Happiness Key (5 page)

“Too bad. I shmooze well with the rich and famous. I’d be great for business.”

“You know, the yacht club event planner might be able to use a little help. She always gets swamped this time of year. I could introduce you.”

Tracy wondered if a more tailor-made job existed. She’d planned or helped plan a host of events as a volunteer, first as second in command to her demanding mother, then as CJ’s wife. Charity balls, golf and bridge tournaments, luncheons.

“That’s a very kind offer,” she said. “I may take you up on it.”

“I’ll see what I can find out and let you know.”

She stopped in front of her car and watched him admire it. The BMW Z3 was a zippy little sports car that, in her extreme youth, had been as good as a sign proclaiming that she was fun-loving, carefree and off-limits to anybody except professionals with excellent prospects.
Now she wasn’t sure what it said. Maybe something about faded glory.

“You’ll probably see me going in and out of Herb’s cottage,” Tracy said. “Until we find his family.”

“I’ll ask Alice what she knows.”

She smiled her thanks. They assessed each other for a moment. She liked what she saw, but then, she’d been perfectly happy with CJ until the morning he sat her down in their solarium and told her he was going to jail.

“I’ll see you around,” she said, unlocking her door.

“Sounds like you will. Let me know if you need anything.”

She thought about that as she drove away. And she realized that she had no idea what she needed, not really. She’d never had to worry about it. Now nothing was ever going to be that easy again.

Janya could count on Rishi to get home by dark, although she knew if she wasn’t waiting at home with dinner, he would stay at work eating pizza out of cartons or fried chicken out of buckets. Janya was certain the food must taste like the cardboard that contained it. She could not imagine how anyone who had, at the very least, been
born
in India could tolerate that.

Although Janya’s family had always employed a cook, Janya’s mother had insisted her daughter learn the rigors of classic Indian cuisine. She had learned to buy and grind only the freshest spices. To toast them until the flavors were perfectly enhanced. To create a plate of vegetables so diverse in flavor and texture that meat eaters wouldn’t realize the meal had none. She knew how to mix flour and yogurt for chapati, then to cook it on the
tawa,
a special iron skillet, nudging the edges until the bread puffed like a balloon.

Rishi could not distinguish a chapati from a tortilla.
Nor did he care. Janya knew she was supposed to care
for
him, so she tried, because it was expected.

Tonight, when Rishi walked into the cottage, Janya was finishing preparations for their meal. She was married to an American. She had observed his eating habits long enough to know he preferred French fries to rice, corn on the cob to lentils. As a strict vegetarian, she would never cook meat, but Janya attempted to please him by trying American recipes.

Rishi slipped off his sandals, as they always did, at the door. “I’m home, Janya.” He said the same thing every evening, as if he were afraid she wouldn’t notice he had arrived.

She went to greet him, and he wrapped his arms around her in the American way. She stood close, not relaxing, but not moving away, either.

“Tell me about your day,” Rishi said, holding her close.

“After prayers.”

Janya’s grandparents had been devout and traditional Hindus. From them she had learned the rituals, the devotions and prayers, the festivals and roles of the many deities who were aspects of the one true God. Her parents referred to themselves as cultural Hindus, abiding by many of the traditions, accepting some of the beliefs, but not putting too fine a point on any of them.

Janya was more free-thinking. Educated by Catholic nuns, never discouraged by her parents when she made friends with classmates with Buddhist and Muslim backgrounds, she had learned to look for the similarities in all religions, the distilled essence of what was true, the consequences when people paid scant attention to what they proclaimed to believe. In her home, though, she was determined to hold fast to the most basic traditions of her
childhood. She was so far from her beloved India, and she didn’t want to move even farther.

A Hindu home, even the poorest, had a special place for prayer, a
puja
room, which was sometimes no more than a corner. The beach cottage was so small that at first Janya had feared she would need to set up her altar in a corner, too. But the moment Rishi showed her the closet for coats on the east side of the living room, she knew that would be the place for worship. Not elaborate, not built to the specifications of those who gloried in obedience to every man-made rule. But a place, nonetheless, to remember who they were and what they believed.

Now she opened the door to reveal a platform covered with a beautiful blue sari, on which sat the
puja
tray with the items they would need for their worship and a statue of Krishna. She had painted the inside of the closet a dark red, then adorned the borders with silver and gold paint, and designs of flowers she remembered from home.

While Rishi waited, she lit the wick of a small brass oil lamp, then a cone of incense. Finally she made an offering of water from a pitcher she had placed there before she began dinner preparations, and a bowl of freshly cooked rice.

She stepped back, they folded their hands, and Rishi intoned the familiar prayers they had agreed upon, still somewhat awkwardly, since this had been done only occasionally in the home in which he grew up. They completed the familiar rituals, finishing when Janya laid flowers at Krishna’s feet. Later she would use a flower to put out the flame, as her mother had always done.

When they finished, Rishi followed Janya to the kitchen. “You know the meaning of the word ‘lite’?” Rishi spelled it. “In this country we say something is
‘lite’ if it’s not quite the real thing. We practice Hindu-lite in this house.”

“Perhaps you want something more elaborate?”

He laughed. “No, I’m happy, but your mother and father won’t be when they come to visit.”

This was a game they played. Rishi talked about her parents visiting as if it might actually happen someday. She wasn’t certain why. Either he wanted to make her believe it, too, so she would not mourn so acutely for her home and family, or, just as sadly, he wanted to believe he had made a normal marriage, with in-laws who were every bit as happy he was their son-in-law as he was to have them in his life.

Of course neither was true.

She stirred the pot of New England-style beans she had made to go with rice and a plate of raw vegetables. “This is not quite ready. Perhaps you would like a snack?”

Rishi opened the refrigerator and stood staring into it, as if he had never imagined such contents. When her husband had gone to live with his uncle and aunt, he had been granted few liberties, and helping himself to food when he was hungry had not been one of them.

Janya found this sad. Rishi had been a beloved son until his parents were killed in the poison gas disaster at Bhopal. His mother and father, who had worked for the trade union that represented workers at the Union Carbide plant, had worried about increasingly deteriorating safety conditions and sent their young son to stay with an aunt in Delhi, planning to join him there at the end of the year. Before they could leave for good, their fears had come to pass, and Rishi had been orphaned.

Rishi often said he had been blessed to have an uncle who was willing to give him a home in America, but Janya was not always certain it had been a blessing. To
her, Rishi was like the beggar children who pleaded for attention and recognition on the streets of Mumbai. Hungry for love, graceless, even frightened. Sometimes she thought he stared into the refrigerator just to be certain that food still occupied the shelves and access was no longer denied.

She did not think her husband was handsome. Rishi was just four inches taller than she, thin, but with a muscular body that seemed at odds with itself, never still, never quite coordinated. His nose was prominent, and a mustache made it seem larger still. He had wiry eyebrows over round eyes. When he smiled, his large, perfect teeth were an eruption against his bronze skin.

Rishi was a kind man, grateful for everything he had. Many times a day she reminded herself that she was lucky to have married someone who did not mistreat her, that indeed, she was lucky not to have a critical mother-in-law, or a father-in-law who insisted his son and daughter-in-law grovel like servants. Rishi’s aunt and uncle were not interested in becoming part of their lives. Although they had retired to Orlando, they had visited only once since the marriage eight months ago. They had not been impressed by the apartment where she and Rishi had lived at the time, and they had departed after one night for a long visit with their real son in Ft. Lauderdale.

Now she couldn’t stand to watch her husband gazing into the refrigerator. She moved past him and pulled out one of the fruit drinks she had bought at the specialty grocers. As he watched, she poured it over ice and served it to him, then went to finish dinner preparations.

“Have you had a good day?” he asked.

“Not as good as it might have been.” She took a spoonful of beans and put it on a plate to taste. The recipe came from an American women’s magazine, but as usual,
the dish lacked flavor. She began to assemble and add spices as they talked.

“Did you go into town?” he asked.

“The bus came right on time.” She listed her activities.

“Then you accomplished everything you set out to do. And that doesn’t make you happy?” He sounded genuinely curious. For Rishi, finishing a list of projects was as good as a day at Disney World—to which he compared everything.

Talking about death as she prepared dinner seemed unlucky, although Janya tried not to be superstitious. She told him succinctly what had happened and her part in the events of the day.

She ended her recital. “It was very sad. He died alone. No one to be with him or help him on. No one who even knew he was gone until we arrived. Strangers tending his body. Is that the way of things here?”

“No, the way of things is people dying in hospitals surrounded by machines and
nurses
who don’t know them.”

She shuddered.

“I’m sorry, I made it sound worse than it is,” Rishi said. “People are often surrounded by family, too. And doctors and nurses try to let them pass with dignity.”

She didn’t feel much better. When she died, she wanted the people who loved her right there. She did not want to die in a hospital bed alone and unloved. And she certainly didn’t want to die as Herb Krause had, waiting to be discovered by the very people who had ignored him in life.

“This has upset you,” Rishi said.

Like many people in his field, he was not good at understanding feelings, but tonight her husband was stretching to accommodate her. She was grateful, but sad he had to work so hard.

Darshan, the man she had nearly married, would have understood how she felt immediately.

Since it was necessary, she tried to explain. “I wish that I had done more for him while he was alive. He seemed like a kind man….” She bit her lip, but then she decided to go on. “And lonely, Rishi. We could have been more interested in his life.”

Rishi looked confused. “Why do you think he would have wanted that?”

“Because he was a human being with no one else nearby who cared.”

“What about his family?”

“I don’t know if he has one.”

“I didn’t know.”

“But that would be the crux of the matter, wouldn’t it? That we didn’t know. That we made no attempt to know.”

“You’re upset because you found him. That would upset anybody. But his happiness was not your job.”

“Then whose job was it?” She plunged on. “I have decided to take care of his plants.” The moment the words escaped her lips, she wished she hadn’t said them. Rishi would not understand. And she didn’t want to explain anything else.

“He had plants?”

Exasperated because he saw so little, she sounded harsher than she meant to. “How could you
not
notice? All over his yard. In many,
many
pots.”

He didn’t speak for a moment. She waited for him to tell her that this was not her job, that caring for the plants couldn’t please a dead man, that she had no need to ask this stranger’s forgiveness.

He was silent as she took food to the dinner table and he seated himself in the chair in the corner. He didn’t speak until his dinner was half-eaten, although his expres
sion changed after a few bites, as if he were thinking very long and hard about something.

Finally he cleared his throat. “I think that’s good. That you’re going to take care of his plants until they can be taken by his family. You can’t help the old man now, but maybe you can help the people who loved him.”

She was so surprised, she hardly knew what to say. She had expected an argument, even prepared herself for one. She was chagrined. “Then it’s settled.”

“Maybe caring for the plants will make you happy. And the dance classes?”

The man across from her wanted her happiness. In this, too, she was lucky. But if good fortune smiled on a woman and she didn’t feel that blessing deep inside her, did it matter? Janya managed a smile anyway. Rishi deserved that much.

“Maybe they will,” she said.

Tracy’s cottage had been stripped to the bare bones, all by her own hard work. Gone was the shabby indoor-outdoor carpet that had covered the floors. Gone, too, were two layers of vinyl. Now she was down to the original linoleum, a dreary brown, speckled with black and gray. Scuffed and torn, it was not a good alternative to the carpeting, so on the way home from the realty, she stopped at a flooring warehouse to price alternatives.

Inside a cavern heaped with carpet remnants and exotic hardwoods, she surveyed her choices. Warehouse or not, nothing was cheap, but a pile of ceramic tile caught her eye. The owner told her the tiles were the tail end of a discontinued line, and she would save a bundle. She had already calculated square footage, and he promised he had more than enough on hand. When she said she wanted them, he threw in all the remaining tiles for good
measure, in case some were cracked or broken—and to make room for something more profitable.

At the cash register, the price still made her whistle. Once upon a time she wouldn’t have blinked at spending this much on a designer dress. But those days were gone, or at least in limbo. Still, she knew a bargain, and the tile was lovely, a mottled rust that reminded her of the adobe house in Taos she and CJ had used as a getaway until Uncle Sam took possession. She gave the owner her credit card and arranged delivery.

Now at home—or what passed for one—she thought about everything that was still needed to make the cottage liveable. Over the past two weeks she had scrubbed, bleached and patched all the walls, and now she had to seal them before she redid the one-bedroom cottage with a pale wheat paint she had bought in bulk. The kitchen cabinets had been scrubbed both inside and out, and they, too, needed to be sealed, then painted—white, most likely, to match the appliances.

She had arranged to have most of the rotting furniture hauled away with the layers of flooring, and to replace it, she had spent a long weekend visiting flea markets. She had found a wooden table and chairs she could paint or refinish for the alcove beside the kitchen, a nearly new sofa and easy chair covered in Haitian cotton, and a four-poster pine bedframe for the discount warehouse mattress and box spring she had bought new. From the sad array at the cottage she had kept a dresser and a nightstand with so many layers of paint she had no idea if there was actual wood beneath them. But the last layer was white and fairly new. They would do.