shut up.” She leaned over my desk as I settled into my seat. “By the way, nice suit. Tahari?”
I nodded, logging back on to my computer. The only daughter of a Greek-American missionary and a woman from Northern India (a Peace-Corps baby, as she had originally described herself to me), Cassie had immediately adopted me as the older Indian sister she never had. Her gratefulness for any connection to the subcontinent sparked my maternal instincts toward her, ever since the first time I noticed the pride with which she ordered everything extra spicy (I’m Indian, she routinely informed any waiter within earshot.)
“Great cut.” She nodded her approval at my ensemble, which was quite the compliment considering that prior to Steel, she had been in the women’s apparel department at Nordstrom’s. “Anyway, that’s not the point. I can see everything that goes on in that meeting through the double glass doors. Stefanie was staring at you so hard that I had one hand on the fire extinguisher the whole time, in case you actually burst into flames.”
“Well, good lookin’ out?” I tried.
“I got your back.”
“It’s not that bad.” I slipped on my glasses and grabbed a stack of snail mail out of my actual in-box.
It wasn’t like I was unaware of the situation; it was more that I felt like it was my responsibility, as one of the few professional females at the firm, to maintain a certain level of decorum.
“Yes it is, Monica.” She began watering the potted ficus in the corner, and then paused as if she just realized something. “You know what it is? Baskania! It’s baskania! In Greek, you know? Evil eye? I knew I felt something horrible radiating out of her!”
I shook my head, tossed a letter from the Young Friends of the Getty Museum into the trash and reached for another envelope.
“Come on,” she said. “I know you know what I’m talking about. What do we call it in Hindi?”
Cassie’s mother had all but denied her that half of her heritage while she was growing up, as a protest against having been disowned by her family for running off with the American missionary all those years ago. Consequently, Cassie had never visited India, and spoke little if any Hindi at all. What insight Cassie could claim into any part of her family history came almost exclusively from her immigrant Greek grandparents. And it didn’t help that, according to her, the Indian girls at UCLA were less than welcoming to anyone who didn’t seem Indian enough for them. I told her they were too jealous of her beauty to allow her to play in their reindeer games, but I knew that for her it was small consolation. The way she described it Cassie had the subcontinent to thank for nothing more than her outsider mentality and her deep brown eyes. From Greece, however, came her facility with Greek cuisine, her encyclopedic knowledge of Greek mythology and her tendency to suspect everyone of everything.
Sometimes I was just glad I was on her good side.
“Yes, I know what you’re talking about, and you’re wrong.” I exhaled. “We call it nazar in Hindi. But in the old wives’ tale—and it is an old wives’ tale—they say that too many compliments to a healthy baby or a beautiful bride pisses off the gods. It makes them jealous because no human should be envied as much as a god. So the gods take revenge on the child or the bride to mitigate the hubris. And we both know that Stefanie isn’t exactly in the habit of complimenting me.”
“So what? She smiles at you with that hateful hateful look on her face. It’s the same thing.” She made herself comfortable in the chair across from my desk. “Besides, Medusa never complimented her victims, you know. She didn’t have to. She just dried them up by looking at them and that’s why they talk about turning people into stone. She sucked all of the moisture right out of them. Seriously. So kids got diarrhea. Big, strong men became impotent. Women couldn’t nurse their babies because they couldn’t produce milk. Everybody she hated literally dried up.”
“How do you know?” I asked without looking away from my e-mail. “Were you there?”
“Seriously, the myth says that young mothers could no longer lactate!”
“Okay, yuck?” I repositioned my bra around my ribcage with my elbows.
“It may be gross, but it’s also universal, Monica. In Greece they would make Stefanie spit into holy water and then have you drink it,” she pointed out, with all the self-satisfaction of a child who’d just proven in too much detail to a roomful of adults that she knew where babies came from.
Experience had taught me that Cassie wouldn’t leave until she was ready, so I decided to humor her to speed the process along. “All right, fine. You win. Why would somebody who hated me enough to curse me be willing to help me out by spitting in holy water?”
“Well, sometimes the evil eye is unintentional. Like what you said about too much praise…too many compliments…making it accidental. Sometimes it’s Medusa, and sometimes it’s just too many compliments.”
“So being admired has roughly the same effect as being hated?” I raised my eyebrows to demonstrate that it added up. “That’s comforting.”
“In Mexico they would roll a raw egg over your entire body,” she continued, ignoring me. “And then crack it open to see if the yolk was shaped like an eye.”
“Kinky.”
“I’m serious. And drying up isn’t a good thing. First you would have dry skin…then you’d start itching, then lose your hair. Think about it, the evil eye could cause premature aging!” She snapped her fingers and pointed at me with too much satisfaction.
“Malocchio, huh?” Jonathan added, having opened the door and invited himself into the conversation. “I don’t know much about it, but I do know that when I was a kid, my grandmother used to dribble olive oil into water and then study it like tea leaves to see if we were cursed.” We both looked at him.
“Yeah, she did it whenever we visited them in Iran. She said it was because I was such a cute little boy that the people in the village were probably jealous.”
“See?” Cassie insisted.
“Malocchio…Isn’t that an Italian word? Not a Persian one?” I asked.
“Well…you know the, umm, flavor of the month?” He raised half of what would have been a unibrow were it not for the weekly waxing appointment he didn’t think I knew about. “Daniela? She’s from Milan, or Florence, or Rome or something. I can’t remember. But I know it’s in Italy. Anyway, she’s rubbing off on me because she doesn’t speak much English. Pretty soon I’ll run out of Italian restaurants to take her to on the West Side. And you know I don’t go farther east than West Hollywood. Oh well, I guess every relationship has an expiration date.”
Jonathan was the only man I knew who could be smarmy and endearing at the same time. Kind of like your horny kid brother offering to rub sunblock on your girlfriend’s back at the beach.
“Oh, right. Back to you, ladies.” He stepped away defensively. “I forgot, it’s all about you ladies. Jeez, don’t you get sick of talking about yourselves all the time?”
It may be useful to point out here that I know for a fact Jonathan actually spends more on skin care than I do. He was the perfect example of that weird hybrid of raging insecurity and blinding self-entitlement unique to a Beverly Hills upbringing. The only son of a wealthy Persian family who fled
