*
We drive away, his parents waving at the door. We go back to our beautiful city and resume our life together. The trip and all that bland food has made me long for simmering curries in creamy coconut milk. I start to cook, remembering how Amma had learned in those early years in America, when for the first time she was without Sita. I cook eggplant moju, chicken curry, pol sambol, and he loves it all. At first when we sit down together, I eat with a fork and knife in deference to a long-ago social studies teacher.
But one day, annoyed by the inability to form perfect mouthfuls, I put my fork down, put my fingers in the food, mix, and eat. I say, “Oh god, that’s so much better.” He stares and I feel like I have dropped my clothes in the middle of the street. But then he lays his fork aside too, tents his own fingers, and mimics my movements. He tries to make neat balls of rice and curry like mine, tries to keep his fingers clean past the first knuckle, makes a mess until we are both laughing.
He says, “Is this how you’re supposed to do it?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. You’re American. You might not like it.”
He smiles, says, “It does taste better.” Then, “How do you do it so easily?”
“Like this, like making a ball.” I push the food against my tented fingers with my thumb, make a ball, and hold it up to show him.
He says, “Mine doesn’t looks like that.”
I shake my head, sassy. “Then use a fork, white boy.”
“But this is the right way, right? I want to do it the right way.”
A hardness in my chest, held since I was a child, new in this country and told how to be, crumbles away.
*
My mother calls and makes small talk for a long time. I’m saying goodbye when she finally can’t stand it anymore and says, “You’re still seeing that foreigner?”
I want to say, “I’m doing a lot more than seeing.” Instead I say, “He’s not a foreigner, Amma. We are the foreigners.”
She says, “You know what I mean—foreigner, white person, same thing.”
“Yes, Amma. I’m still seeing him.”
“Is it … you know … serious?”
“What?”
“Because you know … these people. They have different ideas. They’re not serious like we are. He might use you and then leave you high and dry. It happened to my friend Vishanthi’s daughter. She ‘dated’ one for years and then he just up and left her. Poor girl. She was such a mess. And then the mother. My god, what a long time it took for her to get over it. Now, of course, the girl is happily settled with a boy from home. So all I’m saying is be careful, okay?”
“Okay, Amma, I’ll be careful.” As if falling in love is a disease I can protect myself from. I picture a giant condom, stretched all the way around my body and tied off neatly at the top with a bow. I fight the giggles.
She senses this and changes the subject. She has just gotten back from Los Angeles. She and Aunty Mallini had gone because there had been a memorial service for a young girl a few years older than me who had gone back to the island to teach art to war orphans. She had gotten on a bus and there had been a suicide bomber on it. The girl had died in the explosion along with scores of others. Amma tells me about the chaos of the house, the weeping parents. She says there had been a picture of the dead girl—pretty, laughing, her arm around a grouping of kids with big smiles and amputated limbs. The girl had had an older sister who had been there with her. They had made the sister identify the body. My mother uses the word shattered to describe her, this returned, shell-shocked sister.
I don’t care. None of this has anything to do with me. I feel a stab of sorrow when she describes the sister’s face, but these events, these people, feel far away. Their lives have nothing to do with my own. I wish she wouldn’t tell me these stories about other Lankans. I wish she’d pay attention to my life and what I’m telling her about it instead.
*
Later when Daniel and I have been together for years and it is clear the “foreigner” is going nowhere, Amma asks, “How is your friend?”
I know what she means, but I always ask, “Friend?”
She’s awkward, embarrassed. She says, “You know, that boy you see. That ‘artist.’” The word artist pronounced with as much disdain as if she were saying prostitute. It makes her crazy that I’ve chosen this man whom she sees as a boy for daring to imagine his preoccupation with color and line is anything more than a hobby. “Why can’t he get a real job and do this painting thing on the weekends?” she has grumbled to me more times than I can remember.