Page 259 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

tossed a roasted peanut into his mouth and chuckled at something Angela

Lansbury said. Next to him, I caught Mother watching me pensively, her face
clouded over, but when our eyes met her features cleared quickly and she smiled
—a stealthy, private smile—and I dug inward and willed myself to smile back.
That night, I dreamt I was at a beach, standing waist-deep in the ocean, water
that was myriad shades of green and blue, jade, sapphire, emerald, turquoise,
gently rocking at my hips. At my feet glided legions of fish, as if the ocean were
my own private aquarium. They brushed against my toes and tickled my calves,
a thousand darting, glistening flashes of color against the white sand.
That Sunday, Baba had a surprise for me. He shut down the restaurant for the
day—something he almost never did—and drove the two of us to the aquarium
in Monterey. Baba talked excitedly the whole way. How much fun we were
going to have. How he looked forward to seeing all the sharks especially. What
should we eat for lunch? As he spoke, I remembered when I was little and he
would take me to the petting zoo at Kelley Park and the Japanese gardens next

door to see the koi, and how we would give names to all the fish and how I
would cling to his hand and think to myself that I would never need anyone else
as long as I lived.
At the aquarium, I wandered gamely through the exhibits and did my best to
answer Baba’s questions about different types of fish I recognized. But the place
was too bright and noisy, the good exhibits too crowded. It was nothing like the
way I imagined it had been the night of the field trip. It was a struggle. It wore
me out, trying to make like I was having a good time. I felt a stomachache
coming on, and we left after an hour or so of shuffling about. On the drive home,
Baba kept glancing my way with a bruised look like he was on the verge of

saying something. I felt his eyes pressing in on me. I pretended to sleep.
The next year, in junior high, girls my age were wearing eye shadow and lip
gloss. They went to Boyz II Men concerts, school dances, and on group dates to
Great America, where they screeched through the dips and corkscrews of the
Demon. Classmates tried out for basketball and cheerleading. The girl who sat
behind me in Spanish, pale-skinned with freckles, was going out for the swim
team, and she casually suggested one day, as we were clearing our desks just
after the bell, that I give it a shot too. She didn’t understand. My parents would
have been mortified if I wore a bathing suit in public. Not that I wanted to. I was
terribly self-conscious about my body. I was slim above the waist but
disproportionately and strikingly thick below, as if gravity had pulled all the
weight down to my lower half. I looked like I had been put together by a child
playing one of those board games where you mix and match body parts or, better