Digging to America (7 page)

So you see, Sami told Bitsy, it wasn't as romantic as you think.

Maryam said, Oh, Sami. She spoke very gently, to hide the outrage in her voice. You can't know everything about it, she said. And then she turned away, with as much dignity as possible, and carried the grape leaves out of the room and shut the swinging door behind her.

In the kitchen, she filled the kettle with water for tea. Obviously she should clear the table before she served the pastries and fruit, but she wasn't quite ready yet to go back and face the others. She lit the burner beneath the kettle and then remained at the stove, her arms folded tightly across her chest, her eyes stinging with tears.

When Kiyan had told her, for instance, that her hair smelled like an Armenian church: what could Sami know about that?

The swinging door opened slowly and Connie walked through, carrying two plates. Maryam said, Please, you mustn't, and took the plates from her. You'll tire yourself, she said.

Connie said, That's okay; I wanted to stretch my legs. Instead of going back to the dining room, she settled on the stool and watched Maryam scrape the plates. Aren't family gatherings wearing? she said. All those people who know you so well, they think they can say just anything.

It's true, Maryam said. She began fussing with the stacks of soiled cookware that cluttered her one small counter. While sh
e
was facing away from Connie, she dabbed hurriedly at the tip of her nose. And really they don't know you so well, she said.

You're right; they don't know the half of it, Connie agreed. She turned toward the swinging door, where her husband was just entering with two more plates. We're commiserating about family gatherings, she told him.

Ah, yes, dreadful affairs, Dave said, and he went straight to the garbage bin in a familiar way and started scraping the plates. Maryam never could get used to men helping out in the kitchen. Where was Ziba? Wasn't it Ziba who should be doing this? Families in general, Dave was saying. They're vastly overrated.

Connie tsked and gave him a friendly swat.

And holding this dinner at my house, Maryam went on (reminded by thoughts of Ziba). I never asked to do that! I mean ... forgive me; of course I'm pleased to have you, bu
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We understand, Dave told her. Probably he didn't understand, but he was nice enough to nod his woolly gray head in a sympathetic manner, and Connie nodded too and said, It's funny how we get maneuvered into these things.

We're too careful with each other, Ziba and I, Maryam said. She turned toward the stove and uncovered the kettle to see if the water was boiling. Our family is not very good at saying what we want. Sometimes we end up doing what none of us wants, I suspect, just because we think it would satisfy the others.

Be rude, like us, Dave suggested, and he draped an arm around Connie's shoulders and winked at Maryam. She had to laugh.

Then Connie and Dave returned to the dining room for more plates, and Maryam spooned tea leaves into her best china teapot. She did feel better now. There was something consoling about those two. She poured boiling water into the teapot and replaced the lid and then balanced the teapot on top of the kettle.

Maybe the hiss of the simmering water was what brought back, all at once, a scene from the earliest days of her marriage. Whenever she had felt particularly lonesome, she remembered, she used to set a tumbler of club soda on her nightstand. She used to go to sleep listening to the bubbles bounce against the glass with a faint, steady, peaceful whispering sound that had reminded her of the fountain in her family's courtyard back home.

It was Bitsy who thought up the idea of an Arrival Party. That was what she called it, right off, so that Brad had to ask, A what, hon? Come again?

A party to commemorate the date the girls arrived, she told him. In two weeks it will be a year; can you believe it? Saturday, August fifteenth. We ought to mark the occasion.

Would you be up to it, with your mother?

Bitsy's mother had suffered a setback a whole new tumor, this time involving her liver. They'd had a hard couple of months. But Bitsy said, It would do me good. It would do us all good! Get our minds off our troubles. And we'd confine it to the two families; no nonrelatives. Make it kind of like a birthday party. A daytime event, right after the girls' naps when they're at their best, and I wouldn't serve a full meal, only dessert.

Maybe a Korean dessert! Brad said.

Oh. Well.

Wouldn't that be neat?

I checked Korean desserts on the Internet, Bitsy told him. Spinach cookies, fried glutinous rice ...

Brad started looking worried.

She said, I was thinking maybe a sheet cake frosted like an American flag.

That's a great idea!

With candles? Or one candle, for one year. But absolutely no presents; remind me to tell the Yazdans that. They're always bringing presents. And we might sing some sort of song together. There must be a suitable song about waiting for someone's arrival.

There's 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain,'
Brad said.

Well ... and the girls can wear Korean outfits. Shall we offer to lend Susan a sagusam? You can be sure she doesn't own one.

That would be good.

We could have a ceremony, sort of. The girls would be in another room; we'd light the cake and start singing; they would walk through the door hand in hand ... just like arriving all over again. Don't you think?

And, hey! Brad said. We could show the video!

Perfect! The video, Bitsy said.

Her brother Mac had taken all the different airport videos to be edited into a single tape. Since then the tape had sat on a shelf
there never seemed to be time to watch even the news, anymore
but this was their chance to view it. Maybe at the end of the party, to wind things up, Bitsy said. Is this all too hokey, maybe?

Not a bit.

You're sure, now. You would tell me if it was.

You couldn't be hokey if you tried, Brad said.

The nice thing was, he meant it. She knew that. He had this notion that she could do no wrong. It was Bitsy says this and Bitsy says that and Let's ask Bitsy, shall we? She took his face between her hands and leaned forward to give him a kiss.

Bitsy never liked for this to get around, but Brad was not her first husband. Her first husband had been Stephen Bartholomew, the only son of her parents' oldest friends. Bitsy's parents and Stephen's parents had double-dated all the way through Swarthmore and kept devotedly in touch ever since, even though the Bartholomews lived clear across the country in Portland, Oregon. Bitsy had seen Stephen precisely twice in her life both times when she was too young to remember before they entered Swarthmore themselves; but the idea was, they were bound to be instant soulmates. The first letter her mother wrote her, the first week of Bitsy's freshman year, began with Have you met Stephen yet? And no doubt Stephen's mother was asking him the same thing.

Of course they did meet, by and by, and to nobody's surprise they promptly fell in love. He was an ethereally beautiful boy with a narrow, calm face and sea-gray eyes. She was plainer but a born leader, the campus star, outspoken and impassioned. They went through four years of college as an established, recognized couple, although they had such different interests (chemistry for him and English for her, not to mention her various political activities) that it was a struggle to find the time to be together. Christmas of their senior year they became engaged, and they married the next June, the day after graduation, and moved to Baltimore, where Stephen had a fellowship at Hopkins and Bitsy went to work on her education credits at College Park.

Then she met Brad.

Or no, first she started noticing Stephen's flaws. Actually, which did come first? Now she couldn't say. But she remembered realizing one day that Stephen's most consistent emotion was disapproval. Oh, that narrow face of his was more significant than she'
d
guessed! This was a man who could get all worked up about the phrase too simplistic, for Lord's sake; a man who refused to be moved by a haunting rendition of I Wonder As I Wander because he was offended by the ungrammatical construction of people like you and like I. I mean, where will it all end? was his favorite question, and more and more he seemed to ask it about Bitsy herself her tendency to procrastinate, her offhand housekeeping methods, her increasingly lackadaisical attitude toward her studies. He saw the rest of the world as a sliding heap of ever-sinking standards, and it made him frown and fidget; it made him clear his throat in an edgy, portentous manner that drove her to distraction.

Well, certainly a person could have worse faults than that. It was not enough to justify divorcing him. But the fact was, they had married without much more than an acquaintanceship beforehand. She saw that belatedly. They had been smitten with the mere idea of each other two obedient children trying too hard to please their parents and had spent four years keeping to opposite sides of the campus just so they wouldn't have to find out how very ill-suited they were. (Wasn't their marriage almost arranged, really? Was it so different from Maryam Yazdan's? Maryam's might have been happier, even. Bitsy would have loved to ask about that.)

So anyway, along came genial, contented, easygoing Brad with his fuzzy haircut and his loopy smile and his absolute faith that she was the most wonderful person in the world. They met at a campus rally for John Anderson; Bitsy was very gung-ho for Anderson but Brad thought he might stick with Carter. He just wasn't sure. She reasoned with him, and went out for coffee with him later to reason some more. He hung on her every word. They invented further excuses to meet. (Wouldn't voting Independent mean throwing his vote in the garbage? Hmm? What was her honest opinion?) She had never known anybody so trustful. Even what others migh
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disparage his gee-whiz style of speech, his beginnings of a beer belly warmed her heart.

Every time they were out in public she worried he would find some other woman more attractive. How could he not? She knew she was no beauty. That girl behind the counter at their favorite coffeehouse, for instance: she was so much bustier than Bitsy, but it wasn't only that; she was so much softer, more yielding somehow. And furthermore, she was single! Then the girl said, as she refilled their cups,
I am completely and totally bushed, and Bitsy felt a vindictive thrill because that was such a redundant, ignorant-sounding phrase completely and totally, good grief ! until she realized that Brad hadn't even noticed it. He wouldn't notice; he lacked that critical quality. But never mind: he was looking only at Bitsy anyhow. His eyes were the same shade of blue as a baby's receiving blanket, just that pure and mild.

She told him her marriage had been over for months, and he shouldn't give it a thought. She was shameless, ruthless, single-minded, without a shred of conscience. She spent the night in his sweatsock-smelling bachelor apartment and didn't even bother offering Stephen an alibi. And when Brad accepted a teaching job in Baltimore she dropped her education courses flat and never set foot in College Park again.

Of course, both her parents and Stephen's were shocked when they heard the news. Not so much Stephen himself; he seemed more relieved than anything else. But their parents couldn't believe that such a perfect match had not worked out. They blamed it on adjustment problems (a full year after the wedding). Her mother asked her, privately, whether she'd given any thought to the great, great importance of intellectual compatibility in a marriage. And Brad's parents, well. The less said about them, the better. You could tell they thought their son had lost his mind. Such a gangling, graceless girl, not to mention already married and one year olde
r
than he and politically ridiculous! The Donaldsons voted Republican. They lived in Guilford. When they got together with Bitsy's parents, even now, you could see them open their mouths and draw in their breath and then fail to find a single subject they could imagine discussing with such people.

Bitsy had assumed that as soon as Brad's parents became grandparents, things would ease up. But then they didn't become grandparents. (One more strike against Bitsy.) She spent fifteen years trying to get pregnant while other women, heedlessly lucky women, cruised blithely past her in the supermarket with grocery carts full of children. She endured every possible test and grueling medical procedure, and more than once it was on the tip of her tongue to ask her doctors, Could this be my doing? I don't mean just my body's doing; I mean, is it my nature? Am I not soft enough, not receptive enough a woman who ditched her first husband without the least little twinge?

Absurd, of course. And see how well it had all turned out! They had their precious Jin-Ho, the most perfect daughter imaginable. And a child in need, besides an opportunity to do good in this world.

When Bitsy looked back on Jin-Ho's arrival, it didn't seem like a first meeting. It seemed that Jin-Ho had been traveling toward them all along and Bitsy's barrenness had been part of the plan, foreordained so that they could have their true daughter. Oh, it's you! Welcome home! Bitsy had thought when she first saw that robust little face, and she had held out her arms.

But she supposed no one would understand if she called this a Reunion Party.

Bitsy's two brothers were younger than she, but their children wer
e
half-grown. (That used to rankle, a bit.) Mac and Laura had
a
teenage son a certified genius, antisocial and geeky and a disturbingly sexy blond ten-year-old daughter. Abe and Jeannine had three girls, ages eight, nine, and eleven but alike enough, in looks and in temperament, that they could have been triplets. Poor Brad was forever mixing up their names.