Queen of Dreams (16 page)

Later I would ask,
Do you remember the license plate?

He’d shake his head.
Didn’t think to look at it.

Was he wearing white?

He’d wrinkle his brows, wanting to help. But finally he’d opt for the truth.
I’m not sure.

“The fog grew thicker. I couldn’t make out the black car anymore. I shouted at her to pull over, told her I would drive—I was scared sober by then. But she—like always—paid my words no attention. I wanted to grab the wheel, but I was afraid that would cause an accident for sure.

“When the bend in the freeway came up, she sailed into it without hesitation, as though it were the route she had intended to take all along. I think she was smiling.”

17

All day she has been packing her mother’s things, going through the bedroom closet, surprised at how little there is: a handful of T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, sweatpants for garden work, three cardigans, a stack of saris, some silver bangles. Surely there were other things her mother wore. She recalls a pink kurta embroidered with chickan work, a gold locket with a red stone embedded in the center. Where did they go? And the photographs. Surely there were family outings to the zoo, to Golden Gate Park, a boat trip on the bay. She remembers posing with her mother, arms around each other, the toothy smiles they’d later joke about. She remembers her father sneaking up on them with the camera and catching them with their mouths full of cotton candy. She throws a suspicious glance toward the bed, where he slumps against the headboard as though he could never have been that man. He’s rustling the newspaper, pretending to read, but really he’s watching the small, sad stacks she’s placing in cardboard boxes and labeling for the folks from St. Vincent de Paul to pick up. Should she believe the story he told about the black car? The skin of his arm, chafed by the edge of the cast, looks pale and dry. She should massage some lotion into it, but she can’t bear the thought of contact. She hadn’t consulted him before she decided to clear the closets. She feels guilty about that for a moment, then pushes the feeling away. He isn’t in charge, she tells herself with a new cruelty. Not that he ever was. Besides, these things are not her mother. There is no point in keeping them.

She goes through the kitchen drawers, unearthing old recipes, unused garden gloves, several pairs of embroidery scissors, a silk shawl. From the garage she removes shoes, raincoats, a box of expired coupons. She lifts out, from the bathroom cabinet, toothbrush, comb, hydrating lotion, mascara, concealer, glitter. (Glitter? Her mother?) She considers the bookshelf. Her mother loved reading books about distant places—Machu Picchu, the Andamans, the Antarctic—though she never expressed a desire to travel to any of them. She touches their spines lightly, trying to imagine what went through her mother’s mind as she turned their pages. How defenseless things become when their owner is gone! She leaves the books alone, at least for now.

She has saved the sewing room for last, partly from a reluctance to intrude on her mother’s private space, partly from a hope that here, perhaps, she will find a clue to the mystery of who her mother was. (Is it excessive, this hankering inside her? Her mother would have had little patience with it. Ridiculous! she would have said, with some asperity. Didn’t you live with me for eighteen years? What more can there be to know?)

When she opens the door, the room smells of cinnamon peel. But then she takes another, deeper breath, and there’s no smell. Did she only imagine the spice odor? She’s losing faith in her senses, their ability to evaluate accurately the world around her. When she slides open the closet door, she notices that her hand is trembling.

Inside the closet it is disappointingly ordinary. Extra quilts, old clothes, rags for housecleaning. Catalogs for ordering seeds. But she remembers a time when she sifted through such quotidian items to find a box—what had been in it? Vials? She delves into the sad smell of unused things, things that suspect they’ll never be needed again. No box, no vials, but in the back under a pile of bank statements she comes across a framed photograph of herself and Sonny at their wedding.

In the photo they’re standing outside the Hindu temple, he in a maroon turban spangled with gold, she in a green wedding Benarasi with a too large bindi on her forehead. They hold hands shyly, looking very young and very pleased with themselves. Grasping the photo, she lowers herself heavily onto the carpet, onto the spot where her mother spent so many unaccounted-for nights, and finds herself thinking of how much she hates caviar.

T he caviar she is thinking of had been heaped in neat dark mounds over bread triangles and arranged on a silver tray. This tray was the first thing she noticed when the door opened, after Sonny had rung the bell several times and finally resorted to pounding. The tray bobbed up and down in the loud dimness of a hall crammed with bodies, moving toward her unsteadily, a drunken moon complete with craters. When her eyes got used to the dimness, she saw that it was carried by a pretty woman with dark hair. The woman wore a frilly white maid’s cap and apron, but Rakhi could tell she was no maid, even before she turned away and Rakhi saw that all she was wearing underneath was a black string bikini. That would come later, though. Right now the woman was smiling and holding out the tray, arms extended, the tray trembling slightly, until Rakhi felt compelled to take a piece even though she didn’t want to. And knew—even before they’d pushed their way into another, louder room in their effort to locate the host, a room filled with sweat and frenetic movement and surprisingly good music—that Sonny had been right. She shouldn’t have come.

The host, whom they finally found in a corner sharing a joint with two women, owned the nightclub where Sonny worked. He was large, affable, and very loud.

“Hey, Sonny, my main man,” he bellowed, handing the roach to one of the women and hugging Rakhi’s husband energetically. “Great you could make it! Like the sounds? Maybe you’ll spin some for us later, what d’you say? And who’s this lovely lady? New girlfriend? Oh, your wife, right, right. Delighted to meet you!” He lunged at her, arms open in hug-stance. When she quickly retreated behind Sonny, he looked startled, then laughed. “Enjoy the party!” he said with a malicious bow.

Then they were at the bar, where Sonny got her a glass of wine and a whiskey sour for himself. She was still holding the piece of bread. It made her feel foolish, so she put it into her mouth. The black, congealed mass slid along her palate, making her nauseous. If she’d had a napkin, she would have spat it out. Later she thought she should have spit it out anyway. Just as she should have grabbed Sonny’s arm before he could order a second drink and asked him to take her home, or at least to give her the car keys. He could have caught a ride with someone else. It would have been easy enough; he seemed to know everyone there, and judging by their enthusiastic greetings, every one of them would have been delighted to take him back—to his home or theirs. But she was worried about appearing rude, leaving so soon. Would his boss be offended? Would he take it out on Sonny, who’d just been hired on as the new weekend DJ?

And Sonny was having such a good time. She could see how he loved this crowd. (Why? They didn’t appear particularly lovable to her. Their pale faces, lit jaggedly in green and blue by the pulsing lights, seemed at once sly and exhausted with the effort of having a good time.) She watched him backslap and high-five and cheek-kiss his way across the room, smiling with genuine pleasure. She didn’t want to dampen that smile.

He’d mentioned the party—he was always meticulous about letting her know where he’d be—but he hadn’t asked her to come with him. He was doing that more and more nowadays, going out alone while she stayed home with the baby.

It’s part of my job, he told her. That’s how I make contacts, get more gigs.

What nonsense, he said when she told him he was moving away from her. I love you just as much.

When she insisted on going with him this time, he didn’t say no. But he hesitated.

I don’t think it’s quite your scene, Riks. I’m not sure you can handle it.

I’m a big girl, Sonny. I can handle more than you think.

There was that also. She didn’t want to admit that she’d been wrong.

So she waited awhile, and then it was too late.

She places the photograph carefully on the carpet, as though it were covered with something more fragile than glass, and continues her search. Boxes of old bills. She would never have guessed her mother to be the kind of person who saves old bills. Skeins of embroidery thread to go with the scissors she found earlier. Cartons of videos,
Sesame Street
rubbing shoulders with
Abs of
Steel in 30 Days.
(Had her mother wanted abs of steel? Had she spent hours on the worn carpet in front of the TV doing leg lifts and crunches to the rhythm of the instructor’s nasal commands?)

It is only when she has given up hope that she finds the journals, tied together with a blue satin hair ribbon.

All the air has been sucked out of the room. She kneels in the resulting vacuum, head pounding, to undo the bowknot. A rolling sound, like a giant stone door being pushed open. Or closing. She’s not sure if it’s in this world, or somewhere else. (Is there a somewhere else? The seesaw of her life balances on that possibility.) She opens the first book, the second, then all of them, riffling pages, tearing a few in her haste, her frustration. They are filled with her mother’s writing, the words in an alphabet she doesn’t know how to read.

T he party had grown louder, more crowded, and she had lost Sonny. She felt panic, dry and scaly, slither through her body. Don’t overreact! she scolded herself. You haven’t really lost him— you just can’t see where he is. She tightened her sweating palms into fists and followed the music to another room. Tubes of black light lent her skin a ghostly sheen. Bodies gyrated wildly, slamming into each other. A man smiled at her, his teeth glowing like neon. His skin, too—he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He grabbed at her and tried to pull her onto the dance floor. She put her hands on his damp chest and pushed so hard that he went staggering across the room.
Bitch!
she heard him yell. She elbowed her way through the dancers to the turntables. Sonny was playing. Three records spun simultaneously, a fast Western song and, under it, a sound like waves, then some other music. Once she’d seen a group of Tibetan men in the subway, playing instruments that looked like long wooden trumpets. Was it that she was hearing? Sonny wore earphones. His head moved to the beat, a small, bobbing movement, and his eyes were far away. He didn’t hear when she called his name.

She lies on her side, her back to the door of the sewing room, holding one of the journals. She isn’t crying, though she wants to. Perhaps she has forgotten how. To get this close, this close. She hears her father’s footsteps coming up the stairs. Since the accident, he moves lumberingly, lurching a little to the left, though there’s no medical reason for it. She hears his footsteps pause outside the door. She hears him call her name. She holds her breath and wills him away.

She pushed her way back across the dance floor. She must have drunk the wine at some point—the wineglass was no longer in her hand. She was holding another kind of glass. It, too, was empty. Who had given it to her? What had been in it? Where was her purse? The air was blue with smoke and fear. She saw a door opening onto a balcony. Maybe if she could get there, she could breathe. But the balcony was full of couples. There were threesomes, too. The moon was pocked and concave. A man and a woman stopped touching each other and turned to her. Wanna join us sweetheart?

But the footsteps don’t resume their usual shuffle toward the bedroom, the bed that is his, entirely and forever. He calls her name again, his voice rising a little on the last syllable, as though it were a question. Then he opens the door.

Without turning she says, “Please go away.”

“I can’t,” he says. “You need to talk to someone.”

Not to you, she thinks.

“I know you don’t want to talk to me,” he says.

If I wait long enough. If I wait long enough without making a single sound or movement, he’ll go. He has to.

“You didn’t eat anything all day,” he says. “Here, I made up a plate for you.” He advances into the room.

Don’t come in here, into her space.

“I think maybe you should go back to Berkeley,” he says. “I can manage on my own now. Being here is not good for you. It’s making you more depressed.”

Jesus. My mother’s dead. I have the right to be more depressed.