I’d been further discombobulated thinking about Anita—the new Anita, who’d said she needed me, bringing forth a rocket of old wants. I hadn’t yet given her an answer to her wild pitch. She’d been texting me occasionally to prod my decision along. Each buzz in my pocket drew me further away from this world, of my family, of houses, of the basic arrangements of life.
To see Prachi’s and my mother’s dreamy expressions upon entering each low-slung on-the-market California home was to feel that I had been locked out of one of the great secrets of the world. Each house shared a few things: a single story with sparse grass marking a front “lawn,” a tinlike flat roof, pale paint—orange sherbet, cotton candy pink. Inside: sunbeams on hardwood, lanky windows. Citrus trees, tomatoes. Discussions of how to keep the squirrels from the plants. These were, by most standards of the country, modest buildings. But here, the land upon which they sat, which had once been dotted with flappy tents as gold hunters fled inland, was worth millions. A century and a half ago, to stand on this terrain would have made Prachi and Avi pioneers; even a well-to-do woman like my sister would have struggled to hire someone to build her a house, for all the able-bodied men would have been in the goldfields.
Now, though. Now Prachi and Avi would step into a home full of smart thermostats and smart fridges. They would drive Avi’s Tesla, order groceries for delivery, stream any entertainment they liked, while Avi nursed his side-project start-ups, nail-bitingly hoping against hope that one of those could bloom into a lucky billion-dollar idea, the gold in the dirt.
We considered the city—Glen Park, Noe Valley—but mostly the suburbs on the peninsula: Burlingame, San Mateo, Menlo Park, Redwood City. The latter was the ideal location in Prachi and Avi’s new collective couple consciousness—near their jobs and Avi’s parents in Los Altos. （Who else would watch the future offspring?） Redwood City’s heart: a pedestrian mall, streets lined with Mongolian BBQ and AMC Super 3D Cineplex and the Cheesecake Factory.
“You will have everything you need right here,” my father said.
“Convenience factor, very important,” my mother agreed.
The third or fourth Redwood City house: lemon yellow, squat. A wooden slatted fence ringed a small yard, on which a tricycle currently lay, its front pink wheel spinning slowly. Sesame-colored walls, polished appliances. The floral smell of the potpourri in the pink-wallpapered powder room elicited coughs. Prachi and Avi said, “Is this it?” “This is it,” quietly to each other, as we stepped into a final room, painted seafoam green.
I’d gone out with Chidi’s crowd two nights earlier: MDMA at a warehouse party in Oakland. Forty-eight hours later, I was in the depths of cold, abject nihilism. Suicide Sunday. It hit me just then, as Prachi and Avi said This is it, and the comedown darkened until I was in the throes of one of my occasional panics.
“Is it a home office?” my father asked.
“No,” Prachi said very quietly, and my mother took her hand.
“It’s perfect for kids?” the strawberry-blond real estate agent uptalked.
“Yes,” my mother said.
“Oh,” my father said.
“Wow,” Avi said.
“Uh,” I said, “I have a headache.” I dropped to my knees and pushed my face to the ground. Footsteps moved away—the real estate agent, excusing herself; I was making a scene. Everyone’s ease was galactically distant. I wanted to disdain this prescribed life and yet I could not help it, I regretted that it seemed so out of reach; I wanted what it gave everyone else. I lifted my head from the floor. The carpet looked to be breathing as the indentation my forehead had made in it unflattened. My throat was growing smaller; now it was the size of a dime. Somewhere nearby the Caltrain rumbled, and I thought of the people who lay down in front of it every year, how their gray matter and organs and eyelashes and fingernails salted the tracks for miles.
I remembered the fizzing relief of a fresh glass of lemonade. I was parched with the memory.
My mother knelt next to me. Put a hand between my shoulder blades. Rubbed.
“Breathe, rajah,” she said. “Breathe.” She kept her hand there until the worst of it abated.
* * *
? ? ?
Everyone was still eyeing me nervously at dinner, except that it was a festive occasion, the melding of two families, the mutually achieved immigrant dream hanging like a plump cloud over us.
We sat beneath the wooden trellis in the Kapoors’ backyard. The domed sky was flecked with constellations. This was why people loved Northern California; its buildings did not pollute the sky. You could remember the stars, their dead light, their gold dust.