Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  In the afternoon, she wrote in her journal, then tried to take a nap. She grew sick of waiting for Taylor to return with nothing to do in the meantime, so resolved to walk to find a place where she could watch some television for free. In the previous weeks Aria had devised a clever way of accessing free entertainment. She would make herself look as presentable as possible, then find a restaurant with a sports bar and tell them that she needed a table for two, and ask them to sit her in a place where she had a good view of the television because the guy meeting her was a “sports buff.” She would sip her water and keep telling the waiter that she didn’t want to order until her date showed up. Eventually, when she was ready to leave, she would lead them to believe that she had been stood up by whoever was supposed to meet her there. She would leave without ever ordering anything and without them having any idea as to why she was actually there. On one occasion, a waitress had given her a cheesecake on the house out of pity. The only problem was, she could do it only once for each cycle of staff in each location.

  As with so many homeless youth, no one noticed Aria or guessed that she was homeless. Being so young, she did not look homeless even though she was. Though unnaturally skinny, she was not weathered like the people who had been on the streets for years. So as long as she made sure not to be seen by police after curfew, or go to certain places when she should have been in school, she blended in to society. She blended in to the background of people’s various assumptions about her, all of which were wrong.

  Aria walked over to Robert’s tent, hoping that he might know of a place with a television nearby that she hadn’t tried yet. His bike was leaned against one of the broken-down cars, indicating that he was most likely inside his tent instead of out on the town. Getting closer, she saw his shadow inside the tent, echoing his movements. “Bob!” she called to announce herself tentatively so he wouldn’t be startled by her sudden approach.

  “Yep?” he said, ceasing his task to see who was calling his name. Seeing Aria’s face peek in through the door of the tent, he looked unsure about her visit.

  “Do you know of anywhere close to here that I could watch some TV?” Aria asked.

  “Hm, not off the top of my head,” he said. “Let me think.”

  Aria loved to hear him talk. The fact that his mouth was almost entirely toothless gave him a lisp that made him sound harmless. Coupled with his disarming personality and forgetfulness, he reminded her a bit of Winnie the Pooh.

  “Why don’tcha come in here for a minute and let me think?” he said, still straining to search the outer reaches of his memory to come up with a suitable answer for her.

  Aria sat down on a camping mat that was covered in little wood shavings. “I’m makin’ a donkey for Darren, cause he’s stubborn as a horse’s ass,” he explained, erupting into wheezing laughter that forced Aria to laugh too.

  “I didn’t know you were a carver,” Aria said when their laughter had subsided.

  “Oh yeah, been doin’ it all my life actually. You wanna see some of my other pieces?” he asked, immediately charged with the idea of someone appreciating his craft.

  “Yeah, I’d love to,” Aria said.

  Robert convinced his aging body to cooperate with his enthusiasm and contorted himself, reaching for a giant canvas duffle bag that was leaning against the corner of the tent. Without getting up, he dumped its contents out onto the mat beside her, an assembly of little wooden sculptures. “I know a guy that lets me sell ’em over on Grand Avenue and I done a couple of art fairs.”

  Aria lifted them up one by one to examine them.

  Robert went back to whittling, the sound of his knife gnawing into the piece of butternut wood in his hand. She ran her fingers across the satin smoothness of their contours, admiring the curves and lines of the little details he had added to them. Except for a few naked women, children’s movie characters and trees, most of them were carvings of animals of various sizes. Animals like big-horn sheep and bears and fish and horses and snakes and birds. “They’re beautiful,” Aria said, feeling like her rather clichéd sentiment didn’t do justice to the way she felt about them.

  “Thank ya,” Robert replied, keeping his focus on his carving.

  Having realized that their conversation about the carvings had erased Robert’s memory of her original question about TV, Aria thought about asking him again, but quickly decided against it. Instead, she began putting the sculptures back into the duffle bag for him. “You can pick one if you’d like,” he said.

  Aria was taken aback. “But you have to sell them,” she retorted.

  “Eh, I’m so old you never know if I’m gonna sell em’ or die tryin’.” Robert erupted into laughter again, the sheer size of his smile taking over the expanse of his face.

  “I really do like them, but it makes me feel guilty,” Aria protested.

  Robert countered it: “OK, well, if you won’t just pick one, I’m gonna have to come over there and pick one for ya.”

  Aria abruptly became aware of the opportunity to have something special, inherent in his jest. “Actually, I’d love it if you’d pick one for me,” she said, staring up at him, the open bid for his affection now in plain sight between them.

  “You sure?” he said, assessing her level of certainty and getting up from his seat before she answered, “Yeah.”

  Robert picked through the wooden figures, occasionally stopping to scrutinize one of them, and muttering little sounds to himself as he did it. Eventually, he handed her a little carving of a beaver that he had made out of black walnut wood.

  Aria ran her fingers up and down against the texture of its ligneous fur. She didn’t immediately understand why he had chosen a beaver for her. It seemed a strange pick to Aria. It was not an animal that she had a relationship to already, nor was it an animal that she felt any personal connection to.

  Robert maneuvered himself stiffly back to his station and resumed whittling. To Aria’s relief, he began to explain himself. “The most important thing to the beaver is his home. It seems to me that home just might be the one thing you spent your life wishin’ for, am I right?” He didn’t wait for her to say anything because he already knew the answer.

  “Home doesn’t come easy to the beaver, though. He’s gotta put hard work into it and interrupt the flow of nature around ’im to do it. But in the end, because he’s determined to do it, he builds himself a home and then he gets his lady friends to move on in and has himself a family.”

  Robert chuckled, turning the rather serious weight of his sentiment into humor.

  Aria was frozen to the spot. Her eyes began to well up with tears. She had to intentionally think about something entirely different than where she was in order to prevent it from showing. She knew that this was Robert’s way of conveying what he wished for her future. It was his version of encouragement.

  In that second, this little beaver became the most special thing that she had in her possession. It carried with it the meaning that he had ascribed to it. It carried with it her own deepest desire, which Robert had perceived without her ever saying it. And it also carried with it the quiet, internal caring that Robert felt for her. That care might never be overtly demonstrated, but because of this little interaction, they both knew it was there.

  Aria got up off her knees, holding the sudden treasure in her hand, and kissed him on his cheek. “Thank you so much for this,” she said.

  Robert was surprised to be kissed, but smiled back as she got up to go and said, “Well, you’re very welcome,” before returning his focus back to whittling.

  Aria walked over to the Land Cruiser. She sat in the car with the door closed, holding the little carving of the beaver in her hands. She imagined soaking in its energy. She had never loved an object so much in her entire life. She found the hidden pocket in her backpack and placed it inside for safekeeping.

  Later that night, after Luke had returned from town, he and Aria were sitting face to face in his tent, engaged in a theosophical conversat
ion, when Taylor came bounding toward them. “Oh my God … Oh my God, you guys will never believe what happened,” he said, crashing into the tent to sit with them. His own excitement had taken his breath away. “You know how the studio said they were all full, right? Well, I went back today, it’s like the hundredth time I went back there. And they said they have an opening for me!”

  He clapped as he said it, not leaving a window open for their response. “So I’m gonna go to the studio twice a week now. One time for a work shift and one time for my acting class … Oh my God, you guys, I’m so excited.”

  Aria was happy for him, but she was not happy for herself. She was sick of seeing him disappointed. She was sick of watching him struggle through an experience that so far had been the exact opposite of the success he had imagined it would be. But she was also afraid. She felt him getting closer to his dreams and she felt those dreams pulling him further away from her. Unexpectedly, she found herself afraid to be left behind by him. She and Luke offered congratulations, but neither man noticed the sudden drop in Aria’s mood.

  Taylor reached into his backpack and produced three packages of ramen noodles. Luke had to cook them sequentially because his cooking stove was only large enough for one serving. Aria watched him pull out the propane base of his little stove, assemble the other parts around it and start cooking. To her surprise, when he was done with his first batch, he handed it to her.

  Unable to wait long enough for them to cool down, Aria scalded the roof of her mouth. She ate them with a fork that Luke unfolded from his pocketknife. The all-too-familiar flavor and scent of the noodles soothed away the anxiety she felt in response to Taylor’s news. She loved the wrinkled texture of them against her tongue. Taylor had picked up the theosophical conversation with Luke where she had left off. And so she resumed her usual observer role and listened to them while she ate. When he had finished, she let Palin lick the remaining broth off the edges of the bowl.

  Taylor, who usually had an easy time sleeping despite any kind of disruption, could barely sleep that night from excitement. He tossed and turned, unable to stop his mind from running down the corridors of what good things might happen because of his sudden positive twist of fate. Aria, on the other hand, was not kept awake by the same ambition. She fell asleep with her hands cramped tight around the reassuring shape of the beaver statue that Robert had given her. The sudden threat of being left behind by Taylor had caused her to want a home now more than ever.

  PART THREE

  SONATA

  APPASSIONATA

  CHAPTER 19

  The way the light filtered into the giant hallway made the marble flooring look like it was covered in glass. The gloss of it hurt Omkar’s eyes as he walked down the hall. Students sat around the round tables that were scattered to either side, their heavy textbooks stacked beside them. No one looked particularly excited. Each student seemed to be absorbed in the drudgery of what they had to get done in order to attain their chosen degree.

  Omkar joined them. He sat down at a table with two other students. Only one of them looked up to acknowledge his presence. He thumbed through the polished pages of a calculus textbook until he found the pages that corresponded to the professor’s daily assignment and began resolving equations with his mechanical pencil.

  Omkar was in his second year at college. He had chosen to major in civil engineering. Even though he didn’t know it yet, his choice of major had been determined the year he was born.

  Omkar wasn’t always an only child. He used to have two older siblings. His parents had not been planning to have another child and so Omkar had been totally unexpected. They had a son, Ajit, who was 20, and a daughter, Shashi, who was 16. Ajit had recently moved from where they lived in Chandigarh to Bhuj in the state of Gujarat to work for a textile export company. As fate would have it, Shashi had gone to visit Ajit, accompanied by her aunt, for Republic Day. But that day, an earthquake hit that turned out to be one of the deadliest earthquakes in the history of India. The earthquake destroyed 400,000 homes. Twenty thousand people died that day. Omkar’s brother, sister and aunt were among them.

  Having only just been born when it happened, Omkar didn’t remember his parents’ reaction when they heard the news. He had no memory of his sister or brother. But the tragedy was like a thundercloud always hanging over the family. His mother kept their pictures on the wall. She clutched Omkar tighter because of the loss of them. She clutched him so tight, he could barely breathe. It was as if his parents had placed all of themselves in him and in his life’s trajectory, which they tried to control every part of.

  After the tragedy happened, they spent five more years in Chandigarh before deciding that they couldn’t take the pain of trying to feel like a family again in the same house that Ajit and Shashi had been raised in. They considered moving to a different house in the same city. But it would have been the same way of life. They wanted a new life altogether. So, when Omkar was seven, they decided to move to America. They chose to move to Los Angeles because of the weather and the dreams they imagined they could make a reality there. Although he had been a market research analyst in India, the only job that Omkar’s father could get in America was in a little convenience store called the Sun Market. He worked hard and saved money until he offered to buy the place from its owner, who wanted to retire. He renamed the place the Super Sun Market. The family had been both working and living there above the store ever since.

  Omkar wanted to be a civil engineer in order to design and construct buildings that could withstand any earthquake. This goal was the North Star of his life. The Gujarat earthquake lasted just over two minutes. In those two minutes, the entire course of his family’s lives was changed. It was tainted forever. Three members of his family had been lost. And some people had an even worse fate. Some that were there, who did not die themselves, lost everything and everyone. Omkar couldn’t live with the idea that in a matter of minutes, something like this could happen. He had so many reasons for having this goal, but deep down, part of him felt like if he just figured out how to resolve the issue that had killed them in the first place, the dark cloud over the family might lift.

  When he was done with the assignment, Omkar got up from his place at the table in the great hall. He tried to make as little noise as possible collecting his things. Before driving home, he bought a burrito, which he ate in a solitary corner of the cafeteria, watching other students contemplate their purchases. Despite coming to America, Omkar’s family only ever made Indian food. He knew that his mother would have some waiting for him when he got home. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her cooking; he loved it. It was that eating American food sometimes made him feel less foreign. And today was one of those days where he wanted to feel less foreign. Despite having been in America for almost 12 years now, he hadn’t managed to lose his accent, and as a result, he felt like people couldn’t see him at all. All they saw was the stereotype of an Indian exchange student. Omkar hated that people couldn’t see through that stereotype almost as much as he hated how unfortunate it was that he fit that stereotype so closely.

  And he wanted time to think. Omkar was haunted by his encounter with Aria. The day she’d come into the store, he had raced downstairs expecting to find one or two of his parents’ friends standing there, waiting to scold him for his poor service and irresponsibility. He had thought her to be the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He had found it hard to hide the shyness he felt in her presence with the usual “greet-the-customer routine” that his parents expected him to execute perfectly. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  He’d allowed her to swim around in his head, letting the idea of her distract him from the boredom of the store. He extended the meeting in his own mind. He imagined her life in the suburbs of LA. He imagined her mom and dad and sister and brother. He imagined her at college and wondered what she was studying there. He had no idea how wrong about her he really was. But there was something about her loneliness that mirrored his
loneliness and promised that they might find what they both lacked together.

  He would most likely never see her again. But the fact she existed made him feel like maybe a woman existed out there in the world who could tame his loneliness. And he let the promise of it comfort him.

  The unpredictable chords of the overly dramatic soundtrack from a Bollywood soap opera dominated the room. Omkar’s mother, Jarminder, was glued to the screen as usual, fully immersed in the storyline. Her figure was the very epitome of an Indian mother. Her curves softened into the subtle corpulence of middle age. A furrow of displeasure was always written across her face. Despite the overacting, these soap operas were her drug of choice. And except for the fact that it gave him temporary relief from her constant micromanagement, Omkar hated them.

  Omkar was bothered by so much about his mother. He didn’t understand why they had come to America in the first place if they planned to bring so much of India with them. His mother still wore a salwar kameez every day of the week. To be fair, the silk fabric was more beautiful than what people of the Western world wore, but it was just one more thing that made fitting in impossible for the Agarwal family. Jarminder hated speaking English. Frequently, she would speak to Omkar and her husband in Punjabi and they would respond in English at home. She was as irritated with this behavior as they were irritated by her refusal to speak the language of the country that they were still trying to make into a home. It made her feel like she was losing herself.

  Omkar’s father, Neeraj, also bothered him. Though he had demanded that they all learn perfect English, he too had defiantly brought his customs with him. Every day he would wake up and tediously wrap the navy blue fabric of his traditional Sikh turban into an aggressive peak. This was the image of his father that Omkar would always remember. His kara, a cast iron bracelet he wore on his right wrist, would slide across the surface of his arm as he pulled and folded the fabric of his turban across his cheekbones. In traditional Sikh form, as a sign of his acceptance of God’s will, he did not cut the hair from any part of his body. The bottom half of his face was claimed by wild black facial hair, which had long since been transforming into gray.