Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

“Chai tea, Mrs. H,” Deepti says. “I could easily make you a cup.”

“Well…” Fanny equivocates, but Isabelle can tell she’d like an invitation to their porch discussion and so she brings out another chair and an extra blanket, and now it’s the three women discussing love in the damp night air.

“I loved my husband, I did,” Fanny says with deep regret in her voice, “but what did it get me?”

“Do you wish you hadn’t?” Isabelle asks.

“Sure — why ask for pain? I was in pain a lot longer than I was in love. Not a good tradeoff.”

The young women look at each other as Fanny stares off into the space of her own past. What’s there to say to that? It’s hard to argue with the conclusion, and yet neither Isabelle nor Deepti would like to grow old like Mrs. H — solitary, embittered, holding grudges. Deepti especially does not want to live with regret.

“But what else is there that matters?” Isabelle asks finally, after the silence between them has grown into a gulf.

Fanny shrugs. “Who knows?”

—

IN THE PAST YEAR, HOWEVER, Deepti and Isabelle have had to continue their ongoing conversation on the telephone, very late at night for Deepti, who is at Johns Hopkins Hospital doing her three-year pediatric residency.

The women miss each other with a real ache, but Deepti has promised Isabelle that she will be back. When all her training is done, she plans to practice in the Bay Area. Of all the places she’s been in America, that is where she feels most at home.

“Loving Casey is the easy part,” Isabelle tells Deepti on the phone one night in the summer as she struggles with what to do when he comes home.

“Yes.” Deepti sighs over the phone. “It’s everything else.”

“Exactly! Everything else gets in the way.” And then, after a pause in which neither woman needs to speak and both are thinking the same thought, Isabelle adds, “Well, you know exactly what I mean.”

“Yes,” Deepti says again, quietly.

It is not necessary for either of them to bring up the great sadness in Deepti’s life: Sadhil, the “perfect” one, buckled to his parents’ pressure and went home to India for a more or less arranged marriage, leaving Deepti to mourn quietly, as is her way, for years. Now Deepti has grown more skeptical.

“You’ve reverted to your Indian roots,” Isabelle keeps telling her.

“Perhaps,” Deepti allows, but she no longer believes in falling in love and living happily ever after. It is an American fairy tale that she let herself believe once and now has turned against with absolute finality. Perhaps she will never marry. Certainly she will never again expect to fall in love. She understands more and more the expediency of an arranged marriage.

So it is Deepti who keeps asking Isabelle the practical questions: “How do you want to live?” “What would make you happy?” and “Can you take the part of Casey he brings home to you and Avi and be content?”

At first Isabelle said yes vehemently and often to that last question, because in those early years, when Avi was just a baby, she was guarding closely her secret hope that Casey would change his ways, change his mind. She never said as much to Deepti, but her friend understood anyway.

Deepti would see the look on Isabelle’s face when Casey walked into a room, when he put an arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him and melted. She would watch Isabelle’s face relax into pure happiness when Casey put his head back and laughed. So Deepti never believed that the little bit of Casey that Isabelle had access to would be enough in the long run.

When Avi turned four and Isabelle’s parents moved back into her life, her mother was never shy to voice every criticism of Casey that flitted through her brain—“He missed Avi’s birthday again !” “He’s been gone for three months already ?” “Why can’t he tell you when he’s coming home — does he expect you to just sit there and wait ?” And Deepti saw Isabelle’s dissatisfaction with the arrangement she had with Casey bubble over.

In the past year, Isabelle questioned Casey before every trip, finally laying out what she has come to truly understand: “This is a choice, Casey. There will always be disasters.”

And Casey answered simply, without anger or rancor, “And I will always try to help,” leaving Isabelle feeling small and wickedly selfish.

Didn’t she used to admire that unwavering commitment Casey had always proclaimed to his work, his mission in life? He hasn’t changed, Isabelle admits with an honesty she struggles mightily to find. But she has, and probably not for the better, she feels. She’s become less tolerant, more prosaic, less benevolent…Well, of course, she is the unremarkable, conventional person her mother has always known her to be, and she stupidly wants the adventurer who is Casey to join her in the less than exciting, mundane world she inhabits.

“But that’s what you want, Isabelle,” Deepti reminded her over the phone this past week. “It isn’t wrong — it’s what you need. It’s what you think Avi needs,” she said, to add weight to her argument. “Aren’t you tired of being unhappy?”

“Oh, yes — exhausted.”

“Well, then.”

“Yes, well, then.”

—

WHEN SHE CATCHES SIGHT OF CASEY’S blond head rising above the crowd of people striding rapidly toward the luggage carousels at San Francisco airport, Isabelle’s heart seizes with anticipation, heedless of her resolution to stay calm. Oh, it’s Casey! He’s smiling, so happy to see her! He puts his arms around her, and instantly every cell in her body meets his long-limbed body in perfect harmony. They hold on to each other. This may be the last time explodes into Isabelle’s brain even as her body hangs on to his. Guilt overwhelms her.

“Wow, it’s good to be home!” are the first words out of Casey’s mouth, and with his arm around her, keeping her close, he threads through the crowd and steers them both out to the parking area. He never has any checked baggage, only his backpack and a duffel bag which he carries on. No matter how long he’s gone.

And he’s talking nonstop. This is how Casey decompresses from his trips. He tells Isabelle about them in exhausting detail, and then he’s done. He never mentions his time away again. When he’s home, he’s home.

Isabelle only half listens. “There was nothing but water, to the horizon line. And here and there you could see the tops of these big old trees poking out. And sometimes you’d see cattle swimming for land, all wild-eyed and frantic, or the carcasses of those who didn’t make it floating by, bloated, you know.”

The freeway is easy going, thankfully, and Isabelle keeps her eyes on the road, interjecting a “Really?” or “That sounds awful” when appropriate. But she’s been with Casey long enough to know that all he needs right now is to talk.

“Everyone was getting around by boats, I mean, there was no other way except these small, handmade boats because nothing bigger could really navigate the river. Under all that water were houses and trees and villages even. All gone. Destroyed by the water.”

“Terrible,” she murmurs, without taking her eyes off the road.

“The rice fields were completely flooded, of course, and we estimated that, like, probably five hundred thousand people were starving, so what we basically did is hand out as much rice as we could. That was it — feed as many people as humanly possible.”

Isabelle nods, but she’s trying to figure out how to begin her discussion while Casey continues nonstop. “And then the first cases of cholera were diagnosed and they had to bring in the medical team before it got…”