If Today Be Sweet (4 page)

“In India, when I was a schoolgirl, we used to long to experience a real white Christmas.” Tehmina smiled. “You know, we'd see Christmas cards with lights and trees and snow. None of us had ever seen snow. We even put up a small tree at my school each year. But you know what we'd use to imitate snow? Cotton wool.”

Eva snorted. “Yah, even here you have young Jewish kids running around wanting to be Jesus Christ and Mother Mary. Brainwashing is what it is, if you ask me.” Eva sighed. “Wish I could go someplace to get away from these mad Christians for a week. They spot a Jew from a mile away and they want to convert.”

Tehmina laughed. “Eva, you're all talk. Why, you must have more Christian friends than anyone I know.”

“Did I ever say I didn't? I got nothing against Christians. No, what I'm against is the hoopla that surrounds the holiday. I mean, you been inside a store recently? All those people foaming at the mouth as they run around buying up stuff. Do any of these people look happy? Are any of them thinking of Christ? No, I'll tell you what they're thinking of—they're thinking of PlayStations and plasma TVs and surround-sound systems. That's a religion?”

“I know. I know, Eva. I think of the same thing. Susan and Sorab, they both work so hard. I mean, I see my son come home some nights and my heart just throbs with fear. I wonder, doesn't Susan see how tired, how exhausted he looks? Doesn't she care? And then I notice the same look on her face. And I ask myself, for what are they working so hard? Why can't they buy a smaller house, with a smaller yard and all? Why does Sorab have to work such long hours?”

“Because he got on the treadmill.” They entered the parking lot for the market and Eva cruised around slowly, trying to find a parking spot. “You know what a treadmill is, right? Okay, well, ever tried jumping off one of those things when it's still moving? Very hard to do. No, the way to do it is to hit stop before you can step off. And in this country, nobody ever wants to hit that button.”

Tehmina turned to Eva. “Eva, that's my biggest fear. As you know, the children want me to stay here. Sorab, especially, is worried that with Rustom gone, there's nobody in Bombay to care for me. We are a small family—not many cousins or uncles. And I well re
member how lonely I was in the months after Rustom's death.” She paused, willing herself to not remember the difficult days that had followed her husband's funeral. “And yet…Bombay is my home. Here, I am afraid that I will always be a stranger, that I will never get used to all these ways.”

Eva eased into a space and put her car into park. But she didn't turn off the engine. Instead, she eyed Tehmina assessingly. “Tammy,” she said at last. “You're like family to me. So may I speak to you from the heart, the way I would to my sister Rose? What I want to say to you is, my God, Tammy, don't be a fool. Your son and his wife want you here, so stay. And how can you call yourself a stranger here? A stranger is someone who comes to America, clicks a few pictures of the Statue of Liberty, rides the trolley in San Francisco, and then returns home thinking they know America—that's a stranger. Whereas you and your late husband have been here so many times you know the price of milk at the grocery store. And if you lived here, I would teach you to drive. Your son can buy you your own car, so as you can be independent.”

“Eva, it's not that. It's just that…in Bombay I am in my house, living my life. Two days a week I volunteer at Shanti Center, a home for orphaned children. I help my elderly neighbor with her grocery shopping once or twice a week. Every few weeks I meet up with my old friends. We've stayed in touch for over forty years, you know.” She leaned over and looked intently into Eva's blue eyes. “See, there, in Bombay, I feel like a person—a person whose life has meaning, whose life follows a path. Here, despite all of Sorab's efforts, I can't help but feel like an ornament, a decoration. Sort of like a package that someone has dropped off at his door. I think—what I'm saying, Eva, is—I don't feel needed here. Apart from the occasional worry, the children will be perfectly happy without me here.”

Eva sighed. “It's funny, life is so funny,” she said almost under her breath.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking…if my David and his wife were to ask us to move closer to them, I would fit my whole house into a suitcase and move the next day. But they are so busy raising their little pampered son—private school, music lessons, day camp for the gifted—who has the time or energy to spend with their parents? You're lucky, Tammy, that your son wants you to stay close to him.”

Tehmina swallowed. “I know. Believe me, I know. Ten times a day I tell myself I'm an ungrateful old woman. It's because of Sorab that I can't decide what to do. Part of me wants to stay here and help—you know, help relieve my children's burdens as much as I can. I want to cook for my Sorab, be home when Cookie gets home from school. Eva,” Tehmina cried. “This is not a decision that I expected to make at my age. It was hard enough that my only child left us when he was twenty-one. I didn't think that someday I would also have to follow him to a new country.”

Eva's lower lip trembled. “Oh, honey. It's okay. Oh, my dear Tammy, this is so hard, I know. You know, they call us Jews a wandering people. We're used to living like birds, I suppose, going from place to place. But you…most people have only one place they call home. I understand, honey, I swear I do. This is a big decision to make.”

“And Rustom's not here to help me make it. That's the strange part. I find myself looking for Rustom to decide for me. And then I remember—he's the whole reason I'm faced with this decision in the first place.”

“It becomes like skin, another's life,” Eva murmured. “If you're married for a long time, the other becomes as familiar as skin.”

Tehmina nodded gratefully. “That's what I can't explain to anyone. Susan, Sorab, they all expect me to…why, just this week Susan snapped at me because I mentioned my husband's name.”

Eva clicked her tongue. “What can you expect, Tammy? Your daughter-in-law, nothing against her, but she's a goy. These white people—they're good at making the buses run on time. Everything else, anything that needs a ticking heart, forget it.”

“But
you're
white,” Tehmina protested.

“Yes, but not white like Susan. Not like my daughter-in-law. I'm more like you, Tammy. I know the world is made of blood and pus and sweat and shit. And I'm not afraid of that. People like your daughter-in-law, they think the world is sugar and spice. And the strange thing is, that for people like them, that's the face the world wears.”

Thinking of Susan's sallow, tired face when she got home from work, Tehmina felt a moment's unease at Eva's description of her daughter-in-law. Surely what Eva was saying was not true. Surely Susan had suffered, surely she had seen the dark side of the world, also. She shook her head and turned her attention back to the woman sitting beside her. “Eva,” she said. “I have a favor to ask, something I've wanted to ask for a long time.”

Eva looked surprised. “You want to go somewhere else?” she said.

“No. No, not like that. I wanted to ask—can you call me Tehmina instead of Tammy? After all, that's my real name.”

Eva grew still. Then she put her arm around Tehmina. “Sorry,” she said. “We Americans are so arrogant. We can't get our tongues around somebody's name, so we expect them to change their names for us. Happened to so many of my ancestors, too. And here I am…” She shook her head. “Anyway, it will be my honor to call you by your real name, Tehmina. And I'll make sure the ladies in our card club do so, too.”

“I don't care what they call me,” Tehmina said. “I just…it's you that I wanted to use my name, that's all.”

Eva pushed her bulk out of the car. “I'm flattered. It's settled. Tehmina, it is. Now come on. Let's go buy some fruits and veggies before they get all picked over.”

 

Tehmina loved being at the farmers' market. She felt comfortable and human, here. The dirty, stagnant water on the floor, the shouts of the brown-skinned, sweaty vendors competing for customers to sample their wares, even the smell of rotting fruit and fresh fish, all felt familiar to her. Shopping at the farmers' market was like shopping in Bombay—noisy, crowded, buzzing with activity. Touching the fruit and vegetables, occasionally haggling with the vendors, tasting their offered samples of cut fruit, all made her feel human, like the market was rooted in a section of the world she still recognized and lived in. What a contrast it was to the antiseptic, air-conditioned, clean, brightly lit supermarket where the children shopped for their groceries. A place where tomatoes and zucchini came wrapped in plastic trays and where people looked at you funny if you touched a piece of fruit and held it up to your nose. Not that smelling the fruit made any difference—none of the fruits and vegetables in the grocery stores of America had any scent or flavor to them, anyway. It was as if the country was so enthralled with size and color—the bananas and the peaches and the apples were all bigger than anything Tehmina had ever seen in Bombay—that it had forgotten that fruit was more than decoration. To bite into an American apple or an orange was to taste disappointment. Nothing burst with flavor, nothing tasted as sweet or as tangy the way fruits did in Bombay. Even the roses of America had no perfume to them, a fact that Tehmina still couldn't quite accept.

Now, winding her way down the market's narrow aisles, she felt
giddy with excitement and a strange, deep satisfaction. She felt as if she had rejoined the human race, that she was engaged in an activity that connected her with the rest of the world. From the markets of Istanbul to the bazaars of Bombay, this is what women did—they held and touched the food they were later to cook, they spoke and argued and joked with the men and women selling them that food. Unlike at the grocery stores, no sheet of plastic protected the fruits and vegetables until they themselves tasted of plastic; no clean-shaven man in a spotless, white coat looked at her with silent distaste if she touched an object and then put it back. The grocery stores looked like they were built for a race of perfect beings; the farmers' market was built to human scale, a place for ordinary, fallible human beings.

There was another thing both Tehmina and Eva enjoyed about coming here. “Look at that one,” Eva was now saying, nudging Tehmina. “I think I see her every time I'm here.” They both smiled at the sight of a short, old, dark-skinned woman walking around in a white fur coat, looking as imperial as any queen, inspecting the bell peppers and the carrots as if they were her royal subjects. Right next to her shuffled a ragged-looking man, his eyeglasses held together with tape and holes in his dirty winter coat. That was the amazing thing about the market—it was a pageantry of humanity, as if a kind of democracy was sprouting between the garlic and the bok choy. Tehmina thought again of the grocery store where Sorab and Susan shopped. How dull, how uniform the people who shopped there looked, much like the houses in their development. Everybody in the supermarket looked healthy and clean and well scrubbed, with none of the individuality and the colorful eccentricities that the shoppers at the market wore on their interesting, multicolored faces.

Tehmina loved leaving the anemic suburban streets of Rosemont Heights and coming into Cleveland. Why couldn't the children have bought a house in downtown Cleveland instead? she now lamented, although she knew the answer. Sorab had told her last month, the
night after Thanksgiving when they had gone to Public Square to witness the ceremonial lighting of the Christmas tree. Despite the frigid night air, Tehmina had been warm that night. Perhaps she was warmed by the hot cider and the hot chocolate that Sorab bought for all of them as they shivered through the interminably long speeches by the city leaders, waiting for the moment when Public Square would erupt in a burst of red and green lights. But it was more than that, Tehmina knew. What had warmed her soul was the crowd of ten thousand people, all huddled together, all leaning slightly toward one another, a mass of bodies seeking warmth and closeness and refuge in one another. And what a crowd it had been. Cheerful, boisterous, good-natured. They cheered lustily for the high school bands and the local DJ who was emceeing the show; they booed lustily each time a new politician took the stage. The crowd was made up of people of every race and color, every class background, so that men in fine wool coats were exchanging pleasantries with the homeless men who spent their days hanging out at Public Square, men whose shoes had holes in them. There were ten thousand of them there for the tree-lighting ceremony, but to Tehmina it had seemed as if they were one. One mass, one organism, moving together in time to the music, inhaling the frigid air together, exhaling clouds of frozen breath together. It was wonderful. It was exhilarating. And it made Tehmina feel totally different from what she felt like in Rosemont Heights. In this crowd, it was easy to disappear, to leave behind her own body and become as vacant, as limitless, as expansive as the sky. A part of a whole. Whereas in Rosemont Heights, she was self-conscious of her body, felt the weight of her head as it balanced on her neck, the heaviness of her hands as they hung by her sides, the tingling pressure of her brown skin. She knew that there was another biracial couple living in Evergreen Estates. And that a Chinese-American doctor lived the next street over. But other than that, the housing colony felt uniformly similar. No men with holes
in their shoes and whiskey on their breath lived in Evergreen Estates. And even if they did, nobody would laugh and talk to them the way the well-dressed men were doing right now.

She turned to Sorab, careful to modulate her voice so that he could hear her over the music but that Susan could not. “Do people live in downtown Cleveland?” she asked.