“He’s not coming back, you know.” Trisha lolls her head toward me. There’s a sheen of water over her pupils. “Packed all of his stuff.”
“Why did he leave?” I take the highway toward the hills of Saratoga where Trisha lives. “You guys seemed like you had it together.” When she doesn’t answer me right away, I take my eyes off the road to glance at her. She’s staring through the front windshield at nothing. “Hey.” I reach for her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Talk to me. What happened?”
“Do you want children?” she asks.
“Children?” It’s not the question I expected. I have never allowed myself to imagine children. I loved the ones I came across in my years in the field. I learned that no matter what country I was in or the conditions of the local economy, children all over the world had the same thing in common—they wanted to spend their lives laughing. I was amazed at the lengths they would go to play a game or a joke to reach their goal. When I spent time in Congo, I watched young girls and boys using their firearms as play swords while training for the front lines of a war. They laughed as they played, oblivious to the live weapon in their hand. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Trisha mocks my answer. “Everyone knows,” she says. She grips the door handle even though I am going below the speed limit. “Children are the source of all happiness. The happily ever after.” Her voice, high from the alcohol, suddenly drops. “But you have to have a husband first. Or a wife.” She glances over at me, coming to a realization. “Are you gay?”
“No,” I say quietly, “I’m not gay.”
“Because now that I think about it, I’ve never seen you with a man.” She is reviewing the years, trying to find a time when I brought home a guy or mentioned a date. She will come up empty. “Wow,” she says. “Are you a virgin?”
Sex is not a topic openly discussed in Indian households. There is a taboo around the concept, as if it were a dirty word. When I got my period, I remember my mother dropping her head in disappointment. She told me quietly she would let Dad know. I wondered why it was important to inform him when it was my body. My sisters and I followed Mom’s example and never mentioned the word. Since we weren’t allowed to date, there was never a reason to broach the subject or discuss the implications.
“No, Trisha, I’m not.” I ward off the uncomfortable feeling, the fear that grips me. My secret will remain hidden, I assure myself. “But we’re not talking about me. Why did Eric leave?”
“Children,” she says, thankfully forgetting about my sex life. “He wants children.”
“Don’t you?” I still remember the years of her playing with her Barbies. Her nightly ritual of wedded bliss followed by a family. The only definition of happiness she knew.
“No,” she shudders. Wrapping her arms around herself, she sinks into the seat. “I couldn’t.”
“You have problems with infertility?” Of all the things, I never would have expected this. When you view someone to be perfect, it is hard to imagine any imperfections marring their life.
“No.” Trisha is quiet. I glance at her to see if she is falling asleep, but her eyes are wide open, staring at nothing. “He thought we did.”
She is speaking in circles, taking the conversation around without an endpoint. “What happened, Trisha?”
When we were kids, Trisha and I used to play a game of hide-and-seek. But she changed the rules every time we played. Sometimes I would have to count to ten before seeking her, other times to fifty. But the rule that infuriated me the most was that if I found her too fast, I lost. She used to say the game had not really been played. As if it were my fault that her hiding place was easy to discover. We would start over, with her hiding and me counting. I didn’t realize until I was older that the rule was never used when we reversed position. No matter how quickly she found me, she still won the game.