Bone and Bread (11 page)

“When?” I said. I glared at Freddy, who kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror. The Thunderbird was parked in the loading zone again.

“Tonight.” She passed her hand over the top of my hair and squeezed my shoulder. “I'll see you tonight.” She got in the car and waved as Freddy cut in front of a minivan and drove away.

I put the groceries away and went to bed, where I read and dozed and waited for Sadhana to get home from her party.

“Did you see this?” she said, when she came in the room. She held out her hand, and it was shaking.

It was a note, taken off the refrigerator where Deana had stuck it with a magnet. I couldn't understand how I'd missed it.

“She's not coming back,” said Sadhana. She looked
panicked
. “She says she loves us, but she's not coming back.”

After Deana left, Uncle was stuck with us. A friend of Mama's named Sylvia came by to check on us and, after seeing the state of the apartment, began a series of prodding conversations with me and Sadhana (how long before I turned eighteen, what were the exact provisions of Mama's will, who were our nearest relatives living in Canada) before embarking upon some able and unimaginable negotiations with Uncle. Within one week of her campaign of competence, our rightful guardian had rented his house in Dollard-des-Ormeaux and made arrangements to move into our apartment.

We didn't take to Uncle. For all that he was our only living relative on the continent, not to mention the only one we'd ever met, we were in the habit of regarding him as something of a stranger. Though he'd been working at the shop since Papa died, he had rarely visited. He had consulted with Mama on certain matters related to the business or the building, but when she asked him to stay for tea or for supper, he had always declined with a nod almost too decisive to be quite civil.

What we did know did not please us. Every change at the shop had been a change to something Papa had done, a kind of undermining. Never mind that between us we could scarcely remember Papa. We knew from Mama's stories that there had always been a bit of bad blood between her and Uncle, and Mama got along with everybody, so that was really saying something. The main thing we knew about Uncle was that seventeen years ago he had offered Mama fifteen thousand dollars on his parents' behalf for her to go away and leave Papa alone. The other was that he had pitied Papa for having daughters instead of sons. This was a fact that both outraged us and inclined us to regard Uncle as at least a little bit stupid.

Mama had looked pained when she explained that in India male children were more valued than daughters, that it was not at all unusual for someone to think that way. When we asked why, she said it was complicated. “It's beyond my own understanding,” she said, “or I'd try. But your Papa didn't believe that. He told your uncle never to so much as suggest that he was not the happiest man in the world to have two little girls.”

Uncle arrived with two matching Samsonite suitcases and a very modern vacuum cleaner with a see-through canister. He told us that one of the suitcases used to belong to Papa.

“Our mother bought them for us before we came to Canada. What do you think about that?” He swung one out in front of us as if it were a dog we might want to pet. With a feeling of duty, I reached out to touch its cracked blue leather, but neither Sadhana nor I made any reply. “So that would be your grandmother,” said Uncle after a moment.

Papa's parents had not troubled themselves much with us after his death. A letter had come that Mama had read once and put away. And another, later letter had arrived while Deana was with us, inquiring about the terms of Mama's will, as if there were some final proviso her forgiving heart might have led her to include, something amounting to a conciliatory message from their dead son.

But there had been no unexpected stipulations, either rancorous or appeasing. Uncle was to pay for what we needed from our share of the profits of the bagel shop, which had passed to me and Sadhana after Mama's death. He was to continue to run it, as he had since Papa died, with his manager's salary and one-third of a share in the income. All in all, Mama's will was a standard legal document, which, when it was read out loud by her lawyer, seemed like a mistake. Not its contents, but the thing itself. We had always believed that Mama never did anything by the books.

Uncle frowned as he put down the suitcase. “I suppose your mother told you bad things about your grandmother,” he said.

“Not at all,” said Sadhana, which made me glad. I was too indignant for words.

“Ah.”

He put both suitcases down and stepped around us on an appraising tour of the apartment that was over in five minutes. He pointed inside our mother's bedroom. “That is where I will be sleeping, if you would like to get it ready for me.” He sounded imperious, but I could sense a hesitation to go in amongst our mother's things. I told him we would take care of it.

“Good,” he said. “And it is almost seven o'clock, if one of you would like to start making supper.”

There were two weeks left before school started, and Sadhana said later that it was a shame we wasted them being afraid of our uncle. Though he was cold and alien, he was not cruel, but his manner was so different from anything we were used to that we cringed and floundered when he told us what to do. Apart from asking us to cook and clean, he didn't seem to take much of an interest in us. We watched him sidelong whenever we happened to be escaping his notice, ogling the belly stretching his shirt out over his belt and the set look of his thick lips beneath the thick, black beard that fell three inches past his chin.

Uncle was as strange to us as a new kind of tree, a fir in a grove of maples, and he might have felt the same way about us, since he had always been a bachelor. He said things like “You must fight your feminine tendencies towards lasciviousness” and “You are in league with each other, I know,” which baffled and insulted us but gave me the idea that we made him nervous. Taken with his tendency to leave us to ourselves, Uncle's remarks were like those of an armchair anthropologist, a Victorian studying the natives by virtue of reports and illustrations alone. Like the first attempts of the ancients to track the stars, he managed to get some things right, for who were we in league against if not him?

We did our best to keep house, though we had no experience and he was impatient with the results. When he was at work, it became a game, and though Sadhana usually took the lead, we both took pleasure in the measuring out of ingredients, the chopping of vegetables, even the wiping down of the counter — in all of the things that seemed to connect us to Mama. It had become possible to cook without thinking of the chicken we'd made, though we also did not buy any meat, keeping instead to Mama's few vegetarian cookbooks and the handwritten recipes she'd tucked inside.

Stirring a curry as Uncle finished a shift downstairs, taking turns performing elaborate taste tests between seasonings, my sister and I found ourselves laughing, and to have that feeling return so suddenly, when I thought it might never be given back to us, almost stopped me up short. It was more than I could do not to cry, which, since I was crying about a lack of crying, was enough to make me laugh or cry all over again.

I reflected, when she stood in profile to me at the stove, that my sister was very beautiful. She had always been pretty, but she had finally grown into her high brow and cheekbones. When she caught me staring, Sadhana smiled and handed me the wooden spoon to take a turn.

But when Uncle clomped upstairs in his steel-toed boots, our peace was shattered. Hunched over the bowl with focused scrutiny, he tasted the curry and declared it inedible, even as flecks of it caught in his beard and moustache as he bolted it down. “It is a shame your mother didn't teach you how to cook,” he said between bites. “But then, I suppose she did not know herself.”

As our routine shifted with the start of school, Uncle began flexing his authority like a long unused muscle. Accustomed only to the management of employees in the bagel shop, his preferred method of interaction was issuing orders. We soon discovered more than we wanted to know of his views on the evils of contemporary culture. There seemed to be no end to the list of things Uncle did not approve of: music, sleeping in, caffeine, movies, phone calls for any purpose besides making plans, bright colours, Hallmark holidays, novels, exhibitions of emotion. Our list was shorter and consisted only of him, and possibly culottes, an article of clothing for which our mother had had an odd fascination.

Weekday mornings were always a battle, for, like Mama, he woke very early, around five, and he could not understand why we did not spring out of bed and dash to the kitchen with the alacrity of hungry cats. “You are the laziest children I have ever heard of!” he would bellow from the doorway to our bedroom. “You are a disgrace!” He was impatient because he had to take a break from his early shift to wake us and ensure we were on our way to school. Sluggish and indifferent as we were in the mornings, he did not trust us to rouse ourselves. He cursed the gossiping he suspected of robbing our sleep, as if anything besides our separate unhappiness would have forced us to keep silent vigil throughout the night.

Besides the difficulty of pushing through tiredness that felt like six feet of water, I, for one, was not anxious to go to school. Everyone knew that our mother had died over the summer, and I could feel the pity and curiosity of my classmates like a stinging brand that singled me out with its fresh pain. Everything I said or did in the mornings was dilatory or cantankerous, and Sadhana likewise.

We were still in our pyjamas when Sadhana tried to tell Uncle about a blockage in his sacral chakra. I didn't think she believed in that stuff, and neither did I, except for how Mama had told me my heart chakra was strong and with Sadhana it was
vishuddha
, the one in the throat that controls communication. Anything Mama told us had a truth to it that went deeper than lucid belief. It was knowledge that came to us like melodies or the days of the week, information that was simply there rather than something up for debate. Mama had learned how to read auras from a guru in California, which she said was a Whole Other Story. So when Sadhana started talking to Uncle about the six-petalled chakra located more or less in the area of his groin, it was clear, to me at least, that she was trying to insult him rather than help him find his way to personal enlightenment. A blocked sacral chakra meant the inhibition of joy, enthusiasm, and creativity. But Uncle wouldn't even listen long enough to be insulted.

“Do you know about the kundalini, Uncle?” Sadhana was sitting cross-legged on the rug when she was supposed to be getting ready for school. Neither of us had tried much with Uncle, but sometimes she just talked for talking's sake. “We can teach you how to meditate so that you can raise the kundalini energy up through your spine. Right now I suspect you have a blockage in your
svadhisthana
.”

Uncle was retying his turban, wrapping a five-metre swathe of maroon cloth with an intricate technique, as he held one end of it in his teeth, then pinched the fabric at the top of his forehead as he angled the folds of material. I slurped cereal at the kitchen table while Sadhana waited for Uncle to respond. After what felt like a long time, he took the end out of his mouth and tucked it in over his right ear, speaking to my sister without looking at her. “Can't you be quiet?” he said. “Good girls are quiet girls.”

We were grateful yet sulky about the long hours he spent working at the shop. If anything he worked longer hours now that he lived right upstairs and home was no longer a place of perfect frozen dinners, cable television, and an immaculate lawn but a cramped two-bedroom apartment with no air conditioning and two bereaved teenage girls with cried-out saucer eyes who stared at him like a jailer.

Though at first we were united against Uncle, the fellow feeling that had sprung up between me and Sadhana seemed in danger of dissolving. One night after she snapped at me during dinner, I waited until she was taking a bath and slipped her diary out from where I had seen her hide it between her mattress and the box spring.

She had filled far more pages in her birthday notebook than I had, as though she had been writing in it steadily since Mama gave them to us. I flipped to the most recent page and, spotting my own name, was overcome with such mingled feelings of guilt and dread that I shut it at once and slid it back under the mattress. But knowing the diary was there made reading irresistible, and before the week was out I had looked at it four more times.

Each new foray into Sadhana's notebook brought with it more mortification. It was almost as if she suspected I was reading it and was creating ever more horrible observations as punishment. Far from being an inventory of crushes or a logbook of secret languages or anything that our childhood had prepared me to find, my sister's diary resembled most closely a catalogue of grievances with accompanying insults. I recognized the names of teachers, of girls in her class and in her soccer league, but the principal offender, appearing on nearly every page, was me. The time I hadn't stopped to help her find her headband in the morning, the way I finished my homework before she did, the style of my hair — all of these might as well have been crimes against humanity from the way they were described in the pages of my sister's diary. As a result, I was deemed a jerk, a show-off, a total fashion disaster. When I read
Beena's face is so fat it looks like a
pecan pie
, I had to snap it shut before my tears could mar the ink.

With each successive furtive reading, the shame of looking drained away, replaced instead by a growing outrage for which there could be no expression and no redress. Even Uncle came off better than I did in the world according to Sadhana's diary. But though my sister and I had stopped confiding in one another, a slight hardness in her demeanour was the only clue that she might despise me.