by Galaxy Craze
In the car he rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. I knew he was crying and looked away. He didn’t understand why my mother had left him and the house they had just bought, in an up-and-coming neighborhood. A house with three bedrooms and a small garden. Why had she left him? For what? To go and live in a tiny one-bedroom flat? Why had she chosen this over him? It was like looking into a mirror and seeing nothing.
I knew what I would do, if he came to the ashram. I would show him the horses. His father was a bookmaker and the horses he knew belonged to rich men, men who were driven to the races in Rolls Royces and Bentleys. I wouldn’t tell him these horses had been rescued from local farms and the slaughterhouse. I would tell him they were Thoroughbreds and he would be impressed.
I walked along the shaded path. I felt the small rocks and burrs beneath my feet, but they didn’t hurt anymore. I thought, I should have known. I should have known we would be staying here and not going home. There had been signs: the yellow flower that landed in our mother’s lap. And the rose-gold locket that had belonged to her mother—the locket she had promised to give me for my eighteenth birthday—she had given to Parvati one night in darshan.
On my way back to our room, I passed the ashram office. This was where rent checks were dropped off, donations made, and bills paid. I noticed that the door had been left open, but there was no one inside. A woman named Shiva was the office manager; she always kept the door locked and the key with her.
I touched the handle, pushing it lightly. “Hello? Shiva?”
The sky was not yet dark. The light came through the windows of the office. The computer had been turned off, the lights had been turned off, but Shiva had forgotten to lock the door. I called her name again, and when I was sure she was not there, I picked up the receiver of the telephone. I was going to call my father.
It had been many weeks since I had last used a telephone, and now it felt strange and heavy in my hand. I realized, suddenly, that the receiver was warm as though someone had just been holding it and I turned around, looking behind me.
A can of lime-flavored seltzer and a packet of salted pretzels closed with a rubber band lay on the desk. I pressed O, for the operator. I couldn’t decide where to try first, my father at home or at the shop. Too flustered to count, I heard my heart beating in my throat.
When the operator answered, I told her I wanted to make a call to London, England. I was speaking softly, cupping my hand in front of my mouth. She told me to hold while she connected me to the international operator.
While I waited, holding the phone to my ear, I saw a photograph of Parvati on the wall in front of me. It was a photograph I had seen many times before. The photograph hung in all the houses, but in this one it looked as though she were behind the photo, looking at me through cut-out eyes. I put the telephone down.
As I ran out I had the feeling Parvati was following me, a close over-the-shoulder feeling. Not the way I imagined God would watch me—far away and from the sky—but as though she were invisible, right behind me, stepping in my footprints in the sand.
When I got back to the room, Mum was there with Eden. He showed her the drawings in his notebook while she sat on the bed beside him, listening to him explain each one. She had brought us two whole-wheat apple turnovers left over from Parvati’s kitchen.
I knew she had not told him yet, and I stood in the room with the door open behind me.
“Has Mum told you yet?”
My mother looked up at me. “May.”
“Told me what?” Eden said.
“Please close the door,” she said to me. “Eden?”
“What, Mum?” He looked up at her as he ate the pastry, the crumbs falling on his drawing book.
“We’re going to stay here for a while.”
He looked up at her but did not say anything for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that we’re not going back to London right now.”
In the plain light of the room, the fullness of Eden’s face broke and he began to cry.
“Oh, my darling,” Mum said, the coolness of her voice evaporating as she held him in her arms.
“This means I’m going to miss George’s birthday party,” he moaned into her shoulder.
I felt myself smile. A pinprick in Mum.
“Oh, Eden,” I said. “And you have been looking forward to his party for so long.”
Eden shuddered. The sympathy gave his tears a new strength. He leaned into his mother’s shoulder, burying his face from the news of leaving his house and father again.
“George’s mum was going to bake a cake and decorate it like a swimming pool,” he said, taking in a wobbly breath. “With marzipan water and little people swimming in the lanes.”
Mum sank into him. I could see the sorrow on her face. Her sweet boy, and she had made him cry.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. She reached for his hand and pulled him to her. “I’ll make you a cake shaped like a swimming pool one day,” she said, and Eden laughed.
“You never make cakes like that, Mum,” he said.
“Well, I’ll buy you one from the store and pretend.”
“All right. I already know which one I want for my next birthday,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. I do.”
She kissed his cheek, looked at me and smiled, and reached out to touch my hand. “It’ll be all right, darling,” she said. “I promise you. Let’s just try it out, and if you’re not happy here we’ll leave. All right?”
Eden pulled himself from her. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Does Dad know?” he said.
“He knows, darling. He thinks we need some time apart too.” A thread cut. This is what upset me the most: that there was never a pull, a tug for us.
“How did you talk to him?” I said.
“Parvati let me use the telephone in her room.”
“Didn’t he ask about us?” Eden said, his voice sounding frantic.
“Yes, of course he did. I told him you had both made friends and looked so beautiful and healthy….”
Her voice was slow, cautious, as though she were holding an envelope that she was afraid to open.
I imagined their conversation over the telephone. My mother standing in Parvati’s rooms, our father in our house in London, hearing the phone ring.
He would stand up from the chair in front of the television, walk across the kitchen, reach for it.
“Hello?” he would say, and it would sound like ’Ello?
“Simon? It’s me, Lucy.” My mother would say coldly, as she stood in Parvati’s rooms, pressing the receiver to her ear, her heart beating quickly, a pounding in her throat. “I’m phoning to tell you that we’re staying here in California. We’re not coming back to London. I think it will be a better life for the children.”
She would be standing still, not wavering, not flickering like the flame of the candle. Delivering the words Parvati had told her to say.
“A better life for the children?” he would repeat, knowing these were not her own words, a sentence she had not made up. His face turning, settling into one expression, listening to the dark tunnel down the telephone line. “All right, Lucy, if that’s what you want. I don’t have the energy to fight with you anymore. I’ll be forty soon. A man my age wants to be settled. I don’t want to grow old like this, fighting and breaking up all the time. I work hard and I want to have a nice life.”
She would almost laugh. A nice life; like skates on ice. What a simple desire. This is why I’m leaving him! She’d stand victorious in Parvati’s room, having left the world behind her. He would look at the things around him: the kitchen table and chairs, the stainless-steel sink, the long glass vase blooming with fresh flowers. He’d catch his reflection in the garden doors, standing alone in the kitchen of his house.
“Do you think he’ll visit us here?” I asked her.
“Honestly, May, do you really think he’s going to fly
all this way for a visit?” She sighed, letting her arms fall against her sides.
I looked at her as she sat on the bed, holding her head in her hands. It was as though, at that moment, she had decided to let everything fall. I imagined paper grocery bags falling from her arms, the oranges rolling across the floor, the bottle of milk broken.
In the past she would have protected us from these things: the uncertainties, his casualness as a father. “Oh,” she would say, covering her mouth with her hand, “I must have told him the wrong shoe size or the wrong time of your birthday party. Maybe I forgot to put the invitation in the post.”
“I think he’ll come here,” Eden said, his voice like a balloon rising. “He’ll surprise us and take us to Disneyland.”
“Maybe he will, Eden,” I said. I looked away from him, to the window, but it was dark outside and there was nothing to see. I knew our mother had told us the truth; our father would not come and visit us here. The flight would be too long, the tickets too expensive, and who would watch the shop while he was away?
When I was ten and Eden was four, my mother bought a house by the sea. It was her dream, she said, to live by the sea. She was going to turn the house into a small hotel, a bed-and-breakfast to pay the bills.
The first few weeks we were there, our mother telephoned her friends in London, telling them she had given up the city, given up the rat race. She talked quickly, loudly, into the telephone, explaining her reasons for leaving as though she were on trial. When she put the phone down, she stood by the window looking out to the sea, thinking of who she could call next.
We moved into the house in the late spring, and during the summer months her friends from London came to stay, but when the weather turned colder they didn’t want to make the trip. The house was always cold, with cracks in the wood where a draft came through. The shutters banged in the wind at night, keeping everyone awake.
That first winter, we were alone at home and alone in the town. No one came to visit and it was difficult to make any new friends at school, where they had been together since they were six. Together, aimlessly, we walked up and down the main street and around the town, as a way to fill the end of the day.
Then we discovered a café on a side street. The café had small round tables and pale yellow walls. The warmth of baked bread and buns and vegetable soup steaming in tall pots.
The café became our favorite place. We went there after school and on the weekends, giving us a reason to leave the house. A reason to get out of our nightgowns, brush our hair, match our socks, and wash the dishes in the sink so everything would be tidy for our return.
The hot soups and cakes were the reward for a day of housekeeping: changing the bedsheets, washing, hanging the clothes to dry above the stove, waiting by the phone for someone to make a booking. A small hope, to fill an empty room.
In the café, our mother never said, We’re losing money by the day. She never said, I’ve spent all the money I saved and this place is falling apart. The floorboards are rotting, the plaster is cracking, there’s a hole in the roof…. She never said, I imagined another life in the country for us—a rabbit hutch, a garden, friends coming round, picnics in the fields….
One evening in January, our father telephoned from London. He said he wanted to visit. He was taking a long weekend away from the shop to spend time with us.
When I put the phone down, I looked around the house anxiously. He would poke fun at the quaint bedrooms, some with matching curtains, bedspreads, and wallpaper.
In my bedroom, I examined myself in the mirror. I thought I needed a haircut, but then I noticed my stomach. In the cold weather, sitting around the house and eating pastries at the café, I had put on weight. Nowhere else really, just my stomach and waist, which rounded over the top of my trousers. My favorite jeans didn’t button at the top anymore and they were skintight in the thighs, so they looked painted on.
That night, I did sit-ups on my bedroom floor. My forehead grew hot and prickly and afterward I couldn’t sleep. When we drove to the café after school, I ordered a cup of hot water with a slice of lemon.
“Is that all you’re having?” Mum asked.
“I’m on a diet.”
“Oh, don’t be stupid, darling.”
I sipped my lemon and water. I tasted half a spoonful of soup. There was an ache in my stomach, as I watched Eden eating his éclair.
“Did one of the girls in your class say something to you?” my mother asked.
I shook my head. “All we do is come here,” I said, “and my stomach’s gotten fat.”
“Everyone puts on a bit of weight in the winter,” she said.
Eden licked the chocolate from his fingers. My mother spooned her soup. She looked away from me to the door, as though she were waiting for someone to arrive.
The week before our father came I did forty sit-ups a day and aerobics in front of the dresser mirror. I drank six glasses of water from the tap before each meal so I would feel full. As I lay in bed at night, too hungry to sleep, I could see the beginnings of a dip in my stomach and feel my hip bones through my skin.
The weekend he was meant to visit, there was an unexpected snowfall, a blizzard. In the humid air that blew off the sea, the falling snow around our house disappeared, leaving the ground a darker shade, as though it had just rained.
Our father telephoned from London; I could hear his voice coming through the receiver. He had not left London yet. He was listening to the news over the radio. The traffic was moving at a snail’s pace and the snow was continuing to fall. He would have to make the trip another time. He didn’t want to sit for hours on the roads in the snow.
My mother thought there was another reason why he didn’t want to come. She thought he was afraid she would ask him for money. During the winter months, only a few people came to stay, and when they were gone the rooms sat still, so cold you could see your breath in them.
The last time she had asked him for money was over the telephone. She sat at the kitchen table in our small flat at the top of the bed-and-breakfast.
“How are you, Simon? Things at the shop all right?” Her voice falling like a slide. “You know I hate to ask you for money.”
I heard his voice through the receiver. “Lucy, you have some bloody nerve. Why should I pay for children who don’t live with me and I hardly ever see? You’re the one who left. You took the children away.”
I went to London to visit my father on the holidays, he paid me two pounds an hour under the table, plus lunch, to help him in the shop. I unpacked the parcels from India and Morocco. I dusted and polished the statues, cleaned the windows and counters, watched for thieves, and answered the telephone: “Good afternoon, you’ve reached Simon’s.”
The first time I did it, it was a quiet day and only a few customers had come into the shop. My father said he wanted to pop out for a bit; he had to stop by the post office and the bank, and then he was going to pick up some sandwiches for our lunch. He put his coat on, checked his pockets, and took an envelope from beneath the cash register.
“Toodle-loo, darling.” He blew me a kiss from the door. The cold air from the street blew inside with a slight smell of petrol. The door closed behind him, and I watched through the window as he walked down the street, his scarf wrapped once around his neck.
Then he was gone and I was alone in the shop. I sat on a stool behind the cash register, looking toward the door at the people walking by, wondering if any of them would come in.
The walls were covered in brown-and-gold striped wallpaper, and the lights shone down warmly from the ceiling. Against the back wall lay an antique wooden daybed, covered with a quilt made of orange and purple silk. I touched the quilt with my hand; he had said not to sit on it. The bed was for decoration only.
The telephone rang and I took my hand from the quilt, looking in the direction of it.
“Hello? Simon’s.”
“Hello. May, is that you?”
I let out a breath. It
was my mother’s voice on the end of the line.
“Yeah, it’s me, Mum.”
Yesterday before I left she had gone to bed early, not feeling well. She had woken up when the bank manager phoned to tell her she was overdrawn and she sat at the table with a headache and cold. Eden had been asking for new trainers, the kind his friend had, an American brand, that cost twenty-five pounds.
“Hi, darling,” she said. I pictured her sitting at the table in our house by the sea. “I’m just phoning to see how you are.”
“I’m fine.”
“How’s your dad?”
“Fine.”
When we said good-bye I put the phone down and stood looking down through the counter glass. Inside were antique statues and jewelry, the price tags turned down. If a customer asked to see one, the cabinet would have to be unlocked, the jewelry taken out, and the small tag studied under the light.
The key to the counter was kept behind a picture frame near the telephone. The key to the cash register was also hidden there.
I looked at the cash register. I thought, I should take some money and give it to my mother. I knew where I would hide the money: under the paper in my dresser drawer. Through the window I watched people crossing the street. An old man sold newspapers on the corner.
I lifted the edge of the picture frame and took the key from behind it. I put the key in the register box and turned it, looking at the door. Inside were rows of twenties, tens, and fives and rolls of coins. I touched the corner of a twenty, but there were only a few and he would notice if one was gone. I pulled out a ten-pound note and quickly closed the drawer. I sat on the stool, waiting for my breath to settle. I still held the key from the register in my hand.
The door of the shop opened and the cool air rushed in from the street. My father stood looking at me, his face stiff from the cold.
“Everything all right while I was gone?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone come in?”
I shook my head. “No.”