The writer on watching her parents fall in love three decades after their arranged marriage and what she learned from it:
I was 24, and deeply absorbed in my own dramas. I barely noticed how close my mother was sitting to my father at dinner at our favorite restaurant. They watched me with giddy smiles. Poor parents, I thought. So lonely when I’m not here. Then I saw them playing footsie under the table.
That night, after we’d all gone to sleep, I woke up to the sound of them laughing. “You!” my mother squealed. “No, you!” my father insisted. I’d never heard them speak that way to each other in my life. Were they . . . flirting? The next morning, just as I was beginning to think it had all been a strange dream, I walked into the kitchen, and my parents sprang to opposite corners, blushing.
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