Cambridge (13 page)

The dishwasher, left alone at last, began to chew up a salad plate.

The trouble with Jagdeesh was he wanted to please everyone. Since he had several girlfriends, this wasn’t possible. He started coming to my mother for advice. While Vishwa cooed in the kitchen with Frederika, Jagdeesh sat on the sofa with my mother and described his scrambles to clear evidence of his second girlfriend before the arrival of his first. Luckily, the first one, Delilah, lived in England and couldn’t get over much. But Lucy, the second girlfriend, was snoopy and suspicious, probably because she was married herself and alert for infidelity in others.

They would arrive together of an afternoon, Vishwa rumply and smelling of balsam or myrrh, Jagdeesh suited up and redolent of lime aftershave or perhaps the gin-and-tonic necessary to sustaining his complicated life.

“It’s going to come to a bad end,” he said.

My mother had to agree.

“It happened quite naturally,” he said. “I didn’t intend to hurt anyone, really.”

“It’s always like that,” my mother assured him.

“Delilah is so stubborn about staying in Cambridge. She won’t even consider a half-and-half appointment. That’s where the trouble started, you see. When I came to Harvard.”

“You felt rebuffed,” my mother suggested.

“Not that there was an offer for her,” Jagdeesh went on. “But surely something could be arranged, no?”

“Did you ask Carl?”

Jagdeesh was uncharacteristically silent. Finally, he said, “Well, it isn’t exactly his department.”

He meant that literally. Delilah was a philosopher, not an economist.

“You hesitate to embroil him in private matters?” my mother asked.

Jagdeesh nodded.

My mother was what is called a good listener. She knew what people were really thinking and would encourage them by articulating the things they weren’t saying to show she understood. I didn’t like it. Everyone else who knew her adored it.

“With Lucy, it was a sudden passion—you know the sort of thing.” Jagdeesh sighed. It was clear that sort of thing had happened to him more than once. “But now …” He stopped.

“Maybe that’s all she’s interested in,” my mother said.

“I’m afraid not.” Jagdeesh fiddled around with his cuff link. “She has told Ed.”

My mother widened her eyes. “Hmm,” she said.

“Hmm, indeed,” said Jagdeesh. “I really don’t know what to do.”

“When is Delilah’s next visit?”

“This weekend.” He put his hands into his luxuriant hair and pulled it. “It will be the showdown at the Not O.K. Corral, I fear.”

“Can you take Delilah out of town?”

“She arrives in New York, thank god,” Jagdeesh said. “I will go there to meet her. But we can’t stay there forever. I have a class to teach on Tuesday.”

“I wonder why Lucy told Ed,” my mother said. “Do you think she wants to marry you?”

“They both want to marry me,” Jagdeesh wailed.

“And Lucy has no idea about Delilah?”

“Delilah antedates her, therefore she is aware of her existence. She thinks …” Jagdeesh paused. “I gave her reason to think that Delilah and I parted several years ago. Because we did.” He nodded vigorously. “We did. Except we didn’t.”

“How about Delilah?” my mother asked. “She doesn’t know about Lucy, does she?”

“That,” said Jagdeesh, “would be curtains.”

“Do you want to marry either of them?” my mother asked.

Jagdeesh grinned.

“I don’t feel the need for a wife at the moment,” he said.

“I’ll bet you don’t,” said my mother.

In the kitchen, Vishwa was studying a score and Frederika was making a Bolognese sauce. I was being the babysitter, balancing my sister in my lap while she tried to grab Vishwa’s pages. She was heavy now and almost too big for me to hold.

“All set,” said Frederika, putting the lid on the pot and turning the flame down low. She held her arms out for the baby. “Oof! You’re getting big,” she said, and put her in a chair.

“I am a big girl now,” said my sister. “I’m big.”

The front door opened and closed. Jagdeesh had left. Soon, but not quite yet, the
bang, crunch, bang, clunk
of my father’s return.

As always, my mother’s solution was to invite them for dinner. “That way,” she explained to Frederika, “I can get a feel for Delilah.”

“What about this person Lucy?” Frederika asked.

“I don’t think Lucy is a contender, somehow,” my mother said.

“Have you met her?” Vishwa asked.

My mother shook her head. “I met Ed a few times. He didn’t seem too formidable.”

“Whatever it means to be a contender,” Vishwa said, “Lucy is one. She is not the sort of person you say no to.”

“You don’t like her,” my mother said.

“I didn’t say that,” said Vishwa.

“What a diplomat!” My mother laughed. “Well, maybe if Ed is so mushy and Lucy is strong and really determined …” She trailed off. “What about Delilah?” she asked Vishwa.

“Ah,” said Vishwa. “She is very nice.”

Frederika frowned.

“Nice for Jagdeesh,” Vishwa said to Frederika. “She is a good person. You would like her. Everybody would like her, I think.” He thought for a moment. “She is very nervous,” he added.

“Sounds as if she’s got plenty of reasons to be nervous,” my mother said. “Well, we’ll see. They’ll be here for dinner on Tuesday with you, Vishwa.”

“Who? Now who?” my father said.

“You’re home,” my mother told him.

My father had come to accept Tuesday dinner with Vishwa, with only a few grumbles about “extraneous” people. But his family dinner position remained firm. My mother would have had people to dinner three nights a week if he’d let her, even though the preparations made her anxious. “Oh, I’m doing too much!” she would say, putting her hand to her forehead as if she were going into a Victorian swoon. “Too many people!” my father would crow, delighted. “It’s not natural,” he’d say. “You’re not natural,” my mother would retort. “You’re a misanthrope.”

He wasn’t. He was much more sociable and pleasant in company than she was. He just wanted to have dinner with his family.

“I’m home,” he said. “Who is it this time?”

“Jagdeesh,” my mother said. “So you can’t complain.”

“You said
they
,” my father said.

“And his English girlfriend.”

“I didn’t know he had one of those.” My father took off his tie and dropped it on top of Vishwa’s score. “The department gossip is that he’s running around with Ed Barkey’s wife.”

“The department is right,” my mother said. “He’s a ladykiller, that Jagdeesh.”

“He kills them?” I asked.

“It’s an expression,” my mother said. “It means that girls like him, a lot.”

“Does Barkey’s wife know about the English girlfriend?” my father asked my mother.

“Suspicious,” she said. “So don’t mention it.”

“You mean Ed knows what his wife is up to?”

“Apparently,” said my mother.

“Can you be a mankiller?” I asked. “I mean, could a girl be one?”

“There are other words for that,” my father said.

Vishwa slid his score out from under my father’s tie, gently, deferentially, making an effort not to disturb it.

“Off I go,” he announced. To Frederika, he said: “I’ll be done by ten. Shall I come back then?”

“Okay, okay,” said Frederika.

“Such night owls, the pair of you,” my mother said.

They were, but we all were. None of us ever wanted to go to bed, including the baby, who lay in her cot talking to herself until ten-thirty and never woke up before nine the next day. This was lucky for my mother and Frederika. They could blaze away until one or two in the morning and still get almost enough sleep.

My father and I suffered. I had to be ready for Ingrid to pick me up by seven-forty-five each day, and my father had to wake me. He started at seven and, like a frenetic cuckoo clock, popped
into my bedroom every five minutes until, at about seven-twenty, he just lifted me out of bed and stood me upright. I would pretend to eat a bowl of cereal while putting on my socks. Then the bell, the search for my shoes, my father sticking his head out the front door to say, “Almost ready!” In the backseat with Roger, I usually fell asleep again, or tried to. My father had several times offered to share what was incorrectly called carpooling with Ingrid, but she always said, “I’m on the way to the office anyhow, and I know you people stay up late.” Ingrid pronounced
people
as if it were spelled
pipple
. “And also, there’s that stupid one-way,” she’d add, referring to our street, which ran one way down the hill from the Bigelows’ house to ours. If my father had ever driven me and Roger to school, rather than merely telling Ingrid he’d be happy to do it, he would have had to go entirely around the block first to pick up Roger.

In her cranky, dismissive way, Ingrid was gracious to my father about being my chauffeur, but she often took advantage of the situation to register a complaint with me about what are now called parenting skills. “No mittens?” she’d ask, with disapproval. “Did you eat any breakfast?” was another frequent question. “I think you wore those clothes yesterday,” she’d say. “Peeyew!” Roger would yelp. “Smelly old clothes!” Then I’d poke him in the soft part of his side and he’d pinch me right above the knee. “No, no, no!” Ingrid would inform us.

I knew, or at least I guessed, that it would be easier to pay attention at school if I’d had a good night’s sleep and a real breakfast. But I didn’t want to pay attention. I relied on my morning fog to protect me from the stupefaction I couldn’t avoid in the afternoon. By lunchtime I’d woken up, and I had to experience the boredom I skipped in those half-conscious mornings. There wasn’t any payoff in getting enough sleep. Anyhow, nothing at school could compete with the goings-on at home.

By the time my mother invited Jagdeesh and Delilah for dinner, Tuesdays with Vishwa had matured into Wednesdays also with Vishwa. My father hadn’t complained until the week Vishwa came Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The next week reverted to Tuesday only in a peacekeeping effort. But my mother felt things got “crowded” when dinner followed my music lesson.

“They really don’t have time to visit,” she said to my father.

“They see each other every night!” he said.

That was what kept me up.

After dinner, while my mother tangled with the dishwasher, Frederika put the baby to bed. The bath, the pajamas, the tucking-in, the Swedish lullaby. My mother made a ceremonial nursery appearance, like the lady of a well-run British manor house, for a goodnight kiss. By then it was nine o’clock. If I kept a low enough profile, reading in the window seat, for instance, I could stay in the living room until about quarter to ten, when one of my parents would register my presence and shoo me to bed.

Frederika was already up there on the third floor, primping. Sometimes she was lying in the tub, her hair in a seaweedish fan around her face and a strategic sponge floating on top of her other hair. Her half-submerged breasts looked like saucers—tidy little saucers with eyes on them. Other times she tried out hairdos. I was the arbiter for these.

“Braids?” She turned toward me with braids pinned up on her head.

“Too Heidi,” I said.

“How about braids, but down?”

“Farmer-y.”

“Up on top in a pouf that comes downward?”

I liked this one: Frederika the fountain-head. “Yes!” I said.

She moved her head back and forth, and the explosive hair swung this way and that. “But maybe it’s too much of a fireworks?” she asked.

She usually ended up where she started: bun.

There were also experiments with makeup. My mother bought a lot of makeup that she’d use once and reject: too dark, too light, not for her complexion, and so forth. She passed the little pots and tubes on to Frederika. With her intense eyebrows and dark eyes and interestingly sallow skin, my mother didn’t need makeup—more accurate to say that no makeup was going to impart the pink, creamy face of the fifties she was aiming for. Frederika seemed a bit more likely to achieve that. She was pale, almost monochromatic: a blank canvas. She had a wonderful nose with a bump on the bridge and high, knobby cheekbones. It was an entirely un-American face, all structure, no color.

Mascara, a swipe of red lipstick, and a dab of rouge could transform Frederika into a monster in two minutes. It was terrifying. She looked like a clown, she looked demented, she looked truly awful. We were both fascinated by this. Even a toned-down version (Rose Blush lipstick, light-brown eyeliner) was bad. When I tried—which I always did, synchronizing my strokes with hers as we leaned over the sink in our shared bathroom—I looked ready for Halloween, which was less scary. On me, it looked like the joke it was. Something about Frederika’s bony, pale face made the makeup look purposefully outlandish.

We needed a lot of cold cream to remove the makeup, and our bathroom smelled of it, fresh gasoline larded with lanolin. I loved cold cream; it reminded me of sour cream. When I brushed my teeth after our makeup sessions, the cold cream deliquesced on my hands and the toothbrush slithered from my fingers.

And then it was time for bed. “Ten-thirty!” Frederika would say, surprised every night by how late it was. “Too late for you.”

In bed I could hear the muffled clatter of my parents unloading the dishwasher, their late-night ritual and one of the few domestic chores in which my father participated. Things were beginning to blur in my head. I had to fight off sleep for a second, then for three seconds, a minute. I was waiting for the doorbell.
Ping
, there it was, there was Vishwa’s light, cheerful voice, my father’s heavy tread on the stairs, going up to the second floor and leaving the field to the ladies.

Much later I’d wake for a moment to the creak of the third-floor staircase: Vishwa and Frederika, finally by themselves. Whatever they were up to next door to me—my idea of it was still a bunch of hugging—they were quiet about it. They murmured, they padded about on the black-painted floor in their socks, somebody dropped a book, somebody laughed. It was comforting. They were happy, and I could let myself go back to sleep.