“Ah yes, you called about my—how did you put it—crass perversions! Well, I’d like you to know that Paul and I only smoked after Jona fell asleep.” Sonny’s voice drips virtue. “And we went outside to do it—even when it was raining.”
“And Eliana? Did Eliana go outside to smoke with you, too?”
“Who?”
“Sonny, please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I’d never dare to insult you, Riks! You’d probably sic Belle on me! Besides, wasn’t it I who once told you that you were too intelligent for your own good?”
“Quit joking. Who’s Eliana?”
“I don’t know anyone by that name. Honest!”
He sounds so sincere, so not guilty, that I’m taken aback— but only for a moment. Sonny-the-sincere-sounding—I’ve heard
him
before.
“Let me give your memory a little nudge. She’s the woman you took up to Mendocino with you. She stayed in your tent. Your tent—with
my
daughter! Eliana—long brown hair, flowery dress, foreign accent. Is it coming back to you now?”
A silence. Then: “And just how did you get to know about uh—Eliana?”
“Jona told me!” I say in triumph.
There’s a moment of silence. “Jo told you that?” Sonny asks. From his tone I can tell he’s shaking his head in that disbelieving way he has, as though the world has just pulled the rug from under his feet again. “Amazing!”
“Why should it amaze you that she confided in her own mother? Unless you asked her to keep it a secret? You did, didn’t you? Sonny, how could you do such a low-down—”
But he’s laughing, great roars of laughter, so unfeigned that I get confused.
He pauses long enough to say, “She’ll go far, our daughter! What was that name again? Eliana—with flowers in her hair? Wow! What an imagination that kid has!”
He’s still laughing when I hang up.
It’s evening, the blue hour of gathering shadows. It used to be our busiest time, when even with Marcia and Ping helping us, we could hardly keep up with orders. Today the only person in the place—other than Belle and myself—is my daughter, sprawled across a table at the other end of the store, drawing.
I practiced various sentences in my head as I picked Jona up from school.
Did you just imagine that woman? Your dad said there
wasn’t anyone there except the three of you. You’ve got to learn to separatemake-believe from real life!
But they all sounded accusing or prissy, so finally I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry so much,” Belle says when I describe the morning to her. “We all used to imagine things when we were kids. It’s a part of growing up.”
“The problem is, I’m not sure she imagined it. Sonny’s lied to me before—”
“Come on, Rikki! Sonny would never take a woman along when Jona was around.”
“I can’t believe you’re defending Sonny! Didn’t you once name him Public Enemy Number One?”
Belle grins. “Actually, it was Private Enemy Number One— as in your very own private enemy.” She shakes her head. “I can’t believe I’m defending him either. But you’ve got to give him credit—he’s a good dad.”
“I’m not sure about that either. Believe me, I wish I could be. It would give me one less thing to worry about.”
Not true,
jeers my whisper voice.
You know that what you really
want is for Sonny to prove himself completely and criminally irresponsibleso you can gain full custody of Jona and never let her see him again.
I can’t deny it.
“You could always call Paul and ask him.”
“Paul and I are not on speaking terms. Also, his phone is out of order. And even if I broke down and called him, you think he’d tell me the truth? Especially if it incriminates his buddy?”
“Well, then, I suggest you save your worries for what you know for sure,” Belle says. “Namely, this shop is done for. Another couple of weeks of business like this, and we’ll have to close down. We’ve tried everything—slashing prices, putting up promotional posters outside, having Marco distribute coupons at the street corner. And that horrendously expensive ad we put in the
Berkeley
Voice.
No results. Even our Book Club members didn’t come in this week. And look at
them!
”
We gaze dispiritedly across the street. From what little we can see, past their huge GRAND OPENING banner, Java is chock-full of customers, and every few minutes their door swings open to admit more people.
“We’ve got to figure out their secret—there’s got to be something!” Belle says, pacing restlessly, running her fingers through her disheveled hair. She looks like she’s lost weight. She opens up in the mornings (we’ve let Marcia and Ping go) but usually stays on with me until closing time in spite of my protests.
“It’s like they have a giant invisible people magnet!” she bursts out. “I’ve been watching all afternoon. Even folks who are striding along as though they’re in a hurry to get someplace come to a stop once they see that sign—and then they go in there, like they’re sleepwalking.”
“You’d better go home and catch some sleep yourself,” I say. “You’re beginning to sound like a voice-over from
Invasion of the
Body Snatchers
.” But I can’t help peering out suspiciously. The way my world is tilting, people magnets don’t sound so impossible. All I see, however, is a gaggle of executive types, power-tied and leather-briefcased, coming out of the café, laughing uproariously as though they’ve been drinking something far more potent than coffee. Their laughter brings back the memory of my morning’s call to Sonny.
“Auntie Belle,” Jona calls. “See, I’ve finished my picture of our camping trip.”
She holds up a brightly crayoned drawing. Purple sky, orange trees, yellow grass, two polka-dotted tents. And four people.
“Who are they, sweets?” Belle asks.
“That’s Paul, that’s Sonny, that’s me holding Sonny’s hand, and that’s Eliana, holding Sonny’s other hand.”
I crane my neck over Belle’s head to see better. I recognize Sonny’s picture right away. Jona has drawn him as she always does, with his blue-black hair shiny as a bird’s wing, his sharp, distinctive nose—and sun rays emanating from his head like a halo. Sonny-the-angel. Another item to add to the long list of unfair ironies that made up my life. Next to him is a tall woman in a blue dress with brown hair all the way to her waist. She has what looks like a crown of feathers on her head.
“Tell me about Eliana,” Belle says, sitting down next to Jona. “I don’t think I’ve met her before.”
“Of course you haven’t,” my daughter replies. “I just met her during this trip myself.”
“Where does she come from?”
“Czechoslovakia,” Jona says without missing a beat. Over her head Belle and I exchange a look.
“Is she a friend of your dad’s—or Paul’s?” Belle asks.
“She’s everyone’s friend. But most of all, she’s my special friend.”
“Um—what do you mean, special? Is that like an imaginary friend?”
“Really, Auntie Belle!” Jona says with dignity as she rolls up her drawing. “Only babies have imaginary friends. She’s special because she sings me songs, and tells me stories of how she grew up.”
“In Czechoslovakia?” I ask.
Jona nods. “She told me how there were witches—good ones—in the village where she used to live.” Then she loses interest in our conversation and goes over to check out the puppets.
In the car, as we drive home, I send covert glances Jona’s way. She is examining her drawing, her dark head bent over the stick figures. It strikes me suddenly that I don’t know her as fully as I thought I did. She who had come out of my body, tiny and crumpled and containable—even she now has parts to her life that I can’t enter. It doesn’t matter whether they’re real or imagined. I feel excluded all the same. Like the rest of my family—my mother, my father, Sonny—she too has become an enigma.
Later that night, lying sleepless in bed, thinking of all the things that were going wrong in my life, I’d realize I’d included Sonny in my family list. And with chagrin I’d admit that he was still family, much as I wanted to disown him. Because only family filled you with such exasperation. Only family could irritate you like a hangnail that you couldn’t chew off, no matter how much you tried.
When we turn into the apartment’s parking lot, Jona is singing something under her breath. They sound like nonsense words. But who knows, maybe they’re Czechoslovakian.
10
She has been trying for days to complete the painting, but she hasn’t had any success. She’s pleased with the foliage, the sky, the quality of light. It’s the man that’s giving her trouble. His body seems stiff and posed; there’s something fake about the angle of his neck. And his face—she’s been unable to draw it at all. Sometimes, frustrated, she’s tempted to cover him over with a rhododendron bush. But that would mean a major defeat, and she isn’t ready for that, not yet, even though the show opens in three days.
Things are getting worse at the Chai House. Stragglers wander in every once in a while. But it seems to her that they look around in surprise, as though taken aback at finding themselves in this place. As though they had meant to go somewhere else. They buy take-out coffee and leave as soon as they can. Even Belle’s offer of free Dietbusters (they’ve stopped stocking other snacks) isn’t enough to hold them—or to entice them back.
Where are their regular customers, Rakhi wonders. What has happened to Mrs. Locklin? To old Professor Rogers? To the Laurel Street Book Club members, who used to come in every Wednesday and fill the corner nook with the intense electricity of their arguments? She thinks of them all with bafflement and concern—and a sense of betrayal.
Last evening she walked into the store to find Belle poring over the accounts. Belle beckoned her over to her laptop computer and jabbed at the screen, at the column with the minus numbers. They’d been running at a loss for weeks. Now there wasn’t enough left to pay for next week’s supplies.
“Rent’s due in two weeks,” Belle said. The skin around her eyes looked raw, as though she’d been rubbing at it. In the weak well of light from the laptop screen, her lips were blue. “Where are we going to get the money?”
They weren’t savers; their own bank accounts were too slender to last them more than a month or so. They couldn’t go to the bank. They already had an outstanding loan. Their parents, never wealthy, had helped them as much as they could already.
“I guess we couldn’t ask Sonny, huh?” Belle said. “He
is
the richest person we know. Doesn’t that nightclub pay him an obscene amount of money—?”
“Belle!”
“Okay, okay, forget I mentioned it.”
“Give me a little time,” Rakhi said. “I’ll come up with something.” But all she had managed to do as she lay in bed that night, staring at the crisscrossed pattern of light and shadow thrown on her ceiling by the streetlamp, was to dislodge the rock she’d positioned so carefully over the snake hole in her memory.
She is back in college, in the classroom with large, green-shuttered windows where she first met Sonny. It’s a literature class on modern Indo-Anglian writers, and by this she knows she’s in a dream, for the university had never offered such a class when she was there, and she’s not even sure what the term means.
(But perhaps this is something else, a not-dream that we choose to misname because we all love dreams. Dreams that are like kites cut free from cause, from the ground-glass-dipped string of guilt.
Also: she hasn’t had a single dream since her early teenage years, since those recurring nightmares that her mother finally bought from her with a dollar and a string of Bengali words she didn’t explain to Rakhi.)
She’s sitting in the back of the classroom, near the window, her usual spot. She looks out on the confetti of humanity on Sproul Plaza—old hippies with guitars and bandanna-necked dogs; earnest students in Birkenstocks handing out Earth Day flyers; people queued up at the burrito stall; evangelists, fervently sweaty in black, describing with relish the torments of hell that await unbelievers, among whom, surely, Rakhi is included. Spring is in the air, a faint throbbing, like the drums people sometimes play in front of Zellerbach Auditorium. She thinks she smells hot-and-sour soup from the Chinese cart on Bancroft Way and decides she’ll go there after class.
She doesn’t see him come into the room, but she feels it—a tingling at the base of her spine. Though why should this be? It’s the middle of the quarter already; he must have entered the class many times before this. Still, with her shoulder blades she senses him checking out his seating options. There’s a chair next to a blonde in the second row, and there’s one next to her. He makes his choice, and her life changes.
Even in her not-dream she is amazed at how exactly she remembers certain things about him. He was wearing a faded black T-shirt with Carlos Santana’s face on it. His hair fell over his forehead as he bent to write in his notebook. Good Indian hair, thick and glossy and true black. It was clear he had not combed it that morning. A little shock ran through her as she realized this. In all her sheltered life (the adjective rises in her, unexpected—already he’s started unpacking her so she can see herself better) she hadn’t known anyone who came to class so unashamedly uncombed. He wrote without stopping through class, but when she sneaked a look over his knuckles—solid and a little battered, like a carpenter’s— she saw that he’d filled the page with squiggles from a green fountain pen. Later he would tell her they were notations for a bhangra remix he’d been hearing in his head. He was taking the lit class to fulfill a requirement, but he was really a musician. He couldn’t afford to be interested in anything else.