A year ago, all three of us were different people. A year ago, I could have answered the question, Why do people want to have children so much? Now I don’t know. The instinct, the hunger to have a child—it’s no different from what drives the cancer growing inside Talinda. It’s involuntary and primal. Primordial. I’m an academic; I should be able to tell stories about foreign words that mean “ancient” and “first.” Instead the two words make me think of screaming, or of blood. But Talinda has been quiet so far, as composed as she was when she first understood that she might die.
3.
The scene one night a year ago, around Easter: the night I found out my best friend was out of time, a woman I’d known and somehow loved since I was ten and she was a bossy but affectionate, precocious twelve. Setting: a Korean restaurant she’d picked out for dinner in Flushing. Characters: Narika, a well-respected Asianist, an up-and-coming junior faculty member in the social sciences, the humanities. Not much of a slacker, despite what Talinda implies. In certain circles admired. Also: Talinda, a well-manicured Flushing beauty, a local girl made very good, in line for the next junior chair of the geriatrics department of a prestigious university. A dedicated physician. Bill: Talinda’s first boyfriend, a train wreck, a playboy, luckily not present in person, but talked about, even lusted after, long after college. George: Talinda’s new love, at that point married to her for seven years.
And me—the new me—nowhere in evidence. I was Narika the academic, not Narika the “friend.” Not me, the one who cut herself today on a piece of broken glass, not wholly by accident, in a flash of self-loathing and dread, the woman afraid to go swimming even though it might be good for the baby; the former respectable citizen. Now regressed to seeing the same old black-and-white movies I saw in high school, imagining Talinda gone so I can go and live in her big house in Long Island. Sleep in her big bed with her husband, when pregnancy will make good sleep harder to get. When sleep alone will comfort me.
I remember me and Talinda like from a movie. Scene, action, dialogue.
One year ago: “You’re late,” Talinda said. Narika slid into a fake leather booth. It’s where Talinda’s parents first met. Neither had lived in America more than a few years. The laughing acupuncturist insisted that the too-serious, pretty girl who brought his food sit down with him. That was when the very idea of Talinda first began, frivolous as that was, serious as Talinda Kim is today. Hard to imagine Talinda’s sensible mother ever being pliant, giggly, tractable, but Talinda’s doctor father, telling strangers the story, always insisted she was. In a booth like the one where Talinda and Narika sat, the confident man, years before he would leave Talinda forever, must have pulled Talinda’s mother by the hand, maybe even caressed her roughened fingers. Charmed her enough to make her stay.
In the restaurant, several feet behind Talinda and Narika, near the sushi bar where two men of indeterminate age in white aprons and chef hats busy themselves cutting vegetables, one of the waitresses sat, chubby and tense, perched on a bar stool. She wore a red uniform with sausagecasing cleavage that looked highly uncomfortable. An alert, compact golden retriever sat at the woman’s feet, trim and obedient, panting when it saw Narika looking its way but not attempting to get up. Narika was used to Korean food, but for a second she worried for the dog, saw grim images of paws floating in soup, the waitress’s thin fingers flicking a torn, shaggy ear. She shrugged it off; they came here often during childhood, when Talinda’s mother had to go back to work after Talinda’s father divorced her, disappearing overseas, leaving them without money.
Often Narika thinks that the facts of her parents’ divorce have defined Talinda: abruptness, condescension, pride. Even bare-faced lying. A cynical indifference and yet a kind of quiet and unshakable loyalty, the same kind that made Talinda’s mother send money to her in-laws in Korea for years after the father absconded. Before leaving, he’d taken money from his parents as well. Talinda’s mother, eventually Talinda herself, sent them thousands.
Talinda is much easier to love than to like. But then again, Narika thought, she herself is not that easy to even tolerate.
“You’ve lost weight,” Narika said when minutes passed and Talinda did not speak or even make eye contact. The woman knows how to give a cold shoulder—actually, an icy one, as punishment for Narika’s being nearly half an hour late to their dinner.
Talinda looked up from her menu.
“No, I mean it,” Narika said. “A lot of weight—like, what, at least thirty pounds? Don’t tell me you did this on purpose. It isn’t chic. You look almost skeletal.” Narika aspired to be mean, as she often did when in Talinda’s company. She’s always told herself that this is only in anticipation of Talinda’s bona fide meanness, which she has been so interested in and enraptured by since the fourth grade.
It is bracing, watching Talinda eviscerate some stranger with verve. The last time they’d come to this cheap Korean restaurant, a few months before, Talinda sported a new, thin, but unmistakable magenta streak in her hair, like some Japanese teenager rebelling against her high school principal. Despite Talinda’s Chanel suit and pearls, Narika always half-expected to see her slinging a Hello Kitty knapsack across her chair. That time, Talinda had picked up a brochure in Korean, with one phrase in English only: Water bar.
“Mizu shobai is the Japanese name for it,” Talinda said. Narika remembered the contemptuous curl of her lovely lips. “It’s from an expression about good luck and bad. A matter of chance, as shifting as water. So, might as well live it up now with hot baths, massages, and lots of you know what.”
“Wait, why do they call them water bars?” Narika asked.
“Don’t ask boring questions. Do I look like a tour guide?” Talinda snapped, just as a waiter came over to replenish their water glasses. He was the owner of the restaurant. Narika recognized him from the large photo near the front entrance.
He also had the appearance of being some daughter’s father. This is how Narika’s own father could have been—serene, present, working, instead of disappearing, unemployed, and indifferent. It had been Narika’s mother, and not Narika herself, who waited anxiously for his letters and cards, not even insisting on a check. Narika’s mother who spent her modest salary on beauty treatments, facial creams, hair oils, expensive clothes, so that the house had to be sold to pay all the debts once her mother was dead. Narika’s mother who, upon hearing that Talinda had lost her father too, wondered aloud why Talinda’s mother hadn’t tried harder to persuade the man to stay.
“What are you nice girls doing, talking about water bars?” the genial man said, pausing with the half-full pitcher of water on his tray. “Those aren’t innocent places.”
For his intrusion, Talinda rewarded the man with a cold smile. “I’ll have the dinner plate,” she said, giving him her menu while looking straight at Narika. Instead of taking the hint, the good-looking Korean man caught Narika’s eye, leaned closer than he had to, and said: “You know the secret of the water bars? They’re favorite places of water demons, the kappas. That’s why you should never go to a host club or, God forbid, work in a hostess club, near any body of water. The kappa will wait for you under the water, and then he’ll ravish you. Seduce you into giving him pleasure, maybe even give you a baby.”
“You know the only way to avoid him?” the man had asked Narika, bedroom-eyed. Narika shook her head, ever the wide-eyed ingénue.
Talinda, weary, answered him like she was sick of his type. “Yes, yes, you have to be polite. Bow to the kappa as deeply as you can.” Talinda bowed her head to illustrate her meaning.
The man smiled, but Talinda was determined that he not be complacent, not be charmed. “The goal is to kill the bugger with your politeness. You bow to him only to make him bow to you. As soon as soon as the water falls out of the cup on top of his head, he cannot move. He’s stuck there, and you move on, and then you’re free of him. I mean, totally free of that demon. Like you don’t ever have to talk to him again. Like he’ll know eno
ugh not to come near you. Ever.” Raising her eyebrow slightly, she glanced at the man as he stood there transfixed with his tray of water. He never approached their table again, not that night or any other night.
Talinda’s instinctive sharpness had been there since she was twelve. One day in homeroom, Talinda, a seventh-grade monitor, announced that the fifth-grade Narika’s generic puppy-themed lunchbox was no good, and if she was lucky she would get a better one on sale. Somehow, the very act of being criticized had comforted Narika. She’d felt that they were both marked as outsiders. Not just because Talinda was the new girl in school and, for a time, the only Korean, or because Narika remained the darkest brown girl in the class for all six years of elementary, but because they were both fatherless. Because they’d found a way to do without.
Twenty-five years later, Talinda has become a successful doctor specializing in the care of older people and writes influential papers about feeding tubes. Narika is an academic expert in Indian history—assistant professor, tenure track, no longer an adjunct. She’s on the eve of the publication of her first book on Hindu women in politics and the ambiguous meanings of the mother goddess for Communists in India, a successful expansion of her dissertation. “I never know what you’re talking about when you try to explain what it is you do for a living,” Talinda often says. Or else she drops one of her sayings—elusive, a pearl: “Narika, don’t try so hard to live inside a story that’s not yours.”
That evening, dinner a year ago, Korean restaurant, Talinda was, as usual, practical. “What are you doing these days, anyhow?” Talinda asked, probably just to change the subject from her dramatic weight loss. “Still chasing after dead bad white guys, or what?”
Often Talinda sounds exactly like Narika’s dead mother, comforting for her familiarity, for her constancy. Narika’s mother was stubborn. She’d held onto the house where she’d raised Narika until the end, though she’d been riddled with bad debt.
She’d never stopped preparing herself for her husband’s return after he’d left them for another woman and another child. Narika was sixteen then; her father’s mistress, barely twenty. Only Talinda, out of all her friends, knew why he’d gone. Only Talinda knew how intensely Narika came to despise her own mother’s house, how peaceful it had been to finally be rid of it.
“I mean, I know you’re a teacher, a professor, I do understand that,” Talinda went on, emphasizing “that” and spitting a little when she talked, which Narika made a mental note of but didn’t comment on. “But the subjects you study? Something about colonialism, which I understand is over now in India and elsewhere in the world, and like, has been over for the last hundred years or so? So what does studying that do for anyone, what purpose does that have? And are you at least teaching your students other skills? So they can do research on topics that matter?”
“Like curing cancer,” Narika said, unaware and trying to make Talinda smile. “Like being, oh I don’t know—a doctor?”
Talinda laughed. “Well, what’s wrong with that?” By then the waitress on duty, who recognized the subtlest changes in expression and mood of a table, had brought them water and sake. The liquor stung Narika’s throat and eyes. She never drinks except with Talinda—like so many other things, it is a ritual separate from her life, from her identity as a nose-ring-wearing Indian-origin academic. A dark brown woman who does yoga on the beach.
Talinda was impassive as she drank. She never seems to manifest the Oriental flush that is a peculiarity of cytochrome enzymes’ genetic heterogeneity, she always liked to say. But she never drinks to excess either, not like the Asian man who’d once sat next to Narika on a bus ride from Washington, D.C. to New York with two six-packs on his lap, and who brought his sweaty arms and thighs too close to Narika as she sat next to him, trying to outline her lecture notes. There might be something Talinda had to tell her, Narika got the sense, but couldn’t be sure of, couldn’t force it out. It would probably emerge as they were settling the check. “Bill and I broke up” was how they’d finished a similar dinner eight years before, before Talinda met George, back when she assumed her college boyfriend Bill would be the one.
That time, she and Talinda still in their twenties, Narika only had two hours left before catching a flight to O’Hare for a conference. She’d tried in vain to get Talinda to “talk more about her feelings” (a phrase her friend uttered with a snarl) by taking her to a lovely candlelit dessert place in the Village, with a French name and little tables and perfect espressos served in demitasse with chocolate croissants. The coffee and the pastries had been fine, Talinda remarked afterward, but “please spare me all that psychological whatnot. Bill left me and that’s that. What am I going to do about it? What would I change by talking? Not a thing. Maybe it would’ve been different if his mother liked me. She was no fan of ‘slant-eyes,’ as she put it, but that’s fine. I’ll live.”
Perhaps the not-talking had worked, for only two years after Bill left, Talinda had met George at an art gallery, a show Narika dragged her to. George the academic, well read, definitely humanities—the kind of man Narika herself hoped she might marry someday. But back then, Narika was dating a woman, not the first. Something she and Talinda didn’t talk about. Either because it would spotlight, uncomfortably, how beautiful Talinda still was to Narika, even after so many years—or else because it would raise the question, equally uncomfortable, of what Talinda had intended when they were fifteen and seventeen, respectively, and Talinda, sleeping over at Narika’s house, crawled into her bed to; watch and laugh at a slightly campy Roman Polanski movie where two beautiful women made love, and afterward they tried it themselves.
Slightly nervous now, at Talinda’s continued silence, Narika ordered her usual Buddha’s delight—a vegetarian version of bibimbap with tofu instead of beef, a fried egg on top of tender noodles, sprouts, and lots of vegetables smothered in Korean hot sauce. Talinda’s mother was the one who’d made it for her the first time, along with Korean spareribs that Narika refused, first provoking mild insult then pity as the older, still lovely woman sat with Talinda and they contentedly tore into the meat, picking at the bones afterward, unselfconscious, pinching large pieces of pickled cabbage with gleaming black chopsticks and popping them into their mouths between bites of gristle and beef, even burping occasionally without casting a glance at Narika, their guest, who at age eleven had sat in shocked but amused silence.
Talinda ordered a small miso soup and another side dish with tofu.
“I haven’t decided yet; I’ll tell you in a while,” Talinda said to the waitress, speaking in English to prevent conversation, something she routinely does with other Koreans. The waitress bowed and retreated as a busboy refilled their tumblers of green tea.
“You are starving yourself,” Narika said in triumph. “But now it’s going to stop. I’m not leaving here until you’ve had at least one order of either Korean spareribs or the bulgogi. Take your pick.”
Talinda shrugged. “So, tell me about this book of yours.”
“Well, it’s coming out finally, not that there’ll be any money in it. But there is a book tour if I take the initiative, and I think it’ll be taught at the undergraduate level.”
“That’s good.”
“And it ended up being shorter than the original five hundred pages, even with the photographs I took on my trip back to India—”
“What do you mean, ‘back’? Girl, you are not from India. You are from Flushing, Queens.”
“I know that. But the publishers want to pitch me as Indian.” Their food came quickly, came quickly, as always. The waitress gave another little bow, perhaps wondering if they’d be there all night, bickering and picking at their food, and what kind of tip, if any, they would leave. They must have looked to her like hometown girls, not businesswomen, not quite housewives or mothers, already well into their thirties and out by themselves on a Friday night, poor things.
“Have you ever heard of Jallianwala Bagh?” Narika asked, taking a sip of
tea and thinking about what she’d order for dessert so she could get Talinda to share it.
“No, Narika. I’m educated, not a nerd. And I don’t have a big chip on my shoulder about a bunch of white guys, you know? In case you hadn’t noticed, I married one.”
“Haha. Well, this place I visited in India, it’s a memorial now. Thousands of men, women, and children gathering unarmed, for a peaceful protest, were literally gunned down by the British army. It was unbelievable.”
“Okay—I’m going to ask you something. Don’t get offended, okay? I mean, why didn’t they run? That’s the thing about Koreans. We know when to get away and go think about revenge. Why were the Indians so passive? Answer that.”
“But that’s the thing,” Narika said, cringing a little at the earnest sound of her own voice. “They couldn’t run. The British sealed off all the exits to this compound where they’d gathered. They tried escaping. They wanted to get out.”
“Oh.”
“Terrible, isn’t it?”
Talinda played with her chopsticks, staring at a spot just over Narika’s shoulder. There was nothing there but the wood paneling.
“Well, I guess everyone dies,” she finally said. “Can we talk about other things?”
“Isn’t your mom worried about you? Especially with you being thin. You can’t convince me George likes you this way. How could you possibly try for a baby at this weight? Your wrists are like matchsticks. I can see your veins.”
“My mom is just glad I can fit into her stuff now,” Talinda said, deftly ignoring the mention of babies. “Her silk cheongsams and her oldie-but-goodie Chanel suits. She’s got a Pucci dress that would’ve been way too tight a year ago. It’s great. If you just lose thirty pounds, too, I’ll lend it to you.”
White Dancing Elephants Page 4