Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  Speechless, I stare at him.

  “Claudia,” he says, and now his voice is trembling too. “My love, do you really not know what this is? This is a proposal—I'm asking you to be mine, forever.”

  And then, suddenly, my voice is back. It does not tremble either. “Vikrum,” I say, “what are you doing? Did you forget about Lakshmi?” There, I have done it. I have broken our unspoken rule and spoken that unbroken word, the name of his raven-haired, fragile-boned, wine-loving wife. As soon as I say it, I know why we have had that rule: the very act of saying her name makes me want to cry for what I have done to her. It makes me remember the day I caught my mother weeping into her notebook, the equations she had slaved over for months blurring into streaks of blue, and how much I had hated Hana then.

  “Are you asking me to move to Utah with you, to become your second wife?” I ask. “Because I've got to tell you—I don't really believe in bigamy, and I definitely don't want to practice it.”

  “No, you've got it all wrong,” he says, shaking his head. He sounds calm but his eyes are enormous and dark. “It's a real proposal. It's a promise for the future, when the kids are grown. It's how I feel about you. I want us to be together for the rest of our lives—”

  He has gone crazy, that is clear. I am trying to control my breathing, but I cannot seem to manage it; every gulp of air rasps. “But we can't be together forever,” I say. “We're barely together now; you already have a wife.”

  Looking up to face Vikrum, I speak through clenched teeth. “Don't you know how hopeless this situation is? What were you thinking? How could you put me through this farce of a proposal? Didn't you realize it would just point out to me all that I may never have?”

  “Do you think I don't realize that?” he cries out. Nothing about him is calm anymore; with his trembling hands, he tugs at his hair. “Do you think I haven't been tormented by the thought of all that I've been depriving you of? Every day I think about how much you want to have children. Every day I think about how you should be with a man who can be with you, who can love you, twenty-four hours a day.

  “This was a stupid idea.” With a wave of the hand he dismisses the butterfly and the boxes lying in disarray on the table—an idea that took God knows how many hours of careful thought and planning. “But I was desperate. I thought I was losing you. I knew I was losing you, I could feel you slipping through my fingers.” Those magician's fingers, so adept at hiding objects in a twinkle and making us believe they are lost for good, until they just as quickly reappear.

  “And I couldn't bear it,” he concludes in a whisper.

  For a few long moments we look at each other across the expanse of the table. “Well, I can't bear this,” I say, whispering back. I push my chair back and, swaying just a little, come to my feet.

  “Wait! I'll end the marriage now,” he says, pleading. “Tonight, if you like. Just don't walk away from me. Don't walk away from us.”

  I stop and look at him, hard. He is breathing quickly and his eyes look red and more than a little wild, but he gazes back at me steadily. My first reaction is to lash out at him again for making promises that he cannot or at least will not keep. Yet as I look at him, my anger ebbs away, as it should. He may be speaking out of desperation, but he means it; if I say the word, he will leave Lakshmi and his children before the day is over.

  “You can't do that,” I say. Sure, Vikrum complains about the dense network of his extended family and the obligations they impose on him. Yet his identity is deeply bound up in his grandmothers and parents and the whole doting brood of uncles and aunts and cousins. He cannot violate what they stand for, for the simple reason that he stands for the same. “You know you don't really want to do that.” At least not now, at least not yet. “Think of the children.”

  Vikrum drops his gaze and lowers his chin—a gesture acknowledging the truth of what I said, or is that the bow of defeat?

  “Please don't go,” he says.

  “I have to.” So my voice is shaking after all.

  I take the ring off, but before I give it up I pause. What am I doing? He is the only man I have ever truly loved. But a far more insistent question is also asserting itself: what have I been doing for these past two years? I let go of the ring, trying to drop it back into the small box in which I found it, but my eyes are blurring too much and I miss. With a thud and a clatter it drops onto the table and rolls to a stop.

  Vikrum reaches out a hand and places it on my wrist; it is without much difficulty that I shake it off. I dump out money from my wallet, bills and coins scattering everywhere. It covers far more than my half of what the meal comes to, yet I know Vikrum, he will leave the extra for the tip. I want to kiss him one last time—five last times—good-bye, to cup that dear, round face once again in my hands and hold it, to drink it in with my eyes so I will have it imprinted forever in my memory. Yet I cannot risk such a dangerous act. Besides, it's already there, it will always be there.

  Stuffing the wallet back into my jacket pocket, I gather up the butterfly in the jar and walk out of the restaurant.

  THANK GOD for the small mercies. Outside, it's raining; everyone who sees me running through the streets will blame my haste on my lack of an umbrella, and the wet on my cheeks on the turbulence of the skies.

  The show is over, and it is clear to everyone now that what had seemed like magic was only smoke and mirrors.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Rosie

  England, 1999

  TEETH HAVE MEMORY. YEARS AFTER THE INTRICATE APPA ratus of braces (made of metal and cement, no less, the most unyielding substances of man's devising) has been removed, front teeth grow resolutely back into their familiar overbite; canines move stealthily but steadily until they once again occupy their old cozy niche in front of their dear neighbor the incisor. Rosie learned that from a magazine she picked up somewhere; since she hasn't flipped through anything but books on number theory, various editions of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and the occasional George Eliot novel in either her home or office for some years now, she probably read it while sitting in a doctor's office of some kind. Not a dentist's office, though. What the article led you to conclude was that whatever thousands of dollars spent on Junior's orthodontics would have been better applied toward a new hi-fi system.

  Not too good for the dental industry if that got out.

  From what Rosie remembered—which, somewhat unexpectedly, was rather a lot, even now, even though she was almost in her seventh decade—she thought the article was suggesting that teeth were stubborn, that they were old and set in their crooked ways and intransigent about adapting to any reforms. Although she took what she and her dental hygienist thought was unusually good care of her teeth (as if it weren't enough that she actually had a dental hygienist, there was the fact that to work out a problem, she never just stared into space; she flossed), she knew nothing of dentistry. Still, she would respectfully submit that perhaps the esteemed writer of the article got it a little wrong.

  If teeth do backslide, if they, over time, slip back into the well-worn grooves of their past, into their old offending stances, then maybe it was less a question of stubbornness than of nostalgia. Maybe they wanted to resume what they thought of as their rightful place in life, the only one they had known for so many years. It was only natural; in fact, it was to be expected. For some time now, Rosie has been of the opinion, arrived at through observation as well as personal experience, that the siren call of the familiar is surprisingly difficult and, for some, perhaps even impossible to resist. Would Odysseus, lashed with thick sailor's rope to a mast, have been able to break free if it were Penelope who sang? To confuse classical and Christian references: why but for the lure of the familiar did Lot's wife turn around to cast a final glance at her burning town, at the house where her children were born?

  Rosie could imagine how many people—the writer of the article, say—would sneer if they heard her go on in this vein. It's teeth you're talki
ng about, for chrissake. Aren't you getting a little carried away, comparing enamel and bone to mythic figures from the Odyssey and the Bible?

  Well, yes, perhaps (she'd say civilly; it was beneath her dignity to respond in any other way). But it does seem as if we can learn how our minds and hearts tick by observing how the other parts of us work. Anyway, it wasn't she who came up with the idea that teeth are stubborn.

  So you can put that sneer in your pipe, Mr. Article Writer, and smoke it.

  Because as with teeth, so with the body. It remembers its old place, and it will long for it; it will sneak back into it even if it seems wrong and at first feels all wrong, even if ten years have passed. Rosie knew that because her husband came back to her after ten years apart, and because she took him in when he did. Call it what you will, nostalgia or habit or maybe even a lack of imagination, but her body acted upon it; overriding her own initial resentment and even hatred of Henry, it leaned toward him, longing to take up its place once again by his side.

  It's an unpalatable notion, the thought that change isn't really possible, that despite what the heart wants and the mind knows, two bodies will grow back together like teeth, and if you're trying to decide what to do about your married lover, it's one that will break your heart. Rosie was not sure that she could bear to watch her daughter's heart break, let alone be responsible for delivering the blow that shattered it, when just thinking about what Claudia has been going through makes her shake as if with cold or age.

  But if Claudia had turned to her instead of to Henry, if she had asked her what she should do about Vikrum, that's what Rosie would have said.

  THE WORST OF IT WAS (she whispered to herself, often enough that it was becoming a refrain), she only had herself to blame.

  Claudia was her father's daughter. Claudia thought so and Henry thought so. And, once upon a time not so long ago—though not now, though certainly not now—Rosie had, with resignation rather than sorrow, God forgive her, thought so too. She was not sure how it had happened that her only daughter, the child she had wanted so badly, had slipped away from her.

  But there it was, and she only had herself to blame. This last visit, to take just one particularly damning example. From the moment they had seen Claudia at the train station, standing by her sensibly small suitcase as she scanned the parked cars, looking for them, she and Henry had known that their recent worries about their daughter were justified. They'd had an inkling when she decided to fly out here so suddenly, calling them just five days ago to say that she'd be arriving for a long weekend, but they'd made themselves suppress their own doubts. How nice, they'd said to each other, how lovely that Thanksgiving fell in November and that Claudia had decided, for once, to brave the holiday crowds at the airport, and her own fear of planes too, to keep them company on this most un-English of all holidays.

  STANDING BY THE PARKED CARS, she didn't look much different from the last time they had seen her, four months ago: a woman with long, dirty-blond hair that could badly do with a haircut (Rosie couldn't help noticing that, concerned though she was with what was going on inside Claudia's head rather than with what was growing over it), dressed in a blaze of bright colors. Who looked, in her mother's view at least, young, really more like a girl than a woman—it was only out of respect for Claudia's views about proper feminist terminology that Rosie came up with that term first in her mind.

  That girl looked tired, sure, and perhaps even red-eyed, but she had just taken an overnight airline journey, the nickname of which alludes to that phenomenon, so it was not the shadows on her face that tipped her parents off about her troubled state of mind. She stood with her shoulders hunched forward, but because her posture had been like that for years now, maybe ever since she had had that growth spurt as an adolescent, it was not her stance that made them freeze for a fraction of a moment.

  So how was it that they had known instantaneously that that girl, their girl, was unhappy? Rosie suspected that it was some kind of parental sixth sense that clued Henry and her in, just as it was some type of long-term marriage sixth sense that made it unnecessary for them to signal their thoughts to each other as they sat, side by side, in the car, in that split second before they both, as one, shook off that paralysis born of fear and launched into action, calling out the window to their daughter and getting out to hug her and help her load her luggage into what the English call the boot. And maybe Rosie, like her husband, did possess and would always possess an intuitive knowledge of the girl they had raised.

  The idea that Rosie was not completely devoid of the apparatus necessary for proper parenting was so comforting to her that for a few treasured moments of peace, she did not try to think beyond it. But she was, by training, used to following a thought to its logical conclusion; moreover, she was, by temperament, a person who preferred to look unpleasant facts in the eye. So it was not long before she was squaring up to the hard truth behind the notion that was providing her with comfort.

  If she was right in her supposition, if she was in fact equipped with the same instinctive understanding of their daughter that Henry had, then her failure to act—her failure to ask questions, to listen, to give advice and, most of all, to provide consolation, to sit with her daughter and hold her, as her arms ached to do—was that much more acute.

  HENRY BRUSHED BY HER as she stood at the stove. It would not take Rosie long to realize that that was one of the things she would always remember about that morning: how her husband had brushed by her—the lightest touch, an almost imperceptible tickle, but a brush nevertheless—as he passed.

  She was frying eggs. Claudia had said she was not hungry, but Rosie knew that she must be or, at the very least, that she would be; it's a long journey from America, and Claudia had confessed that she was not able to eat the breakfast they served on the plane. Busy over the stove, Rosie did not hear Henry approach—while her hearing is, admittedly, not what it once was, it is also true that for as long as they have been married, no matter how cold the floor is, Henry has padded about noiselessly in socks. She did not even know he was in the house; she thought he was outside, calling for the cats, so that when she felt his body warmth and the rough sleeve of his sweater—his favorite one, a dark red and all-too-worn cardigan that Claudia gave him some years ago—against her own bare arm as he moved across the tiny kitchen at his usual deliberate pace, she turned around in surprise.

  She turned in time to see Henry come up behind Claudia, slowly place his left hand on her right shoulder and then, with even more care, his right hand on her left. He has large hands; as Rosie knows from experience, they are heavy. Claudia, who had, as always, seated herself on the most rickety of their three kitchen chairs, looked up at her father, craning her neck very far back to meet his eyes, and smiled.

  Watching from the stove, Rosie wondered if she had ever seen her daughter look so exhausted.

  “You're taller than ever, Daddy,” Claudia said, making a visible effort. “You may even have grown an inch or two. What's Mom been feeding you lately?”

  Once Rosie's husband loved to talk (just as Rosie loved to listen); since his illness and the subsequent slurring of his speech, he has become a man of few words and usually eloquent gestures. But his voice is the same as it has been throughout his life, gentle and rumbling.

  “Y'all right, Little Claw?”

  When she saw Claudia's eyes begin to blink fast, Rosie dropped the spatula she had been holding onto the floor. She reflexively stooped to pick it up before rushing the two steps over to her husband and her child.

  Claudia's face was buried in Henry's stomach and she was crying in the gigantic, heaving sobs of her childhood. With his large hands, Henry held and stroked the back of her head; in his low, slow, and infinitely soothing drawl, he murmured incomprehensible words, as to an infant.

  Not until the eggs began to smoke did Rosie realize that she was still holding the spatula. One of her hands was pressing against Claudia's shoulder in the exact spot where Henry's hand rested a
good two minutes ago; the other held aloft the greasy utensil. She was standing close to but a little apart from the closed circle—yes, it was definitely closed, as all true circles are—that Henry and Claudia made.

  Rosie reached out an arm and, without removing her hand from her daughter's shoulder, placed the spatula on the counter and turned the stove off (so there were in fact advantages to a small kitchen, just as the realtor promised). She passed the back of her free hand across her eyes.

  A minute later, she had quietly taken her hand off her daughter's shoulder and was walking back to the stove. About to pick up the pan, she turned around to glance one more time at her family instead. Should she still be standing beside them; was she being remiss? One long moment, then two. Then she was turning around and throwing the scorched batch of eggs into the garbage, removing three new eggs out of the carton to start another.

  Eventually (Rosie told herself sternly, making sure to keep her eyes fixed on the pan) both Claudia and Henry would need to eat, even though for now she continued to cry, he to stroke her head and to murmur his calming words.

  SHE WAS PRETTY SURE that it was then, during those minutes she stood at the stove frying up a second batch of eggs, that she gave up on what she perhaps in another time would have considered one of the rights of motherhood. Claudia did not confide in her during the three days that she stayed with them, even though they went on long walks, just mother and daughter, even though they clung hard to each other on the day that she left, and the reason for that was both simple and obvious: by failing to step forward to help her daughter, Rosie had lost the right to her confidence. So when, the day after Claudia's departure, Henry sat Rosie down and told her that Claudia was in love with a man who happened to be already married, a man who had two children and who did not intend to leave them or his wife for at least another dozen years, she humbly accepted the news of her daughter's predicament and the fact that it came to her secondhand as punishment to which she was due.