She pulled out Jane Eyre again, as a conversation starter rather than a deterrent, but the woman reclined her seat and put a mask over her eyes. Amina wasn’t sleepy, and she had found a song she loved: “Original Sin,” by INXS (which she’d referred to as “Inks” soon after she’d arrived, making George laugh). As she listened, she wished for George’s grandmother’s diamond ring, which might have made her seatmate remove her mask and reveal herself more open to conversation.
Now George sat at the computer, his finger joylessly poised over the ergonomic mouse, in the same spot where he had once sat down (alone) and written to ask her if she was “still interested.” Amina remembered her naïve reply: once she had even believed their courtship similar to that of her grandparents. Now she knew the difference. How the old matchmaker who had arranged that marriage would have laughed if she could have seen the way Amina and George had come together! She wouldn’t have been able to comprehend the distance or speed with which their original communication had traveled, but she would have been shocked by the primitive nature of the information itself. Name, age, languages spoken, physical appearance, hobbies, and interests. This was a woman who had known every young person in Haibatpur and the surrounding villages—who not only knew them, but had watched them grow up. She knew their families, the way they practiced their religion, their worldly successes and failures, habits, favorite dishes, their peculiarities, illnesses, private and public griefs. She would have thought of the matches long before she was hired to arrange them and augured auspicious days in advance. By contrast George and Amina had trusted their introduction to a machine, something made of metal and plastic, blind and dumb, which approximated human knowledge with an electrical alphabet only two characters long. Was it any wonder they struggled to understand each other now?
She turned to her husband and made a decision.
“I’ll go myself.”
George looked up hopefully.
Amina rehearsed the reasons aloud. “It’s the end of the rainy season—the roads may still be flooded. You won’t be able to stand the food, and what if you get sick this time? We won’t need an extra hotel room in Dhaka—if I go alone, I can stay with my parents. And we can save the twelve hundred dollars on your ticket.”
When George protested, it was only in the routine way of someone who knew things had been decided in his favor. “What if there’s a problem at the consulate?”
“I’ll have all my forms, our marriage license, and everything. If the Americans there need to talk to you, they can call your cell phone.”
George was already nodding. “That makes much more sense,” he said. She heated leftover egg-and-potato curry for dinner and then watched half of The Bourne Identity with George. When she went upstairs to get ready for bed, she saw that her period had come as usual.
7She was going to miss the last three weeks of the term, but both Jill and her statistics teacher had promised to help her finish on time. She’d worried more about Starbucks, but Keith had agreed to hold her job for her, on the condition that she wouldn’t be away more than fourteen days. He reminded Amina and Kendra, who usually worked her shifts with her and was also an MCC student, that the entries for the “Reach for the Stars” contest were due by the end of the month. Kendra asked for the details about the contest, but there were two posters in the store and Amina had already read every word of them. All you had to do was write five hundred words about your life and how you would use the ten thousand dollars in tuition money; as hard as it was for her to resist a contest, Amina knew she wouldn’t have time to write another essay before she left. She reminded herself that the other entrants would be native English speakers and that she would never have won anyway. Even that much tuition money wouldn’t have solved their financial problems. It was the thought of winning, of being selected from a crowd of others and chosen for some unusual fate, that intoxicated her.
When she had been in class 7, there had been a contest in math. You could prepare, but no one knew exactly what sort of problems would appear on the exam. Each class had its own test, with its appropriate level of difficulty, but the competition was school-wide. There was no money being awarded, of course, but the students with the highest percentages of correct answers would be given gold, silver, and bronze medals, just like in the Olympics, which were happening that year in Seoul. (The Games were being hosted in Asia for only the second time in their history, and six athletes from Bangladesh had qualified.) Amina was fixated on the gold medal: all she needed was a perfect score. She often got 100 percent in math, nearly always coming in first in her class. It was assumed that she would be one of the gold medal winners, and she came home and told her parents that a bet had been organized, that even Ghaniyah put the odds on Amina coming in first. There was another girl, Zainab, who habitually raised her hand with Amina, but she was less consistent and prone to freezing at important moments.
Her mother said that wagers were un-Islamic, but her father thought that was only if money was changing hands. In fact Amina hadn’t bet because it would look conceited (and, more important, tempt fate) to predict your own success. But she was sure she was going to win. On the morning of the exam, she and her mother arrived by rickshaw together as usual, and Amina had pointed out that several girls had new red hair ribbons in honor of the contest.
“Hair ribbons don’t get you a gold medal,” her mother said, and that was how Amina knew that she was excited, too. When the test was put down in front of her an hour later, she raced through it. If Zainab also scored a hundred, she wanted everyone to see that she was the one who’d turned in her paper first. It had taken a week for the teachers to tabulate the scores, and on the morning of the announcement, without saying anything, her mother had presented Amina with a set of new red hair ribbons. She had touched them surreptitiously on the way into the classroom, making sure they were still in place, but as it turned out, the only medal winner from class 7 was Zainab, who had shared the silver with a little girl from class 4. When the gold was announced, not only Ghaniyah but several of the other girls glared at Amina for acting so confident and then letting them down. When their teacher returned the exams, she saw that she had made four simple computation errors—nothing to do with algebra but the kind of thing she might have caught easily, if she’d bothered to look over her work.
It was almost a relief to confess on the way home; her mother hadn’t said anything, but had directed the rickshaw-wallah to the barbershop, where at first Amina thought they were going to meet her father. Instead her mother instructed her to get into the chair herself and then told her father’s barber to chop off her hair at the ears. The hair was putting too much weight on Amina’s brain, her mother said, and God had punished both of them for their vanity. The next day in school Ghaniyah had laughed behind her hand, shaking her head.
“I’m sorry, Munni—but you look exactly like the little boy who brings the eggs.”
8Eileen’s dinner party took place on a warm, wet night in early July, when their car unexpectedly failed to start. It was raining heavily, and George had to knock on the Snyders’ door to ask Dan to pull their station wagon into the driveway, so that he could connect the jumper cables. When they finally arrived at Aunt Cathy’s, they could see from the cars in the driveway that they were the last ones.
Amina made George take off his muddy shoes before stepping into Cathy’s kitchen, but everyone inside the house had kept theirs on. Jessica and Harold were standing in the living room, drinking wine and talking to Bob, while Eileen and Cathy worked in the kitchen.
“Samosas!” Eileen said, taking the container from Amina. “These are my favorite.”
“I brought a dish with cauliflower, too,” Amina said. “I can’t do it as well as my mother does.”
“Wonderful!”
Cathy eyed Amina’s Tupperware. “You’re lucky your stomach doesn’t give you the same trouble mine does,” she told her sister.
Since Amina had seen her last, Cathy had dyed her hair an u
nnatural, bright auburn color. It was cut very short, a style that seemed to emphasize the smallness of her head. She had dressed up in a black velour pantsuit, but her face looked older; her cheeks sagged on either side of a tiny, bow-shaped mouth.
Everyone had moved into the kitchen, and Amina thought of how strange this type of socializing would seem to her parents, if they ever actually made it to Rochester. When her mother had guests, all of the dishes were prepared for them in advance; usually she didn’t sit down at the table, but only moved around the apartment serving food. Certainly no guest had ever been in her kitchen, which was too small to admit more than one person anyway.
Amina asked Eileen for a task, and George’s mother set her up with the vegetables for a salad, which she sliced on a cutting board next to the refrigerator. Aunt Cathy’s refrigerator was covered with magnets, like their own, only hers were primarily instructional: there was one from the fire department and one from poison control, and the others were decorated with Christian pictures and sayings. WEEPING MAY ENDURE FOR A NIGHT, BUT JOY COMETH IN THE MORNING, and THERE ARE THREE THINGS THAT ENDURE FOREVER: FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE. BUT THE GREATEST OF THEM IS LOVE. Eileen took a lasagna out of the oven and put it on a trivet on the table.
“This looks delicious,” said Bob, whose red sweater and white beard made Amina think of Santa Claus.
Cathy waved her hands in front of her face. “Don’t thank me—I didn’t do a thing. I keep making mistakes, cooking for these two. Eileen did everything this time.”
“Everyone sit, please,” Eileen said loudly. “This isn’t fancy, but I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to cook in an intact kitchen. Poor Bob—we’ve been eating at Friendly’s and the Olive Garden for months.”
“I like Friendly’s,” Bob said pleasantly, taking his seat in a chair next to the sideboard. Amina tried to help Eileen serve, but George’s mother patted her shoulder and asked her to sit, and so she sat down between Jessica and George, directly across from Cathy. Eileen had put the samosas in the middle of the table with a Chinese sweet-and-sour sauce (Amina hadn’t been able to find tamarind, now that she no longer went to Namaste); everyone helped themselves except Cathy and Harold.
“How’s your new job?” Jess asked Amina brightly. She had obviously come straight from the hospital, and Amina was impressed by her navy-blue blazer and oversize pearls. “I keep meaning to come in to Brighton for my Frappuccino.”
“I don’t mind the register, but making the drinks is difficult—people are particular.”
“What about you?” Harold turned to George. “Anything on the horizon?” Amina had met Jessica’s husband only once, at the wedding, and she’d been uncomfortable enough then that she hadn’t retained a strong impression of anyone. Harold was thinner and shorter than his wife; he had fine gray hair that stood out in a kind of cloud around his head, sparse but unruly. Amina had been surprised to see that he was dressed in jeans, a plaid shirt, and sneakers—less formal than she would’ve expected for a doctor. The only thing that made him look at all distinguished was a massive gold watch on his left wrist. In spite of his grumbling about the dinner, George had put on a collared shirt and slacks, as if he were going to TCE.
“I’m looking into a couple of things,” George said.
“It’s brutal out there,” Harold said. “I know a guy down in New York City—a stockbroker—he says all this recession crap is just semantics. It’s a depression, he says, pure and simple, and it’ll be around a lot longer than people think. Credit card debt, bad mortgages—we’re blaming the banks, but it’s us. We’ve been living beyond our means for a long time.”
“Oh my goodness,” Eileen said. “We haven’t even toasted our new citizen. Amina—congratulations. We’re so proud of you.” They all lifted their glasses: hers was the only one filled with water.
“Apparently ninety-seven percent of American high school students can’t pass that test,” Harold remarked. It was the kind of fact George ordinarily reveled in, but her husband had put down his glass and was eating silently, all his attention focused on his plate.
“I read that somewhere. Basic civics, and they have no idea—we’re talking about sixteen-, seventeen-year-old kids. That should tell you everything you need to know about our schools.”
“It’s all right if you study,” Amina said. “Only there are so many forms. It’s been hard for my parents, too.” She smiled at Jess, trying to think of how she might thank her and Harold for the sponsorship without emphasizing the reason they needed it.
Jessica glanced at George and then back to Amina. “When will they actually arrive—I’m forgetting?”
“It could be as early as August—depending on when my passport arrives.”
“They’ll be living in the house with you?” Harold asked.
“You knew that,” Jessica said lightly. “I think I told you they were planning that.”
Harold pursed his lips and exhaled sharply in George’s direction. “Good luck, buddy. You’re a better man than I am.”
Amina suddenly hated Harold: his unkempt hair, expensive watch, and his too-casual clothes. There were a thousand things she’d like to say about the benefits of living together with your parents, especially once there were children. She’d often heard the story of how her mother and Moni had gone home to join Parveen in the village, helping her nanu while her nana was dying. Her youngest aunt, Bristi, had even come from Calcutta, bringing special ayurvedic medicines. They had washed the bed sores on his back and sometimes even cleaned up after the old man, when he lost control of his bowels. How could you force your parents to ask those things of strangers? How could you forget all they had once done for you? You left them helpless in a public place, which you insisted on calling a “home.”
“I don’t know,” Cathy said. She had been so quiet that Amina had wondered if she were even listening. “I think about what’s going to happen to me. With the diabetes and my heart. My friends without children are all scared of getting old—but I tell them my situation is hardly any different. Now I think there’s a problem with the boiler—the shower’s scalding one minute, ice cold the next—but who can I call? I can look in the phone book, but then who knows who’ll show up. They come in here and see a woman on her own …”
“I can look at your boiler,” Bob offered.
“Oh, Bob’s wonderful with that kind of stuff,” Eileen said. “Cathy, you should’ve asked before.”
Cathy looked tearful. “What I mean is—it’s wonderful to have a child who wants to look after you.”
Amina had the strange feeling of being grateful to a person she had only a few moments ago wanted to strangle.
“This is normal in my country,” Amina began, while George and Bob accepted seconds of Eileen’s lasagna. Suddenly there was an insistent electronic noise under the table. Harold jumped up, leaving most of his first helping untouched. He left the room and returned a moment later to say he was needed at the hospital.
“A ten-year-old with a pneumothorax. Life threatening, if we don’t do it right away.”
They all stood up as Harold made another phone call, and Jess collected his jacket from the closet, helping him into it while he talked. He covered the phone to thank Eileen for the dinner and then put a hand on George’s arm. “Good luck, buddy,” he said again, and even though she knew he was referring to George’s job hunt, the phrase offended Amina. After Harold had shut the front door behind him, the six of them remained standing, as if a dignitary had left the room.
“Sometimes I miss him at night, but I’m so proud of him,” Jess said, finally taking her seat again. “He’s just a wonderful surgeon, everyone says so. He has this detachment—he can keep his head when other people would be falling apart. I mean, some of these cases just break your heart.” Jess looked up at them. “But this isn’t a subject to talk about in front of a young couple.”
“I’m the same age you are,” George reminded his cousin.
“Your age doesn’t matter.” Jess
smiled at Amina. “I’m a Nosy Nancy, but I can’t help asking—are you thinking of children yet?”
Amina looked at George for help, but he was noisily stacking the dishes.
“Leave it, leave it,” Cathy said. “If I can’t be trusted to cook, at least I can be useful cleaning up the mess.”
“I always wanted our own kids, of course,” Jess continued. “But it didn’t happen for us. For a while we thought about adoption, but we were older by then, and they make it hard for you. And Harold didn’t want to try other countries. He said you never know what you’ll get.” Jess paused, and her face and neck suddenly got very pink. She took a large swallow of wine and began complimenting Eileen again on the lasagna, which she said was delicious, but not too heavy.
“It’s the pesto,” Eileen said. “That’s the secret.” Jessica gave her aunt a grateful look.
“You don’t know what you get at home either,” Cathy remarked.
“You and I will clear, Catherine,” Eileen said briskly. “You young people sit for a minute.” But Jessica got up immediately and went to the living room to refill her wineglass, and George followed a moment later. She could see why Jessica had been embarrassed, but Amina hadn’t been offended. People said things without thinking or didn’t recognize the way something would sound until it was out of their mouths. Her mother had often criticized her for the same thing at home. George had been right about Harold, but as usual she’d charged ahead, practically insisting on this dinner. Now she wished they hadn’t come.
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