The Lowland (34 page)

He thought of the two homes that belonged to him. The house in Tollygunge, which he had not returned to since his mother’s death, and the house in Rhode Island in which Gauri had left him, which he imagined would be his last. A relative managed the house in Tollygunge
on his behalf, collecting the rent and depositing it into a bank account there, drawing on the income to oversee any repairs.

He would never go back to live there, and yet he could not bring himself to sell it; that small plot of land, and the prosaic house that stood on it, still bore family’s name, as his parents had hoped it would.

A doctor and his family lived in it now, the bottom floor serving as his chamber. Perhaps ignorant of its history, perhaps having heard some version of it from neighbors. No group would go out of its way to admire it, two hundred years from now.

At the end of the tour he added his name and phone number, his e-mail, to a list for the historical society. He accepted another postcard from Elise, announcing a plant sale the following month.

After their brief exchange she had paid him no special interest that afternoon, always speaking to the group. She had not approached him, as he hoped she might, when he had lingered alone in the upstairs hallway, in the part of the house that had felt most familiar to him.

He concluded it had been for the sake of the historical society that she’d invited him, that it had meant nothing else. But a few days later, she called.

You’re all right?

Why do you ask?

You seemed shaken the other day. I didn’t want to intrude.

She wanted to invite him to something else. Not a play or a concert, something he might have turned down. She said she remembered him mentioning, at Richard’s funeral, that he liked walking along the bike path. She belonged to a hiking club that got together once a month, to explore tucked-away landmarks and trails.

We’re meeting at the Great Swamp next time, so I thought of you, she said, before asking if he wanted to come along.

Chapter 3

The ginkgo leaves, yellow a few days ago, glow apricot now. They are the only source of brightness this morning. Rain from the night before has caused a fresh batch of leaves to fall onto the bluestone slabs that pave the sidewalk. The slabs are uneven, forced up here and there by the roots of the trees. The treetops aren’t visible through the windows of Bela’s room, two steps ground level. Only when she emerges from the stoop, pushing open a wrought-iron gate, to step out into the day.

The block is lined with row houses facing one another. Mostly inhabited, a few boarded up. She’s been in the neighborhood a few months, because the opportunity arose. She’d been living upstate, east of Albany. Driving down every Saturday to one of the farmers’ markets in the city, unloading the truck, setting up tents. Someone mentioned a room in a house.

It was an opportunity to live cheaply in Brooklyn for a while. There was a job she could walk to, clearing out a dilapidated playground, converting it into vegetable beds. She trains teenagers to work there after school, showing them how to shovel out the crabgrass, how to plant sunflowers along the chain-link fence. She teaches them the difference between a row crop and a cover crop. She oversees senior citizens who volunteer.

She lives with ten other people in a house meant for one family. They are people writing novels and screenplays, people designing jewelry, people whose computer start-ups have failed. People who’ve recently graduated from college, and older people with pasts they don’t care to discuss. They all keep to themselves, operating on different schedules, but they take turns feeding one another. There is one set of bills, one kitchen, one television, rotating chores. In the mornings they sign up for time slots to use the bathrooms. Once a week, on Sundays, those who can make it sit down to a collective meal.

People still talk about the shooting a few years ago, in the middle of the day, outside the drugstore on the corner. They talk about a
fourteen-year-old boy, whose parents live across the street, who was killed. Most people get their groceries from bodegas or run-down supermarkets. But now there’s a coffee shop with an espresso machine, wedged among the other storefronts. There are fathers in suits, walking children to school.

One of the houses at the end of the block is shrouded with netting. The peeling facade is being scraped down to reveal a base layer of thickly ridged gray. Climbing roses, a combination of orange and red, are in bloom in the small plot behind the gate. The name of the contractor, according to the sign posted out front, is Italian, but the workmen come from Bangladesh. They speak in the language Bela’s parents had used with one another. A language she’d understood better than she’d spoken in her childhood. A language she stopped hearing after her mother left.

Her mother’s absence was like another language she’d had to learn, its full complexity and nuance emerging only after years of study, and even then, because it was foreign, a language never fully absorbed.

She can’t understand what these men are saying. Just some words here and there. The accent is different. Still, she always slows down when she passes them. She’s not nostalgic for her childhood, but this aspect of it, at once familiar and foreign, gives her pause. Part of her wonders whether the dormant comprehension in her brain will ever be jostled. If one day she might remember how to say something.

Some days she sees the workmen sitting on the stoop of the house, taking a break, joking with one another, smoking cigarettes. One of them is older, with a wispy white beard nearly to his chest. She wonders how long they’ve lived in America, whether and in what way they might be related. She wonders if they like it here. Whether they’ll return to Bangladesh, or stay permanently. She imagines them living in a group house, as she does. She sees them sitting down to dinner together at the end of their long day, eating rice with their hands. Praying at a mosque in Queens.

What do they make of her? Of her faded gray jeans, the unlaced boots on her feet? Long hair she’ll tie back later, most of it tucked for now inside her hooded sweatshirt. A face without makeup, a day-pack strapped across her chest. Ancestors from what was once a single country, a common land.

Apart from their vocabulary, their general coloring, none of these men resemble her father. But somehow they remind her of him. They cause her to think of him in Rhode Island, to wonder how he’s doing.

Noel reminds her in another way of her father. He lives in the house, with his girlfriend, Ursula, and their daughter, Violet, in two rooms on the top floor that Bela’s never seen. Noel spends his days with Violet; Ursula, a cook in a restaurant, a pretty woman with a pixie haircut, is the one who works.

Bela sees Noel taking Violet to kindergarten in the mornings and, a few hours later, bringing her home. She sees him taking her to the park, teaching her to ride a bike. She sees him running behind his daughter as she struggles to gain her balance, grabbing on to a woolen scarf he’s tied around her chest. She sees him fixing Violet’s dinners, grilling a single hamburger for her on the hibachi behind the house.

Violet doesn’t begrudge Ursula all the time she’s away. Nor does Noel. They kiss her good-bye in the mornings, they fall into her arms when she comes home, sometimes with desserts from the restaurant. Because she’s the exception, and not the rule, Violet forms a different relationship to Ursula. Less frequent contact, but more intense. She adjusts her expectations, just as Bela once did.

Noel and Ursula sometimes knock on Bela’s door as they prepare their own dinner, later at night, after Violet has gone to bed. There is always plenty, she is always welcome, they say. Bread and cheese, a big salad Ursula tosses with her fingers. Ursula is always a little wired when she gets home from her shifts at the restaurant. She likes to roll a joint for the three of them, listen to music, tell stories about her day.

Bela enjoys spending time with them, and tries to be generous in kind. She looks after Violet, if Ursula and Noel want to go see a movie. She’s taken Ursula out to the community garden, sending her back with herbs and sunflowers for her restaurant. But she doesn’t want to come to depend on them. She says no when Noel and Ursula decide, on Ursula’s birthday, to have a picnic on Fire Island. She’s been in too many friendships with other couples like Noel and Ursula. Couples who go out of their way to include her, to offer her the company she lacks, only to remind her that she’s still on her own.

She’s used to making friends wherever she goes, then moving on, never seeing them again. She can’t imagine being part of a couple,
or of any other family. She’s never had a romantic relationship that’s endured for any length of time.

She feels no bitterness, seeing Noel and Violet and Ursula together. Their closeness fascinates her, also comforts her. Even before her mother left, they’d never really been a family. Her mother had never wanted to be there. Bela knows this now.

Visiting her father last summer, she’d learned that he was seeing someone. Not just anyone, but someone she knew. Mrs. Silva had been her history teacher. But Bela was asked, the day they all went out to breakfast, to call her Elise.

She’d been astonished to learn of their involvement; the most significant figure of her upbringing, paired with a minor one. She’d been secretly upset by it, at first. But she knew it was unfair of her, given that she barely saw her father, given that she continued to measure out her contact with him, whether to deny herself or to deny him, she could not be sure.

She saw he’d been nervous, telling her. She saw that he was afraid she would react badly, that maybe she would use this as further cause to keep away. Intuiting his hesitance, not wishing to intimidate him, she had reassured him, saying she was happy he’d found a companion, that of course she wished him well.

The truth is, she had always liked Elise Silva. Bela had forgotten about her, but she remembered looking forward to her class. Last summer, right away, she’d perceived the affection between Elise and her father. The way they’d studied the menu together at breakfast, her father looking over Elise’s shoulder when he might have picked up his own. The way Elise encouraged him to forgo the oatmeal and indulge in Belgian waffles. She observed a tranquility in their faces. She saw how, shyly, in contrast to her mother and father, they were already united.

She wonders if her father and Elise will eventually marry. But this would mean his divorcing her mother first. Bela will never marry, she knows this about herself. The unhappiness between her parents: this has been the most basic awareness of her life.

When she was younger she’d been angry at her father, more angry than she’d been at her mother. She’d blamed him for driving her
mother away, and for not figuring out a way to bring her back. Perhaps a remnant of that anger is the reason she doesn’t bother to tell him now that she’s living just three hours away in New York City. But this has been her policy: seeing him on her own terms, never making it clear where she is.

At this point she’s lived nearly half her life apart from him. Eighteen years in Rhode Island, fifteen on her own. She’ll be thirty-four on her next birthday. She craves a different pace sometimes, an alternative to what her life has come to be. But she doesn’t know what else she might do.

She wishes it were easier, the time she spends with her father. She wishes Rhode Island, which she’d loved as a child, wouldn’t remind her of her mother, who’d hated it. When Bela’s there she’s aware that she is unwanted, that her mother is never coming back for her. In Rhode Island she feels whatever is solid within her draining. And so, though she continues visiting, though she’s more or less made peace with her father, though he is her only family, she can never bear it for very long.

Years ago, Dr. Grant had helped her to put what she felt into words. She’d told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She said that her mother’s absence would always be present in her thoughts. She told Bela that there would never be an answer for why she’d gone.

Dr. Grant was right, the feeling no longer swallows her. Bela lives on its periphery, she takes it in at a distance. The way her grandmother, sitting on a terrace in Tollygunge, used to spend her days overlooking a lowland, a pair of ponds.

She approaches the workmen. Once again she absorbs their conversation, both foreign and familiar. They have no idea that their talk affects her. She moves down the block, saluting them, wondering where she’ll go after Brooklyn. They see her and wave.

The next time she visits her father she’ll speak to him in English. Were her mother ever to stand before her, even if Bela could choose any language on earth in which to speak, she would have nothing to say.

But no, that’s not true. She remains in constant communication with her. Everything in Bela’s life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because of you.

Chapter 4

June brought clouds that concealed the sun, storms that turned the sea gray. The atmosphere was raw enough for Subhash to keep wearing corduroy slippers instead of flip-flops; to continue to preheat the electric blanket on the bed. The rhythm of the rain was nocturnal, drumming heavily on the rooftop, tapering to a drizzle in the mornings, pausing but never clearing. It gathered strength and weakened, then intensified again.

At the side of the house he scraped scales of fungus off the shingles. His basement smelled of mildew, his eyes stinging when he put in the laundry. The soil of his vegetable garden was too wet to till, the roots of the seedlings he’d planted washing away. The rhododendrons shed their purple petals too soon, the peonies barely opening before the stalks bent over, the blossoms smashed across the drenched ground. It was carnal, the smell of so much moisture. The smell of the earth’s decay.

At night the rain would wake him. He heard it pelting the windows, washing the pitch of the driveway clean. He wondered if it was a sign of something. Of another juncture in his life. He remembered rain falling the first night he spent with Holly, in her cottage. Heavy rain the evening Bela was born.