Interpreter of Maladies (16 page)

Before he could answer, she took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom, whose door was normally kept shut. Apart from the bed, which lacked a headboard, the only other things in the room were a side table with a telephone on it, an ironing board, and a bureau. She flung open the drawers of the bureau and the door of the closet, filled with saris of every imaginable texture and shade, brocaded with gold and silver threads. Some were transparent, tissue thin, others as thick as drapes, with tassels knotted along the edges. In the closet they were on hangers; in the drawers they were folded flat, or wound tightly like thick scrolls. She sifted through the drawers, letting saris spill over the edges. “When have I ever worn this one? And this? And this?” She tossed the saris one by one from the drawers, then pried several from their hangers. They landed like a pile of tangled sheets on the bed. The room was filled with an intense smell of mothballs.

“‘Send pictures,’ they write. ‘Send pictures of your new life.’ What picture can I send?” She sat, exhausted, on the edge of the bed, where there was now barely room for her. “They think I live the life of a queen, Eliot.” She looked around the blank walls of the room. “They think I press buttons and the house is clean. They think I live in a palace.”

The phone rang. Mrs. Sen let it ring several times before
picking up the extension by the bed. During the conversation she seemed only to be replying to things, and wiping her face with the ends of one of the saris. When she got off the phone she stuffed the saris without folding them back into the drawers, and then she and Eliot put on their shoes and went to the car, where they waited for Mr. Sen to meet them.

“Why don’t you drive today?” Mr. Sen asked when he appeared, rapping on the hood of the car with his knuckles. They always spoke to each other in English when Eliot was present.

“Not today. Another day.”

“How do you expect to pass the test if you refuse to drive on a road with other cars?”

“Eliot is here today.”

“He is here every day. It’s for your own good. Eliot, tell Mrs. Sen it’s for her own good.”

She refused.

They drove in silence, along the same roads that Eliot and his mother took back to the beach house each evening. But in the back seat of Mr. and Mrs. Sen’s car the ride seemed unfamiliar, and took longer than usual. The gulls whose tedious cries woke him each morning now thrilled him as they dipped and flapped across the sky. They passed one beach after another, and the shacks, now locked up, that sold frozen lemonade and quahogs in summer. Only one of the shacks was open. It was the fish market.

Mrs. Sen unlocked her door and turned toward Mr. Sen, who had not yet unfastened his seat belt. “Are you coming?”

Mr. Sen handed her some bills from his wallet. “I have a meeting in twenty minutes,” he said, staring at the dashboard as he spoke. “Please don’t waste time.”

Eliot accompanied her into the dank little shop, whose walls were festooned with nets and starfish and buoys. A group of tourists with cameras around their necks huddled by the
counter, some sampling stuffed clams, others pointing to a large chart illustrating fifty different varieties of North Atlantic fish. Mrs. Sen took a ticket from the machine at the counter and waited in line. Eliot stood by the lobsters, which stirred one on top of another in their murky tank, their claws bound by yellow rubber bands. He watched as Mrs. Sen laughed and chatted, when it was her turn in line, with a man with a bright red face and yellow teeth, dressed in a black rubber apron. In either hand he held a mackerel by the tail.

“You are sure what you sell me is very fresh?”

“Any fresher and they’d answer that question themselves.”

The dial shivered toward its verdict on the scale.

“You want this cleaned, Mrs. Sen?”

She nodded. “Leave the heads on, please.”

“You got cats at home?”

“No cats. Only a husband.”

Later, in the apartment, she pulled the blade out of the cupboard, spread newspapers across the carpet, and inspected her treasures. One by one she drew them from the paper wrapping, wrinkled and tinged with blood. She stroked the tails, prodded the bellies, pried apart the gutted flesh. With a pair of scissors she clipped the fins. She tucked a finger under the gills, a red so bright they made her vermilion seem pale. She grasped the body, lined with inky streaks, at either end, and notched it at intervals against the blade.

“Why do you do that?” Eliot asked.

“To see how many pieces. If I cut properly, from this fish I will get three meals.” She sawed off the head and set it on a pie plate.

In November came a series of days when Mrs. Sen refused to practice driving. The blade never emerged from the cupboard, newspapers were not spread on the floor. She did not call the
fish
store, nor did she thaw chicken. In silence she prepared crackers with peanut butter for Eliot, then sat reading old aerograms from a shoebox. When it was time for Eliot to leave she gathered together his things without inviting his mother to sit on the sofa and eat something first. When, eventually, his mother asked him in the car if he’d noticed a change in Mrs. Sen’s behavior, he said he hadn’t. He didn’t tell her that Mrs. Sen paced the apartment, staring at the plastic-covered lampshades as if noticing them for the first time. He didn’t tell her she switched on the television but never watched it, or that she made herself tea but let it grow cold on the coffee table. One day she played a tape of something she called a raga; it sounded a little bit like someone plucking very slowly and then very quickly on a violin, and Mrs. Sen said it was supposed to be heard only in the late afternoon, as the sun was setting. As the music played, for nearly an hour, she sat on the sofa with her eyes closed. Afterward she said, “It is more sad even than your Beethoven, isn’t it?” Another day she played a cassette of people talking in her language—a farewell present, she told Eliot, that her family had made for her. As the succession of voices laughed and said their bit, Mrs. Sen identified each speaker. “My third uncle, my cousin, my father, my grandfather.” One speaker sang a song. Another recited a poem. The final voice on the tape belonged to Mrs. Sen’s mother. It was quieter and sounded more serious than the others. There was a pause between each sentence, and during this pause Mrs. Sen translated for Eliot: “The price of goat rose two rupees. The mangoes at the market are not very sweet. College Street is flooded.” She turned off the tape. “These are things that happened the day I left India.” The next day she played the same cassette all over again. This time, when her grandfather was speaking, she stopped the tape. She
told Eliot she’d received a letter over the weekend. Her grandfather was dead.

A week later Mrs. Sen began cooking again. One day as she sat slicing cabbage on the living room floor, Mr. Sen called. He wanted to take Eliot and Mrs. Sen to the seaside. For the occasion Mrs. Sen put on a red sari and red lipstick; she freshened the vermilion in her part and rebraided her hair. She knotted a scarf under her chin, arranged her sunglasses on top of her head, and put a pocket camera in her purse. As Mr. Sen backed out of the parking lot, he put his arm across the top of the front seat, so that it looked as if he had his arm around Mrs. Sen. “It’s getting too cold for that top coat,” he said to her at one point. “We should get you something warmer.” At the shop they bought mackerel, and butterfish, and sea bass. This time Mr. Sen came into the shop with them. It was Mr. Sen who asked whether the fish was fresh and to cut it this way or that way. They bought so much fish that Eliot had to hold one of the bags. After they put the bags in the trunk, Mr. Sen announced that he was hungry, and Mrs. Sen agreed, so they crossed the street to a restaurant where the take-out window was still open. They sat at a picnic table and ate two baskets of clam cakes. Mrs. Sen put a good deal of Tabasco sauce and black pepper on hers. “Like pakoras, no?” Her face was flushed, her lipstick faded, and she laughed at everything Mr. Sen said.

Behind the restaurant was a small beach, and when they were done eating they walked for a while along the shore, into a wind so strong that they had to walk backward. Mrs. Sen pointed to the water, and said that at a certain moment, each wave resembled a sari drying on a clothesline. “Impossible!” she shouted eventually, laughing as she turned back, her eyes
teary. “I cannot move.” Instead she took a picture of Eliot and Mr. Sen standing on the sand. “Now one of us,” she said, pressing Eliot against her checkered coat and giving the camera to Mr. Sen. Finally the camera was given to Eliot. “Hold it steady,” said Mr. Sen. Eliot looked through the tiny window in the camera and waited for Mr. and Mrs. Sen to move closer together, but they didn’t. They didn’t hold hands or put their arms around each other’s waists. Both smiled with their mouths closed, squinting into the wind, Mrs. Sen’s red sari leaping like flames under her coat.

In the car, warm at last and exhausted from the wind and the clam cakes, they admired the dunes, the ships they could see in the distance, the view of the lighthouse, the peach and purple sky. After a while Mr. Sen slowed down and stopped by the side of the road.

“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Sen asked.

“You are going to drive home today.”

“Not today.”

“Yes, today.” Mr. Sen stepped out of the car and opened the door on Mrs. Sen’s side. A fierce wind blew into the car, accompanied by the sound of waves crashing on the shore. Finally she slid over to the driver’s side, but spent a long time adjusting her sari and her sunglasses. Eliot turned and looked through the back window. The road was empty. Mrs. Sen turned on the radio, filling up the car with violin music.

“There’s no need,” Mr. Sen said, clicking it off.

“It helps me to concentrate,” Mrs. Sen said, and turned the radio on again.

“Put on your signal,” Mr. Sen directed.

“I know what to do.”

For about a mile she was fine, though far slower than the other cars that passed her. But when the town approached, and
traffic lights loomed on wires in the distance, she went even slower.

“Switch lanes,” Mr. Sen said. “You will have to bear left at the rotary.”

Mrs. Sen did not.

“Switch lanes, I tell you.” He shut off the radio. “Are you listening to me?”

A car beeped its horn, then another. She beeped defiantly in response, stopped, then pulled without signaling to the side of the road. “No more,” she said, her forehead resting against the top of the steering wheel. “I hate it. I hate driving. I won’t go on.”

She stopped driving after that. The next time the fish store called she did not call Mr. Sen at his office. She had decided to try something new. There was a town bus that ran on an hourly schedule between the university and the seaside. After the university it made two stops, first at a nursing home, then at a shopping plaza without a name, which consisted of a bookstore, a shoe store, a drugstore, a pet store, and a record store. On benches under the portico, elderly women from the nursing home sat in pairs, in knee-length overcoats with oversized buttons, eating lozenges.

“Eliot,” Mrs. Sen asked him while they were sitting on the bus, “will you put your mother in a nursing home when she is old?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I would visit every day.”

“You say that now, but you will see, when you are a man your life will be in places you cannot know now.” She counted on her fingers: “You will have a wife, and children of your own, and they will want to be driven to different places at the same time. No matter how kind they are, one day they will complain
about visiting your mother, and you will get tired of it too, Eliot. You will miss one day, and another, and then she will have to drag herself onto a bus just to get herself a bag of lozenges.”

At the fish shop the ice beds were nearly empty, as were the lobster tanks, where rust-colored stains were visible through the water. A sign said the shop would be closing for winter at the end of the month. There was only one person working behind the counter, a young boy who did not recognize Mrs. Sen as he handed her a bag reserved under her name.

“Has it been cleaned and scaled?” Mrs. Sen asked.

The boy shrugged. “My boss left early. He just said to give you this bag.”

In the parking lot Mrs. Sen consulted the bus schedule. They would have to wait forty-five minutes for the next one, and so they crossed the street and bought clam cakes at the take-out window they had been to before. There was no place to sit. The picnic tables were no longer in use, their benches chained upside down on top of them.

On the way home an old woman on the bus kept watching them, her eyes shifting from Mrs. Sen to Eliot to the blood-lined bag between their feet. She wore a black overcoat, and in her lap she held, with gnarled, colorless hands, a crisp white bag from the drugstore. The only other passengers were two college students, boyfriend and girlfriend, wearing matching sweatshirts, their fingers linked, slouched in the back seat. In silence Eliot and Mrs. Sen ate the last few clam cakes in the bag. Mrs. Sen had forgotten napkins, and traces of fried batter dotted the corners of her mouth. When they reached the nursing home the woman in the overcoat stood up, said something to the driver, then stepped off the bus. The driver turned his head and glanced back at Mrs. Sen. “What’s in the bag?”

Mrs. Sen looked up, startled.

“Speak English?” The bus began to move again, causing the driver to look at Mrs. Sen and Eliot in his enormous rearview mirror.

“Yes, I can speak.”

“Then what’s in the bag?”

“A fish,” Mrs. Sen replied.

“The smell seems to be bothering the other passengers. Kid, maybe you should open her window or something.”

One afternoon a few days later the phone rang. Some very tasty halibut had arrived on the boats. Would Mrs. Sen like to pick one up? She called Mr. Sen, but he was not at his desk. A second time she tried calling, then a third. Eventually she went to the kitchen and returned to the living room with the blade, an eggplant, and some newspapers. Without having to be told Eliot took his place on the sofa and watched as she sliced the stems off the eggplant. She divided it into long, slender strips, then into small squares, smaller and smaller, as small as sugar cubes.