Everybody's Son

by Thrity Umrigar

gotten two take-out orders of lo mein and sat on a bench on Mass. Avenue under a blue sky that bore no trace of the fact that the world had ended earlier that day, after he’d given her one of his shrimp and stolen

Thats not what happened. The sky was full of jets and the streets full of soldiers with large guns in Boston on 9/11. I was there. It took at least a year to get back to a facsimile of normal. Scary time.

He waited for a week to pass after the 9/11 anniversary. It felt wrong to be happy on that day, as if he were out of step with the mourning that engulfed the whole country. After a year, the trauma was still present—he still looked up nervously at the sky if a plane was flying at a low altitude—but

the Au Bon Pain at the Square,

“But that’s just it. These are the people who make policy decisions that the rest of us have to live with, Anton. These are precisely the people whose views we need to change.” “But they are liberal Democrats,” he cried.

The politics spectrum has changed since 2001/2002 for sure.

“So who is disagreeing with you about Iraq? You’re preaching to the choir, don’t you get it? What I don’t get is why you had to disrupt Thanksgiving dinner with your little diatribe. Isn’t there a time and place for everything?” She looked out the window for a moment, and he saw her brush away her tears. “So that’s what matters more? We’re on the verge of invading a sovereign nation, and you care about—table manners?”

Why had Mom sounded so shrill and hysterical? Why had Pappy been so dismissive when he spoke about the Caribbean? Dad had been okay, but he certainly hadn’t defended Carine. Neither had Anton. In fact, the four of them had closed ranks against her. And then suddenly, swiftly, he knew—if Carine had been a white girlfriend arguing exactly the same points, they would’ve indulged her, cast a bemused eye toward her politics, maybe even admired her sensitivity toward the earth’s poor. What’re you, a Commie? his father would’ve teased. It was Carine’s skin color, her blackness, that made her suspect, that made them feel there was an alien in their midst, a spy in their own country.

She took a few steps to close the distance between them. “You know what confuses me?” “What?” “I can’t decide if you’re the blackest white man I’ve ever met or the whitest black man.” He sucked in his breath, the words crashing into him. He felt as if she had unmasked him, laid bare the central conundrum of his life. For the rest of his life, her words would haunt him.

This was another thing Anton appreciated about Katherine. Unlike so many women he had dated, she ate as heartily as a man and didn’t pretend to hide her appetite out of some misguided sense of femininity.