Authors: Nell Freudenberger
“White Christmas,” Amina said hopefully, and when she looked back at George he was smiling.
“You never know.”
21
The snow came for real in January, and by the middle of February, Amina felt as if they were being slowly buried. Her parents checked the New York weather on the BBC and called to ask how she was managing. Her American self clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering, wore pantyhose under her jeans and turtle-necks under her sweaters, but her Bengali self complained to her parents about the kind of cold that got in through your mouth and your ears and froze your insides, so that you kept shivering even once you were inside a sturdy, centrally heated Rochester house. “Three more months,” George told her, but the notion that the snow would disappear by May was incredible—where could it all go?
One night she half woke to the sound of sirens. George had raised himself onto one elbow and was looking toward the windowless wall that insulated their bedroom from the street.
“Finally,” he said. “Teach them a lesson this time.” Then his head dropped back to the pillow. Amina almost got up—she wanted to see the blue police lights spinning the way they did on television—but the thought of getting out from underneath the down comforter was too daunting.
When she woke up in the morning it was hard to believe the sirens hadn’t been a dream, until George went out to check the mailbox. He came back inside to say it was untouched—the cops had gotten to the thugs before they could do any damage—and to marvel at the fact that kids would bother joyriding in weather like this. Amina fixed his Chex and a protein shake she could drink slowly; it was her day off and she was looking forward to getting things done around the house.
After he left, she put on her red parka and went into the yard. The sky hung in soft, gray drapes over the roofs of the houses. George
always said he’d do the shoveling once he got home, but he’d been so grateful the first time she’d surprised him that she’d gotten in the habit of doing it herself. She liked the quiet while she worked, interrupted only by the clang and scrape of the shovel on the asphalt and the way the chemicals in the Rid-Ice seemed to melt the snow by magic. It was best when Annie Snyder or another of their neighbors was outside; she liked to wave casually as she accomplished this very local chore. No one was in evidence this morning, and she was about to go inside when she saw a silver car speeding up Skytop Lane. A gloved hand waved from the driver’s side, and then Amina recognized Kim.
She leaned the shovel against the side of the house and brushed the snow off her trousers—an old pair of George’s that she’d hemmed to wear in the garden over the summer. George said that she looked like a circus clown, with a belt gathering the pants at the waist, but Amina couldn’t see the point in dirtying one of her own pairs when her husband had so many old ones he never used. She had wondered if Kim wore Indian clothes all the time, and she was relieved when George’s cousin got out of the car to see that today she had put on ordinary dark blue jeans and a plaid jacket, too light for the weather but not exotic in any recognizable way. She was carrying a bouquet of flowers without much color to them, some wildflower or herb with a few tightly closed white buds, and a small package wrapped in cellophane. It occurred to Amina that they’d brought nothing when they’d visited her.
“These aren’t for you,” Kim said, as if she could read Amina’s mind. “I brought bath salts instead, but now I’m thinking—you don’t take baths, do you?”
“Not often,” Amina admitted. The idea of sitting in her own dirty water disgusted her.
Kim was nodding already. “That’s an American thing—boiling ourselves for no reason in tons of hot, potable water. Oh well, you can regift these,” she said, putting the pretty blue package in Amina’s hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t call first—is this a bad time?”
“It’s a wonderful time,” Amina said. “Please come in.”
But Kim hesitated in the driveway. “George should do this for you.”
“He would,” Amina assured her. “Only it’s so hard and icy when he gets home—even if he’s home at four thirty.”
“Rochester,” Kim said, shaking her head. “I bet this isn’t what you pictured.” She didn’t wait for an answer but glanced across the street. “They’re still at the hospital, I guess?”
“Who’s at the hospital?”
“Oh,” Kim said. “I thought you knew. It’s Dan Snyder. He’s only forty-five, but he’s had this heart problem ever since he was born. Last night he had a seizure and they took him in to Strong Memorial.”
“I didn’t know you know the Snyders.”
“Annie and I went to high school together. We were the same year, but we weren’t friends then—I wasn’t part of her crowd.” She smiled gently. “Hers was the right crowd, and mine was the wrong one.”
“Which one was George a part of?” Amina asked, although she thought she already knew the answer.
“We were never there at the same time, of course, so I don’t really know. I hung out with stupid kids—really self-destructive. But George had the confidence not to make that mistake.” She smiled at Amina. “I bet he was just sort of an individual.”
Amina looked across the street at her neighbors’ house. Annie had left the garage door open, an empty black mouth.
“Do you think there was a siren?”
“You mean, on the ambulance? Sometimes they turn them off at night, if it isn’t an emergency. But I would think so, for a heart.”
Amina nodded. “George doesn’t know. He thinks it is thugs.”
Kim looked confused.
“Who have been destroying mailboxes.”
Kim looked at the heavy-duty rural mailbox, which was exactly as it had been the first day Amina had taken it out of the box. “Mail-boxing, you mean? But no one’s hit yours, it looks like. Anyway, he knows now. He’s the one who e-mailed me—that’s why I brought the flowers. She might not have been friendly to me in high school, but she was really nice after I got back from India. I thought I’d just leave these on the doorstep.”
“If you want to bring them inside, I can put them in a vase,” Amina suggested. “Then when the Snyders get home, I can take them. Otherwise they might freeze.”
“I didn’t even know that could happen to flowers,” Kim said. “It’s not too much trouble?”
“Yes,” Amina said. “I mean, no. Please come this way.”
“Do you use the front door? I think that’s nice. George always goes in through the garage.”
Ordinarily they didn’t use the front door at all, but Amina had felt that they ought to go in the more formal entrance, since Kim was a guest. Now she realized that because Kim was family, the garage might have been more appropriate after all. They went into the kitchen, where Kim put the flowers in the sink. They had only one vase, but George’s cousin found it on the first try, in the cabinet next to the refrigerator.
Amina was relieved to remember the lemon squares she’d made three weeks ago, freezing the uneaten portion. Now she put them on a plate to defrost in the microwave and set water on the stove for tea.
“Please don’t go to any trouble,” Kim said. “I really just came to see you. I mean, I know you said I could, but I felt like I needed an excuse. Honestly—I might not have bothered with flowers for the Snyders otherwise. I was thinking that while I was driving over from the studio this morning—not very nice, but true. That’s something about yoga: it sort of brings things up about yourself. Good and bad things.”
Amina tried to follow this while keeping an eye on the lemon squares rotating in the microwave. One of the things that had always encouraged her about her future with George was the fact that he’d bought this house after he’d met her. You did not buy a three-bedroom house with a washer/dryer and a microwave if you didn’t in your heart one day expect to have a big family. If George’s definition of family was more limited than her own, that was simply the result of cultural differences; she cherished the idea that he might eventually relent and see the beauty of having three generations under one roof.
“I stopped practicing yoga when I was with Ashok. His family thought it was silly, something for foreigners, and somehow I didn’t need it then. But when I got back to Rochester, it saved my life. That and George.”
“George said you and Ashok got married?” She had been unsure of whether or not to bring it up directly, but Kim nodded eagerly.
“A Hindu ceremony, but very plain and small. No white horse or
red sari or anything. I wore a dress from home with a scarf and a little mehndi on my hands. We had a pundit do it in a small temple near Malabar Hill—have you been to Bombay?”
Amina shook her head.
Kim smiled. “That’s funny. I know you’re from Bangladesh, but maybe because you sound Indian—talking to you makes me feel like I’m back there.”
“I’ve never been to India, but I also dreamed of marrying in a foreign country. My relatives in Dhaka used to say we were ‘sleeping under a torn quilt and dreaming of gold.’ ”
“That’s beautiful.”
“It’s a beautiful way of saying a nasty thing. My mother wanted me to wear a sari, but I chose a white dress.”
“Actually I wanted to wear a sari. I wanted to have a big wedding and invite my mother and George and his mom and everyone. Of course my mother never would’ve come—we weren’t even speaking to each other then. And his parents wouldn’t have allowed us to have that kind of wedding anyway.”
“Weddings are expensive,” Amina suggested.
Kim shook her head. “They’re rich,” she said. “And he’s their first son. They did everything for him. He went to Cathedral—that’s the fanciest high school in Bombay—and then to Cambridge. I didn’t even know what Cambridge was then, if you can believe that.”
“But they didn’t want him to have a big wedding?”
“Oh, they did,” Kim said. “Just not a big wedding with me.”
“But he insisted.”
Kim seemed to have stopped talking and was pulling at a thread that had come loose from one of her plaid cuffs. She hadn’t touched her lemon square or her tea.
“I don’t have the right kind of tea,” Amina apologized.
“It’s not that,” Kim said, and when she looked up Amina noticed again her remarkable eyes, a dark pond-water green. Now they had a glassy sheen. “George would think badly of me if he knew. He wouldn’t be wrong either—I don’t know why I think I can tell you.”
“George knows you were married,” Amina said. “He doesn’t think badly of you.”
Kim shook her head. “I haven’t told anyone here, but I was pregnant.
It was an accident, and we’d already decided to get married before we found out. I kept asking him to tell his parents we were engaged, but he put it off, and then of course it looked bad when we finally told them. They thought I’d tricked him. And then my mother-in-law wanted me to end it. There was an abortion clinic not far from where they lived—they didn’t call it that, of course. We went by there a few days later, just me and her—supposedly we were going to visit a Parsi friend of hers on Hughes Road. But once we’d parked she called the house and told me the woman wasn’t feeling well. She suggested we take a walk—which was totally weird, because she never walked anywhere—she said she wanted to point out some sights: the Gandhi Museum and the Towers of Silence.” Kim gave Amina a bitter smile. “Anyway, we went back to the car after about ten minutes—she had her arm locked through mine, the way women do there, you know—and it turned out the driver was waiting for us right in front of it: Billimoria Hospital for Woman Care. ‘If you ever have a female problem’—that’s what she said—‘this is where you’ll come. You can walk right in anytime. Give them my name and they’ll take you.’ ”
“You weren’t married yet?”
Kim shook her head. “They said they thought we were too young, and they wanted him to go to graduate school first. Ashok stood up to them about the marriage, but I think neither of us was really prepared for a baby. And so I thought it would be okay—I was so happy we were going to be together forever. I figured we’d have kids later.”
“So you went to—the hospital?”
Kim nodded. “And then two weeks later, we got married. That’s when I knew they’d lied. It didn’t have anything to do with our ages—a lot of Ashok’s friends had kids already. But his parents hardly invited anyone to the wedding. I could see they hoped it wouldn’t work out. And they knew if we had a kid …”
Amina thought she’d never seen anyone cry quite as beautifully as Kim did. She made very little effort to wipe the tears away, but they didn’t seem to interfere with the rest of her face, which retained its delicate coloring.
“It’s different after you do it. I could picture what our baby would look like: Ashok’s beautiful skin, his features, my eyes. It was tiny—ten
weeks—but I realized I was in love with it already. It would’ve come in November, and I know this sounds silly—but I knew it was a boy. I wanted to call him Hari.”
Kim calmed herself. “I thought we’d have our own apartment, not too close to his parents. I’d read this article about attachment parenting—you know, breastfeeding and cosleeping and everything. I knew I wanted to do most of it myself.”
“What is cosleeping?”
“Oh—it’s when you sleep with the baby, instead of putting it in a crib.”
“That’s the way we do it at home.”
“Exactly,” Kim said. “You know. I wanted to do everything naturally—no formula or anything like that. Homemade food. Just the opposite of the way I was raised. I thought I’d tell my mom that if she wanted to see him, she could come and visit us. I never wanted to bring him back here.”
Amina expected some qualification or excuse: after all, she’d just moved halfway across the world to spend the rest of her life in Rochester. But Kim didn’t seem to recognize that particular awkwardness.
“You’d think that would be the way they’d do things in the cities there, too—but it’s almost worse than here. Nannies living in the house with you; bottles of formula; rich people are even using those awful disposable diapers now, when it used to be kids just running around bare-bottomed. I wanted to do it the village way, basically.”
“In the village you live with your family, though,” Amina said. “You don’t have your own apartment.” There were a lot of other things about village life she thought might surprise her new friend, but she didn’t want to undermine Kim’s admiration for her culture, which she thought was genuine if not especially well informed.