Strangers at the Feast (8 page)

Denise was no expert in Colonial family history or gender relations, but she knew one thing for sure: men liked to teach women trivia, not learn it. Trivia was like a car jack, or a charcoal grill—smart women only let men touch that stuff.

Ginny didn’t complain about being single, but Denise had seen, over the years, as Ginny bounced from one dead-end relationship to the next, that it frustrated her.

“Well, men are work,” said Denise. “Heavy lifting. Ask my husband.”

“What?” Douglas entered, holding a present. “I am a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.”

He put his arm around Ginny, who was haphazardly scraping carrots, peels flying everywhere.

“This is an obscene amount of vegetables,” said Douglas. “I hope there’s some protein hiding somewhere around here. I had my heart set on a turducken. Suburban homeowner! Mother. I’m still in shock.”

“This is how single people have a midlife crisis, Dougie. We abruptly settle down.”

“Well, no home is complete without this,” he said, waving the box. Douglas loved giving presents. Two months behind on their mortgage and he still arrived home some nights, pale and exhausted, with ribbon-wrapped remote control cars for the boys, stuffed bears for Laura.

“Doug,” Denise said, “we’re working.”

“For months I’ve been deprived of uncling privileges. I will not be deterred!” He set the box in Priya’s lap and she excitedly tore open the wrapping.

“Monopoly?” asked Ginny. “She’s
seven,
Dougie.”

“I was playing this in diapers.”

“You made me miserable forcing me to play that godforsaken game until all hours with you.”

“And look at the deal you got on this house! Tell me you don’t have my early real-estate mentorship to thank.”

Priya opened the box, and examined the pastel-colored money.

“Look at you all! Look at my adorable sweet wonderful granddaughter!” Eleanor had entered, hands to her cheeks. “Where’s my camera? Everybody, get close to Priya.”

Suddenly, the enthusiasm Denise had felt for Priya began to dissipate. The girl was a magnet, a curiosity. And while Denise was happy to
meet
her, they didn’t need to obsess over her. There were still nine mouths to feed.

“Why don’t we get some photos out in the living room?” Denise suggested. “Of
all
the kids?” She set the dishwasher running and tugged Douglas toward the door. “Your sister has plenty of work, leave her be.”

But Eleanor was upturning her bucket of a purse. “Camera, camera. Where are you, camera?” Finally, she settled for the extraction of a red-and-white dinner mint, which she handed to Priya.

“Hello, cute little granddaughter.”

“Mom, don’t give her candy,” Ginny said. “I’m trying to get her into good eating habits.”

“But grandmothers are supposed to give candy. That’s our job. Do you understand English, Priya? Does she understand English?”

“Enough,” said Ginny.

“Hello, darling. I’m Granny Eleanor. What is your name?”

“You know her name, Mom.”

“Well, I’m just trying to chat with my granddaughter. She’s a very quiet girl… unusually quiet.”

Ginny turned her back to everyone and began studiously arranging a row of carrots on the chopping board. In a soft, matter-of-fact way, and without turning around, she finally said, “Actually, Priya doesn’t speak.”

KIJO

Kijo looked at the house. He had promised his grandmother he’d never do anything like this, but he’d had enough. Like the day he was old enough to go to school, old enough to cross the street alone, strong enough to carry the groceries, or tall enough to answer the door when someone came knocking at night, Kijo felt something had changed inside of him. Something he couldn’t explain to Grandma Rose, or even to Spider.

He’d never much liked school, except for history class. He soaked up the stories about John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. He knew that history wasn’t about how people felt. It was about what they did.

Sometimes you had to take action.

Spider doubled back a couple blocks and nosed the Diamond Diagnostics van into the trees. As Kijo climbed out, the door snapped branches. Spider, on the other side, swatted twigs from his face.

“This is feeling very
Survivor
.”

They brushed leaves from their clothing and Spider tugged open the van’s back doors. He rubbed his hands excitedly while Kijo hauled out their bags of gear.

Spider threw a blanket aside, then pulled out a switchblade and shoved it into his back pocket.

“You wanna leave the po-pos your phone number, too?” Kijo pointed at the van’s Diamond Diagnostics logo, facing the road.

“Check this.” Spider pulled packing tape from their bags, snapped
some branches off the trees, and taped them over the words. He did the same to the license plate. “Constitution State, my ass.” He pulled the pizza box from the front and held it out. “Now we’re just delivering pizza. Arrest me, Officer. It’s pepperoni.”

Kijo slung the duffel bag over his shoulder and they made for the front door. The house was bigger than he’d imagined, large enough to take up a whole city block. It reminded him of a hotel, or the kind of place they put crazy people and old folks. He expected wheelchairs on the lawn, nurses in white. But there wasn’t anyone in sight.

“That’s my ride,” Spider said, pointing to a tree beside the house.

Spider’s real name was Calvin. But no one had called him that since the fifth grade, when he’d climbed a tree outside their school and made his way into the window of the girls’ bathroom to surprise Shaquina Nelson on Valentine’s Day. He got suspended, but he also got the attention of the track coach. Spider had won blue ribbons in the fifty-meter dash, had once had his picture in the paper, and planned to run the New York City Marathon one day. “You know how much them Kenyans get for winning? A hundred G!”

Spider claimed his people came from Kenya.

Spider was also crazy about the Olympics. “Man, that’s so Carl Lewis,” he’d say. Or, “That jacket the gold medal.” A map hung over his bed with red pins stuck in Sydney, Atlanta, Lake Placid, Athens, Turin, Nagano, Barcelona, Seoul, Calgary—sites of the Olympic games.

Spider got on Kijo’s case for not playing hoops. He said the only place a black man could succeed was in the world of athletics. But Kijo had the same trouble with his body as he’d had with speech. He snagged on things—desk corners, curbs. His hands and feet got in his way. It was like his body didn’t fit him right or wasn’t his.

Spider looked Kijo up and down and smiled. “It’s a sad state of affairs when a man dresses like a ninja but can’t climb a tree.”

“Heights,” said Kijo. “You know they make me dizzy.”

“One, two, three, I’ll be up and through that window. Just hang till I let you in.”

Kijo eyed the entrance for security cameras. Nothing. He pressed his face to the glass and saw an alarm pad inside, but it wasn’t armed. He peeled back the doormat. Then he stuck his fingers in the planter box.

Kijo blew soil off the brass key. “Now who’s your daddy?”

Spider laughed. “Maybe they left their wallets out here, too.”

Kijo slid the key in the lock, but held it still for a moment. He could turn back, he could keep his promise to Grandma Rose.

But then he turned the key and opened the door.

Spider patted Kijo’s back. “Now they gonna know you don’t mess with Kijo.”

ELEANOR

She’s
mute
?” asked Eleanor.

“The doctor says there’s no visible damage to her vocal apparatus,” Ginny explained. Then she rubbed the girl’s head, almost proudly. “She just hasn’t spoken.”

A single mother raising a
mute
seven-year-old from India!

Oh, Eleanor loved her daughter, but what a dung heap of liberation her generation had inherited. Ginny cared so much about her
right
to do things, she ignored the difficulties. The girls at Wellesley were reading Betty Friedan. Eleanor went to some meetings, sat quietly in the back during heated discussions about the
movement
. But she didn’t fit in, and she didn’t think they liked her much. These girls were too brazen, snotty even. She tried. Once, for a week, she stopped wearing a brassiere—though she certainly wasn’t going to burn anything for which she had paid good money. In her mind, that was precisely the problem—these girls were burning things, tearing down perfectly good traditions. But they all had fathers and therefore no clue what a house was like without a man around. Well, Eleanor had watched her mother toil alone after her father’s death, eating dinners in a quiet kitchen, chasing mice from the house with a broom when she was frightened. Eleanor was entirely uninterested in statistics and laws. She had always wanted a husband.

Eleanor wouldn’t have the stomach for hopping from bed to bed, either. After all these years, she wasn’t even quite certain she liked sex. Of course, you could never say that. But as far as she was concerned,
it was a fraught, sticky endeavor that left wet spots in the bed. She could not understand why her daughter made a sport of it.

What a painful few years it had been watching her beautiful daughter, a daughter she had once been so proud of, approach her midthirties husbandless. Even Mavis Galfrey’s daughter, who lost two toes to diabetes, had married. Eleanor couldn’t understand it—there was the human-rights lawyer, the veterinarian, the street musician. There were men Ginny referred to as “casual things.” Eleanor would encourage her, ask how the relationships were going, ask if she wanted to bring so-and-so for dinner. She was frightened of what would happen to her daughter when she was gone. When Gavin was gone. Who would take care of her?

But Ginny’s only reply was: “Mom, don’t pry.”

The stubbornness! Eleanor couldn’t help wondering if Ginny feared her disapproval, if this had set in motion a series of clandestine relationships that, lacking family support, were going kaput. Well, one couldn’t sit idly by and watch children wreck their lives.

Ginny had mentioned David Eisenberg worked at the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan. Well, it was a cinch getting Milly Sinclair to bring in her Chihuahuas.

What a son-in-law David Eisenberg would have been! Milly and Eleanor thought he looked like a young Steve McQueen. And how gently he handled little Pierre. Milly said the next best thing to having a doctor in the family was having a veterinarian.

“Dr. Eisenberg,” Eleanor said upon leaving, “if there were a special someone in your life, I bet her family would be thrilled to meet you.” She gave him a wink.

That night, she called Ginny, easing in with some chitchat about the shockingly high (well, this was true) prices on seedless grapes. “So, Ginny, how are things going with you and that David person?”

“Not now.”

“I would like to have this young man over for dinner. In fact, I insist on inviting him for dinner this Friday.”

“Do that, Mom. But you should know we broke up last week.”

Apparently David didn’t listen to Ginny when she talked, although Eleanor had seen him listen with rapt attention to Milly’s complaints about Pierre’s furniture chewing. Apparently David didn’t support her poetry—as if he could be expected to tend to his patients
and
read all her poems. David made her, on some fundamental level, uncomfortable—but how comfortable he had made Pierre!

No man was good enough. If I’d had her attitude, thought Eleanor, I’d be knitting in a rocking chair somewhere right now, beside my cousin Gertrude.

“Your father doesn’t always listen,” said Eleanor. “He doesn’t support every little thing I do.”

“Mom, let’s not go there.”

Then she vanished to India. For two months Ginny didn’t reply to e-mails, until one night she called and, in a strange whisper, asked Eleanor if she and Gavin could wire three thousand dollars. Ginny said it was an emergency, that she would pay them back. Eleanor thought she’d been moved to donate to a charity, that she was paying for one of those cleft palate operations, or maybe—she had seen a movie about this—Ginny had been swindled by a handsome young Indian posing as a prince.

She wasn’t expecting her to come home with a child!

Who knew what temperament the poor child had inherited. Add to that seven years of sleeping in a crowded, filthy orphanage—what kind of girl would she be? What did the adoption agency know about her? Were there any, well, guarantees? Ginny had been evasive about the details. She was a guardian, the legal adoption was pending, there was paperwork, lots of paperwork. That’s all she said.

Eleanor dutifully sent toys and knit sweaters. Gavin set up a college fund, since they didn’t know what Ginny had managed to save from teaching.

When they related the news, friends raised eyebrows at the word
India
.

“We thought China was the hot spot for babies. Or Romania.”

“Ginny feels connected to India. It’s the yoga.”

Eleanor had her concerns about Ginny’s choice, but they were the concerns of a mother; she certainly wouldn’t let other people second-guess her daughter.

“Ginny is a modern woman,” she said confidently. “She simply isn’t concerned with trends. She is a freethinker, always has been. In ten years, everybody will be living like her.”

Gavin nodded.

Above all else, they believed in loyalty.

But now this:
mute
as well? Eleanor couldn’t understand how her daughter, who demanded such perfection of men, could accept a child with countless difficulties.

Ginny drew Priya to her stomach, tucking her under one flap of her cardigan as though shielding her from judgment. Eleanor felt the tug of family allegiance. Ginny was her daughter, and Priya was now her granddaughter. It was done.

Eleanor wiped imaginary dirt from her hands. There would be no more dwelling on the negatives.

“I’ll get some nice photographs later,” she said, moving a strand of hair from Ginny’s eye and placing it behind her ear. “Why don’t the boys put on the game and leave us ladies to preparing?”

GINNY