by Sadie Sumner
“Or what?” Kavitha asked.
The first man reached in and wrapped his fingers around the lapel of her smart jacket. “Or we take all your furniture.” His smile revealed missing teeth. Kavitha wanted to fly at the filthy men and tear at their hair and clothes. She controlled the urge to wipe the finger marks from her jacket and dropped the keys on the floor of the landing.
“Chutiya chootia, chutiya chootia, chutiya chootia,” she said out loud, and under her breath she chanted the fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Never before had she used profanity, and she covered her mouth and was surprised at how good it felt.
“It is not us you should be angry with,” the toothless man called over his shoulder, and his laugh rattled as they walked through a silent corridor of neighbors. At the railing, everyone watched as the men used her key to open her car and drive away.
Kavitha went back inside and closed the door and leaned against the wall in the dim hallway. Her hands shook. She tried to calm her breath. There was another knock. She pulled the door open, hard enough to tear from the hinges. Two policemen replaced the men in coveralls. They jumped back, hands on batons, ready to strike.
Kavitha was immediately calm. She beckoned them in, away from the prying eyes. They had come for Arun. It was worse than she imagined. He had stolen from Americans, and that was somehow more terrible than if he’d pilfered from the local dosa maker. She tried to explain it as he had. The owners did not pay enough for wages, how it was their responsibility as employers to care for their workers. She described how he had used the money to pay better wages, and she described the loan he gave to help their best seamstress when her son was in trouble. “We have the best factory because of this. Our workers are happy; no one gets sick or injured at our workplace.”
One policeman stood in silence as she spoke, his hands loose at his sides and she knew her words were hollow to him. The other wrote it all down and stared hard at her and asked her if she was in on it. Her eyes itched at his words, and she let them search the flat. They found Arun’s wallet in his drawer in the bedroom, and took the cash and the prized credit card and told her their accounts were frozen.
After the police, Kavitha sat at the kitchen table and wondered again where Arun had gone and when he would come back and what she would do.
When it was dark, she got up from the table and warmed the lentils left over from lunch. She opened each cupboard. If she were careful, the food would last a month, maybe a little more. There was cash hidden in the lining of her handbag and behind a mirror. Even Arun did not know she saved a little whenever she could, as her mother had taught her, as every woman in an arranged marriage should. But it was not enough for the rent and electricity and food. And it would not cover Ria’s university fees. She could not bear the idea of asking her neighbors for help. Their envy at their good jobs had become an unspoken chasm between them. When they were generous, it was because they had too much. When they missed an opportunity to help someone on their landing it was because they were miserly. If she went to them now the years of friendships would transform into a guilty pleasure at her downfall.
She took her bathroom bag and went to wait in line for the shared bathroom. The chatter stopped, and everyone looked away. She knew these people so well, their lives entwined for generations. She was born right here, in her parents’ room that now belonged to her and Arun. Ria’s tiny room had once been hers. And for the first time, she did not know what to say to them.
She was next in line. Old Mr. Batra came out and took her hands in his and bowed his head. He was the oldest on their landing, her father’s best friend, a man of wily instinct and few words, whose presence unified their lives.
“Dhan’yavāda,” she said. “Thank you.”
She rushed her ablutions, and when she came out her neighbors touched her arm or nodded or smiled as she walked by, and their simple kindness made her want to cry. Inside she locked her door and changed into her nightclothes. She could not imagine sleeping beneath the covers without Arun, so she moved to Ria’s bed, in the cupboard her parents had converted into a bedroom all those years before.
All the next day she stayed in bed. She ignored the phone and pulled the quilt over her head when someone knocked. The building was alive, home to generations of families, the divine energies of everyone who ever lived there in an ever-changing mandala. Her parents had arrived with their baby underway, the pale green and pink paintwork already as flaky as fish scales. No one spoke of the reason they had left her father’s childhood home. Kavitha knew only that they were not to speak of the burn scar on her mother’s arm or the grandparents she had never met.
Like her mother, Kavitha’s marriage to Arun was arranged and ordained in the stars. But Kavitha could not reconcile the ability of the fortune-teller and the astrologist to pick an auspicious day and not foresee the week before when Mr. Batra had knocked gently on the door, his sons beside him. An accident, he said, his voice a whisper, her parents’ tuk-tuk crushed by a truck, the family meal they were bringing home strewn across the road.
Even now, as she lay on Ria’s bed and heard an early rain, she could not remember her parents’ funeral or her own wedding the following day.
Arun moved in, and they slept in the cupboard her father had converted for her, the tiny bed of her childhood pushed against the wall. Kavitha pulled the blanket further over her head and thought about that time, where death and marriage held her heart in its hands. Her husband was a stranger, but the flat comforted her, and when he left for his new job each day, she would lie on her parents’ bed and wish them back. It was months before she assumed the role her mother left vacant. It took Arun arriving home with a new mattress. Mr. Batra’s boys carried it up the stairs and took away the old one.
When Ria arrived, Kavitha felt some of the old grief lift in the small acts of mothering, this simple thing connecting her to the past. The old rhythms of her life returned and soothed her, and she could not imagine a life elsewhere. She belonged to the building as much as her parents had. They scraped along, Arun earning just enough managing a small factory making uniforms for the local hospital. Those days, Kavitha thought, were the best in her life. Ria played endlessly along the landing with Mr. Batra’s grandsons. Arun would scoop her up near the stairwell and scold her for her scraped knees, and dirty face and she would laugh at him and tug his hair while Kavitha waited in their doorway.
Then Arun got the job managing the American factory, and he brought her in to oversee the ordering and materials. Ria was starting high school, and the timing was perfect. They had money for the first time, more than enough, and Arun begged her to leave the flat behind, to move up in the world. But she would not allow it. She endured the barely disguised envy of her neighbors and pretended their relationships were unchanged. Only in private, when she closed the door, did she consider the mixed blessing of their new positions. And now she understood why she could not move. They said you were only three bad decisions away from destitution. But it had taken Arun just one to ruin them.
Three
It was raining. Always raining in Vancouver. Monica drove across the city to her appointment with the ocularist. It had not occurred to her to cancel it or postpone, even though it was the morning of Dotty’s funeral. She checked in the corners of his consulting room to make sure the phantom baby had not followed her here. The ocularist covered Monica’s sighted eye, aimed the retinoscope at her blind one and asked about the patch. She considered telling him about the fake baby that appeared in the most unlikely places, a baby that danced in the perpetual darkness behind her lid, like the view through an old-fashioned stereoscope, the moment before the images line up and become one. “No reason.” She tried to smooth her hair. “I just got tired of people noticing it.”
He smiled like she was irrational. “It’s almost indistinguishable,” he said. “Surely the patch is more noticeable?”
“Not to me.” Monica blinked both eyes to clear the drops he had put in. “So there’s no change? It’s just a s
tandard ocular implant and prosthetic eye?” she asked.
“As normal as a prosthetic eye can be. Unless you have a problem, I don’t need to see you for two years.” He watched her slip the patch back on and held the door, and she had the distinct impression he was about to pat her bottom.
Outside the Vancouver air was scented with wood smoke and the cherry trees around English Bay were stripped bare of summer foliage. Fresh snow crept down Mt Seymour in an ever changing, painterly backdrop that anchored them all. Dotty’s funeral was in a few hours and she felt alive to her senses, the smallest peel of a wave like a tsunami.
The gynecologist was next. She needed to pick up her test results and stopped on the way to pick up flowers to take to the funeral. At his office, the man himself popped out and beckoned her into his room, his tone as grave as cancer. The prognosis was not good. She’d known she could not conceive naturally, but the state of her eggs was a surprise. “There are options, you know,” he said and tapped his pen on the desk. “This is the best time in history to be infertile.”
The word ‘infertile’ always jolted Monica. “What options?”
“Well your age is an issue, but we could explore donor IVF. What does your husband think?”
Monica ignored the reference to Gil with his creative insecurities; so self-effacing he refused to allow a single photograph of himself. “I’m not even 40,” she said and knew instantly how stupid that sounded. “So what are my chances of success?”
“To be totally honest, with this mix of prior problems, it might be a long journey.” He sounded regretful.
“Do you mean years or just a month or two?”
“It could be years,” he said, and then perked up. “But have you considered surrogacy? We can recommend a very caring agency. And we have such amazing technology now. Anything’s possible. They would use your husband’s sperm and find a smart young egg donor and a healthy surrogate. India is very popular right now.” With both hands, he held out a card. “Have a look at their website. It’s very comprehensive.”
Monica took the card and thought of the saris Dotty brought back from India. Sometimes the commune lived together in an assortment of broken houses around Mole Hill, just up from the Bay, or they’d make the trek in old cars to Squamish, to cabins alongside rushing streams, shaded by woods and mountains. In every place Dotty would pin her saris to the ceiling in her bedroom, draping her bed, enclosing her nights in the bright hues of the faraway land.
Monica stood at the window in her bedroom. Their townhouse looked out onto a shared green space with park benches and a child’s swing that hung empty and creaking in the wind. When she’d bought the place off the plans with the smallest down payment and a massive mortgage the sales pitch had extolled the water view. But in reality she saw just a sliver of blue between two buildings. Today the water was gray, the tiny rainbow colored aquabus that ferried people across to Granville Island market looked sluggish and dull in the rain. The house had impressed Gil. She remembered the first time she’d brought him home and her pride in showing him around. She was 30 and he was 22, shaggy and in need of a shower, a camera slung around his neck like a calling card or a talisman. Back then she had not felt old, just a little wiser and more astute.
Monica arranged her clothes on the bed. In a tiny corner of herself she now wondered if Gil had stayed for the soft furnishings and marble countertops, his wife more an extension of his mother than his lover. She heard him come in and take Dog into the laundry. When he came into the bedroom he was naked, his body as lean as when they’d met. He had a can of tomato juice in his hand.
“My god you stink of skunk,” Monica said. “Where’s Dog?”
“I washed him with juice and tied him up out front, till we’re ready to go.”
“What if someone steals him?”
“He’s not exactly a trophy dog.”
She followed him into the bathroom and applied thick globs of gel onto her face and used the face massager to work the gel into her skin.
“What is that?” Gil cleaned a glob from the counter.
“Plumping nanoparticles that slide between the pores to plump the layer beneath the skin. And hello to you too.”
“Seems to be working.” He fired up his water pic.
“Hey, that mid-week wedding was yesterday right? How did it go?” she asked, aware she’d not being paying attention to him and was now surprised at his levity. Since Dotty’s passing the tension between them was a choreography of polite distance.
“The usual bullshit declarations of eternal love and happy families,” he said, then told her about the abandoned factory he’d found weeks before and the broken chain link fence and how he’d been waiting for the perfect light to photograph Dog alone, amidst the decay. “Of course,” he said, “only now, on the day of Dotty’s funeral, the weather is perfect. Until Dog baled up the skunk, that is.” He described the way weak sunlight refracted through the morning fog and how particulate matter floated on the cold air. She felt his passion and wondered how he had become trapped in photographing brides every weekend. And by extension how they had both become ensnared by brides and their dreams of a perfect marriage.
“It was like the whole collapsed factory was gilded in light.” He stepped into the shower, opened the cans and rubbed the tomato juice all over himself.
Monica smiled at the sight of juice caught in the fine hairs of his chest. She still found him attractive, but she doubted he felt the same. “What about asbestos?” she asked.
“You just don’t get art,” Gil replied. “What did you do this morning? You didn’t go to work, did you? Today of all days,” he said as he washed the juice off.
“Well I didn’t go chasing skunks before a funeral, that’s for sure.” She couldn’t tell him where she’d been.
Monica pushed through her clothes to find a pencil skirt to go with the pale blouse and tailored jacket.
“I want to tell you something,” Monica said.
Gil emerged wearing a towel and filled the basin with hot water and patted his face with a wet cloth. She took a deep breath.
“I lost a baby when I was 16. Dotty made me do it.”
He lathered his face and slid the razor through the foam. “That was good luck, can’t imagine you wanted a baby. No one at 16 wants a baby, right?”
His sheer rationality made her want to scream. “You’ve missed the point. I should have been the one to choose!”
Gil nodded as he tapped his razor on the side of the basin.
“It was my choice to make, not hers, don’t you understand?” She knew she was shouting but did not care. He laid his hand on the back of her neck, controlling her emotions with his physicality. She stepped away from him. “What if I want one now?” The question leaped from her as if it was always there and she wrapped her kimono tighter.
He sighed: “We agreed on that years ago. Come on, Mon. I’m too young for a baby and you’re, well…you don’t want to try for a baby at 40?” He splashed his cheeks with cold water.
Monica felt a hard lump form in her gut. “We’re not trying for a baby. I just wanted to tell you.” Monica pulled off her eye patch and peered at herself in the mirror. “But, you know, why don’t we have one?” Her body felt strange, each limb isolated and alien.
“You mean, why not because we have everything else?” Gil squirted mousse into his hand and ran it through his hair and glanced at her in the mirror. “Why do you put makeup on your blind eye when you just cover it up?”
“Did you know no one uses mousse anymore?” Monica pulled at the corner of her eye to tighten the skin and drew on her eyeliner. She felt an acute need to poke at him with something sharp.
“Seriously, Mon, we decided before we got married, no kids. Neither of us wanted them. I can list the reasons why.”
She shrugged. “Not everything has to be absolute.” His floppy hair annoyed her more than ever.
“So the baby thing is a hypothetical situation?” He brushed past her and re
arranged his jackets in the wardrobe.
“People change. I’ve changed,” she said. She wondered if it even occurred to him to comfort her or acknowledge her early loss.
“Not me.” He took a t-shirt from a hanger.
“Maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe you should talk to someone.” She hated that they shared a wardrobe. His perfect white tees hung like formal wear with pristine sneakers arranged below. His jackets were all variations on a casual smart theme, next to a selection of white shirts for special occasions. Identical stacks of folded jeans lined his shelves, and in winter he added a black zip-up sweater. She had loved this quirk at the beginning; the fact he’d found his pared back look by 20 and by extension himself too.
He laughed: “Nice deflection, Mon. Let’s leave early for the funeral. I want to drive past my parents’ old house.” He put on his jacket.
“It’s in the opposite direction,” Monica said.
Gil gave her a quick hug. “I know. But we have time. It’s just that kind of day. And I’m sorry about what happened when you were 16. You should have told me.”
Dog was barking outside and Monica went to the window, looked down and tapped on the glass. His reasonableness made her fingers itch to throw something, to smash the mirror or scrape his precious van along a wall. Instead, their lives were knotted together, caught somewhere between their flesh wounds and their paper cuts.
Dog still smelled of skunk and they kept the windows cracked as Gil drove a circuitous route, past La Casa Gelato, the ice cream factory that sold 218 different flavors. He told Monica about the rivalry in their neighborhood, all the local boys planning how to steal and what to steal and how to break into the ice cream factory or how to con the adults. “Dotty would have bought ice cream for us,” he said and Monica shrugged. She was tired of him comparing their childhoods as if somehow hers was idyllic while his was endless depravation.
They drove past the park with the children’s paddling pool already slimy with autumn debris. He pulled over in front of his parents’ old home. The houses that surrounded the park were workers’ cottages from another era.