Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “Do they know you’ve been knitting the same sweater for five years?”

  Sadhana laughed. “They don’t. But I’m going to start something new.” Then she pulled out the photo albums, the Bhagavad-Gita, and a recipe for cheddar cornmeal biscuits, a treat Mama used to make — batches of soft yellow batter cut and baked into stars. “I don’t want to cry my head off,” she said. “Okay?”

  I agreed. Every time I cried in front of Quinn, I felt like the goalie on a losing team, letting in points and sinking the game as my teammate watched. I wanted to be like my own mother, who never wavered in front of us. Before Quinn turned three, I’d comforted myself with the thought that he wouldn’t remember. Now my recourse was to imagine that eventually every breakdown would start to meld together into a single memory.

  We gathered in the living room, a Karen Dalton record on the old hi-fi, and sat Quinn between us as we showed him photographs of his grandmother. He’d seen a few framed ones that we kept out, and he likely thought of her, if he thought of her at all, as in those same few images, a woman who was only ever petting a goat or standing beside a giant redwood tree or waving from the end of a dock, with a squinty smile and the wind blowing her red hair like a flag over the water. I think that calcification had happened to me and Sadhana, too, because the albums hit us like a revelation. We were almost beside ourselves.

  “Oh my gosh, look at her dress,” said Sadhana. It was Mama as a girl in Ireland, in a dark, lace-collared dress, like a porcelain doll. She was posed on cobblestones in front of a Victorian house with ornamented eaves.

  “That looks like a normal dress,” said Quinn.

  “It is,” agreed Sadhana. “Just not for her.”

  There were other photographs that amazed us, mostly Mama’s teenage sojourn back to Florida, her birthplace. There were pictures of alligators and cranes, of Mama grinning against backdrops of swamps and orange groves, and beaches stretched against turquoise strips of ocean. Then one from San Francisco, with her arm wrapped around the waist of another young woman, both of them in white summer dresses, and another showing a group of about twenty long-haired men and women in tree pose, their hands pressed together against their chests as though in prayer, a few leaning slightly as they tried to balance on one leg. Mama was standing the straightest and was the only one laughing.

  The last time we’d looked at these photos together, Mama had been showing them to us. We hadn’t touched them since her death, afraid, maybe, of the kind of anguish they’d set off. A crisis spoiling our prolonged, sedate misery.

  Quinn had to tug at the albums to get a proper view, so absorbed were we in looking and looking. Both Sadhana and I had lapsed in our explanatory narration; we were now speaking only to each other.

  Then Quinn spoke up. “Are there any pictures of my father?”

  I froze. “No,” I said at last. I felt caught off-guard. “No, there absolutely are not.”

  “Oh,” said Quinn. “Okay.”

  “Beena,” said Sadhana. Her voice was gentle. Abnormal. “Maybe we should —”

  “No,” I said, though I did not know what she was about to say. “No.” We were already at the last page of the album. “That’s that.” I closed it and got up to put it away. When I returned, Sadhana was watching Quinn.

  “It’s okay,” said Quinn. “Don’t worry. Are you sad?” He patted her on the back. Both of us would rub the small of his back when he got worried about things.

  “A little bit.” Her life, and mine, just one long mourning period. “But no, not really. I’m okay, baby.”

  “Promise not to be sad anymore?” said Quinn.

  My sister and I looked at each other. “It’s time for bed,” said Sadhana.

  That first time Quinn asked about his father, I had the unreasonable sensation of having been a failure. I confided this to Sadhana after Quinn was asleep, and she told me I was being ridiculous.

  “It’s not because you’re not good enough. It’s a natural thing for him to wonder about.”

  I supposed she was right. Quinn was six years old and in the first grade. If anything, it was surprising that he hadn’t asked earlier.

  The next morning, I discovered Sadhana and I had different tactics when it came to talking to Quinn about Ravi. I sat him down with a bowl of cereal and told him that his father had been very young, too young to be blamed for his actions.

  “He panicked and ran away,” I told Quinn. I focused on the corn flakes, softening in their sea of milk. “He probably regrets losing us.” I sometimes believed that. I pictured Ravi, whenever I allowed myself to think of him, as trapped in an arranged marriage in which he was fond of a wife who secretly despised him.

  Quinn blinked. The morning light bounced off his glasses. “Then why hasn’t he tried to find us?”

  From behind us in the kitchen, Sadhana said, “Because he’s a shirking piece of crap who’s too afraid to face up to his responsibilities.” She turned on the blender and stared Quinn down as if daring him to cry.

  “Okay,” he said, nodding. But he was quiet on the walk to school, and as soon as we kissed him goodbye at the gate, Sadhana began defending herself.

  “There’s no point in coddling him,” she said, as we turned back down our street. “Better to know the truth than to have your illusions shattered later. Some people are bad.”

  I let her words echo in my head and waited for them to land on something. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Okay, how about this, then?” Sadhana paused to let a truck pass. “Some people aren’t worth knowing.”

  Not being sure enough myself of anything to do with Ravi, I had a hard time when Quinn pumped me for details. He started asking again the following year, one evening while Sadhana was at her knitting circle. There was so little I remembered. I told him the basics about the romance that had blossomed outside the bagel shop. Though I did embellish ever so slightly, just enough so that I could use a word like romance at all. For some reason, it was easier to talk about while Sadhana wasn’t around.

  “He played hockey. He liked salt-and-vinegar-flavoured popcorn,” I offered, remembering our one excursion to the movies and how Ravi had pulled a seasoning shaker out of his bag, wielding it with liberality. “And his father was a doctor.” Ravi had spoken once or twice about his parents’ anticipation that he would go to medical school and how he was already steeling himself against their disappointment.

  “My father works like a dog,” he’d said. “For me, business school, then management. One day I’ll be a CEO. Either that or prime minister.” I didn’t know what a CEO was, but I didn’t want to ask. I had a hard time picturing Ravi as a manager. He was my uncle’s worst employee.

  “Well,” I said to Quinn, who was by then sitting on the footstool with as much straight-backed attention as a dog waiting for a treat. “He wanted to be a businessman. Or a politician.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “What can I say? We talked about the Pixies more than we did about the future.”

  “What else?”

  I thought hard.

  “He could blow smoke rings. And whistle through his fingers. And he didn’t usually show his teeth when he smiled.”

  “What else?” Quinn’s dark amber eyes were relentless behind his frames.

  There wasn’t much else. He wore white briefs with a red stripe on the band. The treads of his shoes had a pattern of swirls stamped into the rubber. He had a canvas bag he’d bought at an army surplus store. There was a trace of a cowlick on the crown of his head. Almost everything I had was a clue I could skim off the surface.

  “That’s it.”

  “Did you love each other?”

  I decided to be truthful. “No. Not yet. We were just starting to get to know one another.”

  But as I lay in bed that night, I wondered. What had happened to the young man I had expended so
much energy trying not to think about? He had been so cool, oh so cool, and so afraid. So irresolute. His large, curling lips and the languid way his bottom jaw would shift to the side in scorn. His parents, too, had been only too willing to allow him to keep shirking his duty, at least as far as I knew. They had never contacted Uncle, and we had never pressed them, either. But I remembered their dignity, their rigidity, that day on their doorstep, and I did not think they would have let him go so easily. He could have run off, and maybe he really did. But he would have come back.

  The apartment seemed to hum, then pulse around me as I blinked in the darkness and struggled to follow the thought through to its end. Rolling over on my left side, I let the rush of my anxiety flow out until I could detect what felt like a conclusion circling, then knocking up against the side of a drain. Too consequential to slip through. Ravi was not gone, not vanished forever, as I’d begun to hope. He was probably even in Montreal.

  The next morning I stood on a St. Catherine Street corner, my heart racing as I dropped a quarter in the box and dialled the number I’d looked up at the library. There was still a listing for a P. Patel at his parents’ address. But none for an R. Patel.

  “Hello,” I said, when someone answered. I toed a yellow McDonald’s hamburger wrapper with my sneaker and watched it catch in the breeze. “I’m hoping you can help me.” I found myself affecting an accent, something warmer and twangier than my real voice. “I’m trying to get in touch with Ravi. We went to high school together, and I’m in town for the weekend, hoping to get the whole gang together.” I paused, and in the silence, ran on: “This isn’t by any chance still his parents’ house, is it? It’s the number I have from all those years ago.” Not the best story, but not the worst. If his parents really were afraid of me or of Quinn, they would have moved or taken themselves out of the book.

  “Who’s this, please?” This woman did not sound as hard as the one in my memory.

  “It’s Sarah. I don’t know if you’d remember me.” I stared at the hard plastic casing of the payphone, the bright blue lettering of the company. BELL. “Sarah Bell.”

  “Ah, I’m not sure, dear. Do you have a pen?”

  “Yes, I do.” She dictated a Montreal number I could tell she knew by heart, and I took it down, double-tracing the digits with my pen.

  “Thanks very much.” I felt almost buoyant as this fake Sarah, who I was suddenly sure had gone on to do a degree in oceanography or social work or human ecology. She might even have joined a sorority. Pleasantries would be second nature to her. “What is Ravi up to these days?”

  “Oh, he keeps busy. Very busy. He might not have time to come to your little gathering, though I’m sure he’ll do his best. He’s always helping out with a campaign, you know, getting all the experience he can.” I heard a clinking sound, like a spoon in a teacup. “We still tell him he might just be prime minister one day.” She laughed a little, but the pride in her voice was unmistakable.

  The allusion to Ravi’s ambition gave me a funny feeling. “That’s the way to do it then, I guess.” I could feel the fictitious Sarah ebbing away. “Thanks, Mrs. Patel. All the best now.”

  I walked home with a new wariness of the strangers on the street. Lots of people came downtown. The whole city passed through at one point or another. Scanning the faces of everyone I passed, I felt a keen desire to get away — even as I knew that from then on I would be watching for him, for this one person I wanted so badly to be gone.

  Later that week I went to a phone booth and dialled the number his mother had given me. I listened to his voice on the answering machine, discomfited that he was in the city but relieved that there had been no change — that I knew exactly where he was to be found. Unlike his mother’s voice, I recognized Ravi’s, yet it still surprised me. Its slow syllables and deep baritone.

  I returned home to learn that our next-door neighbours on either side of the hallway had been broken into. It was an affordable building, but almost anyone had things that could be stolen. It was drug addicts looking to make some quick cash, or so we speculated with our agitated neighbours, who stood gesticulating in the drab hallway on a Friday evening. The door frames had been split around the latch with a hatchet. Our apartment had escaped unscathed. We examined our lock, which was the same as all the others. It did not even appear to have been tampered with.

  “They ran out of time,” I said. Who could guess why the robbers hadn’t conducted their business in an orderly fashion, one, two, three in a row?

  “Maybe our luck has changed,” said Sadhana. She touched our doorknob as though the brass had some fortunate sheen. Our neighbours stepped around us to commiserate, and as we unlocked our own apartment, I felt a pang for the suddenness of their violation. But, between us, my sister and I had already squandered so much feeling; we could not think about them again once the door had swung shut.

  Mostly what had been stolen were TVs, and we probably had the newest television of them all, small as it was. We felt guilty before we bought it, because of Mama, but afterwards we were surprised by how quickly the feeling went away. I patted the flat grey plastic of its top, its rounded back. “I guess the old girl will be sticking around a while longer.”

  “Good,” said Quinn. He seemed to notice my glance turn to a stare. “What, Mommy?”

  “Nothing.” I was seeing his full lips, the shape of them. It was too soon to say whose lips they resembled. But I was afraid of spotting reminders in him, as though likeness itself might be a bond forging before my eyes.

  While I was boiling water for pasta, Sadhana said she was going out. I could see her yarn and needles poking out of her shoulder bag on the table.

  “Knitting circle? What about supper?”

  “There’ll be food there. Really.” Sadhana buttoned up her coat. “I promise.”

  I watched the pot and could feel the evening stretching out ahead, flat and dull as a toothless saw. “Why are you so into knitting now, anyway?”

  “It’s fun, making stuff. Going out. Having friends.” She smiled at me as she picked up her bag. “You should try it.”

  That night after supper, once Quinn was asleep, I turned on the television and watched a program about missing children. The next day, while Quinn and Sadhana were at school, I turned it on again. It filled up the place wonderfully. I watched a game show and a cooking show. I watched a talk show with a family of brothers who had traded wives. I almost turned it off after that, but the news was coming on at noon and I waited to see the headlines, then the weather. I left it on while I made myself some lunch. Then there was a stretch where the only thing on was soap operas, so I turned it off while I went out to get groceries. When I came home and started cooking, another talk show was on. This time it was fathers who thought their teenaged daughters dressed too sexily.

  The following day I turned it on again after I was alone, and every day after that for the rest of the week. It helped to keep from thinking about Ravi, doing whatever it was he did on the other side of the city. Sometimes I sat and watched, and sometimes I had it on in the background while I did other things. I had a bit of freelance work coming in, mostly editing high school textbooks, something a former professor had hooked me up with. Sadhana was in her last term before she, too, would graduate.

  When Sadhana was home, I turned off the television and watched her instead. The incident in her second year of university had impressed upon me the need to remain vigilant, to hold on to my suspicion even in the face of all assurances. She wore her hair long, and it was darker and straighter than mine. That spring, she was wearing more eye makeup, two or three blended shades of shadow over her lids and brow bone, and clothes that left less to the imagination than the year before, though she still tended to cover her arms. She had expanded her focus, it seemed, from dance to drama, as well. She spent a few nights a week rehearsing for a play at the end of the semester, but she seemed happy and hungry, from w
hat I could see.

  But whatever I could see, there was only that. It was just one sense, one kind of knowing, and it left a good deal out. Maybe even most things. It made me anxious.

  I watched Quinn, too. He was a happy kid. He spent time reading or drawing comics, and he had plenty of friends at school, though we tried, given the smallness of our apartment, to avoid having any of them over. In spite of his glasses, Quinn seemed less than other children to suffer from the bumps and scrapes that were the usual result of little kids putting themselves into the world. Sadhana claimed he had inherited her own coordination and agility. At the park, she cheered him across the jungle gym, as I stood ready to run in with soothing kisses that were rarely required.

  He grew. He was growing all the time, though it was almost impossible to see. The constant rounding and lengthening of his face that I’d noticed when he was a baby, as he went in and out of growth spurts, was a process that had not stopped, only slowed down. Though I hadn’t traced it happening, he’d been growing taller and stronger, increment by increment. He must have been, in order to have become the little boy who was my son, who ran and caught balls and would hurry over to pet strange dogs in the park. Who was six and then seven and then eight.

  It was this realization about Quinn that made me wonder whether all the watching of my sister was not making it harder for me to see her, after all — as any shift, minutely observed, becomes imperceptible. You needed fresh eyes to see clearly. And mine were as worn out as our foggy old kaleidoscope, with that split piece of glass I could hear sliding back and forth inside.

  Sometimes I watched Sadhana scouring the Dutch oven or peeling carrots with a knife, and I was not at all convinced that the anger she’d harboured when we were teenagers had gone away. She had a sharpness to her, not only her quick way of thinking and the straight angles of her body, but an edge to her opinions that meant you were more likely than not to find yourself cut down or sliced open or otherwise dismissed. She had the kind of mind that could take pleasure in its own severity. She was the very best companion for a movie you were already inclined to hate. Because it was so rarely bestowed, her favour was sought and valued by those who knew how discriminating she could be. And her forgiveness, whether of me or of herself, seemed to come at a premium.