Also, there's Tom. He teaches high school physics, grades in green ink, and owns a slide rule on purpose. My parents don't know about Tom.

In spaceflight you count time from liftoff. It's called Mission Elapsed Time. I have been counting since February. You'll see.

>> jump to August

I slept eleven hours Friday night and ten last night, and I still feel like somebody let the air out of me.

Tom came over Saturday with groceries and a plan. The plan was that I do nothing. He made grilled cheese and tomato soup from a can, the only meal he claims to cook "at a professional level," and we ate it on the floor because the couch was covered in laundry I've been meaning to fold since the 14th. At night we drove up into the hills and looked at the harvest moon, which was enormous and orange and completely indifferent to us. I did not look for Mars. I know where it is.

Amma and Appa, my mother and father, called from New Jersey at five, like always. Amma had seen the news. "Is that yours?" she said. I said it isn't mine, Amma, it belongs to a lot of people. She said, "Aiyo, kanna," which covers everything from a scraped knee to the end of the world, and for once it was exactly the right size.

Then Appa got on. He said, "You will sleep. Then you will go back. That is the work." And I almost told them. I had the sentence ready: There is someone I want you to know about. It was right there behind my teeth.

Then Amma said Meena Aunty, her best friend and the Program's chief of intelligence, had news about the Houston candidate, and the sentence went back where it lives.

I don't know when. I know it's soon, because I am tired of being two people, and this week I didn't have the strength to be even one.

MET: Day 218. Days my parents have known about Tom: 0.
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You've probably seen the news by now.

It was the worst morning of my working life. I can't write about it. I'm not going to, not here, not ever, so please don't write and ask.

Tom came and got me because I shouldn't have been driving. He didn't ask anything. He drove me home and made toast and sat at the other end of the couch grading lab reports in green ink until I fell asleep.

That's all.
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Big week at work. That's the whole report on that.

It's 11:40 p.m. and I just got back from the grocery store with Diet Coke, bananas, and a box of cereal I'll be eating for dinner for the next three days. The VCR is taping The West Wing for me. I'll watch it in October.

Amma called my voicemail at the office, which she has been told is for emergencies, to say Meena Aunty has "a very good boy in Houston" whose mother would like to talk. Candidate #5. He's 34. Amma still calls them boys. I suppose that means I'm still a girl. I called back and said, "Not this week, Amma. Please. Just not this week." She heard something in my voice, and for once she didn't argue.

Tom left a note under my windshield wiper: a stick figure holding up a stick spacecraft, and one word. GO. It's in my wallet.

MET: Day 214.
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Report on Candidate #4, for the eleven people on my update list. (Hello to the woman in Ohio who wrote to say her mother does this too. Solidarity.)

Srini is 33, works for a software company in Sunnyvale, and was in Los Angeles for a conference, so our mothers arranged coffee yesterday. He got there first and stood up when I came in, which was nice. Then he talked about his stock options for forty minutes, which was less nice. I now know more about vesting than anyone should learn on a Saturday.

Then there was a pause. He looked down into his cappuccino and said, "Can I tell you something? I'm seeing someone. Her name is Grace. She's Korean. My parents don't know."

I laughed so hard the man at the next table moved.

I told him about Tom. We sat there, two grown professionals with graduate degrees, and compared notes on how to erase an answering machine tape. We agreed to tell our mothers that we "didn't have chemistry," which is true, and that we are "both very busy," which is also true. We shook hands in the parking lot like two diplomats who had just avoided a war.

Driving home I felt lighter, and then heavier. Because Srini and I are going to keep doing this, with other people's sons and daughters, until one of us has the nerve to stop.

MET: Day 211. Candidates this year: 4.
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Spent the morning in Tom's classroom helping him set up Monday's lab: carts rolling down ramps, ticker tape, stopwatches. The same experiment I did at sixteen in New Jersey, with a teacher who called me "Miss Why-Is-That."

Things I have learned about Tom this year, in no particular order:
· He grades in green ink because he says red ink makes the paper look like it's bleeding.
· He can use the slide rule on his desk faster than I can find my calculator.
· He writes his mother a real letter every Sunday, with a stamp.
· In June he asked me what my parents would say if they met him. I said: Amma will ask if you're a doctor. Appa will ask what your father does. Then Amma will ask your exact time of birth, for the horoscope, and you won't know it, and she will take that personally. He said, "I'd like to meet them anyway."

My sister Divya called tonight between shifts. She's a pediatrics resident in Philadelphia, and she knows about Tom. "You're 31, Akka. You're allowed to have a boyfriend. You're allowed to have a mortgage." (Akka is what you call your older sister in Tamil. She only uses it when she's winning.) I said that's easy for the backup daughter to say. She said the backup daughter is on call for thirty hours this weekend, so no, actually, it isn't.

MET: Day 203.
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Labor Day at the beach with Tom. Sunscreen, a cooler of his mysterious sandwiches, and a borrowed copy of Harry Potter one of his students swears will change my life.

Here's the ugly part. When we got back to my apartment the phone was ringing, and it was Amma, and Tom was standing right there in my kitchen. I put my finger to my lips. And he went quiet, and stood by the refrigerator without moving for the whole twenty-two minute call about my cousin's wedding in December, like a man hiding from a bear.

When I hung up he didn't say anything. He didn't have to. I had shushed a grown man in my own kitchen, a man who teaches fifteen-year-olds about Newton's laws and has never once raised his voice.

My parents aren't monsters. They crossed an ocean in 1966 with two suitcases and a pressure cooker and built everything from nothing, and they have one idea of how their daughter's life goes, because it's the idea that worked for them. When my cousin Ramesh married a Punjabi girl in 1994, my aunt didn't speak to him for a year. Now she brags about the grandson. So people come around. It just takes a year.

I don't think Tom should have to spend that year standing by my refrigerator.

MET: Day 198.
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The Program resumes. Candidate #3 is a cardiologist in Cleveland, 35, "very tall, very good family," according to Meena Aunty, who has never been wrong about anyone's height.

Amma sent my biodata to his mother. For the uninitiated: a biodata is a resume for marriage. Mine says I am "accomplished, homely, and trained in Carnatic music." In Indian English, "homely" means good at keeping house. I have burned the rice twice this month. The Carnatic music was eight years of Saturday veena lessons that ended the week I discovered the physics club.

He called Thursday. We talked for forty-one minutes. He asked what I cook, whether I'd consider moving to Ohio, and whether my job is "stable." I asked what he does for fun. He said, "I'm a cardiologist." I still don't know if that was a joke.

I told Amma we didn't click. She sighed so hard I felt the wind in California.

Later Tom asked, very carefully, how it went. I said the man doesn't know whether he has fun. Tom said, "Do I have fun?" I said you have more fun than anyone I've ever met. You have fun at the DMV. He said, "I'll take it."

MET: Day 176.
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Tom and I saw The Iron Giant last night. It's a cartoon about a boy in 1957 who finds a giant robot that fell out of the sky, and I would like it on the record that I was not the one who cried. I was the one handing over the napkins.

In the car he said the best part of teaching physics is the one kid every year who looks up. Not at him. Up. I said the best part of my job is looking up too, and he said, "I know. You can't tell me the rest." He never asks. It's one of about a hundred reasons.

Then Amma called at seven this morning, my time, to announce that the Program would "resume in August," like the fall TV season. She has a cardiologist. Of course she does.

MET: Day 168.
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Last updated: Sunday, September 26, 1999
© 1999 Lakshmi Raghavan · [email protected]