White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  If only his sister had run off with a Stanley, the boy thought, watching the baristas play and laugh, dance to the same prepackaged music as if it were new, watch the clock even while customers waited. If only there had been some boy—strong enough to rescue her. Some boy to carry the palanquin, the kind that protected young women. A friendly boy she could have used to get away, and then get away from, if he bored her.

  A boy like me, the brother thought. A kind of older brother to them both.

  Once the boy finished college, paid his dues, worked for a time in a Starbucks. It wasn’t the one in the Village, where he first read that book.

  Then, when he saved enough, he saw the world. He saw a brilliant red palanquin bearing a rich man’s wife in the middle of a rushed street in China, then a white elephant in India gravely carrying a wealthy groom. Bejeweled princesses; palaces that might be considered relics, their walls made of mirrors, where the boy could see his reflections.

  It was never deliberate, how he would look for his sister, backpacking and hitchhiking and sleeping in rough places for cheap. It was just that he’d never believed she was dead. She could have been a thousand places—on a movie poster, pouting at him, or peering from the window of a café, or mindlessly shopping, wearing furs, or teaching a classroom of children, looking out the window at the precise moment he passed.

  The boy imagined life for her, a life she might reveal to him, her children and his children playing together, his wife coming to love her as a sister.

  The images eventually made him get married, and in the marriage, he was happy but waiting. Waiting for his sister.

  There was life in between the years of searching and imagining— a job for him, first at another Starbucks, then medical school, because it fully distracted him.

  Then a fine day at the hospital where he worked as a doctor and where, through no accident, the body of his sister was brought in, though he wasn’t sure at first.

  She looked the same. He knew not to tell his father—and that was a great gift, not telling, not even whimpering out loud in front of anyone—because in the end he only had his memory to reckon with. How did he know for certain it was she? It was a young woman his sister’s age, face still familiar and beautiful but body wrecked— a car accident, her husband’s or boyfriend’s or lover’s car struck by another motorist. The man, too weak from some illness to turn the wheel in time, deconditioned, had died at once. But she had been six months pregnant, and there was the pale gold band on her ring finger, and wedding pictures in her wallet too, of gorgeous red palanquins from an Oriental honeymoon, a Doli for a bride, the kind meant for queens and deities, the inside obscured by curtains, and pictures of a smiling family, probably her husband’s relatives. But not a single one of him, the boy and the brother she had left, or the father, the mother, the family she started with. Only the family she had been trying to make.

  The boy, the brother, couldn’t bear to conclude that his sister had been defeated. So, he would say to his own wife, instead of saying his sister was dead: “I couldn’t be sure that was my sister. I never had proof. She had a slightly different name—unless she changed it, I suppose. And how could I remember her body? I was so young. So, I don’t really know. I really don’t.”

  But the story stayed, a story that he knew—though his sister had left him behind when she escaped. Though she’d left him alone, to remember. Though her body had endured—what? He couldn’t know. Only that she’d left so that her body would be hers to give away.

  TALINDA

  1.

  SO, HERE I AM sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, hoping no one talks to me or intuits why I’m fat, when the door that says on the outside DO NOT ENTER swings open and Talinda storms out, not long for this world.

  The young, blond nurse stands there, bracing the open door with one hand, holding a clipboard with the other. “We should have the results back any day,” she calls, though it’s obvious my best friend isn’t listening. “Later this week. Do check,” her voice wafts out, like she’s a woman working in a shop. Not an announcer of life versus death.

  Not long for this world. “Don’t say things like that,” I would’ve pleaded with Talinda, if she had said the words out loud. One of her usual angry and dapper turns of phrase.

  “You’ll fight this thing,” I said when she first told me she had stomach cancer, and for once she nodded, not ridiculing the cliche. That was a year ago, before I became this wretched person. A woman sleeping with her best friend’s husband, a woman waiting to take over a life.

  “Aren’t you full of surprises, Miss Narika Kandelwala,” Talinda would have said. “You’re not as boring as I thought.” If she had known.

  But Talinda doesn’t know what her husband and I were—are— capable of. Cancer is what she’s come to know. How its cells lived as shameless parasites of the body, the dark and mocking children who’d never leave home. Talinda could caution you about genes that whispered false instructions. Genes speaking louder and louder over rivers of gushing new blood vessels, these rivers mindless and cruel as they crossed in confusing directions of their own, greedily serving the cells of destruction.

  This is Talinda Kim, and what she’s been given: age thirty-seven, Korean American, born to a waitress in Flushing. Board-certified internist and geriatrician, married, no children, signet cell gastric carcinoma, stage four, prognosis six months.

  Six months. If I weren’t betraying Talinda, I’d use what I know for her benefit. My arm around her shoulder, I’d describe Audre Lorde’s cancer journals, her dignity, her hope. Then Talinda would be forced, as usual, to turn on me with her mix of affection and contempt, the potent and honest combination that I’ve always counted on. She might say, “Narika, you don’t win any points for reading some poor woman’s private diary, whose problems you can’t even understand to begin with. Amazing how you’re trying to read books for a living. At some point you have to stop going to school and get a job. At some point, you have to accept it. The real world isn’t made of poetry.”

  I’d urge her on in making fun of me. I’d do anything to distract her. Talk about Dadaist art or North Korean politics or Bette Davis movies, her favorites. Now, Voyager, with a childless Bette Davis trying to make do by being a cool aunt. Of Human Bondage, Bette as the pregnant, vulgar, coercive, determined Mildred. All About Eve. What it is like to have your life, bit by bit, stolen by a woman you trusted.

  But all I do instead is slink down in the passenger seat of Talinda’s black Benz, hoping she doesn’t really notice me.

  A real friend would take Talinda out to a movie, after her day at the oncology clinic. Some Bette Davis old romance, but who was that actress, after all? Some skinny, overbearing, self-important white woman who bears more than a passing resemblance, I realize suddenly, to Talinda’s husband George’s mother. She’d never remarried after George’s father left her for one of his students, a beautiful Asian woman, the two of them traveling to go teach at a university in Singapore.

  All Talinda has is a mother-in-law who, like Talinda’s own mother, hasn’t been told anything about the cancer. A mother-inlaw who’s expressed the wish, loudly at times, that George had never married Talinda. Who wished Talinda had never existed.

  If I loved Talinda, really loved her, I’d tell her that her husband seduced me, and vice versa. That the three of us should get far away from each other. That she deserves a better life, friend, and lover. If I were good, I’d exit, pursued by a bear.

  For once, I’d be the one with adult knowledge Talinda didn’t have, and I could tell her what was what.

  My affair with her husband began six months ago, well after she’d been diagnosed, after she’d tried to keep working as if nothing were happening but was fatigued and couldn’t stop losing weight.

  I gave in after George called me in the middle of the night, crying for me to come help cook something she could eat. After George and I started meeting up in grocery stores, hospital cafeterias, places where we could hel
p Talinda together, while she was going through surgery and modified chemo.

  Tired by marriage—or maybe by his marriage to Talinda specifically, with its burdens, the heaviest of which was extreme privacy— George pulled me in. The lingering touch on my arm, my back, my hand. The grateful smiles that never felt straightforward. Then his expression when I told him how I’d tried and failed a few times to have a child with donor sperm.

  “I know what it’s like to hope and be disappointed,” he’d said. “To wait, and want, and not have children. To be the only people waiting in the world. Believe me, I know what it’s like.”

  George and Talinda tried a lot too. It wasn’t clear now if her in vitro might have speeded the cancer. She would’ve kept trying. George was the one who couldn’t try again, unable to bear how relentless she was. They’d just gotten to the point of discussing adoption when her new symptoms started. Then Talinda had to tell George that she’d never make him a father.

  Had she reached for him the way I reached for her, when I found out she was dying?

  When she got sick, Talinda forbade her husband from getting his family involved. No mother, and no sisters, and George’s father was long gone. So George made more and more frequent calls to me in the middle of the night, while locked in the bathroom or sitting in his car.

  Many calls, talking alone, and then finally, we were alone. He lavished long, splendid kisses on me, after he’d undressed me at my place, more recently kissing my round belly.

  Talinda isn’t one for gaining weight, not even back in her college pre-med classes when she didn’t leave her room for days. Even after hormone treatments, trying to get pregnant, she was all angles and petite, high-fashion sinews. George is tall, over six three, blueeyed, ever so gentle with his slightly stooped posture. She was the one who’d poked fun at his rumpled-professor demeanor, complained behind his back about how low his salary remained even after he’d been tenured. She didn’t see him for how brilliant he was. She’d never really made him feel special, I told myself, even though I’d never touch the truth of them and I knew that.

  Years ago, the only time that George ever came close to leaving Talinda—early on when they were living together but not yet engaged, during the harshest days of Talinda’s medical residency when she would stay at the hospital for four days at a time without calling once—she’d finally bucked the routine and come home before the end of her shift, trading with someone, running all the way. It was unthinkable to her not to work the hardest, not to dominate, not to be the best. Unthinkable to take the time to answer George’s calls.

  Even though George had said that if she didn’t cut down her hours, they’d break up.

  The night they almost broke up, when she got home, she cried when she didn’t find George, calling me to come over so she wouldn’t “act like a dimwit” when he did show up. Disheveled, she sat at my feet waiting for him, saying that if I breathed a word about how desperate she’d become, she’d murder me. When he let himself in later that night, I saw how Talinda pretended not to care, but how she then came up behind him as he sat eating alone. How she touched him so gently, without asking anything.

  Today, waiting for Talinda to be done at the clinic, by avoiding certain patterns of thought, by walking fast whenever I passed by mirrors, by keeping in my mind an image of Talinda not loving George, never really loving him, I made it all right that I would be the one having George’s baby. Just for a few seconds, I told myself that once I started really showing, I would tell her this was a baby conceived from donor sperm. Accept it when she teased me about using the sperm of a white man.

  But it’s possible Talinda will be gone before the birth and never know my baby is half white. We’d have our joy once she was gone. Once our goddess Talinda had risen fully out of reach.

  High in a white palace, the king’s daughter, the golden girl—

  That image from a book the two of us read in high school. From an old story of infidelity and careless, childless adults.

  By thinking of Talinda as always being high above me, I could sometimes think of her as being untouched by what I had been doing with George. Like she had too much pride to be hurt by it. Like she had better things to do.

  But here I was, a little more than four months pregnant with a boy. With George’s son.

  2.

  Many hours after Talinda’s doctor’s appointment, long after she’s started one of her eight-hour shifts at the hospital, George calls me at eleven p.m., exactly when he said he would.

  I’ve done my good deed for the day, I tell myself. Sitting with her for hours, at the doctor’s. It doesn’t make me good for a second, but it was something she needed.

  Now I’m tucked away and snug inside the little studio that goes for just two grand a month on Cornelia Street, not far from where we both teach. George found the apartment a month ago and paid to rent it in my name, since I’m still only an assistant professor, and I might not have a job next September. My tenure clock is running down. The signs are good, and George’s advocacy has made it easier. But nothing is certain.

  I teach big courses in South Asian studies that use movies and music. I attract future photojournalists, Peace Corps volunteers, missionaries’ children. They’re good young people who wouldn’t condone what I have done.

  George shuts a door behind him so he can be completely alone, even though Talinda isn’t there with him. He always tries to call from a bathroom, as if calling from the bedroom would make what we’re doing worse.

  Then he makes a silly liquid kissing noise into the receiver, joking, “That’s for the baby, not for you.”

  “We just have to sit and wait,” he adds. Then more softly, “Goddamn, I can’t stand watching all this. This is her third straight ER shift. She just won’t rest. I don’t know what to do with her.”

  “Why not tell her now,” I say, suddenly wanting to be mean, as if that is what I, what both of us, deserve. As if George and I were awful people, stuck with each other. “Tell her you’re shacking up with your pretty, plump brown piece. Tell her we did it just enough times to knock me up. Then did it extra, just for kicks. That’ll give her more strength to fight. We would be helping her if we made her hate us. Trust me, I know her.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asks in a whisper. “If you weren’t pregnant, God—”

  “Well, but I am,” I say, suddenly crying even though I don’t want him to come over. “I am pregnant, and I’m feeling impatient.”

  “About what?” he asks. “You’ve got five months. You have to learn to be patient.”

  “George, we’re too greedy and not cunning enough,” I whisper. “And she’ll find out.”

  “No matter what anyone does, she hasn’t got more than another six or seven months,” he says, sounding like a different man, the kind who might have run a hedge fund with arrogance, instead of living as a Communist academic. I’d never suspected, before George, how much some men could yearn for a child, and how poorly that desire could match up with the women they married. How a man’s yearning for a child could make his marriage vows less binding, more porous, help him forgive himself.

  On some level Talinda knows about this. She’s always joked about George’s running off with some coed. Some sociology major from the Midwest seemingly swept up in George’s work against police brutality. Some younger scholar who has really been a wife-in-waiting, praying to marry George and settle down, thinking it easier to shag him than compete for funding.

  “We have to wait,” George repeats. Defensive, grim. “We don’t have rights to anything. We only have the right to wait and see. Just waiting isn’t hurting her.”

  I want to say, Everything we’ve done is hurting her. But that would take hostage our whole night, make George come here this minute, only to pace, drink, and agonize for hours before we fuck, instead of just taking off my clothes without much talk, as I prefer.

  After this morning Talinda might come over to see me tonight. Just to complain about that
nurse who wouldn’t speed up her biopsy result. “Blondie couldn’t get into med school,” she’ll say, “and now she hates women doctors.”

  George throws me another kissy-kiss, and I do the same over the phone, wishing that months ago we’d had the decency to stop at phone sex.

  Once we hang up, I take the time to look in the mirror. In my otherwise tidy bathroom, where I have been talking to George on the new iPhone 6 he bought me, there’s a little blood in the sink from where I broke a glass. It looks worse than it is. I’m not that sort of person, never was. Crazy. Cutter. Unstable bitch. In general, I don’t tend toward destruction.

  I’m a decent—no, more than decent, good—academic with papers, even a book in press. I took loving care of my mother when she was dying of diabetes complications, one foot amputated and the other holding contagion, vision gone and fingers constantly tingling. When we were little I was the one who invited Talinda home, serving my mother’s mediocre Indian food to her in big portions.

  Whenever she came over, she smiled vaguely when asked if she’d have more, only to whisper, “We need to go to Taco Bell,” the minute my mother left the room.

  I was the only one who ever made sure Talinda didn’t have to eat dinner alone.

  I would have shared my father with Talinda too, if mine had stayed. And for years, though I barely knew Talinda’s younger-man husband, I was the one who told her to treat George kindly, to make sure he knew how intensely she loved him. A year ago, Talinda told me about the cancer and admitted to me, “You know, Narika, you are the first person I’ve told. Even George doesn’t know yet.”