At the end of the day, you will probably realize that there is more to losing than coming in last.
Or: at the end of the day, you will realize that there is more to losing than loss, and that jobs are not always easy to get and even less easy to change — you can apply yourself, persuade others, make a case, but in the end, the companies may never hire you. It is their will against yours. Regardless, from now on, after every new city, you will find yourself thinking: “Was this it — was this the high point of our journey, our family’s plunder through Western Civilization? Or, or, is it still to come?” And no other departure will feel like the leaving of Troy — when, that is, you thought you knew with absolute and sickening certainty, a simultaneously troubling and soothing notion, that this was it, that you were falling away from the height of your imaginary powers, your power to believe that you could wish something into being, your power, more generally, to affect the fates of men, and also falling away from a moment in your life that you would tell yourself about, over and over again, self-consolingly, mistily, correctively, assuasively, coachingly, captivatedly, chidingly, legendarily, asymptotically (perhaps you were never really there, at the fabled high point), and high-handedly (as if your use of antiquity as a metaphor were original, as if this metaphoric device of yours weren’t trodden and depleted and had been, by better minds, wisely forsaken). It will grow and grow, this myth of your will at fourteen and a half. And one day, you may even share it with a lover — let him speculate on the details of this golden age, now actually ancient history, as the time of your most noble and lofty endeavor. You’ll say you had high ambitions once, so high that you broke with your past to pursue them, and your lover will think you mean the time in your life when you were in one of the country’s best engineering schools, had studied fiercely and fretfully, only to drop out in your final year and become a person who wandered from job to job, trying to discover what you were actually interested in. And you’ll let him, the lover, think so. But the one after him, the complicit co-worker turned friend turned lover, won’t let you let him. He will have studied your gazing at the streets of Troy in its latest incarnation. He will ask you what you mean by “high ambitions.”
Or: in the long run, you will go to new places on your own and start over the business of getting to know people without remembering why that inside lane ever mattered. But cities later, through high school and college, you will still try to feel “from Troy,” and still continue to believe that another year there wasn’t too much to ask for. For many of those cities did wash over you, and those years of moving were bewildering. They felt like the product of a mistake — as if Odysseus, the one who’d been charged with bringing you across on that original flight from India, had fumbled somehow and let you slip, fall out of the PanAm cabin, and you’d been left in the Atlantic, bobbling in the sea. Did he mean to do it — this is the bewitching, circadian question — involve you in this ill-planned, incomplete migration?
* * *
“Well?” Evan stops to say in the summer-empty field behind the aging high school, as the two of you are walking meanderingly down lanes 3 and 4. When instead of answering, you ramble about your track days, he listens for one whole lap, then finally says, “Okay, show me how you do it.” There is a serious, well-meaning light in his eyes, though he has never been or aspired to be an all-American anything.
You cast off your summer shawl and begin demonstrating. While describing what you can remember of the purpose of the blocks — how the runner must back into the mark, with only the toes touching the ground, how when the runner crouches down, the center of gravity must stay before her, hovering in the air beside her bellybutton — you will think: The weather is so different from the last time you did this, warm and thick.
You will look up to find Evan regarding your bent-over body with what appears to be skepticism but, you’ve learned to recognize, is his brand of lust. He’s not, your mother is sure to note, after she (if she) recovers from many other shocks, proposing marriage. But what he’s asked of you, this co-habitation, involves another kind of faith, the faith needed to quit and look for a mediocre job, to depend on him while you do, to be poor together and struggle, to make public all these romantic intentions. What he doesn’t know is that Penelope is still after her successful doctor/engineer son-in-law. But even she has recognized that at 26, without a career yourself, without her loveliness, your star has dimmed. Her matchmaking relations are starting to recommend divorcees, men in middle age, widowers with forlorn children, and she, who once would have been insulted, has now begun passing on these prospects to you for consideration, believing like all the other aunties that all you can hope for now in this life are the scraps from the bottom of the husband barrel. Or maybe they believe it’s all you deserve.
Did Odysseus mean to do it? Did he mean to drop you?
With this question will come the memory of the deep estrangements of your recent years, when one or the other parent refused to speak to you, your mother more often playing the ill-cast mediator, saying, “Well, this is the life” when she meant “This is life,” the limits you tested, the willful violations of that Lucknawi politeness, and also perhaps common decency, the phone call you answered knowing you were drunk, the times they embarrassed you — not for being parents, but for being people who were as uncertain and apologetic as you were, not like parents at all, but children who didn’t know anything, not how to speak to the gas inspector, not what to tip a waiter, people who couldn’t even imagine (did they ever try?) how things might be like for you in all those different American schools — and the times when you sharpened your embarrassment and aimed it right at them. Corrected them in a department store for the benefit of an over-polite cashier whose patience was straining, with clerks at the doctor’s office and the mechanic’s shop, in a restaurant for the eyes of a waitress whose spiky hairdo you wished you had.
What would have happened — you wonder for the millionth time, the thought like a voluptuous temptress, doubly irresistible because of the warning light in her eyes — if Odysseus had settled in Troy, where the conditions were so clearly in his career’s favor? Would you yourself be living here now, feeling as confidently and permanently Trojan as these other Indians, and reaping the rewards of a migration that could be deemed unequivocally successful by all parties?
“How do you know how to do all this?” Evan asks.
“I learned it from a book.”
He shakes his head. “Someone showed you,” he says, in a tone you’ve never heard from him, possessive, pinched with jealousy. Your heart swells with love at his quick perception. He sees through you as no one else can, perhaps as no one else ever will.
You lift your neck and glance far, far down lane one, much farther than it’s recommended. There appear in your mind’s eye, well beyond the prescribed feet ahead, the happy, stable edifices of those Indians who hadn’t been as adventure-loving as your family, immigrants who’d staked out a spot and settled on it. Now and then, here and there, you’d met such community-minded Indians before. They were often wealthy enough to take their children to India every summer but comfortable enough to let the children grow up as natives of the new country. It could take your breath away how belittlingly these aunties and uncles spoke of their homeland, as if keeping up with it were an odious duty. Even their children were practiced complainers, as if their summer visits qualified them to dismiss the whole place. Bah, we’re better off without all those headaches, they’d say like old grandfathers, with hard, Third-World lives to look back on, instead of pert, frumpily chic frat girls and fashionably dopey, all-American-seeming boys. That Troy of all places had grown such a population — bred these absolute towers of disregard, who were untentative, unshell-shocked, unworried about their awful pronunciation of the beautiful Urdu–stings you, especially since in your house, it’s always, still, India around the clock. It is: Arré, just imagine if these eggs could be scrambled as they scrambled eggs in Lucknow? And: Oh, when will we be able to find fabric in this country like the kind of fabric that could be found in Lucknow?
Living with a man is not marriage, far short of it. What it is in fact is Odysseus’ worst fear, the final step that will make you irreversibly unlike the people you come from. Having failed to live up, having discarded a respectable career, having aged yourself out of their idea of respectable marriageability, you ought to be able to offer your parents something more. But all you’ve got now is your potential happiness. Is it enough? you wonder. And does this boy have any idea what he’s asking of you? Does he need to? an equally defiant voice counters; and why must those people, the other immigrants, always be there in your mind’s eye, hovering out of reach as if on the horizon of a race?
“I’ll race you — one lap,” Evan says, hunkering down beside you in lane two, comically folding his tall frame in half as part of the joke.
For a runner, “[i]t is also important to distinguish between simple reaction time (one, predetermined response to a stimuli) and choice reaction time (when the stimulus is presented, individuals must choose from two or more responses).”
“Fine,” you say. “You win, we go. I win, you go.”
He hardly pauses to consider the proposition, as though he’s not at all surprised. But then he says, “Fine,” suddenly game-faced himself.
The two of you crouch down side by side and decide to go on three. “One,” you both say, in unison, “two…”
At the first bend, you are four strides behind, still chasing him, but by the second, you’re close enough to hear his hard-drawn breaths. Motor-mindedness — this is the athlete’s finest trick. It is when the mind, a properly trained one, retreats, takes an early curtain call, and the body must go through all of its motions as if — and this is the key — as if they are native.
Down the next straight-a-way, you feel your strides lengthen to match his. “The float is described as maintaining a fast pace with relaxed hips and arms. It is difficult for the observer to notice this change but it is felt by the runner.” With the warm summer sun on your back and your breath easy, you begin to reconsider that moment in your high school life when you believed your fate was entirely in your hands — or rather, your feet. Perhaps it needn’t have been the decisive break that it was. Perhaps it and the many other struggles that followed were not so much battles of will but simply of instincts, of answering the question of whether your family should stay or go differently: There is more to discover here — Odysseus would always say, with genuine, though perhaps not heroic, curiosity — something else to see. And if, you think in the home stretch, if there was some part of Odysseus that knew but didn’t mind what all that moving was doing to you, how it left you at sea, maybe this was because he hoped those many migrations would, by replicating over and over again the chaos of arrival and the giving up of everything known and familiar, transmit to you a sample of his own experience and sacrifice. Perhaps he thought they would make you from him. And if that was so, then perhaps he kept moving because he couldn’t help it, any more than you could help swimming to the shore, making your own way across the continent, taking the new terrain more recklessly than your parents ever dared.
* * *
Later that night, in the final summer of the millennium, in a hotel room just within the city limits, when you tell Evan that you would have gone with him even if you’d lost, he will whisper something in your ear, and a few moments later, you will be new, finally, to wrapping your bare legs around a man’s bare waist and feeling — as he slides dearly against the very bottom of your being, nailing all your organs up into place, one by one, kidney, liver, lungs, heart, as if the fit of each had been loose — feeling yourself gasp, genuinely. It is a new sensation, catching you, for once, off guard, and you spend the rest of the night in various angles on the bed, happily plundered, sex made new, wholly re-invented with someone you can be certain knows this person he says he loves.
But what about that other race?
“[W]hen a sprinter leaves his blocks…he drives backward with a force equal to that which propels him forward.” Shoulders parallel to the ground, the runner, whether girl or woman, pushes first on both feet, then the non-power foot surges frontward, the opposite arm rises, there is a wide, lurching, misleadingly clumsy-seeming step, the trunks lifts — the body enacting an almost evolutionary motion — until the runner is upright, accelerating, confidently inhabiting the full and classical stride. All this will happen. But just before the finish line your legs will lock like the front ones of a horse; and while your lungs burn raw (are chaffing, surely), you will never even see the blur or hear the swishing of the shorts of the girl next to you. Afterwards, the fastest boy in the county will, with his sadly inflected eyes, console you from a distance — and then a long-distance (when someone catches you on the phone, you will say you were speaking to Michelle). Also, Odysseus will take you out of Athens the very next day after the Invitational and will schedule a moving van for that weekend, even though that means breaking the apartment’s lease. He will not speak a word of what he’s seen, will not rant, or scold, or say that his honor is besmirched. In fact, he’ll hardly speak at all, won’t build up the adventures offered by Omaha, won’t animate the drive across the middle of the country with his usual lively narration–he’ll simply announce that it’s time to go and are you all packed. And he will be this way for the next move too, from the next city — it’s his version of the silent treatment, except that his silence lasts for years and years, and sometimes remains in his eyes even when he is speaking. This first leaving of Troy will not be a clean break for anyone, just the first of many fine fractures.
But you don’t know any of this yet. It hasn’t even occurred to you that something like this might happen. You’re just a kid still who believes that it’s possible to learn how to win a race (and change the course of adult events) the same way it’s possible to learn how to solve an equation. Given that, what choice do you have when the gun pops, but to take your mark, get set, go?
