One summer afternoon, she sat staring out the window, past the murky pane and beyond the rain to some point far in the distance. Her silence was a maddening static that filled the room and made it impossible to think. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
She turned to him. “Pardon?”
“What are you doing in England, here, with me? You hardly know me.”
She stared at the carpet for a few minutes, thinking. Then she shrugged, “It’s what I was meant to do. It’s what my mother wanted.” How sluggish she was, with her languid blink and her swaying foot, how like a cow. He expected her to flick a fly away with her ear. Instead she turned quietly back to the window.
He shook his head. “Rather obedient of you, isn’t it? Not exactly twentieth century.” He thought of Victoria, who would never have let herself be married off like this. It felt mean but he didn’t care.“It’s not something an adult would do, is it? To pick up and leave because Mummy tells you to? Mummy says, you obey, that’s how it works with you, isn’t it?” No answer came. “Isn’t it?”
She whipped around to look at him. “You did it. You married me. Mummy said, you obeyed.” She looked straight into him and shook her head. “She wasn’t even your mother.”
He opened his mouth to argue, to pick away at the first tender scab he could find, but stopped himself. “Why did you do it?” he asked.
“No George, why did you do it?” The question hung between them like the mist outside, and Viji turned back to the rain.
They spent nearly three months with his parents as George submitted and defended his thesis. In that time,Viji took easily to the role of dutiful daughter-in-law, helping Marla, George’s mother, with the laundry and the washing up. She liked Marla, who laughed easily and wore colorful headbands and strings of beads around her neck. Viji learned to use the kettle and made tea twice a day. She woke at seven in the morning and went to bed at ten. It was these minute scheduling points that gave her purpose during the foggy, do-nothing stretch of weeks.
In the kitchen, she watched as brussels sprouts were scored and chickens basted. The Sunday that Marla roasted a side of beef, Viji ate only potatoes and carrots.
“I’d love to taste your food, Viji. Do you cook?” Marla asked, eyeing Viji’s beefless plate.
Viji glanced nervously at George.
“Viji hasn’t cooked much, Mum,” he said. “She had a cook at home.”
“Well, fiddle-dee-dee,” Stan grunted.
“Stan.”
“Dad, it’s just the way—”
“I can cook,” Viji interrupted. She turned to Marla, who was safer than the men. “I can cook for us.”
That Monday Marla found an Asian grocer. She and Viji returned, arms resplendent with yellow and crimson sachets of powder, cinnamon sticks, and sacks of onions and fresh chilies. Viji smiled freely, like a child.
She began cooking early the next afternoon. The family had left her to herself, her only companion the cat, who normally padded at the feet of whoever was in the kitchen, its head cocked in a one-eyed search for chickenfat drippings or a crumbled corner of cheese. But today, only a thin powdering of turmeric littered the kitchen floor. The cat sniffed it, recoiled and slipped into the corner.
For dinner she was making chicken curry, Madrasstyle, to be simmered for hours in a thick, peppery broth. She was making eggplant raita, for which the thin slices of eggplant had been rubbed with salt and fried and waited crisp-edged on a tea towel. From the corner of the kitchen, the single eye of the single-eyed cat flashed in the passing sunlight. It kept watch over her, suspicious as a nosy neighbor. She’d never asked what had happened to its other eye. Was it gone altogether or sealed beneath the soft black lid?
It felt good to hold a knife again, to wrap her palm around its wooden hilt and use it to slice and crush. To change things completely, simply because she wanted to— this was satisfaction. George came down once and said something about a walk. She ignored him. Before her waited a bouquet of garlic bulbs. She began with the onions, fast rhythmic slicing, pulling her fingers away from the flashing blade as a hill of white grew upon the chopping board.
But it wasn’t natural for her to stand at a high counter like this, her elbows splayed from her sides. A hot finger of pain slid down her back. She rolled her neck from side to side, but the ache only shifted and spread. Quickly, she gathered the chopping board, the knife, the onions, and placed them on the floor by the kitchen table. Here she sat back comfortably on her haunches.
Viji had spent her childhood on the kitchen floor, first watching Old Krishnan, then young Kuttima, chop and grind and fry. They kept the floor immaculately clean, and vegetables were kept in baskets along the walls. By the time she left Madras, she was immune to the lung assault of frying chilies and could mince six bulbs of garlic in under a minute. Soon she forgot about the ache in her back. She could no longer see the cat or hear the footsteps from upstairs. If she heard the knock at the back door, she ignored it. She’d been thinking of the first time she cut onions, how Kuttima had laughed at her, how copiously they’d made her cry. She didn’t hear the door creak open or the offbeat tread of heavy footsteps that followed.
The door slammed and she dropped the knife.
“What the bleeding hell is this?” Stan’s voice boomed through the kitchen. “What’re you doing on the floor, you daft cow?” He leaned over, hands on knees, to peer directly into her face. “What the bloody hell y’doing?” he asked again. “The floor is not where we cut the vegetables.” She could tell he was speaking slowly and clearly for her benefit. He paused between each word, as if she were deaf or old or merely stupid.“The. floor. is. not. where. we. cut. the. ve-ge-ta-bles. The. floor. is. for. the. animals. You see?” He pointed to the cat, who flashed past them and up the stairs.
He was wearing his shoes indoors, and from them wafted the smell of something foul. “Do you understand? Are you an animal? Hey?” He stepped over her with his putrid shoes and moved to the stove.
Viji shook her head. She could only stare dumbly at him. What swelled inside her had no words. Stan lifted a lid to investigate the pot of yellow stew. Then he tapped the counter hard with his ruddy old-man finger. “This is where we cut the ve-ge-ta-bles. You see?” He examined her for several more seconds.
To his horror, she smiled. It was a feeble smile, quivering at its edges. She stood and replaced the chopping board. Her wrist shook violently and sprayed onion pieces to the floor. Stan sighed and picked up a garlic bulb, turned it over, and put it down. Her vision blurred but she managed to find her shoes. Slipping them on, she ran into the garden and slammed the back door behind her.
The house filled with new smells that afternoon. They were familiar to George but worried the cat, who whipped around his ankles like an agitated ghost. The day was warm, too warm to wear socks, and certainly too warm to be trapped in a kitchen. Earlier George had tried to take Viji for a walk, but she had refused to come. He’d found her hunched over the kitchen counter, her fingers coated in tomato slime. Her face was taut with concentration, and when Geoge spoke to her she stared up at him, ready to pounce, like a forest animal trapped in its burrow. For once she didn’t need him around—indeed, she didn’t want him. The feeling, however temporary, left him sour.
Now the house was silent, and the silence saturated the air. He wished for a noise to break the heat, a thunder clap or a siren. He stopped by the mirror to fix his hair and found a thin film of sweat coating his forehead. It broke away when he touched it, like the shimmering skin that formed on soup. For weeks his internal thermostat had been running off-kilter, unable to reconcile Madrasi heat with the starchy English damp.
From the kitchen downstairs, he heard voices. First Stan, then Stan again, louder. He heard a clatter and the slam of the back door. He waited a moment, and heard nothing more.
“Dad?” he called. “Viji?” The house was quiet.
The kitchen was empty. The stove had been shut off and on it sat a pot of yellow liq
uid, mulchy and tired. Finely diced onions littered the floor and stuck to his heels like barnacles; in the corner, half-hidden by the radiator, was a chopping knife. A wooden chopping board lay in the middle of the work surface amid a heap of onion skins. “Viji!” he called again. Her shoes, usually waiting neatly by the door, were gone.
He found her in the garden shed. She sat perched on Stan’s drinking bench, hugging her knees to her chest, rocking from side to side. Behind her, a window opaque with cobwebs framed the looming dusk. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What happened?”
She took a while to answer and this, he now knew, meant that the smallest peep would release a torrent of tears. At last she began to speak, her shaky voice patting itself smooth again. She’d been chopping in the kitchen when her back began to ache; she showed George the spot. So she’d moved to the floor. Here, she said, she could chop comfortably. He saw her as she might have been at home, her body swaying in tempo with the knife, diced onion falling from the blade like snow.
“And then your father walked in,” she said. George knew what was coming. The tremor crept back into her voice. “What the bleeding hell do you think you’re doing? he said. He scolded me for putting food on the floor. That is where the animals eat, he said. Are you an animal? Are you a cat, too?” She looked for George’s reaction. “What the bleeding hell, he said. This is how he speaks to me?” New tears streamed down her face. How alone she looked on the bench, an empty whiskey bottle at her feet. She sniffed and caught her breath. “He can keep his bleeding hell.”
It’s nothing , George was about to say, that’s just the way he is sometimes. Stan was a grizzly with no claws. But clearly, to Viji, it was something. And George knew precisely how his father would have barked the words, thoughtless as an old bulldog. “That’s terrible,” George said. He expected more weeping as he sat next to Viji and circled his arm around her waist. Most women fell to tearful heaps at the first sign of sympathy. But when Viji looked up, her eyes were steel. She was ready for a fight. “So what did you do?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I did nothing. I simply shut up like a deaf-mute. Like a stupid person.”
“You’re not a stupid person.”
“I didn’t know how to answer. What could I say?”
“So you waited for him to finish?”
“Yes.”
“And then you came out here?”
“I had enough. He wouldn’t leave, like an old motherin-law, sniffing and staring and lifting the lid on the pot. Shameless, wearing his dirty shoes in the house, bringing in the filthiness from the street. I promise you, I smelled some dog shits on his shoes. I’m quite certain!”
George laughed. “Poor Viji.” She stiffened, but let him take her hand in his. He pulled her face into his shoulder. “You daft monkey,” he said.
“He’s a daft monkey. I’m not a daft monkey,” came the muffled words. He kneaded his fingers into the sore spot on her back.
“Where have I brought you, hey?”
She softened in his arms, and his collar was soon wet. The tears, he realized, had little to do with his father or the onions. She wasn’t crying for Stan’s language, or for the smell of dog shit, but for everything that she’d wished for, and all that had been thrust upon her. “Where shall I take you next?” he asked. She shrugged, limp against his chest. “Hmm? Go on. Your choice this time.”
“Hawaii,” she mumbled.
In the waning afternoon light, George led Viji back to the house. In the kitchen he helped her finish the dinner, taking her instructions and chopping chicken pieces. She spoke calmly, passed him garlic cloves to crush, explained when to use fresh chilies and when to use dried. Now and then came a sudden sniff or a sigh, soft remnants of her injury.
That night they lay together on George’s twin mattress. Viji drifted off almost immediately, with her head tucked into his shoulder, but George stayed awake to count off the hours and the sounds that drifted around them. At three o’clock, a ghostly sigh. Three forty-seven, a sudden jerk of her legs. He wondered if she loved him. She never said the words, exactly, and seemed to know instinctively not to. But she must have, to some degree—he sensed it in the way she slept, her head tucked against his shoulder, light with certainty and peace. He didn’t love her, of course, no more than he would have if they were still in Madras, meeting in the evenings and parting wordlessly each night. This didn’t trouble him. He loved her enough. It was easy to say these things in the dark, without the buts and what-ifs of daylight. He loved her enough for now, and the rest could come with time.
On the opposite wall hung one desultory football banner, red and white and pinned crookedly above his desk. George had never liked football. When he was fourteen he’d borrowed a book on Bauhaus from the Sneinton Library, and with a Stanley knife he’d extracted three prints from the book’s binding. He worked surgically, leaving not a trace of the pillaged pages. And if no one had ever searched for those three Klee prints, then no one would have been the wiser. Two days after he hung them on his wall, he came home from school to find them gone. In their place hung the banner. He knew who’d done it, and he didn’t need to ask why.
He sat up. “Viji, we’ve got to leave,” he said. “We have to get out of here.” The clock read 5:20. He woke the next morning to find Viji already awake and studying his chin. Often he’d wake to find her gazing sleepily at some quadrant of his face. It was a habit of hers that he was getting used to.
In the end, George had a choice of lecturing posts at two universities.
The first was in a northern city called Hull, which to Viji sounded like the unusable part of a vegetable. The second was in Sacramento.“It’s California,” George warned. “That’s far from home, you know.”
“I’m far from home already,” she said. The choice was made. Two weeks later, they were gone.
CHAPTER TWO
George Armitage bought the house on Winding Creek Road in the winter of ’75. It was covered in California jungle when he first brought Viji to see it, two days after he’d signed the papers. Willows dangled their leafy dreadlocks over the kitchen windows. Camellia shrubs that had sprouted wild in the summer now sagged nakedly across the front porch and halfway down the drive. A bed of ivy that had once bordered the street now carpeted the front lawn, and between its gleaming leaves grew patches of dandelion buds. Neighbors drove past the house quickly.
Three months later, the ivy was trimmed into a tidy rectangular field. The willows were gone and the camellias cut back. The lawn was a field of new soil—by April it would begin to sprout. Eucalyptus trees rose proudly around the property, silver-dollar leaves fluttering now and then in a breeze. George spent his evenings and weekends working on the paint, supervising the carpet-layers, telling gardeners where to mow, hosing and scrubbing, bringing the old house back. Viji watched him from her spot on the sofa bed, stroking the rise of her growing belly. By summer, the house took a breath and stood taller, like a middle-aged woman who’d discovered how badly she had let herself spread.
Sometimes it seemed to Viji that she had won a prize, a sweepstakes like they had on television, the kind where a man with a giant check arrived at the door and the winner jumped up and down, screaming. Sometimes she felt that she’d been handed someone else’s life to hold until they got back. How long, she wondered, before George left her behind, or did something that made her wish they’d never met? Outside, he had planted rosebushes that were sprouting their first buds now. Inside, her kitchen was new and sunny, and the carpets were clean and so very American. She’d never had wall-to-wall carpeting before. The curtains were majestic and the furniture sturdy. It spoke of decades. It was beautiful and it was hers. She’d chosen none of it.
In the summer of ’82, George finished building his back cottage. It stood at the end of the property, beyond the kidney-shaped pool, a healthy distance from the main house. He called it an in-law cottage, though his in-laws had died long before. Of his own family, only his father r
emained, still in the house near Nottingham where George had grown up. The old man showed no signs of wanting to pack up and leave his England for a backgarden dwelling in Northern California.
For this, Viji Armitage was thankful. George had built the cottage with care and with thoughts of England. Inside, the exposed rafters were painted blue-black, the walls white. It was Tudor-style, which meant nothing to Viji, who knew just enough about English architecture to guess that Tudor was older than Victorian, and that Edwardian was not very old at all. The cottage would be her sewing shed. She had plans for a vast worktable and chests full of fabric, shelves to hold spools of thread set down in long straight rows. She would while away the afternoons here, a happy worker in her own small factory, emerging every few days with clothes for the children, curtains, pillowcases, cotton dresses. But by the end of the summer, the in-law cottage sewing shed had become, quietly and irrevocably, a pool house. It would remain a pool house, hung every summer’s day with damp towels that drew mold indoors, with two pairs of swim trunks and a small bikini that dripped gray puddles onto the linoleum.
“It’s a feature,” George said. “It adds value to the house.”
“And for this you’ve given me another room to clean?”
Viji asked.
“I guess so.”
Viji and George had three children, two boys and a girl, all born in the spring of ’76. They’d expected twins, so the two boys were no surprise. When the contractions didn’t stop, the nurse told Viji it was only her placenta, nothing to get worked up about. The girl had to push her way out while Viji was alone in the delivery room, before the exit door closed and sealed her inside forever. She was no bigger than George’s hand, from fingertip to wrist. She was irate at having been ignored, hungry from sharing a uterus with two larger males. She wailed incessantly.
The Prayer Room Page 2