Home To India (19 page)

“I don't want to get a Ph.D.,” I said, my patience and eagerness to be understood all at once abandoning me. “To hell with a Ph.D. What would I do with it? Teach other people to get Ph.D.'s in the same subject? Grow old and crazy in the process?”

“Shut up,” he said. “Stop shouting. Listen to some sense. I'm trying to make you see what you're doing. You're the stubbornest person I ever saw. Headstrong. Your head is of stone.” He tapped his own forehead to make the point. “It's no good. But if you insist on going ahead with this crazy plan—like I said—I'll do everything in my power to stop you, Helena!”

And he did. He used words, arguments, threats. He used love, memories …

A long time ago. Smiling faces; happy shouts. Fleeting. Disconnected. Across an expanse of sand, competing with the sound of waves sloshing against the wet beach, the tide coming in … It's Santa Monica, the day Mama and Aunt Teresa got the bad sunburns and quarreled about which of them always got fussed over more, who got more sympathy, aroused more interest, got more attention. The sun is in my eyes, but I'm smiling as if it is expected of me, since I'm standing in the parking lot at the beach in front of the new Studebaker. The spare tire fastened at the back is a rubber halo behind my head.

The conversations of the grown-ups, half in Italian, half in broken English, wash over me in a comforting tide at first. Aunt Teresa's laughter, my father's asides, Uncle Oreste's jokes, Grandmother Graziani's sibilant scoldings through false teeth as she sits shielding herself from the sun under the multicolored umbrella. The jokes end in jibes. Mama is feeling aggrieved about something someone has said.

“Whatsa matter, Fran, honey?” my Papa asks. “She didn't mean a thing.”

I feel I should understand all of it. I'm left out; bypassed. Nobody actually brings me into the conversation. At the same time, I'm the center of attention on an outing like this. I think it is because I am somebody special. It must be true: I am the only seven-year-old amongst all these adults.

“Hey, tyke, whose pal are you?” my Papa says in English, lifting me up in his arms, putting me on his shoulder, making me feel important. Blue eyes; coarse, curly brown hair; white, freckled skin; muscular body wet from the surf.

“Papa's!” I giggle, self-conscious with love and wonder.

Three sisters arrive in turn to claim everyone's attention. Papa, Mama, aunts, uncles, cousins, all get caught up in these fresh births. Death takes Grandmother Graziani, Uncle Oreste. Aunt Teresa moves across the street. High school has to be gotten through; a war has to start; boys I have known since kindergarten are in boot camp instead of in classrooms.

About that time, Carol Thorpe moved in two doors away. Her father kept bees and worked on the swing shift at Lockheed; her mother made Scottish tarts with coconut and jam and what she called shortcrust. Her brother played the tuba in the high school band. Within a week, Carol fell in love with Andy down the street and talked me into walking with her past his house every evening after school, as though we were going somewhere. He would be practicing boogie-woogie piano—just the bass part. We could see his silhouette through the screen door. Andy, battling acne and a bad case of adolescent voice change, was enough to satisfy Carol's appetite for romance. To me it seemed she was settling for a starvation diet.

Summer nights followed tedious summer vacation days when there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. By contrast, the throbbing Southern California evenings, once the sun went down, offered numberless, undefinable escapades, leaps into fantasy and glamor. Barely eight miles away klieg lights scanned the Hollywood skies, heralding the coming of the stars. Plantinumed, sequined, minked, escorted goddesses rose like Venuses from waves of shiny black limousines while cameras clicked and flashbulbs popped. The lights searched the skies in restless, bold diagonals, crisscrossed each other, and searched again. Carol and Andy would have gone to the beach. Even now they would be watching the grunion swim in by the tens of thousands, turning the waves into liquid silver with their flashing bodies in the moonlight. There was nothing for me to do but lie awake wondering when I would start living. While I waited, I found some temporary time-fillers: school work, movies, and India, each in its way a road out.

“Why are you so interested in India?” Mama often asked. “It's too far away. They worship cows there.”

I didn't tell her my reason because I didn't know myself. Part of it may have been the very remoteness Mama looked upon with such suspicion. Part of it was surely something else. When others in my high school geography class went after the pyramids, the Coliseum, or the Empire State building during a project on famous buildings of the world, I settled on the Taj Mahal at Agra. Did I choose it? Did it choose me? I decided to do a poster of this tomb built by Emperor Shahjehan for his favorite wife: a tribute to love! In undying marble! The drawing arranged itself in my mind first, from details I had been able to make out from a small black-and-white illustration in an encyclopedia: the fine bits of floral inlay in the marble, the paths that lead to the mausoleum, and the evergreen trees that line them. When I started to draw, I walked those paths, climbed those stairs, disappeared through that grand entrance.

The poster needed something more: gilded highlights would do it, I thought, and gold paint was the answer. I had to show what would happen with sunlight on those trees, on that central dome, on those minarets. Even then I knew that what I had perceived as other-worldly grandeur, I had rendered merely garish with my gold paint. I never stopped looking for yet one more detail to add to the picture to make it right, and at the same time for a way that would one day lead me up those actual paths whose reality I had to see for myself. An obsession! Nothing and no one was going to stop me.…

“Do you understand? Nobody, nothing is going to stop me!” I heard myself shout.

Papa stood openmouthed, drop-jawed speechless. He was looking over my shoulder toward the front door that I heard swing open at that instant. I turned around. Mama had come back.

“What's wrong?” she wanted to know. She had the intense look that crises always brought on. Her antennae were up; she could sense trouble, ordinary trouble, across a room. This was something else. Her entry itself was like an accusation. She looked from one to the other of us. “What's wrong?” she repeated.

“Ask
her
, Fran,” Papa said, jerking his head in my direction, but not looking at me.

I could feel the blood hotting up my face; my heart pounding.

“Well, what is it, Helena?” Mama said, trying to keep her voice from flying away.

“I'm going to India to get married, and …”

“You see, I was right!” she said, cutting in. She looked at Papa. “I told you, and you wouldn't believe me, Mario. Months ago! Months ago! We could have done something. But no, you wouldn't listen. Now it's too late.”

“It's not as if I were going to war, or something like that,” I said. “I'm going to get married to the man I love, and who loves me.”

“Be quiet, Helena. You don't now what you're saying. I know you better than you know yourself. I know you could not be happy—nobody in our family could be happy—living so far away. Living with strangers. Eating strange food. Nobody speaks English. Not even Italian. How would you spend your time? Who would look after you? How would you get along with all those foreigners?”

“Mama,
I'd
be the foreigner there,” I said.

“Don't try to be smart,” she said. “You know what I mean. I'm your mother; I gave birth to you,” she accompanied her words with hands on her heart, tears in her eyes. “After nine long months. I loved you so!” She looked out of the corner of her eye at Papa.

“It's true, Helena,” he put in. “We know what's best for you.”

“Then why did you go to all the trouble and expense to educate me?” I asked. “What is an education for if not to help a person manage their own life, be responsible, be an adult?”

“That's a fine question to ask,” Papa declared. “After all the sacrifices your Mama has made—the cheap meals she's had to serve the family, the cheap cuts of meat, the cheap wines, the day-old bread. The clothes she denied herself! My God, honey, she had nothing decent to wear to your cousin Mary's wedding. I couldn't even afford to buy her a new dress. Your room and board had to be paid, every month. Your tuition, every semester. All those books …”

“And your Papa driving that Safeway's truck day in, day out,” Mama said. “Sometimes sixteen hours at a stretch. And now you ask why we did it!”

“Yes. That's what I want to know. Why did you educate me? Why didn't you keep me in the kitchen, rolling out ravioli dough? I wouldn't have known the difference. You could have married me off to a railroader or short-order cook, straight off the boat from the Old Country.”

“Shut up about railroaders and cooks. They're honest, hard-working men; union men, like your Papa. Not a bunch of Reds, anyway,” Mama shouted.

I hadn't wanted to say that about the railroaders. I wanted to die for having said it.

“We wanted the best for you, kid,” Papa said simply, almost apologetically. “We still do.”

His words got to me. I hugged him and stifled a sob. “Forgive me, Papa,” I said into his lapel. He put his arm around me as he used to when I was a child.

“We didn't expect you to turn on us,” Mama said.

“I'm not turning on you,” I said, facing her again. “It's that my experience of life up to now has been different from yours. It's made it hard for us to understand each other. I keep saying things that hurt you when I don't want to. I've had doors in my mind opened up; I've got to go through them. It's my own life.” I was picking words out of a bag of ideas gleaned from books and movie dialogues. And not the less sincere for that.

“I knew we shouldn't have let you go away up North to college,” Mama said, taking up a favorite theme. “With all those Reds there at Berkeley. Foreigners. God knows what all. But your Papa said you must go. It's all your fault, Mario. You've always spoiled her. Something like this was bound to happen.” Then turning to me, “Helena, the Sunday you left for college, when I came back in the house fighting the tears away, here sat Julia and Gloria, in this very living room, crying their eyes out. Even poor little Nicoletta. You don't know what you're doing to your family! What have we done to deserve it?” Words got washed away in tears, and Papa was saying, “Now, now, Fran. You gotta pull yourself together, honey,” as he took her in his arms.

Not to be consoled, Mama crossed herself; called on the saints and the Virgin Mary; alternately cajoled and cursed; made an end to rational talk, if there had been any to begin with; said things, provoked others to say things, that could not be unsaid; made impossible any reconciliation; made sure there would be sleepless nights ahead for all of us; ensured that the weeks that remained would drag on painfully.

The worst of it was knowing that Mama and Papa were right. In their own way. They had crowned me with encouragement and hope; laid sacrifices at my feet. And I had set them up with something they hadn't bargained for, something they weren't prepared to cope with, a surprise of the worst kind: I had asked them to let me go, 10,000 miles away, into the arms of a stranger. What would that day be like, I wondered, when they would have to do just that?

Spring

17

Events took a new turn in the Majra household with the beginning of spring. At first I was too busy being pregnant to notice the changes taking place around me, too preoccupied with my expanding middle and broadening waistline and the barely perceptible stirrings of life. I sat delighting in the one-with-nature feeling, finding fresh pleasure in basking in the sun. I walked barefoot through the new-mown grass as though I'd never made contact with the earth before. I took note of the woodpeckers on the lawn showing off their black-and-white topknots, seeing them for the first time. There were the bravely blooming roses of late January to admire, whose stalks Mali Chella Ram, the gardener, under Rano's instructions, had carefully nurtured through the hot summer. There were the sweet peas and nasturtiums to watch as they nodded giddily in the winter winds. Dahlias, amaryllis, and phlox ran riot, and scarlet canna lilies stood back-lit and on fire in the rising sun.

They all had a spurious air about them. What were these temperate dainties doing here? They sprang up out of the ground surprised to have found themselves in this rich, tropical soil and oblivious to the fight for their lives they had coming to them from termites, brightly-colored beetles, and ants that would make lace of their leaves in a day; from locusts that would reduce them to stubble in one afternoon's nibbling.

However, I was to discover the changes weren't all in the world of nature. There was a shift in family alliances going on, and the nature and intensity of the quarrels and reconciliations were changing. The fights amongst the women over protocol and little privileges went on, but with more aggressiveness. There were daily altercations between Rano and Goodi about clothes, jewelry, who got to go where, and when. When guests were present, the women had even more to get rankled about. There were lots of comparisons made, between girl-cousins, boy-cousins, sisters of a family, daughters-in-law. Someone always came out second best; sides were always taken.

The men, for their part, carped over farm work. Tej grumbled that Hari was irresponsible; Hari complained that he got little reward for all the work he did and was forever pressing for a larger share of the profits whenever a crop was sold. Pitaji made it plain that he regarded Tej's preoccupation with music a waste of time and his frequent forays to places as far away as Jullundur in pursuit of it, sheer self-indulgence.