The Newlyweds (35 page)

“Did you tell my father about George’s job?” she asked, when she hung up the phone.

Her mother nodded. “I know you told me not to say anything, but—”

Amina was suddenly ashamed. Her parents had kept the secret about her father’s cousins to save her more worry. By contrast she’d concealed things out of pride. In spite of the bad news about George’s job, her father had been cheerful on the phone; she knew he’d never for a moment lost his faith in her or the son-in-law he hardly knew. She thought of him performing his laps around the office, keeping himself in shape for an America he couldn’t imagine—for her—and the strength of her emotion surprised her. If she were truly an American she would have wanted to hug them; as it was, she took her mother’s arm in hers, drawing it close as if both her parents were somehow contained in that narrow, aging limb.

7
She didn’t see Micki until that afternoon. Her cousin was still beautiful, but she’d gained weight and she was wearing a great deal of makeup. Amina complimented her on her clothing, a royal-blue shalwar kameez with gold embroidery, the neckline of which dipped slightly in back according to the new fashion. She was startled to realize that Micki had put it on for her.

“This village has become so modern,” Amina said, but Micki only shook her head.

“You don’t have to say that when it’s only me. I know what a hole it is. I’d like to leave—maybe for Khulna, so we could all be together while the boys went to school. But Badal—my husband—he has the new auto shop in Satkhira.” She hesitated for a moment, shyly. “Did you pass it?”

“Oh, yes,” Amina lied. “So busy.” She could tell Micki was pleased by the way her neck colored, just as it used to do when they were little girls.

“You look just the same,” she said. “Your figure is so good! Did you bring pictures of your house?”

Amina had been looking forward to this moment for so long, but something had happened since she’d arrived. Her pride had evaporated, and what she wanted most was to confess to Micki the realities of her situation. Instead she went and got the pocket album from her room, which had pictures of her and George standing in the garden with the house and car in the background. She heard herself complaining to Micki in the same way she’d once deplored, when her students’ wealthy parents did it.

“Actually I’d like to move to a smaller place. Now that my parents are coming, George says we’ll be glad to have three bedrooms. But a big house is so much work—no wonder we haven’t had time for children yet. My mother wishes she had a daughter like you.”

“Not really.” Micki dark eyes hadn’t changed, still round and liquid. “She just wants you to have children. But she’s so proud of you for going to America. And I heard that you’re working in a bookstore. Badal has a friend who went to Texas, but he works in a restaurant.”

“I work in Starbucks now,” Amina said. “It’s basically a restaurant.
Serving only coffee and snacks.” But Micki was gasping at her wedding pictures.

“Like a model in a magazine.” She guided Amina away from their grandmother’s house, toward the path that led deeper into the village. “I was looking forward to a chat with you all these months. As soon as Nanu said you were coming. And I couldn’t wait to see George—he’s an engineer, right?”

Micki was looking at a picture of the two of them in the yard, Amina in the white dress and George looking proud, his arm draped casually over her shoulder. Her own smile looked naïve and silly to her now. If she’d truly wanted to give an impression of her life in Rochester, there would have had to be a picture of Kim, too—wearing one of her bright-colored kurtas, her long hair framing her beautiful face. Was she still in Rochester? Would she show up at the house now that Amina was gone, to say good-bye to George? It was infuriating to be jealous of someone who didn’t actually want her husband—wanted only to gain his sympathy before she left forever.

Micki was shaking her head in admiration. “And I bet he listens to you—not like Bengali husbands.” She hadn’t relinquished the flip book; with her other hand, she held Amina’s tightly.

“Sometimes he listens. But sometimes he can’t understand.”

“Men can’t,” Micki said, and laughed, showing the dimples Amina remembered from so long ago.

She hadn’t been paying attention to the path, but all of a sudden it opened up onto a large field of dal. The farmer was using a hoe on the far side, in front of a row of banana trees, and suddenly Amina realized where they were. Gopal’s house was long gone, crumbled into the mud and grown over with bamboo, but a part of the brick paving from the courtyard was still there.

“Listen,” she said. “There’s a lot I haven’t told people. Have you heard that the American economy is terrible right now? George lost his job almost six months ago. If he doesn’t find another one, we’ll have to sell the house.”

Micki stared at her. “But how much is an American three-bedroom house? If you sold it, you would have lakhs and lakhs of taka. You could come back to Dhaka and live like a princess. Maids, a cook
and driver—you could have your babies here, and never have to do a thing!”

Here we are again, Amina thought, playing make-believe. Only she still believes that fantasy really exists.

Amina bent down to pick a stem of dal, and had the bizarre urge to put it in her mouth. The farmer stood up suddenly and shouted something Amina couldn’t understand; she dropped the plant, startled.

“What did he say?”

“Insecticide,” Micki translated. “He doesn’t want you to get it on your hands.”

“But they didn’t used to use that, did they?”

Her cousin shrugged. “I don’t pay attention.”

“Do you remember that little boy you tried to make me play with?” Amina asked. “In the house—Ghoton?”

“I don’t think we played together,” Micki said. “But of course I know Ghoton. He went to Chittigong, to work for some shipping company. I heard he’s done well.”

“We did,” Amina said. “He was the father, and I was supposed to be the baby.”

Micki shook her head. “Remember how much
time
we had then? Just fooling around?” She put her arm around Amina. “I’m so glad I got to see you, even if I didn’t get to meet your husband.”

“Next time,” Amina said.

“You won’t come back, Munni.” Micki laughed again. “Why would you?”

Amina began to speak, and then stopped. There was no breeze; the heat was trapped under the large, gray clouds. The farmer had bent over again, so you only saw the white curve of his undershirt in the middle of the field. For a moment the birds were quiet and the sky seemed to wheel above them.

Micki was talking again about Khulna: the new blocks of flats they were building on the outskirts, offered at cheap introductory prices. She had known so many people who’d left, and her cousin Munni was already in that category. There was nothing strange about it. It occurred to Amina that she was looking at this field the way George would, as if she had a camera, and that was what made it (an ordinary
field of dal, dull green under midafternoon clouds) so beautiful. Micki’s right: you’ll never see this again, she told herself sternly. Say good-bye, before it’s too late. The field waved listlessly, but the tears wouldn’t come.

That night Parveen made a feast—duck and the tiny eggplants Amina loved from her grandmother’s garden. The bread was hot throughout the meal, and the pulao was fragrant with anise and cardamom. The okra and the dal were so spicy that she thought Parveen might be testing her to see whether she’d gotten soft in America. There was a crowd of people, men in the courtyard outside the kitchen and her grandmother’s female relatives in the house, but Amina ate first, along with Micki, who kept protesting to her mother that she wasn’t a guest.

“We thought we’d have her husband,” Parveen said. “Someone has to sit across the table from her.”

She ate until she was so full that she thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Then she excused herself and threaded her way through the assembled guests to call George. She ran into her uncle Ashraf talking with a visitor from a nearby village, an old man on leave from some government post. He considered himself an important local personage and buttonholed Amina for some time, telling her how he had gone abroad as a young man to stay with his uncle in Hamburg. He’d been most impressed by the autobahn, and it was his opinion that if Bangladesh had been colonized by the Germans rather than the British, many of the country’s current problems wouldn’t exist. When she finally escaped with the phone Omar had lent her, she went around the house to her grandmother’s garden, where she crouched on a low wooden stool near the makeshift graveyard. It would be where her nanu sat, when she came outside to talk to the dead—her husband and her sons.

George answered after several rings. He sounded breathless. “Hi.”

“Hi.” The connection was perfect: she could hear water running and then the soft suck of the seal on the refrigerator door. “Where were you?”

“What?”

“Are you by yourself?”

George sounded confused. “Of course—I was just down in the basement.”

He sounded sincere, and Amina had to admit that even if Kim were to stop by, it was unlikely to happen exactly at the moment she called.

“What’s going on there?” she asked him.

“I had coffee with a guy I know at SL Associates. He does aeronautics—he doesn’t know what they have in electrical, but I guess I’ll send a résumé.”

“You guess?” She could feel his hurt surprise, even before he spoke.

“Jesus, Amina—what’s your problem? I’m doing my best here.”

She’d almost given up on the fantasy that he would be employed again by the time they returned. It wasn’t about the job—didn’t he know that?

“Has Kim left?”

George hesitated. “How would I know?”

“You haven’t heard from her?”

“No.”

“Or from Cathy?”

“I think my mother said something about her leaving,” George admitted.

Somehow she hadn’t really believed Kim would go, in spite of all her talk at the dinner party. If she were in Bombay now, she and Amina were only a half hour apart, inside the same night, while George languished in the middle of a day that was already history here.

“Is she living with Ashok’s family?”

“I told you—I have no idea,” he snapped. There was a pause, and she remembered again their early conversations, when it had always seemed like there wasn’t enough time to talk before the connection faltered. Now that they didn’t have anything to say, the line remained surprisingly clear.

“There are some complications here.”

“Take as long as you need,” George said, obviously relieved to move away from the subject of Kim.

It wasn’t about taking more time, of course. She had to be back in eleven days if she wanted to keep her job; given what her mother had
confided in her, she thought it would be best to leave as quickly as they could.

“I don’t know where we’ll be staying, once we get back to Dhaka.”

“Just let me know when you get there. Are you wearing your money belt? Make sure not to leave your passport lying around.”

“Nothing would happen to it.” She wasn’t convinced that was true, but she resented George for making assumptions. He’d never been to any village, much less hers.

“Still,” George said.

“They’re having a party for me,” Amina said. “I should go.”

They said a stiff good-bye, but she wasn’t eager to rejoin the party. She thought of her husband sitting in the near-silent kitchen in Rochester. She could hear the raised voices and laughter from the party, the wind scraping in the dry palms, and the call and response of a million insects. The men were singing a song with the refrain “O la la”—some new movie hit she didn’t recognize—and she sat on her grandmother’s stool for a few more moments, listening. As a girl she’d often imagined a sort of magic that could give her a glimpse of the person she would one day marry. The likelihood that he existed somewhere made this fantasy even more irresistible, and she could spend hours daydreaming about it in the opulent apartments of her students, waiting for them to arrive at the solutions to simple problems. How thrilled she would’ve been if she’d been able to see George then: a man already, hardworking and reliable, decent looking if not overly handsome, sitting at a computer in an American office. The desire to be sixteen again was suddenly so powerful that a sound escaped her, something between a gasp and a groan.

Her back was to the house, and all of a sudden she was uneasy. You were never alone in this country: there were so many warm bodies in such a small space that it was extremely unlikely to find a view without a human being in it. A ragged half-moon hung low above the grain shed; when a lizard chirped in the tree above her head, she nearly cried out. You were once afraid in Rochester she told herself, as she stood up and walked slowly in the direction of the courtyard—it’s only that this is what’s unfamiliar now. Her own bedroom window was open, but just as she put her hand on one of the shutters, there
was a whooping sound behind her. She spun around and saw two pairs of eyes: two small boys, one in a pair of green shorts, the other wearing only a T-shirt with a cartoon character on the front.

Amina screamed, out of relief rather than fear, and the boys crept slightly backward into the trees, their eyes wide.

“What are you doing, sneaking around people like that? I nearly had a heart attack. Why are you out so late? Where’s your mother?”

“Hello?” the bigger one said. “Howareyou?”

The little one giggled and hit his brother on the back. “I’m fine, I’m fine!”

“What is your country?”

“Bangladesh,” Amina said, and the little boys laughed as if she’d made a joke specifically for their amusement. She switched to Bangla. “I was married in the U.S.A. In the state of New York. Can you say, ‘New York’?”

The older one attempted it; his brother jumped up and down as if he had to pee.

“U.S.A., U.S.A.!”

“Clin-ton!”

“Osama bin Laden!”

Amina heard footsteps in the house behind her; Nanu had come to her bedroom window and was yelling at the little boys to get home before their fathers came out and beat them. The boys turned and ran with high, joyful strides, bare legs white in the moonlight.