All the Way to the Tigers

by Mary Morris

  “So you send money home?” Asha pours oil on my neck, slopping it onto my skin. Her cold hands slick tepid oil over my shoulders and neck, and I tremble as she does so.

  “Yes, mother only two hundred rupees a week. Father dead. I work.”

  “Oh,” I say, now feeling worse for the girl. “I am sorry to hear that.” Her hands graze my body. “Can you go deeper?” She nods, grinning, but like an aquatic bird Asha only skims the surface of my skin.

  “Yes, father. Heart attack.” The girl points to her heart. She makes a gesture as if she is falling over dead, though for some reason she is smiling.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “My father too died…not that long ago. How old was he?”

  The girl holds up her fingers. “Thirty-four,” the girl says, once more laughing. I can’t comprehend this laughter. Is it a cultural thing? To laugh about sadness? Is it something only Buddhists can understand? The circle of life. The need to let go. Part of her belief system? The girl is laughing because to her the universe is funny. Another shiver goes through me.

  “Ah.” The girl laughs again. “We same.” She points to me, then to her own heart. Once more she’s pushing the oil up and down my shoulders and back.

  “Deeper,” I ask. Asha nods and keeps doing the same thing.

  She goes to work on my neck. She puts her hands around my throat. “Yes,” she goes on. “It was sudden.” Her hands still haven’t warmed, and she keeps trembling. In the main room the man is pacing.

  I close my eyes, wishing I could drift off. Just fall asleep on this hard table in this cold room, but I can’t. For years I’ve barely slept without the help of pills. “Designer sleep,” I call it. I don’t dream when I take pills. I used to have nightmares all the time. That’s why the night frightened me. I’m in a forest or walking in a meadow. A snowy field. I come upon a path and, no matter which way I go, it always brings me back to my childhood home. A place I spent decades escaping. Always when I arrive, I’m a little girl again. It is winter and I’m standing alone in the snow.

  Asha steps back. “Massage done.”

  I drag myself off the table. My breasts feel heavy, my limbs stiffer than they were before it began. My head is anointed with oil. Shaking, I slip into my clothes. Asha turns away, pretending to straighten the room. When I’m dressed, I hand her a hundred rupees as a tip, which she pockets into her dress, though in moments I’m sure the man will take it from her. As I leave the massage building, someone calls. “Excuse me, excuse me, miss.” It is the man. I must sign the voucher. I go back and look at the voucher. Nothing is written on it. “This is blank,” I say to the man.

  “Will fill in later,” he tells me. I sign my name, then stagger out into the forest. It is colder and darker than it was before.

  Overhead the sky is illumined with a million stars. There are creatures out here. I hear them. The rustling of the bushes, calls. And other things I now believe. Ghosts. India has its ghosts. But now I don’t feel as if something is out there, watching me. I feel as if it doesn’t even matter that I’m here. In the darkness I trip over a tent wire, catching myself just before I fall; then I rush back to the cottage, where I turn on the shower.

  I stand, waiting for the shower to warm up, but it doesn’t. I can’t believe that my head is covered in oil and I don’t have any warm water to wash it. I am furious now and wrap a towel around my head, race to the main house, where I begin to complain. I’m sick, I’m freezing, and my head is covered in oil. The manager sends a worker to my room who fiddles with the valves. Immediately hot water pours out of the shower.

  It is then that I notice that the hot and cold are switched. It says “hot” for cold. And “cold” for hot. Later the manager will apologize. “Someone should have explained that to you.” Apparently, they are switched throughout the hotel.

  59

  Brooklyn, 2008

  ONE MORNING when Larry draws my bath, I am in a particularly bad mood. It is almost the day when I would have been leaving for Morocco. I should be packing, checking my camera, buying a new journal. Instead I’m struggling to get into a tub of hot water. Larry tries to help me, but I resist. “I can do it myself,” I tell him. Instead I manage to slip and my injured leg dips into the water, soaking my bandage. At first, I don’t worry about it. It will dry, I tell myself, but several hours later the wound starts to itch, and I call Larry at work. “I think I need to go to the hospital and get this bandage changed,” I tell him.

  I call a friend and she takes me over. I keep apologizing because there’s a wait but there’s nothing I can do, and she is a good sport. It takes more than an hour for them to see me and the attendant tells me they’ll have to unwrap and rebandage my leg. I sit calmly as they start to remove the yards and yards, or so it seems, of gauze. My friend and I joke. It’s like a magic trick gone wrong. At last, when it is removed, I see my foot for the first time. Except this thing cannot be my foot. And now it’s not funny at all. This is a monster’s foot, a cadaver’s limb. This foot cannot connect to any living being or living tissue, and certainly not to my body. It is green and mangled, swollen beyond recognition. Surely this is not my foot. I start to sob, and the nurse shakes her head. My friend pats my back. Nothing they can do will comfort me. This is a limb from a bad movie, a horror film, an alien’s appendage, one I wish I’d never seen.

  60

  NO TWO TIGERS have the same stripes. They are as distinct as human faces, as snowflakes. No two are alike. Their stripes are their fingerprint. And they are symmetrical. It is like that child’s art assignment when you put paint on a piece of paper and fold it in two. A Rorschach test. Do you see the bat or the ballerina? The clown or the vase? This is how they count tigers in the wild. They identify them by their stripes.

  Ajay knows one tiger from the next and he knows the lineage of every tiger in the park. He can recite their ancestors the way we refer to our own. If he sees a tiger, he immediately knows it by its stripes. He recognizes them just as we recognize our friends and acquaintances by their faces. He knows their mothers, their siblings, and sometimes even their sires. None are strangers to him. He has given them all names.

  61

  India, 2011

  THE NEXT MORNING after I bribe the usual guides Ajay gets into our jeep. But he seems glum. He barely says hello. His wife’s pink scarf almost entirely obscures his face. He even ignores Sudhir’s endless banter in Hindi. At first, I think there’s something wrong at home. Perhaps he’s worried how he will feed another child. But then I sense it is not about anything personal. It’s about the tiger. The tiger eludes him.

  I’ve come to recognize Ajay’s moods. At times he seems confident and assured. He is a man who has, after all, tracked hundreds, if not thousands, of tigers in his years as a naturalist. He is perhaps not much more than thirty years old, but he is regarded, at least by Sudhir, as one of the best guides in all of India. And yet we have not seen a single sign, heard a single roar, even an alarm call. It is a point of pride for Ajay but in some ways the tiger has become less important to me. I have come on this journey alone. I am doing what I wanted to do—even if I don’t see a tiger.

  We drive around for two hours, stopping when a jackal comes out of the woods, when a herd of young deer saunters by. But not once does Ajay raise his finger for Sudhir to stop. Not once does he seem to hear what I thus far have been unable to hear. Those distant cries that signal that a tiger may be near.

  We stop for lunch at Alikatta and in a circle of sun munch on cheese sandwiches and peel oranges. Nearby the elephants, tugging on their chains, eat their huge chapatis. Then we get back in our jeep and, without a word, we’re on our way.

  62

  BY NATURE a tiger is not a man-eater. We are not part of her normal diet. We are more of an acquired taste. They say that if a tiger threatens you, unless you can climb a tree, stand up very tall. Homo erectus is not prey to the tiger. It attacks
creatures on four legs. This is why it tends to attack workers in the field. They are often crouched and mistaken for antelope or deer. This is why some workers have faces tattooed on the backs of their heads. So that if the tiger is about to attack, it will see a human face.

  63

  Brooklyn, 2008

  SIX WEEKS into my disability I look up from my desk to see a face smashed against the window. It looks like a freaky mask, but it turns out to be my friend Maria. She’s standing at the window with a basket in her hand, trying to see if I’m at my desk. I’m a bit of a sitting duck because my ground-floor office faces the street. Anyone can see if I am working. But to open the door is a chore. I have to get my walker, hop to the door, open it, hop back. Same thing when the friend leaves. It all seems like too much effort. But there is Maria with her face pressed to my window and picnic basket in hand.

  She’s brought me bread, wine, some cheese, and salami. “Let’s pretend we’re in France,” she says as she spreads a checkered tablecloth across my desk. Hard as I try not to, I find myself growing annoyed and sad. I don’t want to pretend I’m in France. I want to be in France. “You’ll see,” she says to me, “someday, a year from now, five years from now, or even later, or sooner, you’ll see the secret gift in all of this.”

  The secret gift? And now I am furious at Maria for ambushing me (even with a French picnic basket) and then suggesting that there can be some good outcome from all of this. What secret gift can there be? I think of all the terrible things that have happened to people throughout history. Was there a secret gift in concentration camps and pogroms? In the 9/11 terrorist attacks? If my husband’s plane crashes, what is the secret gift there? The only thing I can see as a blessing is that I won’t have to visit my mother for a while. I have a perfect excuse.

  When my father died three years earlier, my mother and I had a real falling out. I would have to say that I lost both of my parents at once. I didn’t blame my mother for not mourning my father’s passing. They’d had a rough marriage, and, for all his good looks and charm, he was a difficult man. I always thought she should have left him years ago, but as she once said to me, “That wasn’t done.” Her marriage was her own business, but I couldn’t forgive her for showing no compassion to me in my grief.

  At his memorial service, which I arrange, she complains that it is taking too long. She hates the fact that there are prayers. Over lunch she turns to me and asks, “What’s wrong, Mary? You look tired.” She doesn’t want his ashes so I receive them. Actually, FedEx delivers them to the chiropractor next door when I’m not home. When the chiropractor calls, I ask him if it’s from Bed Bath & Beyond, as I was expecting a delivery of towels. “Well,” he replies awkwardly, “it’s from beyond.”

  Not long after my father’s death, she tells my brother to get rid of everything. She doesn’t keep a single memento. Not a cuff link or a golf tee or one of his handmade silk ties. It is all given to the homeless or put in the trash. My father wore toupees, which he kept on a wig stand. Someone had painted a resemblance of my father on it. It was the one thing of his that I wanted, but my brother tells me he threw that in the trash as well. “I felt kind of strange about it,” my brother later admits. “Putting Dad’s head in the trash.”

  None of this, of course, should have surprised me. I’d known for years that there was something wrong with my mother. Something off about her inability to feel for others especially when it came to grief. I was told of the deaths of beloved aunts and uncles in the car on the way to school. When it was time for my dog Cupcake to be put down, my mother called a cab. She gave the driver ten dollars to cart the dog to the vet, patted her on the head one last time, and shut the car door. While the housekeeper and I sobbed in the driveway, Cupcake scrambled against the glass as she was taken away.

  I was young and didn’t have a word for it, but I understood that my mother wasn’t right. She was missing some component in her DNA. Over the years I learned to keep my sadness and grief to myself. My illnesses and injuries as well. I’d just assumed for whatever reason that I would see some tears over the man she’d been married to for sixty years. After all, she’d cried in front of the TV over JFK.

  When it comes time to tell her about my broken ankle, I don’t want to go into the details with her. By that time half of her is demented and the other half doesn’t really care. I had learned long ago not to share my mishaps with my mother. She always has something worse going on. I resist telling her at all.

  Now when she asks, “When will I see you?,” I am able to answer, honestly, not for a while. And not feel guilty about it. But I do break down and call her to tell her I had an accident.

  She replies, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. So, what else is new?”

  64

  Brooklyn, 2008

  WE HIRE a dog walker. We’ve never needed one before. Someone is usually home to take Snowball, our fluffy white dog, out. But now we do. Somehow we find Eddie. Eddie comes by once a day. He’s retired from a moving van company and is a veteran of Korea. Eddie has no teeth and can barely make it up my stairs. I have no idea how he walks dogs, but he does. Not many, but he has a few. He recites their names to me when he arrives as if they are his references that we should call. Homer is the only one I remember. Homer. Author of The Odyssey. How can I forget Homer and his journey of twenty years? Though for now I am Penelope, stuck at home but not yet weaving.

  Eddie arrives every afternoon at about two o’clock to take poor Snowball out as he teeters through his final years. Eddie drags himself up the stairs, looking for the dog that is usually in my office at my feet. There is no escaping Eddie. He huffs and puffs his way into my office. I am literally his captive. He tells me about all the dogs he’s ever owned or walked or fed a treat to. He talks about the war. On bad days (for me, that is) he speaks endlessly about all the furniture he’s moved over the years. He’s lived on our street since the year I was born and has innumerable tedious stories to share. The worst time is when he returns from the walk because then he has nothing but time on his hands.

  One day he comes in and starts telling me about his rottweiler named Pete. Eddie returned home from work and found poor Pete dead on the floor. He was just three years old. When he took Pete to the vet, the vet couldn’t figure out why Pete, a perfectly healthy dog, should have dropped dead. So the vet did an autopsy and found that Pete had swallowed a live wasp. The wasp had stung Pete to death inside of his gut. “And you know what,” Eddie told me, “when they opened up Pete’s stomach, that wasp was still alive. I saw it myself. It flew around the room and then it died.”

  65

  EVERY NIGHT when I’m a girl I walk my dogs. There are two of them, the mother named Cupcake and the daughter Puppets, whom I helped whelp one night when Mars burned red in the sky and looked as if it was going to kiss the earth. They don’t require leashes. They follow me wherever I go. I walk them down the long, dark suburban streets where we live. I walk them in the summer when the air is redolent with the smell of lilac and fresh-cut grass and in the winter when the streets are icy and the drifts piled high. My dogs always come when I call or whistle and I can walk them for hours. I walk them only in part because they need me to. Mainly I walk them so that I can get out of the house.

  I have to escape my father’s outbursts. This man who plays jazz piano, cries at movies, and cannot listen to classical music without conducting can’t seem to contain his free-floating rage either. The way the air turns heavy before a tropical storm, these outbursts are usually preceded by lectures. There is a right way and a wrong way for most things, including eating soup. With hot soup you push the spoon away from you, wiping the bottom on the side of your bowl as you blow onto it, thus avoiding dripping soup and a burned tongue. Cold soup you eat the opposite way, bringing the spoon toward you, wiping it on the edge. Or is it the other way around? I am never sure. There is a right way to load a dishwasher and a wrong way. A right way
to dress and act. The slightest movements we make are scrutinized. There’s a look in my father’s eyes when he’s getting angry. It’s something out of fairy tales and admonishing children’s books. These are the eyes of dragons and wild beasts. To this day I think they turned red.

  Yet he’s unpredictable. He might get angry if the lights were left on. Or he might not. If the garage door is open. We, his children, can’t seem to figure out the rules, and all of these are reasons for lectures that lead to the minefield that becomes my childhood. Yet he never gets mad at the serious things—the big mistakes we might make. Once, shortly after I get my driver’s license, I smash into the car of a friend of his that is parked in our driveway. I drive right into it. And all my father says is “Accidents happen. Be more careful next time.” And once when our neighbor’s daughter got pregnant and her father threw her out, I overheard my father say, “If anything ever happened to Mary, she could always come home.” Years later, when I am single and pregnant with my daughter, Kate, I will learn that he meant it.

  Yet small things drive him crazy. The things that he somehow takes as personal slights. A sign that we disrespect him. And once the lecture begins, the fight can’t be far behind. I sigh when being told to take a smaller bite of steak and he launches into “Get in the habit of being a lady.” Then our mother will say, “Can’t we have a meal in peace,” and the next thing we know the shouting begins. My mother retreats to the kitchen, my brother to the TV. And I leave the house. I have the excuse of my dogs.

  Fight or flight. I’ve always been interested in this primitive response. When I learned about it in school, it felt right. The two ways to deal with conflict. You face it or you flee it. It is, I suppose, if I wanted to analyze it (and I’m not sure I do), an explanation for my wanderlust. I am always in flight. It is a strange truth about me. I’ve never courted danger. That hasn’t been my M.O. I was never into suicide by adventure. No, for me it was always about escape. It was always about getting away.