Finally Ravi said, “Ah, forget it. The old man can kiss my skinny brown ass.” He tossed down his cigarette butt and crushed it with the heel of his boot, and Carlos chuckle-coughed so hard he really did start coughing.
“That’s it, tough guy,” he said once he could talk again. “Keep it up so the rest of us can go on sitting pretty.” They went inside then, and Sadhana and I had a lengthy tête-à-tête on the subject of whether or not Carlos would be a good kisser or if his stubble would be too itchy.
Occasionally, we’d prod Uncle for information on the bagel boys.
“Ravi?” said Uncle, after a not-too-subtle probing from Sadhana. “He’s still there, though he’s a bad, disrespectful boy.” It had been a week or more since we’d last seen Ravi outside smoking, muttering his laconic complaints about Uncle to his co-workers. Uncle grunted as he got up out of his chair in the living room, a sure sign we’d disturbed his peace enough to drive him back to work. “But I know his parents a little, and I don’t want to hear from them that I didn’t give him a chance.”
My first overtures came after Christmas and consisted of matches and diet Coke. I’d anticipate the evening smoke breaks and hurry downstairs and out the back door, offering a struck match or a beverage to the boys on shift like an assiduous smoking-room attendant. Some of the boys thought it was funny and a little cute, though Carlos and the older guys worried that my uncle would catch me out there and they’d catch an earful in turn for paying too much attention to the weird kid. Sadhana thought I was embarrassing myself, and stayed upstairs.
I didn’t set out to make a play for Ravi. I would have been happy with anyone, any boy’s attention. But Ravi was the first one to accept a match and then touch my wrist as he cupped his hands over mine, leading the cigarette between his lips to a kiss with the flame.
Up close, Ravi looked different, like he hadn’t yet grown all the way into his face. His nose and lips seemed outsize for his thin frame, the way his hands and feet, too, seemed like buds set to burst from a narrow stem. Carlos, who was small and sturdy, with tattooed biceps, told Ravi he ought to bulk up. “Best way to get the women,” he said. “Free weights.”
“Seems like I’ve already got,” said Ravi, with a tilt of his head to the spot next to the ash bucket. I was out there again, this time with ginger beers from the Caribbean grocery store, a treat even Carlos couldn’t resist.
“Maybe,” said Carlos. “How can you tell with the little flowers? They’re so ripe they bring in all the bees.” He looked me up and down, from my huge winter boots to my thighs as thick as bolster cushions and my blue and green plaid school skirt. My turquoise hair band. The down jacket I used to disguise my drooping belly and big breasts. I was getting to be a heavy teenager, though I went to the kind of school where nobody teased, only judged, and sometimes I had to wonder whether my group of friends was very select because I wanted it that way.
“You don’t need to be bribing the boys, chica,” said Carlos, after he finished most of his drink in one long slug. By the door it was warm, but he stamped his feet in the snow. He was one of the only guys who wore gloves out on smoke breaks.
“I’m not. But I know how hot it is by the ovens.”
“And out here just the opposite.” Carlos squinted up at the cloud cover before flipping his empty bottle end over end across the alley into the big recycling bin next to the dumpsters. It clinked like a round of celebratory toasts. “Stay warm, chica. Ravi, break’s over.”
“In a minute.”
The door closed behind Carlos, and then Ravi and I were alone. He hooked his hand into the small of my back, pulling me to his chest in a quick, rough move. Then, my mouth still open in surprise, he slipped in his tongue, rolling it around and around in wet, silent circles. When he pulled away, my chin was wet and I wiped it with my hand.
“Later,” said Ravi. He passed me his empty bottle, and after he went inside, I carried it up to the bedroom I shared with Sadhana and left it on the windowsill. Sadhana noticed the dusting of flour on my skirt and jacket from where I’d pressed against Ravi’s apron.
“Which one?” she asked. She was propped up in bed reading one of Mama’s cookbooks. Uncle expected us to make his meals, and he was getting tired of the sandwiches we’d reverted to after he complained about all the salt. Grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna fish sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches. Witch food, he called it, as though every one we made and served to him was just another hex.
“Ravi.”
“Hmm.” She wouldn’t look up, as though finding a better recipe for rogan josh was every bit as interesting as my first kiss. I didn’t care, because I was floating.
To the glass bottle on the windowsill, I added other mementos. Even before things got messed up, Sadhana started calling it the altar of my fallen idol. There was a button that had popped off one of my sweaters when Ravi was pushing his hand up under it. (“Your own button?” said Sadhana, unimpressed.) There was a pink ribbon he’d tied around a baggie of Hershey’s Kisses. I wondered where a boy would ever find a ribbon and viewed it as an almost-proof of real love. There were the silver cigarette wrappings we’d folded into mangled origami creations, and stacks of bottle caps, evidence of time whiled away in the alley before it was dark enough to kiss freely. And a ticket stub from a movie that was our only real date.
“You really like him?” said Sadhana one day, as though she was considering taking an interest.
“Yes,” I said. The truth was that I liked all of them. I wanted all of them in the way that a dissonant chord wants resolution, setting a vibration out into the world. In the way that a teenager wants her life to get started.
Ravi was tall, or seemed it. At sixteen, I was a full two inches shorter than I would be later. This meant that when we kissed outside in the alley, I had my face turned up to reach him, my head tilted back, and after a full few hours of it, a pain in my lower back that I had to treat with downward dog pose and a series of hot water bottles. Sadhana suggested that kissing shouldn’t come with so many medical complaints, and that Ravi was probably doing it wrong.
When we finally did it, upstairs in my own bed while Uncle was working and Sadhana was out, I felt both triumphant and chagrined. I knew what sex was, but I didn’t know that it could be so fast.
My sister and I stopped bleeding at the same time. That was just how it happened. Both of us pretended to get our periods, but I discovered Sadhana was lying when I emptied the bathroom garbage and there was nothing in it. When I asked her about it, Sadhana said it was normal.
“Don’t worry, sis,” she said. She was rinsing her face, tilting up her chin in front of the mirror. “It just means I’m an elite athlete.” She was running a lot, every day, sometimes twice a day. “It’s a thing that can happen to athletes, you know. Not bleeding.”
“If you say so.” Under normal circumstances, we bled together at the new moon, according to one of Mama’s schemes. In consultation with a lunar calendar, she’d pulled the blinds and left on nightlights until, through some sympathetic trick of hormones and her own iron will, all three of us had synched up our cycles to the light and the dark, to each other and to the sky. That was the way things used to be in the wild, Mama told us. There were rhythms and mysteries we could only observe, never understand.
“What about you?” Sadhana met my eyes in the mirror as I slipped past her out of the bathroom.
“Oh. Switched to tampons,” I said over my shoulder. “Flushable.”
I wondered if I had lost track of the days, or if it was just one more thing from our mother we were losing. I didn’t want to be the one breaking the chain.
The thing with Ravi had been going on only a couple of months, but it was already wearing thin. And thin was part of the problem. He made no secret of his admiration for skinny blondes when they came into the store, more often in tow as the daughters of American tourists than as bona fide bagel customers.
“That one right there,” he said on his break. There was a girl on the sidewalk next to a red Fiat, wearing tight blue jeans and a green, down-filled bomber jacket. She had her hands stuffed in her pockets and no hat. She looked cuter than I’d realized was possible in a Montreal winter.
“I’d take her for a spin,” he said. I stared at him.
“In that car there,” Ravi said, and laughed. “Nice car.”
Unable to make any response, I stood there with him and we watched as she opened the trunk for her father, who was carrying two big brown grocery bags full of bagels. From the looks of it, at least four dozen. The girl noticed us staring, and as she got into the car, I was shocked to see her smile at Ravi. He nodded back as they pulled away.
“Ooh, ooh, oh,” he said. Then he laughed and squeezed my ass, or tried to, through the padding of my winter coat.
Another afternoon, I caught him admiring Sadhana’s legs as she slipped by us to go up to the apartment.
“Your sister, she’s in pretty good shape, eh?”
“Don’t even.”
Every time he seemed to pull away, I’d ramp up my efforts to the next level. I was already trying to eat less at supper so I could lose a few pounds. And I started wearing makeup. Deep carnelian blush and teal eyeshadow that Deana had left behind. Sadhana mocked me when she saw me putting it on before going out to the alley.
“Why bother? It’s so dark out there, anyway.”
“Not that dark.”
“Well, hurry up. I need the bathroom.” This was right after supper, but I hadn’t yet caught on to her routine.
I felt like I could make headway with Ravi if he’d only agree to see me away from work. After our one trip to the movies, where we’d groped in the back of the theatre, we were back to smoke breaks and the odd half-hour after his shift ended.
“It’s not his fault,” I told Sadhana, “that he has strict parents. They only want him dating Indian girls.”
“You are an Indian girl.”
“Not really. Not like they want.”
It was always easier, for some reason, to know what I wasn’t.
One morning in April I woke up feeling fluish and decided to sleep through breakfast. I could hear the clattering in the shop downstairs as the firewood was delivered, and though this was not a sound that could be slept through, I shoved my head under the pillow until the stone heaviness in my stomach turned to a dizzy jig and I dashed for the bathroom.
“Hurry, please.” I knocked on the door. I knew it was Sadhana in there because the newspaper was neatly refolded on the kitchen table, meaning Uncle had already gone downstairs.
“One sec.”
“I’m going to be sick.”
I heard the toilet flush and then the water running and finally Sadhana was opening the door and making way for me. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her face washed and still damp.
When I came out, clutching my stomach, she said, smirking, “Hope it isn’t morning sickness.” Then her eyes got wide as we stared at each other.
“Oh my god,” I said.
The day after Uncle found out, Ravi was gone. I waited out by the back door in the spring drizzle, my bare feet shoved into galoshes, a sweater over my pyjamas. Sadhana had defended me to Uncle during the long night of shouting, but when we finally went to bed, she refused to commiserate. It was plain she agreed with him I was ruining my life.
Carlos came out shortly before ten. “I heard the news, chica. A little sprout on the way? Ravi must have spilled the beans before he split.”
“What?”
“Not me, but he told someone. And today his locker is empty.” Carlos pulled out his cigarettes and shook the last one out. “I went looking for the pack he owes me. But nada. No joy.”
Uncle took the news of Ravi’s disappearance with a grim resignation. His view seemed to be that there was no use deploring the irresoluteness of a teenage boy. It was only critical that we should find him. Uncle paid a visit to his bank and then to Ravi’s parents.
“He’s going to offer them money to make Ravi marry you,” said Sadhana, after Uncle had driven away in his best suit and turban. “Dowry.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. Ravi was Hindu, not Sikh. But I wondered. I pictured myself in a red wedding sari or a puffed-sleeve white gown like Princess Diana’s and felt less sorry than I expected. Perhaps Ravi would agree to a fire-walking ceremony, just like Mama and Papa had at their wedding.
Sadhana, sensing my reverie, was annoyed. “As if you’re not getting into huge trouble for this.” She was still smarting from the lecture Uncle had delivered after our last report cards, which showed her grades sliding below C level.
“Like Venice,” I’d joked from the corner of the living room, and it had provoked another twenty-minute rant from our enraged guardian, who failed to understand that Sadhana’s academic slump had very little to do with a disinterest in algebra.
Uncle had not even bothered yelling at me after that first night. Either he had already shouted himself out (doubtful, given his willingness to cause a ruckus over such calamities as burnt toast and unswept floors), or we had reached a new low in his estimation and were now deemed to be beyond remonstration, like birds or rocks. Sadhana was more awed by his evening silences than I was. I felt like I had already stopped listening, attentive instead to my new companion in the baby I was growing. Someone less likely to point out my faults.
Whatever Uncle’s intentions in visiting Ravi’s parents, they turned out to be thwarted. He came home and thumped his briefcase down in its spot by the door the way a more flamboyant man might smash a plate. There was to be no wedding (no dress, no fire-walk). Ravi had disappeared more thoroughly than he had yet done anything in his young life, and he had left not only his job but his parents’ home, a fact I found baffling.
“Ravi is so lazy,” I said to Sadhana later that night. I did not view this as a fault, but as something merely sensible, taking into consideration that Uncle was his boss. “Where on earth would he go?”
“Away from you,” said Sadhana, reading in bed with her face turned to the wall.
If Ravi ever turned up, we never heard about it. It took a week or two before I realized that Sadhana’s assessment of the situation was true: he had left me. Before that I had been thinking of him as trying to escape Uncle’s wrath, or from his parents, whatever they were like. For three days, I didn’t leave the apartment, expecting the phone to ring any minute with a repentant and reformed Ravi, calling to reassure me that he’d be back as soon as the worst had blown over.
Carlos became a comfort. He thought Ravi was the worst kind of coward, and he kept right on flirting with me during smoke breaks as if he felt someone needed to step in. It was little more than a few pecks on the cheek, some tickling squeezes. Every so often some longer kisses while he rubbed my arms to keep them warm. Whether it was because I seemed lonely, or only willing, Carlos seemed to like me more than ever. He even stopped smoking on his breaks because it was bad for the baby.
More than anything, Carlos’s unexpected allegiance outraged Sadhana’s sense of justice. “You got pregnant,” she kept saying as if she didn’t believe it, or as if she thought I didn’t. “And nobody minds at all.”
It wasn’t as though Sadhana couldn’t have boyfriends of her own if she wanted. But she could not or would not be happy for me. She ignored me at school and only raised an eyebrow when her friend Priya said I was getting even fatter than before. At home, she spent all her time on the phone or shut up in the bathroom. She rarely deigned to sit down with us for dinner, claiming the very sight of me put her off her food. When she did, she would pass me the bread along with a look of critical disgust. “Eating for two is just a figure of speech, you know, Beena.”
At nights, when the lights were off, a truce was called. She would speculate aloud as to where Ravi
could be hiding. “Maybe he’s living with the mole people in the subway tunnels in New York City.”
“If they’d have him.”
“Maybe he went out to Alberta to work on an oil rig.”
“He could have already lost an arm.”
“Maybe he got picked up by a serial killer when he was hitching a ride out of town.”
It always ended up with Ravi being dead. He had died in our bedroom in so many ways that I almost believed it, and really, there was not much practical difference as far as I was concerned. There was the mourning and the absence.
Once Sadhana had finished with Ravi, she could move on to other things. “Do you think Mama knows about the baby, wherever she is?”
“I think maybe,” I said. “Maybe she does.” I knew that this was what Sadhana wanted to hear, but I didn’t believe it.
“But if she’s been reincarnated, how would she even know about us?”
Though we liked remembering Mama’s belief in reincarnation, it hurt to think about her as someone else. By then she could have been a baby herself somewhere, with her own new mother taking our place in her affections.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Sadhana rolled over so her back was facing me. “You don’t know much, do you.”
She was already starving then, but I didn’t know it.
In the bedroom I used to share with my sister, Quinn exhales where he lies on my old mattress, the rasp of the springs as he shifts his weight like the answering breath of a lover.
“We can’t sleep,” I say. In this room, the pronoun is always first-person plural. In this room, the air almost crackles with questions left unasked, and this time, it’s Quinn I long to reach. Did you see who I saw on television? How long will you blame me? And our proximity just now seems to heighten our unease. My son is my idea of my son, who is made up of my past and his and all my memories and dreams for him and who he might become. But he is also himself and his body. The space he takes up in a room, the way he sleeps and eats. The things he wants to keep from me. The way parents and children slide from a physical relationship into something else, from contiguity to separation — it’s continental drift, and it feels just as slow and significant. It feels stable, and then there’s an ocean between you. It doesn’t feel wrong. There will be an opening up to the world for both of us. But there is a desire for fixity, too. A bit of grieving.
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