light, carrying her lunch in recycled yogurt containers to department meetings, stapling flyers to corkboards and frustratingly unstapling flyers that had, she would recount later at home, covered hers. These colleagues’ experience of my mother felt in breach of my own; destroying in some twisted and greedy manner my claim to her. They were privy to her nerve, and worse than that, they were probably providing my mother with support. Why did anyone have to know what was happening in our family? How did they know my name or what grade I was in? Why was anyone talking about me at all?

  More so, why did they have to spend time in our house, where the mood was perceptibly changing, migrating away from the gloom of a marriage lost to, in retrospect, the gentle warping I associate with joy. Even our vestibule’s Mediterranean-blue walls, where I’d kick off my shoes on terra-cotta tiles and hurry to the kitchen or my room—those walls appeared plusher. Like blue velour. The house was, once more, in possession of its many textures. It no longer felt like a shell.

  Still, I was ashamed of having parents who’d fallen out of love with each other. Though it isn’t mine to privilege, their separation was my first heartbreak. My voice began to, at random, condense into a chirp, signaling tears. Quiet panic sloshed around inside of me like stormy waters, and for a whole year, mysterious stomach cramps would come for me in the night, like gremlins conspiring in that part of my gut I hadn’t yet distinguished was where I store secrets and where I hope dumb choices don’t clot, and where I encounter—here, I’ll say it—intermittent clairvoyance.

  As a result, I began to worry nonstop about that which I couldn’t control and, more so, knew nothing about: like money. When I needed some, for, I don’t know, a ticket to see Titanic at the Cavendish Mall—again—I made a point of keeping tabs on whom I’d asked last. Because, quickly, my life required vigilant upkeep. Because, for some kids, when parents separate, the discreet incursion of agonizing about money or time spent, or learning to love just as much but showing it twice as much, of classifying belongings like photo albums or sets of plates, a teal vase, falls on the child whose inaudible awareness of adult pain undergoes what I experienced as a new charge. So, I strained to uphold a sense of equal. I developed a self-styled commitment to what was fair as well as nervous habits like pinching the cupid’s bow of my top lip or folding my arm behind me and pushing my fingers against the beads of my spine; the latter of which I still do.

  But while I withstood those bumps, while I was angry, anxious, and at times embarrassed to be the child of parents who sat on opposite ends of the gym during my ballet recitals, I was also occasionally none of those things. I had preadolescence to contend with, which in its way felt like a highly radioactive time where I was vying with myself for a sense of self.

  In the ensuing years, I had all but decided my childhood was over. I never wanted to be young again because I’d never truly felt the liquid energy of youth pool around me. Its alleviative qualities. This next period was marked by a dramatic break in how I thought. Or rather, how I started to plait my thoughts and overthink. And not as I’d done as a kid, fancying intricate scenarios through the slits of my neighbor’s fence, expecting miracles, mystery, creeps of skin. No. Now I was reacting to how the air
between two people can communicate heat: how a boy could make me feel midflight. Illegible attempts were sanitized by how, at that age, titles and sensitivities amount to little. How timidity needles redundancy. Did he look my way? Was that a kiss? Was it not? Did it count? Is he or isn’t he my boyfriend? Do I like him? What’s there to say over the phone? How do I fill the silence? Happily discerning cluelessness from the slippery ledge of being complicit has never been my strength.

  One winter, as some friends and I walked home in the snow, sliding our boots like skis on the slushy sidewalk, a boy I’d grown more and more attracted to ever since I noticed how he’d lope up stairs, two at a time—sometimes three—or how hard he pushed his pencil into his composition books, stopped me as snow whirled down and as everyone else crossed the street. He leaned in and kissed me. His lips were soft. Mine were chapped. Our cheeks were cold. I was so taken aback that I covered my mouth with my wool glove as if muffling my Wow. I sensed all over my body the jolt of something unanticipated happening to me; of someone else’s impulse pressed against my lips. How even the most innocent acts swarm with pleasure because our nerve endings, thank goodness, never mature. Never mellow. They remain prone-to. Tendrils that keep us—in the best way—shatterable. Wasn’t it lovely, I thought, to be caught off guard by the boy whose every mannerism I’d crystallized? Who I never anticipated was considering me.

  But just as quick, as if being disallowed the phenomenal seconds that follow a kiss in the snow, I tasted a fleecy tuft in my teeth. Wool from my glove in my moment of Wow had hooked onto my braces. I felt sabotaged. When the boy tried to kiss me again, I backed away and kept my lips closed. I imagined the fuzz in my teeth looking like mold growing on my mouth’s metal wires. Mortified, I stared at my boots and felt the wreck of inexperience, like a curse, condemning me to even more inexperience.

  A week later, I sat perched on that same boy’s top bunk, reading a magazine with my best friend, and needing to pee but too afraid to climb down—too scared to be seen climbing down a ladder. That certain scrutiny that races through you when you are bum-first and focused elsewhere—climbing into a public pool, down a bunk bed, up that rickety ladder to catch a rooftop sunset. When you fabricate, maybe, the burn of attention despite proof. When suddenly having an ass, no matter how flat or small, makes you feel immobilized.

  From my perch, anxiously ignoring my bladder push against the round button of my jeans, I watched as the boy placed his cat inside an empty brown pillowcase. He proceeded to swing it like a pendulum, faster and faster, and then whip it around, whirlybird. “I play this game a lot,” he told us, smiling. “She doesn’t mind.” That poor cat, I thought, but said nothing. That poor cat that was being launched in the dark, confused and scared.

  That evil boy. That whole display of unfeeling; of complacency’s cruelty. Shame was a scorch, and my immovable, self-conscious self, who so desperately needed to pee, was instead staring at this boy torture his cat. I tasted the fuzz from my wool glove—the memory of it—and felt helpless again. Displeasured and stuck like an anticlimax; like a candy bar jammed in its vending machine coil. I’d forgotten about the kiss but remembered in its place how natural it was for me to feel wedged.

  Beyond boys, this period was also marked by regretful decisions, some never to be repeated. For one, I heinously overplucked my eyebrows. Looking back at pictures, it’s as if I had vandalized my own face with a thin-tip Sharpie. My eyebrows were reduced to faint wisps, weird and bowed; obvious gaffes, crooked like filaments. My smile, subsequently, photographed deranged. Two hewed mistakes floating above my eyes.

  Some other decisions were more prescient. I began to misinterpret my friendships with girls in my class; assuming a mutual bond where, in effect, all we were doing was sharing secrets and using them as our metric for closeness. If she knew everything about me, then we were best friends. BFFs. Forever and ever. Keepers, not of each other, but of the privilege we derived from knowing. We were each other’s vaults, misplacing our longing or encountering it as boredom. We pried. We made pacts. Intimacy wasn’t only affection but advantage.

  Funny how in adulthood, the opposite is sometimes considered true. Nowadays I spend time, in excess of it, wondering about my friends—about our folds of perception: “Does she know that I know?” A secret she’s keeping, for instance. Or news she’s not yet ready to announce. Or the way an unkind thought about someone we know might pass through her mind between bites of roast chicken; that I won’t press her to share, because I’ve likely had the same thought. Our innermost selves become, over time and out of love, a universe of nonverbal prompts. Those free clues we call inklings. A vague intelligence for speaking without saying anything at all. Or maybe with age we become more paranoid. Less vulnerable. Regulated by what’s unspoken and, in turn, reluctant to delve. Maybe our connections form in tandem to us laying brick and mortar, building emotional walls that eventually surpass us.

  Often it happens naturally, and a relationship I feverishly jumped into discontinues. Whatever gave rise to our correspondence—a season, it’s possible, like summer’s wine-laced inanity and our insistence on walking far in flimsy shoes, or the quickening that flows from connecting over some zeitgeist thing, like a book about women and solitude, like that tapas place with cheap food and red tablecloths—has dried up. Or maybe in adulthood we are more inclined to ration intimacy than carry it around like a trophy to give away intact. Our unreason and instinct miraculously combine, and loving her means also trusting that she’ll share, if need be, what needs sharing.

  Though I’ll never know if I was ever perceived as an Older Girl and by whom, my memory of those years, of what was appealing about those white girls, is less and less absorbing. Less silvery, and nearly impossible to conjure. I was so young and so spellbound by movie beauty and so vulnerable to magazines. To the way magazine girls with freckles had figured it out: beauty that was somehow boyish, I reasoned.

  It’s taken me a while to reshape many of these notions because I was then, and still am, a late-to-bloom girl. Expectant like a card trick. The girl who for years wore a sports bra as her everyday bra, and would wait for the bus practicing my Liv Tyler pout, badly wishing for even a shred of her courteous Liv Tyler cool.

  During my first session, five or six years ago, my therapist lightly amended a declaration I was making, with the words For now. The revelation was immediate. A tonic. Like when clouds part outside, and inside fresh beams of light reinstate the day—those six letters marked a huge shift. Because, as girls, we held on tight to Forever. It was compulsory: the most critical, tender quota. For now, however, is a far more rational unit of measurement, and perhaps one we should encourage much earlier in life because it doesn’t require the insurance of a necklace or bracelet, or any token really. It connotes nuance and the balm of receptivity. It has little to do with girlhood’s insistence on wide-eyed hopes for the future, or feeling like an easy mark, and, in my case, ceding so much power to those older white girls. What For now proposes instead is the give and grace of compassion.

  * * *

  Ick, ick, ick, my mother said, still wearing her nightgown and wrinkling her face at the dead squirrel. I glared, irritated. I knew we were going to be late for school. But from my window, as I watched my mother delicately retrieve the dead squirrel, it occurred to me that the squirrel suddenly looked saved. The droop of its body in the blue net, like the droop of a child faking sleep, slyly hoping to get carried out from the car and into bed. Drooping, I understood, was a kid move. Was this dead squirrel a kid squirrel? Still new to the world and unaccustomed to the spring of its bushy, plumed tail. Had it drowned while playing with a buddy? Chasing each other up the maple tree or across the telephone wire that stretched from our house to the alleyway where Joanna, Marisa, and I felt teenage long before we were teenagers because we were hanging out in an alleyway.

  Maybe the squirrel had tried, in panicked and walleyed horror, to climb out from the water only to scratch its claws against the pool’s sm
ooth, rounded edges. Shaped like a kidney bean, our pool looked borrowed from Bedrock City. Prehistoric, retro, like nothing we were used to. The sort of passed-down aesthetic I found alien and luxurious because the pool, like the whole house, had touches of what I considered the most movied place: midcentury Los Angeles. A “Mamie pink” and black-tiled bathroom, for instance. A lavender one too, with his and her sinks. Carpeting in most rooms and sliding louvered closet doors.

  We never repainted or redecorated, save for that Mediterranean-blue vestibule my mother insisted on, and later, mango-orange in the downstairs hallway because, I’d venture, my parents figured out, perhaps soon into the move, that their marriage was in that stranded stage of an ending where temporary fixes—in this case, buying their first house without making it theirs—suspend ineludible pains.

  Mostly, it bought more time. For my brother and I to delight in what makes a house remarkable: its sounds. Its index of noise. The discreet swish of my father knotting his silk tie in the morning. The panting steam of our iron. That one broken window and its frightening guillotine-drop. Mustard seeds popping in oil. The front door’s particular key-turn. The back door’s spring. If I close my eyes and sail back to our house on Wilson Street, there’s one CBC radio program in particular—its plaintive opening theme—that may as well score the journey. There was too the thud of dropping who knows what upstairs, and how strangely, no matter what it was, the thud invariably sounded the same: like an unscrewed brass doorknob falling two feet and rolling over once. My parents would yell from downstairs—not Are you okay? but simply our names. Yelling from downstairs was without a doubt the most movied novelty. Like families in holiday films who speak over one another during meals, who reach exaggeratedly across plates, elbowing the youngest when grabbing the gravy boat and outing someone’s recent breakup. Whom I couldn’t help but sentimentalize solely because, of all things, they interrupted each other.