High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (17 page)

We passed the cigarette back and forth like it was delicious, and she coughed. I didn’t. I had a talent for them, and I liked how the nicotine made everything slow down and go foggy. I rolled my head to one side, and blew smoke in her face. She laughed and slapped at my leg.

I said, “Is it weird that we’re different?”

She didn’t understand. “You mean how you’re
so so so so
white?”

Now I laughed. I said, “I mean my family. You’re not Christian.”

She looked at me like I was kidding. “You mean how you’re not Hindu?”

I looked up at the sky, but there was no sky. Instead I saw the top-ridge lip of the clamshell and I thought of a giant clam. I said, “I guess so. Yeah.”

She started to say, “I like you, Josie, even though you’re not a Hindu—” But she lost control of her voice in a sudden coughing attack made worse by the fact that she could hardly stop laughing. I thought of the giant clam, and imagined we were lying prone on its tongue.

It was a long year, and much of what transpired at home with regard to Mom or Dad has fallen out of my head, forgotten. I spent that year with Bhanu, in and out of school, a place that no longer meant loneliness for me because I was with Bhanu, and her friends, who eventually accepted me, too. She was alive and love was all around me, and it felt like nothing else unfortunate could touch me.

Later that year, there was a high school field trip to Niagara Falls. I didn’t tell my parents, and just went. Forged their signatures. It was the event of our year, and it would be all day long, with no real adult supervision, somewhere else entirely, outside of Richmond Hill, outside New York City. I bought a Ramones T-shirt from the Aqueduct Flea Market on Rockaway Boulevard even though I’d never heard one song. Bhanu mentioned them once and said they were cool and she was going to get their tapes. I never had the nerve to wear it. It looked too clean and too new. On the bus ride upstate I told her all about Issy. I told her how much I missed Issy, and was that weird? We were sharing a tall black vinyl seat and it felt like nobody could see us, we were all on our own. She said, “You’re weird, but that’s not.” I told her how I always wanted a brother, and she gave me a kiss on the cheek. What a shame kisses on the cheek never matter so much as you age.

She said, “Now you got me.”

I floated.

We slept alongside each other there in the daylight, on warm black vinyl, until we got to Niagara.

The bus parked. We stepped off and felt the mist in the air, heard the rush and gushing of the falls. We walked toward one of the railings, and the great void in the center of the falls. We wiped water from our faces and stood there, spray raining upward and needling our foreheads. We clasped our hands together, and we were silent. We looked at the white implosive hole.

“It’s so big,” she said.

I said, “You can’t even see where it ends.”

“It’s so deep,” she said. “How deep do you think?”

“No idea.”

She asked me if I’d ever read a short story called “The Wish.” Bhanu loved to read. But I didn’t read much, then, so I lied and said I’d heard of it. She said it was about a small boy who played make-believe and actually fell into one of his make-believe holes.

I thought twice before telling her a story this reminded me of. But then I told her about the biblical story of Korah, once a wise man of God, who bared his teeth, screaming for help, as the Good Lord punished him and turned the hard ground beneath him into a hole. A gaping and gorging mouth that swallowed him whole and all of his possessions, even his family. Bhanu asked me what he did to make God so angry. I said he rebelled against Moses (I asked, “Do you know who Moses is?” She said, “I’ve heard of him”), that Korah would not listen to God’s appointed men. That he claimed he could speak directly with God. I told her how it took up two pages in my children’s Bible storybook, accompanied by comic book–like illustrations, and that I’d seen it performed in full costume onstage at Bible conventions. At some point she’d stopped listening to me, and said, “That’s a horrible story.” She was letting her face get wet. Her mouth was open and the upward rain was on her tongue and teeth. I moved closer to her, my mouth closer to hers. The mere idea of a kiss! The possibility was so charged, I was surprised every time she let me.

We stood there and watched the rushing falls, and I imagined the observation deck collapsing and sucking us under, and I was okay with that. This was the asshole of the world, and I looked away toward the river, the Niagara River; who ever mentions the poor river? It came roaring at us like water spilled from a bottomless bucket, incoming nonstop across a long and winding table. I promised myself I would never let anything bad happen to Bhanu as we were both entirely overtaken by the drama of it all, and cued up our Walkmans accordingly.

The year I turned eighteen, Mom finally decided she was better. She sat up in bed one day, came marching down the stairs, and said she had to go for a special session at the hospital. Dad took her, and they came home with tremendous smiles on their faces; I don’t know whose was bigger.

“Full remission,” Mom said.

Dad took her face in his hands, and he kissed her. Never saw anything like that before. He kissed her so hard, she started pushing him off, and she was laughing, but he wouldn’t let her go, she was laughing so much. Then he stopped, and picked her way up in his arms, and she was up there almost to the ceiling, and laughing, while he played biting at her belly. This is my most favorite memory. Not just because of how lovely, but because it woke me up to their lives in such an unexpected way. Like a bucket of cold water over my head. I’d been living peripherally, in my own home, walking along the walls like a mouse, following the same daily paths in hopes of avoiding direct contact with the people who owned this home.

But here they were, right in front of me. Mom was back, and fully charged, and she swore she would set this house aright because this was a churchgoing family. I have to say there was a welcome sense of security in having her back and taking the lead, and we returned to church as a family. Dad was reluctant to go. He’d since taken to calling the Brothers in the Lord apostates. But he went anyway, for her. We all did, arrived just as service started, and left as it drew to a close. We spoke with no one. Mom also somehow managed to ignore the fact that I’d had a serious girlfriend for the last few years.

I’d thought I’d done a good job of obscuring the presence of Bhanu, even though she lived around the corner, but it wasn’t like Mom was blind to it. She occasionally mentioned “the Indian girl around the block,” and when she was really bugged at me, “the brown girl.” When I think back on this behavior it seems so unlike her, uncharacteristic of her. She even claimed once that I chose Bhanu because she was Hindu. I remember being shaken by such a hateful accusation and not even bothering to respond. My parents began to unashamedly hanker aloud for the old neighborhood, because in the last few years Richmond Hill had become a haven for not just Bangladeshis, but Indians and Pakistanis, and there were rumors that the construction site around the corner was the future home of a Sikh temple. This was a new strain in my parents. I didn’t like their new behavior. It appeared to be connected to Mom’s remission: maybe she felt a debt to her Heavenly Savior and nothing less than the purest of worship would do. Mom and Dad were seeing eye to eye. They talked about the old days before the high trill of Hindi ragas, before the tap and pounding dance of tablas all of a sudden sang from car stereos all summer long. Before the teenage Hindi boys in shell-top Adidas made out with white girls on brick front porches. The corner store put up a sign in its window: “Fresh Goat Meat.” And this absolutely horrified my parents because, What, now everybody’s too good for hamburger? Dad turned hot dogs on our backyard grill, and the neighborhood barbecues smoked hot yellow curries.

The faces at church had changed, too. As many brown faces as there were pale, and I could practically see the gears of my parents’ brains turning, trying to process this new information. Regardless, this was good news because the new faces probably didn’t know of Dad’s outburst. Or about me. So we got to arrive and sit and leave in relative peace. City congregations like this one are protean, always changing, just like the city. Picking a different congregation never even occurred to my parents, that I knew of. I spent most of those services thinking about everything but worship. I thought of school, and graduation, and leaving the house. I thought of Bhanu. I invited her a few times, but she’d always decline and then invite me to their temple, which I always politely declined. I told her there were people like her at our church now and she should try it just once. It wasn’t like I was trying to convert her, I hardly paid attention anymore myself. It was more like there was this significant part of my life, and she had no idea of what it looked like, much less meant. I also wanted her to understand that I was going to church again for my mother.

One Sunday, when the minister onstage spoke of the doomed unbelievers, I couldn’t help but think of Bhanu. That she was doomed. I’d avoided this for how long already, made excuses for me, and for her, for my parents, for God himself, but I could no longer cover my ears. The elder onstage said they were hiding in our homes and in our neighborhoods, the Devil-music listeners, and the adolescent masturbators, the false clergymen of neighboring churches, and closeted atheists, the New Agers and yoga practitioners, and even casual dabblers in the abominable Oriental religions. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs. They would all be punished if they didn’t open their hearts to the Lord. And then I saw Bhanu’s lovely face. I thought of her mother’s bindhi, the bloodred dot decorating her forehead like the center of a bull’s-eye target—she who always had milk and jellied sweets waiting for us in their kitchen, ever since the first time I met the woman, in their kitchen, baskets of peppers hanging from the ceiling, when she took me into her arms and said with her lilting voice: “So this is the young man who has my daughter in a spell. Let me see you.” She set me in front of her like a melon she was considering for purchase, and said, “Okay. Be good to my Bhanu and I will be good to you.”

I sat there and looked at the minister speaking and I watched his mouth moving but I couldn’t hear a thing. I imagined Bhanu’s front porch collapsing in the swell of a blood-river wake produced by some warring millennial and messianic chariot. I thought of her sweet-smelling hair—coconut!—and I sort of swooned right there in my seat. I wanted to run out of church and do something totally dramatic, like yell into the sky and dare Him to touch one hair on her head.

That Sunday, because of that sermon, I started my long fight and flight from the angels.

Sarah asked me once when it was exactly I lost my faith. I told her there was simply no such singular time. No single moment when whatever hairline crack suddenly widened, opening up like a fissure. I don’t even know what caused the crack to begin with. This was a slow and invisible process, practically geologic, but I do know that I didn’t join my parents the following Sunday.

That next weekend, Dad asked if he could speak with me, alone. I assumed he meant without Mom around, and so I made like I was going to leave the room with him—but he stopped me.

“Can we talk?” he said.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table. Crying, starting to wheeze. She was losing control and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just about me not going to church.

“Shoot,” I said.

He said, “Talk. Tell me what’s going on.”

I said, “I don’t think I can talk about it.”

“Try me.”

Mom was recovering her composure.

Dad said, “Ida. Maybe you should leave.”

She shook her shoulders, and wiped at her face. Makeup smeared. Without looking at me, she said, “Josiah.”

I said nothing.

“Answer me this,” she said. “Do you believe in God?”

Mom was on to me.

“You’re angry,” she said, “I know.”

I expected to see judgment in her eyes, accusation, disappointment. I saw nothing of the kind. Only empathy, and her beaten soul.

“Me, too,” she said, and stood up. She pushed past my father, briefly took my hand, and then let it fall away. She left the kitchen.

Dad said I’d grow out of it; it was just a phase. But I never did go back to church. Except then Mom stopped, too. She lost steam. And Dad was only going for her. Dad hardly looked my way anymore.

This made me bold enough to one day ask him—he was out back watering what grass we had surrounding the concrete patio—I walked right up to him as if I’d been dared to and I said: “Look at me, please, and tell me something.”

He aimed the hose away, took his time. He looked at me.

“What about you,” I said. “What’s your testimony? Tell me. I have no idea how you feel. I come from you and so I’m a lot like you, but I’m also not like you at all.”

He squeezed the hose with his hand and cinched it, so the water stopped and the hose looked like a snake swallowing its food. He was quiet for a few moments.

Then he said, “Your grandfather. This was a man of great faith. And he was wrong about some things, but he never lost his faith. I’ve been wrong, too, but I never lost my faith.” He looked at me. “How strong will you be?”

We looked at each other for some time and then I turned and went back to the house. I heard the water jet from the hose and smack the pavement.

I’m not so sure faith is a thing that can ever be lost. Like every love we have, there’s always remnants deep inside us, in our cells.

Mom and Dad did agree on one thing, though: that Mom would never get sick again. We’d been washed, a family washed by God’s love and a chemical bath, and if we were to keep that death at bay, above all, we must remain clean. So morning and night we showered. “At rise and fall,” Dad’s words. And, yes, making something so personal the subject of our daily conversations, ritualizing, really, my morning and evening wash and toilet was discomfiting to say the least. It was odd. At first he asked if I’d fully washed myself, made reference to “our unclean fleshly vessels,” which I supposed was my body. Before long, a new rule: he insisted I wash my vessel seven times, no less, the biblical number of perfection. I did this a few times until I no longer did, and Dad made a few passing comments about my skin not looking vigorously cleaned. I didn’t exactly realize what this kind of behavior suggested, that Dad had other issues. Finally one day I had to put a stop to it.