The Vine of Desire (6 page)

In the late afternoon we return laughing and wet, our legs powdered with grains of gold.

I give an exaggerated shiver. “You never told me that the American ocean was going to be so cold!”

“Whine, whine!” says Anju, giving me a little push. There’s a new redness in her cheeks, something for me to hold on to. “Who was it that wouldn’t leave the water? Who was it that kept saying, Oh, Anju, we’ve got to wait for another wave?”

I push back a tangle of strands from my face, the knot undone
by wind. My hair smells like a holiday. “I was hoping to find a sea horse.”

There’s a sudden attentiveness in his face. He would like to know why. But he doesn’t ask. Ever since I arrived, he has been cool and aloof. Never starting a conversation. Keeping out of my way—as though that’s possible in a two-room apartment. Awkwardness and awkwardness. I should have stopped it right away. Should have gone up to him and said, Forget what you said about love in that garden in Calcutta. They were just words, it was a long time ago. We’ve been pulled through the eyes of many needles since.

But I was afraid. What if he looked at me—those lacquer-black eyes you couldn’t see into? If he said,
What makes you think … ?

I am a fool and a coward. Once I thought in complete sentences and acted them out. But after Ramesh …

Now it’s too late. All I can do is avoid him also.

“Oh, you!” says Anju. When she speaks to me, her voice is indulgent, like molasses. But to Sunil, she is all polite business, not like a wife should be. Even I, newly arrived, have noted this. “Still believing in magic, like falling stars and sea horses to wish on? Next you’ll be reading the lines on our foreheads and telling us our fortunes!”

The ocean is a sudden glare, the sun angled hard on waves made of metal. “I’m not sure I’d want to, even if I knew how,” I say. My toes dig a hole in the sand. The air is sour with seaweed. “Sometimes the only way we can bear our lives is because we don’t know what’s coming up.”

Anju stares unblinking at the metal-plated sea, her mouth hard with wanting to argue. She’s remembering my helpless, hurried flight. The handful of rupees, the paltry trinkets stuffed
into a handbag. The memory is a hot, vomity feeling in both our throats. Is it love that makes us this permeable to each other’s pain?

I know what Anju wants to say.
Seeing into the future would help us prepare for it.
The possibility of arranging one’s life—she’s always liked to believe in it. But even she knows better. What of her miscarriage, that sense of being cracked open and scooped out? What could she have ever planned against it?

“Enough of pasts and futures!” I make my voice gay, decisive. (It is important to have a gay, decisive voice, particularly when one has nothing else.) “It’s a beautiful day, the most beautiful I’ve seen in America. Let’s enjoy it!” I spread a flowered plastic sheet on the sand, open the picnic basket. I start lifting out packets wrapped in foil, and after a moment Anju joins me.

I have not exaggerated. It’s the kind of day that turns the seal rocks offshore into wet gold. The Golden Gate Bridge seems close enough for us to pluck its harp string–slender wires. Impossible clarity, after so much clouding.

Ever since Dayita and I arrived, it’s been raining. Two weeks of continuous chill rain. The creeks bloated with it—I saw them on TV—the hillsides beginning their black, gashed sliding. Drunken, tilted houses. Close-ups of stunned families who had to leave with nothing. I saw the others, too, the victims of the earthquake, so many people crowded onto the floors of makeshift shelters, the children crying for things they’d never see again. Freeways buckled and cracked like discarded snake-skin, entire streets gutted by fire. I felt a strange responsibility. The trains weren’t running on time, so Sunil had to take the car. We were imprisoned in the apartment. The air was sticky and
stale. Inescapable. Dayita fretted all day. After a week, the sound of rain takes on a relentlessness. It dredges up memories fetid as corpses. I had to press my face against the fogged-up window to keep in things it does no good to speak about. Nothing outside but concrete and a balding tree with dispirited needles for leaves.

“Do you miss India?” Anju asked disappointedly.

I couldn’t lie. I said, “How do people here watch the stars?”

“From windows, I guess,” said Anju, who was never much of a star-watcher.

“What’s the name of that tree?”

“I’m not sure—some kind of pine, I would think.” She gave my shoulder an apologetic squeeze. “Listen, how about we go camping when summer comes around?”

The evenings, after Sunil returned, were the worst. Each atom of air tense, resisting inhalation. The walls loomed inward, swollen with claustrophobia. Guarded greetings all around. Only Dayita shrieked her baby-pleasure, holding up her arms to be picked up. I kept busy in the kitchen until it was time to eat. Dinner would be full of fractured words, Anju talking too much, trying to pretend everything was fine. I needed all my energies just to swallow. Dayita played by Sunil’s feet. He watched her with the intense eyes of a motorist on a sleety night. The way he focuses on the shining reflectors that divide the lanes. The way he knows that to stray might mean destruction. As soon as I could, I would take Dayita into my room, prolong the nursing. I would hear them, of course, Anju and Sunil. Halted, formal sentences, mostly about Dayita. In a few minutes, silence. There’s no silence like married silence, its undertow
of reproach. When I brought Dayita back, they reached for her with panicked fingers, as though they’d been drowning.

The family (can I call us that?) has finished its picnic lunch. Crisp parotas stuffed with spicy potatoes, a bowl of emerald coriander chutney. (In this one way, at least, I am helpful.) He lies back, a newspaper protecting his face. From the sun, from us. Dayita has fallen asleep, her head wedged into his armpit. His body looks relaxed, almost happy.

We speak softly, so we will not disturb them. It is a conversation I’ve been starting all week.

“You’ve got to go back to college, Anju,” I say. “You’re well enough now. Didn’t you tell me that the new classes are starting in a few days?”

“I don’t think I’m ready,” Anju says. Caught in her mouth, the words are mutinous pebbles. Anju, who never stuttered as a child. I don’t blame her. You drop your life and watch it roll away, growing like a monstrous ball of mud. It seems impossible that you’ll ever run fast enough to catch it again.

If I show sympathy, our talk will end as it always does, in tears. So I say, “You’re as ready as you’ll ever be. At least while I’m here you won’t have to worry about the cooking and cleaning—”

Anju cuts me off, her face furious and knotted. “I didn’t invite you here to be a maid in my house. And, anyway, you’re going to be here a long time.”

She hates it when I speak of returning to India. But can’t she see that I must? Can’t she see the way we’re living now—a giant hand squeezing us together, something getting ready to burst?

“Silly girl!” I say. “I love taking care of people, you know
that. And don’t worry about college—you’ll do beautifully. You always did before.”

“I’ll go to college if you promise to go, too,” says Anju.

The air is a black sphere around me, impossible to breathe. No, it’s a vast whiteness that wants me to lose myself in it. Anju’s words gleam intermittently through it. Dangerous, unthinkable spangles. “You’ve got to stand on your feet, take care of Dayita—”

She doesn’t understand. There’s too much of the past in my blood still, like a sickness I have to sweat out before I can take on the future.

Sunil sits up so suddenly, it’s clear he hasn’t been asleep at all. Dayita, jerked awake, begins to wail. “It’s getting cold.” His words are scissors. Snip, snap. “Time to head back.”

Some time soon, tonight or tomorrow, in bed, they’re going to have a conversation. There will be frowns, tears, defiance, accusation. All very softly, because the walls are thin. Because the fictions of courtesy are still important to us.

This is how it will go.

He: She’s here on a visitor’s visa. She can’t go to school.

She: She can change her visa—people do, all the time.

He: She’s got to go back in six months. That was the deal.

She: Who made that deal? Not me.

He: She can’t keep staying with us.

She: Why not?

He:
(Silence)

She: Very well. I’ll find her a room. She’ll be able to get a student job, and then, once she gets her degree—

He: Let her go back to India, Anju. We’ve got our life, she’s
got hers. You can help her from here, if you like. Send her money.

She:
(Silence)

He: Can’t you understand?

She: How can you talk about money, like she’s a beggar? She’s my sister, my best friend. I need her here. Can’t you understand?

He:
(Silence)

She:
(Silence)

He:
(Silence)

She:
(Silence)

Two turned backs, like escarpments. Anger runs from one to the other, a mouse on scrabbled feet, gnawing. In my frozen bed Dayita whimpers, rubbing her feverish eyes.

None of us will sleep this night.