Free The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee Page A

on a cruise ship by the ship’s captain. Tony, Vic’s older brother, made a play for me my senior year. Tony’s solid now. He manages a funeral home but he’s invested in crayfish ponds on the side.
    â€œYou don’t even own a dining table.” Dad sounds petulant. He uses “even” a lot around me. Not just a judgment, but a comparative judgment. Other people have dining tables.
Lots
ofdining tables. He softens it a bit, not wanting to hurt me, wanting more for me to judge him a failure. “We’ve always had a sit-down dinner, hon.”
    Okay, so traditions change. This year dinner’s potluck. So I don’t have real furniture. I eat off stack-up plastic tables as I watch the evening news. I drink red wine and heat a pita bread on the gas burner and wrap it around alfalfa sprouts or green linguine. The Swedish knockdown dresser keeps popping its sides because Vic didn’t glue it properly. Swedish engineering, he said, doesn’t need glue. Think of Volvos, he said, and Ingmar Bergman. He isn’t good with directions that come in four languages. At least he wasn’t.
    â€œTrust me, Dad.” This isn’t the time to spring new lovers on him. “A friend made me a table. It’s in the basement.”
    â€œHow about chairs?” Ah, my good father. He could have said, friend? What friend?
    Marge, my landlady, has all kinds of junky stuff in the basement. “Jorge and I’ll bring up what we need. You’d strain your back, Dad.” Shot knees, bad back: daily pain but nothing fatal. Not like Carmine.
    â€œJorge? Is that the new boyfriend?”
    Shocking him makes me feel good. It would serve him right if Jorge were my new boyfriend. But Jorge is Marge’s other roomer. He gives Marge Spanish lessons, and does the heavy cleaning and the yard work. Jorge has family in El Salvador he’s hoping to bring up. I haven’t met Marge’s husband yet. He works on an offshore oil rig in some emirate with a funny name.
    â€œNo, Dad.” I explain about Jorge.
    â€œEl Salvador!” he repeats. “That means ‘the Savior.’” He passes on the information with a kind of awe. It makes Jorge’s homeland, which he’s shown me pretty pictures of, seem messy and exotic, at the very rim of human comprehension.
    After Dad leaves, I call Cindi, who lives fifteen minutes away on Upper Mountainside Road. She’s eleven months younger and almost a natural blonde, but we’re close. Brent wasn’t easy for me to take, not at first. He owns a discount camera andelectronics store on Fifty-fourth in Manhattan. Cindi met him through Club Med. They sat on a gorgeous Caribbean beach and talked of hogs. His father is an Amish farmer in Kalona, Iowa. Brent, in spite of the obvious hairpiece and the gold chain, is a rebel. He was born Schwartzendruber, but changed his name to Schwartz. Now no one believes the Brent, either. They call him Bernie on the street and it makes everyone more comfortable. His father’s never taken their buggy out of the county.
    The first time Vic asked me out, he talked of feminism and holism and macrobiotics. Then he opened up on cinema and literature, and I was very impressed, as who wouldn’t be? Ro, my current lover, is very different. He picked me up in an uptown singles bar that I and sometimes Cindi go to. He bought me a Cinzano and touched my breast in the dark. He was direct, and at the same time weirdly courtly. I took him home though usually I don’t, at first. I learned in bed that night that the tall brown drink with the lemon twist he’d been drinking was Tab.
    I went back on the singles circuit even though the break with Vic should have made me cautious. Cindi thinks Vic’s a romantic. I’ve told her how it ended. One Sunday morning in March he kissed me awake as usual. He’d brought in the
Times
from the porch and was reading it. I made us some cinnamon rose