All about Skin (11 page)

Sabina entered the house. In the front parlor, partially hidden by the red brocade drapes, stooped, bespectacled, thin, in blue and white plaid pajamas, peering uneasily out the window, stood her father, Dr. Kannan Veera Mani, the noted animal researcher and obstetrician. Beside him, calmly seated on the mango-colored raw-silk couch and sipping her morning coffee, immaculate in her beige Neiman-Marcus suit, reclined her comfortably endowed mother, Dr. Usha Kannan, Inova Fairfax's lead cardiologist. Call the police, her mother was saying, in her trademark firm, pragmatic way. They could be dangerous. The gold bangles on her arm glinted as she waved an arm at the window. Her father did not seem to hear. He did not have his glasses on. His hands pulled at the curtain tie convulsively. I don't recognize even one of them. His tone was worried, as if he feared this lack of recognition could be his undoing.

Sabina stood by the window and looked, too. A lilac haze of morning fog and wavery sun surrounded the protesters. Rain fell, the same pearl-on-thread rain she'd seen cling in translucent webs to leaf buds, tree bark as she ran on the bike path, past redbud, forsythia, decorative pear. People walked, up and down. People chanted, decrying the work her father did. Through the mist she saw many were young, almost her age. The peculiar delirium she often felt, being her father's daughter, washed over her. These people despised what her father did, day after day in his university lab. Little did they know, she thought. That they echoed her, expressed her own chaotic, often helpless sense of rage. She could be out there, picketing, yelling with them. Secretly still, after all these years—of learning, burning, striving to forget, she
was
one of them. She
hated
what her father did: he researched the effects of drugs on mothers and babies, or rather on maternal and fetal “subjects.” He sliced up kidneys, cannulated arteries, laparoscoped uteruses. He injected drugs, induced disease, withheld drugs. He studied disease progression, compared rates of increase, applied stresses such as the excising of eyeballs, fracturing of bones, removal of bladders. He did these to various mammals—dogs and cats and rabbits and rats—but mostly to monkeys. He had become a specialist in the use of rhesus macaques in research in gynecology, obstetrics, and pharmacology. He wrote papers exclusively on them, on his use of them in his experiments.

Sabina was very young when she learned what her father did, was paid to do, was acclaimed for doing. She was eight at the time, a tender eight, sensitive and questing. She had come upon the knowledge quite innocently, unexpectedly. Her father had not gifted her this knowledge. It had come through an accident, on a visit to his office, a momentary separation. Then, she had felt the universe open a hole, burning, remorseless in her. Into this hole her home fell, her father fell, her mother fell. Into this hole she herself plunged, into the senseless, featureless abyss. Over the years, as she learned more, the hole deepened and swung further into the void.

For a long, sweaty moment in the mist of the morning then, as she stood in their golden Madurai-marble-tiled doorway, watching her father nervously watch the protesters, she saw only the curtain's blood-red brocade framing the photo of a monkey on a sign—a tiny baby macaque clinging to his mother in a cage, as blue rubber-gloved hands bearing steel implements reached inexorably for him.

It is this moment Sabina thinks of, now, as Lucy Kendall leans forward in her rocking chair, her frail blue-veined fingers smoothing, over and over, the scrap of ruffled white lace that looks like a Victorian child's bonnet, and the swirled, tiered ruffles of lace that make up the dress.

She loved to wear this, Lucy says, pulling apart the nubbed satin ribbon at the back and retying the bow. She was like a child; she loved to play dress-up all the time. Behind Lucy—displayed on the wall in their pastel satin hangers, pastille rose and powder blue, peach puff and blanched almond, in fluffs and falls of varying baby-dress fabrics, organdie, batiste, muslin, even sateen, arranged in an arch—hang other children's dresses, sweet with scalloped collars, French rosettes, smocking, and ribbons. Sabina looks from the dress in Lucy's lap to the display on the wall and slowly back again, to the intricacies of the lace. Outside this room in the Fairfax nursing home is a stretch of grass and a gnarled and twisted pear tree, its burgeoning blooms papery white, rustling stiffly in a breeze. Against that luminosity the hue of the dress is faded, antique.

It's beautiful, says Sabina, touching the lace, trying to shake from her mind that picture of the baby monkey in a cage she saw so long ago on a protester's sign. Was she a chimpanzee? She knows people keep chimpanzees for pets. She has seen them in movies, on television.

No oh no, says Lucy, putting a hand to her welling eyes, my beautiful Delilah—she was a rhesus macaque. From India, like you.

Oh. Assailed by this syntax, Sabina pauses in her listening to Lucy's breathing, lifting the stethoscope off for a moment. She does not say what she instantly thinks, which is,
I am not from India. My mother is, my father is, I'm from Virginia
. How long did you have her?

Lucy is weeping, her tears soundless. Not long enough, she whispers. They took her from me.

Sabina frowns. Took her? Who did?

The people who stole her. She was stolen, says Lucy, I know she was stolen. She rocks in her chair, eyes glazed over, as if remembering. The day she was gone the glass in the back door was cut out, removed. Nothing else was taken—no money, credit cards, nothing. They knew she lived there with me. They waited till I was gone to work, then they came for her. My baby my baby! In her agitation Lucy rocks forward and the chair tilts alarmingly. Sabina puts her stethoscope down and steadies her.

She is a little shaken, herself, at the image of that cut-open door, the sudden absence.

She always came flying at me when I came home, says Lucy, through the mist of tears oozing and falling in shiny drops on her lap. Monkeys are very affectionate; they cling. Not everyone could live with a monkey.

No, thinks Sabina, looking in fascination at the little old lady in her striped and flowered calico dress, the coral bursts of miniature dianthus scattered across the clotted cream of it. I would never have dreamed you could. (She does not, of course, say this.) They are very demanding. Lucy is wiping her eyes with the white dress that looks like a baby's christening frock. Sabina is undecided whether to stop her or not and so doesn't. They see you as their mother. They want you there all the time. Delilah would get very agitated every morning when I left. In the early days she tore the house up every day. I would come home; everything would be upside down. She tore up the newspapers, knocked dishes to the floor, pulled pictures off the walls. It took her a long time to calm down, to understand I would come home every night.

Inwardly, Sabina is marveling at the clarity of these memories. She has come to expect a fog of recollection from the patients of dementia, a slurring of moments, a blurred forgetfulness. She has come to expect not merely disorientation, but removal. Lucy is not removed from her memories. She is fixed in them, like a fly in sticky amber.

She was my child; I was her mother. Lucy's tears are streamed and quiet on her face. We were earth and stars to each other. House and home together, earth and stars. She folds the white frock in loosely geometric folds. I let them take her.

It wasn't your fault. Sabina is careful to be soft-toned, gentle. You cared for her.

I could have kept her safe, let no one see her. Lucy is twisting the frilled skirt of the dress and Sabina puts her hand on hers, to still it. Why, she wonders aloud, murmuring—who on earth would want someone's pet monkey?

Circuses take monkeys. Lucy stares dully at the white flowering pear. She was taken to a circus.

Sabina looks at the pear, then down at Lucy. She can remember monkeys in blue satin pants and striped sailor shirts driving a tricycle, a bicycle, a unicycle in a circus she went to once, as a child. Flickers of ultramarine blue in the chalk-white baseball cap on one monkey's head, the way he put up his paws and pulled the cap down when the glare of stage lights hit his eye. She can remember the clown on stilts in tall, yellow pantaloons slamming his decorated wooden stick on the rails and watching the monkeys jump, the cycles jump, while the audience laughed and clapped and the lights burned hotly down and she saw how the monkeys cringed when the stick came down again Whap! and cringed herself, and wondered why they laughed. The cerise and fuchsia satin streamers wound tight around the stick unwound and fluttered when it struck, bells on the cycles rang, and the monkeys jumped.

Why would a circus steal a monkey, she wonders. In India, when she has visited, monkeys are everywhere. She has seen them in the city of Chennai, in pockets of garden with trees, at parks, libraries, museums. Her mother has told her about monkeys at school, peering in at French class, or stealing bananas at lunch break from the children. Her grandmother has told her about monkeys at the hospital, at temples. These very kinds of monkeys, that ride bikes and trikes and was it unikes in American circuses. Rhesus Macaques. Big-eared, wild-haired, large-eyed, scrawny.

She wonders about Lucy. What kind of life was that, to live with a monkey? Where was her family, her children? Had they all grown up and gone away by then?

She hesitates, not certain how to voice this. From somewhere, words arrive. Did your family help you look for her?

Lucy wipes a hand across her eyes. Delilah was my family. For many years I looked after my mother. My mother lived with me then. I took care of her. After she died there was Delilah.

Sabina feels shocked but tries not to show it. It was good of you to take care of your mother, she says, to be soothing.

Lucy smiles slightly at Sabina. You are good to us old people. You are a good listener.

I learned from my grandparents. The response, the smile, are automatic. Since she graduated (seven months ago, at the tender age of twenty-three) and started work at her first nursing home, Sabina has learned she must talk calmly, freely with her patients. She is not always certain this is the best thing to do; they don't always seem to want to listen, or hear. They lived with us when I was growing up. I loved being with them.

She wants to say,
They taught me what I must do with my life. They taught me without saying anything
. When she thinks of her grandparents she feels she has swallowed an ocean. There is so much to say, no way to begin. Waves push out of her in every direction. She takes a deep breath. Without them, she says, I would not have known I could become a doctor without studying medicine.

After all, it had become quite simple, in the end. After all the years, hearing the house refrain:
You must study medicine!
And:
We come from a medical family; we must continue the tradition!
And herself, running after psychology, philosophy, aging. Reading and reading, lost in libraries, in bookstores, by herself under trees in springtime, fall, alone at a table, late at night, at the George Washington University (GWU) cafeteria. Volunteering at a hospice, taking the neighbor's shaggy golden Lab mix in on weekends, to help cheer the inhabitants. Drawn without thought to the comfort of being with the quieter, calmer, gentler ones who were the old to her—her grandparents, always there in the house, when her parents worked late at their respective hospitals and labs—to make extravagant, delicious South Indian teatime snacks for her—coconut
barfis
, chewy peanut sweets, molasses-stuffed
bolis
, tiny carrot and pea
samosas
—then later dinner, and cups of tea when she was studying, and plates filled with crunchy-munchies,
muruku
and mixture and spicy peanuts “to keep her strength up.”

Her Paati and Thatha—ambitious in their own way, who had pushed her father to become what he was, nationally known in a nation not theirs but surely the most famous nation now in the world, famous really in his field, his mind at work razor-edged, clinical—they were calm and soft and encouraging with her, listening and nurturing, all things angelic. When her Paati was sick on occasion, Sabina nursed her without thinking, heated milk for Horlicks, cut pills in two with her pill-cutter, made potato soup with garlic, buttered bread, served her in bed.

Now she was drawn without thought toward caregiving despite being turned, angrily, intentionally away from medicine. Not merely because the latter was what her parents wanted, but because of what she knew it entailed: cutting open cadavers in medical school, and later, probably, cutting into people, dealing with the simultaneously sticky and slippery matters of the body—muscle, fat, blood, veins, arteries—all those inside intimacies she had no desire to approach too closely.

Worse, vivisections, animal research. Some medical schools, she knew, were entrenched; in this day and age, they—faculty, students—still practiced surgeries on live animals; she could not conscience the thought of existing in such a space, of being importuned in this way,
required
.

Truly it was not far, that memory in her, when she was eight, visiting her father in his laboratory, when she took a wrong turn in the building, and looked for her father, and found instead she was surrounded by a high-pitched keening from beagles, a rustle and stir of eager eyes and limbs as she wandered past,
horrified
.

She was in a long, low corridor, stacks of metal cages on one side, three stacks high.

In each a beagle, brown and white with black patches, whimpered, or barked, or exhaled a crude, continuous whine. She stopped, stared.

Metal bowls of water, dry pellets of dog food. Scraps of blanket. Paws reaching through bars. Against the skin, shaved-in-places, electrode-implanted skin on some, matted fur on some, bloodied bandages on some, strange devices pressed against skulls, ears, eyes. Beagles prone, dragging themselves, beagles comatose, weirdly silent, watching her, brown, limpid eyes pleading and deep, reproachful.