Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  I sat at the kitchen table over the prop of a day-old newspaper, pretending not to watch Sadhana as she scrounged around for lunch between class and rehearsal. Our apartment was just around the corner from campus. She was eating an apple, and it was a twenty-minute affair. She had woken up late that morning and had left the apartment without eating breakfast. And now, as always, I was watching her.

  “Don’t you have an appointment at Quinn’s school?” she said. She was rotating the core of apple as she gnawed it down in a showy kind of consumption. But only an amateur would be taken in by an apple.

  “The parent-teacher meetings don’t start for another hour and a half.”

  She took a sandwich bag of cut-up celery out of the fridge and ate that, her manner seeming to veer between teasing and annoyance as I held fast at the table. Then she took a single piece of bread and made a toasted peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich. One tablespoon of natural peanut butter and one of raspberry jam. She poured a glass of milk and gulped it down.

  She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running but no sound of the toilet flushing. When she came out, she heated up some leftover lentil soup.

  “Is this fun for you?” she asked. She was half laughing, but her eyes flashed as she got up to rinse her bowl and toss her crusts into the garbage.

  “That seemed like a good lunch.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d better leave soon if you don’t want to be late.” She sat down to lace her sneakers and I knew she would be stopping by the gym.

  “I will.” I waited until she had rolled her eyes at me and closed the door behind her before I got up from the table. There was a gnawing in my stomach, but I could no longer tell if it was hunger or worry. I double-checked the kitchen garbage and the one in the bathroom, but there were just the usual coffee grinds and wadded-up tissues. I returned to the kitchen, where I washed the dishes and swept the floor.

  My own lunch I prepared with weariness, and I ate it without pleasure.

  She came home late. I woke up to the sound of a coat rack falling over. It was three in the morning. I slipped out from under the covers to go check on Quinn, who was fast asleep in the moonlight behind his Spider-Man–patterned curtain. Sadhana was moving through the apartment in the dark. I heard keys tossed on the table, followed by the drop and clatter of one shoe, then the other. She closed herself in the bathroom, and I heard retching. I followed her in. The bathroom did not have a lock because I had removed it. She was sprawled on the bathmat.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said. Her forehead was on her wrist, which was resting on the edge of the toilet bowl. “I had too much to drink. Me and my knitting ladies.”

  “You were out with your knitting circle?” I hadn’t pictured her famous knitters as partiers.

  “They’re amazing, you know.” She half raised her head. “They’re really, totally radical. We’ve got some amazing plans.” Dropping her head, she murmured, “You wouldn’t believe.”

  “You can’t do this,” I said. The toilet was full of vomit and I flushed it.

  “I’m twenty-three. I’m supposed to go out and have fun.”

  “Not like this you’re not.” It might start out with too much tequila, but it would turn into her old calculations. How much her body could bear to lose, which was always less than she was willing to part with. And then it would be every night.

  “I’m telling you it’s not the same thing.” Her head ducked over the bowl as she shuddered with another bout of retching. Nothing came up except for water and bile.

  I turned away. “It looks the same. It ends the same. From where I’m sitting.”

  Sadhana wiped her mouth with a square of toilet paper. “That’s just because subtleties elude you.”

  “That’s not true.” I counted six strands of hair stuck with sweat to her temple, and the row of sterling rings on her slim fingers as they splayed on the floor. “That’s not true at all.”

  “Yes, it is. You’re like a hammer the way you come down, Bee.” She seemed to be concentrating hard to get her words out. “It isn’t always about whatever you think it is, okay? Sometimes it’s just whatever, it’s nothing.” Sadhana lifted her head and held it in her hands before opening her eyes to meet my gaze. “It’s just me being me. This is normal. There are twenty-three-year-olds vomiting into toilets at three in the morning all over the country.”

  “But they’re not you.”

  “Lucky for them. You make me feel like a freak.”

  As her stomach heaved again, I turned on the tap. The choked, throaty sound of retching made me queasy. “I’m sorry, but that’s what it takes.” I took a glass from the counter and placed it under the water until it was two-thirds full. Then I put the glass of water next to her on the floor. “If you want to do me a favour and actually become invested in your own life, that would be great.”

  “At least I have a life.” She spoke this into the toilet bowl. It irked me that she did not mean gratitude for the fact that she had not yet died, though she had come close. She meant, of course, that at least she lived for herself and not as a sorry extension of the lives of others. I waited for her to say something else, but there was only the dripping of the tap that had needed to be fixed since we moved in. My sister’s eyes were closed.

  I heard Quinn stirring, so I closed the door and left her to it.

  The next morning Sadhana was cold to me. She declined to get up to join me in walking Quinn to school, and when I returned, she was still in bed, reading a magazine.

  “Hungover?” I asked. There was real sympathy in my voice, or so I thought.

  “Not at all.” She winced as she spoke and I knew she was lying. “Like you care.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said. “I care more than anyone.”

  She flipped a page. “Well, consider this an invitation to stop.”

  I ignored her. “Are you hungry? We could go out for a greasy breakfast.”

  “Beena.” My name came out heavy like an oath. She stopped to give me a cold look. “Obviously, I am not fucking hungry.” The magazine landed with a flap at the foot of the bed, though she’d probably tried to throw it further. “Just leave me the hell alone.”

  I went to see Uncle, not so much for consultation as to see how he could help. Whether out of pride or complacency, Sadhana and I had never pushed the boundaries of the economy that had been set down for us. We did not really know how things stood financially. What he had given us when we left as teenagers might have been calculated to call us back, eventually, to where he thought we belonged. In spite of our mutual enmity, I knew that Uncle loved and missed my son and wished for his return. I touched the buzzer and with it the thought that we might even have been entitled to reclaim the apartment where we’d grown up, once we were old enough to take possession of it. Though it was a place of horror as well as happiness: leaving it had always felt easier and right. It had been five years since we’d moved out. It was astounding how little else in our lives had changed.

  When there was no answer from the apartment, I went down to the store. The fire heat of the ovens permeated it to the front door, which was propped open. There was the usual crush of customers, and rather than pushing to the front, I let myself be carried along in the lineup between the regulars and the tourists, whom I judged by language and accent and how long they appeared to study the placard above the cash register listing prices and flavours.

  “Une douzaine de sésame.”

  “Six blueberry, six multigrain, six garlic and onion, and, well, what else do you recommend?”

  Over the heads of the people in front of me, I heard a woman’s voice answering and was surprised. There had never been a woman working at the shop in the whole time our family had owned it. Good for Uncle.

  As I moved further inside, I could see condensation on the glass of the fridges lining the right-hand wall. Uncle stocked lox
, cream cheese, orange juice, and, in perpetuity since the store’s original owners, gooseberry jam.

  When I got up to the front, I half expected to see Travis or Carlos, but there were no employees I recognized. Behind the cashier, a lean young man with a serious face used flat planks the length and width of two hockey sticks to lever circles of dough in and out of the oven. Another man, with his long hair in a net, cut slices from a huge mass of dough rolled into a cylinder. Two teenaged boys fashioned them into the bagel rings to be fired.

  I asked the woman if the manager was in. “Harinder Singh. Can I see him, please?”

  “Yeah, okay.” The woman paused with her hand on the till. She had cropped dark hair and a nametag that read JESSIE. Nametags were an innovation since my last visit. “Is there a problem?”

  “He’s my uncle.”

  She turned to the bagel boys working behind her. “Call the boss man.”

  When Uncle came, he lifted up the hinged part of the counter to let me pass into the shop’s kitchen. I took off my jacket and followed him back past the stainless steel counters and bags of flour and sesame seeds to the office door. I avoided looking at any of the employees as we passed.

  Uncle went in ahead of me. There were more filing cabinets than I remembered. “Come in,” he said, which reminded me that it was his office, and had been for twenty years, even though I still thought of it as belonging to my father.

  “Thank you.”

  Uncle sat down behind his desk. It was covered with invoices shuffled into piles and a calculator with oversized keys lolling a paper tongue of figures.

  “So what is this about?” If I wasn’t mistaken, Uncle’s gaze had travelled to my midsection, as though suspecting another pregnancy. I wondered if he could guess how cloistered I’d been since Ravi. Perhaps he could, since he viewed me as a ruined woman.

  “I want to leave,” I said, though I had not expected it to come out that way. “I don’t want to live with Sadhana anymore.” Uncle had never been to our place on St. Marc, so he could not know its impossible smallness or the prison its lack of privacy created. I thought about framing it in a way he could appreciate. “I think it would be better for Quinn if he and I could live on our own.” I watched his face to see what he made of that and thought I saw his moustache twitch. From the other side of the wall I could hear the clattering sound of firewood being loaded into the oven. “Healthier,” I said, louder. “Can you help me?”

  Uncle leaned back in his chair. “You should never have left. Two young girls like you.”

  “That may be.” I knew this to be a safe concession, as he did not actually want us to come back and live with him. “But it’s done.”

  “True.”

  Behind him on the wall, there was a calendar with a picture of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, in the Punjab. Through the window, I could hear the indistinct sounds of bagel boys in the alleyway. I sat up straighter.

  “I was wondering if there’s any more money. From the life insurance, or from the store.”

  “Not much,” he said. “What there is I have been putting away for the two of you. For your marriages.”

  “Things don’t work that way anymore, Uncle.”

  “They do work that way. If you marry a nice Indian boy.”

  “I think that’s up to us. Also, I don’t think you should be holding your breath.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the traditional ship has sailed. For me, anyhow.”

  I saw him weighing it.

  “Real estate,” he said, “is a good investment. I will put you in touch with the man at the bank.”

  I made plans quietly. Sadhana finished her last semester and was about to graduate. Between the end of term and convocation, she performed in a contemporary dance production of Red Riding Hood that brought me to tears in the front row. Though the company was amateur — just a university club, really — Sadhana’s performance had an intensity enhanced by irony, a complexity of expression that she brought to every movement. She was an actress right down to her bones, and the pas de deux between Sadhana and the wolf became something more about the deliberate refusal of carnal knowledge than a simple tale of innocence falling prey to experience. Most of all, I could see from her strength that she was in good health, slim but muscular, and this knowledge bolstered me in my decision.

  But the more certain I felt, the more I put off mentioning the move. If Sadhana was doing well, and she appeared to be, I didn’t want to upset things any sooner than necessary. But then I would remember Ravi, living and working in the same city as his son, and the idea of his having any part of Quinn’s affection made me almost nauseated. His known presence in the city filled me with disquiet. In my mind, Quinn and his father were like magnets turned the right way round again. Instead of pushing apart, it was only a matter of time before they would come together if we stayed.

  I spent a week rehearsing the words, as though finding the right combination would soften their meaning. Not abandonment. Not selfish. I practiced in my head and bolstered my resolve by anticipating her anger in order to heighten my own. I’m sick of it all, I mouthed. I want my own life. I got so worked up I would catch myself muttering, and then Sadhana would be at my elbow, telling me I’d finally gone bonkers.

  On a night when Quinn was staying at a friend’s house, Sadhana invited her knitting friends over. By the time I got home from dropping off my son, there were young women nestled into every nook in the living room.

  “Everyone, this is my sister, Beena.”

  “Hi.” Shrugging off my coat, I nodded to the girls in turn as they introduced themselves. Mel, Cherise, Tara, Rhiannon, and Anne-Marie. To look at, they were not exactly the women I’d pictured in all the months my sister had been spending time with them, though I’d always had a hard time getting a handle on Sadhana’s friends. There were paisley skirts, nose rings, and dreadlocks. There were crocheted shawls, striped legwarmers, and canvas bags covered with protest pins and rainbow flag patches. They seemed unlike anyone I’d ever known Sadhana to hang out with. My sister invited me to sit down, and Anne-Marie, a petite woman dressed all in black, poured me some tea. She had a cherry blossom branch tattooed on the inside of her wrist.

  With the warm cup in my hand, sitting on the rug in the midst of so many women, I was reminded of my mother. I remembered that she had had a sewing circle of her own.

  “This is nice,” I said.

  The girl named Tara smiled at me. She was wearing an orange T-shirt that read HUMMUS IS YUMMUS. “Thanks for letting us into your space.”

  “No problem.” I could tell that Sadhana had done some tidying and rearranging of the apartment before the gathering. Both our mattresses had been transformed into daybeds via the prodigious distribution of cushions. The television was concealed beneath a purple sarong. And arranged beside the teapot on the coffee table, she’d prepared a tray of snacks. I leaned forward to take some bread and cheese on a napkin.

  “Do you knit, Beena?” asked Rhiannon, who was sitting near me on the floor. Covering her lap, what looked like a deep red blanket was being worked up on two large needles.

  “No,” I said. “I never learned.” Ever since Sadhana had cast on her first stitches at the instigation of the hospital’s art therapist, I had merely listened to her complain about it.

  “We could teach you,” said Rhiannon.

  “That sounds fun,” I said. I looked to Sadhana, but she was busy counting stitches in the bodice of a dress she was making. An ambitious project.

  “We’ll teach you our other tricks, too,” said Cherise, a girl with spiky blue hair and a tongue piercing.

  “Cherise,” said Anne-Marie. She was laughing.

  “What? I like to pretend we’re edgy.” With her round face and blue punk hair, Cherise was like a Campbell’s Soup kid in the midst of a playful rebellion. Mel, who seemed to be
her girlfriend, pinched one of Cherise’s apple cheeks before kissing her on the lips.

  “What tricks?” I said.

  “No tricks.” Sadhana spoke up. She was seated on the corner of the mattress on the other side of Mel and Cherise. “We’ve been evolving, as a group.” My sister lowered her eyes before meeting my gaze, and I recognized it as a look of both admission and conciliation. A pre-emptive apology for what had become our separate lives.

  “In what way?” I wasn’t surprised that Sadhana had been keeping secrets, but it reminded me of my own hidden news. I thought of the list in my purse I’d already begun of what to take to Ottawa and what to leave behind.

  Tara held up a purple toque-in-progress, hanging off a set of circular needles. “Rhiannon got us started knitting hats and mitts and baby stuff for a women’s shelter, and then we found out this woman we were helping was in danger of losing her refugee status.”

  “We’re going to knit a kind of peace blanket for her,” said Cherise.

  “Crochet,” corrected Anne-Marie.

  “We’re going to try,” said Rhiannon. She was soft-­spoken but serious. “That’s all we can really say right now.”

  Anne-Marie leaned forward and helped herself to a cookie. “It’ll be kind of an art piece, something for people to rally around.” The others nodded.

  “Basically,” said Mel, sounding wry, “we’re a revolu­tionary knitting circle now.”

  I was impressed. “That’s great.” It seemed like a useful outlet for Sadhana’s obsessive tendencies. Outwards instead of inwards.

  “You should join us,” said Cherise. “We’ll teach you crocheting first. It’s easier.”

  I looked at my sister and her face seemed veiled. Her hands had fallen still in her lap.