Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  That’s true: I don’t need him.

  Now, that is. I don’t need him today. But nothing stays the same forever. One can’t actually know the future. Where more than one person is involved, there isn’t such a thing, for either, as total knowledge, or control. It isn’t over — until it is. It isn’t over, and then it is. I suppose it’s true I don’t exactly want to lose him entirely. Not exactly. Not entirely.

  Skye is watching me. She says, “She’s not with us. She’s in a world of her own.”

  She’s up, off the ground, and is dusting herself off. “Where have you gone, Pri?” she asks me. Alex watches closely.

  Thankfully I am able to say, without missing a beat, “Oh, I was just thinking about the strange weather. About how long we have left. You seeing buds on trees this morning, and vomit-launching vultures. Climate change. Our uncertain future.”

  Washing her hands, she says, “Climate change? Ah no, no such thing. It’s a hoax.” She snorts to emphasize she’s being ironic. She watches as I pour hot syrup into the bowl of nuts, seeds, and grains. I stir the mixture with a wooden spoon, conscious that I am being watched expectantly, and spread it flat on cookie sheets. I hand the spoon to Skye. She works the entire bowl of the spoon into her mouth and makes garbled flattering sounds around it. I set the alarm for ten minutes — and who knows why, but we all stay right there in the kitchen, I on one side of the granite counter, she and Alex on the other, the smell of the dead thing like a bell clanging behind them.

  In the sudden quiet I ask, “How’s Liz? Isn’t she supposed to be coming sometime soon?”

  Alex slides around to the fridge, opens it, but doesn’t take anything out of it. Her distractedness is irritating. I wonder if Skye can see it, and I feel a little embarrassed.

  Liz, Skye’s partner, who teaches at a university on the other side of the continent, is indeed coming for the Christmas holidays, Skye says. She’s supposed to be here end of next week, but who knows for sure? She sounds sarcastic when she says this. Everyone has their little troubles, don’t they? I tell her they’ll have to come for dinner, and ask, “Excited?” dancing my eyebrows up and down to suggest a slight lewdness.

  She looks down at the counter, laughs, and says, “You know, Liz and I have been together twenty-one years. No, twenty-two. Eh, twenty — twenty-something. We stopped counting a while ago. We’ve been doing this back-and-forth thing for nine of those. Not my idea of a good time, but that’s the way it is.”

  Oh dear, sounds like there really is trouble over there, too. But I am not about to start prying. There isn’t time. I’ll ask when there’s enough time to get into it. I do wonder, however, and not for the first time, why she’s never gone out to Vancouver. Vancouver! Imagine that. Who doesn’t want to go to Vancouver? Liz comes every three weeks for five days, but Skye has never been. One does wonder why. They’re very lovey-dovey when you see them during those five days. But I sometimes imagine she has a lover, someone who is there with her at this moment saying, Oh, Lizzy, just move here, why don’t you. Perhaps she and Skye have some kind of agreement. And Skye, what about her? She’s never expressed an interest in anyone else, at least not in front of us, but who knows, really? You can’t know everything about a person, can you, even if you think you’re close to them?

  I say, “I often wish I’d met Alex when we were younger, that we’d been together long enough to forget how long it has been.” I look at Alex and, smiling, say, “It would have been nice to have grown up, as it were, together. You know, we’d have the same memories.”

  Alex, fumbling with opening a package of cheese from the fridge, responds, but the three seconds or so that it takes for her to do so feel like an eternity. “We could fight about details remembered differently, and who’s right,” she says.

  What is she trying to do? This is so unlike her to drag an outsider into our kerfuffle.

  Skye does a little chair dance and looks at me and says, “So. Who’s the visitor? What’s his name?”

  “Prakash,” I say.

  Alex, answering over me, says, “University friend. She hasn’t seen him in years.”

  Skye repeats his name and asks, “What kind of name is that? Sounds, hmm, Indian. Hindu, Muslim? I mean, is it okay to ask a question like that? Don’t want to be rude, you know.”

  I laugh. Alex says, “Hindu. From Uganda.”

  “I’ve known him since I was nineteen,” I elaborate. “We met in our first year. He’s a year younger than I. Which means our friendship is my longest here in Canada. He and his family were refugees from Idi Amin in ’72. We haven’t seen each other since Alex and I came down here to live.”

  Skye draws her eyebrows up as she makes the calculations. “Ugandan Indian. I remember that era. Nobody wanted them. Good old Pierre, though. You don’t hear much about the Ugandan refugees nowadays,” she says.

  The alarm goes off, and I remove the two trays from the oven. “He was so much like a boy when I met him, he didn’t fit in with the university culture. If he were a girl, you’d have called him slight. The other students used to insist he was from Biafra, not Uganda. People weren’t all that kind.”

  “Well, we’re a cruel species,” Skye says. “You have to marvel at how people like him learn to fit in at all.”

  I am eager to reveal something redemptive, something endearing about Prakash for Alex’s ears. And the words tumble from my mouth as I think of them, the ideas constructed on the fly. “He didn’t make a lot of friends, but he managed. He could make fun of himself, play with the very kinds of things people laughed at. For instance, he pronounces v’s the way we pronounce w’s, and w’s like our v’s. Not something, you’d think, that university students would make fun of, but they did.” I don’t tell her that Fiona and I also teased him about this, trying to teach him where to put his tongue and how to press his teeth to his lips. “So we’d go out for dinner,” I carry on, “and he’d make sure whoever was at the table was listening before he asked the waiter what weggies were on the daily special. Of course, the waiter would be stumped for a few seconds, then you’d see the dawning and earnest attempt not to react, and you just knew he was wishing his job allowed him to make fun of this customer’s pronunciation. Yes, he could laugh at himself and make you laugh with him.”

  I am the only one laughing at this little story, bemused too that Skye and Alex seem unsure of how to react to someone making fun of his own accent.

  “You were his closest friend, then?” Skye asks.

  I turn the contents of each tray and return them to the oven, resetting the timer, thinking fast how best to answer this question so that it provides Alex with an answer that would be useful to her, too. “I and my roommate at the time, misfits all.” I grin, putting air quotes around the word roommate.

  She slides her head awkwardly side to side on her shoulders, imitating an Indian dancing doll, as she says, “Oh, yes? And?”

  I assume she’s asking about the supposed roommate, but Alex answers, “He had a crush on her.”

  Said in a different tone, she might have been teasing me, but this is more like a complaint. I am beginning to think she actually means to open a discussion in front of Skye. I grab it by its neck and deal with it.

  “It might have been in the air, but nothing came of it, naturally. We were both out of our element. He was a nerdy kid, and I was just beginning to understand things about myself, about my sexuality. It was so odd back then, such excitement and terror at once.” Skye’s elbows dig into the granite counter, her head propped in her cupped hands, and she’s batting her eyes at me to continue. I was uncomfortable and guarded around the other Caribbean students, I say, terrified of being shunned in that community, and of news of my depravity — that’s how they’d have seen it — travelling back home to my family and their friends. “Prakash didn’t know people from the Caribbean. He was safe to hang out with,” I add. “We found each other. Two a
wkward brown kids — I was nerdy in my own way — aware of how different and uncool we both were, and what a friendship between us could do for us both. But, of course, we had different ideas about what we wanted from that friendship.”

  I am telling this story to Alex, but I look at Skye and add that his parents, the instant they heard about me, considered us, according to what Prakash had relayed to me back then, a couple. My parents, on learning I’d made friends with a man, were pleased. Actually, my mother was more than pleased: she was relieved. She’d ask me every so often if Prakash had “popped the question” yet.

  Skye grimaces, and out of the corner of my eye I see Alex has remained stony — but she’s listening.

  I tell them that it took a while for my mother to finally hear me when I said for the umpteenth time that I was not interested in marrying him. She then, without having met him, began to find her own faults with him, by way, I suppose, of dealing with her great disappointment that there was not soon going to be a wedding in the family. She actually began to warn me, as if I needed to be warned off him: Indians like to think they are better than we are. Alex is used to hearing about these kinds of prejudices among diasporic Indians, but Skye has a look of horror. I am not sure if this look is because I would say such a thing or because of any fact in that assessment. I carry on about my mother, saying that when I reminded her that Prakash was Ugandan, not Indian, she responded that since he and his parents were fluent in Hindi and Gujarati but not in English, they would imagine themselves to be truer Indians than we were, even though they were not from India, and she didn’t want to be disrespected by them just because her only language was English and she was born in Trinidad. I laugh as I relate this, but Skye looks uncomfortable, and I imagine she is wondering if there is any racism in all of this. Alex sees her discomfort, too. A reassuring nod passes from Alex to Skye, and Skye relaxes. I appreciate the calm that seems suddenly to be descending on us, even as the source of my story is the pebble in Alex’s shoe.

  When out of concern for my mother’s prejudice I defended Prakash and his family, I conclude, my mother, who one cannot ever really successfully argue with, dug in her heels: he might have been born and brought up in Africa, she said, but he’s still an Indian, to which I responded she sounded just like Amin.

  To this, Skye says, “Yeah,” in a tone that makes the word rhyme with duh-uh.

  Grateful for this by-the-way opportunity to throw some light on my relationship with Prakash, I elaborate: “I knew all along that marriage and men were not for me. But I didn’t at that time — back then, in those days — feel I could tell this to Prakash. And so he would try to hold my hand, I’d pull away and slap his shoulder affectionately, and say, What’s that about, come on, moron, you’re like my brother, and he’d shrug, mutter a string of words like I know, I know, I’m just . . . it’s not a big deal, you should know that.”

  Alex is listening to every word I say. This is all new information. It’s easier for me to expound in front of Skye. I get the impression that in front of Skye it’s easier, too, for Alex to hear.

  “Same here. I know exactly of what you speak,” says Skye. “I used to have friends — guys — who knew they didn’t have the chance of a snowflake in hell with me, and that was always the way: they treat you, at first, as if you’re one of them, respectful, totally accepting, and then, next thing you know, you’re fending them off. Get away, shoo, go away. It was as if they were deaf and blind.”

  “So you, too,” I say excitedly, and add, “I always used to have the conversation — But you’re like my brother, don’t you see? Every two or three months, the same conversation. And I was so boyish in those days, it was amazing.”

  Alex says, “It’s not amazing. They’re guys. They know you’re a ‘woman.’ Everything else about you, to them, is inconsequential. Beneath your tomboyishness, under the boy clothes, the forthrightness, they know what body parts you have, and that’s all that matters.”

  I wish she hadn’t said this. Skye and I affirm the boyishness we see in one another, mostly by never contradicting it or making mention of anything that might point in even an askance way to the lie — for want of a kinder word — in it.

  I insist on finishing what I want Alex to hear. “But in our last year of university,” I continue, “I realized that I really did like him and that if I wanted to keep him as a friend, I’d have to tell him that I wasn’t and never would be interested in guys — not just him, but any guy. He didn’t understand at first. But he too wanted the friendship, so he backed off. It’s been almost thirty-­nine years, you know, that he and I have known each other.”

  The timer goes off again. I feel exposed and a little ticked off with Alex, but I mustn’t show it. I remove the trays and set them on wire racks to cool. Alex comes around and pulls some of the hot granola off. She blows on the chunk and pops it in her mouth. The aroma of the toasted nuts and oats hasn’t tempered the stench of dead something or other. I suggest we go into the living room.

  After we’ve settled there, Skye wants to know, “So, Pri, what happened? Did he ever get married? Or is he still pining?”

  I wish she’d leave the subject alone. “He married,” I say, adding quick on the heels of that, “So, what plans do you and Liz have for her time down here?”

  But Alex is already saying, over my words, “It was an arranged marriage.”

  If only Skye would answer my question, but she says to Alex, “Is his wife coming, too?”

  “Nope. He’s coming on his own. Apparently, it’s an unhappy marriage. They live in the same house, but they don’t speak to one another, except about the children,” Alex says, recounting things I recently told her as if she’d acquired knowledge of it on her own, and as if I weren’t there. It is clear — at least to me — that she and I are talking to each other, Skye merely a microphone into which we are speaking.

  “He has children. Three. Typical Indian man, very committed to his children,” I say.

  “Ugandan,” Skye corrects.

  I laugh, and quickly add, “Very good. But enough. I want to know what you and Liz will be doing. You’ll have to come for dinner. Right, Alex?” Alex doesn’t respond, which seems rude to me, but I guess she has only one thing on her mind today.

  After a few minutes of inconsequential chatter, Skye is ready to be driven back to her house. I have no choice. If only Alex had learned to drive. It’s a sore point between us, as I must always be at her beck and call. And in an instance like this, help from her would have been most welcome.

  I go to the bedroom to ready myself, hurrying. I don’t want to leave Skye and Alex out there together too long. And, just as I feared, as I reach the living room again, I see them standing close to each other. Their voices are low. They don’t see me. I retreat a couple steps as Alex says, “There’s something she hasn’t told me. Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “Yes, but that isn’t news. You’ve known this all along. And what does it matter, anyway?”

  “I don’t like having been made a fool of. I feel as if I don’t know her.”

  “Okay, but what is there to do about it? Especially now?”

  “Nothing. But it’s not so easy, Skye. To simply shrug it off and get on with life. I feel I need to understand what I’ve been dealing with here.”

  Skye says, somewhat flatly, “You need to let it go, Al. Let them do their thing. You’re doing what’s best for you, right?” There’s a pause, and I wonder if they know I am listening. Sky asks again, “I’m right, aren’t I, Alex?” I don’t hear Alex’s response, and I wonder what it is that she’s doing that must be best for her.

  Skye, I suddenly realize, acted this morning as if she were learning about Prakash for the first time. But now it seems that Alex had long ago told her about our thorny situation. If so, then I was lied to today by both of them.

  I’m about to step into the room when Skye continues, and
I pull back again. “I have to say it really worries me that this bothers you so much. Just get to the end of today and I’m sure tomorrow you’ll feel a lot better.”

  Thank God for Skye. I suppose it’s good to have a friend we can each confide in, even if it’s the same friend. If she can calm Alex, that’s just great. Later, at the end of today, or better yet, tomorrow after he’s gone, I’ll begin anew with Alex and she’ll see that all’s well between us. She’ll suffer through this next day and a half, and perhaps that’s just the way it has to be. Just until tomorrow, and then I’m sure everything will be all right. Yes, Skye, reassure her, thank you.

  Skye’s hand is on Alex’s shoulder, comforting her as I enter the room. Her thumb rests caringly on Alex’s neck. Alex hears my approach and steps back and, so parted, Skye angles her body to include me. Alex looks oddly as if she’s been caught; she knows I like my privacy, I am not in favour of us discussing with friends any troubles we might be having. It’s easy to lose friends when they feel they have to sympathize with one or the other. But Skye is different. She has broad enough shoulders to carry us both. Conceding that she knows more than I had realized, I say, “Hey, the weekend will fly by. In no time we’ll have our lives back and our home to ourselves again.” I wink at Alex. She looks away.

  “That’ll be a good thing,” Skye says. Is she being sarcastic? I feel chastised. But if her intention is to encourage Alex, I suppose I can tolerate it. With her palm open flat, she taps Alex’s cheek, two quick gentle claps, affectionately, as if rousing Alex from a hypnotic slumber. Best to hurry and take her back home, I think, before this deteriorates into a full-blown mess, with her playing counsellor, therapist, and judge.

  We’re about to exit the front door, Skye ahead of me, but I step back and ask Alex if she’d mind just giving the front stoop a quick sweep. Skye turns as I say this, and as I had intended, she witnesses me kiss Alex on her lips and say, “Love you. Won’t be long.” Alex pulls back, surprised perhaps, which makes sense as we haven’t been close all day, but she seems a touch embarrassed. Nothing to be done, I think. By the end of the weekend, this will all have passed.