“Why don’t you act like all the other aunties?”
“Don’t insult me. I’m not like the other aunties. That’s why you and Mira turned out to be such brilliant young women.”
“Just be happy, throw me a party. Mira was married by the time she was my age.”
“That was different,” my father said. “Mira and Ahmed have known each other for many years. Ahmed’s father is my oldest friend.”
“We did not come to this country so you could be a child bride.”
“I’m in graduate school.”
“That’s right, school. Finish school.”
“I promise you’ll like him.”
“Of course we will like him, that doesn’t mean you have to marry him.”
“What’s his profession?” my father asked.
I couldn’t say humanist spirit guide, so I said, “He studies world religions.”
“Is he a priest?”
My mother gasped. “A Catholic priest?”
“He’s not a priest, he just studies religion. In a nonreligious way.”
“Religion is poison,” my father said. “The entire history of humanity is littered with the bodies of people who have fallen afoul of religion.”
“Just meet him,” I said. “He’s coming tomorrow.”
* * *
Thanksgiving dinner was Auntie Lavinia and her son, Guy; Mira and her husband, Ahmed; the Hosseins from Manhasset; and Derek and Elsa Rosenberg, the elderly couple next door whose three daughters had all moved to Tel Aviv. My mother liked to stuff the turkey with rice and tiny koftas, and my father liked to put cardamom in the sweet-potato casserole. Other than that, we did Thanksgiving just like white people, eating dinner in the afternoon and falling asleep in front of the football.
Cyrus arrived early with his hair in a ponytail and handed a bouquet of white roses to my silent mother. “Hello, Mira,” he said to my sister, who winked and squeezed his arm. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “Our mother is all bark.” Cyrus shook Ahmed’s hand, and Ahmed looked him up and down and nodded.
At the table, my mother was scrupulously polite to Cyrus. “Please, eat,” she said, piling stuffing onto his plate.
Auntie Lavinia was arguing with Guy about his homework, which she tried to convince him to start right away instead of waiting for Sunday night. “You’ll be at your father’s over the weekend, I can’t be sure he’ll make you do it.”
Guy rolled his eyes. “He will.”
“Is there even a desk in that little apartment, and who knows if you have the peace and quiet to do your studies?”
“There’s a table, Mom.”
“I told him at least get a two-bedroom place. But he makes you sleep on the sofa. How’s a boy to learn anything sleeping on the sofa?”
“It’s not rocket science,” Guy said. “It’s Norse mythology.”
“Don’t know what they’re teaching kids these days,” Auntie Lavinia said. “Horse mythology?”
“I’ve always been fascinated by the Norse gods,” Mr. Hossein said. “What do you think of Loki?”
“You mean the bad guy in Thor?” Guy asked.
“We saw that movie,” Elsa Rosenberg said. “Didn’t we, Derek. It was ridiculous.”
My mother passed Cyrus the gravy. “His plate looks dry,” she said to me. I instructed Cyrus to douse his turkey.
“He wasn’t just a bad guy,” Cyrus said. “Loki. He was a complex character who shape-shifted between the gods and the giants.”
“That’s not what my book says,” Guy mumbled.
“Pie?” my mother asked Cyrus.
And on it went. For a moment Cyrus sparked my mother’s interest when he explained that Loki also shifted between genders, bearing children both as a father and as a mother. But that lasted only a few minutes, and soon we were clearing plates, and then we ate pumpkin cheesecake and everyone sighed about how full they were, and before we knew it, we were kissing each other on the cheek and saying goodbye to Auntie Lavinia and I still wasn’t sure where my parents were going to fall on the whole married thing. Finally, when it was just the six of us arranged awkwardly on the L-shaped sofa in front of the football, my father broached the subject.
“We hear you’re interested in marriage,” he said.
Cyrus looked up from the photo book of the Taj Mahal that had been sitting on our coffee table for two decades and fixed my father with an earnest smile. “I am, sir,” he said.
“We are a bit surprised,” my father said.
“I can understand that,” Cyrus replied.
“Asha has never even talked about you.”
Do something, I mouthed to my sister, but I could tell that even though she had my back, she was also kind of enjoying the spectacle.
“Sometimes,” Cyrus said, “you meet someone and it’s like you’ve always known them.”
“Asha always knew you,” Mira said, attempting to lighten the mood. “You just never paid attention to her.”
“That was my loss,” Cyrus said. “But when I met Asha again after all this time, it seemed inevitable that we would end up together. She’s the most extraordinary person I’ve ever known. I can’t imagine spending my life with anyone else. She is smart, kind, wise, funny, beautiful, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have married her.”
“What did you just say?” my mother said, gasping.
“We got married in August,” I confessed.
“You’ve been married since August?”
“Vah Vah!” My father stood up and applauded. “This is wonderful!”
Mira was surprised. “You’re happy?”
“Your wedding was wonderful, darling, but we just can’t afford the Marriott again.”
Cyrus shifted from the edge of the sofa and knelt in front of me. “Thank you for marrying me, Asha Ray,” he said, and to my surprise he pulled a box from his pocket, and inside the box was a small circle of gold that fit my finger perfectly.
A little burst of sound came from the TV; the Patriots must have scored. I glanced over at my mother, and she had this stunned look on her face like she didn’t watch Bollywood films with Auntie Lavinia every other Sunday at the Roosevelt mall.
* * *
The week after Thanksgiving we were trapped in Julian’s house during the year’s first real snowstorm; the lab was closed and the roads were rivers of powdery white. Jules lit a fire and we played Old Before My Time, a game I’d made up with Mira where we confessed things that made us sound old.
“Okay,” I started. “Describing people as ‘chill’ as if it’s a compliment. Like ‘Yeah, I’m so into that guy, he’s so chill.’ How? How is being super-relaxed a quality one seeks in a partner? The only people I really need to be super–chilled out are pilots.”
“Or air traffic controllers.”
“Yeah, but in a focused and uptight way.”
“I don’t understand TikTok,” Cyrus said.
“I don’t understand Reels,” Jules said. “What is the point if everything keeps disappearing?”
“Reels don’t disappear. Stories do. Keep up.” I said.
“So I got a letter today from some people in Missouri,” Cyrus said.
I gathered the game was over. Cyrus started reading the letter aloud: “?‘My wife and I grew up watching Little House on the Prairie and we both have this yearning to kneel beside our bed at night and say some kind of prayer. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that without questioning the viability of a higher power? What if we could put our palms together, look up at the sky, and do some real talking about the day, about the things that had gone wrong, the things that we were okay with, the things we hoped might happen tomorrow? Could we do that, could we just do that and enjoy it? We don’t want to cheat on our atheism.’?”
“Jeez, Cy, if only you could give every skeptic what they wanted, some kind of believable replacement for God,” Jules said.
“Well,” I said, “I did propose that to Cyrus, but he wasn’t sure.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t sure, I said I didn’t want to be a priest.”
Jules looked back and forth between me and Cyrus. “You want to give this man his own religion?”