(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
A week later Gogol was home again, helping Sonia and his mother decorate the tree, shoveling the driveway with his father, going to the mall to buy last-minute gifts. He moped around the house, restless, pretending to be coming down with a cold. He wished he could simply borrow his parents' car drive up to Maine to see Ruth after Christmas, or that she could visit him. He was perfectly welcome, she'd assured him, her father and stepmother wouldn't mind. They'd put him in the guest room, she'd said ; at night he'd creep into her bed. He imagined himself in the farmhouse she'd described to him, waking up to eggs frying in the skillet, walking with her through snowy, abandoned fields. But such a trip would require telling his parents about Ruth something he had not desired to do. He had no patience to their surprise, their nervousness, their quiet disappointment, their questions about what Ruth's parents did and whether or not the relationship was serious. As much as he longed to see her, he could not picture her at the kitchen table on the Pemberton Road, in her jeans and her bulky sweater, politely eating his mother's food. He couldn't imagine being with her in the house where he was still Gogol.
He spoke to her when his family was asleep, quietly in the empty kitchen, charging the calls to his telephone at school. They arranged to meet one day in Boston and spend the day together in Harvard Square. There was a foot of snow on the ground. They first went to a movie at the Brattle, sitting at the back of balcony and kissing, causing people to turn back and stare. They had lunch at Cafe Pamplona, eating pressed ham sandwiches and bowls of garlic soup off in a corner. They exchanged presents : she gave him a small used book of drawings by Goya, and he gave her a pair of blue woolen mittens and a mixed tape of his favorite Beatles songs. They discovered a store just above the cafe that sells nothing but architecture books, and he browsed the aisles to find a paperback edition of Le Corbusier's Journey to the East, for he was thinking of declaring himself an architecture major in the spring. Afterward they wandered hand in hand, kissing now and then against a building, along the very streets he was pushed up and down in his stroller as a child. He showed her the American professor's house where he and his parents once lived, a time before Sonia was born, years that he had no memory of.He'd seen the house in pictures, knew from his parents the name of the street. Whoever lived there now appeared to be away ; the snow hadn't been cleared from the porch steps, and a number of rolled-up news papers had collected on the doormat. "I wish we could go inside," he said. "I wish we could be alone together." Looking at the house now, with Ruth at his side, her mittened hand in his, he felt strangely helpless. Though he was only an infant at the time, he felt nevertheless betrayed by his inability to know that one day, years later, he would return to the house under such different circumstances, and that he would be so happy.
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