by Rahul Mehta
Either way, he wasn’t going to tell Shanti, not until he had spoken to Chris, and perhaps not even then. He looked at her in the kitchen. She looked tired. He remembered her once describing the particular exhaustion she sometimes felt after a day of dealing with other people’s needs. Nishit said, “I deal with people all day, too,” and she said, “It’s different. In those relationships you have the power. I have no power. Your patients may want something from you, they may even need something, but they know better than to demand it. With the customers at the bank, you should see them, you should see the impatience in their eyes, the entitlement. They’re not all like that, and not always. But enough, and enough of the time. I’m there to serve them.”
Now she was preparing dinner—cheese enchiladas—moving slowly. He watched her slice jalapeño peppers paper-thin. He thought to offer help, but knew it would be an empty offer. He had no skills in the kitchen. He would wash dishes later.
He went downstairs into the family room. He gazed out the window, idly wondering when Kiran would be home. Kiran had been coming home late, keeping himself busy with Odyssey of the Mind after school. Or perhaps he was out playing with friends in the neighborhood, though, thinking about it now, Nishit realized he had no idea who Kiran’s friends were these days. He wasn’t still playing with that tubby boy Greg he spent so much time with when they were younger, was he?
The house was a split-level construction, and the bottom floor was partially underground, so that several of the windows, positioned high on the walls, were exactly at ground level. It was only September now, but before they knew it the first snowfall would swoop in, and then there’d be snow on the ground for the better part of four, maybe five, months. Every morning he would come downstairs and open the blinds and look across the eye-level snow and feel buried.
And then there were the spiders. And spiderwebs. Everywhere. In every corner, in every window, under every side table, behind the black faux Chinese cabinet. (Shanti never told him about the dreams she’d had those first few weeks in America in this house, when Nishit was spending long hours at the office and she was alone. Dreams in which spiders wove tight webs that covered all the windows, all the doors, trapping her.)
It was almost eight when Kiran finally arrived home. Nishit and Shanti were sitting at the dinner table, eating already. They heard the front door open and shut, heard Kiran kicking off his boots (actually kicking them; they thudded against the scuff-marked beadboard in the split-level foyer), heard him stomp up the stairs, click the bathroom door shut. A few minutes later he came down the hall and sat down at the kitchen table, a knit cap pulled low on his head, a loose sweatshirt two sizes too big (“That’s the style, Mom,” he’d said at the store). Nishit looked at his son. His hair was too long and it stuck out from beneath his cap. He slouched, not looking up from his plate. Nishit tried to remember himself at that age. He remembered being a schoolboy, being a good student, working hard. He would fill his notebooks, and at the end of the term, when all his exams were finished, he’d bring them to the chana vendor on his street corner, who used the sheets of paper to make narrow cones in which he served his roasted chana. As payment for the notebook he would rip out a page and fill it with chana for the young Nishit. Nishit hadn’t considered it at the time, but thinking about it now, he wondered whether any of the chana vendor’s customers ever opened up the cones and read his schoolboy notes—algebra equations or Indian history timelines or English vocabulary words, not just from school but from his own personal lists of words he’d encountered in books or in conversation, words he wanted to someday know.
When Nishit asked Kiran where he had been, Kiran shrugged and said, “Nowhere.” Nishit didn’t press him. He understood, of course, that Kiran was being insolent, but it also occurred to him that on another level Kiran was telling the truth: there was nowhere to go in this town, not without a car. The whole town, in a way, was nowhere. That’s how Nishit had felt when he first arrived almost twenty years ago, after landing a job at the regional hospital before eventually opening his own practice. That’s how he assumed Shanti had felt when he first brought her from India, from her home—a large, bustling, joint-family bungalow in Pune—and they made the two-hour drive south from the airport in Buffalo, no direct highway, only winding country roads. Her body made her thoughts transparent; he could sense her muscles tense with each tiny town they drove through—dingy, sagging clapboard houses; rusting junk on the front lawns—wondering each time if this was where they would stop, if this gray town was the one in which she was expected to make her life. And even if they had never come to love living here, they had become comfortable, and there were things they did love. Shanti had taken up cross-country skiing after a coworker from the bank introduced it to her, and Nishit was proud of his status in the community, his invitations to serve on boards of various civic organizations. But even as Nishit found the town suitable for his own desires, he didn’t want his children to feel too comfortable. He wanted them to want more, and when the time came, to seek it.
Chris had to be at the site that morning. His men were putting on the roof, and he wanted to be there. He left so that he’d have time to run home, wash up, and change; he didn’t want to show up at Nishit’s office in dirty boots or with grime on his face. He’d swap his truck, too. He had the Mercedes convertible in the garage. He’d bought it used from a client in Corning who had wanted to unload it and was so thrilled with the addition Chris built that he was willing to part with it for a song. Chris hadn’t driven the car in weeks and forgot that the top was down. He had to crank open the rag top and wrestle the bolts into their fasteners and then tighten them into place using the special ratchet in the glove box, and somehow, even though it was a cool day, he’d managed to work up a brand-new sweat that soaked the pits of the fresh shirt he’d donned. He stood back a moment, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, and looked at the car. It was beautiful, sleek, powerful. But not him. “Screw it,” he said out loud. He was going to take the truck. He had nothing to prove, no one to impress. He owned his own business, made good money, great money, probably as much as Dr. Shah, if not more. Nishit should be the one sweating, not him. After all, it was Nishit’s son that they were meeting to discuss. Although Chris, of course, had his own reasons for feeling anxious about their meeting. It had happened four years ago, and in the end it had come to nothing, but he didn’t know what Nishit knew about it, or what he thought he knew about it.
At the office, the receptionist told Chris that Dr. Shah would be with him in a few minutes. But Chris wasn’t going to sit in the waiting room. He wasn’t a patient. He’d be in the parking lot, he told her. He sat in the truck, windows open, enjoying the slight chill in the air. He was glad he hadn’t brought the Mercedes. Zeppelin was on the radio. He closed his eyes, leaned back into the seat. It wasn’t until he felt a hand shaking him and opened his eyes and saw Nishit mouthing, “Chris! Chris!” that he realized just how loud he’d cranked the volume.
Nishit was wearing a cheap-looking shirt and tie, the kind you buy already matched up and packaged together in crinkly cellophane. It didn’t fit him right, Chris could see that. Nishit’s shoulders were narrow and his arms too long. His proportions were all off. Looking at him, Chris couldn’t help thinking of Kiran, who shared his father’s awkward outward appearance.
Earlier on the phone, Nishit had suggested the sandwich shop across the street from his office, but now Chris turned down the radio and said, “Hop in,” and Nishit walked around to the passenger side and climbed up. Nishit didn’t ask where they were going, he only said, “I need to be back in an hour,” and Chris said, “That won’t be a problem.”
Once they’d made a few turns and hit a stretch of open road, Nishit said, “So, what did you want to talk about?”
“Not here. Let’s wait until we’re sitting.”
We are sitting, Nishit thought, but didn’t say so; he knew what Chris meant. Some people liked to talk face-to-face. When he had d
ifficult news to tell patients, he made sure to look them in their eyes if the patient allowed it—not everyone did. But with Shanti, it had always been different. They liked to talk in the car. There was something about the enclosed space, the sitting side by side, the forward motion, that allowed them to say what was difficult but which needed to be said, even if they themselves hadn’t realized it until that very moment.
Chris had taken Nishit up one of the back routes he traveled when he had a job in Rochester; the back routes could be faster than the highway if you knew which ones to take. He pulled the truck over at a roadside barbecue, a small, dirty white wood structure, not more than a shack really, mostly a takeout place but with a couple of picnic benches inside and a few more outside for when the weather was warm. They ordered at the counter inside. Chris ordered first and he already had his wallet out and was handing the cashier a twenty, saying, “I’m getting both of ours,” before Nishit had even said anything.
“Your son has been standing outside our house,” Chris said after they’d sat down at a picnic table outside. It was chilly, but the sun was bright and Nishit was shielding his eyes with a hand. “We’ve seen him there. Several times. He’s out there for twenty, thirty minutes, standing across the road at the edge of the woods.”
“Why would he do that?”
Chris looked at him but didn’t answer.
Nishit dragged his plastic fork through the baked beans in the cardboard boat. When he ordered, he had decided not to ask if the dish was vegetarian; he didn’t want to know.
“Listen, it’s not a big deal, but it needs to stop. It’s not right for a boy his age to be doing that. Amy . . .” Chris searched for the right words, then trailed off.
“Are you suggesting something, Mr. Bell? Are you trying to say he’s a Peeking Tom?”
Chris laughed and looked down at his food, trying to control his smile. “Peeping Tom. No, I don’t think so.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
“Nothing. Honestly, we just want it to stop.”
Nishit watched Chris take an enormous bite of his pulled pork sandwich, wincing at the smear of barbecue sauce at the corner of his mouth.
“Do you own the road, Mr. Bell? This is a free country. Anyone can stand on a public road.”
“Just talk to your boy,” Chris said.
In the truck, heading back into town, Nishit kept remembering how Chris had laughed at him, smirked, corrected him. Why wasn’t it called peeking tom? Tom was peeking.
Nishit thought about all the words he knew, the lists he had kept even as a twelve-year-old, Kiran’s age, lists with words like equanimity, prodigious, epistolary, spiriferous. Did Chris, a native speaker, know what spiriferous meant? Had Chris even been to college? Who was he to correct or to criticize anyone? Who was he to point a finger?
Nishit’s anger continued to build as the truck tore down the back roads. Nishit glanced at his watch. He would be late for his next appointment. He was not going to be back within the hour, as Chris had promised. Chris had lied.
In the parking lot, Nishit stepped out of the cab, and without having planned it, found himself pointing his own finger—rigid and shaking—and spitting out words he couldn’t recall ever having said in his entire life: “Fuck you.”
That evening, Kiran was outside, just as he had been for the past two weeks. Amy remembered that today was the day that Chris was to have had lunch with the boy’s father. It made sense to her that Dr. Shah had not yet been able to speak with his son. The fact that Kiran was out there again this evening didn’t mean anything.
Chris had said that he would take care of it, and she trusted him to do so. They had grown up together in this town, had been sweethearts since high school. Their families had known each other since long before they were born. Hours of her childhood had been spent sitting in the pew directly behind Chris in Ray of Light, the church Chris’s father had founded. Week after week she charted the ebb and flow of his hair on the nape of his neck, inhaled the scent of his Sunday-morning boyness, equal parts cheap soap and grape gum.
Amy remembered the specific moment she first knew she loved Chris. It was eighth grade. She was with a group of kids, eight of them or so, boys and girls, all popular—she and Chris were always part of the popular crowd. They were sitting on the bleachers outside. There was a lull of some sort, they were waiting for something, idle for some reason, she couldn’t remember the details. What she did remember is that one of the girls pulled out her makeup bag and squeezed in close to one of the boys and went to work: applying foundation, lipstick, eye shadow, mascara. The other girls followed suit. The boys were happy to comply. They liked having the girls press up against them. They liked smelling the girls. They liked being touched.
Amy remembered making up Chris. How quietly he sat for her, how big his eyes were when she told him to open them big, how sweetly he gazed at her as she held his chin in her hand and swiped the eyeliner across his bottom lid. It took Chris another three and a half years to ask her out, but Amy had loved him ever since that moment. It had even been immortalized in the yearbook; someone from staff had happened by, snapped a photo. Sometimes, when she saw him on the football field or, years later, playing with the children in the yard, or when she caught a glimpse of him across Kmart greeting a buddy he’d run into, slapping him on the back, she’d think of that boy—the red lips and blue eye shadow, bobby pins holding back his shaggy blond hair—looking up at her, smiling.
Later that night, in bed, Amy lay next to Chris. He still hadn’t said anything about his conversation with Dr. Shah. What had transpired? Surely they talked about Kiran, but had they talked about anything else? Amy decided she wasn’t going to ask. She didn’t need to know, she didn’t need to dredge up the past any more than it already had been.
Not long after they were married, when Amy was eight months pregnant with their first child, Kelly, she saw in Chris’s eyes a particular fire that scared her, a fire that she would see once more, many years later. They were sitting in the bleachers in the unfamiliar gymnasium of a neighboring town (unfamiliar even though surely she had been there at least once at some point during their youth, cheering from the sidelines as Chris raced up and down the basketball court). They were there for a special presentation; the flyers photocopied on goldenrod stock had been distributed two weeks earlier at Ray of Light. Amy had known Chris would volunteer to stand onstage even before he did it, raising his hand not in the eager rocket-launch of a reedy schoolboy but in the smooth, confident motion of a man who knows what he wants. They hadn’t exchanged glances, the way some married couples might have; he hadn’t wordlessly asked for her permission or warned her. But she had felt the energy build in his body as he watched the men on stage, had known, perhaps even before he had, that he longed to be up there with them.
As he made his way down the bleachers, Amy couldn’t help admiring his ass in his jeans. She felt her cheeks get hot remembering the weekday evening a month earlier when they’d bought them, when he stood in front of her, outside the dressing room, and she asked him to lift his untucked shirt and to turn around. She was surveying the fit, yes, but she was also surveying him, the parcel of land she had conquered for herself.
They had asked for someone strong. “Who wants to test his mettle? See what he’s made of?”
The audience applauded as Chris hustled his way toward the stage on the floor of the gymnasium. His heart was racing. One of the men stood very close to him, held a microphone between them, and asked loudly, “You think you got what it takes?” His breath was hot on Chris’s face.
“I’m willing to give it a shot,” Chris said. The crowd erupted in cheers.
The man handed Chris a length of pipe. “See if you can bend it.”
Chris strained. His arms bulged. His face squeezed tight. He shut his eyes, remembering what Amy, in her sweet voice, sometimes said to him: “You’re my Superman.” But the pipe remained rigid.
The man standing next to him smiled,
satisfied. “Can’t do it, can you? Hand it over.”
Chris, still breathing hard, watched the man, barely breaking a sweat, bend the rod. The audience went wild. The man, pacing lion-like across the stage, roared, “How did I do it? I’ll tell you.” He paused for effect: “I didn’t.” He pointed upward. “God did. And this is nothing. God’s powers are limitless, impossible to even begin to imagine. He works through us in amazing ways. And when we believe, when we truly believe, we are capable of miracles. Now I’m not saying that all of you, if you believe, can bend steel. But what I am saying is if you relinquish your self to God—mind, body, and soul—He will give you strength you never knew you had. Let Him in! Let Him transform you!”
Somewhere up in the bleachers was a young girl eating Crackerjacks, mesmerized. Somewhere was a single mother of three who came with her boys because she saw that goldenrod flyer posted on a bulletin board outside of the library and the event was free and it was hot out and she knew the gymnasium would be air-conditioned. Somewhere was a man, mid-thirties, who saw behind him only miles of missteps stretching to the horizon, who heard in the word transform a hope he thought had long ago passed him by.
It was hard not to be seduced. The men in their tight white T-shirts emblazoned with “Gladiators for Christ,” looking themselves like gods, like young Apollos, acting like superheroes. Capable of miracles. Their bodies themselves were evidence of the divine.
Lingering after the show, Amy and Chris found the man who had bent the steel.
“That was some trick,” Chris said.
Amy was holding Chris’s hand, her other hand on her belly. Her body had transformed in its own way over the past eight months, as it would again three more times.