Anita stood with her arms folded, leaning against the dark wooden cabinets, fiddling with her ponytail. Her skin shadowed as the sun went down.
Suddenly, Anjali Auntie turned toward her daughter as if she was just noticing her. “Ani! You’re filthy!” she cried. “I can smell you from here. Look at you, sitting in Mrs. Kaplan’s car for an hour, stinking, and sweaty, don’t fall asleep like this in my kitchen.”
Anita slunk upstairs. I heard the shower running and wondered what she was thinking about as the sweat dripped away, revealing whatever was the essential Anita that got lost when she entered her Anita-and-adult or Anita-and-classmates script. I felt certain that no one else had ever wondered as intensely as I did about that essential Anita, that she had revealed none of it to anyone else.
* * *
? ? ?
Perhaps sensing the generational gap between the youth of Hammond Creek and their forebears, my English teacher, Ms. Rabinowitz, an eager Bostonian transplant, decided our curriculum ought to include several short stories depicting the somber reality of the immigrant experience. Through these pieces, we learned that old people looking out windows symbolized nostalgia for their former nations. We learned that images of springtime symbolized youth, and we hypothesized that the changing of the leaves might imply a metamorphosis from Foreign to American, or perhaps from Life to Death. Having inspired us to discern the signs and signifiers that surrounded us, Ms. Rabinowitz told us to interview a family member as inspiration for our own Heritage Creative Writing Project.
Let me nod to my teacher’s intentions: it was 2006, and one of my classmates bore the unfortunate name Osama Hussain. Much of what Ms. Rabinowitz did in that course seemed to be driven by an implicit desire to redeem the nomenclative tragedy. （Osama, for his part, was thriving. He’d recently talked his way out of a few class-skipping charges by claiming he was fleeing Republican bullies, when he had in fact driven off campus to buy weed from his college-aged brother.）
At any rate, I had no desire to interview my parents only to receive premasticated spiels about how much more mathematics they understood at twelve than Americans could grasp at twenty. So I brought the paper Ms. Rabinowitz had given us listing suggested questions for the Heritage Interview to the Dayals’。
“Ani?” Anjali Auntie called when I opened the door. “Oh, Neil, come, come,” she said when I presented in the kitchen. “I was expecting Anita—she’s late after this cross-country meet. We live so far away, poor girl.” She stood behind the stove, pushing along some okra with a wooden spoon in a frying pan. “You look bothered.”
“Can you help me with some homework?” I said.
“Maybe you should wait for Anita—I’ve never been much help to her.” Then she laughed. “At least, not on the page-by-page basis.”
“I have to interview someone,” I said, and explained the assignment. “It’s meant for family, but I don’t think Ms. Rabinowitz would be mad if I asked you.”
“Well. If it’s for class.” She glanced at the clock and sighed. “I have to make up some new lemonade. I suppose we can talk downstairs.”
In the basement, the interview mingled with the action. It was late October, and I’d now witnessed the brewing of the lemonade a few times. The scene: Three plain gold bangles, laid out on the table. The stone basin. Above, weak fluorescence. The last strains of autumn afternoon light ribboning through the glass. Anita’s mother shoving the sleeves of her lavender peasant top past her elbows.
I shuffled for the tape recorder Ms. Rabinowitz had sent home with each of us. “We’re supposed to use these instead of note-taking so we can be present.”
Anjali Auntie raised her eyebrows and glanced at the splay of criminal activity laid out before us as if to say, you want this on the record?
“I mean, I’m the only one who’s going to listen to it,” I hastened.
She lifted a plastic jar full of a clear liquid—flux—to remove impurities. The jar still wore its original label, shree basmati rice. Nearby lay a few other bottles with liquids whose names I never learned; “untranslatable,” Anjali Auntie always said. Everything with the feel of a moonshine job. The flux, poured over the bangles, splashing against the sides of the stone basin. The liquid taking to the gold, like watching that old mingling of sugar and lemon, the lick of liquid on solid, the solid yielding to its touch.
I turned to Ms. Rabinowitz’s questions. “Would your life today surprise your ancestors in another part of the world?” I read. “If interviewee is immigrant him/herself, can ask: ‘Would your life today surprise your prior self, if so, how?’”