Girl Most Likely To Read online

  “Raaaaaargh!!!!” He growled what I could only imagine was Booboo in cat-speak, and scratched my forearm.

  “Shit!” I yelled, and recoiled from the bed, with my eyes watering.

  This was the problem with being Super Woman’s only daughter. With thirty months to spare until age thirty, my mother had fine-tuned the balance of home and career, secured the illusion of waking up with meticulous makeup, and mastered the art of willing my pancakes down off the kitchen ceiling mere moments after I threw them up there. I, on the other hand, at the same point in my life, was reverse-sexually-harassing my way out of a career I didn’t honestly enjoy and while swooning over one homosexual man, was failing miserably in my attempt to win the affections of the wheezing, fifteen-pound cat of another. Honestly, it was a wonder that I could even feed myself.

  Whether or not I look the part, I hail from a long line of loan sharks. My father has planned to make this one of his sound bytes when the New York Times interviews him in ten years, for a two-page spread about his daughter, the globe-trotting financier. Betel-chewing, bindi-wearing, and almost always below five feet tall, most of the women in my ancestral tree had arrived at their careers in high (or more accurately, low) finance by way of necessity, rather than choice. Practicality rules when you are widowed young in parts of Punjab where remarriage is as much of an option as a sex change. The tradition was to borrow against what little land their husbands had left them, and then loan to the poorer of their villages at three times the banks’ normal rates. Pragmatism is what we know. So it was probably less than incredible that, despite my skant affection for the industry, I had managed to thrive on Wall Street.

  Most people in my life had no idea what I actually did for a living; nor did they care to find out. And I didn’t blame them. They were better off clinging to some airbrushed notion of what my days as an investment banker were really like. Essentially, I did the research that helped my bosses decide which stocks to invest in, and when. Sometimes it involved speaking with the management of public companies, who either eyed me like an Omaha Steak or dismissed me entirely. At other times it involved combing through mountains of reports on an industry to develop a reasonable opinion about where it was headed.

  Typically, I would spend a week researching before I presented a conclusion to my bosses, who often patted me on the back, or otherwise told me the reasons why they believed that I was wrong, if they felt like explaining themselves. Soon thereafter, the market would always prove them right. Apparently, this was good training for the day when, if I was lucky, I would become one of them. It wasn’t being corrected that bothered me so much as it was being wrong. Regardless, my plan was to stick with the job, act like I enjoyed it and apply to business school within a few years.

  After earning my MBA, I could start thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. I would have been a supermodel, but the six-inch heels I’d need just to reach up to the average model’s elbow ended that fantasy. Thanks to the same genes, I was far better suited for sneaking under turnstiles than for strutting across runways.

  And I would have been a novelist, but there were other genetic predispositions to consider. My father hadn’t come to this country with eleven dollars in his pocket thirty years ago, mopped floors at a supermarket, begged for an entry-level engineer’s position, tolerated racism and ignorance and decades of struggle, started a business and saved enough to send his daughter to an Ivy League college, only to watch her give up a career of which he could only have dreamed all those years ago.

  Another reason why I survived in investment banking was because early on I had learned the folly of questioning the judgment of the people in control.

  “This is a waste of her time,” I can remember overhearing my father telling my mother, when she mentioned my excitement over the prospect of entering a poem in a fifth-grade writing competition. “It is not practical, and we should not encourage her in it.”

  “Oh, don’t be so serious, Sushil,” my mother replied from the kitchen, while I squeezed my head through the bars of the banister to get within closer earshot. “It’s just a writing contest.”

  “It is not just a writing contest, Shardha. It is a signal. And it is a waste of her time. These are important years. She should be working on her Math Olympiad, or on the Spelling Bee. Why should we train her to care what these so-called judges think? Her teacher is no Professor of Literature. He is there to teach her Mathematics and Science and History. Anyway, writing is something where there is never an absolute score. It cannot get her into good colleges. It is a waste of her time.”

  “Sushil, be reasonable. I cannot tell her no after I have already told her yes. She’s very enthusiastic. She wrote some poem about Reality, and I think it’s very clever for her age.”

  “That is all fine. Yet I do not agree with it. You and I both know that the world does not value these things. They value success that can be measured. We know this. We have seen this. Why should we send our daughter into such a struggling life?”

  “Teekh hai,” she agreed. “Perhaps you have a point. Though we cannot do anything about it now. And keep your voice down. She just went up to bed.”

  “Chuhlow, fine. But my daughter will not be a writer.”

  “And I will not reheat your Rotis if they get cold while you are prolonging this discussion. Let’s eat in peace, okay?”

  To my eleven-year-old ears, the distinction between a father’s protectiveness and dismissal of my interest in writing wasn’t exactly clear. What was clear was that he had tried to prevent me from doing something, so I had to do it anyway. I proudly entered my poem “Is This Reality?” into the contest. Based on a dream I had, the poem was made up of questions about what proof we had that our world wasn’t some other child’s dream, and whether or not that child could end our world just by waking up.

  The next day, Mr. Kronin called me over to his desk to tell me that it was all right to feel angry and confused about the world, and to ask if I was interested in speaking with the school psychiatrist. Obviously, this was not the response I had hoped for. You talk to the psychiatrist, I screamed, before running to the bus and crying all the way home. If this was what writing would lead to, I told myself, I wanted no part of it.

  “Sometimes it’s not the best thing to share these kinds of feelings,” my mother tried to console me. “Because it is not always guaranteed that everyone will understand it. And that can hurt your feelings. But I’m sure that Mr. Kronin didn’t mean it. Not everybody knows what a special girl you are, beti…like we do.”

  Burying my head in my pillow, I scooted closer to my Nani. Mom and Dad took the hint and left us alone.

  “Vina, you must not be angry with your parents.”

  “I hate it that they were right,” I told her defiantly.

  “Beti, they don’t want to be right. They want you to be successful.”

  I pulled the covers over my face.

  “Try to understand….This is the way that it is in India. Boys and girls must choose which line they will take in the eighth grade…either science for medicine or math for engineering. They start preparations for college early. And your parents want to make life easier for you. It’s the same way as they corrected your hands.”

  I came out from under the covers. “What?”

  “You don’t know this, but you were naturally left-handed as a child, so they corrected you.”

  “How?”

  “When you were very small, they told you ‘No’ every time you used the left hand. They wanted to make your life easier because the world is built for right-handed people. See? You don’t even remember being left-handed.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Beti, good girls trust their parents.”

  I stood corrected, again. And this time there was no point in arguing. It was better not to waste time questioning those who knew more than I did about things like school. They were clearly more intelligent than I was or ever would be, at anything. On that
particular lesson, it turned out, I was a pretty fast learner.

  6

  On the afternoon of the blackout I was still sitting on the floor, examining the wound from Booboo’s outburst, when I heard a familiar voice.

  “Vina? You okay?” The voice came from the hallway outside my apartment.

  I knew that it was him by his footsteps, and by the way that he left out the verb to save time. Jon had used his elbow to prop himself against my door frame, so his palm obstructed my view when I swung the door open. I was always a sucker for breathless and brave. But he was also sweaty. I imagined him running the twenty blocks between his restaurant and my building, and the ten f lights up to my door. Love is the only thing in life that is not anticlimactic; and as much as I hated to admit it, seeing him in my doorway made me feel like I was home.

  Jon was tall, dark and Sicilian, in that broad-shouldered, olive-complexioned sort of a way, so I often told myself that we looked good together. We met in his restaurant, Peccavi, eighteen months ago when I requested a rare vintage of Chateau Cabrieres for myself and my girlfriends. He complimented my choice while personally delivering the wine to our table, and stayed to chat us up and steal a glance down my blouse. I’m the first to admit that I was not above doing whatever I could to make it easier for him. I’ve got to use these puppies while they’ve still got the inclination to stand and salute.

  Eventually, he gave me his business card with the following scrawled across the back: “Bella, I would love to continue our conversation alone, some other time.”

  I called three days later (sending the message that I was interested, but not desperate), and refused a Saturday-night date but agreed to an early dinner on Sunday (making it clear that while I was far too fabulous to have a Saturday night unbooked four days in advance, I wasn’t dating anyone exclusively enough to have my Sunday evenings reserved).

  He wooed me expertly from the start, which naturally made me uncomfortable; would Chinese takeout and a rental of Say Anything be too pedestrian for him? After our first dinner, he draped his jacket around my shoulders as we strolled through Central Park. Then he kissed me, after holding my face in his hands, looking into my eyes and smiling in a way that asked for my permission.

  “Do you think he’s embarrassed?” he had asked me, as we passed by a dog who stared at us with one leg raised, peeing against a tree.

  Emotional risk-taking never came easily to me. My plan was to have a few months of fun with the big, sexy man, and (All together now…) “to keep it casual.” A year later, I was drafting speeches that might dissuade my parents from disowning me for bringing home an Italian and an engagement ring. Since I had already ventured so far outside my original romantic parameters, I even surprised myself by deciding to end our relationship over his disinterest in my ticking biological clock. One of the few things I knew I wanted for sure in this life was a child. So I had broken up with Jon in a no-fault sort of a way. He got Anne & Marie, the CD we purchased from the band we saw in Vermont on our inaugural weekend getaway. I got David and Melissa, the couple we met at the weekly Latin Dance class he had suggested. And I thought we had split the regrets right down the middle. I thought a lot of things back then and I ignored his attempts to reach out and get back together. A clean break, I reasoned, was the best way to end something that was never supposed to have begun at all. I was the picture of restraint: totally successful in ignoring the chocolates, the e-mails and the phone calls day and night. What I mean to say is that I was totally successful, until he showed up at my door in the middle of that blackout.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were okay, I guess.” He gasped for breath, wiping his face like the fireman had in that movie Cristina gave me last Christmas.

  “Thanks, Jon.” I smoothed the hair off of my face. “That’s sweet of you. Come in.”

  “You were at work when it happened, right? You okay for food and water here?” he asked, scanning the inside of my fridge, and the rest of my apartment, as if for intruders.

  “Yeah, sure…I walked home from the office and I’ve got a bunch of water bottles, anyway,” I cleared my throat, “Listen, we might run out of water pressure in the bathrooms, and you’re pretty sweaty. So if you want, you can take a shower. There are clean towels in there.” It was odd to hear myself sound so casual with him.

  “Thanks, I think I will. And you know,” he hesitated, “It’s good to see you. I mean, I miss you.”

  Pamela refused to accept the breakup. Cristina suggested that I jump back on the horse, or at least the occasional cowboy. The thing was, I never gave Jon an ultimatum. I simply realized that he wasn’t interested in more than what we had; therefore, I figured I should look for someone who was. That was when I finally agreed to be set up on a blind date by my parents. I tried to explain all of this to him, but Jon insisted on believing that I was “going through a phase or something,” and still made numerous attempts to reconcile. He just wasn’t ready to take that step, he told me, but he was even less ready to let go of me.

  Now that he was naked in my shower, I wondered if maybe he had been right. Or maybe I had been right; maybe if we got back together, he would acknowledge that he wanted me to bear his children and make an honest woman out of me.

  Damn. I wanted to rip off all my clothes and climb into that shower after him. I laid a hand on the doorknob and closed my eyes to imagine it. I’d strip down and sneak into the bathroom, tapping him on the shoulder. He’d turn around and grab me, pulling me close. We’d devour each other, making love against all the slippery-wet walls of my bathroom. My hair and makeup would remain perfect. Steam would rise seductively to prevent anyone from seeing anything less than a completely aroused couple. The camera would fade out.

  Of course, I reminded myself of the reality before taking that big step backward. Meaning, this scenario was nearly impossible to pull off without someone slipping, or banging against the faucet or dropping someone else on their ass. And even if none of those things happened, someone was sure to wind up with soapy water shooting directly into their eyes, or their nose, or both. Not sexy. I took my hand away from the doorknob—it was all for the best, I decided. I had no business following Jon into the shower, or anywhere else for that matter. I should be sitting on my couch and looking forward to that promising Indian lawyer my father had mentioned.

  Yes. Exactly. But that shower did sound inviting. Oh, why not? What was stopping me? I was young and horny and nobody had made love to me in as long as I could remember. And I loved him. And he loved me. Why wasn’t that enough? Why did I always have to be so logical? Oh, all this emotional Ping-Pong was exhausting. I was not going to think about it anymore.

  I grabbed some candles from my drawer, along with a set of matches, and left them by my bed. On the couch, I immersed myself in a staring contest with Booboo, who had found a stack of papers on my desk that seemed likely to hatch if warmed long enough. He had decided to oblige with his pudgy body, having already taken care of establishing dominance over me. Deciding that I could not drop Booboo’s gaze without somehow forfeiting total dominion over my apartment, I made no effort to acknowledge Jon’s emergence from the bathroom. He sat down on the couch beside me, and pulled my arm straight, to get a better look at Booboo’s handiwork. After disappearing again into the bathroom he returned, and knelt by the foot of the sofa. Then he unscrewed a tube of Neosporin and began dabbing it gently onto my wound. I looked over and couldn’t help being moved by how hard he was concentrating. And he must’ve sensed my gaze, because he looked up.

  He brought my palm to his face, and kissed the middle of it, before tilting his head to rest his cheek inside. He had already parted my lips with his stare by the time his fingers grazed my jawbone. He laid the gentlest kiss on my lips, holding my face lightly in place, like a house of cards he was sheltering from the wind. He searched my eyes before letting his cheek glide along mine and finally burying his face in my hair. The familiar chill set in as he yanked my hips up and around so that I was
straddling him.

  We sat face to face and I admitted to myself then that I had decided to give in. It was one of those moments you wanted to savor, almost more so than the act, especially when you find yourself back in the arms that used to hold you. And that was how it went…as we wrapped ourselves around each other. As we pressed ourselves together, trying to merge. As his arms resettled among the familiar curves of my back, and his hands dove in and out of my hair, grabbing a clump firmly, and yanking backward to expose my neck for him. As we consumed each other, we took our time because there was nowhere else we would rather have been. He rose to his feet and I tightened the grip of my legs around his waist and allowed him to carry me toward my bed. And lay me down. And climb on top of me. And take me.

  He crawled in through my eyes while repeating how much he had missed me. How glad he was that we were together again. This was how it was supposed to be, and he told me that I knew it. As we tumbled around fighting for control and for more of each other, I felt adored and completely, totally open. And even though it was my first, I kept thinking best blackout ever.

  7

  At the end of our second date so many moons before, Jon had invited me to his apartment.

  “For a cup of coffee,” he had explained, “or maybe a glass of port.”

  “Sorry.” I shrugged. “I can’t do it.” I avoided his eyes while my heels dodged the cracks in Prince Street.

  “Why not?” He stopped, took my hands in his and smiled down at me. “You got another date comin’ over at midnight?”