What Lies Between Us (20 page)

“No!” I shout against the closed window.

“But what happened? How will I get home?”

“Maybe your sexy nun can take you.”

I peel away as his palm slaps against the hood. At the door of the house, a small crowd of shocked mouths, raised eyebrows. I see someone come out to put an arm around him and lead him inside. I don't care. I leave them all behind, drive over the quiet bridge shaking, silent tears running down, soaking my blouse. At home I lie in bed, curled into a comma, the heart ripped out of me. It lies next to me in a nest of bloody veins like the site of a detonated bomb. I watch it as it bleeds itself out on the sheets, thuds a final time, and starts to turn gray at the edges, and then I fall asleep.

*   *   *

We make up, of course. I cried. He was shaken, but he forgave me. I promised I wouldn't do that again. We started making jokes about sexy nuns until it entered the language of our relationship and neither of us could remember the details of that party. I was happy again. There is nothing I want more than him. He is the whole of it.

*   *   *

Months later, we are at a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley. We are sharing brown rice and broccoli with veggie chicken. I eat the forested tops of the broccoli and he spears the trunks, which I cannot stand, off my plate. This silly synchronicity in our broccoli desires is something that has always felt auspicious to me, another sign that cosmic forces had taken an interest and said “These two will do nicely” and nudged us toward each other that night three years ago. I am talking about my last shift, a particularly daunting patient, the frustrations of conflicting medications and a family that doesn't trust us.

He says “Uh-huh” and “Hmmm” as he folds a sheet of paper over and over, making it take the shape of a tiny white crane. I say, “Are you even listening to me?” He says, “Yup, uh-huh, yes,” and slowly, carefully writes something in minuscule letters on the bird. He looks at me with that deep-water gaze and holds the origami out on his palm. I take it and stare at the tiny writing until I understand that it is asking me a question.

I raise my eyebrows. “What?”

“Why not? I love you.”

“My god. Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

I can't think of a single reason why not, and so we do.

*   *   *

We are married under the golden dome of City Hall at the top of the curving marble staircase on a silver day in May. I wear a long slinky white dress and carry a jumble of dahlias in every shade of red I can find. His parents are here, wearing formal but sensible clothes, looking surprised but happy.

My mother comes in a worked sari. I know this is not what she had envisioned for me, the bridegroom being a tall white man instead of a dutiful Lankan boy, an artist instead of a doctor, engineer, lawyer, even for god's sake, a professor. And the wedding too must be a disappointment. What she would have wished for is a hall full of people, a spread of food, a flowered poruwa, young girls in white ruffled half saris singing the proper verses. Without these things, is it even a wedding? She would have wanted everything Dharshi had at her wedding for me. She must feel bad that Aunty Mallini gave her daughter these things, married her the proper way, but that she cannot do the same for me. But if she thinks these things, thankfully, blissfully, she doesn't say them. A wonderful thing has happened. After we have lived together for years, instead of leaving me as she thinks all white people are prone to do, Daniel is making me a legitimate and lawfully married wife, and for this she is thankful enough to stay quiet.

Then too she has told me this. Soon, a few months after our wedding, she is moving home. When she told me this, I said, “Where?” before I realized she meant she's moving back to Sri Lanka. I was incredulous. “Why now?” and she said, “You're settled now. There isn't anything to keep me here anymore. Even the cat is dead.” I feel guilty for not asking after Catney Houston, who after hanging on for this ridiculous length of time has finally died. Now there is truly nothing holding her here. She says, “I'll get a place in Colombo. Or a house in Kandy. In any case you're settled, so I can go now.” I can hear the determination in her voice. She wants to reclaim what was lost. My wedding will be the last time I will see her for years. I am sad; I am relieved; I am joyous.

A month before the wedding I open the mail and find a package from her. A sari froths out. A white sari studded with paisley in golden sequins and shining crystals. It's beautiful. I throw it over my shoulder and am transformed. An instant bride. But then the memory of that other sari glowing in the dark, hanging over the door, and below it two bodies tumbling together in love and desire comes to me. I haven't seen Dharshi for years. She has been taken into a different life, become a person I don't know. Our connection has been diluted to seeing pictures of each other on our computer screens. I have seen pictures of her and Roshan, rounder now, and claimed by two children, hanging on to her from all angles. A sort of yearning shoots through me. She had been my first love. I know that now. I put the sari back in its box. I tell my mother it's hard to wear a sari, I don't want to stumble on the steps, I don't want to trip under six yards of floating fabric. The truth is, I want nothing that reminds me of who I was before this man came.

On my wedding day I wear a clean white dress, a satin dress that spills to the floor. A dress that is not ivory or champagne or any other corruption of white, but is instead stark and startlingly white. A dress that he had bought for me a few weeks before, wrapped and packaged, a huge crimson rose held by a ribbon to the top of the large white box. “Here,” he said, “this will fit you perfectly.” I opened the box and exclaimed, “Oh my god. It's beautiful.” I pulled the dress, slithery and heavy as an animal skin, out of the box. I could feel how expensive it was, how exquisitely, elaborately one of a kind. I couldn't imagine how he had paid for it. He must have saved for a long time. I'm touched by his generosity when this money could be going to other, more practical concerns. He said, “Put it on.”

“But you shouldn't see me. It's bad luck.”

He laughed and said, “What? You've turned traditional? Go, put it on.” I went into the bathroom, stepped out of my clothes, and pulled the dress over my head. It sighed against my skin, settled. I came out, shy, the cloth slinky against me, my arms bare, the entirety of my silhouette exposed. He looked rapturous and said, “Yes. Amazing. It's perfect.” I loved that he said the word
perfect
. Not a stain or a blemish anywhere on me. He pulled me close, searched my face, touched his thumb to the mark beneath my right eye, high on the cheek. “This is my spot. This I claim,” and put his lips against my skin exactly there, a slight suction. He thought it was a beauty spot, but it was a scar from a childhood cruelty that had faded now into this slightest demarcation.

The dress
is
beautiful, a long sleek column of white with silver straps that slide against my shoulders and make them shine. But under this, a thought like a splinter under the skin. On the island, white like this, unembellished and not lit up with gold embroidery or jeweled sequins, is a symbol of death. This is something my American fiancé cannot know. White was the color I should have worn to my father's burning. Instead I had worn the slightest shade of pink. Now when I should be as adorned as a goddess, I am wearing the perfect white of mourning.

*   *   *

After City Hall, after the judge has said the solemn words and the rings have been slid onto fingers, after Daniel has been told to kiss the bride and I have acquiesced and after the few assembled friends have whooped and cheered, we go on a pilgrimage to the water. His parents, my mother, the chosen friends. We stand on the cliffs over the Sutro Baths, the churning sea stretched far below us. This is the distant edge of the world. There are apocalyptic clouds above; the red bridge is framed in the distance, the entire world painted in shades of gray, silver, and emerald.

Someone pops open champagne and it froths over all of us, making us giddy. He pours it into gushing flutes and hands them out. We are toasted in words of love and blessing. The wind flings itself in our faces and we fall silent then, because it is beautiful, and just like that I know I will belong to this man for always. I, who have sailed these seas in storm and peril, who had felt ever wind-tossed, ocean-flung, have come home to dock in these safe and sunny harbors. I throw my bouquet over the cliff down into the rushing waters and the sea takes my offering, unties the silver ribbon that holds the flowers together, tosses them until they are scattered on the waves, tiny as single petals borne away on that salt tide.

 

Part Four

 

Fifteen

Three years pass faster than I can imagine. We learn the rules of marriage. It is a closed system with its own weather, politics, and machinations. It is a loyalty constructed out of inside jokes, the sharing of fears, and predawn recounting of dreams. It is a shifting of personality toward each other like two plants in a small pot striving for the same patch of sun and in the process becoming entwined above and below ground. His roots take hold in the earth of my body.

*   *   *

Soon enough comes the inevitable question. Hamlet grappled about whether to be or not to be. Our burning existential question becomes to baby or not to baby. His parents drop subtle American hints, “It would be so nice if you did. And it would be so beautiful. A lovely shade of caramel. Like Halle Berry.” My mother on the phone doesn't hint. “So when are you going to do it? Better now than when you're even older. What are you waiting for?”

I say, “Amma, we just got married.”

“Three years ago. Don't you know what comes after marriage? The baby.”

“And after that?”

“The second baby, of course.”

“God, Amma, you'll have me with a herd if you had your way.”

She says, “I always wanted a lot of kids, but then I couldn't. You should. It'll be good for you two, make you settle down and grow up. Maybe it'll make that hubby of yours get a real job.”

She's set up in Colombo now. She rents a house, has a servant. She says the country has changed so much, I wouldn't recognize it. The war is over, of course, but more than that, money is flowing in, roads are being built—freeways, just like in America—there are shopping centers, and everyone has a cell phone. She says that the only thing that would bring her back to America is to see her first grandchild. I don't tell her the truth. That neither of us really wants children, neither of us is pulled in that particular direction.

She goes on. “You know Dharshi is pregnant again.”

I say, “She's having another baby?”

“Yes, her third. A girl, they say, this time. Two boys before, you know.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“You know, I think it worked out. I think she's happy. They look good together now. Mallini got her married so young. But now she's settled. And the babies, Mallini has her arms full of them, lucky lady.”

I sigh. She says, “What darling? I just want you to be happy. How can a woman really be happy without children? All that other stuff, career, love, what have you, it'll all go away, but a child is yours forever.”

I don't tell her that I've never felt those urges other women talk about. I've never looked at babies with longing, never envied women with newborns in their arms or toddlers hanging off them. My uterus has never throbbed at the sight of a newborn. The biological imperative, those essential hormones that make women stare at babies as if they are delectable, they must be missing in my particular chemical makeup.

And yet the baby-hunger is all around us. I know women with a baby-desire so deep their breasts automatically weep milk when they hear other people's infants crying. I have friends who after years of focusing on careers are issuing baby ultimatums to stunned husbands or boyfriends.

Daniel's male friends sit at the table and talk about being surrounded by women who are newly rapacious for newborns. One of them says, “I feel like they just want my sperm. A woman actually said to me the other night, ‘I want to have your blond baby.'” He looks terrified. The rules of dating have changed under his feet. It's no longer lighthearted or spontaneous; the objectives are different.

The opposite too is happening: men we have known for years are saying to their wives and girlfriends, “Give me a baby or I'll leave.” Formerly happy couples are breaking up, and the one left behind sheepishly, heartbrokenly mutters, “She/he wanted a baby. I'm not sure I do.”

Daniel and I listen to all this and turn to each other, delighted that neither of us are pulled in this way. Instead we clink glasses long after our friends with children have gone to relieve their babysitters. We loll in bed, take hiking trips into the desert, go to Mexico, and congratulate ourselves for not falling into the trap that has enmeshed so many of our friends.

Child free
is the term we use to describe ourselves. In this choice, we are wholly and luxuriously selfish.

*   *   *

But it's not only our friends who are heeding the call to procreate. The grocery store racks are full of magazines that follow the progress of pregnant celebrities with the concentration and enthusiasm usually reserved for sporting events. It's a nationwide obsession that follows a predictable path in the headlines. First, the all-important photos of the woman showing off the sparkling chip of compressed carbon gracing her finger. “He proposed! She said yes!” Then the exclusive shots of nuptials: “The Fairy-Tale Wedding. Flowers. Cake. Dress.” Immediately after follows a giddy anticipation of that lauded physical manifestation of fertility, the baby bump. Who has it? Who is showing? Almost immediately after the baby is born, the most important part of this equation comes into play: How fast does the woman regain her “bikini body”? How quickly can she shed the grotesque signs that her body has harbored another being for the last nine months? If this shrinking takes longer than a few months, there must be something wrong with the mother. She must be lazy or depressed. After all, this is her job as a celebrity, isn't it? To model for us how our own bodies should act?