Marriage of a Thousand Lies

by SJ Sindu

  I jog the rest of the way to the T station and climb down the stone steps. People lumber around the station, holding whimpering babies to their chests and adjusting diaper bags. Too many people. Amma’s never going to call back. Bile rises at the back of my throat. I have to be the one to do it. I have to go back to Amma’s house.

  The tiled walls grumble as the train arrives, but I’ve left my Charlie Card at the rugby house.

  •••

  Tasha’s up and out of bed, sitting on the crumpled sheets playing Xbox when I walk in. She pats the space next to her.

  I want to crawl back into bed and sleep until my lungs can expand without pain. I sit down.

  “Did you guys have a fight?” Tasha asks. “You and Nisha?”

  “Yeah, yeah we had a fight.”

  She sucks in air through her teeth. In the morning light, her broken-and-glued-back-together tooth shines. The jagged edge of it glows dark and clear.

  I spin my wedding ring around and around on my finger.

  She offers me a game controller. “Plenty of fish in the sea.”

  The longer I wait to go back to Amma’s house, the harder it’ll be. I should walk back down to the station, step onto a train, go back home. My legs refuse to move. I fall back onto the couch.

  “Stay for a while.” Tasha pats my knee and places the controller on my lap.

  “I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

  “Nonsense.”

  We play for a while in silence. She pauses the game, goes to the kitchen and comes back with two IPAs. “Stay the week, then go. It’ll be fun.”

  I drink my beer fast. One week in the rugby house.

  She punches me in the arm and un-pauses the game, smiling with her broken tooth.

  •••

  We go to a string of parties with drunk people I don’t know. The first is a block party in the rugby house neighborhood. Young professionals and parents, small kids and large dogs. A table struggles under food—everything from curry to steak to sushi. There are other South Asians there—young, hip couples who ignore me and a couple of new immigrant men who stare.

  One of the Indian men keeps his eyes on me from across the party. He is light skinned and doughy, the kind of man Amma finds attractive. I talk to an older man about his work certifying organic farms for the government. I coo over a woman’s German shepherd that she’s taught to stand on its hind legs and hug people. I keep up a string of conversations because every time I get done talking, the man looks like he’s going to come over. After a while I look for Tasha and Jesse. The Indian man heads my way. His face would be kind if he wasn’t leering, his sharp eyes focused on me like there’s no one else in the world.

  “Do I know you?” he asks.

  I try for the most uninviting look I can manage. “I don’t think so.”

  “I think our parents were friends.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He tries to laugh and ends up scowling. His forehead gets extra shiny with sweat. “But you’re from India?”

  “Sri Lanka.”

  “Yes, yes, Sri Lanka.” He looks down at his paper plate and takes a bite of fufu. He chews it for a long time, and swallows with difficulty. “These Americans with their bland food. I miss my mother’s cooking. Do you cook?”

  “Fufu is African food. You’re supposed to eat it with soup.”

  “I came here for my studies. I just got a job at a good company. Do you go to school?”

  I catch sight of Jesse near the food table, holding hands with her girlfriend. The Indian man looks at them. Jesse pulls her girlfriend in for a kiss.

  “They are so shameless.” He turns back to me and gives me an embarrassed smile, as if we share some secret.

  I think of Nisha, of her mother’s hand whipping across her face.

  “Hey you,” Tasha says into my ear. She looks at the Indian man and takes a step closer to me.

  He chokes on his rice. He opens his mouth, but when no sound comes out, he closes it.

  She pulls on my shoulder, nods at the man, and leads me away.

  •••

  Tasha takes me canvassing door to door for the Obama campaign. Two weeks until the election. We walk up and down the steep hills of JP until my calves ache. I carry a clipboard and wear a campaign shirt, but I don’t know the spiel so I stand back near the curb and let Tasha talk to disgruntled voters. Their eyes pass over her shirt. They nod and shut the door.

  “Is anyone in JP not voting for Obama?” I ask.

  “You have a point. But I agreed to do this neighborhood.” She scratches the side of her leg and squints against the sun. She looks down at her clipboard of names.

  We keep walking. Dried leaves litter the street.

  She stops halfway up a hill and looks around. “Did we do this street already?”

  It doesn’t look familiar, but we’ve walked through so many I can’t keep track. “Ring a doorbell and see if you recognize someone.”

  “All these white people look the same to me. I can’t tell.”

  We start to climb again. She looks down at her clipboard and rings a doorbell. I stand on the sidewalk while she talks to an older lady holding a tabby cat.

  She crosses a name off her clipboard. “Two more streets.” She’s quiet for a while. “I know it’s not my business, but I’m sorry about Nisha.”

  The air fills with fall chill.

  “I know it can’t be easy with your family,” she says.

  “Are you close with yours?” I don’t know anything about Tasha’s family. She never talks about them.

  “My family stopped talking to me when they found out I was queer.” She kicks a pile of leaves pressed up against the curb, and they flutter out from her feet and scatter on the road. “So I get it.”

  My voice jumps ahead of my thoughts. “My sister ran away from home after college. I haven’t talked to her since.”

  “Have you tried to find her?”

  “I don’t think she wants to be found.”

  Tasha checks the clipboard again and starts walking.

  “I was such a dick to my family,” she says.

  “It’s never too late.”

  She stops mid-stride. “At some point I realized I couldn’t save anyone but myself. So I stopped trying.”

  She keeps walking and I follow.

  •••

  One night after rugby, we buy Captain Morgan and craft beer. Jesse and Tasha call up other friends, and we sing rugby songs and play cards. During our smoke breaks the cold air can’t touch me, and when Tasha puts her fingers on my cheeks and kisses me, I pull her closer by the waist and kiss her back.

  Vidya’s letter rests in a pocket of the jeans I’ve worn since Nisha’s house, folded neatly along the already-existing crease in the paper and tucked back in the envelope with the photo. At night I take out the envelope, run my thumb over the serrated edges of the American flag stamp, follow the blocky white text underneath it—Liberty—the return address in Louisville, Kentucky, written in Vidya’s scrawl. I read over the tall loopy writing, the short, square note framed on each side by thick white space. I stare at the photo of Vidya and her daughter, the little girl’s black curls frozen in a bounce, her chubby hands reaching out toward me. Vidya’s skirt blows around her slim hips, her face still the prettiest of us all. She’s smiling at someone. Jamal behind the camera? I want to think so, believe that she ran away for a reason that lasted. Maybe I just want to believe that Amma was wrong.

  Before I go to bed I slip the paper and photo back in the envelope and settle it back in my pocket. Louisville, Kentucky. A sixteen-and-a-half hour drive. Fifteen hours if I drive above the speed limit, and I always do.

  •••

  I finally decide to tell them. Tasha and Jesse gather around me and listen to the story. The whole story
, Nisha’s parents catching us, Amma’s phone call, everything. I’m done lying to them.

  “I’m going to go back home soon.” Just the thought of that cluttered house with all of Kris’s depression littered around makes me weary.

  Tasha puts down her beer and puts her hand on my knee. “We like having you around.”

  At night, I lie in Tasha’s bed and think about Grandmother doubled over with the coughs, her eyes blank with bluish haze. Who is getting her water now? Is Amma taking leave from work?

  I take out Vidya’s letter and carry it to the porch. A few lights dot the otherwise empty street. A clear fall moon hangs in the sky. I can smell the cold in the air now, the winter moving in too late. When we were younger, Vidya always wanted to be outside. She thrived in nature while Shyama sat inside with the AC and the cleanliness of Amma’s housekeeping. Vidya and I ran around the neighborhood climbing trees and getting dirt under our fingernails that Amma would painfully dig out later with a safety pin.

  What would Vidya say? In college, when Amma stopped talking to me, it was Vidya who smoothed things over, Vidya who drove out to bring me home, Vidya who tried to talk me out of marrying Kris, Vidya who kept my secrets safe. Louisville, Kentucky. A fifteen-hour drive.

  •••

  After the incident with Kris’s roommate in college, I spent the rest of the semester living in the prop room of the theatre building. The attic smelled like history, like memories that didn’t belong to me, sleeping thick among the shelves of liquor bottles and kitchen props. There were large Chippendale chaises and flower chandeliers from the seventies, typewriters and rows of chairs of all shapes. I did my homework curled into the arm of an enormous mustard leather wing chair. When I got bored, I browsed the stacks of weapons or the collection of old books—illustrated kid’s editions of Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe, 1950s housekeeping manuals, dusty copies of Anaïs Nin’s diaries. There was an old shortwave radio that worked.

  The place had a reputation for being haunted. Students and maintenance staff ignored the creaks I made, the unexplained music. When students came up to get props, I hid behind old electronics in the back of the attic. I slept on piles of pillows.

  Kris brought me food from the cafeteria, and I hid it with the other pantry items, between Snowdrift vegetable shortening and Tony Chachere’s red beans and rice.

  When it got too hot, I found fans to cool me off. Exploring was enough to take my mind off not having a home. I showered in the gym. Sometimes I fucked girls so that I could sleep in a real bed. And sometimes, when things got bad, I would think about Kris’s offer to get married. I was on track to graduate that summer, and then what? The economy was tanking, and what if I couldn’t get a job? The longer I lived in that attic, the saner his idea seemed.

  •••

  Tasha and I drive out in the midafternoon in her Kia. I take off my shoes and brace my feet above the glove box. With every left turn, her fuzzy rainbow dice and college graduation tassel—both slung on the rearview mirror—tickle my feet. She plays old CDs while we drive, and sings to Disney songs as the car winds around the long blue Adirondacks. I have Vidya’s letter in my shirt pocket.

  From the sides of the highway, trees bend toward the road like they’re going to scoop us up in their foliage. We chase the slice of clear blue sky that cuts through the tree line. Here and there, a water tower floats above the forest that blankets the mountains and obscures the villages. We drive blind, our future in the hands of the mountains that reveal the next slice of road around the bend.

  In a valley town we take an exit to get fast food burgers and fries. Tasha insists that she doesn’t allow eating in her car, so we sit on a park bench.

  “You know,” she says, contemplating a curly fry with a frown, “Nisha’s a good person.”

  I slump my shoulders and hope she notices.

  She bites into her burger and wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “You and Nisha. How serious was it?”

  “I never expected us to grow old together.”

  She watches the empty park—about the size of a soccer field, littered with trees. A swing set and a single rusty slide. “You want to work on your tackles?”

  “Now?”

  She crunches up the burger wrappings and drops them into a trashcan. “Why not?”

  I don’t have an answer, so we walk to the middle of the grassy area, clear the ground of sticks and glass, and face each other.

  She pulls up her plaid cargo pants. “You know the basics. Cheek to cheek. Below the waist.”

  She runs at me before I can prepare myself. Her arms make contact with my pelvis and the world tips. I land with a thud that knocks the air out of me. She lands on top of me, scrambles up, and helps me to my feet.

  In slow motion, she squats and tips herself forward, clasping her arms behind my butt. Her head rests on the side of my hip. “This is the ideal position you want. You try.”

  I bend down to her pelvis and wrap my arms around her. Musty laundry and cologne. I should be used to her smell by now. It gets inside my nose and stays there. I can taste her when I breathe out.

  “Now push with your legs,” she says. “Not with your back. Keep your back straight and drive your legs forward, up and forward.”

  Back straight. Know how to fall. Hold onto something, and drive it to the ground. I push with all my strength and her knees buckle. We fall into a heap. I land on my hands.

  She knocks my arms out with her elbows. I fall heavily onto her.

  “Always land on your opponent. It knocks the air out of them.” Her arms wind around my waist and hold me there.

  I nod and she lets me up. We knock each other down a few more times until I work up to doing a running tackle. I get used to the feeling of her hips, the momentary vertigo, the fall.

  “Squeeze me tight to you. Clasp your arms together. Don’t leave an opening.”

  I run at her and drive her to the ground.

  Her head is cradled in the un-mowed grass. “Always look at the person. Never look at the ground.” She hooks a leg behind my knees and flips us so that I’m pinned underneath her.

  “Never look at the ground.”

  She’s thinking about kissing me. I can see it in her eyes. She stays like that for a few minutes, raised slightly on her elbows, her curls plastered to her head with sweat, before jumping up and heading toward the car.

  •••

  The mountains crack open into hills, and again into flatter land. The sky stretches further, wider, shows off a few stars, faint against the well-lit highway. We switch off driving every three hours. By midnight my eyes hurt. My muscles, saturated with coffee, spasm at the stillness. A group of thirty motorcycles passes us, some of the men doing wheelies and shouting into our car. Tasha stirs from her nap. I keep driving.

  We stop at a Super 8 off the highway at two in the morning. The Indian attendant at the desk stares at me. It’s late. I’m here with a black girl who clearly looks like a lesbian. And with this hair, I probably look like a lesbian, too.

  •••

  I wake up bleeding. Blood smears between my thighs. My boxers are soaked. I jump out of bed in a panic. The sheets are clean except for a quarter-sized spot of red. I’ve waited for my period so long that I stopped putting a tampon in. Finally. A month late. Finally.

  Tasha’s already up, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. She looks at the sheets. “It’s not so bad. They’ll bleach it.”

  I wash my boxers in the bathroom sink but the blood won’t come out.

  The Indian attendant is still there when we check out. He stares with that same look, like he’s watching a bad car wreck.

  “That guy certainly has eyes for you,” Tasha says in the car. She goes through a box of CDs and picks out the soundtrack to Disney’s A Goofy Movie.

  I toe off my shoes and prop my feet back up on the dash. Sunlight filters
through the gray clouds, taking on their smoky, dusty feel by the time it lands on my skin. Tasha bobs her head up and down to the music and puts Vidya’s address into her phone’s GPS. I force my breath to slow and deepen, and try not to pay attention to the cramps sparking in my abdomen.

  She drops the phone into a cup holder. An electronic voice drones on to take the next available U-turn. Tasha sings along with the tape. I clench my teeth through the pain. We drive.

  •••

  After the spring college semester ended, I didn’t go home. Kris and I both stayed in the prop room, preparing for graduation and applying for jobs. Vidya called me every day. I only answered when I thought I could lie effectively. One day she called four times in a row. When I finally picked up, she said, “Where are you?”

  “I’m at home.”

  “I’m at your apartment. Where are you?”

  “You’re here? Who’s with you?”

  “It’s just me. Where are you?”

  “I just got out of class.”

  “I’ll come and get you.”

  Back then I needed time to prepare my lies. I gave her directions to the building where some summer classes were held. I stood out on the curb with my backpack. A riot of petals lay crushed on the sidewalk, the air sweet with their smell. Vidya pulled up and I climbed quietly into the passenger seat. She sat with the car in park, silent.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. My teeth chattered but not with cold.

  “I’m here to take you home.”

  “I can’t.”

  She turned around in her seat. “Amma needs to see you, talk to you.”

  “She doesn’t want to see me.”

  A class had just gotten out. The sidewalk filled with students.

  She stroked my hair. “Amma wants to see you. I talked to her.”

  She turned my face to her.

  “I love you the same, Lucky.”

  I tried to keep it in but I cried anyway.

  “Amma will too, eventually,” she said. She put both hands back on the steering wheel. “Back to your apartment?”