He kicks the floor with his heel. Tap, tap, tap. “You girls are sure working hard,” he says after a moment, to what’s left of that section of sub-floor. He walks to the wall and raps at a joint with his knuckles, preoccupied. “Think you’ll be done tomorrow?”
I will the watch to silence. Does he see something? A problem unforeseen? A construction quandary he has not taken into account while preparing the estimate? But I’m too afraid to ask – not before I’ve heard back from Surinder. “Maybe. We’re close. Which reminds me – better get back to it, huh?” So, I pull an old Maclean’s from the stack and study the cover as though the decision about what to do with this issue requires all my concentration.
He clears his throat. “I been meaning to ask you something.”
He needs more money, wants more time. No doubt now. Though I am generally proficient at pain avoidance, I put the magazine down and face my fate. “Go ahead.”
“Why did you take so many support beams out of your house?”
It takes me a moment to shift gears. “What do you mean? I didn’t.”
“I been looking over the debris here and there isn’t nearly enough wood here to support a roof this size and weight. Didn’t the building inspector tell you?”
“What building inspector?”
“When you bought the place.”
“There was no building inspector.”
Ed seems puzzled. Like I’ve just told him I don’t have a liver or a heart, or that I don’t need oxygen to breathe. “Mighta been a good idea under the circumstances – considering the age of this old girl and all.”
How can I explain? My grief, my desperate longing for Graham, my falling out with Surinder and the resentment and sorrow I subsequently harboured. The solace when I saw the house, the overwhelming sense that everything would be all right now – these will make no sense to a logical man like Ed Malone. I struggle to find other words that might.
But before I can open my mouth, a gust of wind comes up. It lifts the tarp, and though it’s overcast outside, for an instant, the room floods with new light. It is then I see his face. Used to the shadows, he hasn’t had a chance to adjust it. The look is pure compassion.
The tarp falls. Ed’s face slips back into the gloom.
“Thanks for the advice. Next time,” I say, praying he cannot see my red cheeks, though of course he can, illuminated as they are by the work light.
“All right then.” He nods. “Better make a move.” The floor creaks again as he heads for the door. “When I said working hard, I meant you were good folks. I can tell. And I’m sorry about your troubles.” His silhouette slips away.
Alone in the harsh light, I wonder if I have imagined the whole visit. I am not accustomed to sympathetic looks. In fact, I am not accustomed to any looks at all, for, as a fifty-year-old woman, I have become invisible. Clerks, cashiers, librarians, bank tellers – I waltz through their transacted days barely noticed. I challenge any of them to describe the colour of my hair. My eyes. Estimate my height or weight. Not one will be able to.
And I prefer it. I cherish and protect this anonymity. Many times in my life – in Dhaka, silently renouncing my birth country at the border, moving to this little island, I have longed for the freedom of invisibility. I am a pariah by choice.
So I don’t want Ed Malone’s looks, kind, compassionate or otherwise. I don’t need his pity. It distresses me to think he has feelings for me and my situation. The idea drains so much energy I stop working and forget about Graham’s watch hidden under the lumber.
*
Less than four months after I left Dhaka, I decided I couldn’t stand being back in Lansing. Everything annoyed me – the lights and signs, the absence of people on the streets, the shimmering opulence of the A&P, the ragged beggars, whom I’d never even seen before. No one but me saw the hypocrisy knit into the entire society. My vision had blurred or cleared, I didn’t know which.
When was Luna going to write? I hungered for word of her well-being.
I didn’t return friends’ calls. I stayed home, avoiding movies, shopping, bars and coffee shops – all the meaningless activities that had once filled my days and nights. To placate my troubled father, I sometimes went for a walk, but only at night. I wandered the streets of our neighbourhood until I was sure Dad had gone to sleep. I couldn’t bear the expectant look on his face when I came home.
I didn’t lose my year at university, though there was much discussion when I arrived back in the final weeks of the semester. Michigan State could not reach Dhaka University. After the night of March 25, when the campus was attacked by the army, professors and students slaughtered in their residences, steps to the buildings stained with the blood left behind as their mangled corpses were dragged outside, everyone else disappearing and living under assumed names, there was no one left on campus to answer the phone, return a telex or receive the mail. No one could confirm I attended the university.
The school administration’s decision was tempered by the climate of the day; all that interest in conflict and peace manifested in a compromise in my favour. They would review the papers I had written in Dhaka. I would complete summer coursework and write a significant essay. I quickly pulled together a thirty-page comparative study on student political movements in the United States and East Pakistan. I contrasted the role American students played in the Vietnam War crisis – enriching national dialogue – with the role played by East Pakistani students in their independence movement. For they seemed to be responsible for escalating their conflict, taking up arms, perhaps even causing the deaths of many intellectuals and villagers. I used Hasan, name changed of course, as a prime example of the type of student I meant, whose energy would have been better directed to the cause of peace.
My adviser wrote across the top: “Fascinating. But unsuitable for a language degree. Try again.”
I wrote beneath her words, “I don’t have anything else to say,” and resubmitted.
But in the end, I dropped the topic and wrote something benign about Tagore and nature. I graduated with the rest of my class.
My adviser, without my consent, tempted perhaps by the tidal wave of interest in both Vietnam and the Liberation War, and the hunger for more firsthand accounts of both tragedies, submitted my unsuitable paper to an editor she knew at The Journal of International Student Affairs. My adviser’s pleasure when they accepted the paper knew no bounds and though I protested angrily at first, eventually I was flattered into acquiescence.
That article created a minor stir in academia, which eventually spilled into the mass media. Excerpts of my paper were re-printed, most often out of context and carelessly edited. No one asked me about it – apparently, I signed over my rights to the journal. A flurry of letters to the editor was followed by bomb threats to the journal’s office in Washington, Michigan State University, and the offices of anyone else foolish enough to reprint it. I had no stomach for all that sensation. Most of the people stepping into the debate were nitwits, the rest hypocrites.
In Lansing, I plunged even deeper into myself. And when my skin began to take on the pallid look of subterranean fish, my aunt, Adele, came up with a solution. A holiday. In Canada. “We’ll lie on the beach, swim when it’s too hot. Maybe you’ll meet someone.” She was my father’s youngest sister, only two years older than me. We were more like cousins, though I found her overbearing at times. When she wanted something, our age gap expanded to fill an entire generation, and we would assume our familial roles: her aunt to my niece.
“Adele –”
“Come on.” She held out a blinding armful of fashion and women’s magazines.
The prospect of a week like that horrified me and I wouldn’t have contemplated it any further if my father hadn’t intervened. “I keep telling you – you need to get out,” he said again over dinner. “Sunshine – air.”
“What? Like I’m a flat t
ire? A moldy sneaker?” I poked sullen holes in my mashed potatoes. “Speak English, Dad. You’re the schoolteacher.”
“Give yourself a break, hon. What harm will a week on a lake do?”
He had to be joking. The shortlist included an obscenely clean beach, icy Lake Huron water, bland, white Canadians in swimsuits, Coca-Cola, cotton candy, mini-golf and shrieking speedboats driven by middle-aged men in sun visors and aviator sunglasses.
I couldn’t think of anything I wanted less. Unless – and I had to be honest with myself – it was more time alone.
So I packed. Adele went on a crash diet and did something to her hair just before we left.
“Do you like it? I can get my hairdresser to do yours if you want. It’s called a shag.”
I wanted to tell her that she looked like a date palm, bushy locks springing out from the top of an impossible thin and scaly trunk. Rather than replication, the new look deserved a quick demise.
We crossed the border and checked into a cabin on the fringes of Grand Bend. “Isn’t that charming?” Adele cooed about the pine table for two in the kitchen, and its scarred surface. “All this – rusticity!”
And that was almost the last I saw of her. She latched onto a group of girls ripe with tans, who hung out with boys who wore nothing but cutoffs – “they’re locals, you should hear their accents,” she said, as though she’d discovered a rare, exotic species – and while they invited me along, I preferred my own company to their silly flirtations and nonsensical conversations.
I stayed in the cabin most of the time. I washed my hair with Adele’s shampoo. I read all her magazines. When I finished, I bought a news magazine, but it was Canadian, and there was nothing in it about Mr. Chowdhury’s beloved Bengal. I went to the ice cream shop and ordered a strawberry milkshake and after one sip, I threw the pink slop out.
“You’re no fun,” Adele pronounced.
“Why should you care?” I was on my second read of an article about improving your skin – oatmeal, cucumber slices, teabags. Mentally, I was marking off the passages I thought would most puzzle or horrify Kamala.
“We’re going surfing in half an hour. Glen’s bringing an inner tube from his uncle’s tractor. Surfing with a tractor tire! Can you imagine? Come with us.”
On the next page was a question and answer column about clothing. One of the answers was a step-by-step guide to putting on nylons with cotton-gloved fingers. I pictured Kamala and the grace with which her coarse fingers pulled open the string on Amma’s medicine bag. Somehow the prospect of reading that again seemed more daunting than an afternoon with Adele’s dim-witted friends.
“I love New York. Do you know New York?” one of the cutoff boys asked me on the beach. He was carving a woman’s body in the sand.
“I’m from Michigan,” I said flatly and rolled over on my stomach. I thought about Shaheed and what he would say if he was here right now.
“I’m going to the George Harrison concert at Madison Square Garden next month,” the cutoff boy offered. “Clapton’ll be there, Dylan, Ringo – I heard from a very reliable source Paul and John will show up too. The Beatles are reuniting for one last concert. But it’s all on the q.t., eh?”
I looked him over, wondering at his cluelessness. “You’re talking about the benefit for the Bangladeshi refugees, right?”
“Huh?” He slid his hand down the sand woman’s hip.
I picked up my towel and left.
I walked as far down the beach as I could. I sat on the sand at the water’s edge and looked up. I counted seagulls, pointlessly spinning as though caught in a whirlpool that refused to suck them in and end their misery. When I reached one hundred, I decided I needed to go further down the beach.
Right beside me though, barely ten feet away, someone else was carving in the sand. I hadn’t even noticed him arrive.
“Funny things, aren’t they?” he said, not looking away from his work. “Rather dumb. But they sure have perfected the art of making a spiral.”
I looked right down then, to the circular blob he was molding. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”
“Nope.” He heaped two handfuls of sand on top and patted them into place. “I leave that to the experts. Experts with wings.”
“What are you making then?” The mound remained shapeless.
“Just watch me.” Leaving me no choice. I still suffered from the residual good manners that would not allow me to walk away without just cause. I sat back down, and realized something about the way he spoke struck a chord.
“You’re not from here,” I said.
“I’m from Michigan.” He looked at me then and dropped his voice. “But don’t tell. The big index finger of Uncle Sam hath pointed at me. Good thing all you Canadians are sympathetic.”
I laughed. “Actually, I’m related to your uncle. I’m from Lansing.”
“Aah!” He squawked like a gull. “You’re not FBI?”
“No, no. My god.”
“No, you are indeed. I see it. FBI. Foreign Beach Interloper. Do not lope any closer.”
“I’ll let you finish your work before I arrest you.”
“Thank you. Never let it be said Uncle Sam doesn’t have the most courteous Gestapo.”
“Thank you. We like to think we are supportive of the creative arts.”
He collected, dumped and shaped sand. I again imagined Shaheed here – what he would say about the expanse of water and sand. What he might carve on the beach. With no conscious effort, I found my hands had assumed the curl I spent contemplating so many nights while lying in bed in Dhaka. His touch outside the banquet hall had remained with me. I was suddenly aware of my breathing and, somewhere on the other side of the planet, Shaheed’s. I missed him. Where was he while I lolled by the waves? Why was it taking so long for someone to write?
The pile of sand grew longer and thicker in this stranger’s hands and when finally he started working on the tail, I understood.
“Moby Dick.”
“Dickie,” he corrected. “Or is it Dickette? You shouldn’t assume she’s a he.”
“Whatever she is, she’s going to die, beached like that.”
“Oh no she won’t.” He smoothed her bulbous forehead as though caressing it. “She’s not what you think, not exactly. She’s somewhat evolved. She actually prefers land now. Grown used to it, I guess.”
“Then she should be up there.” I pointed up toward the grass that fringed the beach, behind which rose a grove of scruffy spruce. “One big wave and she’s going to be wiped out.”
“Never. Look at her size. She’s built to withstand storms. And just about anything else. Adaptation is a wondrous quality to possess.”
Surprised that until that moment I had not yet noticed how it smelled here, I breathed in the air off the lake. Though part of the same chain, Lake Huron smelled nothing like Lake Michigan.
The impulse was squeaky as a rusted hinge. Still, I blurted out, “My name is Robin Rowe.”
We talked some more. Then it was dusk, and we were still talking. Graham was the first person I had spoken with like that since returning from Dhaka. I was a drifter in the desert who, having traveled from mirage to dried up puddle, had finally found water. I never expected to find it here.
He took me home in the dark. He knew the cottages where I was staying. “Thanks,” I said. Outside the cottage, the shuffleboard, bathed in yellow light, was deserted.
“Anytime. By the way, you haven’t arrested me yet.”
“What?”
“I’m about to escape and you haven’t arrested me yet.”
I smiled. “Tomorrow then. It will have to be tomorrow.”
*
That afternoon, as I sort through the mismatched contents of a cutlery drawer on my lawn, a courier brings the envelope from Surinder’s law firm. I wait until the taillights on the
delivery truck disappear. My hand shakes as I tear open the flap.
Dear Mrs. Rowe,
With regard to your recent letter to Ms Susan Livingstone, formerly Ms Surinder Livingstone of Toronto, Ontario, please be advised we have been engaged as legal counsel for Ms Livingstone in all future matters involving you and our client.
Our client has requested us to inform you that a bank draft in your favor for the sum of CAD$35,000.00 will be forwarded to your solicitors at the earliest possible date. Our client has fixed one condition on this transfer of funds. You will agree to no further contact with our client on this and any other matter in future.
If these terms are acceptable to you, please sign the attached, have it witnessed by your solicitors, and instruct them to contact us with the necessary information to facilitate the transfer of funds.
Trusting these instructions are clear, I remain,
Yours truly,
John Randolph Anderson, Esq.
I throw the envelope and letter in with the cutlery. But it’s not enough. So I flip the whole works over. Forks and knives spill onto the lawn. I kick the overturned drawer as hard as I can. And when the clatter stops and silence explodes, I run. Down the road. Through an opening in the blackberry canes. Along a muddy tire track, the ground spongy beneath my feet. Over a broken cedar rail. Like a forest fire, I do not know where I am going, where or how I will stop. I’ve been dry so long, everything ignites, and promises to turn to cinders and ash.
*
I’m blinded by the late afternoon sun that reflects off the chrome handle of Fee’s refrigerator. I shift until I can see again – our cups of tea, our curled hands, all overcast with a glare lodged on my retinas. Fee’s spoon clatters a discordant tune against the side of her mug. “Little snip, isn’t she?”
She is. I’m so angry, I could spit shrapnel. She’s always been direct, my daughter, never one to leave people guessing about either her feelings or intentions. But this time, she’s gone too far. Her words, her tone – I can only presume she has no idea what she is doing or saying. But a small voice inside reminds me Surinder always knows exactly what she is doing and saying.
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