“Good luck.”
“I telling you. Fine-ass Mateo is all over you.”
“Mateo’s a idiot.”
“But he’s fine and he can dance and you’re smart enough for the both of you.”
“And what I going to do with him? He can’t even drive his car without crashing it. Good luck getting a black guy to pass my parents’ husband meter.”
“He’s half-black. Just tell them he’s a dark-skinned Spaniard. A Moor or something.”
“They’ll think of Othello and worry he’ll kill me when we’re married.”
“Pinky, really. Stop thinking stupidness. You practice first with boyfriends. Don’t even think about husband. Boyfriends are more fun anyway. Husbands are sooo boring. You ent noticed?”
Pinky nodded. “Do you think you’d ever do it, like, on the kitchen table?”
“Do what?”
“You know.”
“Oh, you slut.” Leslie paused and looked out at the boys across the schoolyard. “Yeah. I think I would. Would you?”
“I guess if my husband wanted to.”
They nodded together. Leslie had only done it three times with Benji before school let out and he went to Atlanta to spend the summer with his mother. She said it hurt every time but she expected that if they’d kept doing it all summer, by now it would feel good. Pinky had shrugged. She didn’t like the idea of waiting for it to feel good. Why can’t it feel good right away? It feels good to him. She imagined that when she became an obstetrician-gynecologist, she would make sure it felt good for all women all the time.
Leslie picked up her school bag. “You want a drop to the institute?”
“Sure.”
“Hey, we gone,” called Leslie to the guys playing on the green.
Mateo dribbled the ball between his ankles until he was a few feet away from them. “Hey, I going see you ladies at Anchorage tonight?” His voice had become deep over the summer and to Pinky it sounded rich and matched the musky way he smelled.
“Maybe,” said Leslie.
Mateo was looking at Pinky. “You too, Pinky?”
“No. I’m bagged up.”
“Sneak out,” said Mateo, rolling the ball back and forth under his foot in a smooth movement. Pinky laughed at his suggestion. She flipped her hair and then felt stupid for doing so. Someone on the pitch shouted at Mateo to get back in the game or send the ball.
In the car, Leslie didn’t look at her friend as she maneuvered out of the tight space. “Really, Pinky. I sick of giving you the business secondhand. I mean, I go with you to all the Divali stuff but you never come to the club. ’Bout time. You’s seventeen, woman.”
“Screw you. Divali is a religious thing. The club is not.”
“It could be.”
“Whatever.” But she wanted to go. Maybe tonight she would have that fight. She would cry and ask her mother why she’d brought her here to this island only to tell her she couldn’t be a part of it. Or maybe she would ask to stay over at Leslie’s in Glencoe. The last time she’d asked, her mother had said she was too old for sleepovers.
At the gate they kissed on the cheek before Leslie drove off. Pinky walked past the guard, who stared at her instead of nodding as he normally would. The campus at the hospitality institute seemed more beautiful today, the yellow bougainvillea blooming out extra, and so Pinky did not notice the difference in the air until she walked into her mother’s culinary classroom. There was one student sitting quietly at the long teaching table; another was leaning into the sink as though washing her hair. Gita stood in the doorway and felt the lightness drain out of her. The girl from the sink straightened as though in pain, walked over to Gita, and touched her face with the palm of her hand.
“Gita, girl. You need to call home.”
Gita went to the front desk to make the call. No one answered. When she hung up, the phone rang and the receptionist picked it up. The woman nodded into the receiver without looking at Gita.
A half an hour later, Gita watched as a man who worked with her father at the loading dock drove up in her dad’s sedan. The man didn’t come out to get her but leaned over and opened the door to the passenger side for her to get in.
“What’s going on, Uncle?”
But he just shook his head quietly and drove toward Port-of-Spain. When they turned into the hospital parking lot, Gita could feel her bowels growing tight. Not Dada, she thought. She held her belly as they walked through the lobby and back toward the emergency room. Her father was sitting in a solitary plastic chair. When he saw her, he turned away as though she had insulted him. She went to him anyway.
“Dada?” She put out her hand. He moved from it. Gita turned and walked past her father’s friend, who was just standing there dumb, and went to the nurse’s station. They called for a doctor. The one who came was young and Indian, and she wore her hair in a ponytail like a student.
“Are you Gita?” the doctor asked.
Gita nodded.
“Come, let’s sit over here.”
Gita followed her to a far end of the room.
“Did you know that your mother was ill?”
“Just tell me.”
The young doctor narrowed her eyes. She seemed to be either scrutinizing Gita or fighting back her own tears.
“Your mother died this afternoon. Your father is very upset and wanted me to talk to you. I want you to know...”
As the doctor talked, Gita heard her father let out a loud wail. She turned to look at him. He was watching her and weeping. At that moment Gita decided that no, she would never become a doctor.
Gita’s mother had not been buried in a coffin. She had been cremated. Her ashes were sent to Mumbai to her family, as was the custom. Mr. Manachandi didn’t mind this. The presence of the urn would only make him think his wife was dead.
Mr. Manachandi talked to his wife at night. Gita would walk past the door and hear his side of the conversation. The first time, she thought he was on the phone, but then he said, “Ey, Leela?” and there was no audible response. He seemed quite normal otherwise. His did not miss work at the dock. He did not crash the car. He did not become edgy or volatile. He simply talked to his dead wife at night. He simply slept on only one side of the bed.
But at breakfast Mr. Manachandi had stopped asking his daughter about aluminum and smelter. One morning, he looked past her shoulder and into the kitchen where his wife should have been cutting lakatan bananas into bowls of maple syrup. “The hospitality institute used to be a navy hospital. A hospital, and they couldn’t even save Leela.”
Gita stared at her father but did not know how to tell him that he wasn’t making any sense.
He focused his eyes and looked now at his daughter. “Are you going to college?” he asked.
And Pinky realized that she had only had that conversation with her mother. She was aware of the betrayal when she answered, “I’ve been thinking of Barnard.”
He nodded. “That would be a good school for you.” She lowered her head and felt that pain in her bowels again. Her mother was dead and now she would get to go to Barnard.
“What will you do, Dada?”
“I will stay here,” he said softly. And if he had been talking more loudly, he might have finished his thought as well. I will stay here because I am waiting for your mother to come back.
Gita’s mourning was different. Her mother died and suddenly her own life began. Suddenly she could spend the night at Leslie’s. Suddenly no one scrutinized her clothes when she went out... didn’t check the length of her skirts or the transparency of her blouses. Suddenly she could go to Barnard or Spellman. But she was no longer sure if she wanted to go anywhere at all.