The Newlyweds (29 page)

“Oh, Bob’s wonderful with that kind of stuff,” Eileen said. “Cathy, you should’ve asked before.”

Cathy looked tearful. “What I mean is—it’s wonderful to have a child who
wants
to look after you.”

Amina had the strange feeling of being grateful to a person she had only a few moments ago wanted to strangle.

“This is normal in my country,” Amina began, while George and
Bob accepted seconds of Eileen’s lasagna. Suddenly there was an insistent electronic noise under the table. Harold jumped up, leaving most of his first helping untouched. He left the room and returned a moment later to say he was needed at the hospital.

“A ten-year-old with a pneumothorax. Life threatening, if we don’t do it right away.”

They all stood up as Harold made another phone call, and Jess collected his jacket from the closet, helping him into it while he talked. He covered the phone to thank Eileen for the dinner and then put a hand on George’s arm. “Good luck, buddy,” he said again, and even though she knew he was referring to George’s job hunt, the phrase offended Amina. After Harold had shut the front door behind him, the six of them remained standing, as if a dignitary had left the room.

“Sometimes I miss him at night, but I’m so proud of him,” Jess said, finally taking her seat again. “He’s just a wonderful surgeon, everyone says so. He has this detachment—he can keep his head when other people would be falling apart. I mean, some of these cases just break your heart.” Jess looked up at them. “But this isn’t a subject to talk about in front of a young couple.”

“I’m the same age you are,” George reminded his cousin.

“
Your
age doesn’t matter.” Jess smiled at Amina. “I’m a Nosy Nancy, but I can’t help asking—are you thinking of children yet?”

Amina looked at George for help, but he was noisily stacking the dishes.

“Leave it, leave it,” Cathy said. “If I can’t be trusted to cook, at least I can be useful cleaning up the mess.”

“I always wanted our own kids, of course,” Jess continued. “But it didn’t happen for us. For a while we thought about adoption, but we were older by then, and they make it hard for you. And Harold didn’t want to try other countries. He said you never know what you’ll get.” Jess paused, and her face and neck suddenly got very pink. She took a large swallow of wine and began complimenting Eileen again on the lasagna, which she said was delicious, but not too heavy.

“It’s the pesto,” Eileen said. “That’s the secret.” Jessica gave her aunt a grateful look.

“You don’t know what you get at home either,” Cathy remarked.

“You and I will clear, Catherine,” Eileen said briskly. “You young
people sit for a minute.” But Jessica got up immediately and went to the living room to refill her wineglass, and George followed a moment later. She could see why Jessica had been embarrassed, but Amina hadn’t been offended. People said things without thinking or didn’t recognize the way something would sound until it was out of their mouths. Her mother had often criticized her for the same thing at home. George had been right about Harold, but as usual she’d charged ahead, practically insisting on this dinner. Now she wished they hadn’t come.

“I’m going down to look at that boiler,” Bob said. “Let’s see if I can figure what’s going wrong. It sounds like your mixer’s shot.”

Amina wondered if she should try to help Eileen and Cathy in the kitchen or go into the living room with George and Jess—to thank her personally now that Harold was gone. But both pairs were deep in quiet conversation, and she felt as if she would be intruding on either. She lingered in the open doorway, pretending to examine a framed needlepoint rendering of the Lord’s Prayer. She’d heard of the Lord’s Prayer, but never actually read it, and now she struggled to decipher the squared-off yarn letters:
FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES, AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US
. Her father would have been able to bring the corresponding Qur’anic verse to mind; all she could remember was
Behold, Allah is forgiving, merciful
. Nevertheless, the similarity was comforting. There was only one God, and so somewhere inside this piece of sewing was hidden the one she knew.

The doorbell rang, and George and Jessica looked up from their conversation.

“Oh God,” Jessica said. “He must’ve forgotten something. The pager? Eileen, do you see it in the kitchen?” Jess hurried into the foyer to get the door: Harold had come to the front this time. “Oh, he’s going to be so—” they heard her say, and stop.

“Hi,” said a woman’s voice, and Amina knew immediately. “I’m sorry to interrupt.”

“Kim,” Jessica said. “Did you—is that your bike?”

“I should have driven,” Kim said. “I didn’t know it was going to rain.”

Eileen had come in from the kitchen, still holding a dish towel
decorated with hens, and when Amina turned around she saw Cathy in the doorway, a look of anticipation around her neat, small mouth.

“Cathy,” Eileen said quietly, and the other woman shrugged.

“Don’t look at me. I never know when she’ll show up.”

Jess came into the dining room, followed by Kim. Kim looked around the room, her eyes holding Amina’s a second too long. She was wearing a tan belted raincoat over a pair of purple yoga pants, and her hair and her clothes were soaking wet, dripping dark spots onto Cathy’s pale green carpeting. Amina was struck by the way Kim’s hair lost its color when wet, and also by the almost translucent whiteness of her skin. There were bluish smudges under her eyes, as if she hadn’t been sleeping.

She turned to Cathy. “I was out biking—I thought I’d stop by. But then it started.”

“It’s been raining for hours,” Cathy said.

Kim nodded. “I’m soaked.”

It had been raining when she set out, but Kim had taken her bike anyway. Did she think she’d cut a more sympathetic figure this way? There was an intensity in her expression that Amina associated with alcohol, but she’d never known Kim to have a drink. It was the drama of the situation she’d engineered that excited her.

Amina looked at Jessica, to avoid making eye contact with Kim. George’s cousins were standing next to each other—the one who resembled him and the beautiful foundling—and the contrast between them was stark. Jessica looked down and fingered her wedding band, and Amina thought she knew what she was thinking. Being married to Harold might not be easy, but it was better than the upheaval and uncertainty of Kim’s life. She was thinking that Kim’s looks, her worldliness, and style hadn’t gotten her very far, while she, Jessica, had stayed in Rochester and made a life many people would envy. She was thanking her lucky stars.

“I needed to talk to you,” Kim told her mother. “I didn’t want to do it over the phone.”

Amina glanced at George. Her husband had an ability to remove himself from an uncomfortable situation, to fix his mind on some useless piece of trivia—anything other than the problem at hand. She
would have expected him to absent himself that way now, and so she was startled by his expression: a kind of fierce compassion, tender and undisguised. She saw that his hands were clenched at his sides, as if to keep them from reaching spontaneously for Kim.

She looked away, but there was nowhere safe to rest her eyes. George’s mother and his aunt were watching her, as if she rather than Kim were the one creating the scene. Eileen clearly pitied her, while Cathy’s curiosity was undisguised. Immediately three things became clear to Amina. Her husband was still in love with Kim. Kim had never loved him back. And everyone in this room had long been aware of those facts, except for Amina.

Kim crossed her arms in front of her chest. She was shivering. “I’m so sorry to interrupt the party. I’ll get out of your hair now.” But she remained standing where she was.

Cathy shook her head. “For months I don’t hear from you. I don’t know whether you’re here or on the other side of the world. And then all of a sudden you just show up and—” She leaned on her sister’s arm, then gasped and put one hand over her face, as if she were too upset to go on. For the first time Amina saw a similarity between mother and daughter, something learned rather than inherited.

“Why not call or send an e-mail first, Kimmie?” Eileen said quietly. “Wouldn’t that have been better? Upsetting everyone, and getting all wet.”

“Oh, she won’t answer my e-mails,” Kim said. “I have to barge in on her.” She appeared to be talking about her mother, but Amina felt the sting of the words as though Kim had been addressing her directly.

“Well, we’re about to go. Then you two can have a little chat.” Eileen spoke in a light, reassuring way, as if it were an ordinary Sunday dinner, as if the evening had gone beautifully and was now regretfully drawing to a close. “Why don’t you go upstairs and dry off a minute.”

“Don’t go because of me,” Kim said. “I really just came to say good-bye.”

“No, no,” Eileen said. “Everyone was getting ready.”

“I’m going back to Bombay,” Kim told her mother. “I don’t have the ticket yet, but I wanted to let you know.”

Cathy exhaled sharply.

“She’s trying to do better,” Eileen reminded her sister.

“I’ve talked to Ashok, and we’re going to try to make it work.” The name, spoken out loud, seemed to send a current of electricity through the room; Amina thought she could feel it leaping from Cathy to Eileen to George. “He really can’t be happy here. In the last generation everyone wanted to come here, but now, with the economy and everything—I mean, the opportunities are all over there.” She continued addressing her mother, as if no one else in the room would be interested.

“I know I haven’t always told you the truth—but I never lied about how it felt. Only what happened.”

Cathy laughed shortly. “
Only
what happened! What else is there, Kimberly?”

“Never mind what happened,” Eileen said. “We have to think about the present.”

“You’re like a yogi, Aunt Eileen. That’s exactly what it’s all about.”

“All right, Kimmie,” Eileen said. “Just go take your shower.”

“I’d be careful in that shower,” Cathy said.

“Sometimes I’m embarrassed by what really happened,” Kim insisted. She turned to George: “Like when we were kids.”

George made no acknowledgment of this but continued staring dumbly at his cousin, as he had since she’d mentioned Ashok.

“I remember people asking questions at school—who were my ‘real parents’ and all that. I was ashamed and so I’d make up a story. I guess I’ve always done it.”

“We left our shoes outside,” George said, finally looking away from Kim. “We have to go.”

Eileen nodded, as if the second of these statements followed logically from the first. “I’m so glad you two could come.”

But Kim wouldn’t let them leave. She dropped the pretense and turned to speak directly to Amina.

“I think of you whenever I go into Starbucks. I thought you must’ve entered that contest they’re having.”

“Oh no,” Amina said, but she wasn’t surprised that Kim had noticed it, waiting in line for all her chai lattes. There was something in both their personalities that was attracted to an unlikely gamble. It was juvenile, Amina thought, one of the things she liked least about herself, and she tried to sound now as if a contest with a
ten-thousand-dollar prize was of little consequence to her. “I have way too much to do before I leave.”

“I wanted to tell you I went to the ICR—right after you left Yoga Shanti in December. I said I was just curious, and everyone was really nice. There were people from all over: Indonesia, the Middle East, and India. I even met a Bengali woman—I told her all about you.” She seemed to expect some reaction, but when Amina didn’t say anything, she continued, “The place is huge, with this beautiful stained glass. There wasn’t even enough parking for everyone.”

“What’s this?” Cathy asked.

“International Center of Rochester,” Kim said, without missing a beat, but she was still looking at Amina. “It’s a place for immigrants, so they don’t feel alone here. I thought Amina might like to go, to meet people.”

“Thank you,” Amina said, keeping her voice even. “But I’m so busy now with work and college.”

“Maybe when your parents arrive.” Kim gave her a significant look that infuriated Amina. How dare Kim make suggestions about how Amina ought to live her life, after everything she’d done? What qualified her to meddle in other people’s affairs, after she’d made such a mess of her own?

“How wonderful that you’ll be going back to India.” Amina kept her voice even with effort. “Perhaps things will work out better for you this time.”

Eileen looked at Amina in surprise, but Kim only shrugged slightly, hardly reacting to the provocation. Her hair was beginning to dry in blond tendrils around her face.

“We really have to go,” George muttered. “Thanks for dinner, Mom.”

Kim glanced back at Amina, as if the two of them were the ones who shared a secret, and then allowed Eileen to give her a gentle push toward the shower. As she walked upstairs, Eileen and Jessica exchanged a look of mutual gratitude that Amina suddenly envied. No matter how kind her mother-in-law was, the two of them would never enjoy that kind of silent understanding. How could she have thought it would be any other way?

“Will you take your cauliflower?”

“Oh no,” Amina said. “We have more at home.”

“It was so good,” Eileen said, wrapping the plate with foil. “Don’t let it go to waste.”

9
The night before she left for Desh, Amina spoke to her mother on the phone six times. Her father had wanted to travel to Dhaka just to meet her at the airport, and only her most strident warnings about how angry she would be if she were to see him in the throng outside of Zia International Airport were enough to make him promise to stay in Shyamnagar. It was bad enough, Amina said, that she had to take a bus seven hours to the village and then return to Dhaka two days later. Since it was going to be the last time she would see her nanu, probably forever, there was no help for it, but for her father to make an additional journey was pointless.

She would arrive at night, and there wouldn’t be a bus to Satkhira until the morning. She would stay with her aunt and uncle in Savar, and her uncle’s driver, Fariq, would pick her up at the airport.