The Limits of the World

by Jennifer Acker

  Urmila bit her cheek. She was remembering the day, now so long ago, when her father had told her bluntly that she could not keep the child she was carrying if she was to remain separated from her husband. Even Sarada, whose house she was living in, had agreed. They had said they were protecting her and the baby from the shame. Maybe they had even believed what they said.

  She scanned the dim rooms. The trappings of her African childhood were now the remnants of her American old age. All these useless, inglorious things.

  On her way out of the mall she waved to Sharon inside the Gap, to Omar polishing jewelry he could never afford. The speaker nearest the Wok n’ Roll sounded fuzzy, and she stopped at the information desk to pass this along, as if she were just a regular shopper. A goodbye wave, too, from the round and smiling teenager who scooped Urmila’s vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry afternoon dessert and always complimented her jewelry, today a chain of bone beads with a diamond-shaped centerpiece of coconut shell. Where just five months before she’d pulled a girl’s hair and called her a whore, a man now held open the door for her. Urmila stepped purposefully out into a beautifully clear September day carrying a single wrapped box under her arm.

  Lillian Ross, who presented herself in the din and bustle of Ohio’s Best Coffee, was more ordinary than she remembered. She was taller than Urmila, plain gray hair brushed away from her face. Exhaustion in the purple circles beneath her eyes.

  “My husband is now very sick,” Lillian Ross said.

  “My husband was murdered by a thug.”

  As if these bald, tragic facts were all there was to say, at least all they could manage aloud, they stood for a silent moment, occupying an invisible silo of grief. Breath rose and fell inside Urmila’s chest. The air smelled sweet and bitter. At least this was the second time Urmila had been at this coffee chain, so she knew what to expect—noisy mothers, bad tea—and she relaxed a little bit. This was a sure thing. “Someone is helping you, with your husband?”

  “My daughter came last weekend but she is gone now.” Lillian looked around calmly, tiredly—an expression Urmila knew from the mirror—and led them to a table by the window. Urmila offered to buy her a coffee but Lillian declined. More people were leaving the café than entering. The sky was still bright, but the sun lowering. It must be the dinner hour. If she were on the equator now, very soon it would be dusk. From under the table she took the box of brown paper and ribbon and offered it up. “Two thousand dollars.”

  Lillian Ross shook her head. “Five hundred.”

  “Naa, that’s a steal. You said you were rich!”

  “That was before. Now he is sick.”

  “I am doing you a service, you said it would make your husband happy, but obviously you care less about his happiness than I thought. Forget it.” Urmila waved her hand.

  The woman gave her a penetrating stare. “If you think your son is going to want this, you are wrong. If he has not claimed it already, he’s not interested. I am older than you. This husband is my second, I have been through the death of one already. The fate of your things is in your hands.”

  “I see you are an expert,” Urmila said coldly.

  “I know what I know. I know you need the money.”

  Urmila was silent.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Lillian said gently. “Anyway, I will give you a thousand.”

  Urmila stood while Lillian Ross wrote out the check. “Thank you.”

  “I’m glad we can help each other.” Lillian Ross looked up into Urmila’s face, the pity gone, replaced with a soft sympathetic smile. “I’m being serious. Thank you for calling me. And it will get easier, I promise.”

  Urmila gripped the flimsy check between finger and thumb, nodded politely, and walked away.

  On her way home she took in the landmarks of her thirty-five years here, the various stores—one with better fruit, another cheaper dry goods; the intersection where she had once run out of gas; the Italian restaurant where Sunil had insisted they eat one freezing December day, where he spilled an entire plate of red-sauce spaghetti on his lap; the travel agency owned by one of their friends where she’d secured the best prices for their Nairobi tickets; the Sears where she’d bought her husband’s suits and Sunil’s back-to-school clothes. These places belonged to a life so far removed from the one she was rolling through now that she could not recall what it had felt like to enter their doors. Without going anywhere, she had somehow left all this behind. Just past the Sears, the red light enlarged and brightened to an impossible size and colored the thick watery lenses of her tears.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and saw the silky white ivory of the elephants inside the brown paper package she had left on the table top in the coffee shop. Fingertips running over the bumpy, warm steering wheel, she tried to recall their beautiful reassuring smoothness.

  Pulling into her driveway, she saw that the lawn had been freshly trimmed; the air smelled of the cuttings. It wasn’t until she saw, buried deep in the hedges, the glass vase containing the long-rotted stems of Jon Samuel’s lilies—the glass uncracked but clouded with mold and moisture—that she remembered she no longer lived in this house.

  14.

  Sunil leaned across the Volvo gearshift to kiss her and catch her cottony warm scent. He had missed this; her sweaty scalp smell, too. Sunil realized he’d never been a passenger with Amy driving. They didn’t own a car, and Sunil had driven the rental to the Cape. There they’d both been strangers, experiencing the salty, grainy beach together for the first time. Now, he was acutely aware of being her guest, and of needing her faith and favor.

  She’d shaken the plain missionary look. Today her hair was pulled back, high and professional. Makeup on her eyes, color on her cheeks; her mouth, thankfully, was untouched. It was Thursday, she’d come from work. She gestured to a briefcase in the back seat and said she’d have to do some work from home tomorrow morning before they went out for the day.

  “That’s fine,” he said.

  Then she told him the good news. She’d been promoted to assistant research director of their small lab—basically the same job, but more money.

  “And status,” he said.

  She was flourishing here. Now would be a good time to tell his wife his own good news, but he wanted to wait for a more celebratory moment, one filled with ease and openness, rather than bumper-to-bumper horns inching forward from the train station. Also, he had not yet decided how, or how much, to tell of his story of accomplishment. His friends had offered opposing advice.

  She pointed out the capitol, where they’d go tomorrow, and then they were cruising down avenues so wide and straight it was like Ohio.

  In her blue button-down and pencil skirt, even Amy’s voice was polished in a way he didn’t remember, that he hadn’t heard in their phone conversations. Yet she appeared to be nervous, too, hesitant to see him, touch him, which he didn’t understand, given how much she’d pushed for his visit. They’d been apart only two days at a time before this cavernous separation of nearly three months. When you didn’t know the little things about each other’s days, the big things got bigger.

  “My parents are so excited to see you, they’re almost nervous, it’s very cute. You might even get a train set out of my father, early Chanukah. He always wanted a boy.” She turned down a narrow street and added, “I thought we’d go straight to the restaurant.” Because he’d expected to go first to the Kauffmans’, Sunil was underdressed, but Amy assured him he looked fine in his wrinkled T and jeans. Worn sneakers and third-day socks.

  The place was neither a grad-student dive nor an upscale retreat, but some kind of fancy pub where you had to squeeze past a well-dressed horde—men his own age in suits, several with cell phones—at the bar to get to your seat. Where you had to shout to be heard. He wondered why she had taken him to such a raucous place when they hadn’t seen each other in so long. All he wanted to
do was look at her, from every angle, and touch all the soft and hard curves. Listen to the stories of her success.

  “Who are all these people?”

  “Congressional staffers, White House assistants, future senators. Pompous asses.”

  As the evening blew out a few pink-tinted clouds, Sunil took her in his arms and pressed his temple to hers, felt the heat of her face. Amy led him by the hand to a booth in the back. Wooden tables and brick walls. She looked at him with soft, almost sad, eyes and continued to hold his hands. “You’re thinner,” she said. “God, I sound like my mother.”

  He’d stopped weighing himself at the gym because he’d stopped going to the gym. But he was eating better.

  Sunil scooted forward on the leather banquette. Their drinks came and he told her he’d been thinking about her parents, refining an idea on the train. It had been obsessing him, this puzzle of their motives and beliefs. He wanted to present an idea he thought would help Amy be less frustrated with them.

  Because they were good people, he said, not inclined to dislike or shun, he thought their initial hostility to his and Amy’s marriage was more a show of hurt feelings than a serious objection to his not being Jewish. “They were offended, but not for religious reasons. They didn’t want to categorically reject me.”

  Amy shook her head. “You don’t understand how much they’ve invested in the idea of themselves as religious people.” Like all fundamentalists, they saw themselves as following not just any code, but the right code. She wrapped her hands around her wineglass, her wedding band clinking in a momentary pause in the noise. “I think it’s easy for journalists to feel self-righteous. Their vocation is serving up truth to the public. And at Moment, there’s a culture, a cohort, they can be a part of and feel good about.” But they didn’t go along with everything Orthodox, she pointed out. “They don’t discriminate against gay people—I don’t think they even believe it’s a sin. My gayest friend from high school has been over a lot, and they couldn’t be nicer to him.”

  “Yes, exactly, another data point, as you would say.” It felt so good to be talking to her again, face to face. “They adopted externally justified moral principles—Jewish moral codes—but some parts of this code conflict with what they know to be right. So then, why hold on to the code at all? Forgive me, I’ve been thinking nonstop about external moral codes.”

  “This has been a sore spot between you and my parents in the past. My mom saying you were amoral and anti-God. The look on your face.”

  “Was I rude?”

  “On the arrogant side,” she said.

  He shook his head in dismay. “I’m not planning to bring up any of this, I just think it’s helpful to think about it this way. Don’t you?”

  “What I want to know is why they have to believe their moral code comes from God.”

  “Right, that’s just it. An external justification, in this case a transcendental one (from God), seems to be irrelevant for them,” he said. “See, the way they know some principles of the transcendental code are right is because they’re supported by their own confident moral judgments. When the code conflicts with their own internal judgments, they say, ‘Fuck the code.’ This rejection shows them that they don’t even need support from an external a code. It’s irrelevant. See what I mean?”

  “I think so. Yes. You’re saying that you’re like my gay friend, in my parents’ eyes. They’re good people so they really don’t want to discriminate. Their initial reaction to our marriage was like a hiccup. They thought they should object because of their religious code, but in the end they really couldn’t because it wasn’t fair or right to exclude you, to keep us apart.” She leaned back, her dolphin-sleek profile pale against the red leather seat. “I think that does change how I think of them. Of course I know they love me, and they love you, but it’s a relief to see them as flexible in this way. More flexible than I thought, anyway.” She leaned over and kissed him. “To choices,” she said. “To us.”

  Amy’s blonde head flashed in the mirror behind them, and he thought of her steadfastness in Nairobi, her yellow amid their brown, how she was both slender and unassuming like his father and a fistful of steeliness like his mother. Sunil had told Amy about the envelope his mother had sent, but he had not gone into much detail. He had brought it with him and was waiting until they were back in her house, secluded in her room, to linger over the pages with her, for they still felt intensely private. Although every day since the receipt of the package he had woken vowing to call his mother to thank her, to tell her what it had meant to him, he had not been able to do it.

  During their quiet drive back to the house, Amy played him a few minutes of Beethoven’s Ninth, whose movements bridged her daily commute.

  Rivka, too, listened to symphonies. Had played Mendelssohn one evening.

  He did not have feelings for Rivka Lieberman. None beyond gratitude, anyway. He was still baffled and distraught by how those moments of gratitude and intellectual understanding had felt forcefully, however fleetingly, like some kind of love. He had run into Rivka just once since she left his apartment. She had been outside the library peeling an orange, white pith under her nails, and had pointed to a green apple poking out the top of her backpack. “Fruit?” Then assessed him in her unnerving way. “Remember, the brain needs sugar.” He had accepted because he could not remember if he had anything but popcorn in his apartment.

  “I finished my dissertation,” he said to Amy now. “I’ve been approved for spring funding.”

  The car slowed softly, as if braking into a featherbed.

  They were on her street, almost at her parents’ house. The road was recently paved, completely smooth, with no center stripes. This was the kind of street where lines were not needed. Here was successful self-rule and self-control. Where everyone behaved as he ought.

  Amy steered the car into the driveway and put it in park and turned off the ignition and clicked off her seatbelt. She leaned into him and hugged him very hard. His arms wrapped her narrow back, and he pulled her as close as he could given the seatbelt still locking him in. Amy took his head in her hands.

  Inside the potpourri-smelling foyer, Amy released her briefcase onto a bench. She slipped off her shoes. His own shoes were the largest in the neat row against the wall. Very close to them was a small, very worn, pair of black sandals that looked like nothing Amy or her mother or sister would ever wear.

  “We’re in here!” Ariel called from the living room deep inside the house.

  Amy took his arm, as if with pride, and walked him down the hallway. Warm lamps lit the people in the room. Three people.

  He did freeze for a moment, but he did not buckle. No, after a first startled hesitation, he moved steadily and silently across the plush carpet to greet his mother-in-law and father-in-law and embrace them before facing his mother.

  She hugged him fiercely, desperately, as she had in Nairobi the first night they arrived. He was surprised to feel relieved to see her, and to be held by her; to know that she had survived the last few months; to feel her strength and believe in her desire to be with him. Because there was little give left in his bony, grief-soldered body, his depleted mind.

  On the table in front of his mother was a small dish containing a used teabag, the brand she filled whole suitcases with in Kenya and carried back to Columbus. She’d brought the Kauffmans several bags of the Indian equivalent of Chex Mix, snacks that turned your fingertips orange. Also in front of his in-laws were wineglasses, a half-empty bottle, and dishes of flawless green olives. Jazz from the local public radio station gently buzzed the air. Then the Kauffmans stood, and all three of them quietly filed out of the room.

  “We’ll leave you alone,” David said.

  As Sunil watched Amy’s firm back and bare legs walk away from him, he realized: she had brought them together. She wanted them to find peace, just as she had been advocating for months.
But could he do it? Could his mother? She was here; she must want it as much as he did.

  “Mom, how are you?”

  “I have been worried sick about you! Me,” she sniffed. “I am fine.”

  They sat on the Kauffmans’ springy new couch, awkwardly turned to face each other. Right away, Sunil pulled the envelope out of his backpack, the edges now worn from his repeated opening and closing. “Thank you for sending this. It means a lot to me.”

  “I have been waiting for your reply,” she said quietly. She had recently dyed her hair—no gray at all was visible. This, combined with the elegant sari she was wearing made her look severe, like an old-fashioned portrait. He was touched she had dressed up.

  “I can imagine. I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t help much now to say that I really did try to call. I even tried to write a letter, but I just couldn’t. Seeing all these mementos that Dad kept, that I had no idea still existed, it made me feel so empty and sad. I missed him too much to talk about it.”

  “It was his secretary who did this, who preserved them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mrs. Fiske.”

  “Yes, I remember her, but what does she have to do with it?”

  She shook her head and burst into tears. “Everything is upside-down, that is all. I had forgotten who she was—you know, I barely knew anything about that part, the office. So,” she said tentatively, “you do not think they were having an affair?”

  “Definitely not! Dad was too low-energy to have an affair. Not that he would have anyway—” He was moved to wipe a wet blushy smudge from her cheek with his thumb. He began to ask her if seeing him was the only reason she’d come to DC, when he caught sight of the cluster of enormous suitcases in the corner. Of course. “You’re moving back there,” he said.

  She nodded. She explained how, earlier in the day, she had visited the Kenyan embassy. So the nice clothes weren’t for him, but no matter. Her paperwork was now in order. “There is now nothing for me here,” she said.