Marriage of a Thousand Lies

by SJ Sindu

  Nisha sweeps into the room in the middle of low, rumbly laughter from the men. She shimmers in a lace net saree and has done up her hair in a 1960s Bollywood pouf.

  “You didn’t even say hi,” she says to me. Her bangled hand clings to the arched doorway between the living room and the foyer. She turns and floats out of the room toward the kitchen.

  I get up and follow her. The kitchen is the last place I want to be, but maybe if I put up with it, we can escape to the basement after a while. The women are all gathered around the giant kitchen island, leaning on the gleaming black granite countertops and sitting in fancy upholstered dining chairs.

  “ . . . and Shyama’s enrolling her son in a gifted preschool next year,” Laila Aunty is saying. She waves her arms around wildly like a drowning monkey. “He’s so smart, you know. Just like his parents.”

  I try to hide behind Nisha but Laila Aunty sees me.

  “Lucky, dear!” She walks out from the mass of women in the kitchen and comes toward me with her arms out wide.

  I step back but she catches me. She sniffs kisses on each of my cheeks.

  “You’re looking so pretty,” she says to the crowd. The women in the kitchen look me and Nisha up and down. “Look at you two. A pretty pair. Just like when you used to dance.”

  I know that on their way home, these women will talk about each other to their drunk husbands. But I can’t beat my programming. In front of a crowd of brown faces, I sing and dance like a trained fucking seal.

  Nisha pulls up two chairs next to each other. She sits with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap. I try not to slouch or sit with my knees apart. The saree helps.

  Bharatanatyam usually molds those who dance it. It leaves its mark on the dancers’ bodies. They develop wrist flips and flamboyant gestures, a hip swing as they walk, a way of treading that swings their arms back and forth against their momentum. But I didn’t get those marks. My muscles refused to absorb the fluid motions, the coquettish habit of making eyes bigger, the coy downward glance that Nisha did so well. Amma was always suspicious at the immutability of my body.

  Laila Aunty goes on and on about how my sister Shyama’s son is god’s gift to earth.

  “We’re looking at grooming him for Exeter,” she says.

  The “we” is nothing more than Laila Aunty’s wishful thinking. I manage to turn my snort into a cough. My sister Shyama isn’t exactly fond of Laila Aunty. We all chose sides.

  “Shyama’s going to visit soon,” Laila Aunty says. “So busy you know, with the next one on the way.”

  “My son just got into medical school,” someone else says. “Northwestern. Best medical school, you know.”

  Her son and I went to the same middle school, and as I remember, he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. But that doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t matter which med school is actually highest ranked. The one her son goes to is the best. No discussion.

  “I’m just glad we got a good marriage match,” Nisha’s mother says. She’s a thin, frail woman who looks a lot like Nisha. She wears makeup and high heels, which most of the other brown women her age don’t do.

  “Are you excited?” someone asks Nisha.

  Nisha does that shy downward glance thing. “A little.”

  “The poor girl is probably scared,” someone else says. “Before my wedding, I thought I’d never be happy again.”

  “It’s something quite unlike anything else, getting married. You never think you can love someone you don’t even know but then you wake up one day and you do.”

  “Right, Lucky?”

  The women laugh.

  “You know,” one of them says, “my husband didn’t even know how to boil water when we first got married.”

  “We already trained our men.”

  “Us old women can only tell you so much about keeping a man happy these days, Nisha. I hope you’re getting tips from Lucky.”

  None of them had advice for me when I got married. Not that I would’ve listened. It was Amma who gave me the talk. As she pleated my wedding saree before the ceremony, her hands stilled.

  “You know how it works?” she said. “You know what happens the first time?”

  I froze, not knowing the answer she wanted.

  “I’ll bleed,” I said.

  Her hand moved again, deftly folding the pleats, bangles clanging together as she worked. She pinned the pleats together and tucked them into my underskirt.

  “Kris is a good boy. You got lucky.”

  “Amma.” My head was spinning out of control. “I’m scared.”

  She looked at me, her eyes focusing on mine for a second before they adjusted and she was looking through me again. “You’re doing the right thing,” she said. “You’re a normal girl. You’re going to have a normal life.”

  In the kitchen with the gaggle of women, Nisha smiles and laughs at the appropriate times. I think about the flask resting safely inside the waistband of my saree. When the women start talking about food and swapping recipes, Nisha stands up and gives me the signal to go.

  “We’re going to check on the kids,” she says.

  “When are you going to have kids, Lucky?”

  I trip over the front of my saree pleats. Nisha grabs my arm to steady me.

  “I don’t know if we’re ready, Aunty,” I say. I try to imagine Kris with a kid, holding it at arm’s length because he wouldn’t know what else to do with it.

  “No one’s ever ready. You just do it.”

  I follow Nisha downstairs. The basement smells like new paint. Children cluster around a projector screen in the open space of the den, the older ones playing video games while the younger ones watch with wide-open mouths. Teenagers lounge on the sectionals with their phones out.

  “You haven’t seen the new basement, have you,” Nisha says.

  She pulls me away from the kids, down the hallway to the bedrooms. She pushes me into one of the rooms and closes the door. The metallic lock clicks.

  “Wait,” I say. I back away.

  She follows me, pinning me against the cold wall of the room. Night spills from the slit-like window above me. She slips her icy fingers underneath my saree. The moon dips everything in silver. She traces along my waist. My spine arches against her touch.

  “Nisha, stop.”

  I catch her hand and pull it away from my skin. The place where she touched me stays cold. She looks beautiful with all the makeup. Flawless, like a glass bead.

  Her shimmering lips frown. “What’s the problem?”

  “This is your engagement party.”

  “I’m not engaged yet.” She reaches out toward me again.

  I try to slip her fingers in between mine. She snatches her hand away. Her eyebrows make one thin line across her face, dividing her skin in two. She puffs out her chest, turns, and opens the door, leaving me to watch the swish of her saree as she walks away.

  I remember the flask. The metal is warm from my skin. I drink it all in one go. The bourbon scorches its way down my throat and into my limbs. I feel raw.

  I wait until my heart cools, then go out to the den where the kids are playing. The teenagers get quiet when I sit on the couch. I’m too much of an adult. Married. Can’t be trusted with the gossip of who-likes-whom and who-took-whom-on-a-secret-date. I don’t feel like facing the women and their bullshit questions so I stay down here. I’m about to ask to play a round of Mario Kart when Laila Aunty comes downstairs to find me.

  I take out my phone so I have something to hold onto.

  “You should be upstairs,” she says. This is one of those rare times she sounds like Amma, and I can believe she and Amma used to be best friends.

  I make a show of turning off my phone. “Just checking work email, Aunty.”

  “Come, come.” Her thick gold bangles clang with the moti
on when she beckons me closer. She puts a hand under my elbow and guides me to the stairs.

  Back before she married Appa, she was the one who defended me against Amma’s tantrums. “She’s an active child,” she’d say. “I used to climb trees all the time too. Don’t worry.” She talked Amma down from punishing me for scraping up my knees, for ripping holes in my jeans, for holding hands with a boy after school. In third grade I asked for Barbie dolls for my birthday because I’d played with a friend’s and I liked dressing them, with their poreless faces and plastic tan breasts. Instead, Laila Aunty got me a Lego set and some books, and told me that successful women need more than beauty. She was my favorite of all of our family friends. But that was before the divorce, before I took sides.

  “You and your husband are getting along, no?” she says.

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  She stops with one foot on the stairs.

  “We’re fine,” I say.

  “Fighting is a part of married life, Lucky.”

  Amma and Appa fought all the time when I was young.

  She sighs. “You can’t let it break you.”

  •••

  Upstairs, Kris is drunk. He slurs his Tamil words and gives me a vacant look when I walk into the living room. He raises his glass. I sit next to him on the couch, the bourbon still tingling inside me.

  The men are in a heated debate about the election, some of them arguing that Romney’s tax plans would benefit them because they’re in a higher tax bracket, even though we all know everyone here will vote for Obama.

  “You need whiskey to join this conversation, Lucky,” one of the men says.

  They all laugh, because the idea of a woman drinking whiskey is just too absurd.

  Kris chuckles to himself and drains the last sip from his glass. He shakes a piece of yellow-stained ice into his mouth. His arm slithers around my waist.

  I slap his hand away. He tries again. I think about Nisha’s cold fingers under my saree. I take Kris’s hand off my waist and put it back on his knee. I twist his fingers just a little too hard. Appa gives me a look, but none of the other men notice our fight.

  Kris stares at his whiskey glass like he’s expecting it to refill itself. He doesn’t talk to me the rest of the night, not until we’re in the car and driving back to Amma’s house. He insists that he be seen driving away from the party, like all the other drunk brown men who don’t trust their wives with cars. Once we’re a few blocks away, he pulls over into a gas station and we switch seats in the chilly night air.

  “Are you going to ignore me all night?” I say. I wonder if he’s still mad that I twisted his fingers.

  He rubs his hands together and blows into them. Steam curls up from his mouth, fading into the darkness of the car.

  “You know I hate it when you get all touchy,” I say.

  “I’m supposed to touch you. You’re my wife.”

  I keep my eyes on the road, anger filling me up in the space the bourbon left behind. “I’m not your fucking wife. I’m not your puppet you can use to make a point.”

  Kris gets quiet, and when he speaks again I have to strain to hear him over the hum of the car. “We’re all puppets. That’s all we are.”

  “Stop it, Kris.”

  “I’m your puppet, too.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Because of me,” he says, his voice rising a fraction, “you can seem like the perfect little brown wife.”

  I check the rearview mirror. No one behind us. I slam the brakes, hurtling Kris forward into his seatbelt. I drive on.

  “Jesus, look at us,” he says. A passing Dunkin’ Donuts sign bathes him in its orange glow. “Let’s get coffee.”

  I pull into the drive-thru. We get our coffees with milk and sugar and drink them in the car. I wait for a long expanse of silence, revving myself up to say it. Finally I say into the cold of the car, “I fucked Nisha. A couple of weeks ago.”

  Kris turns and looks at me. His eyebrows shoot up. He takes another sip of coffee and fights to keep a smile off his face.

  “It’s not funny,” I say.

  He slips a cigarette out of his pocket. He likes to pretend he smokes, but no matter how many he might tuck away, he isn’t addicted. He wants to be. So he keeps on doing it, hoping that one day he’ll get that urge that smokers talk about.

  “Justin’s been staying with me while you’ve been gone,” he says. Justin is his on-again, off-again boyfriend of two years. “He’s been talking about moving to California. He wants me to go with him.”

  “You can’t.” It’s silly to say. I’m not his wife.

  He spits out sweet, clove-flavored smoke as he speaks. “I won’t. I told him no.”

  •••

  That night, Amma insists on sleeping in the guest bedroom so that Kris and I can have her bed. When Kris leaves the next morning, Amma says, “You two are fighting.” She’s cooking, talking to the giant nonstick wok that she loves to use.

  “He had to go into the office,” I say. That was his excuse. I think he just wanted to see Justin before California becomes a reality.

  I’m cutting up onions. Amma doesn’t trust me with the actual cooking. When I was in high school she didn’t even trust me to use a knife without slipping and cutting off my finger, so instead I had to rinse all the vegetables and pull skin off the chicken.

  Amma comes up and peers over my shoulder. “Cut them small.”

  “I am cutting them small.”

  She grabs the knife from me and butts me out of the way with her hip. “Small,” she says. She cuts a few strips, each impossibly thin and transparent as glass.

  “That’ll take forever.”

  “It’ll taste better.”

  I try to cut the onions as thin as she had, but my knife slides down the exposed edge of the onion without stripping it.

  “We’re not fighting,” I say.

  “Get the leeks out.”

  I grab the leeks from the fridge and wash them.

  “Do you know how to cut leeks?”

  “Why wouldn’t I know?”

  I don’t actually. But I’m not going to tell her that. She’d go on for hours about how she doesn’t know how Kris can put up with a wife who doesn’t even know how to cut leeks.

  “We’re not fighting,” I say.

  “Cut the leeks small, too.”

  I cut the leeks smaller, thinner, sliding the knife down again and again, cutting off pieces as thin as string, watching the morning light glint off the metal edge. One slip, and the leeks could be red.

  After the engagement party, Nisha doesn’t talk to me. But just a week later she comes by the house while Amma’s at work.

  “I didn’t think you’d answer your phone,” she says when I open the door.

  “I wouldn’t have.”

  She pushes past me and into the house. She keeps her blue peacoat on and her hands in her pockets. “Let’s go somewhere,” she says.

  I point to Grandmother, sitting outside on the deck.

  “I can’t leave her here,” I say.

  Nisha looks around the entryway. “Do you need me to pose for something?” She peers around the wall at my laptop and the reference photos scattered all over the couch. My half-colored commission of a pixie looks back at her. Only the pixie’s skin is colored so far—a dark almond that clashes sharply with the still-white background. The young man who ordered the drawing didn’t specify a skin color, but I know he meant for her to be pale. It’s my policy to default brown skin when the commissioner doesn’t specify.

  “The line art’s done,” I say. Three more commissions have come in since I last saw Nisha, but all those are custom portraits—easy, painless, fast. The pixie is supposed to look like an oil painting, and the budget, I was promised, is unlimited. “Don’t you have class?”

 
She scrunches up her nose. “This weekend then. Let’s go out.” She steps closer.

  “I don’t think—”

  She puts a finger on the edge of my clavicle and traces it slowly. “Come on, Lucky. You’re still my best friend.”

  •••

  Amma isn’t keen on the idea.

  “Where are you going to go?” she asks. She squints at the computer and enters credit card receipts into a spreadsheet.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to be careful. Not everywhere is safe.”

  “Amma—”

  “Why don’t you ask Nisha to come here for dinner?”

  “She wants to go out.”

  Amma’s lips press into a thin line. “When you’re home you should spend time with your family.”

  I haven’t left the house for weeks. I want to punch something. Twenty-seven years old and married. I own a house and car, and I have to ask my mother permission to leave her home.

  Amma doesn’t say anything. She flattens out a receipt between her fingers and enters the total into the computer. I wait a little longer for her to say something, and when she doesn’t, I take that as permission.

  •••

  Nisha drives me to Jamaica Plain, to a house where some of her friends from Wellesley—her first college—live. She’s tense and quiet, her shoulders pulled back, her hands in the ten and two position, her eyes on the road. I keep quiet. She doesn’t like the closeness of the other cars, the traffic, the road rage. Makes her nervous. I watch the river. One flick of the wheel.

  We pull up to a faded gray triple-decker with a porch so large it overwhelms the front. Three mismatched old parlor chairs overlook the sharp incline of a one-way street. Other houses in the neighborhood still have flowers in their lawns and tough hedges that hide cracked foundations, but this house is unadorned except for the mailbox, which is painted with blue and yellow squares.

  Nisha checks her makeup in the rear view mirror and coats her lips with a sparkly pink gloss. When she smiles at me, her lips catch the sun and glisten like water. The wind plucks leaves from the trees and scatters them over the dappled sky. I follow her up the steep wooden stairs to the deck. She knocks. No answer. She yells through the blue curtains that hang limp in the half-open windows. The door opens and a solidly-built white woman with a crew cut sweeps Nisha up into a hug.