Viji shut the puja room door and exhaled. In here, freedom. Out there, an old man who thought he was some kind of ladies’ man; who watched Donahue in the mornings at full volume; who cleared his throat after each meal in great hacking coughs, as if his food had gone down his lungs; who left careless yellow drops on the toilet seat and refused to lift the lid; who ate beans for breakfast and then stank up the guest bathroom every morning between eleven and eleven-twenty a.m.; who poked with his fork at the food she made, always muttering something about heartburn, heartburn, though it certainly wasn’t heartburn that made those sounds whenever the maid came over, was it?
“ Chih! Have some respect,” her mother chided. “Who taught you to talk about your elders that way?”
Viji knelt before her mother’s picture, picking a crusted fleck from the corner of the frame. “You should be making him breakfast now, girl. What’s wrong with you? Leaving him hungry and alone like that, looking through the cupboards like a wild animal. No wonder he eats beans. You don’t make him anything else.”
“He won’t eat what I make him, Amma.”
“Nonsense. Is that any reason to stop? Who raised you? Disgraceful.” She called to Mrs. Müller, “Isn’t it disgraceful, Mrs. Müller?”
Viji turned to the dour-lipped portrait of the German headmistress, of whom she was no longer afraid. “Who said this was your business?” she asked.
“You know who, my liebling,” Mrs. Müller replied.
Viji started preparing for her morning prayers. She threw yesterday’s damp petals in a brown paper bag that stood in the back corner of the room, and placed this morning’s roses around the collection of deities. One per frame or statue, with the extras before Durga. She poured oil in the lamps, rolled wicks out of cotton, and lit them. She recited her prayers in a half whisper, her hands clasped at her forehead. “Have some respect,” came her mother’s voice, echoed closely by Mrs. Müller’s. It was just like them to gang up on her.
Mrs. Müller had been her mother’s great friend, the headmistress at St. Mary’s. She’d never wanted to live in India, and she’d made no attempt to hide it. Viji attended St. Mary’s for just one year, so she only had to suffer Mrs. Müller when the lady visited for tea.
Mrs. Müller was as brittle as an old coconut husk. Her voice was the crunch of dry leaves, her hair a net of cobwebs. Once when Viji came in to greet her, the woman stroked her hair and said, “She’s not a very pretty child, is she?” Viji’s mother sniffed, held herself in. Nobody, as far as her mother was concerned, called a child ugly, no matter how true the statement was. Even the scrawniest, most bug-eyed servant’s child was a ravishing beauty; even the boy down the road with the harelip was fine. Children were princes and princesses by default, until maturity proved otherwise. But to Mrs. Müller, children were as human as anyone else.
Both women had lost their husbands—Viji’s father had gone away when she was ten, and Dr. Müller had banished himself to his study, emerging only for the students that descended on the Müller home every week. Dr. Müller had the chin and shoulders of a romantic hero. His hair leapt off his forehead, as if he’d been running in the wind. Viji had seen him only once, when he came in from the car to collect his wife, but she hadn’t forgotten him.
“He asks me to join in,” Viji once heard Mrs. Müller complain, “o watch him, I suppose. With his hangers-on, his admirers. He does like to be admired. Funny that his admirers are all young women.” Every time the coterie gathered, Dr. Müller, perhaps out of guilt, sent a female student to knock on his wife’s door. “No thank you,” she would sometimes say. “I’m in purdah this week.” Other times she would return the knock with a knock from her side of the door, which invariably brought on another knock, followed by a lengthy exchange of fruitless knocking that continued until confusion overcame the student and she went back down.
“Be kind to her,”Viji’s mother would order, “she isn’t a happy woman.” But often Viji heard peals of raucous laughter coming from their visits, hands slapping furniture in delight, joy that rustled against her bedroom door, urging her out to see what had happened. But whenever she walked in, she found the women in quiet conversation, any sign of the earlier ruckus tucked neatly behind a sofa cushion.
There were other women, Viji learned. “I don’t have your father anymore,” her mother once said, “but every day I say thank you to God that I don’t have a cheating scoundrel.” There was always a student who lingered after these tea parties, and Mrs. Müller could hear the delicate footsteps that followed her husband’s to his bedroom. “It’s the hypocrisy,” she once said. “Why should I have tea with them? Why should I suffer the company of that ridiculous man? Not to mention his student whores.”
“Maybe,”Viji’s mother once suggested,”you should go back to Germany.”
“Nonsense. We’re married, you know, and that’s that.”
Viji tucked a rose into the top of Mrs. Müller’s frame. Marriage was for life; this she’d learned from Mrs. Müller, not from her mother. Viji had always held this thought proudly, as a guiding principle. The downside, of course, was that marriage was for life. Inescapable. This, she guessed, was how Mrs. Müller must have felt that final day. A student had been sent that afternoon to knock on her bedroom door; when there was no answer, she’d opened it to find a woman hanging from a silk scarf tied in a noose. A note on the bedside table read, Please tell Dr. Müller that indeed, I would rather hang myself than come down and join you for tea.
Viji finished praying. She kissed her fingertip and pressed it to her mother’s portrait. Eyes closed, she knelt and touched her forehead to the ground. Here, again, the cramping pain. She ran to the bathroom, where the urgent tingle came out as a thin, painful trickle. Daggers inside her. She shut her eyes, waited for the throbbing to cease. Downstairs, the teapot whistled. If Stan wanted tea, she would make it.
“Go ahead, darling. Scream. It’s good for you sometimes.”
Viji screamed again. How she’d ended up by the pool house, where Kamla found her shrieking until her chest hurt, provoked by no obvious terror, was unclear. She knew only that she’d come outside to hang the laundry, wishing she’d worn a sweater to protect herself against the heavy November afternoon. The three o’clock loam had begun to settle, frosting the lawn in ashen mist, when she noticed how overgrown the bushes were at the back of the lot. It was no wonder Babygirl feared the tigers that lurked behind them. She’d surveyed her yard. The shoddy deck chairs of summer, overstaying their welcome and littered with crumbling leaves. The patches of mud that bruised the lawn. The shuffleboard court, hardly ever used, faded now with a disc and two sticks lying at skewed angles on the ground. The house was her territory. She looked after it, saw to it that towels were washed and put away, carpets vacuumed, shelves dusted, and towels stacked in the linen cupboard. She made sure that three children left each morning, bathed and fed and combed, and that three returned each afternoon. But the yard, with its vast plains of grass and weeds and brambles, its insect galaxies, was foreign territory.
She had her roses, dead now until May. The thought of flower corpses rotting in the soil made her faintly nauseous. Whose responsibility were they? Night would fall before she even finished hanging the laundry. The clothes would never dry, only drip in the dark and grow colder. The asphalt sky leaned in, close and frigid, gray cement clouds pouring into her mouth, into every crevice, stopping her up and boxing her in like a grave dug into a wall and hissing this is yours this is yours this is yours until she screamed.
“We all do it, you know.”
“You do it, then,” Viji said. Kamla clenched her fists, squeezed her eyes shut, and shrieked, open-mouthed. It was such a shocking thing. Each scream was as jarring as the last. And yet how intimate.
“Again,” Viji said.
Kamla screamed again. And Viji screeched. They shouted and barked, the two of them, screaming until they laughed. Sometimes the screaming scared Viji. If it boiled up from this—her life, her home,
everything and everyone around her—then there was a chance it would never stop. Other times, the screaming felt like something that could be good for everyone. She wondered if the other neighborhood ladies did it, in their kitchens and pantries, surrounded by their houseplants and cookie jars. She wondered if they could hear Kamla now as she kicked at the pool house wall, shrieking and laughing and shrieking. Maybe they would join in, Gail Bauer and Marcia Fromm and Connie Pimsky with her thin lips, or that skinny one, that Attenborough lady who speed-walked every evening. That tight-buttocked walking wonder in Viji’s pool house, screaming. Maybe Abby Butler would come, and Elena Feldman with her cakes. They would be the Maple Grove Screamers, the Maple Grove Domestic Banshees. The Winding Creek Wailers.
But nobody came. Only Kamla and Viji stood in the pool house, that week and the week after, screaming into the still afternoons, thinking that someone might hear them, but not caring when nobody did.
“Screaming, darling, is all well and good.” Kamla opened Viji’s closet door.“But there are other ways to address your problems.”
Viji looked over Kamla’s shoulder to the shirts and dresses packed in.
Kamla asked, “When was the last time you cleaned your closet?” Stacked on a shelf above the clothes were shoeboxes, empty, lids askew or missing. A pink straw hat teetered at their peak. A bundle of old pantyhose poked out of the corner. “So much wasted fabric,” she sighed. “So much polyester.” She poked at a pair of green trousers and pulled her hand away, as if she’d touched acid.
“Shall we make a parachute and escape?” Viji asked.
“Indeed.”
Viji grabbed an armful of hangers from the closet and flung them on the bed. Kamla opened the drawers. Viji watched her gingerly pick out a pair of old panties, the ones with the torn seam that had gone gray in the wash years and years ago, the pair all women, even Kamla, kept in the depths of their dressers. Kamla flung the panties onto the bed, then scooped an armful of clothes from the next drawer and tossed them onto the rising pile. Each piece, at one time, had felt essential. Now they grew into a mountain of scrap that dimmed the room’s walls, swallowed the bed, and threatened an avalanche that would suffocate them both.
Kamla asked for trash bags.
“Really?” Viji asked. “Just throw them out?”
“You weren’t serious about the parachute, darling.”
Viji returned with black garbage bags and they dug in. Kamla gathered an armful and flung them into the air, where they floated and fell like autumn leaves: ill-fitting trousers and horizontal-striped cardigans that had looked jaunty in the shop, skirts with uneven waistlines, and blouses stained for eternity with turmeric.
Kamla froze. “What’s this?” She was blocked by the closet door. When Viji found her, she was holding up a dress. The white cotton dress from her college days, hidden away since that night, forgotten until now.
“I know, it’s so old,” Viji said. “I just didn’t bother throwing it away.”
“Darling, no,” Kamla gasped. “It’s lovely. This is lovely.” Kamla pointed out the lace fringe, how the work was obviously done by hand, how rare such detail was these days. She pushed past Viji to the large mirror above the dresser, held the dress against her own body, pulled the waist close against her own. Her bust pressed against the top of the dress, filling it, giving it life again. Viji felt suddenly possessive. She clutched a handful of the flouncy skirt, rubbed the soft cotton between her palms.
“It is lovely, isn’t it?” she said. “I never really appreciated it when I had it.” She remembered now—the dress on George’s dorm room floor, kicked halfway under his bed by hurried feet to mingle with the dust and dead flies. She pulled at it, but her friend held tight.
Kamla spoke whimsically, gazing at herself in the mirror. “Do you still want it, darling?”
“Of course I do,” Viji snapped. She softened. “I do. Though I don’t think it will fit me anymore. Triplets, you know.” She patted the mound of belly that rose against her trousers. Still, when she imagined how her friends and cousins back home would have bloated once they’d married and had children, she knew she was slim in comparison.
From behind, Kamla wrapped her arms around Viji and held the dress to Viji’s shoulders. Viji pulled the fabric against her waist, and remembered. There was so much to remember. Even the smell, unchanged after years in a cedar-lined closet, brought back more buried visions than Viji could process. She grew breathless. She wanted to be alone with the dress, to crush it against her face and stare into the oracle of its faded folds. She glowered at Kamla’s hand, still clutching at her dress. She wanted Kamla out.
But Kamla hugged her instead, gently, from behind. “It will fit, I’m sure of it. Wear it now, go on.”
Viji stepped away. In the mirror, Kamla met her gaze intently, as if she understood.“All right, when you’re ready, darling.” She released the dress to Viji’s grasp. “Shall we finish with these drawers?”
That night at dinner, the triplets pushed their plates away, even Kieran. Viji couldn’t blame them. She’d cooked with little interest and could only bring herself to nibble at the cut of roast chicken that tilted drily onto the mound of mashed potatoes, lethargic and yellow, beside the green beans. George had asked for this.
“Go on, Viji,” he’d said that afternoon, kneading the sore crevice between her shoulders. She liked it when he did this; it may even have saved him from explaining his request. “How about a good old-fashioned Sunday roast? Hey? Yorkshire puddings not required.” He’d wrapped his arms around her, and she’d fallen back into him; it was a luxury not to hold her own weight. Viji did not make Sunday roasts—it had never been asked of her; it had never occurred to her to cook the equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner just because it happened to be Sunday.
Viji took George’s challenge, and raised him. “I’ll do it if you help me.”
“Deal.” George did the shopping, dodging the Maple Grove ladies who populated Bel Air market on Sunday afternoons, picking over the produce aisles and gossiping over cold cuts. He bought a whole raw chicken. At home, he plopped it proudly on the counter and unwrapped it. It was unctuous, yellow, and very still.
“There you go,” George said. “Ready and waiting.”
“What do I do?”
“What do you mean, what do you do? It’s just like a Thanksgiving turkey.”
Viji always made turkey curry for Thanksgiving. The children liked it, and there was little chance of her poisoning anyone. She crouched down to the level of the turkey’s hole and jabbed her finger inside it. Out came something like a pinto bean.
“It still has its kidneys,” she announced.
“Those are giblets; you use them to make gravy.”
Gravy. When had she ever made gravy? Gravy came in green packets with yellow writing. She sighed, turning from the chicken to her husband, who looked slightly worried now. He refrained, for the moment, from mentioning the Swede mash and brussels sprouts.
“George,” she said, “this is not how I make gravy.” She opened the drawer below the stove and pulled out a green packet. “This is how I make gravy.” She could have been in an instant-gravy ad, for all her confidence. She picked up the chicken kidney. “This, I suppose, is how you make gravy. However, you have always eaten the gravy from the packet. So tell me,” she peered into him, “why does it matter so much that I make it from these internal organs? Which brings another question to my mind—why a roast dinner tonight, of all nights?”
George shrugged. He fingered the counter’s edge. “I just thought it might be nice, you know, for Dad.”
It didn’t occur to Viji to be annoyed by this. Her resentment would collect slowly. It would build into a sedimentary wall of minute, almost untraceable offenses.
“Okay, then. I will do my best.”
The result was this, a meal that could only be apologized for. Meat that called for intrepid feats of chewing. Gravy, made by George in the end, tasting more of chicken kidneys than h
e’d hoped. Mashed potatoes that served their function, which was limited. Carrots and broccoli made by Viji that, fortunately, had come off well, but only underscored the chicken’s shortcomings. Stan took a last swig of wine to wash down his last bite of chicken and sat chewing, his dentures clacking, for several minutes. When he finished, he asked, “What’s for pudding, then?” Ice cream and watermelon, mercifully. There had been no attempt at spotted dick.
After dinner Viji returned to the bedroom. She wanted to show George the dress, to see if he remembered it. She neared the kitchen but stopped at Stan’s voice.
“I suppose so,” it said. “Can’t go far wrong with a Sunday roast either way, can you?” (HOW TO BAKE YORKSHIRE PUDDINGS HOW TO KEEP A CHICKEN MOIST HOW TO MAKE A PROPER GRAVY HOW TO CARVE A ROAST)
“I’m glad you liked it, Dad.”
“You know who could do a Sunday dinner, though?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“If I didn’t think it’d get me in trouble, I’d go so far as
to say that her roasts were better than your mother’s.” Viji stood outside the kitchen and listened. “Mum’s were pretty good,” George said softly. She could hear that he was smiling. “But you know? You may be right. Victoria’s may have been better.”
“You’re damn right they were.” The two men laughed. Stan continued. “She was some woman, wasn’t she? What happened to you two?”
“Well, you know.”
“I don’t.”
“Course you do. I met Viji, Dad.” Viji leaned against the wall, listening closely. George’s tone had taken on a lilt that she vaguely recognized, the accent he’d still had when she met him.
“Is that all?”
She pressed her ear to the wall and held her breath. “What do you mean, is that all?” George asked. Viji exhaled.
“Nothing, nothing at all. Forget I spoke.” A heavy pause, then, “It’s just that…I don’t want to be awkward, you see, son. It’s just that I would hate to see you plodding along in life, doing as you’re told.”
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