No Country: A Novel (52 page)

“Cool,” I said lamely. I wasn’t looking for a wing to be taken under. Strictly for the birds. Jerome did not push. “It’s okay, man,” he said, giving me space. I slid into my corner and listened, because stories happened here: Disasters under high spirits, goddamn grace under pressure and shit. This was AA, two letters of the alphabet I think I can handle.

“I’m Jerome,” he said at the lectern. “I’m an alcoholic.”

Everyone greeted him. I am a citizen of a secret country with no last names. And one night, out of the spring rain, in walked Gillian. She sat in a huddle with her sponsor, a rail-thin woman called Rachel whose iron-gray hair was nodding as she listened to her. Finally Gillian stood up to speak. I could see the scratches and bruises on her hands, frieze-dried marks of torment, and a red welt down her cheek.

“I’m Gillian,” she mumbled, tears coursing down her cheek, her nose runny.
Someone give her a tissue
, I thought,
this could be me
. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“My boyfriend kicked me out because I am an alcoholic.” She bent her head and wept aloud. I could see her saliva dripping on the linoleum top of the table. “I was fired last week. Don was laid off seven weeks ago.” She seemed to be using up all her strength to stop shaking. When she looked up, I was astonished to see how much anger shivered in her face. “It’s okay for him to drink. But me, I’m an alcoholic, kicked out, sleeping in the street.” Her split lip was bleeding afresh. “I’m so sick of myself I could die,” she muttered. Then, she looked up defiantly. “I’m done with Don. Never again. I want another life.” She faltered. “I don’t know how . . .”

“Love ya, Gillian!” said a voice. It stopped her in her tracks. The anger drained out of her eyes. Her face looked pale. I realized I was the one who had spoken. We had been told not to speak out of turn, but I knew I would die to be so interrupted in this hard world. I wanted to hold her hand but did not, of course, because Rachel would have decked me. I got her coffee instead.

“I’m Billy,” I mumbled.

A week later, I picked up enough of my own courage.

I’m Billy . . .
My voice faded in the church basement, which was hazy with smoke.

“Hi, Billy!” it answered in a chorus. “Speak up, Billy,” someone urged. “You can tell us, buddy.” It was Paulie.

Yeah
, I said to myself,
sure I can
. Let me tell them of my pals Jack and Gin. I am done weaving a curtain of bullshit around myself. I saw Gillian’s face in the crowded basement, smiling at me, looking curious. I was curious about her being curious.

“I’m Billy,” I tried again, coughing to clear my throat. “I’m an alcoholic.” I want to say,
Oh, Gillian, please will you save my life and have coffee with me? I am in the basement of my heart. I cannot sink any further.
Except I can’t say it. Not yet.

The cigarette smoke circled about her like a censer. “I’m going to need a cup of coffee after this,” I blurted out. The room chuckled with camaraderie. Gillian looked at me, her smile dividing all my life between then and now. She fished about in her handbag, then lit her cigarette, her face aglow in that cupped light.

•  •  •

I
N THE FOLLOWING
fortnight, Gillian landed a job stacking shelves at the A&P in Oakridge, about two miles from Clairmont, and I had begun work in a lumberyard close by. We rode the same bus route to work, and I made sure I got on the same bus. In six weeks, we moved in together.

From our small apartment we could hear the percussion of the long goods trains. They soothed our sleep, touching our old building with the thrum of unseen fingers. Our one room, just off the staircase, had two large windows, side by side, which faced the shady street. The floor was old mosaic, the size of large, uneven dice. In front of one window stretched the iron geometry of the fire escape. Gillian put her pots of geraniums there. The tall windows let in the most marvelous mellow light, and our river flowed only a block away, just beyond a narrow park. Some evenings, a magical fog came from it and greeted me at our door as I returned from work, my back sore from lifting, a fine powder of wood chaff on my cap.

Our bed stood by the tall windows, Gillian’s great-aunt’s hope chest at its foot. On it she placed a flowering plant. We hung a small square mirror on the wall in which we could see ourselves making love, and next to it we put our carved elm chair. It had a sagging seat, its old tapestry fabric worn and smudgy. But it was
an old beauty, and I never tired of caressing the subtle pitch of its broad arms. Gillian had hauled it from someone’s old barn, and the wood had been grimy with dirt, which I had helped clean and polish. Beside it, made of buckled plywood, was a small desk with a hutch on it, which I had painted white for her, where she wrote in her journal. I never peeked. Besides, I never wanted to see letters again,
ever never
, as I used to say as a child.

Beyond that room was our tiny kitchen. We kept our vegetables and fruit in a large round woven tray I’d picked off the street and hung from the kitchen ceiling. Our small bathroom had tiles the color of old piano keys. A little light seeped here from the large windows way in the front, a luminous drape. This was our safe haven. I wished I could have Russ, the gentleman cat, back with me.

I did not think constantly of Mr. Jack now. Hand in hand with Gillian, I went to our smoky church basement, and found friends. What peace we found, we learned to share, like children at playschool. Cyril, who had fallen off the wagon but was now back, mysteriously minus a tooth or two, Fiona of the wild hair, flirty Alice, mumbling Tom, who always gave us a companionable wink. We were a hideaway nation, recovering, covering our tracks over the hard and bitter terrain of the world. We were kind to each other. We were each other’s kind. One day at a time, for chrissake. As simple as that.

This was no country the world outside cared to know.

•  •  •

I
HAULED TIMBER
from the trucks to the yard or vice versa. Sometimes I did small carpentry for Mr. Peter Foley, who found I had
a neat hand with wood. Mr. Foley whistles to himself, clear as a flute. Once I asked him if he was making up the tune, and he said, no, it was Handel. Another time I asked him if he was whistling Handel again, and he smiled and said, no, it was just pure Peter Foley. He never rushed me, and figured out never to ask me to write anything down. He took care of all that sort of stuff. I hang my coat next to his.

I offered to buy small pieces of cedar wood left over from a special job.

“You want to make something, Billy?” I nodded.

“For a lady, eh?” He grinned.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll work in my own time,” I added.

“Use whatever tools you need, Billy. Anything you want.” He took out a box of tools for fine detailing.

I made a small, delicate box, with a sliding top, my best piece of work. It smelled beautiful too. Mr. Foley looked at it with admiration, and turning to me, he said,

“Exquisite! Well, all I can say, Billy, is that she’s one lucky lady.”

Lucky lady
 . . . I thought in misery. It was for Mom. I was going to put her pendant necklace in it and find a way to return it to her.

•  •  •

O
NE AFTERNOON
I got off early because of some problem with the power saw.

“Take the afternoon off, Billy,” Mr. Foley said, and I went straight to the supermarket to wait for Gillian to finish. But she wasn’t there.

Her friend Regine with the snake tattoo on her ankle said she had had a fight with the produce manager, Gary, who picked on
her if he had nothing better to do. Gary, the one with the pimpled neck, the overflowing paunch, and one shirt button popped above his bulging equator.

Worried, I went straight home to find the door bolted from inside. Gillian wouldn’t open! I climbed the rainwater spout to the fire escape. I stared at Gillian on the floor, cradling a bottle of vodka, her face bruised. She must have fallen. Everything in the room was in shambles.

Driving my fist through the long pane, I scrambled across the bed and grabbed her arm. I flung the bottle out of the window and turned on Gillian in a fury. She was paper-pale, but refused to guard herself with her hands. “Okay, go ahead, hit me.”

“Why?” I cried out, “Why, Gillian? It’s our six-month anniversary coming up. We both have jobs.”
God
, I thought suddenly,
I need a drink
. Being sober was a paper bag of flinty stones I carried inside me. I was constantly aware of their edges waiting to pierce the flimsy package in which they slid and shifted. Now, in panic, I wondered if it was about to tatter, and the deadly pebbles spill into my waiting bloodstream.

“I’m going to call Jerome. We need someone to talk to us right now! You need to call your Rachel this minute. Gillian,” I screamed, “Gillian!” She turned and bit my ear. I cried out and wrestled her down. Before I knew it, I had her nipple in my mouth. “Oh Billy,” she moaned, “is that you, my love?” reaching to hold me in her clenched hands.

And I lost it. Something troubled me to the core. What was it? Something in my head was echoing, gonging,
is that youISTHATYOUisthatyoulove?
I threw up my hands, expecting the whistling blow of a belt. I pushed Gillian aside. She reached for me again, but I hit her face with my open palm.

“Stop,” I snarled, “stop talking,” and I entered her hard. She cried out. I felt a deep disgust for my life, my hands, my body. But she reached for my face, moving my hair from my eyes. “Billy, oh, Billy. We need to help each other.”

I sat silent, not knowing how to speak, how to tell her about those years, about Archie.

“Will you let me love you, Billy? Will you love me back?”

I nodded, unable to speak in the choke of my tears.

“Hold me now,” she wept. I did. My hand bloody, my face buried in her hair. In the blackness, all night, into dawn.

I could write my full name, Devika Rathnam Mitra, by the time I was four. I also knew how to write the names of my parents: Dr. Kush Mitra and Dr. Seetha Rathnam Mitra. I used to think that
Dr.
 stood for Dear, because I love them. Baba calls me “Devi,” but also sometimes “Ma.” He explained that in Bengal, a father calls his daughter that, because one day she will be the mother of all their descendants. I liked that.

Chitto-Uncle and his wife, Kamala Auntie—my parents’ Indian friends were all uncles and aunties, even if you met them once—knew my parents from when they first moved to Clairmont, soon after my mother took up her job at the hospital and Baba began to teach at the math department in the university nearby.

Chitto Uncle, or Chitto-kaku, as he also liked to be called, in the Bengali manner, and my baba were unlikely friends. They probably would never have connected in the old country. At least, I think so. Chitto-kaku prided himself on being practical. He knew about sales at Sears and Two Guys or in malls as far away as Albany,
income tax loopholes, mattress bargains, investments in strip malls, reliable car repair shops, which Indian grocery store was cheapest, and other very practical matters. He owned two Dunkin’ Donuts franchises and a gas station, and planned to buy a small motel soon.

He knew answers, but they were inevitably about things I had no interest in. He never once talked about books, but would bustle into our house, full of local news and advice. He wagged his head, which had some hair around the fringe, and one outcropping of salt-and-pepper hair, like an island, just above his forehead. His ears sprouted hair, as if in compensation for the lack of it on his head, while his eyebrows were awesome, and he had one gold tooth.

Plump and comfortable, Kamala Auntie did not go out to work and wore saris all the time. She told me that in India she would swim in the local river in her sari; her family had come from a place called East Bengal, which became Bangladesh. That’s the land where my father was born, although their families did not know each other. They too had been refugees after Partition, when the country broke apart like an old plate—which is why she feels a special affection for my father. She calls Baba
Kush-da
. You add
da
, to show he’s an elder brother—or someone who is like one. That’s funny—for I read in a book that the Irish call their fathers Da!

Kamala Auntie’s family had been very poor; she only studied till the sixth grade in a Bengali medium school. But Baba and Ammu say that she is very smart. Her parents were both killed in East Pakistan before her two teenage brothers escaped with her to the outskirts of Calcutta, when she was only two. There is some kind of incomprehensible affection she feels for Baba, simply because their ancestors lived at some time on the same land.

Chitto-kaku and Kamala Auntie had no kids, but three pet cats: Bhola, Bablu, and Tuni. She got them from a shelter. Chitto-kaku is allergic to cats, so he has to take regular medication. He must adore her, Ma said. But I also feel the unquestioning affection both Kamala Auntie and Chitto-kaku give me. I mean, I got a prize for a spelling bee, and they both cried for joy. Even Baba got a little embarrassed.

Kamala Auntie speaks broken English with Ammu—because Ammu is not Bengali. Her family is from Madras, where she went to medical school before coming to America. She grew up speaking Tamil, although we speak English at home.

But Baba taught me Bangla—as if his life depended on it, Ammu says—and we have always spoken that with each other; Ammu never learned to speak it well, because she’s always busy and says she has no patience with languages, although she pretty much understands what Baba and I are saying. I knew for sure the time he and I made plans to go and buy spicy
chanachur
snacks from the Indian grocery store, but Ammu said I was eating too much junk food. We had been speaking in Bangla—yet she knew what we were up to!

Ammu seldom cooks, but Baba likes to. He taught himself, with cookbooks, after he got married. But twice a year or so, during long weekends, Ammu makes elaborate preparations, soaking rice and lentils overnight, grinding spices by hand. She makes a tremendous mess in the kitchen, but at the end she produces perfect and simple dishes, like the gigantic and paper-thin crepe-like dosa which we eat with creamy coconut sauce and spiced lentil sambar.