Small Days and Nights Page 14

  ‘I think most people don’t look at the past. I think they’re blind to their mothers and fathers, otherwise they’d choose differently, wouldn’t they?’

  I realise I’m collecting a tribe. The people I feel safest with are those who live alone in the world – Praveen, Auntie Kavitha, Uncle Sundar. Unmarried, unmoored. In America, the loneliness had haunted me. In India I long to see evocations of it because it seems from the second you are born there’s always someone else’s shadow casting over yours.

  On our last day we take a taxi to the house. We turn off before PPCG and its looming arches and the Naidupuram market. I had been warned about what to expect, but you can never imagine the scale of ruin when it comes to the house of your childhood.

  It has been forsaken – overrun with thickets of wild, cottony carrot bushes and shrubs of lantana. All the glass has been smashed out of the windowpanes and the tin roof sags like a hammock in the breeze.

  There’s a sign painted against the side of the house: THIS LAND & BUILDING ARE ATTACHED BY THE RECOVERY OFFICER EPFO, MADURAI. TRESPASSERS SHALL BE PROSECUTED.

  The yellow board nailed to the trunk of a jacaranda still says Mahalakshmi, and it is uncanny to walk through her gates again, through all those derelict memories.

  The taxi driver tells me that the family is in court. The old man is dead and all the children are battling for a larger share. ‘Happens in all families when there’s money,’ he says almost cheerfully, as if relieved that he will never have to suffer this kind of ignominy.

  He doesn’t seem to be perturbed by our mission or by our flouting of the law. He stands at the gates watching, while Lucia and I cross the jungle of lawn and arrive at the portico, where the front door has been unhinged and dismantled.

  The whole place is damp and bereft. The drawing room has been invaded by raspberry brambles pushing up through the floor and cascading through the windows. Cheap whisky bottles and cigarette stubs are scattered in corners. All the grey stone is eroded and the floors are filthy with excrement. Only parts of the walls show evidence of an earlier periwinkle blue with yellow trim.

  There are two gaping holes in the walls of the sitting room on either side of the fireplace and the kitchen has been stripped bare. It’s as if someone had redecorating plans and then just forgot the house existed.

  There is my bay window overlooking Mount Perumal and Papi’s office shed. The garden that Ma so painstakingly nurtured, completely overrun with devil’s plague.

  ‘I used to live here with Mummy and Papi,’ I tell Lucia, who has parked herself on the dirty floor and is flipping the sleeve of her sweatshirt this way and that.

  I try to imagine how our evenings in Mahalakshmi would have been with Lucia sitting on the rug in front of the fire, crouched over a jigsaw puzzle, her tongue stuck out from concentration, while her stubby fingers slowly pushed the pieces of the puzzle together.

  ‘We had a dog, you know? His name was Salsicciotto. He was completely white and I loved him.’

  At the mention of Salsicciotto Lucia perks up. ‘That’s Mummy’s dog.’

  ‘Yes, she took him with her when I went to college. Did she bring him with her sometimes when she came to see you?’

  ‘That’s Mummy’s dog. He’s gone to God.’

  I ask the taxi driver to take a photograph of Lucia and me at the entrance of the house before we head down the hills to catch our train.

  ‘Cheese,’ he says, and Lucia answers, ‘Paneer.’

  The picture is blurry, and Lucia is standing on the step above me, making it so that she’s the taller one. Two broken chimneys sprout out of the roof, and behind that, a ring of eucalyptus. We are both opening our mouths, exposing the pink tinge of our gums, and in that tremulous light, it’s possible to believe we are sisters.

  PART THREE

  22

  There’s a tendency in failed marriages to look back and remember it all as suffering.

  So much distance between us, but I can still feel the weight of Blake’s thigh on mine. Prosciutto legs. That’s what I used to call him. ‘Get those prosciuittino off me,’ I’d say, and he’d heave with greater force, squashing me until we were both laughing. I still lash out some nights, battling with his imaginary body.

  We used to sleep like dead trees. Weight on weight. At first, there was a comfort to it, then a kind of dismay.

  I shovel love for you, I will keep digging and digging. This is what Blake writes, what he remembers. The times we sat together in bed and binged on The Sopranos, the ransacking of each other’s bodies, the glory.

  In the beginning I could not stop touching him. The graze of stubble along his cheeks, the soft globes of his deltoids. He had small, pea-green eyes made to look sad and pulpy by the thicket of dark eyelashes that encased them. A neck of wire. Facing the mirror together, I sometimes thought, He is me, I am him – the longness in our faces, those high, heartbreaking foreheads.

  No one ever said we weren’t suited for each other. I had expected it from Papi, who could always be relied upon to scout out the souring in anything. But instead, he took Blake to breakfast and said, ‘I’m so happy to hear you’re marrying Grazia. She was such an awkward, lonely child. Always in her room, listening to her Walkman. I always worried that she would never find someone because there is something so stubborn in her nature.’ Blake and I had got engaged in Venice. I wandered the markets of Rialto while Papi offered Blake one of his Montecristos, to which Blake said, ‘Thanks, Mr Marisola, but I don’t smoke.’ Later, in the room, Blake said, ‘Your father was very kind. He kept asking me to call him Jack.’

  When I rang to tell Ma, she said, ‘He’s a good boy. Slightly tepid, but a good boy.’

  Over the years I watched him, as couples will watch each other, looking for signs of betrayal, and I saw that he was exactly as he was. Everything he presented of himself was true. Nothing in him would ever surprise me, and it was this lack of guile that began to gnaw at me.

  We married at Blake’s grandparents’ farm in Penrose, North Carolina. Ida and Rush kept longhorn cattle and beef cattle, goats and sheep, pigs, horses and chickens. Their house loomed out of the fields like an exotic bird. Grandma Ida had apparently seen a picture of a Trinidadian house in a travel magazine and said that it was exactly the house she’d always dreamed of living in, so her husband built it for her – this grand, baby-blue Victorian anomaly with white Demerara shutters and fretwork. Everything in it was fitted out with pinewood and red cedar. There was no swimming pool but a large barrel-like thing that children and dogs jumped into in the summertime. I loved eating breakfasts in that kitchen with all those solid gleaming pans hanging from hooks above the stove. Grandma Ida whipping up fresh omelettes, Grandpa Rush fussing over the coffee maker. Blake’s parents Tom and Molly had moved there to help with the running of the farm, and Blake’s sister, Liane, who was seven years older, lived in the house too, with her husband Gus and their boys. The Hendersons all shared the same oblong jaw, and it was reassuring to look into their faces in the morning light, those immaculate bones moving up and down like mechanical toys. I felt I’d married into some kind of stability.

  Senior year in college I told Blake we needed to take a break. ‘If we’re really going to get married we should sow some oats.’

  ‘But Grace,’ he said, ‘that’s mad. I don’t want anyone else.’

  Two months later I heard a mousy blonde called Lorrie had attached herself to him in Chapel Hill. Misrak laughed when she told me. ‘Now you’re going to be all jealous when you’re the one who started this.’

  Every Wednesday Misrak and I would go out, and while she was generally encouraging of random men dry-humping her on the dance floor I preferred to create a box of air around me.

  ‘Blake gets you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you’re pushing him away.’

  I missed our weekends at the farm and I mistook this for longing. I had grown attached to Blake’s family, and in that year of our apartness I understood that when you give up
on a person you must relinquish their family too. Molly finally called, ‘Why don’t you stop all this nonsense, honey, and go get him. If I have to make one more gluten-free meal for that girl I will lose it, I swear.’

  I had tried something with one of Misrak’s friends – a beautiful Ethiopian boy called Dawit who was all bone and limb, whose stomach was a cave of muscle. As long as he didn’t speak, I was content to look at his glistening body in bed, a rope of shells around his throat. With him I was someone else and it was this transformation I was interested in. When Dawit tried to tell me about his family back home, the words were so limited, so paltry, I had to tell him, ‘Shush, darling, you don’t need to talk.’

  I’d come back to the apartment I shared with Misrak night after night, the place looking like some refugee camp. Ethiopians of every size sleeping on the couch and on the floor, all the groceries from the day before vanished, the kitchen in shambles. ‘What happened?’ I’d say, and Misrak, sitting in frayed lingerie, forking cheesecake from a Styrofoam box into her perfect mouth, would say, ‘These people are driving me mad. I’m like some mother hen for them. How can I say no?’

  Spring arrived and when the winter fat did not fall off me I believed I was homesick and bought $5 phone cards to hear my mother shout down the line. ‘I can hear you just fine, Ma,’ I’d say, but she’d shout anyway, telling me about how the air conditioner in the guest room needed replacing and how her neighbour, Mrs Dalal, had bought a flat-screen TV.

  Blake did not call. He did not once break our pact. I saw him fleetingly through the windows of the students’ centre. He was eating a burger with a stranger. Two decent-looking men wearing T-shirts and those stupid knee-length nylon basketball shorts. I ran past him, wondering what he was doing in Charlotte in the middle of the week, and who he was talking to. ‘I felt pangs,’ I told Misrak. ‘Like he was someone else, like everything we’ve already lived didn’t exist.’

  Misrak blinked. ‘It’s all over in a second if you want it to be. You know that, right?’

  Three months later we were married. I remember only Papi’s face as he passed me over to Blake at the altar. ‘Better take good care of her,’ he said, menacingly. And Blake, crinkling those eyes, ‘Of course I will, sir, of course.’

  Later, in bed, ‘What did your father mean by that? What kind of man does he take me for?’

  In the summer of our third year of marriage I began yawning. I’d sleep eight hours and still gasp for breath when I woke. As soon as one yawn escaped I’d start thinking of the next, and the next – the delicious reprieve. ‘Please don’t think you’re boring me,’ I had to tell people. ‘It’s some kind of neurotic tic, I can’t seem to stop.’

  Months of this and Blake began assuming the worst – multiple sclerosis, a dissected aorta. All the shrinks I went to said it was anxiety. I told them about my dissatisfactory childhood, but they said no, it must be something more.

  In bed I received Blake like a dowager, creaking my legs meekly apart and offering a few grunts of encouragement before even those fell silent. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked repeatedly. ‘Don’t you like me any more?’

  Blake’s father, Tom, fitted me out with a mouthpiece to slide between my teeth at night. ‘You’re clenching the hell out of your jaw when you sleep,’ he said, skating a probe around in my mouth. I fell in love with the word ‘bruxism’, repeated it to everyone at work. ‘I’m a jaw-clencher, a bruxist!’

  *

  There was a spring day in Charlotte, 2002, and I think it’s possibly when I was happiest. The sky was wide and bright. The air tripping with the lightness of small birds.

  Misrak and I are driving to the courthouse. She’s wearing a white column dress bought on the cheap, a silver tiara set back in her curls, a netted veil. She’s smoking, elbow propped out of the window, and we’re laughing because it is all a moving picture story and we are the protagonists.

  On the way there, Misrak screeches, ‘Fuck, I forgot to get rings.’

  ‘What rings?’

  ‘Rings. Rings. We need fucking rings to get married.’

  We detour to Wal-Mart and Misrak leads the way, marching giraffe-like on satin platform shoes, veil streaming behind her. ‘Jewellery?’ she barks at one of the name-tagged employees. ‘Where can I get jewellery?’

  We follow each other down the aisles. I am in a magenta Ethiopian dress that has been shunted around for different weddings. The fabric scratches against my knees, but I stride as if I’m the kind of woman who can withstand any kind of inconvenience.

  At the jewellery counter Misrak says, ‘Give me the cheapest ring you have. I need two of them.’ The man at the counter smiles and says, ‘You have a happy life now, you hear?’ as we turn away from him.

  At the courthouse, the boy Misrak will marry, Abebe, is hunched over a cigarette, wearing ivory silk pants and kameez. ‘You look good,’ Misrak says. ‘I bet you didn’t think to get rings, you bastard.’

  Blake is there too, and it is a moment in our history when I’m still in love with the solidness of him. I stand next to him and he whispers, ‘This will be us soon, but we’ll do it differently, of course.’

  Misrak’s boss Patty arrives with her husband. They’re carrying a fluffy white-fabric photo album and a bouquet of white roses.

  ‘Please, no slips, okay?’ Misrak says, when she sees them walking towards us. ‘I told them it wasn’t necessary, but Patty was hung up. She said if my family couldn’t come, the least she could do is be here, can you believe?’

  It is over in minutes. We sign our names as witnesses. We take photographs in the sun. It’s an afternoon of giddy delight, as if we were standing on a high mountain, the oxygen in our lungs clipped and clean.

  Later, at Applebee’s, Abebe unbuttons the top of his kameez. ‘Coronas for everyone,’ he says, and the way he gesticulates, the great girth of him, makes me think that one day he’ll make a woman burst with joy. Not Misrak, of course, but someone else.

  ‘I feel bad,’ Misrak says, looking at the card that Patty and her husband had placed in the album. ‘They were so earnest. So full of good wishes, but it’s also funny, isn’t it?’ We laugh so much the stitches in our sides seem to come undone. To an outsider we might have appeared like the subjects of a Bruce Weber photograph gone downscale – no Hamptons here, but look at this dewy skin, look at this golden light.

  That night, as Misrak and I lie across from each other on our mattresses, the dirty grey shag beneath us, she says, ‘They always tell us we need a man. All the old crones at home, they go on and on about how much we need a man. Even my lovely liberal father says it. He says it will make life acceptable. But what I need is America. And if a fake husband will get me a Green Card so I can stay, then fuck it, I’ll take him.’

  Five years later Misrak met Jake at a library meeting, a man of such checked-shirt regularity, it seemed unthinkable that they could love each other. But within weeks they fitted parts of themselves into each other’s voids, voids they didn’t know they had. There was a speedy divorce from Abebe, who laughed loudly when he heard the news. ‘My wife is in love with an American man!’ he chortled. ‘And I am so happy.’ There was another trip to the courthouse – subdued, nervy. I yawned through the whole thing. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Misrak said, crushing me against her. ‘I’m not going to change a bit.’

  When I think of weddings now – all the waste and propaganda – I prefer to remember that fake spring union of Misrak and Abebe. We understood that the dangers of hours and hours of cohabitation would never touch these two, and as such, they were gleaming, like the afternoon itself. We knew as well that our own futures were bound to be different. About romance and companionship we knew little, but watching those two commit themselves felt honourable, the way marriage was intended to be, a transaction devoid of the complications of love.

  23

  There is an intimacy with women that is as domesticated and necessary as doorknob, pillowcase, wrist. I long to be fenced in that way. Sometimes
I climb into bed with Lucia just to feel the heat off her back. I wait till she’s asleep to slowly unhook the tangles in her hair. I press my nose into her neck and it brings me back to myself. Even Ma, who would rather rearrange rocks in the garden than stay enfolded in the sheets, understood my need to lie in the aftermath of her warmth while she fixed herself up for the day. I always lay on her side of the bed, never Papi’s – covers up to my chin, watching as she rattled around with bottles of cream on the dresser. Polka-dot terry-cotton robe wrapped tight around her spare waist, socks up to her knees. This is when she was still thin, when I thought everything about her was as majestic and enticing as a holiday in a hotel.

  I cannot know if men share this, if their anatomy allows it. In college, there had been a new friend, Elisabeth. ‘Are you a dyke or something?’ she asked when I did her hair in a French plait and pressed her shoulders afterwards. ‘Of course not,’ I said, fingers leaping away from her skin.

  How to explain it, though? Always in bedrooms, always a distant sexual thrum. Even those tiny Madrasi friends, those pigtailed girls from Rosary Metric, whose faces I have forgotten, but whom I remember coming over to play – the shy tingle of pleasure of bringing down each other’s panties and powdering each other’s bottoms. The softness. The sheer peachiness of a girl’s bum. And running out of the room afterwards to play hide and seek, faces hot with shame.

  It is all touch, after all. With Queenie and Misrak it had been uncomplicated. We had been so obsessed with boys, trying to understand our bodies as weapons, not as playgrounds. But still, we would lie beside each other, the ease of tangled feet. And none of this had anything to do with the jiggle in my cunt while riding behind the neighbour boy Agostino Bernardi on his motorbike in Vicenza, or what I felt resting my knee against Blake’s that first time. Certainly nothing to do with clambering on top of Vik in the dark of a dead-end street. All that had made me feel was that there was a ladder inside me – climbing, conquering, descending, dwindling. I tried explaining it to Blake once, how sometimes what you wanted was not a ladder but a lake. Something that spread all around you.