What Lies Between Us

by Nayomi Munaweera

  This too is happening: sex. In huge quantities and at all times of the day and night. Undergraduates slip in and out of each other’s rooms, wander home disheveled in the early hours, dressed in last night’s short skirts and stockings, shoes in hand. My roommate comes giggling to the door with whatever specimen of beefcake she has currently won, and I gather my books and leave them to it.

  I kiss a few boys and let one do some other things to me. But it’s never worth it. There is always an accompanying panic, that seething of the waterweed all along my veins, a rancor rising in my throat, and I must push the boy away, leave before he realizes I am gone, shut the door as he says, “Hey! What’s wrong?” I walk home pulling my sweatshirt hood over my face. I turn my body into a castle, inviolate. If no one gets into my body, nothing dangerous can burst out of it, either. In this way safety is won.

  In my room, under the covers I push the knife tip against my pulse until I am recast in time and space, and only then can I breathe again.

  * * *

  When Dharshi calls, months later, I don’t recognize her voice until she says my name the second time. We chat of different things, but I hear a flatness in her words that wasn’t there before. I’m castigating myself for not calling earlier, for forgetting her so completely in the midst of my own life and plans. My mother had said she wasn’t doing well, had asked me to call, and I had forgotten or let myself forget. Then her voice gets steely and she says, “I need to tell you something. I’ve decided to do something.”

  “Dharshi? What?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  I start laughing. Surely she’s joking.

  “No, really. I’ve decided. It’s the best thing.”

  “What? To who?”

  “A guy. His name is Roshan. Amma found him. He’s nice. He’ll take care of me.”

  I can feel my eyebrows rise, my mouth make that oh of absolute shock. “What? Why?”

  “I didn’t get scholarship money. This is the only way. Amma says this is the only way. Thatha lost a lot of our money, you know? We’re poor now.” An accusation. My mother has told me that Aunty Mallini is floundering. The grief is too heavy; she does little but sleep and cry, and she leaves the agency entirely to Amma.

  “I’m going to marry him. He’ll take care of me.”

  I’m silent. Ridiculous, but what comes to my head are those Wham! lyrics we used to spend all day bending over the old tape recorder to write down: “One, two, take a look at you/Death by matrimony.”

  I say, “Do you love him?”

  And knowing that this is the trump card, the one thing that will shut me up, she says with a twist in her voice, “Yes. I love him.”

  * * *

  I call my mother. “Why? Why is Aunty Mallini doing this? Why would she push Dharshi like this?” Amma listens, and then she says, “A mother shouldn’t eat off her daughter’s body.” There’s silence. But there’s more she wants to say. I can feel it, heavy in the air, so I wait. She clears her throat like something painful is caught there and says, “After our parents were gone, there were only the two of us. She had to take care of me. There were relatives, but we were nobody’s children. So when Sarath came, she didn’t love him, but he fell hard for her. She was so pretty. He wanted to marry her without a dowry, and his people were well off, so she did it. To save herself and me, do you see?”

  I don’t see. What does any of that have to do with Dharshi? Amma continues, “She thinks it’s Dharshi’s responsibility like it was hers. To save them both. She thinks it’s the only way.”

  I say, “But that was a different time.”

  Amma sighs. “It’s what she knows. It makes sense to her.”

  “I don’t understand. They’ve been here forever. Why would Dharshi agree?”

  “Sometimes the old ways are easier. Don’t you see? Love is difficult. There are no guarantees. But this way is easier, safer. Dharshi’s chosen safety for herself, for her mother.” She laughs. “Don’t worry, I won’t try to make you do this. I know better.”

  I am grateful for this. Amma might throw plates, lock herself in the bathroom for hours, and cut her wrists. She might scream and yell, but this is something she could not do, this selling of a child to the highest bidder. For once we are united.

  * * *

  I throw myself back into school, try to forget the whole thing. Mostly I do, but in my dreams I see Dharshi’s beautiful face and some other unknown one next to it. A frog, not transforming into a prince but shape-shifting into something frightening. The metallic taste of these dreams tinges my mornings like a flavor stirred into my coffee.

  Aunty Mallini calls. She makes small talk and I force myself not to let the venom rushing through my body erupt through my mouth. Finally she says, “So you must have heard … Dharshi is getting married.” I mumble an affirmative and she says, “You two have always been so close. Like two little birds in the corner twittering away. Right when we brought you from Sri Lanka, you were joined at the hip, isn’t it?” I say nothing; I wait and then she asks the question I know she has called to ask. “Darling, will you be her bridesmaid?” I want to say no. I want to scream at her that I want nothing to do with this marriage. But more than all this, I want to see Dharshi one last time before it happens.

  I say, “Okay, yes.”

  There’s relief in her voice. “Oh, good. Dharshi will be so happy.”

  I wonder if this is true. It has been months since we last talked.

  * * *

  The night before the wedding I take the train again. Retracing the journey I took on that other awful night. I’ve come late, so I’ve missed the dinner, and at the station it’s Aunty Mallini who picks me up and takes me to the house, talking nervously all the way, filling the silences.

  Dharshi opens her bedroom door. Hanging on her closet door where all her posters used to be is a white sari encrusted with gold filigree dripping to the floor. Her sari blouse hangs next to it, stiff as a piece of armor with the weight of beads. My own terrible pale-pink bridesmaid sari hangs next to it. Her wedding jewelry—earrings, bangles, the headpiece that will hang along her hair parting—is lined up in velvet boxes on the dresser. High-heeled jeweled shoes balance on their box in the corner. She looks at me and then away. I start pulling clothes out of my backpack, taking off my jeans to pull on my sweats. She says, “How are you?”

  “Good, I’m good. What about you? How’s it been?”

  She shrugs her shoulders, drops them, turns to the jewelry on the dresser, says, “Look at what Amma gave me to wear tomorrow.” She pulls out a large ring gleaming with brilliants in a paisley pattern, slips it on her finger; it catches the light with its gleaming surfaces.

  She says, “Amma wore it at her wedding too. It was the first thing Thatha gave her.”

  “Is that right?” I can’t keep the serrated edge out of my voice. I finish changing, say, “I’m going to sleep,” and slip into my old bed. She has kept it here for whatever reason. Perhaps some reminder of how it used to be. I hear her sigh, hear her clothes thrown off. I hear her get into her bed just feet away from mine. I pull the blanket even higher around my shoulders, stare at the wall. She switches off the light, and I am falling asleep when she whispers, “Are you awake?”

  I hiss, “No.”

  She says, “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

  “No! Of course not. This is stupid. I don’t understand.”

  The silence falls thick around us. An impenetrable wall of bricks rises from the floor to the ceiling. I hold my hands between my knees, my heart thudding. This is it. This is the moment she slips away forever. I keep my eyes open, stare blind at the wall I know is just in front of me.

  She stretches her hand over the miles that separate our beds and catches my shoulder in her fingers, the grip of a drowning woman. She pulls me toward her and I reach out my hand and she takes it and I tumble out of my bed onto the floor and then am dredged up into hers. Then we are against each other, body to body, and she
sighs against my cheek, and when we kiss it is rougher than I have imagined but also delicious and her body with all its gentle fallings and swoopings and depressions is melting against mine. She pulls off the heavy sweats that cover my skin. I feel like a snail slipped from its shell, vulnerable but also released. The white sari hangs like a threat in the corner. It glows, the only point of light in this room. I grab fistfuls of her hair and pull it around us like a tent of silk. It blots out the sari, the room, everything. It is squid’s ink, a darkness where no one will ever find us. I realize I’m not scared. That my pulse is not thrumming through my body as it has every other time. I feel only love and desire. Her chest rises against mine, our legs dovetail. There are mutterings and moanings and softness. I lick the salt at the corners of her eyes. There is the slide of skin, a tumbling together, her sobbing softly against my chest. Her opening for me, my bare feet against hers. Later we fall asleep tumbled together, entwined in the tiny cocoon of her single bed.

  * * *

  In the morning we hear a voice just outside the door, and we jolt apart as if electrocuted. I have barely jumped into my bed and pulled the covers over my bare shoulders when Aunty Mallini comes into the room singing, “Good morning, darling. It’s your big day!” She leans down to kiss her daughter. Both of us holding our breath, hoping she doesn’t note the scent of sex that hangs heavy in the room. But it must have been too long since she had known this particular perfume, so she doesn’t seem to notice. We don’t look at each other, both of us startled by this thing that has happened.

  Aunty Mallini sits on Dharshi’s bed, my thrown-off clothes right at her feet. She ticks the day off on her fingers. “First we have to go to the hairdresser’s. And then after that, the makeup artist’s, and then we have to dress you. That will take time because we have to make sure the sari is draped perfectly. It won’t be easy with that much work on it. And then the boys will bring the bouquets. Red roses. Such a good choice, no?” She turns to look at me then, and I, the covers still pulled to my shoulders, nod frantically. She rotates back to her daughter, says, “And then there are photographs to take and then the poruwa ceremony in the hall and then of course dinner and dancing. So hurry up, girls! Get up!” We are both terrified that she will pull the covers off Dharshi, reveal her small, naked body, when instead she jumps up and flounces out of the room, no doubt remembering some urgent wedding business.

  Dharshi’s face has gone black and uninviting. I don’t dare talk to her. I wrap the sheet around myself, rise to grab my sweats, and pull them on with my back to her to hide from her eyes the body she has kissed and loved for hours. When I come out of the bathroom, she’s already gone to the many hands that will transform her into a bride.

  * * *

  When I see her next, it is in the wedding hall. She is draped in the white sari, a row of deep red rosebuds like bloody spearpoints in her elaborate folded hairdo. Her face is painted several shades lighter than her jawline so that it floats disembodied above her darker limbs, a beautiful mask. Her long eyes are shadowed and outlined, the lashes coaxed to sweeping stiffness, her lips coated in scarlet. The shape of them reminds me of Samson’s orchids.

  Her husband is handsome. He’s tall and well built and towers over her. His jaw is sharp, and a tumble of hair falls over his eyes. He might be kind or he might not be. It is impossible to read the quality of his tenderness from where I sit. I remember Dharshi jumping from couch to couch with the hairbrush clutched in her fist yelling about how much fun girls want to have, about being a material girl, about feeling like a virgin. I have to turn away so that no one sees the lone bridesmaid in the terrible pink sari tearing up.

  When we hug goodbye, she says in a shaking voice, “He’s handsome, right? You should be happy for me.” I nod against her neck, kiss her under the ear where her own dark shade is spared. A surge in my heart almost spills through my lips. The thing I want most to tell her: “I love you. Come away with me.” But the words stay stuck, and then the crowd carries her away from me, a hail of confetti obscuring the bloody rosebuds in her hair. She climbs into a car bedecked with trailing jasmine; Roshan follows her. The car starts and she is gone. In my hands, her bridal bouquet, crimson roses so dark their edges crisp outward toward midnight.

  Part Three

  Twelve

  So much happens before we are born. We come into being in the middle of the narrative, midway through stories that have been unfolding long before us. We totter in on our fat infant feet and attempt to take our places on the stage, but we know only a fragment of the bewildering plotline, only a sliver of the odd characters we encounter. The big people have been practicing their lines and playing their parts for decades.

  I pitied my child from the moment she dropped away from me. Even then, tiny as she was, she tried so hard to understand events that had started decades before her birth. She moved her head, looking from one face to the other, back and forth, trying to read the emotions, the moods, the secret signals that would reveal what had occurred before she came. She was wise. I looked into her eyes and saw that she had come armed with ancient knowledge. But at the same time, so much of what came before was beyond her knowing. This is the worst kind of disability, the primary disadvantage of childhood.

  * * *

  But that was much later. At this moment I have outrun all my nightmares. I am a young nurse working at the old brick hospital in the city. There is a saying: “Someone who saves one life is called a hero; someone who saves thousands is a nurse.” It is my guiding principle in these days.

  I live in a brightly lit apartment over a Mexican grocery store in the Mission District of San Francisco. This is a mountainous city of dramatic views, great steel bridges rising in either direction, their heads lost in clouds. This is a place where one is shaken awake by earthquakes in the middle of the night. The planet beneath you moves in long liquid waves or quick gasp-inducing shrugs. It jolts you awake and reminds you that this is a precarious spot on the earth’s skin. You wait to see if the bookshelves stop moving. When they do, you go back to sleep.

  We are casual about it, but we know that one day the Big One will come, the colossal, catastrophic earthquake that will destroy us. It will snap the bridges like long beans. It will smash the buildings, as if under the invisible foot of a Japanese movie monster. The sea will rise and swallow this place; it is an apocalypse in waiting.

  We know all this and are willing to ignore it because we are seduced by these forty-eight square miles. Here are streetcars rushing up and down the sinuous slopes, ferryboats skirting the island of criminals, with dolphins rollicking in their wake, sunshine falling like a blessing of the gods through the whispering fog, raucous crowds in Dolores Park, ice cream worth waiting in block-long lines for, a park that stretches even farther and more luxurious than Central Park, with bison and boats on lakes, street-corner flower shops spilling blossoms onto the streets, and it is all completely magic.

  * * *

  On a corner, tucked on a slight hill, is the old brick hospital. I spend my days and nights here, and I’ll tell you this: when you are dying, small and alone in your hospital bed, it will be a nurse who will make your existence horrific or bearable. It will be a nurse who holds the bedpan, catches your quivering hand, gives you the begged-for extra shot of morphine. It will be one of us who shifts the bed those few inches that make the difference between agony and, yes, even pleasure. It will be one of us watching over you as you face the toothed abyss.

  I work in the ICU, which can be either a place to heal or an antechamber to death. Not much is beautiful here, and yet there can be a grace, a certain painful dignity that happens to those lucky ones when the time has come. I walk from my apartment for the night shift. On the quiet streets the curtains are drawn. I see a few TV watchers awash in the blue glow; the sight of a shambling hobo with hands sunk deep in his pockets makes me sink my own cold hands deeper. Then I enter the hospital and the night is banished. It is always such a relief to arrive and be encased in these
ringing halls, to be enfolded into the multitudes working, living, healing, and dying here.

  Here then are the evening’s cases: rival teenage gunshot victims from the Mission in cubicles down the hall from each other; a girl in a room waiting for the rape kit, realizing she is still wearing her rapist’s sweatshirt and screaming anew; an ancient-faced meth-head scratching deep rivets into his legs. I have heard each story a hundred times. I know how to tend their wounds and their souls.

  This is a place with its own specific codes: blue for heart failure, some serious malfunction of that most important muscle; pink in the case of a child abduction. When we don’t want patients and visitors to panic, there are the secret codes. When the system pages Dr. Stork, it means that a woman in labor is in crisis. A call for Dr. Strong means that there has been a security breach.

  But there is no code to signal our most important visitor, no announcement when he comes. I see him often, the night-winged angel of death perched on the highest gabled roof of the hospital, his inky eyes searching for the souls that fly out of our windows. His, the reign of this entire kingdom.

  * * *

  In the wards, the doctors come and go like gods, consecrated by their white coats and stethoscopes. They pronounce and diagnose and stand in judgment. Then they leave and we are still here. In the ICU you are reduced to your barest essence. No possessions, no homes or wallets, all you bring here is your body in whatever state it has fallen into.

  There is always a rhythm to it. The family comes in in shock. What happened to the son, the lover, the brother who said goodbye this morning and went to jog along the Presidio? How has he been transformed into this shattered thing? Why are these tubes piercing every part of his tender and beloved body? They will cry, they will rage, they will be exhausted by the decisions that have to be made, the arrangements, and the paperwork. Yet in a few days they will accept this new reality and do the best they can. Tears will become an unnecessary extravagance.