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 Iran in the 1970s, he had earned his bachelor’s and JD degrees at UCLA, had never lived more than five miles away from his parents, and categorically refused to date any woman who wasn’t blond and at least five inches taller than himself. The latter fact, as he had explained to me over a working lunch shortly after we both joined the firm, was because all the fun was sure to be over once he decided to grow up and settle down with a nice Persian virgin.
Meanwhile, the fact that he weighed roughly 100 pounds with his pockets full of lead, in a town full of men who looked like walking G.I. Joe’s, probably had nothing to do with his need to have the latest cell phone, the newest Maybach, and the pimpin-est table at any club he ever set foot in. But Jonathan was good at what he did, we looked out for each other when the workload got too steep, and the demonstrated depth of his family values had long since mitigated some of my revulsion at the double standards by which he lived. Also, he was a good ally to have within the firm because something about his playful smarminess seemed to make our two-timing clients feel at home. Jonathan, clearly, would make partner.
“Anyway, that doesn’t mean I’m with you on this home-remedy stuff, Cassie,” he elaborated. “I could’ve done without my grandmother spitting into her hand and rubbing it onto my cheek all the time.”
“Are you wearing a pink shirt with that suit?” I squinted at him.
“Daniela said it brings out the color of my eyes,” he defended himself.
“Since when does pink bring out brown?”
“I know, I know,” he admitted, shaking his head. “I have to break up with her.”
“Hmm, I’ll get some bottled water for your office anyway,” Cassie reassured in the most serious of voices. “So you’ll have it handy in case you find yourself starting to dry up, that is.”
“Oh, gross.” Jonathan winced. “Is this a woman thing?”
“No, it’s not a woman thing, you troglodyte. It’s a superstition thing.” I shook my head, averting my eyes with a grin. “Anyway, Cassie was on her way out, so you and I should get to work.”
The problem with acknowledging another woman’s envy is that it implies you actually believe you are somehow superior. And I never saw any reason for Stefanie to envy me. She was attractive, intelligent and a formidable future litigator in my opinion. And when we had first arrived at the firm I had imagined we would be friends. Or at least convivial colleagues. Boy, did I have a lot to learn back then.
Cassie noticed my smirk. “What did you do at that meeting?”
“Nothing. I brought everyone up to speed on Cameron and Lydia’s case.” I saw her perk up like a puppy that had caught a whiff of kibble. “And I don’t plan on telling you anything about it, so scoot.”
She whimpered, which would have been annoying coming from anyone else. But since she had started working with us a year before, Cassie had become the little sister I never had. The one with the