George sat back. This was the most his father had said to him about anything, ever. Why now? Three children, twelve years. Why not the first time he’d brought Viji home? His mother had been thrilled, and George had taken this as confirmation that he’d made the right decision. “Do you have a problem with Viji, Dad?”
There was a long silence. Viji placed a hand over the ache in her chest.
“No. She’s a good wife. The thing is, are you happy, George? I was happy with your mother. As different as we were, I was happier than I knew. I hope, in the end, that you’ll be able to say the same.”
Viji screwed the white dress into a ball and hurried up the stairs, shutting the puja room door behind her. She hated that man for trying to poison her husband’s mind.
He must have been crazy to like that classless, feces-gifting Victoria. He’d probably found her wedding present funny.
She hated George by extension and wished passionately that her own parents were still alive, so that she could exact some kind of revenge.
She wished they were alive, period. Beneath Amma’s portrait, she kept a rock. It was about the size of an egg, a luscious cream color with streaks of copper. The rock, because she had no photo, was her father. In some ways it was better than a photo, this rock, for she could cup it in her hands and hold it to her chest. She could wrap her fingers around his absence and feel its cool weight.
A dream passed through the house that night like a specter, morphing as it wound its way past puffed-up pillows, blowing smoke into the ears of those who slept. It wrapped itself around Babygirl’s bedpost and whispered flocks of black-shadowed birds that flew against her, all beating wings, before they vanished. For Avi and Kieran, who often dreamed alike but didn’t know it, there was a tower of cake, frosted chocolate and teetering, bending at its center, threatening to bury them both in sweet crumbled frosting. For Stan there was Marla, Marla in his taxi with wide red laughing lips, arms squeezed across her chest, body squeezed between two others, black eyes that caught his in the rearview mirror and held them there. Down the hall, the dream slipped into George and buried him in a field of flowers, brightly colored, too bright, rotting stamens, hairy anthers, obscene and sweaty marigolds, rhododendrons, and great bushy things that opened and closed their petals, opened and closed their petals, chanted the sibilant it’s hot it’s hot it’s hot it’s hot.
Beside him, Viji lay coated in fever, dreamless. She opened her eyes. Sleepless. Earlier, from the heavy warm black, she’d dreamed of a baggy trench coat lined with knives, which she put on and couldn’t take off—searing, febrile blades that she knew were real because she knew she wasn’t sleeping. Knives grew and retracted, grew and retracted, glinting in the starry sky and screeching like a fork on a china plate, no matter how she thrashed to get away. She’d woken up whimpering.
Beside her, George was still asleep, his lips working around something in a dream. She thought of going to the pool house for a scream. But then she wouldn’t be alone. This thing growing inside her, the collected bundle of her life with George, had begun to go limp, as if malnourished, as if it hadn’t been fed in weeks. She felt a mother’s panic and pulled herself out of bed.
There was a new chill in the puja room when she entered. It was the only place she could go. The cool brought coarse fingers to her skin, raised goose bumps as it passed. Her dress lay sprawled in the corner where she’d left it that night. She picked it up, dabbed at her forehead. Between her eyes, a stinging ache. She was glad for the dark. Around her the walls perspired, patches of grime littered the pure blue. A sheen of dust covered the hanging portraits, and her statues gazed drearily from their shelves. Viji set to work. She would use her dress. No, she would use the dish towel that lay in a shamed heap in the corner. Piece by piece, she polished the dust from the brass bowls, from the miniature bell she dingled every morning to begin her prayer, and from the peacock-shaped vermillion holder, which sat covered in fine red powder. With her fingernail she picked the black soot from the oil lamps and the crust from the edges of the frames. The carpet, littered with dried rose petals, soon wasn’t. She found the hammer and started fixing the crooked nails behind the picture frames.
“There’s a good girl,” her mother cooed.
“I was wondering where you’ve been.”
“I was on leave, had to take a break from this slum.”
“Ha ha, very funny.”
“Nothing funny about a bad housewife, my girl.”
“So you’ve been talking to Stan?”
“Stan, Stan, what is this Stan? Who calls their husband’s father by his first name?” Her mother clicked her tongue. “Americanized,” she muttered.
Viji gave her mother’s nail a sound whack. “Krish-na, don’t get angry with me. I did nothing.”
“Easy to be dead, isn’t it?” Viji whacked another nail in.
“Well?”
“Well what?” Viji cried.
“You’ll wake everyone up, crazy. What do you want me to say?”
Viji let the hammer drop to the carpet. She rubbed her eyes and said nothing.
“I know,” her mother said. “He’s not your father. Things would be different with your father.”
“It’s true. He would stand up for me.”
“Of course he would, kanna. There would be a duel to the death for your honor.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“It doesn’t matter what you mean or what you don’t mean—there is no father for you. Only me. Simple me. Simple fat me. Simple fat dead me—”
“All right.” Her mother would whip herself into a frenzy if given the chance.
“You think he’s some kind of great man, don’t you? My father the magistrate. A real hero, a real Pandava prince.”
“I never said that.”
“I’ll tell you one thing—he would have gambled you away if he could. Pandava prince, all right. If he didn’t gamble you, he would have gambled me or your sister—”
“Okay.”
They sat silently for the rest of the hour. The pain had started, coursing now through the tangled circuits of her thighs. She ignored it.
“It’s not so terrible, this life of yours.”
Viji whispered a small prayer, snuffed the oil lamps, and went to bed.
This, then, was beauty. Viji looked placidly into the bedroom mirror. Behind her, Kamla beamed. It made sense now. Beauty didn’t lie in the eye of the beholder. Beauty lay solely in those women who believed that they were right. Just right.
Kamla had sheared off at least seven inches of Viji’s hair, which lay like a black gash on the bedroom’s pale carpet. What was left of it hung now just below her shoulders and curled inward at the bottom. Eyebrows, waxed. Mustache, waxed so completely that her lip looked comically bald. Down there, waxed, though not completely, of course—she hadn’t seen the need. Then came eyeliner, mascara, lipstick. Not the bright pink lipsticks that came free as samples from cosmetics counters. On Viji’s lips, Kamla’s chocolate brown turned burgundy.
“There,” Kamla said. “That’s better. Definitely better.” But for Viji, something was not quite right. She’d almost asked Kamla about it on their drive to the salon. Then, lying on the treatment table, she’d almost asked the beautician. Her name was Lisa, with hair so blond it was almost white. She’d felt close to the woman, who shifted her limbs gently before ripping the wax away. One bare leg bent to the side, panty seam pulled in to reveal her bikini line, hot wax creeping into the dark spaces, she’d felt she could speak to Lisa.
“This is my first time,” Viji said.
“No way, really?” Lisa paused. “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll be gentle.” Viji grabbed the side of the table and gasped at the first rip of the wax strip. Lisa worked quietly for a moment. “That would explain the bush, though. No offense.”
“Thank you.”
“So what made you take the plunge?”
“My friend made me.”
“Well, that’s a pretty good
friend. You want a special shape, honey? I could do a heart?”
“No, that’s all right.”
In the end, she hadn’t asked Lisa, though it would have been so simple and anonymous. Lisa would have known about these things, privy to confessions from woman after woman, day after day. She would have answered frankly. Moreover, Viji was quite certain (from the moment that first strip of wax zipped down her crotch) that she would never see Lisa again.
But now it was too late.
“What’s the matter, darling?” Kamla asked. Her face dropped beside Viji’s in the mirror.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You don’t like the makeup?”
“No! I like it very much. I do.”
“Tell me.”
Viji gripped the sides of her seat and told her. The cramps, the burning, how it all disappeared when she tried to pee. How they began, inevitably, in the puja room.
“They must be menstrual.”
“No, they can’t be—they happen during the whole month.”
“It must be a yeast infection.”
“It isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. It always—it always seems to begin just when I think about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s as if, if I don’t think about the pain, it isn’t there.”
“And if you do think about it?”
“Then it’s everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
“It starts—down there—and then I can feel it, I can really feel it, in my belly and my throat and my chest and my stomach—”
And in my heart. Viji couldn’t bring herself to say it. She didn’t want to alarm Kamla or make the problem bigger than it was. It was pain of her heart, not in her heart. But that didn’t make sense, either.
Kamla took her to a woman doctor, a small, pale lady with the teeth of a mouse, who showed Viji into a room with pink walls. On one side hung a painting of playful tiger cubs, and on the other, a diagram of a cervix. A cork board was crammed with photos of newborn babies. Viji’s knees poked bald from the paper smock; her bare feet rested in stirrups. “When do the pains usually start?” the doctor asked.
Viji didn’t want to explain about the puja room, so she said simply, “Not until I think about them.”
“Come again?”
“They start, usually, when I think about them, and then it’s hard to make them go away.”
“Mm-hmm. Then I suggest that you don’t think about them.” The doctor asked Viji probing questions as she gelled her gloves and slid her fingers inside. She used the term “STD” and even implied that George had been unfaithful. She finished swabbing and asked Viji to pee in a cup, then said she would phone with the results.
“No,” Viji said, “please don’t.” The doctor tilted her head. “Don’t call my house, I mean.” The doctor pushed her glasses up her nose.
“So you’d prefer to call us?”
“Yes, please.”
“I’ll make a note of it.”
“Thank you.”
“There, darling,” Kamla said in the waiting room, “was that so terrible?”
“No more than I expected.”
Two women. One seated, fresh and expectant. One standing, proud of her work, beaming. George gazed at Viji, who fingered the edge of her seat and looked down shyly from his eyes. The after of the before that he’d married. He looked over Viji to Kamla, caught in a film of hazy evening sunlight, and smiled at her. She smiled back, incandescent, and he had to look away. That evening, Stan noticed the difference too. The old man whistled when Viji entered the kitchen, rubbed his eyes, and looked her up and down. “Ahoo-ga! Oo-gaooga!”
“Dad, please,” George intervened. But later, when they were alone, George pawed the ends of her hair, traced his finger along her eyebrow, and touched her lips as if they were new. “It’s like,” he whispered, as his lips dandled the curve of her neck, “it’s like you’re another woman.”
Indeed. Afterward, she slipped her nightgown on and walked down the hall. In Babygirl’s room, the triplets were asleep. She laid extra comforters over the boys’ sleeping bags because the night was chillier than usual. It was time to buy extra beds. Imagine a mother who made her children use sleeping bags, like vagabonds or squatters. She took a shower and dried herself. Even days later, it would surprise her to feel the tidy ends of hair curling in just below her shoulders, ducking smugly from the phantom mane that had been chopped and thrown away and mingled now with last week’s newspapers.
Two days later, Viji phoned the doctor for her test results.
“Are the symptoms persisting?”
“No,” she lied.
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with you.” But there was. In the background she heard an instrumental version of that Michael Jackson song. The doctor waited. Viji pressed the hang-up button on the receiver and held it there. Never mind. She had lived with this so far, and she would live with it until it left.
CHAPTER TWELVE
His mom had had what they called a makeover, which to Avi suggested a do-over, as if she hadn’t been done quite right the first time. It happened in tennis, when the served ball hit the net but still landed in the half-court box. In any case, they were going to dinner, and Babygirl said it was to celebrate Viji’s makeover, her new look. Kamla Aunty came to the door with Anisha, and they drove in two cars to the restaurant.
Kieran raced him through the parking lot to the great red-and-white-striped awning, which made Avi think of a candy store and an ambulance and a carnival all rolled into one. He beat Kieran easily and was the first to open the building’s heavy door, the first to step into the warm and wonderful cloud of onion rings, red meat, sweet cherries. There was a traffic light in the middle of the restaurant, and banners for sports teams hanging at nutty angles on the wall. Here the waiters wore red vests pinned all over with funny buttons, which Avi thought was a great thing to do. They wore straw hats, sang “Happy Birthday”—loud— to whomever was having a birthday, and refilled sodas for free as fast as he could drink them.
The triplets got to order mozzarella sticks, which were sticks of fried cheese and, in Avi’s opinion, as brilliant an idea as the vests with the buttons. He and Kieran had a burping contest after the sodas came. Babygirl snarled at them at first, until Anisha joined in. The grownups didn’t seem to notice; they were too busy talking and talking and talking, as always. The triplets and Anisha sucked urgently on their straws and traded gas, with little thought of the food that lay waiting. Avi thought he was the clear winner until Kieran, who’d been quiet for several minutes, came out with a momentous braap that shook the walls of the restaurant.
“Kieran,” Viji hissed. She stared openly at him. At a table nearby, a group of teenagers gazed over for a moment, then broke into snorting laughter.
“Avi started it.”
Viji said nothing, but gave Kieran an empty sort of look that Avi had never seen before. Viji went back to cutting her chicken breast, slowly, as if she were thinking about something else.
“Sorry,” Avi mumbled. He turned to Stan, who was just then stuffing into his mouth the largest chunk of meat Avi had ever seen a human attempt to chew. He’d seen a show about lions once, and remembered the way they ripped huge swaths of flesh from the side of a gazelle. Stan managed to wrap his cheeks around the meat, and in a few swift chews it was gone. His mother sat staring at Stan, her fork in midair. She often told the triplets not to stare. Avi picked up an entire mozzarella stick and crammed it into his mouth. He picked up another, found space between his cheek and gums, and coaxed it in with his finger. But the cheese was piping hot. It began to burn his mouth and he couldn’t, try as he might, chew fast enough to make the food swallowable. Something made him gag and he had to release it all, half-chewed into an ecru paste, lumping lazily onto his plate. He forced himself to peek across to his mother and, again, was unable to explain the look he found there.
T
o Avi’s relief, her gaze moved quickly to Kamla, who was slicing off a piece of her steak and placing it on George’s plate. Her eyes were hard and her brow furrowed, as if it hurt to think. But she said nothing.
And then Babygirl: “Mom. Mom.”
Viji seemed to wake up. “Yes?”
“You’ve got lipstick on your teeth.” Next to her, Anisha Mehta snickered into her shoulder.
“What?”
“You have lipstick on your teeth.”
“Oh.” Viji licked her teeth once, then again. “There.” Babygirl covered her face in her palms. “It’s still there.”
She shook her head.
“Oh.” This time Viji lowered her head and scraped her finger over her teeth. The girls leaned into each other and giggled. Something about this was not right. First of all, Avi had seen Babygirl do the same thing, only with toothpaste, when she couldn’t find her toothbrush. And secondly, he didn’t see why they had to laugh. He looked to his father, who had noticed by now.
“Just a little smudge,” George chuckled. “You’ll have to give her lessons, Kamla.”
“Hang in there, chuck.” Grandad Stan winked at Viji. “You’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”
Kamla smiled sadly at Viji and didn’t respond to George. The smile on his mother’s face was one Avi had never seen before. It was a lips-curled-in smile, and she didn’t look up at anyone, but seemed to focus on smoothing down her skirt.
Behind Viji, at the table full of teenagers, a birthday broke out. A flock of waiters jogged to their table and began clapping in the air. There were a lot of them, and they crowded around Viji’s chair, their behinds like so many cushions around her head. She did not look like she was having fun, not like the teenage girl whose birthday it was, not like someone who’d been given a nice haircut and a chance for a do-over.
Grandad Stan joined in the singing. And soon the rest of the table did, too, George clapping and a little embarrassed, Kieran kneeling on his chair with his fork in the air, everyone singing but Viji. Stan’s voice grew louder and louder, until he was outsinging the waiters, banging his fist down with every word. Happy—bang—birthday—bang—dear Eshhicaaa—bang bang bang…. Grandad Stan was enjoying himself.
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