Authors: Nell Freudenberger
They were still standing over the table, as if the meal had been prepared only for show. The dishes steamed convincingly.
“How long did she live in the house, George?” His name sounded strange in her mouth. In almost thirty years of marriage, her mother had never said her father’s name.
“Only two months. Until she—until she had the abortion. Otherwise it would’ve taken even less time. We used to fight about everything—nothing like you and me.”
“And so—in this game you played together—she helped you pick me.”
George jerked his face away, shutting his eyes for a second. She could see the faint, boyish freckles at his temples. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Not for me.”
“Not for me either—I started thinking about you all the time, especially after you sent the picture. I felt guilty about it.”
“Guilty for what?”
George didn’t say anything.
“Your game was my whole life.”
He shook his head. “She’s a witch—that woman. She likes to cause trouble.” His expression was frightened, pleading. “My mother told me not to mention Kim to you at all, but—”
“My mother said not to tell things, too. But I did tell you everything.”
George took off his glasses, brushed one hand over his face, and replaced them without wiping the lenses. He looked at her. “I was going to tell you the rest after you got here. But then Kim and I patched things up—we talked after I came back from Bangladesh. I told her I’d asked you to marry me, and she was really happy for us. She said not to say anything—I guess she was afraid you might not come.” George hesitated. “I was afraid.”
She looked at her husband and understood that he was the kind of person for whom a lie only counted if it was said out loud. At the same time she could sit in the places of her relatives, who would point to all the concrete evidence that she’d been duped. She even could see the situation from Kim’s perspective, believing that once she and Amina
got to be friends, they could all coexist peacefully in Rochester. The only people she couldn’t bear to imagine were her parents. When she thought about going home, disgraced, it wasn’t her own shame but the thought of their despair that paralyzed her—knowing they’d let her go for nothing.
When they went upstairs, George asked whether she wanted him to sleep in the other room.
“I will,” she said, and she could see immediately that he’d thought she would say no. He was genuinely frightened now that she would leave him, and she wondered whether he thought she would really consider going home. He touched her awkwardly on the shoulder and disappeared into their bedroom.
She went into the room across the hall and lay down on her back on the blue quilted bedspread, remembering how she’d admired it when she first arrived. The stuffed panda George’s mother had brought her still sat on top of the dresser, its fur stiff with dust. Now she got up and retrieved it; she had the urge to embrace something inanimate. She wondered what had really been going through her mother-in-law’s mind when she’d left it here for Amina. Even if Eileen hadn’t known about Kim’s pregnancy, what had she thought about a foreign fiancée moving in less than a year after her niece moved out? How had she and Cathy felt when they discovered that their children—the stolid introvert and the wayward gypsy—were living together? Amina thought that Cathy would’ve been secretly pleased, and pretended the opposite, whereas Eileen would’ve done everything in her power to point out the perils of such a relationship to George.
She held the bear as the light under the door went dark: George had turned off his lamp. After a while she found that it wasn’t Kim and George she was thinking about so much as Ashok. In particular there was something Kim had told her one windy January day, when Amina hadn’t been able to face the wait in the freezing bus shelter. Kim had taken her back to the apartment, where she had been in the midst of organizing her closet, weeding out things she no longer wore. Occasionally she would offer something to Amina, but they were such different sizes that almost nothing fit.
“After he left I tried to figure out what had done it. I mean, I knew he was unhappy—but I figured there had to be something specific.”
“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Amina had said, pleased to supply the idiom.
At that time in Manhattan, Kim told Amina, there were all kinds of people too frightened to take the trains. The fact that the attacks hadn’t happened on the subway, but in an entirely unpredictable location 110 stories in the air, didn’t matter; even Kim, relatively untouched by the disaster, found that her heartbeat sped up and that she exchanged glances or even a nervous joke with the other passengers when the train stopped in the tunnel. Ashok was of the opinion that the subways were actually safer now than they’d ever been, and so Kim was surprised one morning to see him setting off in running shoes to walk to school. He had a thing about sneakers—what he called trainers—he didn’t believe they should be worn at any time other than during sporting activities. He had a very clean white pair that he used to wear in India when they went to the Willingdon Club for tennis; at first he had attempted to give her lessons, but Kim had shown no aptitude and had preferred to sit on the sidelines watching him play with friends. Finally he had told her that it looked strange, her sitting on the court like that, and that she ought to go and have a lemonade with some of his friends, young people who could always be found in the club’s bar or café, involved in serious conversations the import of which Kim invariably failed to grasp.
When she asked him about the sneakers, he told her he was no longer taking the subway but wouldn’t say why. She had pressed him, and he said it wasn’t what she thought; he wasn’t scared. He had said that she had no idea what it was like for him to live in this city. But because her idea of their relative positions was so firmly fixed—Ashok with his family and his houses and his Cambridge education, and herself, perpetually struggling to keep up, with no advantage other than the way she looked—she found it hard to credit this idea of her husband as a second-class citizen.
“Okay,” she said finally, in the midst of another argument. “Give me an example. Has anyone said anything directly to you, or is it just the way you think people are looking at you? Because everyone’s looking at everyone these days—we can’t help it. You’ve said it
yourself—Americans are such babies. It’s been so long since anything happened to us.”
And that was when he’d told her about the Bangladeshi. Ashok had been waiting for the subway a few weeks earlier, when a young South Asian man in an ill-fitting suit and a bright purple tie had approached him on the platform. The man had begun in Hindi and, when Ashok had stopped him to say he didn’t speak the language well, had tried Bangla before switching uncertainly to English. (Ashok had assumed the man was a Bengali from India, and it was only later that he had the leisure to discover his true origins.) The man asked Ashok his shoe size and whether by any chance he knew the corresponding European size. Ashok knew his European size, but the pair he was wearing was one Kim had bought for him after their arrival in New York; he politely told the man that he had no idea about American shoe sizes.
This politeness, Kim said, was not quite authentic, but you would have had to know Ashok to hear the condescension in his voice. Kim had begun to explain what the man had wanted, but Amina had known already. This was a man exactly like her father, only much more successful—a man who had come close to realizing her father’s lifelong import-export dream. He had made it to America with suitcases full of Bangladeshi shoes and needed the correct sizing information before he tried to interest local retailers. Perhaps the size conversion was only a pretext to start a conversation; if he talked to as many prosperous South Asians as he could find, he might eventually discover a fellow Bengali with the connections to help realize the entrepreneurial fantasies that had brought him here. No doubt he had a family sequestered in some familiar part of Dhaka, waiting for the great and only miracle of their lives: for those suitcases full of shoes to be transformed into American dollars.
“Could you look?” the man had asked. He would have asked quietly, in the baldly plaintive tones of the desperate, easily casting off his own dignity in front of a man he’d never see again.
Amina pictured the handsome young man in the photograph and could see the expression of concealed distaste, the moment of hesitation, when he was faced with the Deshi salesman. At the same time she knew what must have happened next even before Kim told her: a person brought up as Ashok had been was of course unable to refuse
a request from a stranger. He bent down and removed one shoe, lifting the foot in its clean sock just slightly so as not to touch the subway floor. At that moment (and here was where Amina’s imagination failed her) three New York City police officers had arrived, sprinting across the platform, shouting warnings and frisking the men as a curious crowd looked on. Both Ashok and the Bengali were instructed to remove their shoes and walk the rest of the way through the station in their socks; it was a day that had alternated between rain and sleet, turning the cement platform into a kind of slop sink for the collected filth of downtown sidewalks. By the time they reached the street, where they were shoved into a waiting car, this cold and greasy mixture had seeped between Ashok’s toes and ruined the cuffs of his trousers. He had waited six hours to be questioned by two detectives for twenty minutes and released at 4:30 p.m. with an apology for “any inconvenience” and a joking reminder to keep his clothes on in the subway. He had not learned the fate of the salesman.
When Kim got back to the apartment that evening, Ashok was already there, freshly showered and dressed, calm and unusually solicitous of her. He hadn’t told her about the incident immediately, and she’d enjoyed his mood that night without questioning it. Many weeks later, when she had come home to find a note in an envelope centered on the bedside table between the telephone and the lamp, she thought it must have been that November afternoon that he’d decided.
Ashok left just before Christmas, and the holidays passed for Kim in a daze of grief. She continued to go to work, but spent the rest of her waking hours in bed or on the couch; Ashok had left enough rent money for December and January, and although she knew she should get out by the thirty-first and save the twenty-six hundred dollars, she was incapable of taking the steps necessary to accomplish it. Something had happened to her stomach after he left, and unless she ate the blandest foods, she suffered diarrhea and vomiting; she figured she was saving some money by existing on a diet of Top Ramen and ginger ale. The sickness was helpful, she’d told Amina, because it was often the only thing that got her up from the couch.
They hadn’t socialized in New York, and outside of work she’d
known only one person—the woman who’d traveled with her to India the first time. Waking up from a nap late one Saturday afternoon, something had possessed her, and she called information; miraculously her friend had been listed and had answered the phone on the second ring. She’d been thrilled to hear from Kim and had immediately invited her to a club in the East Village the following night. The next morning Kim had showered—taking perverse pleasure in the state of the bathtub, which had not been cleaned since Ashok had left—and gone to Cheap Jack’s, picking out a white-and-gold vintage dress, a cream-colored wool jacket with a fur collar, and a pair of gold stiletto sandals. She had gone for a manicure and spent almost three hours dressing and making herself up. She was aware that the look, a kind of 1940s Hollywood glamour, was one that would have particularly appealed to Ashok; it was cheering to pretend that she was dressing up for him.
She didn’t have the money for it, especially after the morning’s expenditures, but she took a cab; when she arrived, she saw her old acquaintance standing in line outside with a group of young people, all of them dressed in dark jackets and distressed jeans. She told the driver to let her out on the next block, where she walked until she found a bar. She stayed for three hours and was approached again and again; even through the haze of alcohol, she could see how remote these male creatures were from Ashok. She managed to walk to Union Square when her money was finished and take the 6 train to the apartment, where she collapsed just inside the door. Once in the night she woke up to vomit, not quite making it to the bathroom, and then dragged herself to the couch.
It was the following day, a cold January morning at around eight o’clock, that her cousin George—an early riser who would already have been up for several hours—called to check in, as if he somehow knew it was time for her to come home.
14
In the morning George went to the basement to use the neglected Bowflex, and then Amina heard the noise of the shower. She went to the kitchen in her robe and fixed coffee and
breakfast. When he came down, dressed for work in a green-and-white-striped shirt and belted khaki trousers, she put the bowls on the table and went back to the sink to clean up.
“I was thinking,” George said.
Amina prepared herself for another apology. She wished he would simply be quiet and go to work.
“I mean, I’ve been thinking for a while—I don’t see why your parents shouldn’t stay here.”
Amina was standing over the sink. She was wearing her old white bathrobe, which she had brought from home, and which was too light for this time of year. She could feel gooseflesh on her arms.
“They could stay in the bigger room, but they could use the bathroom downstairs. I mean, so they could have their own.”
“You’re only saying that because of all of this,” she told George, resuming the washing up in the sink.
George turned around in his chair. “Will you leave that, for God’s sake!” He knew the way she felt about swearing. “I mean, will you come here please, so that we can talk?”
She left the kitchen and sat down at the place opposite. George’s pallor and the puffiness of his eyes didn’t evoke any feelings of compassion, nor did she take pleasure in his obvious distress. He looked to her like a stranger, and she marveled at the fact that they had spent nearly three years living together as husband and wife.