"Ever go out on the roof?" you asked. You did not wait for me to answer, and the next thing I knew you'd lifted the screen and were gone. I rushed over to the window, and when I leaned outside I couldn't see you. I imagined you slipping on the shingles, falling into the shrubbery, my being blamed for the accident, for standing by stupidly as you did such a brazen thing. "Are you okay?" I called out. The logical thing would have been to say your name, but I felt inhibited and did not. Eventually you came back around, seating yourself on the incline over the garage, gazing down at the lawn.
"What's behind the house?"
"Woods. But you can't go there."
"Who said?"
"Everyone. My parents and all the teachers in school." "Why not?"
"A boy got lost in them last year. He's still missing." His name was Kevin McGrath, and he'd been two grades behind me. For a week we'd heard nothing but helicopters, dogs barking, searching for some sign of him.
You did not react to this information. Instead, you asked, "Why do people have yellow ribbons tied to their mailboxes?"
"They're for the hostages in Iran."
"I bet most Americans had never even heard of Iran before this," you said, causing me to feel responsible both for my neighbors' patriotism and for their ignorance.
"What's that thing to the right?"
"A swing set."
The word must have amused you. You faced me and smiled, though not kindly, as if I'd invented the term.
"I missed the cold," you said. "This cold." The remark reminded me that none of this was new to you. "And the snow. When will it snow again?"
"I don't know. There wasn't much snow for Christmas this year."
You climbed back into the room, disappointed, I feared, by my lack of information. You glanced at yourself in my white-framed mirror, your head nearly cut off at the top. "Where's the bathroom?" you asked, already halfway out the door.
That night, lying on the cot in my parents' room, wide awake though it was well past midnight, I heard my mother and father talking in the dark. I worried that perhaps you would hear them, too. The bed where you slept was just on the other side of the wall, and if I had been able to stick my hand through it, I could have touched you. My parents were at once critical of and intimidated by yours, perplexed by the ways in which they had changed. Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had, my mother said, something she hadn't anticipated and didn't understand. There were remarks concerning your mother's short hair, her slacks, the Johnnie Walker she and your father continued to drink after the meal was finished, taking it with them from the dining room to the living room. It was mainly my mother who talked, my father listening and murmuring now and then in tired consent. My parents, who had never set foot in a liquor store, wondered whether they should buy another bottle-at the rate your parents were going, that bottle would be drained by tomorrow, my mother said. She remarked that your mother had become "stylish," a pejorative term in her vocabulary, implying a self-indulgence that she shunned. "Twelve people could have flown for the price of one first-class ticket," she said. My mother's birthdays came and went without acknowledgment by my father. I was the one who made a card and had him sign it with me on the first of every June. Suddenly my mother sat up, sniffing the air. "I smell smoke," she said. My father asked if she had remembered to turn off the oven. My mother said she was certain she had, but she asked him to get up and check.
"It's a cigarette you smell," he said when he came back to bed. "Someone has been smoking in the bathroom."
"I didn't know Dr. Choudhuri smoked," my mother said. "Should we have put out an ashtray?"
In the morning you all slept in, victims of jet lag, reminding us that despite your presence, your bags crowding the hallways, your toothbrushes cluttering the side of the sink, you belonged elsewhere. When I returned from school in the afternoon you were still sleeping, and at dinner-breakfast for you-you all declined the curry we were eating, craving toast and tea. It was like that for the first few days: you were awake when we slept, sleeping when we were awake; we were leading antipodal lives under the same roof. As a result, apart from the fact that I wasn't sleeping in my own room, there was little change. I drank my orange juice and ate my bowl of cereal and went off to the bus stop as usual. I spoke to no one of your arrival; I almost never revealed details of my home life to my American friends. As a child, I had always dreaded my birthdays, when a dozen girls would appear in the house, glimpsing the way we lived. I don't know how I would have referred to you. "A family friend," I suppose.
Then one day I came home from school and found your parents awake, their ankles crossed on top of the coffee table, filling up the sofa where I normally sat to watch The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island. They were chatting with my mother, who was in the recliner with a bowl in her lap, peeling potatoes. Your mother was dressed in a nylon sari of my mother's, purple with red dots in various sizes. Distressing news of your mother's missing suitcase had come: it had been located in Rome but had been placed on a flight to Johannesburg. I remember thinking that the sari looked better on your mother than on mine; the intense purple shade was more flattering against her skin. I was told that you were outside in the yard. I did not go out to look for you. Instead I practiced the piano. It was nearly dark by the time you came in, accepting the tea that I was still too young to drink. Your parents drank tea as well, but by six o'clock the bottle of Johnnie Walker was on the coffee table, as it would be every night that you stayed with us. You had gone out in only a pullover, your father's costly camera slung around your neck. Your face showed the effects of the cold, your eyes blazing, the borders of your ears crimson, your skin glowing from within.
"There's a stream back there," you said, "in those woods."
My mother became nervous then, warning you not to go there, as she had so often warned me, as I had warned you the night you came, but your parents did not share her concern. What had you photographed? they asked instead.
"Nothing," you replied, and I took it personally that nothing had inspired you. The suburbs were new to you and to your parents. Whatever memories you possessed of America were of Cambridge, a place that I could only dimly recall.
You took your tea and disappeared to my room as if it were yours, emerging only when summoned for dinner. You ate quickly, not speaking, then returned upstairs. It was your parents who paid me court, who asked me questions and complimented me on my manners, on my piano playing, on all the things I did to help my mother around the house. "Look, Kaushik, how Hema makes her lunch," your mother would say as I prepared a ham or turkey sandwich after dinner and put it in a paper bag to take to school the next day. I was still very much a child, while you, just three years older, had already eluded your parents' grasp. You did not argue with them and yet you did not seem to talk to them very much, either. While you were outside I'd heard them tell my mother how unhappy you were to be back. "He was furious that we left, and now he's furious that we're here again," your father said. "Even in Bombay we managed to raise a typical American teenager."
I did my homework at the dining table, unable to use the desk in my room. I worked on my ancient Rome report, something that had interested me until your arrival. Now it seemed silly, given that you'd been there. I longed to work on it in privacy, but your father talked to me at length about the structural aspects of the Colosseum. His civil engineer's explanations went over my head, were irrelevant to my needs, but to be polite I listened. I worried that he would want to see whether I had incorporated the things he said, but he never bothered me about that. He hunted through his bags and showed me postcards he'd purchased, and though it had nothing to do with my report, he gave me a two-lire coin.