An Unrestored Woman (7 page)

“Please,” Jenkins gestured, “please sit down.”

She walked to the chair, her eyes still cast down. “Sat Sri Akal,” she whispered.

Jenkins recognized it as a common Sikh greeting. “Yes, indeed.” He cleared his throat. “Well, Mrs. Singh—”

“Yes, I know,” she interrupted in Urdu. “You want to express some condolence, some sadness. Isn't that so?” She looked up at him, the veil fell away, and Jenkins saw that she was not as plain as he'd imagined. Her eyes were extraordinary, accusing, ablaze in the curtained room.

“He was a good man,” Jenkins said, wanting those eyes to stay on him, to punish him.

She smiled. “You're better than him.”

“Am I?”

Jenkins didn't know what she meant but it occurred to him—with a certain horror—that this woman was not grieving. Not at all. That she had none of the weight, none of the blankness of grief. But there was something in her eyes, something more delicate.

“He'd managed to leave the fields,” she began, looking past him. “He was proud of that. He was afraid, after the accident, that he wouldn't pass the physical.”

“An accident?” Jenkins's voice faltered. “I never noticed.”

Her eyes darted back to him. “You're lying. It was obvious. His arm was never the same. He could hardly raise it past his shoulder.” She smiled faintly. “Believe me, I know.”

It was then that Jenkins noticed the slight bruise on the side of her face. He smiled back despite the pain that shot through his spine. “No, not a thing.” He looked beyond her, at the fan, and it seemed to him a murderous thing. A thing that would go on and on, revolving through all of time, slicing through everything that was ever dear to him.

“Cruelty's a strange thing,” she said after a long moment. “It gets so you actually miss it.”

Her eyes drifted toward the window. It was curtained against the heat, and Jenkins became acutely aware—even though they were behind him—of the tawdriness of these curtains. He felt old. And he felt that some understanding had eluded him; that if life had ever had any nobility it had most certainly, and most perversely, passed him by.

She rose to go, pulling her veil close around her shoulders.

Jenkins wanted to see her out but all he could manage was to rise slightly from his chair.

She turned at the door. “Did he say anything before he died?”

“Your name.”

It was a lie she forgave, it seemed to him, and very nearly expected. Once she'd left he drew the curtain back. He watched the two figures—hers straight and determined, her white veil blowing in the hot desert wind, and the old man's bent, weakened, as if the land and the woman beside him were too vast, and had stolen his strength—as they walked toward the outskirts of town. And the horizon, already white with midday heat, seemed just another thin cloth that she could, if she chose, pull like a veil across her face.

 

U
NLEASHED

The doorman found me the next morning, a Saturday. Just before he did, I was dreaming. I was dreaming that my little sister, Meena, was shaking me awake. “Wake up,” she was saying. “We'll be late for school.”

We were both adults in the dream, but what she was saying seemed to have a certain logic to it. “I thought this was summer vacation,” I said.

It
was
summer in New York, when the doorman found me. I was in the elevator. I suppose I'd been there all night. Or at least, whatever part of the night remained after I got back from the party. Meena and my husband, Vikram, had been there, but I left without telling them. I couldn't remember much more of the party, only that I felt old. Not older than the other people at the party, just old.

I blinked my eyes open, having lost the last part of my dream, and the doorman—I'd passed him in the lobby for months (Vikram had actually chatted with him once and found out he'd lived in India many years ago)—smiled shyly and said in a perfect British accent, “Nine B, isn't it?” And though I was embarrassed, and everything Meena had done came back to me in a rush of pain, it felt like a small kindness: the doorman's brevity, his not saying anything about my being sprawled out on the floor of the elevator, stinking of alcohol, my mouth cottony and rank with stale whiskey. He led me to my door, waited till I found my key, and then stepped aside. “If you need anything else,” he said.

I nodded quickly, not meeting his eyes.

By then my head was swimming, and I felt something coming up my throat. I lurched inside and raced to the bathroom. I had never had more than a glass of wine with dinner, maybe two, but after the party I hailed a taxi back to the apartment, saw the round neon sign for Dive 75, and lost count of the number of whiskey sours. I don't even know what came out first in the bathroom: bile or tears. I gripped the toilet seat, sobbing, then sat back against the wall and that's when it came to me, the last part of my dream: “But it's summer vacation,” I said. And Meena, just like that, just as if she hadn't slept with my husband, said, “It doesn't matter, Anju. You have to wake up, anyway.”

*   *   *

When Meena and I were in elementary school, me in sixth grade and she in third, our family moved to the United States. Our father got a job teaching in Albany, New York. We stood outside our house that first winter, laughing at each snowflake that landed on us. “Look.” Meena giggled, pointing to my head. “You have more dandruff than Dad.” I shook my head free of snowflakes, glanced down at my hands, and realized I could no longer feel them. Or my toes. I'd never known such cold in India, and it had never occurred to me that cold could do such a thing: crawl into you, as a thief into a house, and steal your fingers and then your toes.

*   *   *

I saw the doorman again the following Monday morning. When I hesitated, he seemed to understand. “I won't tell him,” he said, and the firmness and melancholy in his voice felt as if someone had pulled me ashore after a long time at sea.

“I don't know your name.”

“Jenkins.”

I stood there, fussing with the latch on my purse. I wanted to explain to Jenkins about Vikram, how he'd told me he loved me by the boathouse in Central Park, with the springtime leaves unfurling around us like flags, and how, when he'd asked me to marry him, Amma had breathed, “A cardiologist!” and how all that delight so suddenly had gone sour, like curdling milk.

“My husband tells me you lived in India,” I said.

Jenkins smiled. “A long time ago.”

“When?”

“During Partition.”

“But that was forty years ago! You must hardly remember a thing.”

He smiled again, and this time the smile was slow and patient, as if he'd spent years considering that exact statement, and then he said, “On the contrary, my dear, I remember everything.”

*   *   *

Behind our house in Albany was a creek, and beyond that creek lived the Finleys. They had one son, Sean, who was older than me and Meena. All that first summer after we moved to New York, we played along the creek. We built dams and made paper sailboats and played cowboys and Indians. “You have to be the Indians,” Sean said, “obviously.”

Meena and I looked at each other.

He handed us some sticks. “Here's some arrows,” he said, holstering a toy pistol in his belt.

“That's not fair,” Meena said. “How come you get a gun and we only have arrows?”

Sean sighed loudly. “That's how it was. Don't you even know your own history?”

“I don't think we're those kind of Indians,” I said.

“Doesn't matter any to me,” Sean said, “you still can't have the gun.”

One late afternoon, we played cowboys and Indians, and Sean killed Meena when she jumped from behind one tree to the next, and he killed me while I was hiding behind a huckleberry bush. Afterward he walked triumphantly along the perimeter of the yard and the creek and then we all lay down in the tall grass. The leaves of the birch trees that lined our yard swayed in the breeze and the sun dappled us with coins of light. In the air was the scent of honeysuckle and birch sap and wild lavender. We'd been in America for eight months now, and the sky, as I gazed up at it, no longer felt new to me but shone like polished silver. Here, all the dirt and noise and crowds of India were gone, and we could lie on a wide expanse of grass undisturbed, the sky spinning around us blue and empty and feverish with light.

I was nearly asleep when Sean sat up and said, “I know a new game.”

“We have to get home,” I said. The sun had dipped low behind the birch trees, and the creek was a dark, silent ribbon.

“You'll like it.” He got up and walked to the clump of trees. He stood on the far side of one, where we couldn't see him.

Meena looked at me. A distant lawn mower sputtered like a weeping animal in the hush of twilight.

“Come on!” he yelled.

Meena got up first. I followed. His pants and underwear were around his ankles. There it hung, a deflated balloon. We stared at it. “Go ahead,” he said. “Put it in your mouth.” We stood there unmoving until he took Meena by the wrist and pushed her onto her knees. Then he grabbed the back of her head and pulled her to him. I thought I might cry but why should I cry when Meena wasn't? Then, when she was done, I did the same. It felt rubbery, flimsy, thin, like a second tongue, and then it stiffened and my mouth filled with something warm and acrid. Sean pulled away and I scrambled to my feet. Meena wasn't watching either of us; she was standing by a tree, scraping at its bark. Even from where I was standing I could see that her tiny fingernails were bleeding. I yanked her wrist away and that's when I heard it again: the lawn mower. It filled the hollow of my head like a rush of water, and I said to it, “Stay with me. Go on and on forever. I'll be fine, so long as you're with me.”

*   *   *

Two days later I was walking past a group of girls who were standing just beyond my locker. One of them pointed and the other giggled, and the third turned in my direction and said, “You know what you are, Ann-ju?”

It's Anju, I wanted to say, not Ann-ju. Anju. Like
un
-der, like
un
-til, like that book we're reading in English class,
un
-abridged.

But she was smiling for all the world as if she were about to tell me a grand and wondrous secret. She relished each word as she said it: “You're a slut.”

I might've smiled. The word was so perfect in its way.
Slut.
It was a wave pounding a shore. It was Sean leaving my mouth. It was the membrane around my heart, tearing.

*   *   *

Funny what only a few years of marriage does, the way it blinds you. I'd leave them together, alone, while I went to pick up milk at Fairway, or a bottle of wine at West Side. “Don't start without me,” I'd sing over my shoulder while Meena chopped vegetables and Vikram smiled over his newspaper or his medical journal or his television. “Don't worry, Anju-like-
un
-dulate,” he'd say.

It was a joke between us, from the very start. “But it's two syllables,” he said on our first date. “How can you mess that up?”

I shrugged. “Friends I've known for years still get it wrong.”

“You're a linguist. That must drive you mad.”

“I give them a homophone,” I said.

“Like what?”

“An ‘un' word. Like un-like.”

“Or like un-cork,” he offered enthusiastically, and then quieter, looking for a long moment into my eyes, “Or like un-believably beautiful.”

I laughed. “You're a cornball.”

“How un-kind of you,” he said.

“Stop.”

“What? You're un-impressed?”

We were at Candle Café. Vikram was doing his residency at Lenox Hill, and he'd asked me to pick the restaurant. It was winter, early evening, but already dark. Snow had fallen earlier in the day but now there was only a shimmering stillness. Taxis flashed by the window, people wrapped in scarves and thick coats trudged past, a distant truck rumbled, and yet the stillness was complete. As if the yellow-lit restaurant, our tiny table at its center, the overstuffed warmth of our wool sweaters, and even the bitterness of our coffees formed a supreme and cardinal quiet, like the very center of a storm, and we only had to go on, to simply go
on
, for the stillness to continue.

*   *   *

The next time the doorman found me—a week after the incident in the elevator—I was sprawled next to the trash bins, in the basement of our building. I didn't mind the stink of rotting food. Nor the concrete floor damp with runoff from the leaky bins. The light directly above was burned out but the other one, at the opposite end of the narrow hall near the elevators, lent me the feeling of being in a cave. Hidden, wounded, savage. This time I remembered exactly how I'd gotten there: I'd been drinking a glass of wine. Well, a bottle. And then another. Vikram had been called to the hospital, a car accident. One of the passengers in a taxi had been carrying a bouquet of flowers and one of the stems—on a hydrangea, maybe—had punctured her heart. “But
how
?” I asked him. He was putting on his shoes. “How should I know?” His eyes scanned the counter for his keys. “Maybe they were going at high speeds.”

“But a
stem
?”

“Anything can be a weapon,” he said, sighing impatiently, “if you're going fast enough.”

“Maybe it was one of those plastic sticks. You know, the ones they use to hold up the plants.”

It had been a week since I'd found out about him and Meena. We three had been at the party together. I'd left the room and when I'd come back in, they'd been standing in the opposite corner. A crowd of people separated us but I'd had a clear view of them, though neither had looked up to see me. They'd laughed about something Vikram had whispered in Meena's ear and then—with the sure intimacy of lovers—he'd taken hold of her wrist. Brought it close to him. It had been a slight gesture, tender, and yet its familiarity, its insistence, had been sexual. I knew, then. I had lived for an entire week, knowing.