Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “Zing!” he said, as he slid to a stop at the edge of the living room rug. “Remember? Hey, remember how I had my bed behind a curtain?”

  Sadhana and I exchanged glances. What to us had been squalor had become Quinn’s lost utopia, apparently.

  “I remember,” I said. We had played up the caravan aspect of things, all the scattered mattresses and floor cushions instead of proper furniture. But in truth the sight of Quinn’s and Sadhana’s curtains surrounding their beds had always reminded me of hospital rooms, with their feeble partitions between one agony and another. It had been decided that my bed didn’t require a curtain, since I had privacy by default from the other curtains. Also we had run out of ceiling hooks.

  Quinn spun around on one foot, arms out. “Whooosh! And the posters, all the posters along the wall by Mom’s spot, under the light-up bananas.” One of my rare decorative touches, those plastic party lanterns I’d found on clearance while buying Spider-Man paper plates for one of Quinn’s birthdays. The lights had gotten lost when we moved, and Quinn, it seemed, had never forgiven me.

  “Yes, whatever happened to those posters, Beena?”

  Sadhana had seized Quinn in a hug on his last lap past the couch, skinny arms tightening around him like a lasso. He tried to wriggle free, but Sadhana, however exhausted, was still too strong for him. When she kissed the back of his head and let him go, he sprung from her to the basement door.

  “I’m going to go look for some of that stuff.” The basement was a repository of things I couldn’t bear to look at or throw out, stacked in storage bags on old doors laid across bricks in case of flooding.

  “Put your shoes on first,” I said. “Put everything back where you found it.”

  “We should have a talk with him,” I said to Sadhana when he was downstairs. “Explain that this is just temporary.” He was running around in a state of such obvious glee that I was starting to feel bad.

  “I’d rather not.” Now that Quinn was out of sight, she was closing her eyes again. She could rally for him, but not for me.

  Quinn came back up rubbing his dusty hands on the front of his sweatpants. “Too much stuff down there,” he said, kicking off his shoes. He ran back to the living room. “If we make this into Auntie’s bedroom,” he said, pointing to the east side of the room, “we can hang a sheet between the bookcase and this part of the window.”

  “Auntie might want a real bedroom,” said Sadhana. “If I’m going to be staying for a while.”

  We stared at her, then Quinn offered first his room, the little loft that was the whole of the second floor, and then mine, before I could utter a word.

  Sadhana said, “I think your mother would prefer me to be down here.”

  “That’s right. We’ll get a cot.”

  But we didn’t. Instead it was me and my sister, sharing a bed like old times, like the bad times. When she rolled over in the middle of the night, I could barely feel the bed creaking. When I opened my eyes in the morning and watched her sleeping, turned away from me, she didn’t look any different from when she was fourteen years old. Long, ropy legs and arms like spaghetti noodles, clumps of black hair flocking on the pillow.

  She wavered between a livid mutiny and a genteel convalescence. When Quinn was around, she submitted to the pizza and cookies on offer without much fuss, though she warned that I was in danger of making us all fat, that Quinn would never be weaned off a taste for junk food. She meant me, too, but she didn’t say it. During these periods she could pass for a sufferer of a lingering flu, or at any rate Quinn seemed to believe that’s what was wrong with her. It was only after Quinn went to bed that she became a roving menace, snaking through the house in a foul temper, complaining about my shoddy housekeeping and screaming at me when I followed her to make sure she wasn’t throwing up.

  I had a new boyfriend then, Andrew, and he recommended therapy after she snapped at him for parking too far from the curb. She had been watching through the front window. He came in, slinging off his jacket and calling out hellos as she struggled to a sitting position on the couch. “If you’re going to pollute the environment with a car,” she said, cheeks flushed, “why don’t you learn how to drive it?” His white Toyota was slung between two green hatchbacks, nose to the curb, with its back end not quite tucked in. Sadhana could channel road rage even when she wasn’t behind a wheel, which she rarely was.

  Andrew snorted. He was growing used to her barbs, and he’d heard reports of her mood swings, but I could tell he was stung. He tossed her the car keys from his pocket, and she flinched away from where they landed on the couch cushion. “Feel free to park it yourself,” he said. It sounded measured, but for Andrew this was a fury.

  Later, at the Portuguese restaurant on the corner, he betrayed his irritation by suggesting that I not only ought to force Sadhana into therapy but that I should consider joining her there.

  “This has been going on between the two of you for long enough,” he said. He lined up the salt and pepper shakers along the edge of the table touching the wall. “Why do you let her talk to you that way?” We were waiting for two orders of chicken and fries. At the end, they would bring us a third order, boxed up to take home to Sadhana where I could watch her eat it.

  “You mean, talk to you that way.”

  He ignored that. “It isn’t healthy.”

  “I’m making her healthy.”

  I knew the guidelines, the list of dangers. You had to re-nourish a body slowly or it could throw off the levels of electrolytes, a phenomenon I didn’t understand but knew enough to be afraid of. One of Sadhana’s doctors once told me, “Swelling, heart attack, seizure, coma. Be careful.” Then he handed me a stack of nutrition charts. His warning became my morning mantra, the one that ran through my head as I blended milkshakes and buttered toast. It came and went at other times, too, whenever I felt my own stomach grumbling or found my stride hitting a particular rhythm as I walked.

  When the chicken and fries arrived, grease-slicked and salty, Andrew and I ate quickly and in silence, each turned to the privacy of our abashed consumption. Backsliding dieters as we were, our pacts to indulge in guilty pleasures tended to yield more guilt than pleasure. Andrew’s girth was slightly outsized for his build, the product of years of late-night computer programming buoyed by solitary drinking. There were always moments when I shared my sister’s revulsion for food but knew it could live alongside a dictatorial appetite. Andrew caught my eye as I replaced a drumstick on my plate, then looked away as I used my fingers to strip away one last piece of meat and put it in my mouth. Pulling the paper napkin from my lap, I covered the remains of the meal as it shifted before my eyes from something delicious to something vile.

  After dinner, Andrew decided not to come in. He said, “I’ll be glad when she’s better.” It was a declaration of exasperation rather than concern, and it was a feeling I knew so well that I was ashamed.

  “Goodnight,” I said, and I gave the door a firm close that was just shy of being a slam.

  One afternoon I came home from a Saturday shift at the law firm to find Quinn and Sadhana digging in the garden in front of the house. Most of the houses along our street were equipped with only the gesture of a garden, an abbreviation delineated by salvaged railway ties leaking creosote into the packed soil. Ours was no exception, and when we moved in, the rectangular beds buffering our front porch from the sidewalk contained a weedy mix of delphiniums, columbines, and bushes of bleeding hearts, a tall, swaying mass of cool colours. It looked intentional, if less impressive than the neighbours’ gardens, and I’d never gotten around to changing it. The tiny backyard, with its privacy and the circling embrace of lilacs I was coaxing up from shrubs, was my first priority.

  As I came along the sidewalk, I saw Quinn perched on the edge of a garden bed and Sadhana crouched low beside him, digging with a hand trowel. The back of her grey shirt was dark with sweat, and when she
turned in my direction, I could see her face shining with moisture. She looked exhausted but wound up, her legs trembling as she got to her feet. Quinn’s T-shirt was spotted with dirt, and both of his shoelaces were untied. When I got close, I saw a pile of root-strong weeds laying twisted and clodded on the paving stones, and my sister and my son staring at me with the same brown eyes, pupils dilating to liquid black.

  “What about Christopher Papadopoulos’s birthday party?” I said. There had been a lengthy telephone RSVP with Chrisopher’s mother earlier in the week, during which I’d enumerated Quinn’s food preferences, his swimming abilities, and his comprehensive lack of allergies. I’d surrendered two emergency phone numbers, and bought and gift-wrapped two packs of Magic: The Gathering trading cards, which Quinn had assured me Christopher was bound to love. I’d even bought Quinn new red swimming trunks, after finding the waistband fraying on the old ones.

  “We forgot,” said Sadhana.

  “You forgot.”

  “But look at all the work we’ve done!” said Quinn. “See? Doesn’t it look terrific?” He took hold of my hand as he pointed out the dark patches of earth they’d cleared free of weeds. “And Auntie says we can go get some seedlings tomorrow, maybe, if you’re okay with adding in a, um, a border here?” He looked at Sadhana, checking his facts, and she nodded. “Oh, and fertilizer.”

  I eventually admitted my approval of the transformation, avoiding Sadhana’s gaze just as she was avoiding mine. When I got inside, I called Christopher’s mom, who chided me about the extra food she’d prepared. But when I sounded suitably remorseful, she confessed that she couldn’t help but be relieved to have one less kid running around. I could hear the sounds of shouting and splashing in the background.

  “I’ll have Chris bring Quinn’s loot bag to school for him on Monday,” she said before she hung up.

  Loot bags. It brought back memories of my own childhood. I couldn’t remember the last time Quinn had been invited to a big birthday party at a classmate’s house. He’d always had friends, two or three close ones, but my impression was that all of them were always just on the outside of the rest of their classmates. For whatever reason, he’d been more popular in Montreal.

  Sadhana leaned against the fridge, blinking her long lashes as her eyes adjusted to the relative darkness of the kitchen after hours in streaming sunlight. “I really am sorry, Bee. I totally lost track of time.”

  I believed her. Her concentration was a brute force, a combustion propelling her like a torpedo towards her objectives. “It’s okay,” I said, and I stepped aside to let her get to the sink to scrub the dirt from her hands.

  But the next weekend, it was the same thing. Quinn cancelling plans with his friend Keith to do something with Sadhana while I was stuck at work. Quinn was already too solitary, too inclined to prefer the company of adults. Keith was a brat, in my opinion, though I supposed he might grow out of it, but I still thought it preferable for Quinn to make his way by negotiating the vagaries of bad jokes and video game supremacy wars with his peers, rather than spending an afternoon running lines with his perfectionist aunt — no matter what the quality or educational content of the play. This time it was Richard III. I wondered how convincingly he could play a conniving hunchback, and whether it could possibly be useful for Sadhana’s craft or only to feed her ceaseless need for attention.

  When I spoke to my sister about it, it turned into a fight. “You’re just jealous.” She could say cruel things casually, the things other people normally say in a temper. “You’re jealous of the bond between me and Quinn. That’s why you moved away.”

  “That’s not true.”

  I’d left because I was sick of her sickness, sick of looking after her, of worrying, of fighting, of being tossed from one day to the next on a tide of fear. But I didn’t say this because I was looking after her again. By some miracle she was letting me.

  I retaliated instead by training Quinn, giving him an edited version of the recovery plan and continuing to suppress the facts of the actual illness. “It’s very important for her to eat in order to get well,” I said. “She needs her vitamins. I want you to tell me if she’s eating or not when I’m not here. Okay?”

  Quinn accepted the mission with his typical ten-year-old gravity. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep track in here.” He waved a little yellow spiral-bound notebook that he’d been carrying around, spinning it around a pencil so it flapped like a noisemaker. I could see pages filled with tiny printing and things that looked like cartoons.

  “Thank you,” I said. “It’s a very important job.”

  It worked for a day or two, Quinn pulling me aside every evening to whisper what he’d seen, one sandwich or two, one banana or nothing but cereal, until the afternoon I arrived home to find Sadhana waiting for me alone in the living room, beating the notebook into her open palm.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t notice? You turning Quinn into a spy?” She seemed tearful, but when I tried soothing her, she sprang back into anger. “You know, it’s humiliating enough having you watching my every move, let alone a little kid.”

  It amazed me that Sadhana could still take things personally after all these years of my working to prop up her recovery. Every relapse was like a train on a collision course, and there was nothing I wouldn’t throw in front of it to try to slow it down. Even Quinn.

  “He’s not stupid,” I said. “He’s going to figure it out eventually.”

  Sadhana had screamed at him, it turned out, flying into a rage she’d been ashamed of when she saw how it frightened him. But she had apologized with humble sincerity, as well as with a new Nintendo game. After that he seemed to hold me exclusively accountable for the whole incident, as did she.

  Both of them were ambivalent about recovery if it meant she would be going back to Montreal, back to her regular life.

  We lasted two weeks in family therapy. It was Andrew who urged us to go, and Quinn was excited. After Sadhana’s outburst, we had to explain to him the nature of her illness.

  Both Sadhana and I still had memories of the group sessions from her teenage hospitalization. At those, we’d sit sullen and silent until prodded by the facilitator, but once provoked, we’d dominate the rest of the session with our sniping. With ten years of maturation under my belt, I thought I would be better equipped to handle myself, but everything about group therapy still worked to provoke me.

  “Make her stop rolling her eyes,” said Sadhana to Melinda, our new facilitator. It was as if we were sixteen and fourteen all over again.

  “I’m not,” I said. “Stop being paranoid.”

  “You are. You’re doing it right now.”

  Melinda inclined a shoulder and rotated slightly to face me, clipboard held tight to her chest. “You were. But maybe you didn’t realize.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “Mom,” said Quinn. “You were. Just listen.”

  He was only ten going on eleven. I had to remind myself of this, or I wouldn’t believe it.

  Sadhana said, “Bee, stop trying to have the last word.”

  It was all I could do to stop myself from making a face.

  My sister got sentimental about candy bars after we went back to therapy, and Melinda regarded it as a breakthrough.

  “A Mars bar,” Sadhana said one day in group. “I haven’t had one of those in ages.”

  I could picture a Mars bar, the black packaging and the red-lettered logo. I associated them with older people for some reason I couldn’t pinpoint. “I don’t know that I’ve ever had one,” I said. “Are they good?”

  Melinda, who always got exasperated by unhelpful remarks from family members, shot me a look to be quiet. Quinn looked like he was thinking about telling me the same thing.

  “Oh no?” said Melinda to Sadhana. Everyone else was acting as though I hadn’t spoken. “When was the last time you remember having one?�
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  “When our mother had to go to the hospital,” said Sadhana. “The night she died.” She was looking at the floor, where she was drawing an arc around her chair leg with the toe of her black flat. “I got it out of the vending machine.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, we weren’t allowed to have candy normally, but we were so hungry and we’d been there for hours. I remember it was the best thing I had ever tasted, and I felt so guilty that I cried when I was finished.”

  “What did you feel guilty about?”

  “Breaking the rules. And being glad about it.”

  “You saw it as a betrayal of your mother’s values.”

  Sadhana nodded. “Maybe.” She talked at length about unwrapping it, the crinkle of the paper and the smooth brown form of the bar, which made me smirk. And about the first bite, how she expected it to be heavy but it was light, how it melted on her tongue. I couldn’t stand listening to her. She was talking as though she loved food, like she wanted to do more esoteric things to the Mars bar than just eat it.

  “And was that the first time you purged?” asked Melinda. She thought she was really on to something. I tried not to show on my face that it was pointless to waste time on purging when Sadhana had mostly given that up years ago — after her first time in the hospital, when someone had explained how bad it was for her teeth. Throwing up was something she only tended to do at the beginning of a relapse.

  “No, no. Nothing like that. I couldn’t even have told you how many calories were in it then. All that came later. I wasn’t sick then.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Quinn, intent, as though tangents about hospitals and candy could really fix anything.

  “What about Wunderbar?” I said, keeping my eyes away from Melinda. “That’s a good one. When’s the last time you had one of those?”

  Melinda believed in the healing power of journals, and she encouraged all of us, even those of us who were not sick, to start keeping one. I stiffened at the first mention of the idea. The sting of Sadhana’s original diary was a memory that had not lost much of its potency.