Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 12

  To make matters worse, this was around the time I met Peter. We had only been in Los Angeles for two years. I was still in sixth grade, living in our apartment in Arcadia, when I came out of my room one morning to the sight of a man snoring loudly on the divan in a big, dark heap. He had greasy hair and skin the color of mahogany leather. A beer belly leaked out of the space between his tattered T-shirt and paint-speckled jeans. I was scared of this man, of his big, knotty, callused hands, of his smell, sour like old beer and tobacco. Two years later, he would become my stepfather.

  “Mom!” I yelled. “Who is this man?”

  She explained that she had hired him, a friend of a friend, to build us a stereo cabinet. For some reason, he had decided to show up at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday, too early for hammering. She told him so and suggested he lie down for a while. When the sleeping giant awoke, he clomped around in his work boots and spoke to my mother in bass, tortured Hindi. My preteen self immediately hated him.

  Born and raised in Fiji, Peter descended from generations of lower-caste Indians whom the British shipped as indentured laborers to colonies like Fiji and Guyana with the promise of a better life. He immigrated to California directly from Fiji, working first as a gardener. Historically, the Indian migrants to Fiji had a combative relationship with Fiji’s indigenous peoples. Afraid of losing their culture to that of their adoptive home, they clung to it. While India moved forward, the insularity of these transplants kept them culturally frozen in time. Gender roles were sharply defined. Women had little say; they belonged at home. Punishment of children was always corporal. Girls were to be married off, fraternizing with the opposite sex was forbidden.

  In part because of his size but mainly because of what I saw as his crude, beast-like ignorance, I referred to Peter when speaking to my mom in private as “the Incredible Hulk.” I was too young to understand how he went from cabinet builder to main squeeze. All I knew was that I didn’t like him. I didn’t like his big belt buckle, his stench, his coarse way. I didn’t like his Hindi, which bore a thick island drawl—ugly, I thought then.

  I wanted my mom to be with someone more cultured. Not this man who had never visited India, this farmer with an eighth-grade education, this brute who would unleash strings of curses from the front door when an unsuspecting boy classmate dared to walk me home and set foot on Peter’s lawn. How could my mom, who in New York had stretched her income to take me to movies and museums and Broadway shows, who held a master’s degree in public health, date this man so far beneath her? I felt entitled to judge her choice of companion. Her choice of companion drastically affected my daily home life, and suddenly our home became known at my high school as the house with the irascible, ill-tempered stepdad. Over time he would repeatedly go back to school to study for various trade licenses, like plumbing, contracting, and even real estate. Many years after his intrusion into my life, this giant and I would bond deeply through the love we shared for my daughter and my mother—this ogre turned out to be more Shrek than Grendel. Now he is my daughter’s closest grandparent, playing physically with her and spoiling her in a way no one else can.

  Through the decades, I’ve thought hard about the reasons behind the virulence of my initial reaction to Peter. There was, of course, his interruption of the intimacy my mother and I shared. I didn’t like his intrusion into our life. For years, it had been just the two of us against the world. There was also my history with wannabe fathers: first my birth father’s abandonment of me, and the second divorce because V. had not believed us. They had hurt me and they had hurt my mother. I felt I had to protect us both. And finally, there was a more subtle reason: I had begun to internalize the judgment I felt for being Indian, for being dark-skinned, for being from a poor, strange country. Then Peter came along and made manifest everything I hated about who people thought I was. I changed my name just as my mother and Peter were getting close.

  My new name came from my mother’s friend, a fellow nurse at City of Hope named Angie. I looked forward to the days when she’d come over. A short, round Colombian woman, she had a mane of lush dark-brown blow-dried locks, feathered to perfection like Jaclyn Smith’s on Charlie’s Angels. Her skin glowed, even though I couldn’t detect any makeup on her face, except for approximately six coats of mascara on her spidery lashes. I had never seen someone so beautiful. She showed up in her all-white nurse’s outfit (dress, stockings, shoes) straight from work with my mom. She and my mom would sit at our coffee table, my mom with her lentils and rice and Angie with a Styrofoam box of takeout. I’m still not sure why Angie never ate my mother’s food. She may have felt about it the way I felt about eating meat. Maybe she felt bad straining my mother’s resources.

  I’d corner Angie on the couch and interrogate her. How come your hair is so bouncy? What shampoo do you use? Do you sleep with curlers, like Alice from The Brady Bunch? How did you get your eyelashes to look so beautiful? Her answer to that last question I still remember: Apply coat after coat of mascara, letting each dry before adding the next. And, she said, warning me not to, she separated them with the tip of a safety pin. She answered each question with evident pleasure. I watched her around others and she had the same sunny, soothing way with them. I wished to be like Angie and have the effect on people that she did. I also knew that she lived with her mother, who was sick with cancer. Angie would phone her and speak in the most melodic Spanish. Her voice as she spoke to her mother reminded me of Elena, my old Peruvian babysitter in Elmhurst. Elena never became flustered, even with half a dozen other people’s kids buzzing around her and her husband coming home for supper soon. She catered to everyone and made you feel that even the most annoying, chaotic scene was just fine, just part of a normal day. I loved her ability to make everything all right with calm.

  One day in late August, right before we moved from Arcadia to the house in La Puente, Angie asked me if I was excited to go to my new junior high school. I said no. I had gone to two different schools already since we had moved to L.A., and what I dreaded most was having to repeat my name over and over again to a whole new batch of people. I dreaded roll call, when the teacher would come to my name on the attendance sheet—the long pause, the stuttering and stumbling.

  It hurt even more because part of me liked my name. My given name was Padma Parvati Vaidyanathan. In modern Tamilian tradition, your father’s first name becomes your last name until you marry, when it surrenders to your husband’s. When my mother married, she became Vijayalakshmi Vaidyanathan. After her divorce, she dropped her husband’s name. Instead of reverting to her father’s name, she split her first name in two and Lakshmi became her and my last name. It was Rajima’s second name too, after all. My mother’s decision was both a form of feminist defiance and a matter of practicality. The traditional culture of Kerala, where our family is from, is indeed matrilineal, so the split felt like honoring her roots. It was also a matter of pride: she refused to be tagged by men. She would no longer be defined in those terms, as a daughter or a wife. I was proud to have a name that reflected her courage. As a practical matter, having more digestible names would help our transition from India to America.

  Yet, reflected in the mirror of others’ reactions, my name came to seem distorted, strange, and a little icky. As icky in their eyes as what my mom would sometimes pack for me for lunch. I’ll never forget the grimaces at the lunch table from friends and acquaintances who, having unwrapped their PB&Js, would spot (and smell) the contents of my square Tupperware container. My rice and curry, which I loved and which I admit was, like most Indian food, fragrant (to put it generously), inspired many an “Ew, what is that?”

  At the time, Indian culture had none of the cachet it would acquire decades later and now possesses. By 1984, my native country had had only one major moment in popular American culture, inspired by rock stars. The Beatles had gone to India in 1968 to meditate at an ashram in the city of Rishikesh. The press covered the visit with such wonderment that soon afterward, Westerners were toting books of In
dian lore and spirituality, and dorms filled with the scent of nag champa incense and patchouli oil. Life became all peace and love and maharishi. More than thirty years later, another rock star, Madonna, would take up yoga and former aerobics instructors everywhere would discover the glories of pincha mayurasana and halsana poses. After college, when I went to yoga classes in L.A., I would giggle so hard at the Valley-accented approximations of chataranga that I could barely hold my downward-facing dog. But that wouldn’t happen for another ten years or so.

  At the time I became Angelique, India—for most Americans I encountered—connoted smelly, poor, and weird. I felt both American and Indian. But I had to pick a side, and I decided I’d choose the least conspicuous one. I wanted to fade in, not stand out. A new school meant another round of hazing, but as I realized after my conversation with Angie, it also presented an opportunity for reinvention. And while I couldn’t change the way I looked, I could change my name.

  Now all I needed was the right one. I wanted something approachable, something that didn’t sound foreign, that would make no waves. I thought of Angie, the way I felt when I heard my mom say her name. I liked that name. Not so long ago, there had been a sitcom of the same name. That proved to me that most Americans were familiar with the name Angie. I told my mom of my plan. I suspect she was heartbroken, even though she never showed it. In fact, she encouraged me to find a name with which I felt more at ease, one that “fit” better. I told her my choice, and she suggested that I should ask Angie. So the next time they came home together from work, I gushed that I had always loved her and her name and I would like to use it as my own in my new school and would that be okay?

  Angie listened patiently. I made sure to mention that even Peter had changed his name from Anand when he first arrived from Fiji. When I was done presenting my case, Angie told me she thought my name was very special. She looked to my mother and asked whether she was all right with the change. My mother set Angie’s hot tea on a coaster on the coffee table and assured her that she wouldn’t stand in my way if that was what I wanted. Angie met my mother’s eyes, as if trying to divine the role my mother expected her to play. Eventually, graciously, she assented. She was flattered, she said.

  The first day of each new semester, I’d eagerly wait as the teacher took attendance, ready for her to reach the last names beginning with L. I could sense the moment when she reached my name. I could spot the beginning of the furrowed brow that preceded the stutter, “P-P-Pad . . .” And I spoke up immediately. “Here!” I’d say. “Call me Angie.” I wasn’t the only one with a new name. Hae Sun became Susie. Marisol became Lisa. I’m pretty sure my friend Lynn was not a true Lynn. I never thought to ask.

  I was Angie for a year. As the shock of yet another new school wore off, I drifted back toward the exotic. I then elongated and embellished the name to Angelique the year after. I suppose I wanted to be noticed, just not for the reasons I was noticed as Padma. But of course my skin color and the other markers of my ethnicity—my dark eyes and fine, straight black hair—were immutable.

  So all through eighth grade I was Angie, and for the entirety of high school, my friends and teachers called me Angelique. My mother feigned indifference, a sort of neutral support. If asked by other relatives for her opinion, she would simply say, “Well, I named her Padma, but if she doesn’t like it, what can I do? Let her be called what she wants.” She even went so far as to call me Angelique when speaking to me around my friends, with only the faintest whiff of resignation. I’m sure she noticed that I never ate at the table and stayed mostly in my room. At the time my household environment was stressful, to say the least, and I wasn’t comfortable in my own home. I felt it wasn’t fair that I had no control over whom I lived with. My mother knew me well. I would have balked at any serious opposition to my name change. It was one of the few things I had control over, after all. My mother also knew I sneaked out or was picked up down the street by male friends to get around the ogre guarding our threshold.

  Two years after I spotted him on the couch, Peter and my mother decided to move in together to the working-class neighborhood of La Puente, a pimple on the map between Hollywood and Disneyland. In 1984 they bought the low-slung house where they still live today. I spent most of my time locked inside my bedroom, lying on my bed, trying to lose myself in The Outsiders. I spent no time in my mom’s bedroom, because it was Peter’s room, too. The third bedroom was officially a guest room but functioned as a dumping ground for my hoarder of a mother’s excess stuff. Today this room is no different, taken up by stacks of boxes, old clothing, shoes, Christmas ornaments, glue sticks, and photos of me, from ancient modeling shots to a framed one of me in cap and gown and bindi, my mom in a sari, beaming.

  Peter created a lush garden with trees bearing kumquats, tangerines, and curry leaves, and one with roses in front of the house, for my mother. Our neighbor had a pomegranate tree that hung over the fence in our backyard. I’d wait for the pomegranates to fall before cracking them open, prying out the seeds, and dousing them with lemon and salt—chaatpati in a bowl. Peter tended the garden, shuffling between trees with his farmer’s gait, bowlegged from the car accident we suffered in 1985 and slightly pigeon-toed. My contempt for Peter endured, and not without reason. A window next to my bed looked out onto the backyard. On certain days, I looked up from the pages of my book after hearing insistent clucking followed by a desperate squawk. I didn’t have to look outside to know what it was. Peter was using his giant hands to slaughter a chicken. It would come to be a familiar sound.

  The Silence of the Chickens happened every few weeks. He would chop their heads off with one swoop, dunk the still-screaming birds into a barrel of boiling water, pluck them, and use the same cleaver to hack them into indecipherable pieces. He and an enlisted friend from back home slaughtered about a dozen at a time. They divided the kill between the two of them. What my parents didn’t freeze for a later date, he’d make pungent chicken curry with. The curry, as I remember it, was made from tons of garlic, onion, oil, and a coarse, stinky spice mixture. The smell was nothing like the delicate aroma of South Indian food. When it finished stewing, a slick yellow-tinged soot clung to the pot. I mostly succeeded in avoiding Peter, but occasionally we’d cross paths and I’d watch out of the corner of my eye as he ate a bowl filled with curry and a giant wedge of rice—not basmati rice but some inferior poni grain, microwaved. He hunched over the bowl, his left arm hugging it and his right hand dragging a cluster of stale rice through the sludge. Even from the other room, I could hear him sucking on the bones and snapping them with his teeth to get at the marrow.

  He complained that the grocery store chicken had no flavor. Today I understand that he was right about that and that his way was actually much less cruel than factory farming, which produces meat sanitized of its origins by customers’ remove from the gruesome particulars. But an avian bloodbath was not a convincing argument against factory farming to a teenage girl. I had been slowly incorporating meat into my Brahmin diet for a couple of years now. I was not exactly a vegetarian but still very squeamish about eating things that actually tasted and looked like meat. Peter’s occasionally murderous activities meant that even the backyard was a place I didn’t feel comfortable. I could no longer tell if a red splotch on the ground originated from a squashed pomegranate seed or a doomed chicken. Spotting a stray feather would send me into hysterics. I resented my mother for allowing the slaughter, though I suppose she deserves credit for drawing the line at lamb. I knew he’d lost that battle the first day I saw him walk in with a large black Hefty bag filled with parts that he’d unload into the freezer. I knew what the heavy, still-warm contents were. By that time, I was no longer a vegetarian and had no moral objection to eating meat. Peter and his relatives were Hindus, too, but not Brahmins, of course. They ate all meat except beef and pork. So he had the same reaction when I brought home a burger or cooked bacon on a Saturday morning. I was accustomed to religion restricting diet. Still, I couldn’t unde
rstand (or refused to consider) why he would eat lamb and chicken but not beef or pork. He was a hypocrite, I decided. And disgusting.

  The days of my mom and I working as a team in the kitchen were over. Now she would come home from work, cook dinner, and leave it on the stove. I’d emerge from my bedroom only to make myself a plate, then go straight back to my room and shut the door. I was horrible to Peter. When he spoke to me in Hindi, I’d snap, “I can’t understand you, what language is that?” I’d speak to my mom almost exclusively in Tamil, which I knew he couldn’t understand. He’d sigh and say, “Mabitiya, mabitiya” (“Mother-daughter, mother-daughter”), as if to say that we were in a club he wasn’t part of. Yep, pretty much, I thought.

  Blinded by my disapproval and adolescent certainty, I couldn’t see Peter’s struggle. If I had been watching, I would have seen him try hard to reconcile his old ways with his new family. He loved my mother, I could see that, and he was trying to show affection for me. He did this the only way he knew how, through fierce protection. Like when senior prom rolled around. I had won a free limo ride in a lunchtime raffle, but I had no date and insufficient courage to go with just my girlfriends. A week or so before the big dance, a junior boy came up to me. “I heard you don’t have a date to prom,” he said, before adding, “and that you won the limo.” Talk about sweeping a girl off her feet. “I’ll go with you,” I said. “Just don’t touch me above the knees or below the neck.” Peter, as I expected, refused to be in the house when the boy arrived. But I later found out that he paid for a couple extra hours of limo time. In retrospect, I think his outbursts had an ostentatious quality. He had a very big temper and often got into fights at the local bar, the ironically named Hi Brow Lounge, where the area painters, plumbers, and electricians drank. He became unreasonable when he drank, and our linen closet for years had a different-colored piece of wood on one of the doors from when he kicked a hole through it during one of his outbursts. If an unwitting boy stopped to speak to me on my front lawn after school, in broad daylight, he would come out of the garage where he kept his tools, swinging a wrench and spurting obscenities. I could never do group projects with male students, as they weren’t allowed in my home. We did have many Mexican and Filipino kids at my high school whose parents had similarly conservative attitudes, but none as backward as his. He did not tolerate any socialization between the sexes. And no one was as scary as he was. He had Fijian friends in the neighborhood; perhaps he wanted to prove his conservative bona fides. They all had clung to ancient Indian customs that were archaic even when compared with those of my South Indian grandfather, whose private tutorial business out of our home in Chennai frequently had students of both sexes studying together and milling around the house. In Peter’s community, quite literally everyone had arranged marriages; no one was even allowed a say in the matter. Even my mother’s upbringing a generation earlier in India had been more liberal than what Peter allowed in our shared home.