Before We Visit the Goddess

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  The policeman’s eyes narrow. He lowers his forehead like a bull about to charge. And Bijan faces him, standing tall, glowing with exhilaration, because isn’t this what he’s been missing ever since he got here, an opportunity for battle? For destruction?

  But Bela does not see any more because she has squeezed shut her eyes. She is crying so hard that her body shudders and her indrawn breath rasps her throat, until finally the doctor has to give her a shot. Even then sobs burst out of her, intermittent, effortful, as though through viscous mud. Her heart is changing from iridescence back to a flesh-bound lump that thuds uncertainly in her chest. She has lost something, but what? An opportunity to remember? To understand a mystery? To make amends? She knows this much, though: More losses are on their way. She feels a shift in the air, an imminent storm. And no one in this room knows how to stop it.

  American Life: 1998

  Blanca bursts into the utility area in the back of Nearly New Necessities as I’m dumping the latest batch of donated clothing in the washer.

  “Hola, girlfriend!” She sets her grocery bag on top of the dryer and frowns. “How come you’re banished back here? Aren’t you supposed to be working the cash register? What did you do to piss off Mr. Lawry?”

  I execute an elegant shrug. “Do I have to do anything?”

  “Well, there was that time when you told a customer that the pants she tried on made her look like a fuchsia hippo.”

  “She asked me. I was trying to be truthful and expressive.”

  “There are times when it’s good to be that. This wasn’t one.” She narrows her eyes. “Tell me, Tara!”

  “This man—he was about to buy a stereo system. I pointed out that the speakers didn’t work.”

  “I bet Mr. Lawry didn’t take kindly to that. Let me guess: he said, We never told him that the speakers were working. If he didn’t check them out, whose fault is it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re going to get yourself fired one of these days, Tara.”

  “It isn’t right to cheat people.”

  Blanca sighs, then changes the subject. “Look what I got us from Jehangir’s Take Out.”

  She rummages in the bag and holds up a greasy brown-paper package.

  “Can’t eat pakoras. I’m on a diet.”

  “Why? Did El Roberto say you’re too fat?”

  “I don’t need a man to tell me what I am.”

  Blanca cocks her head. “Had your first fight, did you? I was wondering how long it would take—”

  She sees my expression and stops, then brightens again. “Picked this up, too.” She hands me a crumpled copy of the Indo-Houston Mirror. “You need to be in touch with your people.”

  It’s a sore point between us, what Blanca sees as my abandonment of the Indian community and I consider self-preservation.

  Mr. Lawry’s voice, mournful as a turtledove’s, floats into the utility room. “Girls, girls, why is it I get the feeling that someone back there is wasting their time and my money?” His tone turns snap-crackly. “Get your butts up here. Now.”

  Blanca and I work at Nearly New Necessities on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Just a pinch short of thirty hours, she says, so Mr. Lawry doesn’t have to give us benefits. But she doesn’t care because she’s almost done with her beauty school courses, and the manager at the Hair Cuttery, who’s sweet on her, said she can start working for him as soon as she gets her diploma.

  I’m happy and sorry, both. Ever since I wandered into Nearly—soon after I took a semester off from college, a semester which stretched into a year and then another and some more—Blanca has been a good friend. No. In the interests of truth, I must modify this statement: at this point, Blanca is my only friend.

  Sometimes when Mr. Lawry is particularly contentious, I think of quitting. My boyfriend Robert could get me a waitressing job at Pappasitos, where he has connections. With tips I’d be earning twice as much. We could move to a bigger place. This is important because lately our one-bedroom seems to be shrinking.

  I feel guilty thinking this. Just last week, after I told Robert I’d had a rough day, he sat me down on the couch, put my feet in his lap, and rubbed them with peppermint oil until they tingled. I could see why he’s the most popular massage therapist at Bodywork. But what touched me the most, pun fully intended, is that he was willing to do this for me at the end of a long day spent wrestling with flesh.

  In the mental conversations I can’t seem to stop having with my mother (which are the only conversations we have anymore), I ask, Can you imagine Dad ever doing this for you, even before he decided to leave?

  My mother responds with one of her sayings: He who laughs last laughs longest.

  No. She turns her face so I won’t see her tears, and I feel rotten.

  I don’t think I’ll quit Nearly anytime soon. I love navigating its cavernous interior, replacing on hangers pants that have fallen to the floor, folding curtains into a compact squareness, rummaging with missionary zeal to reunite a lost sandal with its mate. I sweep the ancient feather duster over escritoires, andirons, a Jesus statue with an index finger chopped off. Sometimes I stay on even after my shift is over, running my hand over stains and rust-tattoos, imagining the adventures these objects had before they ended up here, their tribulations when they leave. Once in a while I take something small, a saltshaker that’s lost its pepper partner, a talking doll that makes a strangled sound when you pull on the cord attached to the back of its neck. I carry it around in my car for a few days, and then I leave it in a freeway underpass so a homeless person can have it.

  So far I’ve only taken things that no one else wants, but I can feel something growing in me, restless and cresting like a storm wave. I find myself watching the Jesus statue. One of these days, I’m going to snag it.

  When people bathe in the Ganges, I once read somewhere, or maybe my mother told me, their sins are forced to leave them and wait on the banks because the river is so holy that nothing impure can enter it. The sins will repossess the bathers when they climb out, but as long as they’re immersed, they’re free of sorrow.

  Nearly is as close to a holy river as my life can get.

  After our first fight, I made a list to remind myself why Robert is special:

  4. He’s a great cook. (I’m not.)

  3. I love his hands. I’ve loved them ever since he ran them over my naked back at our very first meeting. (This is not as risqué as it sounds. I was at Bodywork for the Weekday Half-Hour Special, which Blanca had bought me as a birthday gift.) He gave me a full hour and then invited me to dinner. Over souvlaki and ouzo, we discovered that we shared a passion for sci-fi movies. A month later, he asked if I’d move in with him.

  I knew it was too soon. Plus I’d never lived with a man. Yes, I said. Oh, yes.

  2. He’s an intriguing mix of contradictions. He loves literature. (On our first date, we discussed Paul Auster.) Yet every Friday night he gets together with his high school buddies to play pool. Sometimes it bothers me, how he has these different compartments in his life. (He hasn’t introduced me to the Friday buddies. Not that I want to meet them. But still.) I wonder which compartment he’s placed me in.

  Are these frivolous reasons? How about this one, then:

  1. Robert is nothing like my father.

  At three p.m. Mr. Lawry perches his hat, a startling spinach-green, atop gray corkscrews of hair and informs us—as he does every afternoon—that he has errands to run. He leaves Keysha, his favorite, in charge and exhorts Blanca and me to use our time gainfully by price-tagging a box of kitchen supplies. We know he’s going down to La Cariba, where he will get happily intoxicated, but we’re careful to pretend ignorance. We understand the rituals of subterfuge.

  Keysha pops her purple bubblegum and says, “Don’t you worry, Mr. Lawry. We be just fine.”

  With Mr. Lawry’s departure, an air of truant hilarity settles on Nearly. Blanca and I eat pakoras and read the classified ads from the Indo-Housto
n Mirror out loud to each other. Keysha, who’s getting married soon, uses the store phone to call her mother in Amarillo to discuss bridesmaid gowns. (“Ecru? Mama, you serious? We going for hot pink.” She punctuates her sentences with a flurry of jingles from the bells woven into her braids. “Uh-uh. No bows. Definitely no bows.”)

  “Sister Shireen, god-gifted problem solver,” Blanca reads. “Will remove curses, reunite loved ones, heal marriage and business.”

  I read, “Parents looking for match for fair-skinned homely Punjabi lady doctor. Must have green card. Prefer 5'8'' but 5'4'' ok.”

  Then Blanca says, “Dios, Tara, look at this one. Family requires respectable Indian woman with car to take care of Mother over long weekend. That’s what you and Robert need, a bit of distance-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder.”

  “You want me to babysit an old woman all weekend?”

  “Not just any old woman. An old Indian woman. It’ll be like staying with your abuela.” Blanca knows that my grandmother died about three years ago, right around when I left school. I never met her. When I was younger, I used to ask my mother about her all the time, but she’d mostly change the subject, until finally I gave up. I don’t think about her much nowadays. I have other problems. But Blanca’s obsessed with my lack of family and always trying to remedy the situation. “Maybe she’ll teach you how to cook some proper Indian food. El Roberto might fancy that.”

  This reminds me of my discussion with Robert this morning, the one that ended in me walking out of the apartment. I didn’t slam the door, but only because I am not that kind of person.

  “Oh, very well,” I say.

  I’m late for my interview, having been lost twice since I got off the freeway. The geometric houses, the look-alike pruned bushes, the subdivision names—Austin Colony, Austin Glen, Austin Crossing—make me feel like I’m in some kind of suburban funhouse. Really, I should feel right at home, having grown up in the suburbs myself, but I am no longer that girl.

  Finally I park my beat-up VW next to a Camry that stands, docile and squeaky-clean, in the Mehta driveway. I am attired in clothes that Blanca culled with care from Nearly’s stock: shapelessly loose slacks (“You don’t want to show no legs, trust me, legs get employers all worked up”) and a deep pink top with puffy sleeves to cover my scorpion tattoo. I hear the disembodied laughter of the gods: Who’s the fuchsia hippo now?

  Mr. Mehta opens the door: neat side part, navy blue pants, shirt buttoned to his neck, brown leather sandals, kind of Stepford-husband-meets-Walmart. He’s about five-foot-four. I feel like I’ve stepped into the wrong ad.

  “It’s six twenty-five.” He jabs at his watch. “Your interview was at six.” His eye falls on the silver ring inserted into my left eyebrow, which I refused to let Blanca remove, and his mouth puckers.

  “For heaven’s sake!” a female voice clangs from the room beyond. “It’s not like you have ten other candidates lined up.”

  Heartened by my invisible champion, I lie my way through the interview conducted by Mr. Mehta and his wife, a surprisingly glamorous woman several inches taller than him, her hourglass figure draped in a chiffon salwar kameez. No, I don’t drink. No, I don’t do drugs. I’ve never had an encounter with the law. Only when they ask if I have a boyfriend do I stumble. I know the right response. But if I deny Robert, something will go wrong between us, I just know it.

  “Yes,” I say.

  Mr. Mehta’s Adam’s apple bobs in agitation, but his wife touches his arm. “We can’t be picky. We only have two days left before the Masala Cruise.”

  From the back room: “Yes, yes, no need to be picky. Just dump the old woman with whoever shows up, so what if they suffocate her with a pillow and steal her jewelry. Why don’t you kill me off yourselves? Then you can go on all the Masala Cruises you want.”

  Perhaps I’ve been overly optimistic about my champion.

  “You’re hired,” Mrs. Mehta says. I wait for them to introduce me to my charge, but they hurry me to the door. I tell them I need half the money up front, as Blanca advised. When Mr. Mehta hesitates, the voice snaps, “You mean you’re ready to leave me at the mercy of someone you can’t trust with a few measly dollars?”

  The reason for my fight with Robert is a stuffed raccoon. He won it from Victor, his best buddy, the result of a pool-playing bet involving something called a bank shot with throw (the intricacies of which I fail to grasp), and installed it on our chest of drawers two weeks ago. Apparently, the raccoon is valuable. More important: Victor had shot and stuffed it himself, and he was terribly cut up at having to part with it. He offered to buy it back from Robert for two hundred dollars.

  “And you refused?” I eyed the creature with disbelief. Its upper lip was lifted in a snarl, and one front leg was shorter than the other (though that could have been the result of Victor’s taxidermy). It appeared ready to spring off the chest of drawers and launch itself upon us.

  “Naturally,” said the love of my life. “You should have seen Victor’s face.” He ran his hand over the raccoon’s back. “Feel the fur—it’s incredible, soft and bristly at the same time.”

  I declined. The only thing I found incredible was that he expected me to sleep in the same room with this monstrosity.

  “Want a shower?” Robert offered as a peace gift.

  I considered sulking, but I love showering with Robert, his fingers unbuttoning my clothes, letting them drop where they will, the way he holds me as he soaps my back, as though I were a child who might slip and fall.

  But afterward, I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the sliver of moonlight that had edged through our window, illuminating our belongings: secondhand waterbed, two gooseneck lamps that didn’t match, chest of drawers, a teetering stack of books. Coming from my parents’ overcrowded home, I’d felt proud of our minimalism. But tonight it frightened me, how either one of us could walk out the door and not feel we’d left behind anything we cared for.

  Except, now, the raccoon.

  I became aware of a musky odor. The raccoon? Surely it couldn’t smell, except of whatever embalmment Victor had used. Was it the scent of another woman? I couldn’t stop myself from imagining Robert at work, his hands caressing female curves. What did he say to them? What made him the most popular massage therapist at Bodywork?

  The raccoon’s glass eyes glinted. Its tiny teeth shone, so white they could have been in a toothpaste ad. I pushed myself closer to Robert and held him tightly until he gave a drowsy grunt and twitched away.

  In the morning I wanted to confess my fears, exorcise them with laughter. But I couldn’t. In her twenty-one years of marriage, my mother had never suspected my father. When one morning at breakfast, as she was serving him a crisp dosa, he told her that he loved someone else, she smiled, thinking it was one of his jokes. Here, she said. Have some coconut chutney.

  So instead I asked Robert to move the raccoon to the living room. He refused. I claimed he was inconsiderate. He accused me of not caring about what was important to him. I took to covering the raccoon with a pillowcase when Robert was out of the house. He took to checking on it, first thing, when he returned. Without a word, he’d ball up the pillowcase and throw it with vicious accuracy into our dirty-laundry basket. I’d rescue it surreptitiously so I could use it again. It was like a vaudeville show, except not funny.

  But today I don’t want to fight. I’m going to be at the Mehtas’ starting tomorrow, Thursday evening until Sunday night, and I want to repair matters before leaving. I pick up a bottle of ouzo and rent a DVD of Total Recall, the original one with Schwarzenegger. It must be telepathy, because when I enter the apartment, Robert has made moussaka. We eat sitting cross-legged on the couch, replaying favorite scenes, refilling glasses. Robert laughs when I describe the Mehtas. But when I tell him that I got the job, he frowns.

  “Victor’s throwing a barbecue party Saturday,” he says. “I wanted to introduce you to the guys.”

  I’m flattered—and surprised. It looks like our relationship has ju
st been bumped up several notches.

  “I can’t believe you’re abandoning me the entire long weekend for some old woman.”

  “Not just any old woman. An Indian woman. She could be my grandma. Maybe she’ll teach me some great Indian dishes that I can cook for you—”

  Robert looks skeptical, so I offer to make it up to him the only way I know, in bed.

  When I arrive, the Mehtas are standing at the door attired for adventure: he in a Hawaiian shirt, she in a sundress. Of the mother there is no sign. He hands me the house key and a sheet with phone numbers: the family doctor, the hospital, and Mr. Mehta’s brother, who lives in Poughkeepsie. In case of an emergency, they are to be contacted in that order. At the bottom, in tiny digits, is Mr. Mehta’s cell number. It won’t work once they set sail, Mrs. Mehta informs me happily. She leans toward me.

  “Be careful,” she whispers. “She can be tricky.”

  Watching them hurry to their car, I think they make an unlikely pair. Then she reaches out and puts her arm around his waist, even though she has to bend a little. He opens the car door for her and tenderly tucks in her dress.

  What do I know about love, anyway?

  I discover Mrs. Mehta, a tiny woman in a widow’s white sari, crumpled in a heap on the kitchen floor, her glasses askew. My stomach cramps. I’m halfway to the phone to call the Mehtas when I remember the warning and swing around. Sure enough, I catch a glint under her closed lids. She’s watching me. I’d love to empty a pitcher of ice water over her and watch her gasp and sputter and not be able to complain. But I am not that kind of person, so I say, “I’m not going to call your son and force him to cancel his vacation, if that’s what you’re aiming at. However, I’ll be happy to call an ambulance. You can spend the weekend in the hospital, getting poked and prodded and having your blood drawn.”

  For a long moment, she lies there. Then, just as I’m thinking maybe she did have a stroke, she sits up and announces that she would like dinner.