Wreck and Order

by Hannah Tennant-Moore

  “It’s a religion. You know the Holocaust, in Germany? World War II? Hitler?”

  “Hitler,” she repeats, emptily. The bus thumps over a pothole and we tighten our grip on the seat back.

  “He was an evil, evil man. Killed millions of Jewish people. Took them out of their homes, put them in prisons, and murdered them all.”

  Suriya bites the inside of her cheeks and tilts her head. “Have not big girl party in U.S.A.?”

  I turn to the world outside the window—decrepit advertisements plastered to the side of a high concrete wall. One of the posters is an ad for Rambo IV, peeling away at the top and bottom so that only Stallone’s sweaty headband and sharp eyes are visible. A shopkeeper in Jaffna told me that the Tamil Tigers played Rambo movies for child fighters before sending them into Sinhalese villages armed with machine guns. It’s good to remember that I know that fact. It makes my presence on this bus more appropriate, as if I’m here to document something important, a kind of white lie to myself. The bus comes to a rolling stop. The mass of bodies shifts frantically—bags tossed through windows, women in long skirts running and jumping onto the platform just before the bus rumbles onward.

  Gradually, the storefronts and fruit carts give way to soupy rice fields and purpled lakes. Giant beehives, golden in the afternoon sun, hang from the knobby branches of ironwoods, or some other tree with a less satisfying name. A metallic rendition of “Jingle Bells” rings out from a phone behind me.

  “My boarding home is so lonely,” Suriya says. “Now you are here and I can share my lonely with you.” She speaks to the window. Her shiny black bun is tied with an orange scrunchie at the base of her neck. “Yes,” I say, grateful now for her imperfect English, familiar words arranged unfamiliarly. I unclench my fists in my lap, letting the breeze from the window pour over my sweaty palms.

  —

  “Nilla, Nilla, Nillamuwe,” the ticket taker calls, leaning out the bus door into the tornado of dust stirred up by the tires. Suriya grabs my hand and pulls me through the knot of hot flesh toward the front of the bus. We jump to the side of the road as a crowd of villagers thrusts into the grumbling machine, already pulling away from the stop.

  “Your bag. I think is hard for you,” Suriya says as we walk down a dirt road toward her aunt’s house. She reaches over and lifts up the bottom of my backpack with her hand in a vain effort to relieve some of the weight.

  “I’m fine, really. I’m used to traveling like this.” But I do find it hard to carry my heavy pack in this heat. Perhaps I’ve outgrown backpacking around third world countries. We pass one-room concrete homes with palm-leaf roofs, men in sarongs sitting on plastic chairs in dirt yards, following us with unblinking eyes. Suriya points to one of these houses. “Hashini-Mommy’s home.” Crotons form a fence of oblong leaves in varied shades of pink, green, and yellow. Suriya’s aunt is washing metal bowls in the tap outside. She dries her hands on her dress and nods hello. Wisps of gray enliven her long dark hair. Her two front teeth protrude even when her mouth is closed, suggesting a smile that never takes shape. Speaking softly and quickly, she walks inside and pushes aside a blue curtain covering the entrance to the one bedroom. I had forgotten how people here rarely say hello or goodbye; they simply arrive and depart. Dusty sunlight passes through the small triangles carved throughout the brick wall. “Net,” Hashini-Mommy proclaims, pointing to the pink gauze tied in a knot above the bed. She speaks to Suriya in Sinhala, then motions to me.

  “Hashini-Mommy say this is your room. You may leave your bag and valuables. This village have not thieves.”

  I rifle through my pack for the small gift I brought my hosts. When I look up, Hashini is standing in the doorway, holding a tray of sweets and glass mugs of steaming tea. She motions to me to follow her and sets the tray on a folding chair in the main room. A calendar of presidential photos shows Rajapaksha’s plump, beaming face superimposed over a group of cross-legged, beatific monks. Rajapaksha won the election by throwing his opponent in jail on trumped-up charges, all the while pretending to be the great protector of Buddhism. Well, apparently it worked. The president’s photo is the only adornment on Hashini’s walls.

  I hand Hashini three foil packages of Ceylon tea, the one thing she surely has in abundance. I ought to have brought American treats—chocolate and coffee, T-shirts flaunting the Statue of Liberty—but I only remembered the necessity of gift-giving an hour before I met Suriya at the bus stop. She is so much better at people than I am. All those cards she’s mailed me over the years—for the Buddha’s birthday, the American New Year, the Sri Lankan New Year—decorated with stickers and pressed flowers. Hashini nods at the tea and runs her hand over the top of my head. She gestures to the sweets, oil cookies in the shape of stars. The cookies are bland and greasy, but I eat three in the hope of relaxing my hosts, who stand in silence while I munch from my post on a wooden bench covered in flowered fabric. Only when I reach for a fourth cookie do they turn to each other and exchange a soft stream of Sinhala words about the sudhu, white person.

  “Hashini-Mommy ask me if you are working in the U.S.A.,” Suriya says.

  “I write.” This is my socially appropriate shorthand for “very slowly translating the fictive diary of a lonely cat lover.” I hold an imaginary pen and scrawl invisible cursive letters in the air. Hashini nods her approval. When I told a Dutch couple staying at Rose Land that I was a writer, the woman exclaimed over how lucky I was to be able to travel and work at the same time. “That’s really the dream, isn’t it? Sometimes I think I’ll just quit my job and write a book. I already have the title. Wonderful Wandering.” I smiled and returned my eyes to my fraudulent notebook. The only reason I was able to travel around, occasionally rendering a French sentence or two into English, was the senseless way money flowed through the world, pooling here, evaporating there. Of course I could only think of money as senseless because I’d never been forced to think of it otherwise. My father gave me a birthday check soon before I left for Sri Lanka. And why was I so smug about the woman’s wonderful wandering? She seemed like a happy person.

  Hashini-Mommy picks up my hands, turns them over, points to my empty ring finger, speaks hurriedly in Sinhala. “Hashini-Mommy say she worry for you,” Suriya says. “No husband. Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two!” She counts the years on her fingers and then opens her palms skyward: A woman’s life evaporated once she reached her thirties.

  “I was going to be married. But my boyfriend”—my eyes widen with shock as the words leave my lips—“is dead. My fiancé died.”

  “Oh, El.” Suriya shortens my name to a single, masculine letter. “This is too sad. How does the man die?”

  “He had—it was an accident. He was buying groceries, and when he was leaving the store, there was some construction in the parking lot, and a forklift, a small one—it’s a machine for lifting heavy things, and it didn’t see Brian walking, and so—” I stand up and mimic a claw scooping toward my face, cupping me under the chin. Snap. Beheaded by a miniature forklift in the Stop and Shop parking lot. Poor Brian. I sit down and stare into my lap, sighing, red-faced, frightened of myself. How else to justify being a grown woman with no family, no job, no permanent home?

  Hashini-Mommy leaves the room and returns bearing a new plate of cookies. “So full,” I say, placing my hand over my belly.

  “I think the hunger leave you,” Suriya says. “Because of your sad.”

  Brian in his boxers in the doorframe of our bedroom, tall and grinning and well-made. A sudden giddiness would come upon him at times, as if a spring inside him had been tightened and then released. He’d pin me down and tickle me and I’d squeal, “No, no, not the hook!,” and he’d growl like a lion and dig his fingers into my ribs. Or he’d give me airplane rides on the bed, balancing me on his feet like a toddler. Once I fell on top of him, we’d give each other smacking kisses that vibrated our eardrums. “I need you, I need you,” I said after an airplane ride, burying my face in his neck. Silent, he rested his
hand on my lower back.

  Suriya suggests we visit her uncle. “He will make leave your sad.”

  —

  Her uncle turns out to be a neighbor sitting in his dirt yard in a plastic chair, wearing a sarong and chewing betel leaf, an expanding puddle of red spit at his feet. He stares at me as Suriya talks. Then he picks up a large carving knife and disappears into a thicket of plantain trees. His shoulders hunch up close to his ears; his upper arms are stiff and motionless, and his forearms jut out from his sides. He returns from the jungle cradling a jackfruit the size of a watermelon, axes through the bumpy green shell, and holds the sticky flesh out to me.

  “For White Daughter.”

  I peel a gummy ribbon from the rind. “So sweet,” I say, wide-eyed and sincere.

  Uncle claps and exhales a low-bellied laugh. As we squat around the fruit, Uncle points to his back and explains to me, Suriya translating, that he was poisoned by Tamil Tigers. They infiltrated his air force unit, pretending to be cooks. He was lucky, Suriya tells me. The other men died, including his two brothers. Uncle escaped with partial paralysis.

  “White Daughter, husband have?” he asks.

  Suriya answers in Sinhala, nearly whimpering as she describes something that happened to me that seems sad even here, alongside the story of a man who lost his brothers and his freedom of movement in a war. I almost wish it were true, that I merited such compassion from strangers.

  Uncle is staring at me with concern. “He ask if you know martial arts,” Suriya says.

  “Martial arts?”

  “Ka-ra-tay?” he says.

  “No. No karate.” I shake my head, perplexed.

  “He thinks you are scared to live alone,” Suriya says.

  “No, no. In the U.S.A., a woman can live alone, no problem,” I say, lying again. A woman living alone has no one to keep her mind in check, to tell her not to call 911 when she hears voices in the night, to force her body not to succumb to the mental anguish that assails her at times for reasons she rarely understands and with a force that seems to have little to do with her. Pain chooses her as its vessel, makes itself at home for a while, moves on. Unable to relieve herself of this reasonless pain, she is always able to imagine the many forms relief might take, and does imagine them, endlessly. An almond croissant and a latte at her favorite coffee shop. Reading in the park. Getting a massage. Baking cookies. Sitting in a sauna at the Turkish bathhouse. So many accessible, luxurious treats, suggesting a life of such ease and privilege and contentment that she wishes she would just lose her mind once and for all and get checked into an insane asylum, so that her circumstances would, at last, match her reality.

  A psychiatrist would call my bad times depression, but I prefer to call them dukkha. If I use the Sanskrit word, my periods of heavy, wet, cold malaise become a matter of enlightenment and the dozens of lifetimes I am away from it, rather than the solipsism of time passing while I wonder why I’m doing what I’m doing instead of doing something else.

  —

  The walk home from Uncle’s takes us through an expanse of tall, shining, swaying grasses. Suriya points to a tree house in the middle of the sugarcane field, which protects the crops from wild elephants. Men sleep up there, and if they feel the tremor of heavy footsteps, they throw firecrackers down to scare the elephants away. She gestures to the bamboo ladder. “You want to go up?”

  Inside is a rumpled cotton sheet and the smell of wet leaves and an empty bottle of arrack. A cocoon of vacant waiting. I lie on my back. Blue light dapples the palm-leaf roof where the weave has pulled loose.

  The first time I felt I really loved Brian was when he made me feel better during one of my bad nights on our first winter together. “You’re slumping,” he said, sitting down behind me on the edge of the bed—flannel pajamas, toothpasty breath. I normally had good posture, one of the things he liked about me. He took my shoulders in his hands and pulled backward to bare my chest.

  “It’s happening again,” I said. “I need it to stop.” I kicked off my boot.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It replaces me.”

  “Do you want me to hold you?”

  “I think so.” He pulled me against his chest. My right big toe pried the wool sock off of my left foot.

  “Harder,” I said. He wrapped his long legs around my waist and tightened his grip on my lower arms, crushing me into him. I love getting my blood pressure taken, always dread the pang of emptiness when the nurse presses the release button and the black cuff hisses as it returns my arm to itself.

  “Think of somewhere you want to be,” Brian said.

  The courtyard of Shirmani just before dawn. Lying on the grass as the stars fade into the childish brightness of daybreak. I closed my eyes and felt Brian’s heart beat against my back. The damp grass cooling the base of my neck and the koel birds’ slow whistle, a nude teenage boy diving off a boulder into a dark lake. I turned and kissed Brian’s cheek. “You made me feel better.” He had reminded me of that other version of myself, the young woman who knew her purpose, knew it wasn’t much, knew this smallness was something to be grateful for. “You made me remember when I was traveling in—”

  Brian was so tired. Could I tell him in the morning? He was so glad I felt better. Could he please turn out the light now? I nodded against his shoulder. So many tiny failures on his part—larger ones on mine. Stop. Please. Here I am now, in the place I used to imagine myself when I needed courage to face my life in New York. Although if I had known how temporary that life would be, I suppose I wouldn’t have needed so much courage.

  In the sugarcane field below the tree house, a peacock mews eerily, sorrow reaching for something pretty. Suriya calls up. “El? You are sleeping?”

  —

  When we get back to Hashini’s house, her husband, Rajesh, is laying red chilies on a strip of newspaper. Their shiny skins wrinkle under the harsh sun. His body is fiercely compact—the brown buds of his nipples too close together, his abdominal muscles like small stones slipped under his skin. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,” plays in my head, deadpan. Cut it out. There is something unsettling about the mind’s odd inner loops, like “Falling, falling, effortless flight,” which runs, wheezing, through my head sometimes while I’m having sex. But now I’m nodding and smiling and repeating the words “hello” and “thank you.” Rajesh grins back. The gap between his front teeth leaks red betel juice.

  Hashini-Mommy walks through the backyard, holding her long skirt in front of her waist to make a basket. She disappears into a windowless clay hut in the backyard. The kitchen. I ask Suriya if I can see. Pockmarked pots and pans are piled against the wall. The stove is a clay cube with a cauldron resting on top of it, warmed by smoldering sticks. Hashini kneels on the dirt floor and peels potatoes, her hands a blur of unthinking strokes.

  “Can I help?” Stupid question. “No!” Suriya barks, smiling.

  So I sit still, resigned to aimlessness, waiting to feed off Hashini’s hard work. Would it feel good to have such a clear, constant purpose, or does Hashini feel wasted on one repetitive motion after another? Suriya sifts rice in a shallow, woven basket, churning the milky kernels in search of stones, which she tosses to the woods behind the house. The first time she made rice, she tells me, it had so many stones. Every bite was— She crunches her teeth together. I ask how old Suriya was when she started cooking.

  “Six years old, seven years old. Like that. I must. Because at that time my father was cruel.” Her mother was afraid for Suriya and her brother to live with their father, so she sent them to live in a hut in the woods. A hut like for farmers. She brought them food at night. But one night their mother did not come. Suriya’s brother said, I hungry. Suriya clutches her stomach and groans, enjoying making theater of her past. She cooked rice the way she had seen her mother cook rice. But she didn’t know about stones. The rice had so many! She claps her hands to her cheeks and shakes her head side to side, as if the astonishing part of that story
is that she ate poorly sifted rice. “Do you have a mother and father?” she asks.

  “Yes. Sort of. They’re both alive. But my mother left me when I was eleven years old.” This is a sentence I’ve repeated so many times I no longer hear any difference between the meanings of the words. It’s easy to tell the truth about easily comprehensible difficulties. People tend to find me more likable and sympathetic when I tell this story right away. It makes me pathetic in an interesting way, and then later, no matter how sordid or strange or unsettling my behavior is, they have a handy excuse. I once overheard Brian on the phone with his sister, saying, in protest, “She barely had a mother!” I stifled a groan. It’s not that I don’t believe my mother leaving affected me, any less or any more than my father’s depression or my natural shyness. But none of these facts are an explanation for who I am. I’m still trying to find that out.

  “What does it mean—left you?” Suriya asked. “She stopped to be your mother?”

  “Oh no, she’s still my mother. She just met another man and decided she wanted to be with him instead of my father. So she went away and I didn’t see her for a long time.”

  “Were you angry, Akki?” Suriya asks, addressing me the same way she does her older female cousins.

  “Not really. Not at the time. Nangi.” I touch her wrist, proud I know the word for “little sister,” happy I’ve earned this new intimacy. “She wanted me to move with her, and I actually felt guilty for staying with my dad.”

  “Dad means?”

  “Father. I’m closer with my father. He’s my real parent and my mother is like a fake parent.”

  “Did you find a new mother?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A new woman to take care of you. An auntie or a lady in your village.”

  “No—that makes sense, I guess, but—I still have my mother. We write letters and talk on the phone. We visit each other.” Actually, my mother has always insisted I visit her, that I need the vitamin D and swimming pools she seems to think are only available in Arizona. Plus, she doesn’t want to leave her family. She and Rick have teenage twin boys. IVF—she wanted new babies that badly. I’ve met them a handful of times. Unremarkable kids. It seems only fair that I make no effort to get to know them—what my mother wanted was a shiny new family, unencumbered by my father’s “negativity” and the “brutal” New England winters. And she seems genuinely happy making peanut butter sandwiches in their bright condo, wearing flip-flops year-round, drinking margaritas on the balcony with her thoughtlessly cheerful husband. It’s a relief in a way that she’s separate and okay. Worrying about my father is burden enough.