Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “Just tell him you’ll make it up to him,” I said. “However he wants.”

  We watched as she put on a tight black sweater, gold earrings, and a fine dusting of turquoise eyeshadow.

  “Wish me luck,” she said, kissing each of us at the door. She looked nervous. Her fingers were wrapped tight around the handles of her bag and her lips were almost white, like frozen raspberries left too long in the freezer.

  “Luck,” said Sadhana. We locked the door behind her and went to the window, where we watched her sally forth to the bus stop, her long stride barely reined in by her high wedge sandals. Sadhana and I spent the rest of the evening eating crackers and resorting to Monopoly after our card game was derailed. On a lark, Sadhana had tossed the deck in the air, and we decided we were too lazy to pick them all up.

  Deana came back just after midnight with five garbage bags of clothes and a cardboard box containing what she called the rest of her life. I peeked in and saw necklaces tangled in with seashells and headbands, a curling iron, and a pack of pastels. I carried it into Mama’s bedroom and set it on the dresser, pushing to one side Mama’s matching hand mirror and brush set with the mermaid handles that had belonged to her grandmother. I looked up to see Sadhana’s reflection frowning at me.

  “What?” I said into the vanity mirror. “She has to put her stuff somewhere.”

  “Not there she doesn’t.”

  I shrugged and left it where it was, keeping one hand on it. Sadhana waited for a moment, then left the room.

  Deana herself was quiet and didn’t say much besides it was over. Freddy couldn’t forgive her because the car was his baby and he’d had it even before he met Deana. Sadhana was outraged and called him a pig, which made Deana flinch.

  “But it’s true,” said Sadhana. “It’s not like the car is gone, just towed. If he wasn’t broke he could just go get it.”

  “But he is broke,” said Deana. This was another way she was like Mama: never blaming other people for their feelings, even when the feelings in question were stupid.

  I was glad about the breakup and said so. “This is so much better,” I told her a few days later, when she was mostly done with sitting in baths and crying. I was curled up on Mama’s bed eating cookies, in sheets that were starting to feel gritty. I brushed away the newest crop of crumbs and they fell to the floor where they blended in with the wooden parquet. “Freddy wasn’t good enough for you. And now you don’t have to go back and forth all the time.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “This is better.” She sounded faraway, though, her words sagging as she rooted through a pile of clothes, looking for a clean shirt.

  “Also,” I said, “there are plenty of fish in the sea.”

  “That’s what they say,” said Deana, pulling on a T-shirt and shaking out her hair like a wet dog. “But what am I going to do with a fish?”

  Around noon one day Sadhana got a call from a school friend, and when she was done being surprised, she managed to accept an invitation to go swimming. By the time she put down the phone, I could see her shoulders pushing back, her pride taking hold. Whether it was her elation at being remembered by her friends or her relief at the prospect of getting out of the apartment, everything about her seemed more defined, as though she was focusing her gaze until it was sharp enough to see her out of the soft fog of our grief. She dug into her dresser, looking for a bathing suit.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “We haven’t finished our game of crib.” Deana had bought us an amazing cribbage board with a little plastic skunk that popped up. And her brother had mailed us a bunch of card decks from real casinos. All the cards had two of their corners clipped to show they’d been used, and we were cycling through the packs during our games, trying to guess which decks were lucky or unlucky.

  “We can finish when I get back.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know. That’s your problem.” Sadhana’s shrugs were somehow always elegant.

  I left the room and considered complaining to Deana, but instead I went and lay down in Mama’s bed, pulling the quilts and the sweaty smell of sheets up around me, even though it was the hottest point of the day. I turned over a pillow and found that both sides were equally strewn with long, clinging strands of red and black hair. Mama would have told Sadhana to take me along, oblivious to the fact that she and I didn’t share any friends and that tagging along ought to have been well below my dignity as the older sister. But Deana was part of the real world in a way that Mama never had been. Deana wouldn’t allude to the social hierarchy of teenage girls, but she knew enough to realize that if I wasn’t invited, I wasn’t wanted.

  I didn’t know what it was about Deana, how she could make the air around herself soft, so it was easy to move through it to her, to get close. Not as hard as it was with some people — with most people, really. She was like Mama that way, but maybe even more so, since she had no expectations of us, and no rules.

  At some point I fell into a hot and tossing sleep, and when I woke up I went into the kitchen, where Deana was eating a piece of toast and staring out at the balcony. She looked at me and said, “Have you been sleeping? You should get out of the house.”

  “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “Go for a walk. Pick up some groceries while you’re at it. I’ll make you a list.”

  “Okay.” I stood by while Deana wrote out a list in her neat printing, then handed it to me along with some money.

  “I have a yoga workshop to teach, so take your keys.” I nodded. “And take your time too. If you don’t get some exercise, I’m going to have to drag you to class one of these days.”

  It was the first time, apart from trips to the bathroom, that I’d been alone since Mama’s accident. I knew where the store was, but it was strange to have to think about how to get there since I was so used to following. I walked two blocks in the wrong direction, out of habit maybe, or some secret mission known only to my feet, before stopping up short in front of a fish shop that smelled bad enough to snap me back to attention. At the grocery store, when I finally got there, everything went smoothly except for when I saw the sympathetic cashiers, whose look of open pity was almost too much for me to bear alone.

  “You take care now, darling,” said one of them. I almost started bawling.

  When I came back, bags swinging from the crooks of my arms, I saw Deana sitting low on the front stoop, arms resting on piles of garbage bags to either side. She was wearing a backpack and a cap pulled low on her forehead against the sun. A queen on a black polyethylene throne.

  I called out to her when I got close. “Deana!”

  Her shoulders jumped, and one hand flew to her hat. “Goodness, honey, you scared me.” She pulled me to her, and I toppled over onto the pile of bags.

  “Mind the groceries,” I said. I was worried the eggs were going to smash. “What’s going on?”

  A green Thunderbird pulled up, Freddy’s car, rescued somehow from the tow lot in the far industrial reaches of the city. And it was Freddy, I guessed, behind the wheel, who passed his eyes over me for the briefest of moments before bending his head to pop the trunk.

  “Sweetheart, I’ve got to go,” said Deana. “I’ll see you later, okay?” With a loud smack she planted a kiss on my cheek, just next to my ear, and started throwing garbage bags into the car.

  “When?” I said. I glared at Freddy, who kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror. The Thunderbird was parked in the loading zone again.

  “Tonight.” She passed her hand over the top of my hair and squeezed my shoulder. “I’ll see you tonight.” She got in the car and waved as Freddy cut in front of a minivan and drove away.

  I put the groceries away and went to bed, where I read and dozed and waited for Sadhana to get home from her party.

  “Did you see th
is?” she said, when she came in the room. She held out her hand, and it was shaking.

  It was a note, taken off the refrigerator where Deana had stuck it with a magnet. I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it.

  “She’s not coming back,” said Sadhana. She looked panicked. “She says she loves us, but she’s not coming back.”

  After Deana left, Uncle was stuck with us. A friend of Mama’s named Sylvia came by to check on us and, after seeing the state of the apartment, began a series of prodding conversations with me and Sadhana (how long before I turned eighteen, what were the exact provisions of Mama’s will, who were our nearest relatives living in Canada) before embarking upon some able and unimaginable negotiations with Uncle. Within one week of her campaign of competence, our rightful guardian had rented his house in Dollard-des-Ormeaux and made arrangements to move into our apartment.

  We didn’t take to Uncle. For all that he was our only living relative on the continent, not to mention the only one we’d ever met, we were in the habit of regarding him as something of a stranger. Though he’d been working at the shop since Papa died, he had rarely visited. He had consulted with Mama on certain matters related to the business or the building, but when she asked him to stay for tea or for supper, he had always declined with a nod almost too decisive to be quite civil.

  What we did know did not please us. Every change at the shop had been a change to something Papa had done, a kind of undermining. Never mind that between us we could scarcely remember Papa. We knew from Mama’s stories that there had always been a bit of bad blood between her and Uncle, and Mama got along with everybody, so that was really saying something. The main thing we knew about Uncle was that seventeen years ago he had offered Mama fifteen thousand dollars on his parents’ behalf for her to go away and leave Papa alone. The other was that he had pitied Papa for having daughters instead of sons. This was a fact that both outraged us and inclined us to regard Uncle as at least a little bit stupid.

  Mama had looked pained when she explained that in India male children were more valued than daughters, that it was not at all unusual for someone to think that way. When we asked why, she said it was complicated. “It’s beyond my own understanding,” she said, “or I’d try. But your Papa didn’t believe that. He told your uncle never to so much as suggest that he was not the happiest man in the world to have two little girls.”

  Uncle arrived with two matching Samsonite suitcases and a very modern vacuum cleaner with a see-through canister. He told us that one of the suitcases used to belong to Papa.

  “Our mother bought them for us before we came to Canada. What do you think about that?” He swung one out in front of us as if it were a dog we might want to pet. With a feeling of duty, I reached out to touch its cracked blue leather, but neither Sadhana nor I made any reply. “So that would be your grandmother,” said Uncle after a moment.

  Papa’s parents had not troubled themselves much with us after his death. A letter had come that Mama had read once and put away. And another, later letter had arrived while Deana was with us, inquiring about the terms of Mama’s will, as if there were some final proviso her forgiving heart might have led her to include, something amounting to a conciliatory message from their dead son.

  But there had been no unexpected stipulations, either rancorous or appeasing. Uncle was to pay for what we needed from our share of the profits of the bagel shop, which had passed to me and Sadhana after Mama’s death. He was to continue to run it, as he had since Papa died, with his manager’s salary and one-third of a share in the income. All in all, Mama’s will was a standard legal document, which, when it was read out loud by her lawyer, seemed like a mistake. Not its contents, but the thing itself. We had always believed that Mama never did anything by the books.

  Uncle frowned as he put down the suitcase. “I suppose your mother told you bad things about your grandmother,” he said.

  “Not at all,” said Sadhana, which made me glad. I was too indignant for words.

  “Ah.”

  He put both suitcases down and stepped around us on an appraising tour of the apartment that was over in five minutes. He pointed inside our mother’s bedroom. “That is where I will be sleeping, if you would like to get it ready for me.” He sounded imperious, but I could sense a hesitation to go in amongst our mother’s things. I told him we would take care of it.

  “Good,” he said. “And it is almost seven o’clock, if one of you would like to start making supper.”

  There were two weeks left before school started, and Sadhana said later that it was a shame we wasted them being afraid of our uncle. Though he was cold and alien, he was not cruel, but his manner was so different from anything we were used to that we cringed and floundered when he told us what to do. Apart from asking us to cook and clean, he didn’t seem to take much of an interest in us. We watched him sidelong whenever we happened to be escaping his notice, ogling the belly stretching his shirt out over his belt and the set look of his thick lips beneath the thick, black beard that fell three inches past his chin.

  Uncle was as strange to us as a new kind of tree, a fir in a grove of maples, and he might have felt the same way about us, since he had always been a bachelor. He said things like “You must fight your feminine tendencies towards lasciviousness” and “You are in league with each other, I know,” which baffled and insulted us but gave me the idea that we made him nervous. Taken with his tendency to leave us to ourselves, Uncle’s remarks were like those of an armchair anthropologist, a Victorian studying the natives by virtue of reports and illustrations alone. Like the first attempts of the ancients to track the stars, he managed to get some things right, for who were we in league against if not him?

  We did our best to keep house, though we had no experience and he was impatient with the results. When he was at work, it became a game, and though Sadhana usually took the lead, we both took pleasure in the measuring out of ingredients, the chopping of vegetables, even the wiping down of the counter — in all of the things that seemed to connect us to Mama. It had become possible to cook without thinking of the chicken we’d made, though we also did not buy any meat, keeping instead to Mama’s few vegetarian cookbooks and the handwritten recipes she’d tucked inside.

  Stirring a curry as Uncle finished a shift downstairs, taking turns performing elaborate taste tests between seasonings, my sister and I found ourselves laughing, and to have that feeling return so suddenly, when I thought it might never be given back to us, almost stopped me up short. It was more than I could do not to cry, which, since I was crying about a lack of crying, was enough to make me laugh or cry all over again.

  I reflected, when she stood in profile to me at the stove, that my sister was very beautiful. She had always been pretty, but she had finally grown into her high brow and cheekbones. When she caught me staring, Sadhana smiled and handed me the wooden spoon to take a turn.

  But when Uncle clomped upstairs in his steel-toed boots, our peace was shattered. Hunched over the bowl with focused scrutiny, he tasted the curry and declared it inedible, even as flecks of it caught in his beard and moustache as he bolted it down. “It is a shame your mother didn’t teach you how to cook,” he said between bites. “But then, I suppose she did not know herself.”

  As our routine shifted with the start of school, Uncle began flexing his authority like a long unused muscle. Accustomed only to the management of employees in the bagel shop, his preferred method of interaction was issuing orders. We soon discovered more than we wanted to know of his views on the evils of contemporary culture. There seemed to be no end to the list of things Uncle did not approve of: music, sleeping in, caffeine, movies, phone calls for any purpose besides making plans, bright colours, Hallmark holidays, novels, exhibitions of emotion. Our list was shorter and consisted only of him, and possibly culottes, an article of clothing for which our mother had had an odd fascination.

  Weekday mornings w
ere always a battle, for, like Mama, he woke very early, around five, and he could not understand why we did not spring out of bed and dash to the kitchen with the alacrity of hungry cats. “You are the laziest children I have ever heard of!” he would bellow from the doorway to our bedroom. “You are a disgrace!” He was impatient because he had to take a break from his early shift to wake us and ensure we were on our way to school. Sluggish and indifferent as we were in the mornings, he did not trust us to rouse ourselves. He cursed the gossiping he suspected of robbing our sleep, as if anything besides our separate unhappiness would have forced us to keep silent vigil throughout the night.

  Besides the difficulty of pushing through tiredness that felt like six feet of water, I, for one, was not anxious to go to school. Everyone knew that our mother had died over the summer, and I could feel the pity and curiosity of my classmates like a stinging brand that singled me out with its fresh pain. Everything I said or did in the mornings was dilatory or cantankerous, and Sadhana likewise.

  We were still in our pyjamas when Sadhana tried to tell Uncle about a blockage in his sacral chakra. I didn’t think she believed in that stuff, and neither did I, except for how Mama had told me my heart chakra was strong and with Sadhana it was vishuddha, the one in the throat that controls communication. Anything Mama told us had a truth to it that went deeper than lucid belief. It was knowledge that came to us like melodies or the days of the week, information that was simply there rather than something up for debate. Mama had learned how to read auras from a guru in California, which she said was a Whole Other Story. So when Sadhana started talking to Uncle about the six-petalled chakra located more or less in the area of his groin, it was clear, to me at least, that she was trying to insult him rather than help him find his way to personal enlightenment. A blocked sacral chakra meant the inhibition of joy, enthusiasm, and creativity. But Uncle wouldn’t even listen long enough to be insulted.