Aerogrammes (6 page)

“Looks like he’s in one of his moods,” Ben said. He tugged at the bill of his baseball cap and gazed at Henry with disinterest. “No one can talk him out of a funk.”

Neneh kept insisting on her privacy, so Ben moved away to sweep an empty cage within shouting distance. “Just don’t get too comfy with him. He’s still a wild animal. He might not remember old friends.”

She turned back to Henry, worried that he had detected the irritation in her voice, but he was avoiding her eyes in favor of the fruit cup. He seemed not to recognize her, despite the red headband, and for a time, there was only the scrape of Ben’s broom.

Henry took up the fruit cup. His fingers, long and slim and thick-knuckled, moved with all the care and precision of an old man’s, as if the object might jump from his hands if he didn’t handle it deliberately. He found the peel-back flap on the lid and opened it as Pearl had taught him to do, an act so perfect, so familiar, that Neneh had trouble containing her smile behind her hand. He drank the syrup first, and she almost laughed when he scooped out a yellow wedge of pineapple with a single finger; Henry always mined the pineapples first. Without hesitation, she reached an open palm through the bars, just as she used to do when asking him to share. Henry put down the fruit cup and watched her hand coming toward him.

With a lunge, he took hold of her wrist so quickly she almost cried out. His grip was frightening in its power and assurance; her bones and tendons were no more than flower stems in his fist.

“Henry, stop,” she said quietly, “it’s me …” But his lips remained sealed, his gaze cold and impassive. Was this the same face that had winced when the trunk door fell on her head? And didn’t he rub his crown just as she rubbed her own? She had collected those memories like precious stones, kept them all these years. Hadn’t he?

But his grip did not tighten or loosen, and she began to wonder if he was holding her there for a reason. Perhaps he was testing her, to see whether he could trust her as before, or whether she feared him and would squirm free of his clasp. She made herself as still as possible. She flexed her forearm and closed her fist as if to transmit her steadiness, her strength, the solid resolve of a promise, until a distant yell came bearing down on them both: “Henry, let go! … 
NO, HENRY, NO!
”

Ben rapped his broomstick against the bars. Henry flinched but didn’t let go until Ben whacked the bars again, harder this time. Shrieking, Henry scrabbled across the cage to the farthest wall. “Wait,” Neneh said, almost to herself, and before she realized what she was doing, she had sprung up and wrenched the broomstick from Ben’s hands.

“What the hell,” he began to say, but stopped short, silenced by her wild, rage-reddened face.

“Leave him alone,” she said hoarsely, in a low, raw voice, as if she’d been shouting for days, years. Ben stood there, staring. “Just leave us the fuck alone!”

Ben backed away, palms raised. “Okay. I’m leaving.”

Dropping the broom, she fell to her knees by the cage and reached her arm through the bars, calling to Henry, coaxing, begging even. No matter how she beckoned, Henry would not come. He had turned away from her, a watery blur of black, and all she could do was trace the air with her finger, the question mark curve of his spine.

Somewhere, behind her, Ben was muttering into his walkie-talkie. She knew they wouldn’t let her return. She wrapped her hands around the bars and held fast to the only thing that could keep her intact, the remembrance of last night’s dream, wherein Henry was being chased by the hunter. Neneh had thrown herself between Henry and the barrel of the hunter’s gun, but she felt no pain as the bullet entered her, only an electric tide that swept through her body. This was death—a last, luminous surge. The hunter was gone, but her death was prolonged, painless, as Henry crouched beside her. And though he could not talk, they were communicating in a wordless language all their own, and he was thanking her, he was telling her that he loved her, he was promising her that she was not alone.

In later years I will come to avoid him, but for now, I am eight years old, and the man everyone says is my father is sitting in the living room. I watch him, discreetly, from the doorway. He is wearing my mother’s baby-blue robe and matching slippers whose seams are pulling apart around his big toe. He arrived the week before with three Air India tags on his single suitcase, looking little like the man in the photograph my mother kept tucked against Psalm 23 of her Bible. In the photo, he was leaning against a coconut tree, an inch of ash on the end of his cigarette.

This was the father I thought we would collect from the airport a week ago. On the morning of his arrival, my mother slipped into her churchgoing heels and dusted her face with Chantilly instead of talcum powder. The Chantilly came in a round pink case as wide as my mother’s hand, and inside was a satin pillow that smelled like the type of lady I was almost sure I would someday become. She looked perfect all the way to the airport, until she parked the car and applied a rash of
blush to each cheek. “Is it too much?” she asked me, and for the first time in my life, I pitied my mother enough to lie and say no.

“Don’t ask him about Dubai,” she said. She clapped her compact shut.

But what else would I ask him about? For the past four years my father had been working in the Gulf under a man we called The Sheikh. To me, The Sheikh was a villain robed in black who kept dragging out the work contract by withholding my father’s passport. I pictured my father pleading with The Sheikh for a brief vacation, just to spend a few days with my mother and me. I pictured The Sheikh, petting his beard, shaking his head no.

My mother and I were living in Trivandrum when my father left to find work in Dubai, before I could form a memory of him. My friends with fathers didn’t treat me differently until the school talent program or my Holy Communion, which all the fathers attended but mine, and suddenly I wasn’t myself anymore. I was his absence. Even in my new white veil and black patent shoes, I was the dented suitcase he had left behind, the one with no wheels.

As I grew older, my father remained ageless, preserved by prayers and photos handled only around the edges, and stories whispered by my cousins on rain-battered nights. They said it happened all the time, the men and women who left for the Gulf and never returned, their fates in the hands of cruel Arab employers, their portraits gathering dust on the wall, not even a headstone to hold their places in heaven.

While my father was trapped in the Gulf, my mother wrote on his behalf to consulates, embassies, connections of all kinds until, one day, she received a letter from him that she wouldn’t read aloud, not even to her sisters. They stayed up late with her in well-guarded talk, all of them in their mother’s enormous
barge of a bed, which was actually two beds pushed together and draped with a quilt to hide the crack where I sometimes got wedged in the middle of the night. That night, I didn’t belong in the bed or anywhere near it. I could glean only this much: my father was not coming back. No one mentioned him for months. My mother grew hard in some buried way, gained weight. I never saw her eating, but sometimes she would come home with a sweet, sticky hunk of
aluva
wrapped in waxed paper, and not three days later, I would find the waxed paper in the trash.

By year’s end, my mother had received a visa to the States, to work as a nurse at a veterans hospital in Baltimore. We moved into a small apartment with rough orange carpeting that had likely seen legions of feet. I had my own room but slept in my mother’s bed.

During the days, she left me with the elderly lady down the hall, who insisted that I call her by her first name. We settled on Harriet Auntie. She stunned me with her generosity—a gold tin of chocolates, an Easter basket, a baby doll that drank water through one hole and made water through another. When I showed my mother the doll, she said that if I liked cleaning up pee so much, I could have her job.

Early in the following year, we received a phone call from my father. “He’s coming,” my mother said, carefully placing the phone in its cradle. I waited for her to weep or laugh or smile, but she kept her hand on the phone, staring at it as if it might spring to life. I knew better than to ask her for specifics, but I imagined a heroic and mysterious escape that included hot words of confrontation, a raised fist, a blackened eye, and a passport produced from the dark tunnel of The Sheikh’s sleeve.

•

The man we collected from the airport, the man sitting in the living room, is not the heroic type. He is thinner than in the photos, with coffee-glazed teeth and shoulders that slope like a worn wire hanger. His shirts are lined with a burnt odor that my mother can’t get out, no matter how many times she pulls the trigger of her OxiClean.

Aside from the first time he saw me and kissed the top of my head, he hasn’t once moved to hug me, as other fathers do. He almost seems afraid of touching my mother, who has stopped with the heels and the blush. Once, we all ate dinner while watching a white family eat dinner on television. Those white people had so much to talk about that the food never even arrived at their mouths. The mother said things like
How was your day?
and
Want seconds?
My father took seconds from a bottle of Jameson.

But this evening, I have caught him alone in the living room, his slippered feet on the coffee table. His eyes are closed, furrows across his forehead, a glass of whiskey in his fist.

I go closer. His fingernails appear recently trimmed, maybe bitten away in that far-off country where he welded metals by day and worried by night. I can just make out the faint freckles across his nose, like a handful of birdseed, the same freckles that appear across my nose every summer.

His eyelashes all of a sudden flutter open. His lips part, releasing a gust of whiskey.

“You’re breathing on me,” he rasps.

I stop breathing altogether.

His lips widen into a smile I’ve never seen from him. “I’m just playing,
molay
. Were you afraid?”

“No.”

“You’re too uptight.” He extends his glass to me. “Here, have a little sip.”

I take the glass with one hand and drink from the opposite
side of where his lips have left a mark. The sip goes flaming down my throat, and my belly shudders and shrinks, offended by what I’ve poured into it.

He chuckles. “You want more?”

I shrug okay.

“No you don’t,” he says sharply. “Remember that.”

He tells me to turn on the radio. I lean over the stereo resting beside the television and nudge the tuner across fields of static. All I can find is classical, a whiny violin and no words to go with it. Sad as a book with no pictures.

My father sits up in his chair and puts the glass between his feet. “I used to play violin,” he says. “Did you know that?”

“No.”

“You didn’t know that?” he says, as if I don’t know how to spell my own name. “In the Gulf, I knew a girl who played the violin so beautifully she would make you cry.”

My mother enters the room, her cheeks shiny with cold cream. On her way to the kitchen, she eyes me, my dad, his glass.

“She has school tomorrow,” my mother says.

He nods emphatically. “Yeah, yeah, we’re just talking.”

“Don’t talk too much.” She clangs the plates around in the sink.

He glares at her back, but the venom soon drains from his face, leaving behind a colorless resignation. He turns to me and shrugs. “She hates me.”

After my mother leaves, my father puts his elbows on his knees and leans forward, his eyes closed. I wonder if he is dozing off. The song on the radio softens and slows, at which point my father takes an imaginary violin in his left arm, pointing it downward, and tilts his chin against it. He draws his invisible bow along with the single, smooth note from the radio’s violin, his face perfectly still, as if listening for his own
pulse. The slipper with the exposed toe begins to tap against the orange carpet. The melody gathers force, and he dives into his performance, elbowing the air, rocking back and forth as he inscribes the space between us with song. The music climbs inside his body, takes possession of him like a long charge of electricity. Trills of joy, half and whole notes, reckless crescendos. I am lost in a rapture of admiration.

When he has drawn the last note, I clap until my father stands and takes a wobbly bow. He puts both hands on my head, which he kisses as if in blessing. “You are the only one who gets me,” he says. “Now go to bed.”

The next morning, I wake up early enough for my mother to rake a brush through my tangled hair and plait it into a French braid. I whimper only once at the pain and sit patiently until she snaps the tail into a hair bobble with purple beads. On the school bus, I keep fingering the taut spine of the braid and sniffing the tail, fragrant with pomade.

All this effort is meant for Wes Lipkin, a boy in my class who double-blinks between every sentence, as if something is permanently stuck in his eye. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, Wes gets on the school bus with his lunch box in one hand and a violin-shaped briefcase in the other. He sits alone, toward the front of the bus, with his back to the revelry at the rear, where kids are shouting, kneeling on the seats, bracing themselves for the turns and hills leading to school.

Usually I sit somewhere in the middle rows, but today I take the seat next to Wes. I say hello, but he doesn’t answer. Wes is bent over his notebook, drawing something on the back, a swollen face with huge, veiny eyes and a tiny line for a mouth. “Is that you?” I ask.

“No,” he says wearily, as if we’ve been through this before.
There is a placid quality to Wes Lipkin, the sorrow of a martyred saint, and a dorkiness that seems almost willful. His lunch box sits between us, the last of its kind in our grade.

Laying the end of my braid over my shoulder, purple beads in view, I ask Wes if he likes playing the violin. He glances at me as if this is a trick question. I say that my dad plays, and he’s very good. Wes erases something. I say that my dad had to leave his violin behind, in the Gulf, when he came to America.