“Great, Dad,” Jules replies, nudging his scrambled eggs.
“Jules is keeping the ship afloat,” Cyrus volunteers.
“That’s weird, because he couldn’t even keep his pants up in high school,” his brother, a total asshole, barks.
“He got us our funding,” Cyrus says. “We’re launching in three months because of him.”
“That’s wonderful, dear,” his mother murmurs.
“What is it again?” his brother asks. “Facebook for people who want to go to church?”
“Yeah, Don, something like that,” Jules says, pushing his chair back.
“Mommy says you spend your allowance on hanging on,” one of the twins says. Her mother shushes her.
“Hangers-on,” the other twin says. “Peggy always gets it wrong.”
All the blood rushes to my face. It occurs to me that for most of my life, I have shared this island with the Cabots. Merrick is only an hour away, yet it never would have occurred to my parents to drive over to East Hampton, park their car, and unload their Bengali picnic on the beach. The summers of my childhood were spent in the homes of friends in Hunters Point or Astoria; someone might stray into the backyard for a chicken kebab barbecue, but mostly they stayed inside and sang Tagore songs, recited poetry, and talked about how terrible yet still wonderful things were back home. Summers were not for sunbathing, they were for singing and homework and waitressing at the nearest IHOP.
I’m ashamed of taking money from Jules, which is, in fact, money from his dad. There’s a detailed internal monologue in my head about how I’m just another immigrant leech, another drain on the system, the system in this case being the Cabot family trust fund.
“Do you want to leave, Jules?” Cyrus says, whispering but loud enough for everyone to hear.
I lean across the table. “Come on, Jules.” I am ready for us to storm out of there in a blaze of fuck-yous.
“Oh, don’t go,” Jules’s sister says with a light laugh. “They’re just kids, they don’t know what they’re saying.”
Jules looks back and forth between Cyrus and his father. He puts his fork down. He mouths something to Cyrus. Cyrus nods to me. I retreat and stuff the last of the French toast into my mouth.
“Pass the butter,” Jules’s mother says brightly.
“Well,” his father bellows, “whatever makes you happy, son. As long as you’re not taking drugs or getting the HIV, right?” He looks around the table, and a few other people laugh.
* * *
We spend the day between the pool and the beach. At the pool we are given towels and more pink lemonade. Someone has taken the trouble of inflating the various plastic items that we drift around on. At the beach there are deck chairs and umbrellas, a wide stretch of sand leading to a cloudy, very cold sea. At four p.m. there are martinis. At five p.m. there are finger sandwiches. Jules tells us there is no dinner, just these sandwiches, and that we are barred from entering the kitchen and foraging for ourselves. I stuff a few extra sandwiches into the pocket of my sweatpants. The children occasionally allow themselves to shriek in delight at, say, the appearance of a hermit crab on the beach, but otherwise the silence is uninterrupted and nearly deafening, and there is the sense that the same routine has gone on in this house since the day it was built, that the rituals were enshrined even before that, brought into being by a tribe of people who say little and eat even less.
Cyrus and I barricade ourselves around Jules and try to distract him with stories of our own unhappy childhoods. I tell Jules that my parents made me eat a disgusting dried-fish dish called shutki every Friday afternoon when I came home from school, that the carpets and the sofas and even my hair took on the stench of the shutki and to this day, if someone even says the word “anchovy,” I want to gag. And Cyrus said his mother had invented a kind of boiled lettuce slurry she called Green Magic, which tasted like pond moss and gave him the shits. But both of these stories revolved around mothers, and it was obvious that Jules’s mother had made no attempt to shove smelly/nutritious/culturally appropriate foods down his throat, that instead, mealtimes had been wordless and cold. Perhaps she had never cooked a meal for him herself in all the summers they had spent in this house. Soon we three lapse into silence, lost in our thoughts. After we finish our sandwiches, Cyrus and Jules decide to go for a swim, and I call my mother.
* * *
“I miss you, Ma.”
I haven’t seen my parents since we moved out, although I call them every Sunday. We talk about ordinary things and they always ask me what I’m eating, but I have avoided getting on the train to go out and see them, even though Mira sends me threatening text messages on a regular basis. I feel like if I slow down, even for a day, everything will fall apart around me. I’m feeling it now, here on the beach, my first non-workday in months. The hours stretch out behind me, and I can’t measure them by lines of code or meetings or bug fixes. The fact that it is impossible to relax in this house really helps, because even though we are taking the weekend off, no one is having a good time. If I were in Merrick right now, my mother would cook my favorite things and insist I join my father in watching reruns of Jeopardy!; they would remind me of a time when there wasn’t a million dollars in a bank account, dwindling to nothing. So I don’t go home.