The Poison Apples (3 page)

There was a long, excruciating pause. I tried to think of everything I could say to Dad. I tried to think of what might make him change his mind.
I don't want to go. I refuse to go. I love New York City. I don't want to go to Massachusetts. I don't want to go boarding school. I'll be good. I'll live in R.'s bathroom. I'll sleep in a tent. I'll live with friends. I'll live with the Fernandez family. I'll be a bag lady in Central Park.
Anything.

“It's actually an incredible opportunity,” Dad said. “I showed them your transcript and they were very impressed. They were willing to let you in even though the admissions deadline had passed. You'll get a great education. And it has a beautiful campus.”

Massachusetts.
Wasn't Massachusetts supposed to be cold? And boring? I remembered driving through Massachusetts on our way to a vacation house in Maine when I was little. It had lots of pine trees and gray highways. And fruit stands. And weird farmers with missing teeth.

I stared into Dad's eyes.
Dad,
I tried to silently implore him.
I don't want to freak out right now. I don't want to give R. another reason to hate me. I don't want you to think I'm a bad daughter. Just. Please. Don't. Make. Me. Go.

The weird thing was, I could tell that Dad was also trying to tell me something with his eyes. He was silently begging me to be okay with this. To not make him guilty. To not make him feel like he was marrying a psychopath who wanted him to send his daughter away to boarding school.

Although he actually was marrying a psychopath who wanted him to send his daughter away to boarding school.

“Well?” Dad said, his voice cracking. “That's the plan. How does it sound to you?”

I broke away from his gaze and stared into the kitchen. I looked at the little crystal hanging in the window above the sink. Mom had bought that crystal when I was in elementary school, and we'd strung it up together in the window with dental floss.

“It sounds…” I said. I took a deep breath. “It sounds fantastic.”

 

From the
New York Times
“Vows” Section

Sunday, July 26

TWO

Reena Paruchuri

I hate yoga.
I've always hated yoga. I mean, come on. Who wants to stand still for ten minutes with one leg lifted in the air? Who wants to lie on the ground twisted up like a pretzel while some lady in velvet stirrup pants tells you to “relax”?

White chicks, I guess.

Apparently yoga was originally an Indian thing. Ha. That's hilarious. I'm Indian, and everyone in my family is Indian, and if you asked any of us to get into a downward dog or child's pose position, we'd laugh in your face. And whenever I drive by a yoga studio (there are like ten billion here in Beverly Hills) and look through the windows at the crowds of skinny young women in short-shorts, contorting themselves into freaky positions, they're all white. White as white can be. Lily white. Wonder Bread white. Snow white.

Hmm. Speaking of Snow White. Actually, wait. More about how I hate yoga first.

I really, really, really hate yoga.

Don't get me wrong. Exercise is cool. I love running. I love dancing. I love
moving.
I'm just not interested in staying still, or relaxing, or being aware of my breath. Why relax? There are Things to Do! There are People to Meet! There are Plans to Make!

My older brother Pradeep says I sometimes remind him of a small, hyperactive dog.

He is such a jerk.

Anyway. I should probably be honest with myself and admit that maybe a teensy-weensy part of the reason I hate yoga so much is Shanti Shruti.

Shanti Shruti is a yoga teacher at the Beverly Hills Integrated Living Iyengar Yoga Body Arts Center. She is white, skinny, blond, blue eyed, and twenty-five years old.

She is also my stepmother.

Let's do some math. Shanti Shruti is twenty-five. I, Reena Paruchuri, am fifteen. My father, the distinguished heart surgeon Rashul Paruchuri, is fifty-three. Shanti Shruti is ten years older than me, and twenty-eight years younger than my dad. I'm not exactly sure what that means (that
I
should marry Shanti Shruti?), but I know that it's not a good thing. Trust me.

You may be thinking: Shanti Shruti! What an interesting name! Is it Hindi? Was Shanti Shruti born in India? Is she from Bangalore? Bombay?

Um, no. Shanti Shruti was born in Skokie, Illinois, and she was raised outside of San Francisco. And oh yeah: her name isn't really Shanti Shruti. It's Amanda Weed. She was raised by Charles and Mary Weed, inheritors of the Weed Breez-ee Air Conditioner fortune. Amanda Weed only became Shanti Shruti after she studied abroad in India during college and decided that even though on the surface she appears to be the Whitest Chick in the World, she is, deep in her soul, an Indian woman. An Indian woman who wears skin-tight, pink T-shirts with the word
Om
stenciled across the boobs.

I first met Shanti Shruti a year and a half ago. In yoga class.

At that point I didn't know I hated yoga. I'd never done it before. My best friend Katie persuaded me to go with her. She was all, like, “It's so relaxing,” and “It tones your butt.” (My best friend Katie is a white chick. So, you know. You can't blame her for liking yoga. It's just a weakness that all white chicks have.)

So I went with her. Once. To try it.

And therefore, as Pradeep is fond of telling me, I am entirely to blame for our parents' divorce.

*   *   *

“Shruti,” Shanti Shruti explained
to us that first day of class, facing the mirror while neatly folding herself into the lotus position, “means ‘what is heard' in Sanskrit. It represents divine knowledge. Shanti means ‘tranquility,' or ‘inner peace.'”

I glanced at Katie and pretended to strangle myself. Katie giggled. Shanti Shruti looked at us in the mirror and blinked her big blue eyes disapprovingly. Then she twisted herself out of the lotus position and shimmied upward into a standing pose. She stretched her arms out parallel to the floor and tucked her right foot behind her left thigh.

“Imagine yourself,” she whispered, “as an ancient tree. You have deep roots. You have branches that stretch out into the sky. You are grounded. But you also can fly.”

The twenty white chicks in the class and I attempted to imitate the pose. A bunch of them balanced perfectly and did kind of look like trees. I took a deep breath. I put my right foot behind my left knee. I started to wobble. I steadied myself. And wobbled again. And then steadied myself. And then wobbled again. I concentrated hard and finally steadied myself. For a good ten seconds. Until I toppled over and crashed to the floor.

“Oh my God!” Katie shrieked.

Shanti Shruti rushed over and helped me up.

“I'm okay,” I said. “It's fine.”

“Take a deep breath,” she instructed me. “Find your center.”

“I'm fine,” I said loudly.

She backed off.

I spent the rest of the class counting the minutes until I could get out of there. The hour seemed to stretch on forever. We lay on our backs with our legs in the air (painfulpainfulpainful) while Shanti Shruti told us to think about “nothing.” Instead I thought about (in the following order): Peanut M&M's, Katie's mysterious dislike of Peanut M&M's, thong underwear (pros and cons), the third Harry Potter movie, the fifth Harry Potter book, geometry proofs, my dead grandfather, how visible the faint mustache above my lip is when I'm standing in the sun, how visible the faint mustache above my lip is when I'm not standing in the sun, whether I should return the cardigan I just bought at Nordstrom, and, finally, whether James Yonus-Good, the most gorgeous and inaccessible senior at Beverly Hills High, had maybe—just maybe—glanced at me the other day while buying Ring Dings in the cafeteria.

And then class was over.

“Stay calm,” Shanti Shruti told us as we rolled up our sticky mats. “Don't forget to let yourself blossom.”

I was going to blossom my way out of there and never come back.

My father was waiting for me and Katie, leaning in the door frame in the yoga studio, hands in his pockets, looking amused. I made a beeline for him.

“Get us out of here, Dad,” I whispered.

“This is interesting,” he said, grinning. “You like this yoga?”

I started to say, “Are you kidding me?” when Katie nudged me and tilted her head toward Shanti Shruti, who was standing behind us, getting ready to leave. Shanti smiled sweetly at all three of us.

“Is this your daughter?” she asked my father.

“This is my Reena,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

“She's a wonderful student,” said Shanti.

I was probably the worst student she'd ever had.

“Reena is good at everything she does,” my father said proudly.

Also a lie.

“Where are you from? Originally?” Shanti asked him.

I rolled my eyes at Katie. My father has a really obvious accent, and people are constantly asking him Where He's From. It's the first thing they say when they meet him, and it always drives him crazy. He'll be in the middle of open-heart surgery and one of the nurses will say: “What an interesting accent. Where are you from?”

I looked at my father to see how annoyed he was. But the weird thing was, he actually looked kind of pleased. And … nervous? No. Impossible.

“I'm from a university town in northern India,” he said. “It's called Santiniketan. The poet Tagore founded a famous school there.”

Shanti gasped. “I love Tagore!” she said. “He's my favorite poet ever!”

“You know Tagore?” asked my father.

“Of course,” said Shanti, nodding solemnly.

“It's rare I meet an American woman who knows about Tagore,” he said.

“I use him in class all the time,” Shanti said. “You know what my favorite Tagore line is? ‘Everything comes to us that belongs to us, if we create the capacity to receive it.'”

There was a long pause.

“Beautiful,” my father said softly. “I had forgotten about that poem.”

“Oookay,” I said. “We should probably drive Katie home now.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear his thoughts. “Of course.”

And so we bid Shanti Shruti good-bye (forever, I thought), piled into Dad's car, and drove away.

It was a long time before I thought about yoga—or Shanti Shruti—again.

*   *   *

Almost a year later,
I walked into our house on a sunny Saturday afternoon and found my mother lying on the kitchen floor in a heap, sobbing and yelling incomprehensibly.

“Did someone die?” I asked. It was the first thing that came into my mind.

She looked up at me, her eyes bloodshot.

“Worse,” she whispered. “Your father is leaving me.”

“That's not worse than someone dying,” I said. (Okay. Not the most supportive thing to say. But I'd gone totally numb with shock.)

My mother burst into a new round of sobs. “I'm
going to die,”
she moaned.

“No, Mom,” I said. I was trying my best not to start screaming and crying myself. I knelt down on the floor and put my arms around her. She wept into my shoulder. “You're not going to die. You're not going to die. You're going to be okay.”

But what I was really thinking was: She is
so
not going to be okay.

My mom and dad got married in India when they were eighteen. They were one of those couples where you couldn't imagine one without the other. It's not like they had the same personality (my dad is kind of quiet and serious and critical of everyone, and my mom is loud and hilarious and accepting of everyone), but it was as if they each had the personality they did because of the other person. Does that make sense?

Everyone always said: “Your mom and dad are just so perfect for each other.” They were one of those Great Couples. Parmita and Rashul. And they'd moved to America together, and my mom had raised us and worked as a waitress while my father went to medical school, and she was by his side when he got his first job as a surgeon, and together they'd moved out of our tiny apartment in the Valley and into our big beautiful white mansion with the big green lawn in Beverly Hills. If it weren't for my mom, my father would never have achieved everything he'd achieved. And if it weren't for my father, my mother would never have been able to finally relax and live in a beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood after all the hard work she'd done.

Back to my mom sobbing on the floor:

“This must be some kind of misunderstanding,” I said. “Where's Dad?”

“Gone!” she shrieked. “Gone!”

At this point Pradeep came in through the back door. He froze in his tracks and stared at the two of us crying on the kitchen floor.

“I'm assuming this is girl stuff,” he said. “Am I allowed to leave?”