Relax, tiger. “We can’t have that, can we now?”
When she turned to the kitchen, he tried to follow. “How can I help?”
Ah, how she loved the 2020s. If Rajendra Desai hadn’t died over two decades ago, the fact that men were now expected to help in the kitchen would certainly have killed him.
“Why don’t you open the wine.” She pointed to the minimalist wine rack on the kitchen island, one of Cullie’s many housewarming gifts. “Pour us some, and regale me with stories of your National Book Award speech.”
It was his favorite thing to talk about. Throwing her a look the most devout of worshippers saved up for goddesses, he got right to it.
If someone had told Bindu that she’d ever go on a date after she lost her husband, she would have called them delusional. When she was growing up, talking to a man she wasn’t related to would have earned her a beating from her mother, so dating was an entirely foreign concept then. All she’d seen of love came from the movies her grandmother sneaked her into, the outwardly quiet yet inwardly volcanic form of love from Indian cinema of the sixties and seventies.
Then, at seventeen, she’d exposed herself to ruination. Rajendra had swooped in out of nowhere and married her and saved her from destroying her family’s honor. Bindu had spent every single day of their marriage making it worth his while.
If gratitude were love, she’d loved him enough to last her a lifetime. It took an effort to shove away the sense of loss that had recently taken to rising inside her when she thought about her marriage, but she refused to disrupt the memories. Refused to think of them as anything but happy. What was the point of examining your past?
It was something Rajendra had said to her over and over as he unmolded and remolded her. You are not that person anymore. Forgive yourself. What is the point of examining your past?
Now, here she was, with a man named Richard eating her up with the bluest eyes as she moved around her kitchen in a hot-pink dress that showed enough cleavage that it would have caused her mother to disown her. Even now, all these decades later, making jokes about her mother disowning her felt, as the kids said, too soon. It made nausea churn in Bindu’s belly, and she pushed it away, choosing instead to focus on how funny Aie’s disapproval of her clothes had felt, years before it morphed into shame at having borne a daughter she’d only ever seen as a whore after one youthful mistake.
The pot of chicken curry on her professional-grade cooktop started to boil, and she gave it a stir, pushing away every thought of the past.
“You remind me of the first girl I ever loved,” Richard said, handing her a glass of wine. The blue of his eyes was so much more fun to examine than the past.
It wasn’t the most original of lines. He could do better, but she had to at least give him an A for delivery. His breath stuttered sincerely around the words. His gaze turned unfocused and dreamy in a way Bindu refused to think of as rheumy. He looked like Cary Grant, tall with coiffed hair and a lopsided smile, and she was holding on to that visual, thank you very much. A man who （usually） had a way with words and looked like Cary Grant did not come along often.
Oscar had been obsessed with Cary Grant. Not unusual for a filmmaker in India in the seventies. They were all obsessed with Hollywood back in the day.
Think Marilyn. That breathless sensuality. The way she meets the camera is pure eroticism. The pleasure she can make a man feel with just her gaze: most women can’t make you feel that with their mouth on you.
Every woman on that set would have swooned in a horrified faint at his words. Rupa, the other actress on the film, would have run off and wept into her mother’s sari in horror. But Bindu had laughed.
You’re a dangerous girl, Oscar had said to her. Trouble. You’re trouble, Bhanu.
Sometimes she thought he was the only man who’d ever really seen her.
Why couldn’t she stop thinking these things? Why were these memories back? They were useless at best, dangerous at worst.
You’re trouble. Exactly the kind of trouble this world needs.
Trouble.
This. This was why the memories were back. Because of that word and because of the email. Stop thinking about the email.
It was time to focus on the award-winning novelist in her kitchen, wielding words as foreplay.
“Her name was Melinda,” Richard said, lips opening only on one side, much like Cary Grant. “And the first time I ever saw her, she was standing in a field of poppies in a yellow dress.”
Okay, now he was just mixing up his memories with some greeting card photograph. She needed to feed him fast. As you aged, strange things happened when you didn’t eat for long periods. Sugar levels, sodium levels, vitamin levels: you had to manage your body and mind like a machine, oiling and cleaning and running the various parts in turn lest they rust. Bindu’s father had run a peanut oil mill. He had taught her to respect every part of a machine. Especially the tiniest components. They wore out without warning and were the easiest to ignore.
Most men she’d met didn’t know how to do this. Especially the ones who’d been married. Especially the ones who’d been in long marriages where their wives had been their maintenance mechanics. Richard had been married five times.
Bindu found that astonishing and oddly freeing. The man clearly had no judgment whatsoever.
In the time that Bindu had lived at Shady Palms, she had learned a lifetime’s worth about men. For instance, the older they got, the more they loved talking about their youth, even if they generously filled gaps with imagination. And for the married ones, the more they talked about themselves, the less their wives were interested.
Bindu had also learned more about herself than she’d ever bothered with before. Even though she had taken the tour of the model homes during the open house only to annoy Alisha, by the end of that tour something deeply buried had shaken loose inside her. The frayed rope of lies she’d been holding on to had suddenly snapped.
She’d needed to know what she had missed. What being by herself might tell her about herself.
A bead crashing to the floor. An echo of a forgotten word boomeranging back to her. Trouble.
Listening to Richard wax eloquent about his greeting card love made her want to throw her head back and laugh.
Until Richard’s award-winning words, she hadn’t let expectation be part of these dates. The entire point of moving here was to have fun. To have the kind of fun she’d seen shining on the faces of the residents that afternoon at the open house. The kind of fun she’d watched the film crew having years ago, always from the outside, her nose pressed up against the glass. Too young, too unpolished to be included.
The fun she’d suddenly become aware of having missed simply because of a few turned backs. How ironic that the coven had offered her this bounty. Not only had they woken her up to those memories, but they’d also offered themselves up as a symbol for all the things she’d never had a chance to fight before.
Until the open house, Bindu had thought there would be a relief to getting older. She’d finally be able to stop trying. Stop feeling different. Stop kicking herself for it. She’d been wrong. And she’d lost so much time because of it. You had to live life out, not wait it out.
Over the past six months she’d danced barefoot by a pool and kissed as she laughed and swum in a bikini and lain out in the sun with a cocktail and a book.