Page 7 of Close Reading

PRIYA

The thing about Kali is that she has never once, in five years of cohabitation, demonstrated any evidence of learning from experience.

I say this with love. I say most things about Kali with love, even the things that are complaints, because Kali has the quality of a natural disaster you’ve grown fond of: you know it’s coming, you know it will cost you something, and you have stopped trying to prevent it because the prevention would require a fundamental reorganization of the laws of physics. The empirical data is extensive. The cerulean paint incident. The sourdough loaf she ate whole off the counter and then regarded me with the bottomless vacancy of a creature who has not yet connected the bread to the stomachache, and will not connect it tomorrow, and will eat the next loaf with the same conviction and the same regret. The backyard squirrel she has been chasing since we moved in. The same squirrel, I am almost certain, a wiry grey one with a notch in its left ear who sits on the fence and watches Kali approach with the weary patience of a prey animal that has long since stopped taking this particular predator seriously.

Moti, by contrast, has learned everything and chosen to do nothing with the information. He observes. He judges. He lies on his enormous bed, the bed I bought for a Great Dane because the store was out of the Lab-sized ones and Moti accepted the upgrade without comment. He sighs. The sighs are philosophical. They contain a complete worldview organized around the principle that effort is overrated and naps are undervalued. The boys call them both “the destroyers,” which is technically unfair to Moti but the name stuck because Ravi coined it at seven, and Ravi has a gift for the irreversible declaration.

Tonight the destroyers are underfoot while I attempt to make dinner. The kitchen is small, too small for a woman and two dogs and two boys and the accumulated evidence of a family that cooks every night and cleans up most nights and has, over four years, established a layered archaeology of spice jars and school artwork and charging cables and one mysteriously persistent oven mitt that no one will claim ownership of but that reappears on the counter every morning like a small domestic ghost.

The house is a Victorian, a hundred years old, in the historic part of Millhaven a few miles from campus. I rent it. When Vikram and I divorced, we sold the family house and split it down the middle, and I started renting this one while I looked at places to buy. Then the boys decided they loved it, and the neighbors turned out to be the kind of people who collect your mail and watch your kids and refuse to be paid for either, and at some point I just stopped looking.

“Amma, can Ben come over Saturday?”

Dev is at the kitchen table with his homework spread across the surface in a formation that suggests organization but is, I have learned, a performance. He is actually doing three things at once: the homework, eating an apple, and negotiating about his weekend, and none of these is receiving more than a third of his attention. He is twelve. He has his father’s bone structure—the narrow face, the sharp jaw that will become more prominent. And my inability to sit still. His right leg is bouncing under the table. It has been bouncing since he sat down. It will be bouncing when he gets up.

“What’s happening Saturday?”

“Nothing. That’s why Ben can come over.”

“Is your room clean?”

“It’s clean-adjacent.”

“That is not a real state of being.”

“It’s a spectrum.” He takes a bite of the apple. “It’s fine. Ben doesn’t care about my room.”

“I care about your room.”

“Your room has three stacks of papers on the floor and a dog bed you said you were going to move two weeks ago.”

He is not wrong. The stacks of papers are research, or were research, and are now research plus mail plus a handout from Ravi’s school about picture day plus the receipt from the vet’s cerulean paint consultation. The dog bed is Moti’s secondary bed, the one he migrated into my room over the course of several weeks using a strategy so gradual I did not notice until it was fully established and removing it would have constituted a breach of implied contract.

Ravi appears in the doorway holding a tablet and an expression of urgent need. He is smaller than Dev, compact, still holding the softness of childhood in his nine-year-old face and his hands, though his hands are never clean. There is always something on them: paint, ink, graphite, the residue of whatever medium he has most recently used to render his understanding of the world. His school shirts have permanent stains in the chest area where he wipes his brushes. I have stopped trying to remove the stains.

“Amma, I need poster board.”

“I thought we handled the poster board.”

“That was for the other project. I need time to create, Amma.”

Dev, without looking up from the homework he is not doing: “You need time to procrastinate and then panic.”

“That’s my creative process.”

I serve the pasta. The kitchen fills with the smell of it. Garlic, basil, the earthy warmth of tomatoes that have been simmering for an hour. I serve it with bread from the bakery on Foster and the mango pickle Vikram’s mother sent from her favorite shop in Chennai, arriving wrapped in so much tape that opening it required scissors and determination and Dev holding the bottle while I cut, both of us laughing, Ravi documenting the process in a series of increasingly dramatic watercolors he titled The Opening of the Pickle.

The boys eat. Kali positions herself beneath the table in the spot that maximizes her chances of receiving an accidental drop; she has mapped the trajectory of food from plate to mouth across years of dinners and identified the optimal coordinates with a precision that would be admirable if it were applied to literally any other endeavor. Moti waits in the living room. I will bring him something. I always do.

Over dinner, I realize I have been talking about my new collaborator for six minutes.

I don’t realize this on my own. I realize it because Dev puts down his fork. He is looking at me with the steady, evaluative patience of a boy who misses very little and comments on about half of it.

“Is she your friend?” he asks.

“We’re colleagues.”

“You don’t talk about colleagues like that.”