But these memories are wary, fugitive. You have to coax them out of their dark recesses. They dissipate, foglike, even as you are looking at them. And suddenly his arm feels terribly heavy. You are suffocating beneath its weight, its muscular, hairy maleness. You slip out and step into the shower. The wind snatches at the straggly nasturtiums you planted on the little strip of balcony. What will you remember of him when it is all over? whispers the papery voice inside your skull. Light from the bathroom slashes the floor while against the dark wall the hanging glows fire-red.
The first month you moved in with him, your head pounded with fear and guilt every time the phone rang. You’d rush across the room to pick it up while he watched you from his tilted-back chair, raising an eyebrow. (You’d made him promise never to pick up the phone.) At night you slept next to the bedside extension. You picked it up on the very first ring, struggling up out of layers of sleep heavy as water to whisper a breathless hello, the next word held in readiness, mother. But it was never her. Sometimes it was a friend of yours from the graduate program. Mostly it was for him. Women. Ex-girl-friends, he would explain with a guileless smile, stressing the ex. Then he would turn toward the window, his voice dropping into a low murmur while you pretended sleep and hated yourself for being jealous.
She always called on Saturday morning, Saturday night back home. The last thing before she went to bed. You picture her sitting on the large mahogany bed where you, too, had slept when you were little. Or when you were sick or scared. Outside, crickets are chanting. The night watchman makes his rounds, calling out the hour. The old ayah (she has been there from before you were born) stands behind her, combing out her long hair which lifts a little in the breeze from the fan, the silver in it glimmering like a smile. It is the most beautiful hair in the world.
And so you grew less careful. Sometimes you’d call out from the shower for him to answer the phone. And he would tease you (you sure now?) before picking it up. At night after the last kiss your body would slide off his damp, glistening one—and you didn’t care which side of the bed it was as long as you had him to hold on to. Or was it that you wanted her, somehow, to find out? the voice asks. But you are learning to not pay attention to the voice, to fill your mind with sensations (how the nubs of his elbows fit exactly into your cupped palms, how his sleeping breath stirs the small hairs on your arm) until its echoes dissipate.
So when the phone rang very early that Tuesday morning you thought nothing of it. You pulled sleep like a furry blanket over your head, and even when you half heard his voice, suddenly formal, saying just one moment, please, you didn’t get it. Not until he was shaking your shoulder, handing you the phone, mouthing the words silently, your mother.
Later you try to remember what you said to her, but you can’t quite get the words right. Something about a wonderful man, getting married soon (although the only time you’d discussed marriage was when he had told you it wasn’t for him). She’d called to let you know that cousin Leela’s wedding was all arranged—a good Brahmin boy, a rising executive in an accounting firm. Next month in Delhi. The whole family would travel there. She’d bought your ticket already. But now of course you need not come. Her voice had been a spear of ice. Did you cry out, Don’t be angry, Mother, please? Did you beg forgiveness? Did you whisper (again that word) love? You do know this: you kept talking, even after the phone went dead. When you finally looked up, he was watching you. His eyes were opaque, like pebbles.
All through the next month you try to reach her. You call. The ayah answers. She sounds frightened when she hears your voice. Memsaab has told her not to speak to you, or else she’ll lose her job.
“She had the lawyer over yesterday to change her will. What did you do, Missybaba, that was so bad?”
You hear your mother in the background. “Who are you talking to, Ayah? What? How can it be my daughter? I don’t have a daughter. Hang up right now.”
“Mother …” you cry. The word ricochets through the apartment so that the hanging shivers against the wall. Its black center ripples like a bottomless well. The phone goes dead. You call again. Your fingers are shaking. It’s hard to see the digits through the tears. Your knees feel as though they have been broken. The phone buzzes against your ear like a trapped insect. No one picks it up. You keep calling all week. Finally a machine tells you the number has been changed. There is no new number.
Here is a story your mother told you when you were growing up:
There was a girl I used to play with sometimes, whose father was the roof thatcher in your grandfathers village. They lived near the women’s lake. She was an only child, pretty in a dark-skinned way, and motherless, so her father spoiled her. He let her run wild, climbing trees, swimming in the river. Let her go to school, even after she reached the age when girls from good families stayed home, waiting to be married. (You know already this is a tale with an unhappy end, a cautionary moral.) He would laugh when the old women of the village warned him that an unmarried girl is like a firebrand in a field of ripe grain. She’s a good girl, he’d say. She knows right and wrong. He found her a fine match, a master carpenter from the next village. But a few days before the wedding, her body was discovered in the women’s lake. We all thought it was an accident until we heard about the rocks she had tied in her sari. (She stops, waits for the question you do not want to ask but must.) Who knows why? People whispered that she was pregnant, said they’d seen her once or twice with a man, a traveling actor who had come to the village some time back. Her father was heartbroken, his good name ruined. He had to leave the village, all those tongues and eyes. Leave behind the house of his forefathers that he loved so much. No, no one knows what happened to him.
For months afterward, you lie awake at night and think of the abandoned house, mice claws skittering over the floors, the dry papery slither of snakes, bats’ wings. When you fall asleep you dream of a beautiful dark girl knotting stones into her palloo and swimming out to the middle of the dark lake. The water is cool on her heavying breasts, her growing belly. It ripples and parts for her. Before she goes under, she turns toward you. Sometimes her face is a blank oval, featureless. Sometimes it is your face.
Things are not going well for you. At school you cannot concentrate on your classes, they seem so disconnected from the rest of your life. Your advisor calls you into her office to talk to you. You stare at the neat rows of books behind her head. She is speaking of missed deadlines, research that lacks innovation. You notice her teeth, large and white and regular, like a horse’s. She pauses, asks if you are feeling well.
“Oh yes,” you say, in the respectful tone you were always taught to use with teachers. “I feel just fine.”
But the next day it is too difficult to get up and get dressed for class. What difference would it make if you miss a deconstructionist critique of the Sonnets? you ask yourself. You stay in bed until the postal carrier comes.
You have written a letter to Aunt Arati explaining, asking her to please tell your mother that you’re sorry. I’ll come home right now if she wants. Every day you check the box for Aunt’s reply, but there’s nothing. Her arthritis is acting up, you tell yourself. It’s the wedding preparations. The letter is lost.
Things are not going well between him and you either. Sometimes when he is talking, the words make no sense. You watch him move his mouth as though he were a character in a foreign film someone has forgotten to dub. He asks you a question. By the raised tone of his voice you know that’s what it is, but you have no idea what he wants from you. He asks again, louder.
“What?” you say.
He walks out, slamming the door.
You have written a letter to your mother, too. A registered letter, so it can’t get lost. You run outside every day when you hear the mail van. Nothing. You glance at the carrier, a large black woman, suspiciously. “Are you sure?” you ask. You wonder if she put the letter into someone else’s box by mistake. After she leaves, you peer into the narrow metal slots of the oth
er mailboxes, trying to see.
At first he was sympathetic. He held you when you lay sleepless at night. “Cry,” he said. “Get it out of your system.” Then, “It was bound to happen sooner or later. You must have known that. Maybe it’s all for the best.” Later, “Try to look at the positive side. You had to cut the umbilical cord sometime.”
You pulled away when he said things like that. What did he know, you thought, about families, about (yes) love. He’d left home the day he turned eighteen. He only called his mother on Mother’s Day and, if he remembered, her birthday. When he told her about you she’d said, “How nice, dear. We really must have you both over to the house for dinner sometime soon.”
Lately he has been angry a lot. “You’re blaming me for this mess between your mother and yourself,” he shouted the other day at dinner although you hadn’t said anything. He shook his head. “You’re driving yourself crazy. You need a shrink.” He shoved back his plate and slammed out of the apartment again. The dry, scratchy voice pushing at your temples reminded you how he’d watched the red-haired waitress at the Mexican restaurant last week, how he was laughing, his hand on her shoulder, when you came out of the rest room. How, recently, there had been more late-night calls.
When he came back, very late, you were still sitting at the table. Staring at the hanging. He took you by the arms and brought his face close to yours.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “I want to help you but I don’t know how. You’ve become obsessed with this thing. You’re so depressed all the time I hardly know you anymore. So your mother is behaving irrationally. You can’t afford to do the same.”
You looked past his head. He has a sweet voice, you thought absently. A voice that charms. An actor’s voice.
“You’re not even listening,” he said.
You tried because you knew he was trying, too. But later in bed, even with his lips pressing hot into you, a part of you kept counting the days. How many since you mailed the letter? He pulled away with an angry exclamation and turned the other way. You put out your hand to touch the nubs of his backbone. I’m sorry. But you went on thinking, something must be wrong. A reply should have reached you by now.
The letter came today. You walked out under a low, gray-bellied sky and there was the mail-woman, holding it up, smiling—the registered letter to your mother, with a red ink stamp across the address. Not accepted. Return to sender.
Now you are kneeling in the bathroom, rummaging in the cabinet behind the cleaning supplies. When you find the bottles, you line them up along the sink top. You open each one and look at the tablets: red, white, pink. You’d found them one day while cleaning. You remember how shocked you’d been, the argument the two of you’d had. He’d shrugged and spread his hands, palms up. You wish now you’d asked him which ones were the sleeping pills. No matter. You can take them all, if that’s what you decide to do.
You’d held the letter in your hand a long time, until it grew weightless, transparent. You could see through it to another letter, one that wasn’t written yet. His letter.
You knew what it would say.
Before he left for class this morning he had looked at you still crumpled on the sofa where you’d spent the night. He looked for a long time, as though he’d never really seen you before. Then he said, very softly, “It was never me, was it? Never love. It was always you and her, her and you.”
He hadn’t waited for an answer.
Wind slams a door somewhere, making you jump. It’s raining outside, the first time in years. Big swollen drops, then thick silver sheets of it. You walk out to the balcony. The rain runs down your cheeks, the tears you couldn’t shed. The nasturtiums, washed clean, are glowing red. Smell of wet earth. You take a deep breath, decide to go for a long walk.
As you walk you try to figure out what to do. (And maybe the meaning of what you have done.) The pills are there, of course. You picture it: the empty bottles by the bed, your body fallen across it, a hand flung over the side. The note left behind. Will he press repentant kisses on your pale palm? Will she fly across the ocean to wash your stiff eyelids with her tears?
Or—what? what? Surely there’s another choice. But you can’t find the words to give it shape. When you look down the empty street, the bright leaves of the newly-washed maples hurt your eyes.
So you continue to walk. Your shoes darken, grow heavy. Water swirls in the gutters, carrying away months of dust. Coming toward you is a young woman with an umbrella. Shoulders bunched, she tiptoes through puddles, trying hard to stay dry. But a gust snaps the umbrella back and soaks her. She is shocked for a moment, angry. Then she begins to laugh. And you are laughing too, because you know just how it feels. Short, hysterical laugh-bursts, then quieter, drawing the breath deep into yourself. You watch as she stops in the middle of the sidewalk and tosses her ruined umbrella into a garbage can. She spreads her arms and lets the rain take her: hair, paisley blouse, midnight-blue skirt. Thunder and lightning. It’s going to be quite a storm. You remember the monsoons of your childhood. There are no people in this memory, only the sky, rippling with exhilarating light.
You know then that when you return to the apartment you will pack your belongings. A few clothes, some music, a favorite book, the hanging. No, not that. You will not need it in your new life, the one you’re going to live for yourself.
And a word comes to you out of the opening sky. The word love. You see that you had never understood it before. It is like rain, and when you lift your face to it, like rain it washes away inessentials, leaving you hollow, clean, ready to begin.
A PERFECT LIFE
BEFORE THE BOY CAME, I HAD A GOOD LIFE. A BEAUTIFUL apartment in the foothills with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, an interesting job at the bank with colleagues I mostly liked, and, of course, my boyfriend Richard.
Richard was exactly the kind of man I’d dreamed about during my teenage years in Calcutta, all those moist, sticky evenings that I spent at the Empire Cinema House under a rickety ceiling fan that revolved tiredly, eating melted mango-pista ice cream and watching Gregory Peck and Warren Beatty and Clint Eastwood. Tall and lean and sophisticated, he was very different from the Indian men I’d known back home, and even the work he did as a marketing manager for a publishing company seemed unbelievably glamorous. When I was with Richard I felt like a true American. We’d go jogging every morning and hiking on the weekends, and in the evenings we’d take in an art film, or go out to a favorite restaurant. or discuss a recent novel as we sat out on my balcony and drank chilled wine and watched the sunset. And in bed we tried wild and wonderful things that would have left me speechless with shock in India had I been able to imagine them.
What I liked most about Richard was that he gave me space. I’d been afraid that after we slept together he’d either lose interest in me or start pressuring me to marry him. Or else I’d get pregnant. That was what always happened in India. (My knowledge of such things, of course, was limited to the romantic Hindi movies I’d seen. At home, we never discussed such things, and though my girlfriends in college gossiped avidly about them, they were just as protected as I from what our parents considered sordid reality.) But Richard continued to be passionate without getting possessive. He didn’t mind if I went out with my other friends, or if work pressures kept us from seeing each other for days; when we met again, we slipped into our usual comfortable groove, as though we hadn’t been apart at all. Thanks to the Pill and his easygoing attitude (it was a Californian thing, he told me once), for the first time in my life I felt free. It was an exhilarating sensation, once I got used to it. It made me giddy and weightless, like I could float away at any moment.
Eventually Richard and I planned to get married and have children, but neither of us was in a hurry. The households of friends who had babies seemed to me a constant flurry of crying and feeding and burping and throwing up, quilts taped over fireplace bricks for padding and knickknacks crammed onto the top shelf out of the reach of destructive little hands. And over
everything hung the oppressive stench (there was no other word for it) of baby wipes and Lysol spray and soiled diapers.
I guessed, of course, that there was more to child-rearing than that. Mother-love, for instance. I’d felt the flaming rush of it when I’d gone to the maternity ward to visit Sharmila, who’d been my best friend at work before she quit (abandoned me, I claimed) to have a baby.
Sharmila had pressed her cheek to the baby’s wrinkled one, to that skin translucent and delicate like expensive onionskin paper, and looked at me with eyes that shone in spite of the hollows gouged under them. “I’d never have thought I could love anyone so much, so instantly, Meera,” she’d whispered. And this from a woman who’d always agreed that the world already had too many people in it for us to add to the problem! So I knew mother-love was real. Real and primitive and dangerous, lurking somewhere in the female genes—especially our Indian ones—waiting to attack. I was determined to watch out for it.
Many of my women friends considered me strange. The Americans were more circumspect, but the Indian women came right out and asked. Don’t you mind not being married? Don’t you miss having a little one to scramble onto your lap when you come home at the end of the day? I’d look at their limp hair pulled into an unattractive bun, their crumpled saris sporting stains of a suspicious nature, the bulge of love handles that hung below the edges of their blouses. (Even the ones who made an effort to hang on to their looks seemed intellectually diminished, their conversations limited to discussions of colic and teething pains and Dr. Spock’s views on bed-wetting.) They looked just like my cousins back home who were already on their second and third and sometimes fourth babies. They might as well have not come to America.