CHAYA KNOCKED ON DANIEL’S DOOR.
He opened it, and Chaya stood there in the doorway, looking in at the place that was achingly familiar. The white couch with the pillows arranged just so. The tidy bookshelves and desk. The soft grey rug. Daniel was a neat man—that had surprised her when she first came here. She had expected something more chaotic. There were a few changes now; bright paintings hung on the walls, cheerful abstracts in orange and red. The poli sci woman.
“Is she here?”
“No, Laurie’s out of town for the week. Conference.” Daniel stepped aside, and Chaya came in.
Chaya wasn’t sure what she was expecting. Daniel, to his credit, did not immediately try to make love to her once the door closed. That argued well for him; perhaps he hadn’t been dating Laurie yet when he came to Chaya’s apartment that day. Daniel didn’t even step toward her. Chaya didn’t know why he did, or didn’t, though. Why had become important.
“Why didn’t you stop?” She said it abruptly, with no prelude—if she’d worked up to it, she wouldn’t have been able to say it at all. That was how words so often behaved; fine in her head but choked in her throat, smothered in her mouth. So this time Chaya simply spit them out, without thinking about it.
“What?” Daniel looked completely confused.
“That time, at my apartment”—her voice rose in volume with each phrase—“why didn’t you stop when I asked you to? Why didn’t you stop when I said no?” Chaya was shouting. She had prided herself on never shouting in a family of frequent screaming fights. Chaya had always been the calm, contained, quiet one, but now, if she didn’t shout, she would cry, and crying was unacceptable. “I trusted you!”
Daniel looked blank, bewildered, even a little angry. He didn’t say anything at first, though—he just looked at her. Finally, he sank down onto the couch and started to speak. “Okay, I think there’s some confusion here. Could we just go over this slowly?” He paused, but Chaya said nothing.
Daniel continued. “I’m sorry that I left when I did. I’m sorry that I started sleeping with Laurie right after we broke up. I’m sorry I didn’t come after you sooner. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you first when I did come after you, and I’m particularly sorry that I didn’t tell you about Laurie then.” He paused again, but Chaya still didn’t speak. Daniel went on, slower. “I meant to talk to you, but I had missed you so much. When I saw you, my body just took over. I’m sorry that I just let you send me away that day, that I didn’t stay, or at least come back. Maybe things would have worked out differently.” He shrugged.
Chaya’s shoulders had relaxed a little, and her arms loosened. As she started to open her mouth, Daniel held up a hand. “Hang on. I wasn’t done. I’m sorry for all of that, but you weren’t exactly clear with me either. And more importantly, I also don’t know what you’re talking about, when you ask me why I didn’t stop. I thought you wanted it…and Laurie and I had only slept together a few times at that point…and we’d been using condoms, if that’s what you’re worried about. I didn’t put you at any risk.” Daniel sounded almost indignant now.
“I wasn’t on the pill.”
Daniel hunched over slightly, as if his stomach hurt. “Jesus. I didn’t know.”
“I know that.” Chaya’s face was completely still. “That’s why I said no, why I told you to stop.”
Daniel’s pale face grew even paler. “You didn’t. I swear it, you didn’t say anything at all. You just kissed me, and pulled me down, and took off my clothes. You didn’t say a word. You never do. Trust me, if you had said anything, I would have noticed!”
Chaya stared at him, just stared, while her mind went back to that day in September. Had she actually said it at all, or had she simply thought it? Chaya bit her lip, wondering if she had ever really believed it, or if she had just convinced herself that she did, so she would have an excuse, a reason to be angry with him. What was wrong with her?
Daniel asked, in a voice suddenly rough, “Did you really think I could do that to you?”
Chaya shook her head, realizing that no, she didn’t really believe it. She started to cry. Tears welled up, as if the ice in her chest were melting, as if she were flooding, drowning. She walked over to Daniel and, shaking, held out her hands to him.
“Hey…,” he said, and pulled her down to the couch, into his arms. Chaya huddled there, with her face pressed against him, sobbing until his shirt was soaked, her fingers digging into his chest while he slowly rocked her, whispering soft reassurances.
Chaya’s head was pounding by the time she stopped, her eyes aching with soreness. She had to breathe through her mouth; she couldn’t seem to clear her nose. Daniel still held her tight, and she felt oddly safe, almost as if she were cradled in the limbs of a tree, so solid and deeply rooted that it couldn’t be shaken. When she was finally still, breathing slow and deep, his arms tightened around her. He said, “You’re not…?”
“No.” His arms relaxed. Relief, plain and clear in the body whose language she had once spoken so intimately. That hurt too.
“So, you’re engaged.” Daniel nodded, his chin against the top of her head. “Do you love her?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I know it was fast, but yes. I love Laurie very much.”
Oddly, that wasn’t as painful as Chaya might have expected. Did she still love him? Had she ever?
“We’ve got lots of talking to do,” Daniel said quietly.
Chaya took a deep breath. She pulled back a little—just enough to talk, but not enough to let go. Not yet.
THEY KEPT TALKING, MOSTLY ON THE PHONE. DANIEL MADE HER A deal—for every story he told her about his life, his family, Chaya had to tell him one of hers. Laurie wasn’t thrilled, but she apparently believed in being civilized about such things. The wedding was still on schedule. Chaya thought she was actually glad of that.
It was hard at first, getting the words out. She tried closing her eyes and pretending she was talking to herself, but the words still stuck in her throat. Finally she took to typing the words on her laptop, and then reading them back to him on the phone. It was ridiculous, she knew. But it worked, and after a few conversations, she didn’t need the laptop anymore.
They talked for hours, until Chaya’s ears were actually ringing, until her neck ached from holding the phone. Words came spilling out of her like waterfalls from the rocks, and she was giddy with the pleasure of it. She had never thought that talking could be so intoxicating.
Work improved—the time in Tucson went very well, and the analysis of the data went even better. She presented a preliminary talk on it at a conference over the holiday break. In mid-January, Jenny called. The position at Davis was still open, very much so, and they were excited about her current line of work. Chaya told Jenny she’d think seriously about the job.
IT WAS EARLY FEBRUARY WHEN HER MOTHER CONFRONTED HER.
“So. You’re going to California?” Her mother talked loudly over the whirring of the mixer; she was making caramel pudding.
“What?” Chaya flushed. Maybe she should pretend she hadn’t heard that. She had almost decided to go, but she wasn’t ready for this conversation, for her mother’s threats and complaints—she hadn’t prepared…
“It’s warmer there,” her mother continued, relentlessly. “And you can keep an eye on your sister.”
“Davis isn’t so close to Berkeley.” Chaya turned away from the stove, where she was toasting almonds.
“Not so far either. Don’t burn the nuts. I’m worried about her—she isn’t sensible, like you. Maybe if you settle down there, you’ll find a husband. And with both you girls out of the house, I can finally take a vacation. I’ve never been to Sri Lanka myself, you know. Not in all these years.”
Her mother’s voice was firm, calm. She didn’t seem worried at all—and since when did she think Chaya was sensible? The impossible suddenly was becoming possible. Chaya turned back to flip the nuts. If her mother didn’t need her now—had her mother ever needed he
r?
Maybe Chaya had just wanted to be needed, to have a clear place and purpose, even if it had meant going nowhere.
DANIEL THOUGHT SHE SHOULD GO TOO, THOUGH HE SAID HE WOULD miss her. Chaya stopped trying to argue against it when she realized that three drafts of letters to Davis now sat on her computer, and that she was already thinking about what to take with her, and what to leave behind.
It would be something new. Something strange, and different—a shift away from her fixed orbits, a chance to leave these endless circlings and chart her own unique path.
The morning of the day she was leaving, Chaya went to the cemetery where her father was buried. She still didn’t know what had happened that day of the concert. She didn’t know why her mother, her aunts, had always refused to talk about her father. There were secrets in her family, things unspoken; it was the way things were, the way they had always been. But as she bent to lay roses on her father’s grave, Chaya made a silent promise to him—that she would do things differently from now on. That she would tell her own story, at least, without hesitation. And she swore that the next time someone trusted her with his body, his heart, she would trust him back. Before it was too late.
Minal in Winter
Chicago, 1999
Dear Raji Aunty,
I hope you and Vivek Uncle are well. How is the painting going? The painting you sent on my birthday—of the women bathing at the waterfall—hangs over my bed. I think my mother would be shocked, but my roommates are very impressed that I have an aunt who paints such things. The women in their bright saris remind me of home…
All my letters to my aunt start like that, and never finish. I have written twenty or thirty of them in the last week. Words and lines and paragraphs of politeness, all true and all lies. I cannot write what I am really saying. I cannot write that I am in terrible trouble, and I don’t know what to do. I cannot write that I want to leave here, leave school, leave Chicago and flee to her in Massachusetts, that I want to hide in her guest bed with the covers pulled up over my head until it all goes away. I cannot write and ask her to fix everything for me. I cannot do anything but write and write and write these letters that say nothing and that I crumple up and throw away before starting again.
Dear Raji Aunty,
I hope you and Vivek Uncle are well. I am not. How is the painting going? The painting you sent of the practically naked women, withthe water coursing over the bared necks and pointed breasts and arched backs, makes me think that maybe you might understand and be able to help me. Didn’t you have a scandalous youth, once upon a time? The aunts always fell silent when I entered the room, but I heard bits, fragments, perhaps just words I wanted to hear. A scandalous youth, and a white man for a lover—but now you are married to a nice Sri Lankan man. You are married married married. How can I talk to you?
MINAL BARELY NOTICES WHEN HER ROOMMATES COME BACK, WHEN they ask her to join them for dinner, when she shakes her head no, when they leave again. The snow is falling outside their window, and she takes her unfinished letter to Rose’s bed, to sit near the window and watch the snow fall on the highway and the lake, watch the waves crashing up and down, higher each time, the wind whipping them up until the white ice of them crashes up and over the thin strip of snow-covered park, reaching to the deserted highway. It is terrifying. The monsoons had been hard and fierce at times, had uprooted trees and drowned the fields—but they had never been so cold.
She has been cold for months.
She had arrived in September, fresh off the boat from Sri Lanka, with a full scholarship for the sciences and plans to be a doctor. Her mother had insisted Minal wear the warmest clothes she had, so she had sweltered in the layers of heavy sari and warm sweater on the long plane ride, and still, when she stepped out of the airport and into the brisk wind, she had instantly been cold, chilled through. Her mother’s sister, Raji, had flown from Massachusetts to Chicago to get her settled, had taken her shopping for more appropriate clothes, had made sure that she drank hot tea and soup and even fried samosas for her in the dorm kitchen—and Minal was still cold, deep inside. The chill had deepened when her aunt left, leaving her alone with her roommates, who seemed nice enough but who were so terribly pale and alien. She wore a turtleneck, shirt, heavier shirt, sweater, stiff new blue jeans, two pairs of socks, and a thick wool coat. She shivered in the unforgiving stone buildings that wore the artificial heat like a thin blanket over grave-cold bones. Calculus class, high on the third floor of a grey Gothic building, was the coldest. The first weeks she spent huddled in on herself at her desk, only raising her head long enough to copy down the equations on the board. Minal would practically race back to her dorm afterward, to strip off all the clothes, turning the water on with shaking hands and chattering teeth, waiting until the tiny bathroom was full of steam before taking off the last layers, stripping to the skin and climbing into the blessedly warm water.
The water covered her toes, her feet, her ankles, her calves—and then she sank down into it, so that it covered her stomach and ribs and small, pointed breasts, lay back in it, so that her hair was soaked in water, spreading out around her like a night-black fan, lay back until only her nose and mouth lay on the surface of the water, disembodied. Steam filled the room, her bones warmed, she was happy—but eventually, always, the hot water would run out, and she would have to climb out of the tub, dry off, wrap her thin body in a robe and step out into the chilly air that hit her face like a slap.
Sometimes she thinks that if it hadn’t been for Diego, she would never have warmed at all, just slowly frozen into a thin icicle of a girl, so cold and hard that even when they shipped her back home, she would not melt, not even when her mother’s tears rained down on the ice.
Sometimes she thinks that would have been better.
Dear Diego,
I need to talk to you. I have something to tell you. Meet me downstairs at Cobb, tomorrow, at…
I don’t get further than that. I can write the words that I know will frighten him, insert the place, the date—all it needs is the time and my signature before I slip it under his door, down the hall, just four doors down. He’s waiting for it. Our notes have become something of a joke on the floor, but a friendly one. When I first admitted to my roommates how we’d gotten together, how I’d written him a note and slipped it under his door, like a schoolgirl, they’d laughed and laughed. But eventually Rose decided it was just too romantic, and Karly had agreed, and soon it seemed the entire floor had adopted us as their very own storybook romance.
Romance, hah! If they had seen how my hands were shaking all that night, how I tossed and turned, how little I slept, waiting, expecting him to sadly but firmly shake his head no, with a little hateful pity in those coriander-green eyes…well. They probably would think that romantic too. Idiots.
I admit, I had grown fond of the notes, these last three months.
Minal, meet me for breakfast?
Diego, I’ll see you at 8:00.
Minal, do you have time to visit the museum on Saturday?
Diego, I’m skipping calculus this morning—join me?
We never wrote anything that seemed of importance in those notes—and yet I kept every one. I knew what they didn’t say, what they didn’t need to say. They didn’t say, “I’ll give you a dozen kisses if you get up early to eat with me.” They didn’t say, “Let’s skip the electricity exhibit and go neck in the statue garden.” They didn’t say, “Rose and Karly are going to their classes, so we have an hour—join me in bed?” They didn’t need to say any of that—we knew.
And if I send him this note, if I finish it with a time and sign it and slip it under his door, he will think he knows what it means. He will think it means that this is the end, that I have grown tired of him, or that I have decided this was a mistake after all. And he will be wrong, but he will also be right.
This is the end of something.
OCTOBER. MINAL SITS IN THE LOUNGE PAST MIDNIGHT, STRUGGLING with equations. Tea water
is heating on the stove, heating, boiling, boiling over, hissing, and she swears as she jumps up, grabs the pot handle and lets go again, grabs up some of her skirt to help her hold the handle as she lifts the pot off the range and clunks it down in the sink, spilling boiling water everywhere and just missing scalding herself again—“Goddammit!”
“I’ve never heard you swear before.”
“What?” Minal swings around, her long black hair swinging with her, straight and smooth like a waterfall, and he bites his lip.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear. Do you need help?” He is leaning in the doorway to the small kitchen, taking up space—taking up so much space. Minal loses his name for a moment, then finds it again—yes, Diego. A second-year from four doors down. She has a little trouble understanding him; he has an accent. And his eyes are very green.
“Why would you know, or care, whether I swear?” She turns back to the sink, lifts the pot, pours the hot water into the mug with the tea bag waiting. She puts the pot back on the stove and turns off the flame.
“I’ve been watching you.”
She is startled but will not look at him. The words could have sounded menacing, in another mouth, but from him they sound sweet, and slightly sheepish. She takes down sugar and pulls out a spoon, and milk, before answering.
“Really.” She does not know how she means that—challenging, inviting? But it must have come out wrong, because he is pulling away, stepping back out of the doorway so the light comes spilling back in, walking away.
“Sorry. I should really get to bed. Good night.”
And he’s gone. Damn.
SHE WRITES HIM THE FIRST NOTE THAT NIGHT AND SLIPS IT UNDER his door, and doesn’t sleep until almost dawn.
Diego,
I’m sorry if I snapped at you earlier. Would you like to study together tomorrow night?
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