Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [107]
My parents felt slighted by your parents’ extravagant visions, ashamed of the modest home we owned. “How uncomfortable you must be here,” they said, but your parents never complained, as mine did, nightly, before falling asleep. “I didn’t expect it to take this long,” my mother said, noting that almost a month had gone by. While you were with us there was no room for anyone else. “The Dasguptas wanted to visit next weekend and I had to say no,” my mother said. Again and again I heard how much your parents had changed, how we’d unwittingly opened our home to strangers. There were complaints about how your mother did not help clean up after dinner, how she went to bed whenever it suited her and slept close to lunchtime. My mother said that your father was too indulgent, too solicitous of your mother, always asking if she needed a fresh drink, bringing down a cardigan if she was cold.
“She’s the reason they’re still here,” my mother said. “She won’t settle for anything less than a palace.”
“It’s no easy task,” my father said diplomatically, “starting a new job, a new way of life all over again. My guess is she didn’t want to leave, and he’s trying to make up for that.”
“You would never put up with that sort of behavior in me.”
“Let it go,” my father said, turning away from her and tucking the covers under his chin. “It’s not forever. They’ll leave soon enough and then all our lives will go back to normal.”
Somewhere, in that cramped house, a line was drawn between our two families. On one side was the life we’d always led, my parents taking me to Star Market every Thursday night, treating me to McDonald’s afterward. Every Sunday I studied for my weekly spelling test, my father quizzing me after 60 Minutes was over. Your family began to do things independently as well. Sometimes your father would come home from work early and take your mother out, either to look at properties or to shop at the mall, where slowly and methodically she began to buy all the things she would need to set up her own household: sheets, blankets, plates and glasses, small appliances. They would come home with bags and bags, amassing them in our basement, sometimes showing my mother the things they’d bought, sometimes not bothering. On Fridays your parents often took us out to dinner, to one of the overpriced mediocre restaurants in town. They enjoyed the change of pace, having mysteriously acquired a taste for things like steak and baked potatoes, while my parents had not. The outings were intended to give my mother a break from cooking, but she complained about these, too.
I was the only one who didn’t mind your staying with us. In my quiet, complicated way I continued to like you, was happy simply to observe you day after day. And I liked your parents, your mother especially; the attention I got from her almost made up for what I didn’t get from you. One day your father developed the photographs from your stay in Rome. I enjoyed seeing the prints, holding them carefully by the edges. The pictures were almost all of you and your mother, posing in piazzas or sitting on the edge of fountains. There were two shots of Trajan’s Column, nearly identical. “Take one for your report,” your father said, handing me one. “That should impress your teacher.”
“But I wasn’t there.”
“No matter. Say your uncle went to Rome and took a snap for you.”
You were in the picture, standing to one side. You were looking down, your face obscured by a visor. You could have been anyone, one of the many passing tourists in the frame, but it bothered me that you were there, your presence threatening to expose the secret attraction I felt and still hoped would be acknowledged somehow. You had successfully wiped away all the other crushes I harbored at school, so that I thought only of being at home, and of where in the course of the afternoon and evening our paths might intersect, whether or not you would bother to glance at me at the dinner table. Long