Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (14 page)

My mother tried to mediate between us, to no avail. It got so bad that once, near the end of my sophomore year, Peter actually tried to run me over with his work truck. Or at least to scare me pretty bad. My mom had to go to a nurses’ conference in Baltimore, and by then I had an after-school job at Robinson’s department store. I was late to work and a friend offered me a ride. I was very nervous that Peter would come home, since his schedule was erratic, depending on whatever jobs he had on any given
day. When D. pulled up into my driveway in his pickup truck, I dashed out to get into the passenger seat. D., trying to be a gentleman, got out of the car to let me into my side. I got in as fast as I could. D. walked around to get back into the car as Peter drove up.

I begged D. to hurry but the next thing I knew, we were being rear-ended by Peter’s work truck. D., of course, was shocked and stunned. My stepdad yelled curse words from behind the wheel as he repeatedly backed up and then rear-ended us several times really hard. I begged D. to stay in the vehicle, even though with every bang the whole truck shook forward. Peter was yelling for us to “get the fuck out of” his driveway but somewhere in his blinding rage he must have realized we could not do this if he was behind us. Peter finally backed up one last time and parked his vehicle on the street. He got out and kicked and dented the side of poor D.’s white Toyota pickup. D., not a small guy himself, was pretty cool about the whole thing. He drove me to the Puente Hills Mall as I sobbed next to him.

When I finished work, I decided I had had enough. I went to a friend’s home and called my mother at her Maryland hotel. I told her what had happened and that I refused to go back into that crazy house. I stayed with my friend until my mother came home. I refused to live there any longer and told her if she wanted to stay she could. Needless to say, the dynamic between Peter and me caused severe strain on my relationship with my mother, which until Peter came along had pretty much been idyllic. She and I moved into a rental nearby with a colleague of hers from the hospital shortly before my junior year in high school. I was baffled by my mother’s love for Peter. She had always raised me in an open and liberal way. Now we were forced to live according to his ignorant standards of what was appropriate.

But we were not totally disconnected from him. I knew my mom still saw him on the sly. And when I turned sixteen at the end of that summer, he helped me to buy a car, strangely from a senior male student, coming
with me to check it out and giving me the three hundred dollars as a gift for my birthday to buy it. He must have been very conflicted, trying to reconcile his ways with ours and trying to control his temper, with little success.

Peter got the brunt of my teenage hate and myopia. The rest went to my mother. I was a decent kid, too much of a goody-goody for drinking or drugs—my only form of rebellion was the menthol cigarettes, long and gruesome, that I hid in the glove box of my copper-brown Ford Pinto. I was not, however, immune to impressive feats of self-absorption. At the time, I didn’t see my mother for the person she was beyond her motherly duties. For instance, she had a great capacity for nurturing. Years before she and I moved out of the house we shared with Peter, I understood this only from the little things she did for me. In the winter, before each day of school, my mom would put my jeans in the dryer so I could have the pleasure of slipping on heated pants. Late at night, I’d call out and she’d bring me a glass of milk, even though I was far too old to be scared of the dark and even closer than she was to the kitchen. Through the years, hospitalizations, and surgeries to come, she’d drop everything to fly to my side and care for me. I took this as a given, as what any mother would do for her daughter. But as an adult I came to understand that this was who she was as a person, not just as a mother. It was so much a part of her that she chose a career devoted to the service of others.

When the AIDS epidemic began, she left City of Hope to become a hospice nurse. I remember coming home one Friday during freshman year to find blueberries in the fridge. Before I could eat them by the handful, she warned me to leave them alone. I begged and pleaded, to no avail. They were for Robert. Robert had been one of her patients for six months. She adored him. He had advanced AIDS and was feeling particularly bad of late. Recently he had shared with my mother fond memories of going blueberry picking as a child. She thought that bring
ing him this basket of berries when she returned to work on Monday might give him some small measure of joy.

But when I came home from school that Monday, my mother said I could eat the berries. I didn’t stop to think what this might mean. My concerns were fully contained in the small, self-absorbed box of adolescence. I couldn’t imagine the world in which her patients existed. So I didn’t try to. I happily grabbed the container from the fridge and popped handfuls of berries into my mouth as I did my homework. Robert had died, of course, and when I found out, I didn’t feel sadness for him, his family, or even my mother. All I felt was profound guilt for the pleasure I took in eating those berries.

The summer before senior year, I left our little rental and went to India for three months, as I always did, and halfway through, my mother showed up with Peter in tow, hand in hand as if there had never been a separation. I was livid and determined to get out of that house, and college seemed to be a legitimate escape route.

I didn’t go back to calling myself Padma until applying to college. I saw a poster for Clark University in faraway Worcester, Massachusetts, at a college fair. The poster had a picture of a half-open pea pod with different-colored peas nestled into it. “Categorizing people isn’t something you can do here,” read the caption. That was the college for me. Not only was it clear on the other side of the country, away from Peter, away from that house and everything else I had always hated about my home life, but it seemed to be telling me that on its campus I could be myself. I had also just come back from India and was bolstered by a fresh reminder of myself at home there. I began to see that changing my name was futile. A name is a marker of identity, but there are markers we cannot change, like the color of our bodies.

As a model, through my failures and successes, I felt conflicted. I liked who I was, but I also wished I could be a more salable color, a better commodity, a toothpaste-commercial-worthy girl. It took years for this internalized self-loathing to fade.

Still, the tension remains. It always will. When I look at my daughter, with her green eyes and light skin but with my bone structure, I see the strange reflection of the “me” I had long wanted to be. The funny thing is, when she looks back at me, she covets all the features I once wanted gone. She begs me to straighten her light, ringletted hair. She wishes she had brown eyes. She yearns for the dark shade of my skin and fights with those in her class who tell her she doesn’t look Indian. “Don’t worry,
kanna,
you’re brown on the inside,” I joke to her.

I
had no intention of being
a
TV host when I attended Clark, where I majored in theater arts and minored in American literature.

By my senior year, I was bored of campus life. The surrounding city of Worcester (pronounced, with a thud, as “Wooster”) wasn’t exactly a hub of culture and opportunity. So I wiggled my way last minute into a spring-semester-long study-abroad program in Madrid for my last months of college life. I spoke no Spanish. My first choice was Paris, though I didn’t speak French, either, but our university’s French program was in Dijon. Since I was a city girl, I opted for the metropolis of tapas and flamenco.

Between classes, I’d walk the city. With its squares and grand buildings, Madrid looked the way I had imagined Paris would. I was excited to be in Europe. I experienced no culture shock, even though it was my first time there. Perhaps all that shuttling I had done between India and America had helped me become a curious and unencumbered traveler. By the fall of my senior year, I had grown out of Clark, and Worcester was starting to look as small as La Puente had four years earlier. I stayed
with a family in the Argüelles neighborhood in Madrid. The mother of the family I lived with came home every day to cook elaborate meals for lunch. I couldn’t believe she left work just to make freshly breaded cutlets of veal or pounded chicken with potatoes and salad for the family, only to then take the subway back to work without observing the siesta, except for a brief time she lay on the couch with her legs up as she smoked her black Ducados cigarettes. I discovered that after the post-lunch siesta came a magic time for starving students. With dinner an eternity away at nine thirty, you could kill a few hours nursing a small beer at a bar and eating your fill in free tapas, perhaps salt cod on toast,
papas bravas
(fried potatoes topped with a thick, pimentón-spiked sauce), or a little dish of olives.

I knew only one person in Madrid: Santiago Molina, a friend from Clark who had graduated a year before me. Santiago chivalrously took care of me in Madrid. A platonic friend, sweet as can be, he picked me up at the airport when I arrived, bought me drinks when we went out, and showed me around the city. I was eager for culture, though far from cultured myself. He took me to the Prado—which I mistakenly called the Prada, wondering to myself why an Italian design house would own a Spanish art museum—where I spent hours lingering in front of works by Goya, Velázquez, Bosch, and Rubens.

A couple of weeks after I got to Madrid, Santiago took me to a bar called Zarabanda, where we met up with a friend of his, a tall, beautiful man named Fernando. He worked as a booker at a modeling agency called (I kid you not) Jet Set, and Santiago joked that I could model for him. I’ll never forget what Fernando did in response. He took a step toward me, so his face was inches from mine. As I looked into his eyes, which were blue like the sky in April, he reached out his big hands and took my face in them. I might have swooned if he weren’t as gay as he was gorgeous. His fingers fondled my jaw and cheekbones, as if he were inspecting the
wrapper of a Mars bar in order to tell whether the candy inside had melted. “Maybe,” he said. “She has good bones.”

The next day, Santiago suggested we visit Fernando at his office. “You just want to meet models,” I replied. “Yeah, so what,” he said, smiling mischievously. Then he reminded me of my dire financial situation. I would soon graduate with a theater degree and a mountain of student loan debt. Extra pocket money couldn’t hurt. Money aside, I was secretly excited. Like many girls, I had a serious fashion magazine habit. I knew all about designers like Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, Armani and the rest. I envied the models pictured in those pages—Christy, Linda, Cindy—but I knew I wasn’t model material.

Sure, I thought I looked very cool at the time in my pilly oversized sweater, leggings, and knee-high fake leather boots. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sweater had shoulder pads. I understood that I was cute enough to flirt my way into a nightclub, but that was about as far as my looks could get me. The women in fashion magazines weren’t just a different degree of pretty from me. They were a different kind, like a different race born with glossy long limbs and perfect skin and white teeth. Speaking of race, modeling seemed to me the domain of white girls. I had yet to see Yasmeen Ghauri, a stunning half-Pakistani, half-German model, grace the cover of
Cosmo
in pink satin. Santiago had to drag me to the agency. But a part of me, at least, was happy to be dragged.

We met Fernando at Jet Set. Whatever I was wearing that day—most likely another big-sweater-over-leggings combo—I was not dressed like a girl who was about to have a modeling audition. He led us to a room dominated by a sort of jerry-rigged runway, where Josette Naimas, the owner of the agency, soon joined us. Josette was Brazilian, her skin approximately the same color as mine. She looked elegant in her burgundy cashmere sweater and suede pants, with her dark coiffed hair, like a longer version of Anne Bancroft’s in
The Graduate,
not a strand out of place. She asked me to step up
on the platform. This, I learned, was where she taught models how to walk.

She and a female booker named Peppa, who would later become a good friend, asked me to walk across the platform.
Ooookay,
I thought, as I put one foot in front of the other, trying my best to walk normally, which felt difficult now that I was being observed. After that, Josette began to inspect me. She unfurled a tape measure and wrapped it around my waist and bust. She measured my height. I knew very well how tall I was. I had reached five-foot-nine at age thirteen. I’d often taken flak for my height. My old elementary school nickname “Black Giraffe” echoed in my head. My height and long neck earned the noun. The adjective speaks, rather sadly, for itself. Later, I was called “Skeletor,” after He-Man’s nemesis, whom I suppose I resembled because I was naturally gaunt. By the time I was old enough to be shy around boys, I had been ridiculed for my gangliness long enough that I developed a hunch to conceal my true height. Yet in that moment, for Josette, I straightened my back to look as tall as I could. Now she was telling me I was barely tall enough. My ambivalence about this strange audition gave way to anger. Even though Josette was kind, I hated Santiago for taking me there. I felt I was being forced to participate in a contest I was ill prepared for. It was like being entered into the French Open without ever training beyond playing casual social tennis. I was pretty enough and just beginning to feel confident, and now I was being scrutinized against impossibly high standards without ever wanting to put myself up for it.

My audition was nearly over when Josette interrupted her inspection to answer a call. She hung up and engaged in a back-and-forth in rapid Spanish with Santiago. They were both looking at me. He beamed: “We’re going to
Elle
magazine!” Turned out Spanish
Elle
needed an exotic girl to be a fitting model. Fitting models are the lowest rung on the modeling ladder. They’re essentially live mannequins that editors dress in various outfits, testing the looks before the shoot with the real model—in this case,
almost certainly a girl with my dark skin tone. I couldn’t believe it. My anger quickly turned to exhilaration. I didn’t care if I was walking a runway or the floor of a restaurant carrying a tray of drinks. I had a job! But now that I did, I knew that I had to come clean. My stomach knotted and my heart sank.

“Wait!” I said, as they started making arrangements to send me to
Elle
’s offices. Before Josette and Fernando and everyone else embarrassed themselves by submitting me to
Elle,
they had to know that I was a lemon—a decent-looking car with a bum transmission. “I have a scar,” I announced. No one was listening. “A very big scar,” I boomed. I pulled up the sleeve of my turtleneck and revealed the ropy line of swollen tissue, seven inches long and as thick as a garter snake, on my right arm.

The accident happened on a Sunday afternoon filled with sunshine. I was fourteen years old, driving home with my mom and Peter from a Hindu temple in Malibu. We had an old Mercury sedan, the kind with bench seats in front and back. I was sitting up front, between Peter and my mom, because I had been severely ill and hospitalized, only to be discharged two days earlier. The traffic on the 101 freeway was quite heavy for a Sunday but, oddly, moving at a very fast speed nonetheless. I remember thinking how strange that was. Then there was a loud bang, and I looked out the windshield and saw nothing but the prettiest blue sky. I thought I was dreaming, because I’d been nodding off, but then I realized we were part of that sky. Our red Ford Mercury was airborne. Arcing through the air in that car felt like an exhilarating hallucination, an unbelievable ride that oddly remains one of the most beautiful images in my memory.

We were airborne for what seemed like a very long time, flying off the freeway, then forty feet down the embankment. I remember watch
ing the car door swing open and shut on one of Peter’s legs as we flew, while he clutched the steering wheel to keep himself inside. There was a tremendous bang as we hit a tree, then a crash as the tree fell on the car, crushing the roof and pinning the three of us against the seat—our strange family suddenly forced together and confronted with more than just dysfunction. My right arm, which I had thrown across my mother’s chest, perhaps in a vain effort to protect her, took the brunt of the impact from the roof. Yet this impact was so strong that after crushing my arm, it also broke her sternum, five ribs, and her arm. Things went black.

Then I remember opening my eyes in the car. Blood, glass, dirt, and leaves were everywhere. I could barely turn my head, and when I did I saw that my mother was unconscious, blood trickling from her mouth. Peter was muttering, confused. “Where are we?” he asked. “What’s going on?” I would remain conscious, covered in glass, for the hour and a half it took for the paramedics and firefighters to get through the traffic and hike from the road down the embankment. My body went into shock, shivering uncontrollably, but I felt no pain. They used the Jaws of Life to open the car roof like a tin of sardines. A helicopter landed in the middle of the freeway to take my parents away to USC Medical Center. An ambulance carried me to Queen of Angels Hospital, where I finally lost consciousness without knowing whether my mother and her husband were alive.

When I woke up hours later, I had tubes coming out of several places in my body. My right arm had been shattered, my right index metacarpal severed, and my left hip fractured. Shards of glass had embedded themselves in my skin, under my nails. To this day I have a shard lingering in my right thumb. My mother and Peter, I soon found out, were alive. Peter had broken his leg in four places and his hip in two. My mother was hurt the worst. She had snapped five ribs and her sternum, as well as her left hand and right arm. She had been airlifted because the impact had squeezed her heart. Her body and her spirit have never recovered com
pletely. She no longer drives on freeways. When I’m in town, she often chooses to sit in the backseat with my daughter, which I think makes her happy in more ways than one. When she does ride in the front seat, I can sense her anxiety. Even as I ease to a stop, I often see her hands clutch the dashboard and her foot jam an imaginary brake pedal.

After my first surgery, I was left with the scar, thin and straight, on my right arm. I was so grateful for the use of my arm that I didn’t think much of it. The doctors suggested that it might even get thinner and less noticeable. Instead, over the three or so years after the accident, I developed a keloid and the scar transformed into the gnarly caterpillar that today creeps up my right arm. Perhaps I could’ve asked the doctor to cut on the underside of the arm instead, where the scar would have been hidden. But at the time, of course, I was in no state to make such aesthetics-based decisions.

When we got out of the hospital, we recovered at home, each of us too injured to minister to the others. We had home health nurses who looked after us. My aunt Trudy visited frequently and helped tend to us. As we healed on the outside, we all struggled inside, in our own quiet ways. My struggle was one of faith. The accident alone didn’t bring this about. Just a couple of days before the crash, I had finished a long stay at City of Hope Hospital. My mother had wanted to give penance and perform a
puja
of thanks at a temple, and the nearest Hindu temple was in Malibu, fifty miles from our home.

Several weeks earlier, I’d developed Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a rare and life-threatening condition caused by an adverse reaction to medication or to a virus. Ulcers and lesions attacked and scalded my eyes, mouth, and throat. I’d first gone to a local hospital, but even the electric ice bed they put me on couldn’t lower my fever. My mother slept in the hospital, slumped on a chair or in a free bed beside me—as she’s done every time I’ve been hospitalized since, even when I’ve begged her to leave—while doctors tried and failed to diagnose my illness. She was fierce, my mother, and refused to
accept incompetence. After days, she hired a private ambulance, unhooked my IV bag from its hook, and led me out of there with the IV still tethered to my arm. She took me to City of Hope, where she worked. The ulcers and sores rendered me essentially blind and mute for three interminable weeks. I was in terrible pain. I could not swallow my own saliva and had to sleep sitting up. At five-foot-nine, I weighed ninety-eight pounds.

From these events I took away a new suspicion of comfort and happiness, understanding they were impermanent and could be taken away at any time. My family and I were pretty secular, but I believed in God and took our Hindu rituals seriously. Exacting this kind of karma seemed cruel if there was a God. Hadn’t my mom’s life been hard enough? I experienced a bout of atheism. With adolescent self-importance, I wondered why God would allow all this to happen to a fourteen-year-old girl.

When I was finally able to resume my normal life, I focused on making up the months of schoolwork I’d missed while in the hospital and then recovering at home. I was out until May, and even when I went back to school, I had grueling physical therapy to reeducate my arm three times a week before school started as it was frozen and immobile at a ninety-degree angle at my side. I tried to move forward. The scar, however, was there to remind me and everyone else of what had happened. It caught everyone’s eye, a ropy and gnarled raised keloid. And I could see the look of wonder and shock on other people’s faces when they met me for the first time after the accident. I thought it was ugly, and it embarrassed me to no end. I became very self-conscious about it. I wore long sleeves when I could. For those times when I couldn’t, I perfected a casual pose that hid the scar under my left hand and raised thumb when my arms were crossed. I had always stood out for my height and skin color. But now, all people seemed to notice was the scar.