“Good choice.” Binji’s smile was one of her signature extravaganzas of emotion, rolling together pride, affection, worry, and everything in between. “Why don’t you give it a chance too?” Binji’s voice dipped into softness, her kid-glove voice for her “sensitive” granddaughter.
“I don’t think trying on clothes on a video call is my style.”
“Funny.” Binji leaned in, placing her elbows on the vanity, and fixed Cullie with a stare that meant she wasn’t going to let Cullie deflect.
“I don’t think dating-shating is my style.” It was, in fact, the least productive thing Cullie could think of doing with her time.
“You know when I was your age—”
“I know, I know. When you were my age, you had a seven-year-old child.” This entire pushing a living being out of the vagina was so vintage sci-fi; wasn’t it time to fix it with technology? If Cullie wasn’t so absorbed with Shloka, the idea might have been worth pursuing.
“That’s not what I was going to say. I would never suggest that any woman marry at seventeen and become a mother at eighteen.” This was true, and Cullie felt like a brat for falling back on her childhood pattern of melting down all over her grandmother at the first sign of uncomfortable feelings. Binji had always been there for her.
“That was, in fact, my point,” Binji went on, as unaffected by Cullie’s prickliness as ever. “When I was your age, only one thing was expected of women. That we find a man to take care of us. The path to our happiness was predetermined. Your path to happiness is so wide open, so limitless, that you don’t even seem to know where to start looking for it.”
“I don’t need a man to be happy.” Pursuing happiness by way of coupledom was absurd and too exhausting to contemplate.
“I know. God knows I’ve been happy these past twenty-six years without one.” As soon as she said it, Binji seemed to realize that might have sounded disrespectful to the grandfather who’d died before Cullie’s birth. She pressed a hand to her heart and mumbled a prayer. “May your grandfather’s soul rest in peace.”
That was Binji for you, the kind of contradiction in terms Cullie could never explain to anyone. “What I’m trying to tell you is that dating-shating is not about finding someone. It’s about exploring what you want, about learning who you are. It’s embarrassing how late in life I pieced this together. Until I moved to Shady Palms, I didn’t even know how much living I’d missed out on because I bought into society’s rules. You don’t have those rules. So what is stopping you from living?”
“Just because we don’t have the same rules as you did doesn’t mean we don’t have any or that preexisting notions have somehow disappeared.”
Binji looked thoughtful. “That’s a fair point. But at least you know that. So you can start undoing your own conditioning sooner. You don’t have to wait until you’re at an age when your breasts need prosthetic support.”
Suddenly it was clear to Cullie why her grandmother had moved out of the house she’d shared with Cullie’s mother after her parents’ divorce. Binji was making up for a lifetime of FOMO.
“But isn’t the purpose of undoing conditioning being able to do what we please? I already have everything I want.”
Binji made a face. “You’re twenty-five years old, Cullie! Your whole life is ahead of you.” She didn’t add that work wasn’t everything, but Cullie heard it all the same.
“We don’t all have to want the same thing, Binji!”
“Actually we do. We all want to be happy. And we all owe it to ourselves to try and find out what will make us happy. Even if focusing on what we can control is easier.”
Cullie dragged herself to her kitchen and poked an annoyed finger into her blameless coffee machine, which was coded to give her the exact strength of brew she desired. “Again, what does any of that have to do with dating?”
The coffee machine let out a commiserating gurgle.
“What we find attractive about love interests says more about us than about them,” Binji said in the wise grandmother voice she rarely accessed.
And it made Cullie stop in the act of reaching for a cup. She ran back to her room and picked up her iPad. Her heart was racing again. More importantly, her brain was racing. She wrote down Binji’s words. “Go on,” she said.
Binji winked. “I see going out with men as a journey of self-discovery. It’s about finding us, not them. Think about that for a moment. And the next time you use Hot Steve as an excuse to write off all relationships, consider that you might really be writing yourself off.”
Cullie wrote all of that down. Then deleted the last part about Steve. Yet again, her Binji might have found a way to save her.
CHAPTER SIX
ALY
When I first told her about Poornima, I asked her if she knew what it was like to want something so badly it defined everything you were.
She met my eyes the way only she ever did, slipping inside me through them, and answered, simply: “No, but I feel like I’m about to find out.”
From the journal of Oscar Seth
We need to find a way to get Cullie home.” Aly’s mother-in-law was one of those women who thought “I have a feeling about it” was reason enough to do anything. Without even asking, Aly knew that would be the answer if she asked Bindu why she thought Cullie should come home.
So instead, she said, “Aren’t you the one who keeps telling me to get used to the fact that my daughter is an adult? If she needs to come home, she knows to come home.”
They were grabbing lunch at Cullie’s favorite Iranian place in downtown Naples. Under the bright Florida sun, a plate of khoresh bademjan sat on the wrought iron bistro table between them, almost all gone. The butter-fried eggplant layered on slow-cooked lamb was delicious when it went down, but now it sat heavily in Aly’s belly, making her wish for the siestas of her childhood summers when she visited her grandparents in Goa.
“If only it were that simple. Cullie is your daughter and my granddaughter. So, you know . . .” Bindu trailed off with all the drama of a film star. God knew she looked the part in her chiffon blouse over slim-fit linen pants. Those erstwhile Bollywood actors Aly’s parents idolized had nothing on her mother-in-law.
“She’s inherited that Desai pride,” Bindu said in the perfectly husky voice that always made the broadcast journalist inside Aly envious. “And then there’s the Menezes ego from your side.”
“Why is it pride when it’s your family but ego when it’s mine?”
Bindu made a sound that was an eye roll turned into a scoff. It was all very sweet and dandy that her mother-in-law had chosen Aly over her son in the divorce, as she loved to declare, but recently Bindu Desai had changed so much that Aly was starting to think that this new avatar was best consumed in metered doses.
Nonetheless, Aly’s Catholic guilt jabbed a brutal spike inside her. Bindu had never led Aly wrong when it came to her daughter. She had an uncanny sense for what Cullie was going through. Something that often eluded Aly.
“Fine. I’ll call Cullie as soon as I’m done with my editorial meeting. I need to focus on the story I’m working on. I think this one’s going to be it.” A curl popped out of her chignon, and she pushed it back into place. Joyce was still “working on things,” so Aly was pretty sure she hadn’t been able to make contact with Meryl’s people to poach the interview from her.