When my father immigrated to the United States from India in 1971, many of his relatives followed in his diasporic footsteps. By 2006, the year his mother, my Avva, passed away, our only family members left on the subcontinent were his sister, his eldest brother, and their spouses. Today only a single aunt and uncle of mine remain. All of my first cousins immigrated to either Australia, Singapore, Europe, or the United States. Even though I have never lived in India myself, with each relative’s migration I felt more untethered to a country I had grown to love as much as my own.
When I learned the piece of furniture that once held Avva’s neatly folded saris was up for grabs, I leapt at the chance to bring it back to Georgia. It arrived several months later, after a harrowing and outrageously expensive journey, in a state of utter disrepair. Part of the base had broken off, so it stood at a slant like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, threatening to topple over at any moment.
After its restoration, I discovered something on its floor I hadn’t noticed before—a fading white six-pointed star. Simple, yet elegant. Perfectly centered. A square border surrounded it like a picture frame. It was a muggulu, a design Avva created out of flour.
She would never have called herself an artist, but Avva created this art in the mornings in the courtyard and in the pooja room at her home. I can still picture her squatting in her sari, a stream of powder flowing from between her index finger and thumb. She did this in long swift strokes like the conductor of an orchestra. Stars, swirls, dots, and flowers blanketed the ground.
After her death, the developers who purchased my grandparents’ house converted it to condominiums. The canvas for her artwork became the foundation for a newer, more modern Hyderabad known as the Silicon Valley of India. The sari chest is all that remains of my grandparents’ home, and my childhood memories of Avva’s artwork.
Over the years, I’ve contemplated how to preserve the muggulu best. Should an artist friend restore it with a fresh supply of rice flour? Should my daughter trace it with white acrylic paint for a more permanent solution? How do I recreate something vital to my heritage, to my identity, so that it will always stay with me?
•••
Who am I? I am a woman of color. I am brown. Mixed race. Indian, Austrian, Puerto Rican. I represent multiple souths—South Asia, southern India, and the Deep South in the United States. I am an immigrant’s daughter. Claiming each of these identities has shaped and refined my perspective of the world. It has helped me to find and immerse myself in a community that nurtures all of these parts of me. And the act of claiming my identity has empowered me to engage on a sociopolitical level, to grow my empathy, to reflect on the ways I fall short in the liberation of others. And to learn how to rectify this.
The claiming of identity and the evolution of a point of view sow the seeds for social change. For if we are lucky, if we follow the idea of the self far enough, it can end at a community that prioritizes compassion and justice in order to build a kinder, more equitable, more humane world.
In the summer of 2019, two friends and I decided we needed to work harder to keep members of the South Asian American community in Georgia more politically engaged year-round. The problem, as we saw it, was that our South Asian friends tended to come together for various Democratic campaigns, but as soon as the election passed, we lost touch, dispersed, and disengaged with politics until the next election season ramped up.
The three of us decided to start the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats.
Like any movement, ours began small. In August 2019, about a dozen people showed up to our first meeting at an Indian restaurant. Six months later we packed 150 people into a room for a 2020 Election Kickoff event featuring Georgia’s former House minority leader Stacey Abrams, three U.S. Senate candidates (Sarah Riggs Amico, Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, and Jon Ossoff), and state senator Sheikh Rahman.
Today we are over four hundred strong.
Our members have roots in several different countries, faiths, languages, and regions. We are immigrants and U.S.-born. We are learning how to be better allies and accomplices to other communities more marginalized than our own. We are interrogating our anti-Blackness. And we are mobilizing together to help flip Georgia blue.
Despite the risk posed by Covid-19, in the fall leading up to the 2020 presidential election, we worked ourselves to the bone for the Biden-Harris campaign and all down-ticket Democrats. We made thousands of calls, sent thousands of texts, and wrote 7,000 postcards on behalf of Democratic candidates. We hosted virtual forums with candidates. We educated South Asian voters about the voting process and trained to be poll workers and poll monitors. Our labor has paid off. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders nearly doubled their voter turnout in Georgia from 2016. Approximately three-quarters of AAPI voters voted for Biden. Georgia’s sixteen electoral college votes will go to the Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992.
What I am most proud of, though, are the South Asians in Georgia, many of whom had little to no experience with political activism until this election, who found a community in They See Blue Georgia and threw themselves into this work.
This, to me, is the heart of how identity shapes activism. It is the process of engaging people in our communities who have traditionally and intentionally been excluded from political discourse.
It is a movement about solidarity, camaraderie, coalition building, and lifting one another up. It’s about how our shared identity can propel us to become agents of social change, whether this takes the form of running for office, volunteering on a campaign, registering voters, or protesting.
It is who we are and where we come from.
•••
I consult a neighbor before I begin. “It will stay longer if you make the rice flour wet,” she says. “Turn it into liquid. Then you can paint with your finger.”
I watch a few YouTube videos to psyche myself up. I am no artist. I pour some rice flour into a bowl and add water, equal parts. With a fork, I swish the mixture, scraping it from the sides. Eventually it thins evenly. I attempt to paint a design on my countertop with my fingertip, as my neighbor suggested, but my finger makes for a clumsy brush. Instead I roll a sheet of paper into a funnel, pour the wet flour into it, and bend the tip to trap the mixture so it doesn’t escape before I’m ready. I practice again, this time forming half of a sloppy circle. Still, it’s progress.
I’m no match for my grandmother’s dexterous hand. Many years ago, she offered to teach me muggulu when I visited her home. I declined. What I produce now will not measure up. It will fail to honor her legacy. But this no longer matters. She would want me to try.
I sit cross-legged at the base of the sari chest, the door propped wide open, and take a deep breath. When I first unfold the tip of the funnel, the flour mixture rushes out too quickly. I wipe away the excess with a wet paper towel and begin again, squinting to locate my Avva’s neat outline. I position my hand over the design, and this time when the flour-ink flows, I’m ready. Curves and angles appear that I hadn’t noticed until I reunited them into one.
The image that emerges takes me by surprise. The faint pattern I had assumed these past nine years was a six-pointed star transforms into an eight-petalled jasmine flower, the same sweet-smelling blossoms my grandmother used to string into garlands at her home almost every morning. I would never have recognized her design for what it was if I hadn’t tried to restore it to its original state.
When I finish with the rice flour, I set aside the funnel and lean back to take it in. Some of the lines are shaky, too thick or too thin. Certainly, it is imperfect.
ANJALI ENJETI is a former attorney, journalist, teacher, and author based near Atlanta. Her books Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and the novel, The Parted Earth were published earlier this year. Her other writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Harper’s Bazaar, USA Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, and elsewhere. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She teaches in the MFA program at Reinhardt University and lives with her family near Atlanta.
My eleven-year-old son Jonathan followed me up the creaking wooden stairs to the unfinished third floor attic of my father’s house one Saturday summer afternoon. What was he imagining? A secret stash of Spanish gold coins? Purloined jewels? But I knew what he meant. As a child, this Moorish-style house built in the late 1920s had always exuded mystery to me too.
“Let’s hope,” I said.
My eighty-three-year-old father had decided it was time to move. My mother had died two years earlier, a week short of her seventy-second birthday, after a drawn-out wasting illness. We’d grown so accustomed to the hiss of her oxygen tank that after her death, the silence was jarring. My father had removed the chair lift, the bed pans, the medications, and medical equipment. He’d taken to wandering through rooms in search of things to straighten and fix.
My husband Marc, our sons, and I were moving soon too. I had the unenviable task of emptying two houses at the same time and finding homes for all the soon-to-be-discarded books, house wares, tools, and toys. But I was grateful for the distraction. It kept me from focusing too much on the pain of closing up the only childhood home I had ever known.
“Let’s start here,” I said and opened the door to the attic bedroom. It was painted Pepto Bismol pink, a color my parents had chosen to welcome my teenage cousin Carole. She’d come to live with us after her mother Frances died. One unshaded light bulb still hung from the ceiling. Jonathan and I sat on opposite sides of the full size bed. But the old mattress was so soft and deep that we sank and rolled against each other, clonking heads. Giggling, we hauled each other out.
I seated myself at a built-in plywood desk tucked under the dormer, dragged open a warped drawer and dug in. Not the hidden treasure Jonathan hoped for, but treasure to me: a stationer’s box of faded invitations for my parents’ 1951 wedding at a long-gone New York hotel. Birth announcements for each of my fifteen first cousins. An envelope with a return address that said only, “War Bonds.” Braille manuals. A round-tipped Braille stylus, oak tag, a masonite board, and a hinged metal slate I remembered playing with. My mother had made books for the visually impaired; in later years, she recorded audio books for The Lighthouse. Reading was her lifelong refuge. Even as a child of ten, in the midst of the Depression, she’d told me, she’d sit on the floor and read three-week-old newspapers as avidly as if they were the latest screen magazines. At ten she read books by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Woolf. “I didn’t understand most of it,” she once told me, “I just read whatever I could get my hands on.” Was that why she’d dedicated so much time to producing those Braille books? To share that love of reading she’d also imparted to me? I closed my eyes and ran my fingers over the indecipherable bumps.
Then I unearthed a landmine.
I stared at a pair of similar printed cards. The same date. The same time. The same cemetery. I’d been barely two that terrible day in August. Grandma Anna and Aunt Frances died within twenty-four hours of each other. Mother and daughter. Frances, from mysterious symptoms that might have been lupus; Grandma, of complications from diabetes. I hadn’t known there had been one funeral to bury them both.
I had only the dimmest visual memories of Grandma Anna, my dad’s mother: a kind, billowing woman in a wheelchair, an afghan concealing her lap. I was not allowed to climb on that lap. Only years later did I learn why: her leg had just been amputated. “But even on just one leg,” my mother marveled, “she balanced herself on crutches because she said she had to bake. It was Purim, she had hundreds of hamantashen to make.” Her absence was a phantom limb presence in my childhood. I had ached for the grandmother I didn’t get to know.
I looked at Jonathan. He was reading one of my old book reports. “This is pathetic, Mom,” he said. “How old were you when you wrote it?”
“Those were simpler times,” I said. “You must be bored if you’re reading that. Why don’t you go see if Grandpa will play Connect Four with you?”
My mother had adored her mother-in-law. Anna had filled some of the void her own mother’s early death from cancer had left. My mother’s mother Liane died long before I was born. I’d been named for her. I knew Grandma Liane only through my mother’s stories. A woman so kind and beloved in their Yonkers community that five hundred people had come to her funeral. The only picture I’d ever seen of my grandmother was printed on the back of a small round mirror that fit in my mother’s purse. It was a faded photo of a woman kneeling in a polka dot dress, embracing a small blonde child who grew up to be my brown-haired mother.
“Why don’t you have more pictures?” I’d asked. She never answered. It had frightened me to hear my mother’s sad voice, to see the shrouded look in her eyes, so I stopped asking. Years later, I learned that a year after my mother’s mother died, her father remarried a widow named Helen. Helen resented my mother’s presence in the house. She tried repeatedly to drive her out. One day, my mother returned home from work to find that Helen had taken my grandmother’s photo albums and her set of the Harvard Classic Books series. She’d dumped it all in a metal trash bin in the back yard. She’d incinerated it all and erased my mother’s childhood.
Because I was named for my grandmother, I’d grown up feeling that I was the repository of all my mother’s fantasies, hopes, and longings. I’d also believed that names and words had a dark magic presence. To name a fear was to breathe life into it, so I learned early on not to ask about the things that scared me most. My mother had been only seventeen when she lost her mother. I worried my mother would leave me too. Because I bore my grandmother’s name, I also feared I might die young the way she had. I remember lying in bed at night, searching my seven-year-old body for cancer lumps. It was a typical fear for any child, but I worried more than most. I knew firsthand that mothers could and often did die before their children were done needing them. I am now past sixty. My mother has been gone twenty years, I am still not done needing her.
I continued to search. Cleaning out, but hunting too. I found a metal box full of index cards, scribbled over in my mother’s backward slanting hand. I began to read. “Patrick Mulcahy: August 23, 1949: black skirt, Ohrbach’s; white ribbon blouse; movie: ‘On the Town’; dinner, Caffe Reggio.” Each card contained the name of a man she was dating, with relevant details about what she’d worn and where they’d gone. There were scores of cards. She’d once told me, “Back then I only had two skirts and three nice blouses. I washed and ironed all the time so I wouldn’t repeat an outfit from one date to the next.” She’d been a poor young woman, sleeping on her brother and sister-in-law’s sofa bed in a Stuyvesant Town apartment. She worked at an advertising agency high up in the Empire State Building. She’d been popular. My dad once told me, “I had to fight off half the male population of Manhattan to get her.”
“I encouraged that fantasy,” she said and laughed. I like to imagine her looking like Rosalind Russell in His Gal Friday, delivering snappy lines of dialogue and wearing great hats.
I marveled at the volume of what she had stashed away in the attic. The file cabinets were crammed. My grade school loose-leaf notebooks, still bulging with yellowing compositions. Forty years’ worth of cancelled checks. A clever musical parody she wrote of The Mikado. Large, rolled-up photos in cardboard tubes. I unfurled them, and studied the panoramas of dinner dance crowds, women in taffeta gowns and rhinestone studded eyeglasses, balding men proud and portly in their tuxes. I recognized many faces, people who had once looked so old to me. I was now the same age, probably even older, than they had been when those photographs were taken.
I slid open the warped closet door and found her emerald green strapless satin evening gown. I’d loved to dress up in it. I swam in it then. What would it feel like to try it on now? But the gown sagged under the weight of its own whale boning. The glamour was gone.
Instead, I stepped into the long closet, slid the door shut, and stared at the pinpricks of light at the far end. One day Peter O’Leary, the imaginative older boy of five who lived next door, locked us into the closet together, pointed out the holes of light in the far wall, and said, “Those are witch’s eyes! She’s going to get us!” I remembered my terror when I couldn’t open the door. How I’d screamed and screamed until my mother found us and comforted me.
Slowly I began to fill large black plastic trash bags. In went the piles of torn pink bedding thick with dust; files full of raffles and receipts from the temple bazaars my mother used to run; rotting suitcases, the seams infested with tiny, larval debris that made me shudder.
“I wish I could be as sure of other things in this world as the fact that the housework will still be here long after I’m gone,” she often said.
I thought about the essential unknowability of my mother. The mysteries of our parents’ inner lives. Did she mean to leave me this tantalizing trail? More likely, she’d assumed she still had time left to sift and to sort the half-written stories, the faded photos, the letters from long-gone lovers. Why had she kept the boyfriend index cards? The snippets of lace and cloth? The feathered bits of millinery? The Braille books? Why had she valued these items above others? What had these totems meant to her?
I will never know for sure.
Her stepmother had destroyed the talismans of her own childhood. Had she preserved finite, fragile clues, bits of an adult life she’d cherished, to give me what she hadn’t had? Wanted me to know her in ways she’d been denied knowing her own mother? Reassembling these shards from my mother’s life was an emotional archaeology.
And then, finally, I found what all along I must have been seeking without even knowing. It was in a stationery box filled with unsent greeting cards. A note written to my husband Marc from my mother, on the eve of our wedding. I had seen it when she’d given him an antique silver Kiddush cup. Marc must have dropped the note during the excitement of that evening. I’d forgotten it. My mother had saved it.
The note said simply, “May Liane give you as much joy as she has given us.”
Did she know that I would find it one day? How much comfort I would draw from it? Could she have known that note would be what I’d treasure most? I’d like to think so.
Joy. I’d given her that.
And in return, she anchored me. The home she created was tender and safe. It is a lifetime since I lost her, but I still bask in the warmth of her sustaining love.
•••
LIANE KUPFERBERG CARTER is a nationally known writer and advocate for the autism community. Her memoir, Ketchup Is My Favorite Vegetable: A Family Grows Up With Autism, is a winner of the 2017 American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award. Her articles and essays have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, BrainChild, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station, and Brevity. www.lianekcarter.com
We arrive at the cottage at night, feeling for the gate latch in the dark. Then, with our arms tightly around the two boys, we slowly make our way down the stone stairs through the patio garden. Kamal, my husband, uses his cell phone to light our path in a single, glowing square. A wolf spider freezes above the screen door, and because the kids are with me, I pretend there’s nothing scary about opening a door in the dark when one enormous spider and who knows how many others hidden outside the cell phone light hover within touching distance.
“Do you have the key?” I whisper to Kamal.
“I’ve got it,” he says in his normal voice, the volume exaggerated over the gentle chorus of night bugs chirping from the forest behind us. We all have loud voices in our family: Kamal, Oscar, Simon, and me. In the dark, standing before the empty cottage, Kamal’s voice booms.
“Can I choose my room?” Oscar, our eight-year-old, asks.
“Shh shh shh,” I say, uncertain of being there until we’re inside.
Kamal unlocks the door.
“Ho, ho, here we are,” he says, punching along the wall to flick the light switch.
The inside smells like baked wood, warm air that hovers without circulation. Here we are. Mingling with the ghosts of my family.
•••
My great-grandparents purchased the cottage on Quaker Lake in 1906 and named it Forest Lodge. The story I know is that the cottage was built as a boarding house for the laborers who constructed the first homes around the lake. Before my great-grandparents bought it, the boarding house was split in two, with one half moved onto a neighboring plot of land. Our family’s half has the Great Room: a heavy, smoky space with a floor-to-ceiling fireplace built from the large stones mined around the lake. The Great Room staircase is made of birch logs, the papery bark curling where it has torn, just like the trees outside. Each bedroom has its own corner sink with only a cold water faucet, so small that it takes just the gentlest of fingers to work it. The wood around the sinks blooms in red water stains from a century of washing.
My great-grandparents died when my grandmother was young, but she still spent every summer at the cottage with her older brother and their commanding Grandfather Sisson. When my mom was a child, she and her sister spent one month every summer at the lake; their cousins enjoyed the house for the other month. By the time it got to my generation, we visited Quaker Lake to celebrate milestones: my grandparents’ fortieth and fiftieth wedding anniversaries, the one-hundred-year anniversary of Forest Lodge.
When Kamal and I were first dating, he joined my family at the lake for a weekend before my college graduation in nearby Ithaca, New York. The water was so cold; the spring ice had just recently melted. Kamal loves to swim. He had his bathing suit on that first afternoon, so of course I had to follow, wrapped in my oversized towel, shivering in bare feet on the stone walkway down to the lake. Before I had time to even dip my fingers in to gauge the temperature, Kamal dove off the stiff diving board, large bubbles escaping from his nose underwater. When we returned to the cottage together a half hour later, damp towels hanging heavily around our bare shoulders, Kamal’s black hair tousled every which way into spiky needles, my grandfather greeted us on the porch, rocking on a wicker chair with a golden old fashioned in his hand.
“Kamal, good job,” he said. “You got her in.” My grandmother was in the kitchen, puttering around with dinner preparations. “In every couple, there needs to be someone who helps us more reserved folk have a little fun.”
My teeth chattered. The sun behind us was weak.
“Papa, I just don’t like being cold,” I said.
He smiled at me. “But you had fun, didn’t you?”
•••
My mom’s cousin, Tom, and his wife, Wendy, have owned Forest Lodge for the past twenty years. Tom inherited it from his father, my grandmother’s brother. They are in their late seventies. Owning the cottage is becoming burdensome for them, but they would like to keep it in the family. Kamal and I live in Pittsburgh, a six-hour drive away. Having the house at Quaker Lake would be a dream come true for both of us. We’ve been talking about the specifics over the phone with Tom and Wendy since January. They invited us to spend this week before Labor Day to test it out. Our assumption is that we will buy the house from them in September.
•••
We drop our bags on the floor in the front room and go immediately to the dock to stare across the black water where my grandfather used to dive, where my aunt lost her engagement ring. Outside, the air is still and cool and the kids are finally quiet. Kamal lies on his back on the carpeted boards and searches through the Milky Way, the stars stretching above us in wide, dusty swatches. We go back inside, brush our teeth in the little corner sinks, and fall asleep cocooned within the deeply stained wood slats that make up the floors, walls and ceiling of the second floor.
•••
The last time we were at the cottage, just months earlier, it was a short visit to deliver my mother’s ashes to the family mausoleum in Binghamton, New York. My stepfather saved the last handful to sprinkle into the lake water. Before the sun dropped over the pastured ridge, two perfect rainbows bent across the white sky. Oscar, our older son, had been so in love with my mom that he often misbehaved in her presence. He and I sat silently in our kayaks on the darkening water and watched those rainbows until the moment they were no longer there. I have no belief in God, spend no time in spiritual inquiry. Those rainbows, however, hit me hard, reminding me that there are things in the large, large world we don’t understand. Connections hidden in physics, in chemistry, in the metaphysical. A perfect double-rainbow.
•••
When I wake in the morning, steam is rising off the lake. Simon, our younger son, and I take our breakfast onto the front porch and wrap a fleece blanket around our legs. Oscar and Kamal fish off the dock. They pull something glittery out of the water, and Oscar’s bare feet slap against the stone walkway, then up the porch steps.
“We caught a fish!” he announces, then runs back to the dock. The sun has burned through the morning steam. He and Kamal grasp the slippery body, and Kamal removes the hook. Oscar uses both hands to toss the fish back in the water. He runs back to the porch.
“Can we buy this house?” he asks. “Please?” His front teeth are coming in, squeezing out the space of several lost baby teeth. I love how his tongue smacks thickly in his mouth when he speaks. In September, he will start fourth grade, which was my favorite year in school.
Simon puts down his toast on the blanket. “Please? Can we buy the house?” he asks. Simon is growing his hair long; silky brown chunks hang past his ears. He’ll be in first grade soon. Under the blanket, his skinny legs are warm next to mine.
From the porch, I watch my husband on the dock. He stands still, looking out. A fracking truck rumbles down the narrow road on the far end of the lake.
We told the kids we would make our decision at the end of our stay, that we wanted to enjoy our visit to Quaker Lake without spending the whole vacation thinking about something as huge as buying a house. But of course we’ve already decided.
“I don’t know,” I tell the boys. “Daddy and I will tell you when we get home to Pittsburgh.”
“I think we should buy it,” Oscar says.
“We have to buy it,” Simon says.
The one thing I had been uncertain about was whether I might be scared at the cottage. Whether, without grandparents and parents and my sister and cousins, it would feel too lonely. My mom and grandfather both died during the past year, my grandmother just a few years before them. But it’s not ghosts that I feel at Forest Lodge. Instead, it’s the certainty of history. My family history. And now, looking into Oscar and Simon’s faces, I see it’s their family history. It’s so clearly our futures, too.
•••
We make tacos for dinner. The gas burner ticks and then catches, the flame chasing around the circle until it’s well-controlled. Kamal browns the ground beef while I dice grocery store tomatoes, and we talk quietly about the cottage.
“The drop ceilings have to go,” he says, speaking of the kitchen.
I nod my head yes. “But I don’t want to change the feel in here,” I say. “It’s dated. I love that.” The light wood cabinets have brass fixtures; the countertops are pale yellow laminate threaded in splotchy amber veins. One of the cutting boards is a polished piece of a neighbor’s old diving board. “I remember sitting at the table with Gam and Papa, shucking corn. Eating tuna fish on white bread and drinking 7-Up.”
We count things. Weeks of paid vacation. Weeks of unpaid vacation. Years until retirement. The miles from Pittsburgh. We brainstorm how to spend as many days at the lake as possible.
Tom and Wendy call us after dinner.
“We just want to check in. See how everything’s going,” Tom says. He and my grandmother grew up in Binghamton, only a half-generation apart. Over the phone, he sounds just like her, taking time with his vowels.
“How are you?” Wendy asks, almost in a whisper, like telling a secret she wants to take back.
“The cottage is great,” I tell them. “Just like I always picture it. The boys love it.”
“I’ve asked Jeanie Coughlin to stop by this week to say hello. She was great friends with your mom growing up,” Tom says.
Kamal writes me a note on a pad of paper by the phone. Tell them we’ll make arrangements for me to fly out to Binghamton next week. We can hire a lawyer to draft the sales documents. He’s ready.
Simon comes down the stairs in his fleece skull-and-bones pajamas. He can’t fall asleep. I hold back relaying Kamal’s note to Tom and Wendy. We can figure it out in a few days. After Simon is settled in his bed, Kamal and I tuck under our down comforter. We have to stretch across the king-size mattress to find each other.
•••
On our last morning, we take turns swimming the quarter mile across the lake. I swim first. Kamal ties a rope between a boogie board and the rowboat and pulls Simon, in his bright yellow life vest, behind him as he rows. Oscar paddles his own kayak.
I’ve swum across the lake a handful of times, always an event when we gather at Forest Lodge. Like every other time, I’m nervous before heading out. The water is cold. I push off from the algae-slick ladder and curl up my legs until I’m past the waving underwater plants. I know the fish won’t nibble at my skin as long as I keep moving.
Kamal rows beside me. Oscar shouts he wants to paddle ahead. Simon sings an adventure tune from his board. I do the breast stroke with my head above water, like always. My hands meet in front of me, my arms white beneath the surface. Scoop and glide. I blow out through my mouth but the glacier smell of the water still makes its way into my nose. It’s untouched, primeval. I have swum this length with my mom and my sister, with my stepfather. With my aunt in the rowboat, towels piled on the bench seat beside her.
•••
Before Oscar was born, I had a miscarriage. I was pregnant for thirteen weeks, the second half of the short pregnancy spent holding my stomach against waves of nausea. I bled and then cramped and then lost what had been growing inside me. The depth of loss took me by surprise.
“I don’t understand how I can miss something we never had,” I cried to Kamal from the toilet, blood clotting between my legs.
He kneeled next to me, his fingers stroking the palm of my hand.
“It’s because we’ve lost the future,” he said.
•••
When we get home to Pittsburgh, I email Tom and Wendy to tell them that we absolutely want to buy the house, become the next owners of Forest Lodge. Kamal reaches out to our local real estate agent to understand what needs to be done, even though she won’t be part of the final transaction. I don’t hear anything back from Tom and Wendy, so I wait a few days and try again by email.
Kamal’s schedule at work is pretty open. He can book a flight to Binghamton next week. Does that work for you?
The next night, Tom calls.
“I’m sorry to say we’ve changed our minds,” he says.
On the extension, Wendy speaks at the same time. “It’s just too much, you see.”
“It’s my fault,” Tom continues ahead. “I hadn’t talked clearly with Wendy. It turns out, we aren’t ready to sell the cottage.”
I scan my memory, racing through the many, detailed conversations we’ve had over the past eight months. Tom going over phone numbers for the handyman, for the pest control. Tom and Wendy telling us about the families around the lake, suggesting a summer camp the boys will want to try. Both of them certain that our family will love the lake as much as they have.
Tom slips in, almost as if I won’t hear it, “You see, we decided we couldn’t sell it when our granddaughter visited for the fourth of July. She just loves it too much.”
“But our visit was at the end of August,” I say, finally part of the conversation.
Wendy explains, “We were hoping you wouldn’t like it. Then we never would have to tell you we changed our minds.”
•••
I go through a period of mourning. I don’t know if the loss is more difficult because my mom died the year before, or whether I should know better, having lost my mom so suddenly, that a house is just a house. It’s difficult to tell the kids we will not be buying Forest Lodge. That Quaker Lake is not our home after all. There is an emptiness that precedes me through the parts of each day. It is a painful autumn. November is the anniversary of my mom’s death.
“I could see our retirement,” I say to Kamal. The Steelers game on our neighbors’ TV flickers across our living room windows. This time of year, Tom and Wendy are closing up the cottage for winter. “We’d be there, sitting on the porch, looking across the water while the sun goes down over the ridge.”
“I could see it, too,” he says.
•••
MILENA NIGAM is a Pittsburgh-based writer and a 2016 fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She was a finalist in Cutthroat Journal’s Rick DeMarinis 2014 short story contest, and her work has appeared in Slice, The Fourth River, Lunch Ticket, Hippocampus Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently an editor at Halfway Down the Stairs and has recently completed a collection of short stories.
I’m holding in my hand an inexplicable jewel. It’s about an inch and a half long, just the right size to nestle inside my closed fist, and smooth; it feels slightly warm, not cold as a stone would be. When I was a child, I thought it looked like an eggplant—a miniature, precious eggplant. Not only because of its fat teardrop shape, but also because of its color—in my hand, it looks dark, almost black, but when I hold it up to the light it glows deep purple-red. On its blossom end is a bright gold cap that comes down in points just like the green stem part of an eggplant, which makes me think its maker intended it to look like an eggplant, and it wasn’t just my childish imagination. At the top of the cap is a gold loop, so that it can be worn on a chain.
This object used to belong to my Korean grandmother, my father’s mother. She gave it to her daughter-in-law, my mother, who kept it in her jewelry box, unworn, for years, where I used to love to find it. Not long ago, my mother passed it along to me.
•••
The eggplant is not the only jewelry my grandmother gave my mother. My grandparents made the trip from Korea to Boston to see us perhaps once every two or three years, and when they came my grandmother brought gifts. Matching sweaters she had knit for my two older brothers. Tiny rings for me: turquoise and amethyst. Cash, hidden in the hem of a coat. Once, my mother parted the wrapping paper in a large box; inside it was gleaming, dark fur. My mother reached for it, exclaiming, “A mink stole!” When she unfolded it, though, it turned out to be a tiny fur jacket that tied at the neck with big mink pom-poms. For a five-year old: me. I can picture my grandmother hiding a smile.
My mother and her mother-in-law were never close. It did not help that my father himself did not have a good relationship with his mother—“she’s a bullshitter,” he would always say of her. But my father was the first of his brothers to marry and so my mother was the recipient of a number of gifts from my grandmother, all of which are embedded now in my earliest memories.
When my mother gave me the eggplant, I was caught off-guard. My mother has a long, rich history of giving me presents I don’t like, although I have never believed she has done this intentionally. Gift-giving is simply not something she cares about, and thus she approaches it like the chore she finds it to be, to be accomplished with the least inconvenience to herself.
She frequently gives me old things that have been lying around her house, or that she has picked up at the swap table at the town dump. Now that I’m an adult, I’m glad that she just gives me old stuff because then I don’t have any qualms about throwing it away. But sometimes this tendency of hers annoys me, as when she wraps up things that are already mine. I’m not sure what she is thinking when she does this. It could be that she has forgotten that they belong to me, as when she presented me with a set of twelve wooden place-card holders, carved to look like miniature Korean villagers, that I somehow acquired on our one family visit to Korea when I was eight. When I unwrapped them, I said, “Mom, these are mine.” She seemed genuinely surprised. Since I had never bothered to remove them from her house, I suppose she was justified in thinking that they were hers. That still does not explain why she thought I would like to receive them as a gift, however.
For my fortieth birthday she gave me a set of gold-plated miniature spoons bearing the crest of my grandmother’s alma mater (Ewha Women’s College, in Seoul, Korea).
“Mom,” I said, letting the gift wrap fall to the floor. “If you want to get rid of old, ugly, useless crap, why don’t you just sell it on eBay?”
“What?” she said, incredulous at the suggestion. “Who would buy it?”
The point is, when opening a gift from my mother—when smoothing out the previously used gift wrap bearing the ghostly marks of old scotch tape and lifting the lid of a cardboard box bearing the logo of a long-extinct department store (Jordan Marsh recurs with some frequency)—expectations are low. It could even be said that the sight of a wrapped box can fill me with dread and anticipation of disappointment and bewilderment.
But when she began, within the past few years, to give me her old jewelry, I was moved. For the first time, I felt that she was giving me things that had some meaning for her, things she specifically wanted me to have.
The first time I opened a small box and found one of the bracelets she had been given by my grandmother, I believe my mouth actually fell open and I uttered a word I rarely say when I open her presents: “Thanks!!” This bracelet is made of oval domes of a material with the hue and translucency of apricot jelly. No, not apricot. Something redder, darker, something that must be plucked from a tree with blossoms and is juicy and tastes like honey—maybe quince? I can picture this bracelet as it used to nestle against white cotton in my mother’s cream-colored, red-silk-lined jewelry box. I used to love to look through this box and carefully handle the colored gems. My mother is a pianist, and I remember watching her get dressed for a recital, how exciting and disconcerting it was to see her put on little screw-back earrings that dangled and swung and caught the light and transformed her from mere mom to someone perfumed and lipsticked, floral and fine, an artist and a performer in a pretty dress and high heels. My mother was giving me part of my childhood, and part of her youth.
In addition to the bracelet, she gave me the earrings that match it. The earrings are more of a teardrop shape, but of the same deep clear orange. Another time she passed along to me a necklace and earrings of dime-sized slightly curved disks the color of the ocean at its greenest, set inside circles of silver. I also have heavy earrings of a green-gray stone carved into flower baskets that hang from enameled flower backs.
But my favorite piece of all was always the eggplant. My mother gave it to me in the condition in which it had sat in her jewelry box throughout my childhood—without a chain or any way to wear it, just its gold cap, and a rough patch on one side as if someone had dropped it in something sticky that then hardened forever.
•••
When I’ve asked my mother what these objects are made of, she has always been vague. There are so many opportunities for misinformation. It was never clear to me exactly why my mother was uncertain, but it could have been because she thought it was impolite to ask directly, and so my grandmother just hadn’t told her exactly what the pieces were; or perhaps she doubted what my grandmother had said; or maybe my mother just didn’t understand her because of the language barrier. My grandmother could be the source of uncertainty, or it could be my mother herself. At various times my mother told me she thought my grandmother had said the quince jelly jewelry was made of red jade. She told me maybe the ocean necklace was green jade. The flower basket earrings were white jade, perhaps. And the eggplant—she didn’t know, but she guessed amber.
All the references to “jade” made me suspicious. My mother doesn’t like to say that she doesn’t know something. And I know the “jade” answer solves a lot of problems for her. When she says something is made of jade, it is her way of saying: it’s from long ago and far away and however little I know about jade, you know even less, so just be quiet.
So I tried asking my father. My father is a scientist, a person who believes that facts matter.
“Dad, do you think this is red jade?”
“How would I know?”
“Grandma said it was red jade.”
“Then it’s bullshit.”
I wonder if my mother actually liked any of these pieces. The fact that she wore them doesn’t necessarily prove that she liked them. But she herself might not even have been able to answer that question. I don’t recall ever hearing her say, about a piece of clothing or jewelry, or item for the house, “I love this!” or even, “This is nice!” I heard her say, “It was on sale and it just fits the bill!” or, “It was right there in the back of the closet!” Liking or not liking something was not particularly relevant to her. Which also explains why, when giving gifts to others, she doesn’t tend to take their personal preferences into account. It’s not because she doesn’t care about them or intends to displease them—personal preference simply is not something she thinks very much about.
•••
I considered taking the pieces to an appraiser, but most of them were in need of repair and I didn’t want to take them anywhere in the condition they were in. In addition, I had been to an appraiser once, in New York. Their policy was to charge ten percent of the value of each piece, which, it seemed to me, provided an odd and transparent incentive to appraise on the high side. It was a transaction loaded with more than the usual distrust and positioning, and I didn’t want to go through that with my few family heirlooms.
Last winter, however, while skiing in Vermont over Christmas vacation, my husband and I came across a small, family-owned jewelry store in the base village, and we went in so I could choose my Christmas gift. The young woman standing behind the case of blinding diamond rings was wearing a great deal of jewelry. I thought that if I wore that much jewelry I would look like a crazed kleptomaniac, or a hoarder heiress. But Roxanne looked like a radiant goddess. She guided us through our options patiently, enumerating each piece’s characteristics with the deep, husky voice of a fortune teller, and by the time I finally settled on a pair of gold dangly earrings, I trusted and loved her like a sister. As she wrapped the earrings, I told her that I had some old, broken jewelry that I wanted to have fixed.
“I can help you with that!” she said. “Bring them in the next time you come.”
So when we returned home to New York I packed my pieces carefully in pouches, and when we went skiing over Martin Luther King Day weekend, I brought them to Roxanne.
She and I sat opposite each other under a bright light, with a small table between us. I suddenly felt afraid for my little jewels. Here’s the thing about them: they are all I have from a grandmother I barely knew and whose life was essentially unimaginable to me. We are not a family that has much in terms of handed-down possessions. My mother’s family left Korea when she was a child of six, and no family possessions came with them across the Pacific on that boat, the last to leave Yokohama for the United States in 1940.
My father’s family, still in Korea, fled their home in Seoul for the south as the Communists advanced at the beginning of the Korean War ten years later. On our one visit to Korea when I was a child, I explored my grandparents’ home and found doors hidden in walls, rooms behind panels, places where they could hide if the Communists came. My father calls his mother a bullshitter, but I prefer to think that she simply was a keeper of secrets, a role that often necessitates obscuring the truth. There are reasons why the provenance of things is unknown—in all that fleeing and hiding, all manner of things were lost and forgotten.
But now it feels important to know about these few things that remain, these things that comprise my inheritance: what is their value? Perhaps it is because my grandmother is gone, and my parents are aging, and soon this information will be irretrievable, unless someone makes an effort. Perhaps it is because I want to give these things to my own children, and I want to know what it is that I am giving them.
Roxanne placed a little pad on the table and carefully laid out each piece. She examined each with interest. I sat silent. I didn’t tell her about how I always thought the bracelet looked like jelly or the necklace like seawater.
She started with the bracelet.
“My mother always said that was red jade,” I ventured.
She shook her head. “It’s carnelian,” she said, eying it through a loupe. “Pretty, and it’s set in a high karat gold. The bracelet is lovely just as it is. And the simplest thing to do with the earrings is just to put them on gold wires so you can easily wear them. I can do that for you right now.” And she disappeared into a back room, re-emerged with two gold wires, and, with a twist of a pair of pliers, replaced the screw-backs.
She next picked up the green necklace and weighed it in her hand. I could tell from the quickness with which her hand lifted and fell that the weight was underwhelming. She showed me how the green color was pulling away from the edges of each little disk, leaving them clear. I was very disappointed in them. They plainly had no value at all. Roxanne, seeing my expression, held them up against her neck.
“They’re a pretty color, “ she said. “A fun piece, for your daughter, maybe.”
“Hum,” I said. I didn’t want to give my daughter anything crappy, not even for fun.
The jade flower baskets interested her. “Look,” she said. “The baskets and the rings they dangle from are cut from one piece of jade—see how there’s no break in the ring? “
“So they are really are jade?” I said, brightening a bit.
“A great piece of workmanship,” she said. “A real conversation piece. The enamel backs are going to be too difficult to clean, though, especially since I can’t tell what the metal is. So if you want to wear them we’ll find you just a simple pair of gold hoops, and you can hang the baskets from them. “
“Should I be careful with these, then?” I asked. “Are they fragile?”
“Well, they’ve obviously been through a lot—you can see how the rings are wearing thin in places. They can’t be as fragile as all that. And it’s not so much that they’re worth a ton of money—they’re just interesting. Nice pieces.”
And then we came to my little eggplant.
“Oh,” Roxanne said. She held it, and thumbed the rough patch. She weighed it in her hand. I told her to hold it up to the light, and she did.
“Oh, look at that,” she said. She weighed it some more. Finally, she spoke.
“I have no idea what this is,” she said.
“Neither do I, “ I said.
“It’s very light. I’m going to guess some kind of resin,” she said. “Amber.”
“Amber sounds right,” I said.
“But this gold cap is very high-karat,” she said. “And the workmanship on it is very fine. It indicates to me that it’s something of value. No one would put a fancy cap like that on something worthless.”
“You didn’t know my grandmother,” I said.
“Let me hold onto this one,” she said. “I’ll ask the people at our studio what they think it is, and what they think can be done with it. I’ll let you know.”
•••
I wear my new carnelian earrings quite a bit. I like their length, their color, and the way they dangle. But I still do not know what they are worth. Roxanne would not put a dollar value on any of the things I brought her. She said she didn’t know what they were worth, and determining exactly what they were made of would involve subjecting them to tests of various kinds to determine things like hardness and melting points that would probably damage them irreparably. Her view was, if you like them, then wear them—what difference does it make what they are worth?
This wasn’t a satisfying conclusion for me, though, so I went on eBay and plugged in “Carnelian earrings” to see what I could find. “Carnelian earrings,” it turns out, are a dime a dozen. Almost literally. I found a pair that approximated the size and shape of my teardrops, and the bidding started at: thirty-nine cents.
•••
I heard from Roxanne a few weeks later.
“The artists at the studio could not determine what the material is,” she said. “Our best guess is still amber. But I have to tell you that there is a possibility that it is plastic. We can’t rule it out.
“We can repair the loose cap by putting in a new pin, and we can take off whatever is stuck to it,” she said. “And I’ve found a perfect gold chain for it. The chain runs …”
I can’t even tell you how much. More than I would ordinarily pay for a piece of jewelry, especially one that could not be ruled out as being plastic.
I wrote back. “I would like to be able to wear this piece. But is there any way to guarantee that it is not plastic?”
“No,” she wrote back. “But it is a lovely piece, and I think if you love it, you should wear it.”
If I love it. It was as simple, and as impossible, as that. Being my mother’s daughter, I don’t ask myself that question very often. Do I love it? Is there an answer to that question that is separate from the questions of its utility, its dollar value? Of course I don’t love it. I don’t tend to feel love for inanimate objects. Although, you know, if I ever were to love an object, the eggplant might be the one.
“I wanted her to tell me what it’s worth,” I complained to my husband. “She didn’t answer my question at all.”
“Go ahead and get it fixed,” he said. “Otherwise, it will certainly be worth nothing.”
Ultimately, I gave Roxanne the go-ahead. In a few weeks she let me know that it was ready. She said it was gorgeous.
And it was. And it is. The chain is Italian gold, richly colored but not overly brassy or bright, substantial but not heavy. Roxanne had two loops put in so I can wear the pendant at different lengths. As it turns out, I wear it all the time. It suddenly seems that every outfit is enhanced by a possibly plastic eggplant on a lovely gold chain. I will never know what my eggplant is really made of, but at this point I’d almost rather not know, for its unknowability may be its most precious feature. When I give it to my daughter, she will know at least this part of its story: I took my mysterious inheritance of indeterminate value, and I put it on a gold chain, and I gave it to her, with all my love.
•••
CAROL PAIK lives in New York City with her husband in a half-empty nest. Her writing has appeared in Brain, Child, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, and Literal Latte, among other places, and has been anthologized in The Best Plays from the Strawberry One-Act Festival, vol. 6, and Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, fifth ed. More of her writing at: www.carolpaik.com. More about her short film, Pear, at www.facebook.com/pearthemovie.
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