The Poison Apples (4 page)

“Yes, leave!” my mother screamed, collapsing into my arms again. “Leave! Like father, like son! Abandon me! Abandon me forever!”

My brother looked aghast.

“Don't leave,” I mouthed to him over my mother's shoulder.

He nodded, his face drained of its color.

Eventually my mom calmed down enough to show Pradeep and me the e-mail (that's right, e-mail) that she'd just received from my father an hour before:

from: Rashul Paruchuri [email protected]

to: Parmita Paruchuri [email protected]

Hello, Par:

Please do not forget to buy the soy milk for Reena when you go shopping this afternoon as I am quite concerned about her lactose intolerance and she is so stubborn about taking care of it herself.

Also I would like to let you know that I have fallen in love with someone else. It would be very difficult for me to tell you this in person. You have a terrible temper and I have various problems with confrontation as you know.

From tonight on I will be staying at a hotel or a different place of my choosing. Please tell Reenie and Pradeep that I will be contacting them shortly to explain in full.

I have a great deal of affection for you but think that it will be best to end our marriage in as civil a fashion as possible.

With regards,

Rashul Paruchuri, MD

It was finally starting to sink in.

My father was leaving my mother.

“I hate him,” Pradeep whispered, the printed-out e-mail trembling in his hands. “I hate Dad.”

“Don't say that,” I said, and immediately started to cry.

My mother sat down on the floor again, her head in her hands. “I have no heart,” she announced. “My heart is extinct.”

“I don't think you mean ‘extinct,' Mom,” I said. My mother's English is pretty good, but sometimes she'll come up with these weird words and phrases that don't really make sense. “I think maybe you mean ‘broken.'”

“Stop picking on her,” Pradeep said.

“I'm not picking on her!” I said.

“My heart is extinct,” said my mother again.

“Your heart can't be extinct,” I said. “That's impossible. Wooly mammoths are extinct.”

“Stop it, Reen,” Pradeep said.

“YOU STOP IT!” I shouted. “GO SCREW YOURSELF!”

There was a long pause.

“If either of you see or speak to your father after today,” my mother said softly, “I will never forgive you.”

*   *   *

Dad smiled nervously
and tucked his napkin into his lap.

“Well,” he said.

Pradeep and I were silent. I looked around at the faces of all the other people in the restaurant. What were they thinking? Were their lives falling apart, too?

“Are you two going to say anything?” Dad asked.

Pradeep glowered into his plate. I bit my lip.

“Well, you should at least order some food,” Dad said. “This is a very nice restaurant. Only the best for my children.” He reached over and attempted to pat Pradeep's hand. Pradeep snatched it away.

“What's her name?” Pradeep demanded.

“Now, now,” Dad said.

“Tell us her name,” said Pradeep, “or we'll leave the restaurant.”

I glanced at Pradeep, impressed. It was exactly a week since the e-mail and Mom's breakdown. We'd agreed to go out to dinner with Dad because … well, he was our dad, after all. He had the last word. He was like our boss. If he said he was taking us out to dinner, he was taking us out to dinner. Even if it did make Mom threaten to disown us (and she was always making threats she couldn't stick to). But now Pradeep was acting differently than I'd ever seen him act before. He was acting like, well, like his
own
boss.

“Her name,” said Dad, clearing his throat after a long pause, “is Shanti Shruti.”

The lump that had already been in my throat for the past week transformed itself into a giant boulder.

Pradeep frowned. “Is she Indian?”

“Well,” Dad began.

“No,” I croaked. “She's not.”

Pradeep turned to me. “How would you know?”

“She's … she's … she's like my age,” I whispered.

Dad slammed his fist down on the table, making the plates clatter. “She is NOT your age, Reena. Have some respect.”

“I have no idea what's going on,” Pradeep said. “Would somebody please tell me what's going on?”

I turned to my brother. “She's a white chick. She was my yoga teacher. She's half Dad's age. Happy?”

Pradeep opened his mouth and then closed it again.

“Dad,” I said, looking my father in the eyes, “I don't think you understand what you're doing. Do you understand what you're doing?”

“Don't talk to me like a child, Reena,” he said.

Tears sprang to my eyes. “Mom is a mess,” I told him. “You've ruined her life.”

“Your mother is going to be okay.”

“You're wrong.”

My father sighed. “Reena,” he said. “I'm in love. What do you want me to do about it?”

Pradeep, still speechless, buried his face in his hands.

“I don't understand how you even got to know Shankee Shmooti,” I said.

“It's Shanti Shruti,” Dad said, giving me a withering look. “And we were friends at first. Then we eventually realized that our feelings had grown stronger and we had to—”

“ENOUGH,” Pradeep shrieked.

The restaurant fell silent. You could hear the sound of a single spoon scraping against a dessert plate.

Dad cleared his throat. “Pradeep—”

“I ACTUALLY DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT,” Pradeep yelled. A tear rolled down his cheek and into the corner of his mouth. “I'M NOT INTERESTED.”

“Okay,” Dad said quietly. “Okay.”

No one said anything for a little while.

“Listen,” Dad said finally. “I want to make you both an offer.”

We looked up.

“Things are going to become very difficult,” he said, “between your mother and myself. We are both hiring lawyers. There is some question as to who will get the house, and—”

“Mom should get it,” Pradeep interrupted. “Mom isn't having an affair with a yoga teacher.”

Dad sighed. “These things are complicated.”

“Where's Mom going to live if you get the house?” I asked.

“Let me finish my thought,” Dad said. “Things will be messy. There is also the question of alimony. It is my suggestion—and this is only if you wish to go, of course—that you both leave LA and attend boarding school this fall. That way you will not have to be around such difficulties.”

“You're trying to get rid of us,” I said.

“That is not true,” my father said. “I'm trying to give you another option. That is all. We all know how unstable your mother can be in times of conflict. But it is your choice.”

He pulled a glossy brochure out of his pocket and put it on the table in front of us. Pradeep and I stared at it. There was a picture of a hillside covered in snow with a brick cathedral on top of it. The words
Putnam Mount McKinsey
were written across the top of the brochure.

“It's in Massachusetts,” Dad said. “It's one of the best schools in the country. Shanti actually went there. Think about it. I know you're both angry with me, but trust me. It is a gift.”

Pradeep and I looked at each other. Then we looked back at Dad.

“Mom needs us,” I said. “You have a white chick yoga teacher. But she has nobody.”

“Well, think about it,” said Dad.

We all sat there in silence.

“Oh, and Reena?” Dad said after a while. “Please do not refer to Shanti as a ‘white chick yoga teacher.' You and Pradeep are very important to me, but you're going to have to accept the woman I love. That woman is Shanti Shruti.”

*   *   *

“Do you have the long underwear
we bought?” my mom asked, wringing her hands.

I nodded.

“Which suitcase?” she said.

I shrugged.

“Probably suitcase number eleven,” Pradeep said, chortling. “Or maybe twelve.”

“Shut up,” I said. It was true. I had no idea I owned so much stuff until I tried to pack it all into a single pink luggage set. Turned out I actually needed three pink luggage sets.

The three of us were sitting on plastic airport chairs, holding hands. A woman announced over the loudspeaker that our flight was going to board in five minutes. My mother quietly started to cry. Tears streamed down her face and onto her light green sari.

“We don't have to go,” I told her.

“Go, go,” she said. “I'll be all right. I will. Pria will take care of me.”

Pria is my mother's older sister. She never married—she isn't the easiest woman in the world to get along with—but the second she found out my parents were getting a divorce, she insisted that my mother move in with her. “Don't stay in that house,” she told my mother. “That house is poisoned.” Pria had a nice—but small—bungalow in West LA. With only one extra bedroom. As the summer progressed, it became obvious that if Pradeep and I left for boarding school it would probably be the best thing for everyone. We didn't want to live with my dad and Shanti Shruti, but we knew that living with my mother would mean she'd have to support us, at least until the alimony was settled. And my mother didn't have a source of income. Her job, after all, had been raising us.

Also, to tell you the truth, Pradeep and I had been fantasizing about going to an East Coast boarding school since we were little kids. Boarding school just always seemed so … magical. Skiing. Sledding. Pine trees. Cute boys in earmuffs. We'd tried to convince our mom and dad to send us to boarding school when I was in seventh grade and Pradeep was in eighth, but they'd refused. No, at the time it was really important to them that Family stick together, and that Pradeep and I pass our teenage years spending quality time with the Family. So it was pretty ironic that boarding school was now the place they sent us when the Family completely fell apart.

And in a weird way I was happy to leave Los Angeles. I'd felt sort of numb ever since the afternoon I walked in and saw Mom crying on the kitchen floor. Kind of like I was living in a dream. Sometimes I'd even wake up in the morning and genuinely believe it
was
all a dream for a good twenty seconds. My life just didn't seem like my life anymore. All summer I hung out with my friends, and cracked jokes, and went shopping, and lay on the beach talking about cute guys, and anyone watching me would have said that I was Doing Just Fine, Considering. But it felt like the real Reena Paruchuri had been replaced by an identical robot version of Reena Paruchuri who didn't have any actual thoughts and feelings.

“Flight 1191 to Boston boarding now,” a woman intoned on the loud speaker. “Flight 1191 to Boston boarding now.”

My mother stood up and smiled bravely at us, the corners of her mouth trembling.

“Make me proud,” she said.

“You're going to be okay, Mom,” I said.

She shrugged, tears brimming out of her eyes.

“Dad is a jerk,” Pradeep said loudly. “Don't waste time thinking about him.”

“Pradeep,” I warned.

“He is,” said Pradeep.

“Go,” Mom said. “Just go.”

She put her hands on our backs and pushed us gently toward the gate. My heart skipped a beat. For a second, the real Reena Paruchuri flooded back into my body. And the last thing she wanted to do was get on that plane. The real Reena Paruchuri wanted to curl up like a baby, bury her face in her mother's lap, and cry forever. But it was too late. I took a deep breath, shouldered my duffel bag, and followed my brother into the buzzing white tunnel that led to our plane.

I didn't look back.

 

From the
Los Angeles Times

July 10

THREE

Molly Miller

“You are not taking
the entire Oxford English Dictionary to boarding school,” Candy Lamb said. She stood in the driveway, hands on her hips, squinting at me in the late summer sunlight. She wore an oversized sweatshirt that said, I'M NOT FAT, I'M PREGNANT WITH ICE CREAM'S BABY.

“Um,” I said, “yes, I am.”

“Everyone will make fun of you.”

“I don't care.”

“You'll seem like a big nerd.”

I smiled pleasantly at her. “I am a big nerd,” I said, and lifted Volume VI, P–Q, into the trunk of my father's station wagon. Then I started walking back toward the house, my feet crunching on the gravel. Only fourteen more volumes to go.

“You're not gonna wear that skirt, are you?” Candy hollered after me from the bottom of the driveway.

I ignored her.

Candy Lamb is my stepmother. She has short, bleached, spiky hair. She has capped white teeth. She has a fondness for paisley leggings and blue mascara and gigantic sweatshirts with abrasive comments written across the front. She never tires of reminding me that she was
BOTH
prom queen and homecoming queen
BOTH
junior and senior year at North Forest High School. She feels that this makes her an authority on two extremely important subjects: Fashion and General Coolness.