by SJ Sindu
Now I buy ingredients from a local Indian store and fold betel leaves for Grandmother. She tells me stories of Sri Lanka while she chews, and I listen while I draw. She tells me how she spent time in a refugee camp during the civil war, how the old woman in the tent next to hers had no arm, how the buses to Jaffna would be stopped, searched, sometimes bombed.
“We never knew what was coming.” She stuffs a leaf in her mouth. Her eyes flutter closed. She bites down slowly, savoring the way the leaf bursts and fills her mouth with juices.
I draw pictures of a woman in a ratty saree, the tail of it wrapped around her arm where it ends at the elbows. I’ll never be able to sell these, or show them to Amma, who would cluck her tongue and tell me I should draw pictures of nice things like flowers and beautiful girls. The woman’s eyes pull with emptiness. I don’t think I’ll be able to sell any prints of this on my website, but I’m tired of just drawing happy anime characters and fan couples in sexy boudoir scenes. Once when I was in high school, before I started drawing for money, back when I still thought I could be a real artist, Vidya looked at my drawings and said, “Everyone you draw has sadness in their eyes.”
“They’re smiling,” I said.
She said, “Like they’re quietly burning from the inside.”
“Your mother was a young woman,” Grandmother says. “It was a dangerous time for young women. She wants you to have a good life. She wants you to make all the right decisions.” When she talks I can see red teeth and gums.
I shade the eyes of the woman I’ve drawn, hoping I can fill the emptiness in.
•••
For as long as I’ve known her, Grandmother has had a routine of waking up before anyone else and making coffee. Now that she can’t get down the stairs on her own, she waits in bed for Amma to help her. Once they’re in the kitchen, she directs Amma on how to properly make coffee. They fight.
I avoid it all by sleeping in until after Amma goes to work. By the time I come down to microwave my coffee, Grandmother is already a few episodes deep into her Tamil soap operas. She fills me in on the latest plot developments. She asks if I’m doing well in school.
After a few days the sound of the soap operas gets to me. The dramatic music, the women’s shrill fighting, the men’s boasting. I understand enough Tamil to know the gist of what’s happening, and a few days of angelic mothers and evil, plotting daughters is all I can take.
“Why don’t we take a walk?” I open the sliding glass doors to the deck. “It’s nice out.”
Grandmother gets up from her folding chair and walks out onto the deck. I go to get her a light jacket and shoes. When I return, she has dragged her folding chair onto the rotting floorboards and is sitting there, watching Amma’s vegetable patch.
She motions me closer. I step out onto the deck with bare feet, the cold of the wood shocking me all the way up to my knees. There’s a bite to the air. I can smell the leaves starting to rot off the trees, drying and curling their tips in on themselves.
I help Grandmother pull on the jacket and wool socks with her plastic flip-flops. The breeze lifts and cools the hair on my arms.
“Why are you sitting out here?”
She holds a finger to her shrunken lips and cups her other hand around her ear.
“Do you hear that, Vidya?” she asks in Tamil.
“I’m Lucky.”
“Listen.”
I wait and listen, trying to hear anything more than the raccoons puttering around under the deck.
“Can you hear? Use your ears.”
I listen again in the cold, with the wind that smells like trees. And then—floating on the air, a frail wailing, thin and lonesome.
“It’s a baby,” Grandmother says. “You’re going to have a baby soon.” She smiles and closes her eyes, still cupping her ear to take in the cry.
I step back, away from her, away from the deck and the cool wood under my feet.
I don’t tell Amma, but every day after that when I come down for coffee, Grandmother is sitting out there on the deck, straining with her whole self to hear that sound.
•••
Most days Nisha drops by for lunch or dinner. Her visits are long and full of complaints about her impending engagement. Except for my wedding day, Nisha and I haven’t been close in a long time, but here we are, acting like best friends again.
“He’s thirty-five,” she tells me once. We’re sitting outside on the deck to escape the heat in the house from unseasonably warm weather and Amma’s hit-or-miss window air conditioners.
Nisha leans back so I can sketch her outline for a commission of a scantily clad young pixie sitting on a mushroom top in the forest.
“An engineer,” she says. She curls up her nose at the word.
I draw the curve of her back. One fluid line. The pixie I’m drawing is thin and slight like Nisha, draped only in strips of fabric that move with their own wind. In her hand she holds a birdcage from which fireflies escape in an upward swirl.
“I can’t believe you’re still drawing,” she says. “I saw your website.”
My pencil stalls in the middle of a strand of hair.
“I like what you do,” she says.
“It’s just for money.” I charge fifty dollars per hour for each commission, which is relatively high and only possible because I’ve been doing it for six years and have a faithful online following. Fifty dollars an hour and you get high-resolution digital art of anything you want and a frameable print.
I start drawing again, stretching the hair out in movement, and say, “It’s not real art.”
“I can’t draw like that,” Nisha says. She slides closer and puts a hand on my knee. Her fingers find a hole in my jeans. She rubs my skin with her fingernail. My stomach clenches tight.
The first time something happened between us, we were both in middle school. I’d found a bunch of mean letters from Nisha’s more popular friends who didn’t like us hanging out, stuffed into my locker, letters full of words like dyke and transvestite. Nisha and I burned the letters and buried the ashes in Amma’s vegetable garden. Nisha held me while I cried. Maybe she recognized her friends’ handwriting. Maybe she was moved by my crying. Whatever it was, something made her push my bangs out of my eyes and kiss me.
“Will you come to the engagement?” she asks.
I shade in the muscles of the pixie’s leg. I’ll have to darken it later. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You’re going back to your husband.”
“I’ll be here for a while.”
She scrapes at the bumps of dry skin on my knee and draws a line up my thigh with her finger. “Do you feel stuck?” she asks. “I don’t want to get stuck.”
“You don’t have to do this, you know.” I know her parents. They wouldn’t force her.
I draw curls that blow back in an invisible breeze.
“I want to come home to someone,” she says. Her fingers slip back and forth across my thigh. “I want to be married.”
•••
On another visit, she brings me a picture. A dark man in a suit stands next to a bright new staircase. She tells me his name is Deepak. He looks filled up with air, his smile stiff and small as if a bigger one would deflate him.
Nisha’s face flushes purple. She only lets me look for a couple of seconds before she snatches it back and stuffs it in her purse.
“Well?” she says.
“He seems nice.”
Her carefully-arched eyebrows sink into each other.
“Do you want me to say he’s ugly?” I ask.
“He’s not ugly.”
She’s baiting me. She wants to lash out at someone. Like it’s my fault she’s engaged.
“What do you want?” I say.
Part of me wants to ask her if she’d be happier if she came out. I know she wouldn’t be. L
ast time I tried to come out, I ended up homeless and alone.
She slumps over. I snake my arm around her waist. Her weight is heavy on my side.
•••
Nisha wants to visit our high school as a last look at her old life. Or so she says. The school’s closed for summer renovations. I haven’t set foot in it for years, not even for my high school reunion.
We take the same path we used to take as teenagers. Nisha hooks her arm into my elbow and walks in step with me. Leaves blaze in the trees. My feet still know the way.
The building looks like I remember. Renovations haven’t started. The mural of the school mascot—a Native American chief—is still emblazoned on the side of the brick building. When we were in school, students and teachers staged a massive walkout to change the name of the teams from the Winchester Sachems. Nisha didn’t participate because her math teacher had threatened to flunk anyone who left the building.
Nisha tries the front door. Locked. We circle the building until we find an unlocked door in the back, the door that kids used to smoke outside of during lunch. The hallway provided a little niche for them to hide while they passed around their cigarettes and lighters, hand-rolled joints if they felt adventurous. I wasn’t a part of that crowd, but Nisha was. She’d come back with her eyes shining. Rebellion woke something in her. Her smile would tip on the edge of wildness. She’d smell like smoke all day, right up until she washed it out of her hair in the sink before we walked home.
She holds the door open. Her eyes have that wildness.
We walk through the front hallway, looking up by habit. Every year’s art students add self-portraits to a collage of ceiling tiles. My portrait is squashed up next to the men’s bathroom. My skin is painted too dark, my mouth too lopsided, my eyes too flat.
A janitor in overalls watches us silently as we pass. We go upstairs to the science hallway where our class set chickens loose as a senior prank. The hallway is dark and empty. Nisha stops walking. Wooden blinds slice the light that falls onto the vinyl. I can’t really see her, but there’s something about the way she stands that makes me stop moving. The hallway smells like textbooks and chalk.
“I don’t want to get married,” she says into the empty air.
I say nothing.
“I wish I had a boyfriend,” she says.
The thick air presses at my skin.
She jolts into movement and leads me to the light of the hallway, downstairs toward E wing where shop courses are held. Silence stretches out behind us. She walks me into the gym, veers left and holds open a door. I enter onto a concrete staircase.
Everything goes black when she shuts the door. I know the staircase leads to the wrestling room. Wall-to-wall padding reaching up to the ceiling. Gym teachers used it for the yoga unit.
Our steps echo against the concrete. The blackness is all encompassing, thick and impenetrable except for a hole in the ceiling that lets in a thin beam of light. I can make out the dim outlines of the room. The sweat of many wrestling practices floats out of the red mats. Nisha puts a hand in the middle of my back and pushes me into the room.
“I don’t want to get married,” she says again. She slides down the padded blue walls.
I kneel in front of her. “You don’t have to get married.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. Of course I do. But I don’t want to. Does that make sense?”
“No.” I try to smile but my face won’t move.
“I want to get married. Just not like this.”
“Like what?”
“I want to—you know, I want to date.”
She grips my arm. Tight.
“You don’t understand, Lucky.”
She turns my face toward her. Her fingers press hard against my skin. She moves closer. The mats squeak. I can almost see the pinprick of light reflected in her eyes. Veins pump in my skull.
“I’m married,” I say.
With a strength I couldn’t have imagined coming out of her thin frame, she pushes me down onto the mat. She hovers over me. I can only see her outline. She pulls off her dress in one fluid motion.
“What do you want me to do?” I say.
Her outline swallows up my vision. I can smell the dryness in my mouth. The air turns hot and sticky. Nisha is thin skin underneath me, salty everywhere with little black hairs that tickle my nose. We have to peel ourselves from the vinyl mats to move. I press my face against her jasmine scent and push my fingers into her. She trembles. Her nails clutch at me. The room fills up with her soft moans that come out like sighs. She whispers in my ear like a secret. Yes. Yes. I want this. Yes.
I was born bone heavy, my marrow dense like stone, calcium fibers spun tight and thick. People say that I shuffle when I walk but I know I danced beautifully. The pads of my feet are thick from carrying around the heaviness, and they let me slap the ground hard to the rhythm of the drums. I learned early on that I could thrive on the pressure in my heels. Dancing saved me.
Every summer in high school, Nisha and I danced Bharatanatyam together. We trained intensely for performances all around Boston—Indian cultural festivals, multicultural school nights, Sri Lankan community events. Most of the girls who danced with us did it because their parents made them. Their bodies refused to bend, their gestures awkward, stiff, frequently offbeat. Nisha and I danced because we wanted to. We isolated muscle groups and trained each part of ourselves to move independently. The head separate from the neck. The chest separate from the stomach. The hips separate from the torso. I was good, but Nisha was better.
Our performances used to be the only time I wore makeup and noticeable jewelry. Now when I put on makeup, I remember Nisha bending close to my face, my chin in her hands, lining my eyes with kohl, and how, when I blinked too much, she would kiss my eyebrow to distract me from the scratching of the pencil on skin.
•••
Nisha’s parents throw a party before her engagement ceremony. I spend an hour in front of the mirror, lining and relining my eyes, trying to get the color to flick up at the outer corners like Nisha always did.
Amma insists that I wear a saree, but not the navy one that I pick out.
“It’s too dark, Lucky. It’s not a funeral. Wear your pink one.”
“Why can’t you go instead?” I say.
Amma clucks her tongue. “Nisha asked you to come. Be a good friend. Sometimes I don’t know what’s happening to you.”
Kris arrives at Amma’s house two hours before the party. Amma fusses over him, over his long hair and thin frame. Oh, look at the poor husband, starving to death because his wife isn’t at home to cook.
We get dressed in the guest bedroom and fight over the one small mirror on the dresser.
“What do you think?” Kris spins around. His dark Wranglers cling to his legs. He holds up a lime-green plaid tie in front of his striped shirt. “Too much?”
“Too much.”
He throws the tie onto the bed and watches me get dressed. My saree glitters like shards of glass in the sun, six yards of transparent pink shot through with stones. Wrap around once and tuck. Twice around, and over the shoulder. Pleat the extra and tuck. Kris adjusts my pleats so that they ripple evenly at my feet.
On a Bharatanatyam costume, the pleats attach to the legs so that they sway with each movement, fan out and jump with the drums. When I wasn’t dancing with Nisha, I watched the movement of her pleats, the starched symmetry of them, shadows flowing to the staccato beat.
I throw the extra pink material over my shoulder.
“No, no, don’t do that.” Kris arranges my saree so that my blouse is exposed.
I pull the blouse up. He pulls it back down.
“Kris!”
“I have a sexy wife. Let them see that.” He safety-pins my saree and blouse together under my shoulder blade.
“No touching at the party,” I
say. I put on my thali, with its thick gold chain and two perfect circular coins flanking a Ganesh pendant. The mark of a married woman is important. Amma wouldn’t let me leave the house without it. I tie a knot with the extra saree material inside my petticoat, and tuck my small flask of bourbon inside the waistband. A couple of sips at every bathroom break and I can get through this.
•••
Kris’s hand is clamped to my waist when we step up to the doorway of Nisha’s parents’ house. He likes to cause a stir when we walk in. Tamil couples don’t often touch in public. This is Kris’s way of rebelling—making them uncomfortable but staying safe, modern, and normal with a wife and a job and a house. I clench my teeth and let him hold my waist. I have to pick my battles.
The house is expansive and still crowded, shiny and new after Nisha’s family remodeled it. Cherrywood floor in dizzying zig-zags, finished basement, new windows, new staircase, granite mantle, beige walls. People fill every nook, the women in sarees and jewelry that jingles when they walk, the men in sweater-vests and slacks, the kids in itchy taffeta dresses and miniature suits.
Kris drags me over to the living room where the men sit around a coffee table weighed down with Johnnie Walker bottles. They’re going to stare at me. I know this, and Kris knows this, but of course he likes showing me off to the men, who find my interest in politics and business amusing. Amma’s not here to tell me to go to the women. Might as well get in an argument about climate change.
The living room suffocates with the extra chairs they’ve squeezed in. White, wood-paneled walls bow inward toward the ceiling. The giant flat screen plays MSNBC’s coverage of the Obama and Romney campaigns.
Appa’s face crumples a little when he sees me. He’d rather I go to the women, too.
I sit next to Kris and arrange my saree so that my midriff doesn’t show. We watch Rachel Maddow rip apart Romney’s platform of trickle-down economics. Appa pours a glass of scotch for Kris and slides it to him along with a plate of hot wings. My flask lies against my belly.