He sighs grandly, but I feel him walking outside. Silence overcomes the background hum. I can breathe again.
“Hi, love.” My voice is desperately sweet. “Thanks for leaving so we can talk. I hope you’re not sleeping with that awful woman.”
“Look. Just stop it. I am not going to waste another night hacking out your insecurities. It is so goddamn boring it makes me want to cut off my dick. You are always mad at me. Stop being mad at me. Just don’t ever call me again if you’re gonna pull this shit, judging me for every goddamn thing. I can’t take it anymore. Just don’t call me again. Leave me alone. Déjame en paz.” He laughs at his lisping Spanish.
My organs are losing their contours, melting, dripping, laughing at me as they ooze to the floor. Hard to hold the phone. “Oh no. Dear God.” I’m in a small, black room, cold, no windows, no doorknobs. “Please, God.”
“Are you praying?”
“Please, God.”
“Jesus Christ, what are you praying for?”
Someone to talk to, someone to say something that could change, even just barely, even imperceptibly, the landscape inside my head. “I cannot believe you’re speaking to me like this right now.” My voice is a stale whisper. “This can’t be happening. I can’t—I got raped.”
The lie is a relief for as long as it takes the three words to leave my lips. Then it is evil, the hopelessness of connection given language.
“Hey man,” Jared is saying. “Yeah, go in, I’ll be right there. Are you shitting me, Elsie?”
“Not really.”
“Not really. Jesus Christ. Did you or did you not get raped?”
“Not. I did not. I mean I did. I did get raped. I raped myself.”
“Okay, that’s it. You think you can say whatever the fuck you feel whenever you feel like it. I’m hanging up, Elsie. I told you this was not a good time and then you went ahead—”
“I wanted to talk to you about what happened!”
“—and say all this intense shit and I am really needed inside right now. You are not going to ruin my night. It’s not exactly easy to get this many cool people together in the same room. I’m finally feeling good and then you call me and say whatever the fuck you feel like saying and I’m hanging up now, good night, goodbye, I love you, be safe.” Click.
—
I am too weak to be involved. That is what I know, lying in this bed below the window with the wooden bars, two missing, a space large enough to admit clever monkeys and feral cats. But no life comes through. The lace curtain is yellow and frayed at the edges, sticking to the hot breeze. How many days has it been since I even imagined a human noise? The crying—treacherous, jagged icicles cutting my throat. Sucking my thumb again, even. I would be ashamed to recall that, except it was my only comfort. How did I think I could calmly withstand this pain, see it as just a temporary combination of thoughts, feelings, sensations—notice them, accept them, this too shall pass? The shock every time—of being hurt, turning to Jared (who else to turn to?) to soothe me, finding only more pain. How could he do this to me. God, I mean. Questions like that—old and dumb—barreling me down. Clutching my chest, hyperventilating on purpose in the hope that I might faint, hearing the dry heaves of my sobs as if they were coming from someone else, a child stuck on a movie screen, someone I cannot help. For days I have been reduced to that noise. There is no one else at this guesthouse, which is just a house with a sign in the yard that says ROOM FOR RENT. The owner thinks I’m very sick, brings me plain white rice and tea, which I eat lying on my side, grabbing handfuls from the bowl on the floor below me, dumping tea into my open mouth, catching some of the liquid on my tongue before it spills out the other side and soaks the pillow. The smell is nice. Sugar and plants.
Once there is nothing else to do, no other hope of ever leaving this room, I fold my stained pillow in half and jam it under my ass. My fingers are in my mouth, my spine curved, my head lolling and heavy, waste fluids pouring over my fist and chest and stomach. I rock, rock, rock until it is no longer I but my body that moves—the space between my breasts, the soft tissue inside the shell, pulling me forward and back. The movement releases me. I sit still until I can’t stand it any longer. Jump up, beat the pillow with my fists, toss the pillow on the floor, sit on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands. My best effort is not enough.
Show him that you care just for him. Do the things that he likes to do. Some popular girls performed “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” for the talent show in tenth grade. It was supposed to be ironic: postfeminist girls with nose rings and perfect GPAs wearing ribbons around their ponytails and blue eye shadow and huge smiles, pretending they were making fun of their mothers and grandmothers, mocking the idea that “true love” is a woman who knows how to please her man. But the fantasy hasn’t much changed. The girls are more violent in speech and dress and behavior, but they are only exposing their ugly, rebellious complexity to get to the same old place: a relationship that works because the girl makes it work. That is her power. Once I’ve given my life over to helping him stay sober, once I make my relationship my full-time job, then he will be good to me. He just needs to be accepted exactly as he is. Only then can he stop being so angry. Once I fully commit, he will be good to me. Isn’t that what I’m hoping for, just like the dumb bitches in high school singing a lady’s love song they probably didn’t even know was written by men?
How gross it is that I am still thinking about this stuff. Men and women, how a penis erect transforms a man, how a woman is made to receive this transformation, what parts of herself take him in, what parts she withholds, what she has the power to withhold. How to protect herself without cutting herself off, how to be generous without being self-deprecating, how to be detached without being cold, how to be attached without being obsessed, how to get her own needs met without being demanding, how to meet his needs without being sacrificial, how to be gentle without being a pushover, how to be firm without being bitchy, how to be calm without being lifeless, how to be passionate without being enraged, how to be independent without feeling alone, how to be dependent without feeling alone, how sick I am of it all.
I would lose anything to be free.
—
What I need is food. I need to consume all the spices and grains and vegetables and oils in the world.
I march into town, order five curries, have three large bites, let the fourth fall out of my mouth. Gasp. Pay for my meal. Am walking slowly now, noticing every sight and sound and smell around me, but I won’t be bothered to put them into words.
I cannot see him again. I will not.
There is no possible way to imagine myself into the small house we were going to share by the beach. His breath on my neck as he bikes us home from a bar. The sweet pudginess of his large arm muscles going slack as we fall into bed. My lips against his neck in the morning, puckering against his loose skin until he says, “Cut it out, that tickles,” and rolls on top of me, his belly warm and sticky against mine. The relief of his body beside me, after the nights when I won’t know where he is or what he’s doing: all the dumb, tiny soldiers inside me dropping their guns and drifting off to sleep.
If I went through my life in a meditative state—observing instead of reacting—I could live that way. Or if I were normal, more desensitized to the vagaries of sex and connection. Some people feel the pain of love’s disappointment, and then do something else with their time. I cannot move, cannot think, can barely breathe. Passion. What a lie. The way I love gives up everything.
I’m sitting in front of a computer at an Internet café. I’m not sure why I brought myself here. Seven emails from Jared. I guess that’s what my brain was hoping for. He thinks I called him last night, he hopes he wasn’t out of line, he’d had a little to drink, please can I call him again, he misses me so much, he’s so sorry if he was out of line, he’s gonna stop as soon as I get home, he can’t wait for me to get home. Of course. He always asks for my forgiveness in a way that allows me, effortless
ly, to grant it. The morning he came to my apartment with a bouquet of handpicked flowers in a handblown vase his mother made for him before she fell in love with a woman and moved to Europe, how the flesh softened around his bones when I opened the door, our foreheads touching and our snot and tears all mixed up.
“Please don’t close your heart to me,” he said. “You are the best friend I’ve ever had.”
And the night when the spider woke me up in some motel bed I was sharing with Jared. At first, the skin on my arm felt something like wonder at how wide apart the creature’s legs were, how many there were, how slowly they walked in perfect concert with one another, creeping, trying not to disturb me. And then it was at my throat and I was wide awake and shrieking. “Get it off! Get it off!” Jared thrashed out of bed and turned on the light. I jammed my finger in the direction of the black body escaping across my pillow on long, strong, gauzy legs, one of which Jared grabbed between his thumb and forefinger. The spider dangled, its free legs pawing the air and its fuzzy head stiff and protracted, while Jared’s wide eyes darted about, landing on the glass of water beside the bed. Into the water Jared flicked the creature. Stillness. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back to me, peering into the glass. Remnants of disgust and outrage at the sensation of the spider’s legs on my throat competed inside my chest with shame at the frivolousness of my outrage. Jared’s shoulders began to shake, his head bent forward, he sputtered and opened his mouth wide, did nothing to stifle his sobs. “He tried so hard,” he said. “He was trying so hard but the water was too much for him. He wanted to live so bad. He just wanted to live. He was trying so hard but the water—” He kept talking as I took the glass from his hand, pulled him down to me, held him, murmured it wasn’t his fault, he had done nothing wrong, I was sorry, I was so sorry, I didn’t know how to not be always freaking out, how did a person stop always freaking out, I didn’t know, I was sorry. He slept and I held him and then sometime in the early morning I became the sleeper, he the holder.
No. Must not think of that. Must choose memories that harden not soften me, must tell myself a story in which he is simple and bad. Fierce determination to get to a place of steadiness. I do not get to keep my love for him.
The tinny ice cream cart song trickles past. Suriya’s name is in my inbox, too. She has written me three notes, all saying the same thing: “Elsie Akki, my mother has died. Can you come to my home please? I hope you are receiving this mail. God bless.”
GAMBAWELLA
My mother had a manuscript of unpublished poems written by a friend of hers in college. She would get them out when she was in one of her moods, lay the pages on the kitchen table and pick them up at random, silently mouthing the words with a deliberateness I found annoyingly melodramatic. One time I snatched the page out of her hands. “My father took me at the same time every day,” I read aloud.
“Her father raped her, that’s what ‘took’ means there.” My mother fidgeted with the edge of the tablecloth. “There was Satan worship. A cult. Anne is complicated. A bird—a large bird of prey—slaughtered over her. The blood dripping on her. She was naked, a little girl. Something happened to her, some thought, something kind of good for the first time. Darlene, too, she has a master’s degree, she is very smart, she never could understand Anne’s poems. Some kind of Satan worship, a large bird of prey. The men wore hoods. But there was this good thing.”
My mother often told stories in fragments like this. When you asked for clarification, she would respond in more fragments. I dropped the piece of paper back on the table and poured myself a glass of orange juice.
When my mother moved across the country with Rick, she brought the box of Anne’s poems with her. I saw it on the backseat before they drove off, Rick gripping the wheel in one hand and a plastic travel mug that said “Dunkin’ Donuts” in bubble letters in the other, my mother’s hair pulled back into a diamond-studded barrette, tears rolling down her cheeks and catching in the thin ring of excess skin around the base of her neck, her biggest insecurity.
Not long ago, I asked my mother if she still had the poems. “Oh yes.” She started to repeat her fragmentary take on Anne, how complicated she was, even Darlene did not really get her, the bird of prey, the Satan worship, the little girl with blood—
“Do you still talk to Anne?” I asked.
“God no. Not since college.”
“Why do you care about her poems so much?”
“I wouldn’t say I care about them so much. You just don’t throw away something like that.”
I want my mother to be a deep person, to matter in some way aside from having pushed babies out of her womb. But she doesn’t want to be deep; she wants to be happy. She answers the phone when I call. And she did bring me on those whale watches and to that Cambodian temple. She cannot be more than she is. Of course I’ve had this thought many times before. It’s Psych 101 stuff. But now, riding the bus to Amma’s funeral, god bless, god bless tolling in my mind, I feel the thought rather than think it.
—
Ayya is waiting for me at the bus stop. He raises one hand. “We happy you come here,” he says, enunciating too deliberately. It’s clear he’s been saving these words. He takes my backpack and I follow him across the street to Suriya’s house. There is a coffin in the empty front room attached to the kitchen. As Ayya carries my bag upstairs, I walk to the edge of the box. Suriya’s mother has been dressed in a white sari and gold jewelry. Her face is made up with kohl around her eyes, cakey whitening powder, red lipstick. Her lips are upturned, but the smile belongs to the living; Suriya’s mother is nowhere near this room. I’m permitted the preciousness of the thought because I have no attachment to Amma’s specific body.
“Come,” Ayya says, and leads me to his neighbor’s house, where it seems the whole village is gathered in the front yard, laughing and talking and squatting over plates of food. Children chase each other, running figure eights around the grown-ups’ legs and shrieking when they get caught. I find myself smiling as I enter the yard. But then I see Suriya’s face, an island in the chaos of limbs and voices and consumption. Making eye contact with her is like staring at a blinding light. “El,” she says, and takes my hands in hers. “This is my auntie’s house. We must come here for meals. During funeral days, we cannot eat in our home. Or we will become sick. One time there was a woman in our village who fed her child during a funeral. All the people told her no, but she said, I don’t believe old stories, baby is hungry, and she gave some rice milk. And then that baby becomes so sick. He must live in the hospital. So we cannot take meals at our home until the funeral is finish, okay, El? Very important.” She speaks quickly, tonelessly. Her English seems better than ever. “Okay, El?”
“Yes, okay. I’m happy to see you. I’m so sorry.” Pause. Silence. Try again. “There are so many people here.”
“Yes, there are many. Because my mother is kind.”
I look away from the wounded gape of Suriya’s eyes. “Where is your father?”
“He is in the bed. Like baby. In these days, I must do everything for him. I give him to eat and wash his face. He is not moving. When we learned she has died—the sound that came from his mouth, El. It eats my heart.”
A short woman with wide, flat nostrils gives Suriya a plate of oil cookies. Suriya stares down at the cookies as the woman speaks to her in Sinhala, gently at first, then more emphatically. At last the woman takes the plate from Suriya’s hands and walks toward the kitchen. “I don’t know what that woman is saying to me. I am to do something with those cookies. I think.” Suriya’s mouth barely moves as she speaks. I want to pull her toward me, but my body offers no assistance. I stare at the dirt clinging to my swollen toes.
“What happened, Nangi?” I ask. “How did she die?”
“She had a tomb in her womb. And she had blood coming from her breast. Like milk. Except blood instead.”
“Did she have cancer?”
Suriya closes her eyes, her thumbs pressed against her t
emples. “My head is a ghost’s garage.”
—
We dress in white on the day of the funeral. Suriya irons the family’s clothes on the upstairs patio, holding each item of pristine cloth to the light and turning it about in search of creases. As I start to tie my hair back in my usual haphazard bun, she looks at me in alarm. “Akki? Shall I fix your hair?” Her mundane concern makes me giddy with relief.
Three monks from the village temple come for the service. They stand in front of the casket in worn robes, eyes softly unfocused, hands clasped before them, a little too poised. The oldest one speaks for a short, dreary while. When he stops, Suriya’s father raises a golden pitcher into the air. Suriya and Ayya place their hands atop his, and together they tip the pitcher downward, letting the water it contains fall into the dry earth below Amma’s coffin. A willingness to give up the most precious thing, maybe. Allow the heart to break because that’s how the heart survives.
Suriya’s spine curls toward the ground, an unseen weight pulling her down. Her wail reminds me of the time my auto-rickshaw driver ran over a puppy in Colombo and then laughed at my anguish over such trivial suffering. Ayya takes Suriya by the armpits and pulls her upright. His chest absorbs her howl. I don’t realize the service has ended until people begin to crowd around us, patting Suriya and murmuring words that are probably trite but necessary before heading into the cloudy day. Suriya’s father and brother stand on either side of her and pull her up the stairs to her room.
Hashini and her husband walk over to me. I put my hands in front of my chest and bow. Hashini smooths down my hair. Rajesh grins and nods vigorously. Suriya’s wails continue from her bedroom. Ayya comes down the stairs and hurries to me, pointing down the road to the eating house. “Take a meal,” he says. “Please.”
“I go to Suriya,” I say, accidentally mimicking her English.
I find her lying on her side, clutching at the sheet, her mouth opened wide, shrieking soundlessly. How much of my adult life I have passed in this position, for reasons that seem so wasteful now. I lie beside her, my butt falling off the small bed. I take her hand in mine and press our clasped hands against her chest. Her heart pounds through her back. I can admit to myself now—in feeling, if not in words—why I was irritated when Suriya spoke of her mother’s illness. It seemed almost sweet to die, compared to choosing to leave. I had no idea; I still don’t. I breathe loudly and slowly. I can’t think of anything else to do. Only after it grows too dark to watch the large, slow bounce of palm leaves through the window does Suriya quiet. I loosen my grip on her hand as her cry loosens into a thin, slow wheeze.
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