Afterward, Cyrus lay down on the carpet. I sat beside him and he rested his head on my lap. He cried and cried. “Mama,” I heard him whisper. I felt pulled toward him, drawn to what he sometimes called the dark behind his eyes, and I was also a little afraid, because I saw now that this man walked around with a hole in his heart, and I thought about how hard I would have to work to fill that hole, and I was worried that I wouldn’t ever be able to.
And after that, the three of us—Julian, Cyrus, and I—definitively and permanently became a tribe.
* * *
At Thanksgiving, I went home to tell my parents everything. I was going to wait until Thursday, when Mira could be there to cushion the blow, but while we were unloading the groceries the day before, it all came out in one breath: Mrs. Butterfield’s funeral, meeting Cyrus again, moving in with him. I left out city hall, but I said I was in love and that Cyrus made me want to be married, which wasn’t completely true but at least wasn’t an outright lie.
“Who is Cyrus?” my mother asked.
“He went to high school with me. But then he dropped out.” Why? Why did I say that?
My mother pointed a sweet potato at me. “A dropout?”
I turned to my father, hoping to find an ally. “He’s actually very smart,” I said. “Reads a lot.” Inside I was thinking, Reads a lot, that’s the best you can do?
My mother stood up and hovered behind my father’s chair. “Explain this to us so we can understand. You’re telling us about a boy, fine. We are okay with boyfriends, you’re old enough to make your own decisions now. If you wanted to go out with a girl, that might be different.”
“Don’t be homophobic, Ammoo,” I said.
“But what’s this about getting married? Why do you have to marry him?”
“I don’t have to marry him, I want to marry him.”
I didn’t tell them that I’d already married him.
My parents didn’t want to be pharmacists. My father had spent his entire life hoping to someday publish his novel, the details of which he had never revealed to any of us. All we knew was that every night after dinner, he would shut the study door behind him, and we would have to finish picking the rice from the place mats and do our homework on the dining table. And my mother, although she loved putting on that uniform every day and giving people advice about spider bites and hormone replacement therapy, really came alive during the annual performances of the Long Island Tagore Society, in which she would direct the Bengali writer’s most famous work. Right now she was in rehearsals for Chitrangoda, a musical play about a warrior princess. I figured that’s why she reacted to my news like I was challenging her to a dual.
“You’re too young to get married. Full stop.”
“Why don’t you act like all the other aunties?”
“Don’t insult me. I’m not like the other aunties. That’s why you and Mira turned out to be such brilliant young women.”
“Just be happy, throw me a party. Mira was married by the time she was my age.”
“That was different,” my father said. “Mira and Ahmed have known each other for many years. Ahmed’s father is my oldest friend.”
“We did not come to this country so you could be a child bride.”
“I’m in graduate school.”
“That’s right, school. Finish school.”
“I promise you’ll like him.”
“Of course we will like him, that doesn’t mean you have to marry him.”
“What’s his profession?” my father asked.
I couldn’t say humanist spirit guide, so I said, “He studies world religions.”
“Is he a priest?”
My mother gasped. “A Catholic priest?”
“He’s not a priest, he just studies religion. In a nonreligious way.”
“Religion is poison,” my father said. “The entire history of humanity is littered with the bodies of people who have fallen afoul of religion.”
“Just meet him,” I said. “He’s coming tomorrow.”
* * *
Thanksgiving dinner was Auntie Lavinia and her son, Guy; Mira and her husband, Ahmed; the Hosseins from Manhasset; and Derek and Elsa Rosenberg, the elderly couple next door whose three daughters had all moved to Tel Aviv. My mother liked to stuff the turkey with rice and tiny koftas, and my father liked to put cardamom in the sweet-potato casserole. Other than that, we did Thanksgiving just like white people, eating dinner in the afternoon and falling asleep in front of the football.