“You know what they keep saying about how it’s full of cholesterol and hormones and it’s really, really bad for you?” I teased. They ate steak a couple of times a week, but they still seemed pretty healthy. Then again, they weren’t really that old, only about thirty or so. Julie was a little bit older than Jillian, not that she looked it.
“One steak will not kill us, surely?” asked Julie rhetorically with a fake look of horror. Julie’s black eyes shined bright with withheld laughter and she reminded me of a pixie, tiny and pretty, despite her usual jeans-and-T-shirt look. Unlike Jillian, though, she sometimes wore saris and kurtas, a kind of long-sleeved man’s tunic with buttons at the neck and slits up the sides. I recognized the different styles because I had done a project on Indo-Trinidadian traditions.
Indo-Trinidadians were the largest ethnic group in Trinidad and lots of Trini Indian people wore traditional clothes, beyond just for celebrating religious festivals like Diwali and Eid. People wore them on the regular, especially Trinidadians whose grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents came from India to work during Indentureship a hundred years ago.
Julie had about a dozen kurtas in different colors, and she wore them in place of a business suit when she had anything official or important to do, which would remind me of home home. In stark contrast to Jillian’s version of dressing up—a blazer over her signature T-shirt and jeans—Julie wore saris, and that got to me more. With her hair long and straight, way past her waist, Julie looked even more like an Indian film star, like Preeti Jhangiani or another actress from the Bollywood billboards on the highway close to my mom’s house
Now she swept up her hair into a bun as she walked out of the kitchen toward her bedroom. “You gals make up your minds and I’ll be in the shower while you do it.”
It was still bright outside as Jillian and I leaned against the kitchen counter, relaxing. I felt so comfortable, even in spite of the terror the outside world had made me feel just a little while earlier. But I still wasn’t used to how long it took to get dark here. Home home it got dark by six, earlier if it was a rainy day. The sun came up around six every morning, all year long, and went down quickly around six every evening, all year long. When the sun rose at five in the morning and set at six-thirty at night, that was an extreme. Here in Canada, the sun could come up at six in the morning and go down at nine at night, after hours of twilight. At almost six o’clock, there were still a good three hours of light left. I knew that by the time we were all ready to leave for dinner it would be hours from sunset but already what I thought of as night. It was, to me, entirely magical and a bit astounding. I would never get used to eating dinner in the daylight, I thought.
Eating dinner out was a whole thing in and of itself, though. I’d been to what I’d call a Fancy Restaurant twice in my life before coming to Edmonton. Once was when Jillian visited when I was small, and I barely remember it. The other time was supposed to be a celebration dinner after I finished my Secondary Entrance Assessment. I only have vague, unpleasant memories of not knowing what to do with the cloth napkin, which we never used at home, and having a small meltdown over the long long long menu. I chose a burger, because it was the first thing listed, and my mother was disappointed that I wasn’t trying something better. “It’s supposed to be a treat,” she had hissed at me over the table. I did not arrive in Canada with good memories of going to dinner, and every time I did it with Jillian and Julie I felt a zing of worry that it would be scary and awful. That I would mess something up.
“Thinking about doing another barbecue next Saturday,” Jillian said casually. “What you think?”
I grunted. Inside, my heart lurched, switching the focus off the immediate minor threat to the looming Extinction Level Event disaster. A barbecue would mean about twenty people in and out of the house over the course of two days, since guests would come on Saturday and a few wouldn’t leave until Sunday. I had made it through a couple of her barbecues before. Some of the people tried to talk to me—and that was just too frightening. I came out of my room to eat and to use the bathroom and to show my face, to be polite, but that was it. I couldn’t do sociable. Socializing with strangers made me feel the big, yawning hole in my belly worse than ever, a feeling that no pill had yet entirely controlled.
I didn’t tell Jillian any of that, but she must have guessed something like it, because she said, “Hey, I won’t pressure you to come out and lime, if you’re not ready to hang with our friends. But Stevie says we should be as normal as possible and give you support to help you get through it.”
Stevie was Dr. Khan to me. He was my shrink. He was the one making me write a therapy journal. I usually saw him at his office in the city, but Jillian knew him socially; he was involved with the LGBTQ community; that’s how she had met him and asked him to take my case when I came. He was a round, brown Indian guy with gentle mannerisms. I liked him, maybe.
“I know,” I said, irrationally a little worried that she would feel I was trying to interfere with her life. I was aware she and Julie had considerably reduced their entertaining, one, because they had an extra mouth to feed and it was cutting into their budget, and two, because it was hard for them to ignore how withdrawn and uncomfortable I became when they had company. I fidgeted with my hands for a moment, then said, “It will be fine, Aunty. I’ll survive.”
She looked at me with concern, her eyes soft. I smiled awkwardly. When we heard the spray of the shower in Jillian and Julie’s bathroom, I pushed myself off the kitchen counter. “What should I wear? To dinner, I mean,” I asked Jillian, heading to the other bathroom to start my own preparations for going out.
“Just wear what you like, kiddo,” she said unhelpfully. I had about an hour until we left. I would need every second of it.
I peered into the closet, trying to decide which of my outfits would be the least offensive. I’d never had so many new clothes at once. Clothes in Trinidad could be expensive, and my single mom wasn’t rich. I came with some of my own stuff, but most of the wardrobe I was currently looking at was thanks to Jillian and Julie. The three of us barreled through the mall shops and walked out with bags and bags. I felt like a girl in a rom-com when I wasn’t absolutely freaked out about all the choices Jillian and Julie pushed me to make that day in a huge, crowded, loud, scary new place.
The burbling ringtone started up on my phone. It was Akilah on Skype again. She was out of her church clothes and back at home. I recognized her bedroom, the concrete wall with breeze blocks at the top to let the air circulate from outside. Her parents weren’t rich either. One of the things we had in common.
“You survived?” She was such a caring friend.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said with a sigh, and perched on the bed. “Sorry to be such a pain.”
“You’re not a pain. That’s what friends are for,” she said. She was smiling. I was relieved. But my relief was soon replaced by growing terror about the evening to come.