And Laughter Fell From the Sky (14 page)

“You’re trembling,” he said.

“I must look awful,” she said.

“Don’t worry about what you look like. You’re beautiful.” He rubbed her bare, goose-fleshed arm.

She wiped around her eyes with a fingertip, but without a mirror, she was afraid she was making things worse. “When are you leaving?”

“Maybe in the spring. Come with me. We both need a change. They have banks in Portland. You’ll find a job. You won’t have to deal with your parents anymore, or the Indian community. You can be your own person, whoever you want to be.”

“I don’t know—” She almost said she didn’t know who she wanted to be, but that sounded too much like something Abhay would say. She
did
know, after all—she wanted to be a high-class, married Indian-American woman. She pushed Abhay away with a realization. “I didn’t obey my parents.” Her right palm was streaked with gray from her eye makeup, and she rubbed her thumb over the marks to try to erase them. “I haven’t been doing what they want me to do.” This thought comforted her, oddly. The events of the past few days were beginning to fit into her view of the world. “That’s why this happened,” she said. “If Kanchan Uncle hadn’t seen us at the hotel, he never would have started this whole thing. So it’s my fault, really.”

“You have to stop blaming yourself for being human, for having sexual feelings, for wanting to be in charge of your own destiny.”

Rasika scooted farther from Abhay, irritated by his words. “I want to be the way they want me to be. I need more willpower.”

“So you’re going to forget that this whole thing happened and go on with your life as planned?”

“I’m going to send an e-mail to Dilip. He’s the guy I met on Saturday. He seemed nice. I just need to try harder.”

“Rasika.” He braced himself with his hands on the rock on either side of him. “Why are you pretending?”

“I’m not.”

“Yes. You’ve always tried to pretend. Pramod told me that in high school you cheated whenever you could. He said you’d sit next to the smartest kids in class and sneak looks at their tests. He said you were friends with this one unpopular smart girl just to get her to write your papers. You were trying to pretend you were smarter than you really were.”

“That little snitch.” She had only told Pramod about her techniques because she thought they might be useful for him, too. “I wasn’t trying to be someone else, I was just trying to fit in. You know?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“I was in third grade when we moved to the U.S. I wore two long braids, and lacy dresses. I was so thrilled to be able to wear pretty dresses every day, because in India I had to wear a uniform. But then I noticed that I stood out. The other girls wore jeans and short hair, so I asked my mother to cut my hair and buy me some jeans.”

“So you wanted to dress like the other kids. What does that have to do with copying other people’s work?”

“We never had worksheets in India, so when I got a worksheet I looked at what the other kids wrote. We never had show-and-tell. I watched what the other kids brought in, and I did the same. I never brought in anything Indian. I imitated to learn to be American.”

“And then, what—you just got used to copying?”

“My parents expected me to get good grades.”

“Why didn’t you just study and do the work? You act like you’re not very smart, but I can tell you are. You could’ve gotten good grades if you’d studied.”

“I didn’t want to be the girl who slaved away at her homework. I didn’t want to be like the other Indian girls. I wanted to be happy and carefree.”

“You cheated so you could fit into an American ideal and an Indian ideal at the same time.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Well, it’s time to stop pretending.”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t want you to give in, I guess.” He grasped her hand again. “I meant what I said. I love you.”

She looked at his trusting, boyish face, and smiled. “I’m not giving in. It’s what I want to do.”

“I don’t believe it.”

She shook her head. “We’re too different, Abhay. You’re only interested in me because you’re rebounding from that other woman. The one from the commune.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t even think about her anymore.”

She extracted her hand from his and stood up. “You’re a good friend, Abhay. But you’re not the right man for me.” She was ready to get out of the woods, away from Abhay, and get on with her life. Her bruise would heal. And she would really, really be good from now on. “Come on,” she called to him. She started walking back toward the parking lot. “Let’s get home.”

Abhay watched her teeter down the path in her silky skirt that draped around her hips and thighs, the fabric moving as she did. He was angry that she’d used him for sex and a sympathetic ear. He’d heard the same thing from other women—he was a pal, a friend; he was never
the one
.

She stopped. “Aren’t you coming?”

He looked up at the sky. He wanted her to come back to him.

“I’m going to the car,” she called. “I need to fix my face. I’ll wait for you there.”

He watched her until she turned a corner and was out of sight. He felt silly sitting there all by himself. He’d have to go back to the car and let her drive him home. It was too far to walk. He sat in the coolness and frowned at the path where Rasika had been.

He saw a low rock arch ahead of him and climbed up to investigate. He ducked through it and found himself in a narrow chasm, with the blue sky and lacy dark hemlock leaves above him. It reminded him of an aisle between library shelves. On the sandstone walls were carvings: a horse in full gallop, and three faces in profile. He ran his fingers over the horse’s neck and back. How old were these? What an amazing little place. Did anyone else ever come here?

At the other end of the chasm he came across an answer: a pile of brown beer bottles. He picked up a bottle by its neck, and old beer gushed onto his sneaker. He flung the broken bottle down and fled back under the arch, back down the path toward the parking lot. He heard the grinding of machinery, metallic clanking and beeping. Someone was building something nearby.

Rasika was leaning back against her seat with closed eyes. He opened the door, heard the sounds of a string quartet from the CD player, and flung himself into the passenger seat. She opened her eyes. Her face was “fixed” and she was wearing her sunglasses, even though it wasn’t particularly sunny. She looked cool, distant, beautiful.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They drove in silence. When Rasika dropped Abhay off at his house, she said, “Thanks for your help, Abhay. I hope someday you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

He glared at her lovely, unattainable face. Then he clambered out of the car and slammed the door. As he entered the house, he heard her car zoom away.

As Abhay walked away from her, Rasika opened her window halfway. She felt the urge to call out to him. She knew she shouldn’t. She had to forget about him. She zipped the window up, threw the shifter into reverse, and raced backward out of the driveway. Then she bolted down the road.

Once she turned the corner, she stopped and turned the car off. An elderly man walked a tiny dachshund past the car. Several lawn mowers were droning and whirring. Down the block, she saw a teenaged girl bouncing a basketball. The thump of the ball reached Rasika’s ears after the ball was already on its way back to the girl’s hands.

Rasika took off her sunglasses and tilted the rearview mirror down to look at herself. She wanted to make sure she was ready to face her parents at home. Her lipstick was a bit lopsided, so she dug around in her purse, found a tissue, and inched it along her lip. Then, in a fit of frustration and rage, she scrubbed all the lipstick off and threw the tissue onto the floor. Abhay didn’t rely on artifices the way she did. And then a thought occurred to her: Abhay didn’t approve of her. This realization made her feel incredibly sad. She tried to tell herself that she didn’t care, but her throat felt tight, and then she was sobbing again. She let her forehead rest on the steering wheel. Her wails bounced off the closed walls of the car.

Finally she was able to catch her breath and stop herself. She almost never allowed herself to fall apart like this. As she lifted her head, she caught sight of her face again in the mirror: red, wild eyes and mussed hair. She used every tool in her purse to put herself together again.

As she combed and painted, she began to feel calm and washed clean. It would be okay. She would live through this. She had to go on as planned. She had no other choice.

Chapter 8

O
n a cool, sunny Sunday in mid-September, Abhay sat on one of the concrete steps encircling the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Oregon, enjoying the sound of the waterfalls in the middle of a downtown city block. Not many people were at the fountain. A young man in dress slacks and a sweater was reading on a step below his.

Abhay had learned to say “
Or
egun,” accent on the first syllable, instead of “Ore
gawn
,” and now, a few weeks after his arrival, he was beginning to feel at home. He was glad to be away from Ohio, away from his father’s judgments, from Chris’s job offers and barbecues, and from Rasika’s craziness.

Even though he’d told Rasika he wasn’t leaving until the spring, he’d made a decision to go right after their conversation at Ledges. He had no real job in Ohio, after all, and the only reason he was staying was for her. She was becoming the most important person for him there, and he felt himself falling into his usual unrequited-love despair. The best thing to do, in his experience, was to move on. Otherwise, he’d be in danger of brooding and depression.

A week before coming to Oregon, he’d called Rasika and left a message on her phone, asking if she’d like to meet him before he left. In reply, she had sent him a short note—in an envelope with no return address—telling him that she had decided to take his advice: that she wanted to stop pretending and start living the honorable life she always intended. Therefore, they couldn’t see each other again.

He had read this note several times. He had run his fingers over her pretty handwriting. Then he had ripped it up and stuffed it into the bag of to-be-recycled paper under his desk. She was right, of course. What they each wanted out of life was too different, and it was good that he was leaving.

While he was seen as bohemian in Ohio, in Portland he was quite straightlaced and entirely normal. He was perhaps on the conservative side, since he’d cut his tail of hair off for the temping jobs, and had gotten rid of the macramé necklace and leather bracelets he used to wear. Here, it seemed that everyone—mothers, office workers, grandfathers—was tattooed or pierced in odd places or wearing purple nail polish and bright green sneakers, along with their backpacks and jeans. Not that anyone was ostentatious. Everything was subtle in Portland.

The fountain he sat by was supposedly designed to imitate the movement of water in nature, although Abhay found amusing the prevalence of concrete, and the square and rectangular shapes that predominated. That part of it certainly wasn’t natural. If he lifted his head he could see the green pine and maple trees surrounding the fountain and a tall, three-cornered building rising from behind the fountain. Abhay unzipped his backpack and pulled out the classifieds section of the Sunday newspaper. He tried to keep himself busy constantly, so he wouldn’t think about Rasika. In order to stop thinking about Rasika, he ought to get involved with another woman, but he wasn’t quite ready for another emotional roller coaster.

He shook open his newspaper, folded it to the employment ads, and dug around in his backpack for a pen. Over the past week he’d found work at Powell’s bookstore, “the largest independent used and new bookstore in the world,” according to their ads. As much as he liked Powell’s, and the feeling of being surrounded by books, he didn’t intend to spend his life as a store clerk.

Two young women descended the staircase to the left of the fountain and stepped over the concrete slabs to throw something—flowers, he thought—into the water. The woman with long red hair wore a bright dress, red swirls on a black background. Her breasts were small and high underneath the fabric. The brown-haired woman had on jeans and a sweatshirt.

They turned and walked toward him up the wide steps, and the red-haired one stopped on his step, her sandaled feet planted neatly together. She had traces of mud along the edges of her toenails, and a tattoo encircling one ankle, some sort of tribal design featuring spirals. She bent forward gracefully to throw a dandelion at his chest. The yellow bloom fell onto the step, and he immediately picked it up. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. Her gesture made him uncomfortable. It reminded him of a priest in a Hindu temple throwing flowers at the idols.

“Hi.” She smiled down at him.

Her friend had wandered away, maybe to throw blossoms at some other young man. He got to his feet and noticed with satisfaction that he was almost as tall as she was. Not that it mattered.

“Are you from India?” She had a rosy face and straight, even teeth. A thin ring glinted in one light-brown eyebrow.

“No.” He didn’t bother to enlighten her any further. It irritated him that this was often one of the first questions other people asked him.

“Oh.” She looked down at her feet and brought her dandelions up to her nose to smell them. He noticed her fingertips were stained with mud, too, just like her toes. Her face seemed to flush even rosier. He thought she’d walk away, but she kept standing next to him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She lowered the flowers. “Kianga.”

He raised one eyebrow. “You make that up?” He was being flippant to hide the fact that he felt unsure and awkward.

She shook her head. “It’s Swahili.”

“Ah.” He tried to put on a knowing smile. He wondered how a white girl had ended up with a Swahili name.

“I’m hungry,” she announced. “Want to come over and have lunch?” She spoke slowly.

“I’m busy looking for a job.” He held up his newspaper. “Thanks anyway.”

“You have to eat, don’t you?”

Kianga’s friend rejoined them. She had a small stud in the side of her nose. “He’s coming to have lunch with us,” Kianga said.

“Okay.” The friend smiled at him.

He figured he might as well go along with their plan. After all, he was hungry. He stuffed his newspaper into his backpack. “My bike’s up there.” He pointed to the sidewalk at the top of the steps. “How do we get to your place?”

“This way.” Kianga led the way up the steps.

“I mean, do we have to take a bus, or something?”

“No.” Kianga provided no more information, and Abhay wondered if he ought to press her for details on where, exactly, she lived and how they would get there.

Abhay walked behind the two of them, pushing his bike past a repair crew laying a new brick sidewalk, with orange cones and metal barriers around their work area; past parking lots and parking garages and a three-story, block-long brick building with no sign on it. They turned left into a strip of greenery: the campus of Portland State University. At the end of campus they crossed a bridge over a freeway, and right there—right next to the roar of the freeway—was Kianga’s house. It was one of a row of houses built next to each other, with strips of grass in between. Kianga’s was the ugliest of them all, a long narrow building with a garage underneath and a front door reached by a flight of stairs. Abhay locked his bike to a street sign.

In the living room there was almost no furniture—only a few hammock chairs hanging from hooks in the ceiling, and several large potted plants. The old, stained carpeting had been covered in places with what looked like printed tablecloths or bedspreads with colorful designs, florals and paisleys. The place smelled like incense.

Abhay slipped off his sandals inside the front door and followed Kianga and her friend into the kitchen, where they were taking things out of the fridge and cabinets.

“I’m going to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” Kianga’s friend set a brown hunk of what looked like homemade bread on the cutting board on the island countertop, and started sawing off thick slices.

“What’s your name?” Abhay asked the brown-haired woman.

“Ellen.” She smiled at him as she scooped grainy peanut butter from a large tub printed with the faded words:
NANCY’S LOWFAT YOGURT
. “You want yours open-faced or closed?” She had a bit of a lisp. Her r’s didn’t come out right.

“Open-faced is fine.”

Kianga went out the back door and came in with two large red tomatoes. “Feel them.” She placed a tomato in each of Abhay’s hands. They were heavy and warm from the sun and had a pungent tomato-leaf smell. Kianga took them from him, rinsed them in the sink, and sliced them onto a plate.

Ellen carefully wiped the crumbs off the counter before walking with the plate of sandwiches to the table in the small dining room, which was filled with light from the curtainless windows. Kianga placed her plate of tomatoes in the center of the table. Abhay made himself useful by filling up some water glasses, and they all sat down. They both smiled at him as they lifted their bread. He smiled back. He found it odd that neither of them seemed interested in his name. He wasn’t sure he liked the anonymity of the whole thing. Did they do this every weekend—find a strange guy to invite home for peanut butter sandwiches?

“So. Uh. What do you do here in Portland?” He looked from one to the other.

“I sing,” Kianga said.

“You’re a music student?”

“I’m with a band.”

“And you plan to make a living that way?” He felt like his father, grilling her about her moneymaking capacity.

“Singing keeps me alive.”

“Ah.” He wondered if she knew what he was asking and preferred not to answer, or whether she actually didn’t have a clue. He looked over at Ellen.

She gave him a shy smile. “I’m studying health education,” she said. “We both are.”

“So you’re going to be school nurses?”

“Something like that,” Ellen said.

“Are you in the band, too?” he asked Ellen.

She blushed and shook her head so her curls covered part of her face.

They ate silently. It wasn’t the same kind of silence as the dinners with his parents. It was more peaceful. Kianga looked out the window as she chewed, and Ellen seemed to be looking inside herself. Still, the silence made Abhay a little uncomfortable. He wondered who would be the first to speak. After slowly finishing the last bite of his bread, slowly eating several tomato slices, and drinking all his water, he asked, “Don’t you want to know what my name is?”

Kianga looked at him and laughed. “Tell us, if you want us to know.”

“Abhay,” he said. “It’s a Sanskrit name. It means ‘fearless.’ ”

“uh-BYE.” Kianga copied his pronunciation. “Fearless. That’s wonderful.”

“Why did you invite me over?”

“I thought you seemed lonely,” Kianga said. “You were by yourself, so I thought you might like some company.”

“Do you do this all the time? Invite strangers over for meals?”

“She
does.” Ellen tipped her head toward Kianga.

“Sometimes,” Kianga said. “If I see someone I connect with.” She gathered the dishes together in a stack. “Want to go out and look at our garden?”

They set the dishes in the sink and walked out the back screen door into the patch of fenced yard, most of which was taken over by a vegetable garden. This would explain the mud on her fingers and toes. She probably spent a lot of time digging in the soil. The ground was punctuated in several places by large greenish orange globes. “Pumpkins?” he asked. “You make a lot of pies?”

“I carve them for Halloween.” Kianga sunk into a squat and grubbed out a few weeds. The hem of her dress trailed in the soil.

“That’s a lot of jack-o’-lanterns,” he commented.

Kianga stood up. “I line them up around the front yard. It looks amazing.”

“Halloween’s a really big holiday for Kianga.” Ellen had her arms folded over her flat belly, holding her elbows with her opposite hands. “It’s just about the only holiday her family celebrated.”

“We did birthdays. And we did the solstices and equinoxes.”

“No normal holidays, like Christmas or Easter,” Ellen protested.

“My mom was raised Christian, and my dad was raised Jewish. They didn’t like either religion. So they made up their own, I guess.”

Back in the house, Abhay helped wash and dry the dishes, and then said he had to go. He didn’t want to give them the impression that he was interested in either one of them romantically.

“Want to come and watch our rehearsal tomorrow?” Kianga asked. “It’ll be here at the house.” She leaned against the kitchen counter. Ellen seemed to have disappeared into some other part of the house.

“I don’t know, I’ll probably be busy.”

She laughed at this. “You’re funny. I have someone I want you to meet tomorrow. He’s looking to hire someone to help him out, and I think you’d be a good fit.”

His first thought was that Kianga couldn’t possibly know what kind of job was right for him. But he reminded himself that he was keeping his options open. “Okay. Sure. I’ll try to be here. What time?”

“About seven o’clock,” she said.

She walked him to the front door and watched him put on his sandals. Then, before he could open the door, she placed her hands on his waist and kissed him on the cheek. He wasn’t sure how to react to this gesture. What did such a kiss mean in Kianga’s world? Did she kiss all the men she invited home for lunch?

She stood back with a smile, and he tried to say good-bye in a polite way as he opened the door. Walking his bike to the bridge across the highway, he wondered if Kianga was watching him go.