Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “We’ll page her, honey,” a nurse told me. “What’s her name?”

  “No,” I said. “No, no, no, no.” I wondered why I hadn’t called her myself before I left.

  By the time I was checked into a room and had made myself understood, a nurse had been sent up to me to explain. I squinted at her face as she spoke, let the syllables drift towards me through the huff of my own breathing. Her jaw that tapered to a sharp point, dark feathered hair. She was telling me that Sadhana was asleep and they weren’t going to wake her.

  “Part of her treatment program is keeping her to a schedule. Eating, sleeping at regular intervals. And emotional stability.” She shrugged in her mauve scrubs that still seemed new, that seemed to take a moment to follow her shoulders down. Her eyes, though, were worn, as though at the end of a shift. With my tear-streaked face, my stomach hard as a wall, there seemed to be no question but that I was a liability.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and I nodded. I didn’t believe her, but it was nice of her to say it.

  When Quinn was born, I was staring at a tiny scar on one of the nurses’ faces. It was at the side of her lip and curved up in such a way that it looked like a lopsided grin, even as she checked me, forehead wrinkling, barking encouragement with narrowed eyes. Where it was, as a cut, it would have bled a lot, and I was seized, in those dislocating moments, not with the betrayal of my own body into pain, for I expected no less of it, but with the utter vulnerability of the face. The momentousness of a change there, whether fleeting or permanent. People read reactions there, and character. Then I thought that sometimes even the look of a smile could be enough, as it was to me then. I was riveted on her, the point on my horizon, now far, now looming close, terribly close. It was because I was hunching my upper body, throwing it forward into every push. I thought about the wooden crib that Uncle had bought and the nurse that came to see me from Sadhana’s ward, and I wanted to be able to be grateful for gestures, for the seed of a feeling behind a gesture, and also for whatever it was in me that might allow me to take this comfort even in something involuntary, like the nurse’s smiling scar, that could be infused with meaning. To be able to exist in surfaces. Why should I demand anything more? I did not feel that I was particularly entitled. If I held out for something wholly real, for some secure certainty of authenticity, I might spend my whole life unhappy.

  It was clear to me later that these thoughts were themselves a kind of coping mechanism, as was the idea I had then that the intensity of those labouring hours had given me a new insight into life, into experience itself. Pain was no doubt a factor, as were the drugs, and the memory of both, and of my accompanying strange descent into philosophy, soon faded. For profound thoughts, even or sometimes especially when they arrive by revelation, necessarily fade, and with the passage of time seem not only to lose their urgency but, by what might be in the end a wrong-headed logic, also some of their claims to truth.

  Quinn, in my arms, was small, and intent on taking all of me.

  When my sister Sadhana saw my son for the first time, she scraped the side of his cheek with her bony brown finger. He opened his mouth, fists working, the folds of skin on his face and hands voluminous and soggy, like something waiting to be blown up to full size. He kicked out one of his pigeon-toed feet and it brushed at the tape holding the IV tube in place on her hand.

  “What a funny little raisin,” she said. She was fourteen and I was sixteen and Quinn was the first newborn baby either of us had ever seen. Up where I was, in the maternity ward, I had heard a few more, from behind the curtains the other mothers kept drawn, where other people moved and snapped pictures and brought bouquets of flowers in glass vases from the shop downstairs.

  “Can I hold him, Beena?” said Sadhana, and I was touched that she had asked with such politeness.

  So we called a nurse, who propped up the pillows, cranking the bed so my sister could sit up without becoming exhausted. The nurse stayed a moment, with a tight smile, to watch me place Quinn against Sadhana’s chest, helping us position her scrawny arms as though we were all afraid the baby might plummet through, like a set of dropped keys slipping through a grate.

  “Don’t you stay too long,” the nurse said, and left.

  “Can I look at his you-know-what?” asked Sadhana. “I’ve never seen one before.”

  We didn’t know what to do with a boy. We could scarcely remember Papa. As for Ravi, I could hardly even summon the sensation of his fierce, darting tongue, though I often tried.

  When Uncle came to pick me up at the hospital, he barely looked at the baby. “So your shame has been brought into the world,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  Yet Uncle had already bought the crib and put it at the foot of my bed in the room I shared with Sadhana. He did not complain about Quinn crying, either, for just as he had ideas about the predilections of females, he had a notion of babies, as well. They cried, and were a nuisance, but there was no sense in grumbling about it as though it might be changed. So he told me, over and over.

  So one of the surprises about Quinn was Quinn, how he was very much not like a doll or even a cat, which were my two closest points of reference. The other surprise was Uncle. There was the unexpected patience, and also a dignity that he began wearing around the house as though it were his work apron, talking to me as he might to a customer: his voice quiet and even, like that of a man who visits the public library and asks another man if he has finished with the New York Times. He stood straighter, as he did in the store; perhaps the bitterness implied in his slump was no longer the attitude he wanted to convey. I thought it must be Quinn, the possibility he offered of a legacy, a personality not yet turned to the bad.

  Quinn was a wonder, a fullness. He felt like the precipice of every emotion I’d ever fallen into. I whispered secrets to him, things about Sadhana, about his father. About how he made me angry but it wasn’t his fault because he was only a baby. At first I thought he looked like his father, then I didn’t. I’d been trying to picture Ravi’s face for months. I talked and talked, then felt guilty for exploiting his lack of language. I got out my French textbook and whispered to him in French. It was a story about a man who worked in a bank and bought baguettes on his way home to dinner. It felt like a poor world I was offering him.

  Sadhana began calling after Quinn was born and I stopped visiting every day. Something about holding the baby had triggered a change, and from talking to the nurses, I knew that she had made progress. It made it easier to stay away, even if I’d been anywhere close to figuring out how to wrangle a baby out of the house to go visit. She’d call, and sometimes it seemed like I already had the receiver to my ear before the phone rang. I’d pick it up when she was just an angry pulse coming down the line, a second before she burst into sound.

  I’d barely say hello before she launched into it. It was a long, ongoing conversation we were having. There were no pleasantries. She complained about the nurses, the doctors, a therapist she was forced to talk to who had called her a liar. If we didn’t answer, she left messages that were accusatory and abusive. “I’d like to know what the hell you’re doing that you’re too busy to pick up the goddamn phone.” She’d left behind all pretence of propriety. It was as if Uncle did not even exist, or she was past all thoughts of fearing him. I made no mention of the messages when I called her back.

  One Saturday when Uncle was down at the store, I answered the phone halfway through the first ring.

  “When are you coming?” she asked. “It’s been nearly a week.”

  “It’s hard for me to get down there, Sadhana.”

  Her response was icy. “Do you even care about me getting better?”

  When I did arrive, Quinn strapped tight into a second-­hand car seat I had carried on the bus, I was surprised to find Sadhana sitting up in her bed, surrounded by a group of girls I recognized from our high school. She was bright-eyed, strung up with vibrancy
. When she was speaking, she did not give the impression that she was someone very sick at all. I could hear the laughter of the girls all the way up the hallway. Through her absence and ordeal, she had become a kind of heroine. And it occurred to me then that Sadhana had never needed me as much as she said she did.

  Not long after, Sadhana was discharged. Perhaps seeing her friends had done her some good, because at last she opened up her mouth and took in food, and if she did not relish it, at least she did not gag and weep and act as if everyone at the hospital was intent upon her destruction.

  As I gathered her things into a knapsack, the nurses on her floor tried to give me advice.

  “Watch her like a hawk,” said a wry one named Helen. “She’s trickier than most.” She and Sadhana had a sarcastic kind of rapport.

  Another nurse with dark blonde curls snorted as she stripped the bed. “See you soon,” she said.

  Sometimes it felt like death was something we were outrunning. It was hard to keep a baby alive. It was constant attention from morning till bedtime, and then, often enough, throughout the night as well. But Quinn’s life in my hands felt secure compared to my sister’s. Out of the hospital, she was losing weight fast, mostly to do with Uncle’s haphazard guardianship. He yelled at her more often than not when it came to food, he had no patience, and for two months it wasn’t clear whether it was her condition that was persisting or whether it was only a quarrel, a standoff with Uncle, that kept her from eating properly. Or at least that was how it seemed to me then. Now I know it was more complicated, that Sadhana was at least as helpless as we were. At the time, though, I was almost as angry at her as Uncle.

  “It’s stupid, you being here,” I said. She was back in the psych ward at the children’s hospital, and it felt like her eight weeks at home had been a dream. We were in a visiting room with chairs and tables, board games stacked on low side tables. The game boxes looked battered, but I’d never seen anyone playing them. I found it hard to imagine depressive teenagers wanting to play Monopoly. At least Sadhana never would when I asked.

  “Stupid,” repeated Sadhana. She was wearing a hospital gown over flannel boxer shorts, a concession to the nurses, who kept nagging her to put on clothes. With her legs tucked up sideways on the chair, the gown looked like a giant bib for a very messy eater. I was relieved that her legs were hidden. Even though I was used to them, it was hard not to keep staring at their scrawniness. I had Quinn on my lap, and he grappled at my plastic necklace while Sadhana made faces at him.

  “Just try,” I said. “Just try getting better. Then you can come home.”

  “I’m not coming home,” said Sadhana. “Some people don’t.” She was in one of those moods when baiting me seemed to be her only pleasure. It seemed churlish to tell her to stop when she had so few opportunities for fun.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew what she was getting at. Before we checked her back into the hospital, she was scared, she talked about death all the time. It was only a few days after she had been admitted that she started using it against me as a kind of threat. As a boast.

  She had a notebook with her, and she pulled out a sheet of foolscap with writing on it. “I’ve started making my will,” she said. She flipped it out to face me, and I could see The Last Will and Testament of Sadhana Kaur Singh written across the top in fancy lettering, embellished on either side with vine leaves, clustering and veiny.

  I knew this was bad, one of the warning signs, though I thought if she really wanted to kill herself, it would be easier to do at home. Still, it was possible that someone in the ward would try and help her, sneaking or trading pills. One of the therapists had warned us of suicide pacts, weight-loss competitions, dark things that girls did together. If Sadhana made any close friends, I was supposed to be worried.

  “You can have my tape collection and all my books.” This was half moot, as Sadhana didn’t have any books, at least not any that I didn’t already regard as being held jointly — children’s books that Mama had read to us, two shelves of them on the bookcase in our bedroom.

  “What about your clothes?” I said, and I thought I saw her flinch before she shrugged.

  “Well, I promised Marie my purple Esprit sweatshirt. The rest, I don’t care.”

  “Who’s Marie?” I asked, suspicious.

  “Just a friend. Quinn can have Floopy Bear.” Floopy Bear was Sadhana’s mustard-coloured rag toy that Mama had sewn for her when she was a baby. It was something between a bear and a monkey, with flowered patchwork paws and ear linings, tail like a fat thumb. After fourteen years of companionship, it was threadbare, disgusting, and much beloved. It was probably even more prized than Princess Puss, my mousy cat born out of green corduroy and a blue backstitch.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. She always went too far, she was always too thorough.

  “What?”

  “Well, what about your earrings, then? The ones that used to belong to Mama’s grandmother?.” Silver and amber, tiny and dangling. I couldn’t remember how Sadhana had secured them for herself, but I was sure it was at the end of a long conversation with Mama, after which Sadhana came straight into our room and tucked them directly into her jewel­lery box. There were lots of things like that, little interests and pleasures that she and Mama seemed to share. Except that I was never convinced that they really did share them, that it was ever anything but Sadhana playing, flexing her skills. Trying things on.

  “The earrings.” Sadhana frowned at the will. It made a snapping sound as she flicked it with her pen, and Quinn flailed a fist in its direction. She held out her pen for him to grab and his fingers curled around it. “Fine, I guess.”

  Sadhana folded away the will then, as a very thin girl with limp blonde hair came in and sat in a chair by the window. She had a deep hollow below her brow bone, a face more wasted than my sister’s.

  “Hi, Cynthia,” said Sadhana, cocking her head to one side. “Hi, Cindy.”

  Cynthia, or Cindy, stared. “Hi,” she said. She was wearing a huge wool sweater, and the front pieces of her hair were held back with pink barrettes. She was pulling her fingers with their bitten-down nails in and out of the corner of her mouth, and she seemed nervous. I didn’t blame her, as Sadhana didn’t sound altogether friendly.

  “Cindy, this is my sister, Beena,” said Sadhana. “You remember me talking about her in group.” Cindy nodded, her eyes trailing over to me. Then, “Beena, this is Cindy, another Ana.”

  “Pardon?”

  “She has anorexia.”

  “Oh.” Cindy and I exchanged hellos, and Sadhana watched, plucking with one hand at the fraying armrest of her chair. Cindy seemed tentative but friendly in a meek way. It was hard to imagine another reason for her to come into the visiting room besides wanting to speak to my sister. The windows only looked out to the parking lot, two acres of grey asphalt bounded by grey stone walls. Even with the windows closed, the sounds of the street leaked through, shrieks of cars braking as ambulances pulled straight out into rush hour. The air conditioning, too, was chilly. In the anorexia ward, they kept it turned down because the girls got too cold.

  I took the pen from Quinn, beaded with spit, and wiped it off on my denim skirt. In protest, Quinn shook his foot until one of his baby shoes fell off. Cindy leaned down to pick it up.

  “Cute baby,” she said to me. She fitted the shoe back on as Quinn regarded her with open-mouthed curiosity.

  “Thanks.”

  Cindy folded herself back into her seat. She had a thick rolled-up tube of papers in her hand. She looked over them at my sister. “I wonder,” she said, “how long they expect us to keep choking down this crap they’re trying to pass off as food? I mean, they know we’re sick, right?”

  Sadhana said, “Don’t make excuses for your disease.” She didn’t crack a smile. It wasn’t clear to me whether she was serious or just poking fun at one of their therapist’s
usual sayings. It didn’t seem to be obvious to Cindy either, who made a small sound and looked away. The papers she was clutching unfurled in her lap, flattening into a glossy pile. She was just bending her head to them when Sadhana hooted.

  “Did you catch your anorexia from magazines?” she asked, snatching the small stack and holding them up to show me. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Seventeen.

  “Sadhana,” I said. Quinn was fussing, wriggling on my lap.

  “What?” She tugged with one hand at the edges of her blue gown, pulling it taut. Her knees poked up underneath like tent poles. “I’m helping. Leila says we’re supposed to call people on their shit.”

  “I have a feeling this isn’t what she meant.”

  Cindy’s mouth tightened as she started up. She grabbed at the magazines Sadhana was waving back and forth, just out of reach, until she finally seized them and stalked out.

  I turned to my sister. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  “It’s just so boring. Wanting to look like a model.”

  “And you’re not boring?”

  “No.” Sadhana clasped her hands together behind her neck with false insouciance, stretching her bony legs out over the armrest. “I’m an orphan.” She had a look of mingled insolence and rage, a grim scowl topped by a defiant glare. She was waiting for me to comfort her, but just then I felt that there was no room in her for my sympathy. Or my pain. For anything that I could try to share.

  I stood up. “Well, I think you are. I think all of this is beyond dull. At least, now it is.” And since Quinn was hungry and working himself up to a bawl, I carried him back down the hall to Sadhana’s ward and to all the other skinny girls who didn’t belong to me. I knew she wouldn’t follow.