“It was beautiful. We swam in the river and I had a best friend, Puime, she and I, we were so close. And I miss speaking Sinhala. And Sita’s cooking. She could make the best moju.” I stop, guilty for evoking all these lost and buried treasures.
“Whose cooking?”
A vision of Sita at the gate as we left, small and tired, waving as if her arm would fall off. Punch at her side. A sharp stab through my heart. But also the realization that I was not the only one who had lost home and gained America. Dharshi too had lost certain things, and for her, these are losses she doesn’t even know she has sustained. I try to explain it all to her. But I know it is futile. She grew up in this soil; her shade of flower has taken on the colder tint of this air. Leaving is an act that cannot be undone.
* * *
We sit on the couch, watching Gilligan’s Island, our feet resting on each other. She teaches me the joys of afternoon cartoons and how to eat Oreos. “Like this,” twisting apart the cookies, her tongue languid in its swirl across the cream center. We walk to the drugstore for rainbow-flavored ice cream, delicious synthetic sweetness. We sit, heads close together over a single cassette tape recorded off the radio. We play and rewind and play and rewind, all the while our pencils scribbling like crazy to write down the lyrics, to penetrate the mystery exactly. We fill notebooks with lyrics. We transcribe parts of our favorite Wham! song so that we can reenact the video: “Young guns, having some fun/Crazy ladies keep ’em on the run.” In those days she was the whole of the continent for me. “One, two, take a look at you/Death by matrimony.” She is George and I am Andrew and we strut through the living room feeling dangerous and free. She twirls and glitters and I, star-struck, emulate her every move.
* * *
I hear Dharshi and my mother talking in the kitchen. Usually they just tolerate each other as if my mother can’t deal with having another daughter and Dharshi can’t abide the idea of a second mother. But now I listen and hear Dharshi say, “Aunty, who is Samson?”
My mother says, “Why, Dharshi?”
There’s a pause that Dharshi doesn’t fill, so my mother says, “That’s the name of our servant back in the old house. Why do you want to know?”
Dharshi says, “No reason.”
I wait for her to tell my mother that this is the name I cry out in my sleep. Sometimes in horror, sometimes in something far from horror. But she doesn’t say it and I walk into the room and they both look at me. My mother with steely eyes asking whether I have revealed the secrets that will destroy us. In Dharshi’s eyes is knowledge, as if now, without my saying anything, she knows everything.
Nine
The white man opens the door with a flourish and my mother and I walk through the two-bedroom apartment, noting the worn magenta carpet, the windowless bathroom, the chilly rooms. He says, “It’s not much, but the rent is good and your daughter’s school is close enough.”
And then we are alone, Amma and I. We have never been alone together in this way before. As if set adrift on an ice floe in this enormous new continent. We live together, both of us haunted by a place, absent people we must never speak of.
* * *
America: It is like being reborn as a blank, like being outside history. People look at me and then look past me because they cannot place me. They think I am Indian or Mexican. Innumerable conversations invariably follow this precise trajectory:
Person: Where are you from?
Me: Sri Lanka.
Person (confused and incredulous, sure he/she has misheard): Where?
Me (in the monotone of a person delivering lines): It’s a small island twenty-two miles off the southern coast of India.
Person (relief dawning in his/her eyes—a familiar word; visions of samosas, chai, and women in bindis): Oh, so it’s part of India.
Me: No, no, it’s a separate island. It’s its own country.
Person: Oh.
Me: It’s a separate independent island nation. It has nothing to do with India.
Person: So is it Hindu or Muslim?
Me: Neither. It’s primarily Buddhist. But there are Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.
Person (eyes glazing over): So it’s not a part of India?
The social studies teacher says, “And as another marker of their primitive state, these people eat with their hands. They haven’t discovered cutlery yet.” She shows a slide of a family of Australian aborigines around a fire, the absence of forks and knives marking them as other, savage, frightening. I think of our dining room in Kandy, all of us gathered together. Sita bringing steaming dishes to the table, the luxury of my fingers moving through rice and curry. So this is what they think of us. Entire civilizations derided because of the way we choose to tackle our food. It feels unfair, but I’m careful after that. No outsider will ever see me use my hands. Always I will be proper and formal, employing my knife and fork.
* * *
After school, I let myself into the silent, empty apartment. Amma works at the travel agency from morning until well past nine. Uncle Sarath drops her home then, and exhausted, she falls into bed, sometimes forgetting to change her clothes. I’ve found her like that often, feet dangling off the side in her new sturdy flats. I kneel and ease her feet out of them, roll her over so I can cover her with the blanket.
Now I pull out the containers of food she has cooked on the weekend from the freezer, warm up the curries, and eat in front of my textbooks. The apartment has the quality of a place where no one had been for many hours. The sense of not being watched drops around me. It is lonely, but also safe. I can do anything I like, no one is watching me, there are no hidden eyes. A taste for solitude blooms.
In my bedroom, I am the queen ruling over her minute kingdom. This space is mine; no one can enter without my permission. When we left Dharshi’s, she had pulled her old Tiger Beats out of the closet and pushed them into my hands. Now I cut out one picture of Depeche Mode, put tape on the back, and place it carefully in the center of my wall. That night I hold my breath when Amma comes in, squints at these men in suits and manes of teased hair. “What is this?”
“Amma, it’s what girls do here. All my friends have them. You saw Dharshi’s room.”
“Dharshi grew up here. She’s not like you. These are men! In a young girl’s room?”
“Amma, it’s just what girls do here. Please.”
I wait for the shouting, the ripping off of photos from walls, but maybe America has already worn down her ramrod sureness. She turns and looks at me for a long, searching moment, says, “Okay, but don’t turn too much into one of these foreigners, okay? We also have things to be proud of.”
I nod. I don’t correct her. I don’t tell her that we are the foreigners and that everything we had before is rendered useless here. I’m just ecstatic that she has allowed me to retain my poster. I have plans to turn the entire wall into a harem of wall-hugging androgens.
* * *
A postcard comes from Puime, a missive from a different world. I trace the florid plumage of birds, the spotted coat of the leopard with a finger. Such colorful, vibrant stamps, nothing like the red, white, and blue logic of my new home. Her rounded letters, now formal, as if we barely know each other.
She writes:
Hello,
How is it there? Have you met interesting people, new friends? Everything is the same here. We have exams in a month, so Ammi is shouting at me to stop writing and start studying. Anyway, I miss you.
Love, Puime
I turn over the card and find the Sigiriya Queen. An image I have known from childhood. Here are her round breasts and face, her long, slitted eyes, her hand bent at an awkward angle as if warding off evil, holding a sprig of jasmine. I see something I have never seen before. This woman, centuries old, frescoed on the rock face of a single enormous bolder rising far above the forest canopy; this woman who was the beloved of a king who dared build his palace on this lofty, precarious height—this woman looks like me. Here are features from an ancient past,
replicated on my face and figure. Here is an inheritance I’ve never even been aware of reaching down through the generations of islanders and touching my blood here now. Amma is right: perhaps we too have things to be proud of.
But that’s not good enough. Looking like some ancient queen from a tiny island a world away will win me no friends here. Her sloped shoulders and gold skin are not beloved here. I would give up the resemblance in a heartbeat to look like the white girls with their long limbs and exposed cheekbones. I would sacrifice a kingdom to have their confidence, their utter and unquestioned belonging. I put away the postcard; it has nothing to do with me.
And yet a magic moment. Christina Green stops by my desk, looks straight at me, says, “Do you line your lips?” I shake my head in confused disbelief. Is it possible that this goddess is speaking to me? She tries again, this time pantomiming the movement over her own lips, tracing an outline. “I mean, do you use lip liner? Around your lips?” Again I shake my head. She says, “Because it looks nice. Like you have natural lip liner.”
I stare at my lips in the mirror after this, study the dark pigment, their color and curl. She never looked my way again. But I had been seen. She had noticed something I had not ever noticed about myself, and this was powerful.
* * *
At breakfast one day Amma says, “The only dates in this house will be the type you can eat,” and laughs at her own joke. I’m shocked. I didn’t even think she knew the word dates in the context she is decrying. What she doesn’t understand while she is yelling, “Cover up, cover up!” is that she is seeing me in a way no one else sees me, as desirable. At school, the boys are not looking at me. I am invisible. I simply don’t exist in the way the white girls with their thick ponytails and their long, hairless legs do.
Instead I am “exotic,” like a python or a large cat. One does not have crushes on these animals. One does not pet or caress or love these animals. One does not ask them to dances. One regards them with suspicion and perhaps admiration, but one does not approach them. I can wear a skirt shorter than any I have and no boy will come up to me because in so doing he would be marking himself also as strange, and no boy in this place and this time is willing to do that.
But more than this. Something that Amma doesn’t see. I want to be like the white girls; I want to stalk the hallways like them and wear my hair in spiked shapes around my face like them. I want to feel some sort of belonging in this new place. But I don’t really want to be seen by the boys. Not in that way.
Something deep in me shrinks every time a boy’s eyes touch me. Some memory raises its head from deep within and I have to walk fast past the boy before it rises fully and erupts out of the depths. Always the possibility that Samson’s hands will reach out from these strangers’ arms and grab for my soul. So though my skirts are short by Amma’s standards, they are always far longer than anyone else’s. The pivot point of fear inside my skin so much more a push toward chastity than Amma’s lectures could ever be.
* * *
On the weekends, Dharshi and I comb the racks of the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, looking for baby-blue jeans, fringed boots in soft white leather, sweatshirts that slide off the shoulder. I hide my loot in a garbage bag at the back of my closet. I wear it all secretly under my long skirts and shirts. So that when Amma sees me at breakfast, I am still her little girl.
I come home one day to Amma in my room, my garbage bag of clothes in her hand.
She shakes the bag and shouts, “What is this nonsense?”
“Leave it.” I grab the trash bag, my precious hoard so carefully won, my ticket to an all-American girlhood. I tear it from her grip, and both of us realize that I am bigger than she is, that I tower over her, that she is small and cowering. I raise my hand and she shrinks, and in that moment everything is reversed: I am large and she is small. She steps back and stands by the door and watches me hang each piece up carefully in the closet. I no longer need the garbage bag. The tide has shifted; the power has slid my way. It’s a heady victory.
* * *
We live alone together, but we never talk about what happened before. It is as if my father’s death has rendered her mute. I catch her looking at me. For a quick second I read the distrust in her eyes. Always, I will be the daughter steeped in a secret and unfathomable shame.
We live alone together, Amma and I. Our living room window looks out onto the desolate landscape of a parking lot, but always beyond this, we hear the smash of falling water, see the curve of a moonlit tree over the rushing, tumbling river. The ghost of one drowned man rises from the water. The shadow of that other lost man waits on the bank. They look up at us in the window. They want entry. They want to be with us and live with us. But we never speak of them, never acknowledge their presence, never say their names or recount their deeds to ourselves or each other. This is the only way to survive.
Ten
This happens when I am sixteen. She’s in the shower. I’m in my room reading when I realize that the water has been running for a long time. I knock, ask, “Amma, are you all right? Is everything okay?” I am answered only by the hiss of water running. I stand with my ear against the door, the surface of my lobe melded to its cool surface. There are odd noises, small animal sounds. I sit on the ground, back against the door. It feels like those days when I was small, sitting outside her bedroom door, waiting and hearing nothing.
Time goes by. Maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty, then a quiet click. I jump up, grasp the knob, and turn. She is staring at her wrists held over the sink, blood dripping on the knife dropped there. The white porcelain is streaked as if with food coloring. I turn the water on, grasp her arms from behind, hold her wrists to the flow. Flesh opens; the water runs deep red, then rosy, then a delicate pink. She is muttering. “He left us. He left us. I didn’t do anything. It’s my fault. I didn’t do anything.”
I turn her to me, dab at her wound with a towel. Wrench the door of the cupboard behind her head open, grasp a tube and slide antiseptic gel along her wrist. A long thin cut revealing the layers of her flesh like strata: pink flesh, white fat, red muscle, the colors of her interior.
I pull the edges together, cleanly, neatly, wrap long strips of white bandage around her torn skin. I say, “Why did you do this?” She stares down at her wrists as if they belong to a stranger. She says, “Why did he go? Why did he leave us?”
“I don’t know, Amma.”
I put her in her bed. Take to my own bed. Lie there, my heart opening and closing in the rhythm of an anemone, something that passes salt water through its tender, delicate self in order to live.
* * *
I beg and beg for a pet. I miss Judy and Punch more than almost anything else. One day Amma comes home with a tabby kitten, all glinting amber eyes, rose-petal softness, and tiny thorned paws. He is supposed to be my kitten, but it is Amma whom he claims. Tucked under my mother’s chin, the kitten falls asleep, and she whispers, “Isn’t this the sweetest thing?” Her hand covers the tiny body. She says, “So small and all alone. No one to take care of him. He must think I’m his mother.” Tenderness in her voice.
Catney Houston, she calls it, ignoring gender and after the pop star who is singing her heart out on the radio, newly discovered, young, and luminescent. The kitten reminds her of the singer, my mother says, something about his meow—loud, soulful, and diva-ish.
I hate Catney Houston as much as I hate Whitney Houston. It is impossible to turn on the radio without the singer crying out about an adulterous love affair or issuing passionate invitations to dance. At home my mother strokes the kitten, follows it with her eyes, talks to it in that baby voice. I hate the way it winds around her feet and insists on sleeping curled next to her. When it comes meowing to me, I push it away with my foot. Not so very hard, but enough to make it jump in surprise.
At home alone, I slip scissors around its whiskers, snip on one side, and then quickly before he leaps away, on the other side. The cat looks lopsided now. When she comes home, Amm
a says, “Why did you do this?” with a bewildered look and holds it even tighter. I shrug. I don’t know why I did it. I was just bored. There was nothing else to do.
Another day, Amma is late from work. I lie on the couch waiting, watching TV and trying not to pay attention to the ticking clock. On the ledge the cat is also waiting, and from its suddenly pricked ears and the steam-engine rumble in its throat, I know that my mother is approaching. The door opens and she stoops to sweep up the animal in a hail of kisses, a soft glut of love noises. “I’m going to bed,” I say. I get up and stretch, and still they do not look at me.
Now always this animal is on her lap or next to her head on the sofa. The cat, sensing my rancor in the way that animals do, hisses when I come near, shrinks away as if I have hit it. Amma says, “I don’t know why he doesn’t like you. He’s so loving with everyone else.”
* * *
One evening she looks at the dishes I washed in the morning, says, “What is this?” Her nail scratches at a bit of dried-on egg. I say, “I’m sorry, Amma, I didn’t have time. I had to do homework.” I had rushed out that morning, the horrors of chemistry homework left unfinished the night before snapping at my heels. I see the tensing of her shoulders, her jaw moving, and I back away toward the door.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Look at this! Can’t you see this? Can’t you do anything right?” The plate flying past my head smashes like fireworks against the wall. The cat zips out of the way. I run to my room, throw the door closed, slump down against it. I wish there was something heavy I could drag against it. Instead I have only my body to keep her out. I hear the usual cacophony in the kitchen: exploding plates and glasses, the smashing of glass. Then her crying, and after that, silence.
Hours later I hear her just outside the door. She says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry.” I stay quiet. Through the wood she whispers, “There’s only us. Only you and me. We have to stay together. I love you. My little girl.” She continues, “I was so young when I had you. Only eighteen. Just a few years older than you. Can you imagine? I didn’t know how to do anything. And when I was small…” She pauses, takes a breath before she goes on. “Mallini and I … we were like luggage. Moved from place to place. We never had anyone.” I stay stiff and silent, wishing I could be like the cat, sinuous and bending to all her moods, loved.
What Lies Between Us Page 9