All about Skin (16 page)

“Ha! They'll be fine. We have fought long and hard.”

“Yes, you have. You've fought very well.” She smiled at me and for a second I thought she was proud of me.

“Anything else?” I asked.

My mother looked up at me and stayed quiet for a few minutes.

“
Hija
, I have told you everything about love. I have prepared you as best as I could, but you have not listened. So what do I tell a daughter who does not listen? What would make you believe? I could tell you about how I've been hurt, but I think that hasn't shaken your faith; in fact, I think it strengthens it.”

I asked her about Carmencita. “Do you think she still comes to those who believe in love?”

My mother smiled. “I don't know. I know that was really our story, our story for our generation, but for you girls, in this world, I don't know. I don't know if she ever came to girls in Chicopee. But for us, me and my friends, it was a different story.”

“Whose side do you think Carmencita would pick?”

“Side?”

“In our war.”

My mother got up and put my remaining T-shirts into my suitcase, and she didn't look at me when she answered. “I don't think she would ever pick a side. I don't think we could ever choose one, even if we're sure we have. I think we move back and forth, always back and forth.”

Part 2

Reinvention

Manjula Menon

R
eshma married him in spite of his assertion that he was a modern man. She had been instantly suspicious when he had described himself in this way, of course—who wouldn't be—but had been charmed by his gentle smile and his dark, shining skin that appeared to be completely without blemish. She had lived in her small town in southern India all twenty-one years of her life, and the idea of moving with him to America, a place so far away from all that she knew, both frightened and attracted her. She sensed that her parents had mixed feelings about him. They knew and liked his family. But to send their only child to such a faraway and foreign place? When she had shyly said yes to the proposal, their hopes for her had outweighed the fear and they gave her their blessings.

“I work as a waiter at an Indian restaurant in Boston called Star of India,” he had told her during their first meeting, “but don't think that being a waiter is all I want to do in life. I have a bachelor of arts in English literature. I have just been unlucky in finding another job so far, but maybe you,” and here he had averted his eyes shyly, “will bring me good luck.”

He had returned to India specifically to find a spouse, and when both parties agreed to the match, a wedding was quickly planned and carried out in the village temple. For the occasion, she wore a heavy cream sari that added weight to her otherwise small, frail frame and darkened her eyes with kohl to further contrast them against her copper skin. After the wedding there was an ultimately successful interview with a suspicious American visa officer in Chennai, a teary but proud farewell to her relatives, a long flight, and then she was in America. As the wheels of the 747 hit the black tarmac of the landing runway and sped toward the terminal, she felt a shiver of anticipation. A new husband, a new country, and all at once.

Her husband had told her that he currently lived in a two-bedroom apartment that he shared with two other men, also waiters at Star. At first she was anxious about living with two strange men but as she soon found out, they both worked other jobs in addition to their shifts at Star. Except for the snores that trumpeted from their room in the small of the night, she rarely noticed their presence.

Although Reshma missed her family terribly at first, she adjusted quickly to her new life. She came to intimately know the Chinatown neighborhood around their shabby brown five-story building—where the freshest vegetables could be had, which store could be relied upon to have the sweetest mangoes and the tenderest coconuts. She hung picture frames over the water stains on the walls in the apartment and fixed the windows so that they wouldn't rattle with every gust of wind. She made friends with Shaila, the Pakistani woman who lived down the hallway, and from her learned to make the most delicious-tasting tea: a rich and creamy brew, fragrant with cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and a touch of black pepper. She had been taught English in school, and because her husband insisted, she also practiced her English, using language tapes and books with titles like “Speak English like a Pro in Twelve Easy Steps!” that he checked out of the library. He also bought her some modern clothes—two pairs of heavy cotton pants, four shirts, three long skirts, and the only thing she liked, a white cardigan.

“We are in these people's country so we should try and adopt their customs—if nothing else at least dress like them,” he had said, in answer to her pout.

Her husband was in love with America, his adopted country. He extolled American virtues and was forever explaining to her why America was so great. One night as they lay in their bedroom, he spoke admiringly about the ability of his American customers to drink.

“Back home they drink too but it is not the same,” he boasted. “In India if they drink like this, they would have to be carried home. But these Americans drink and they drink but they still walk straight and talk proper, maybe a little more loudly, but still.”

But it was not just their ability to drink that her husband respected. He would nod approvingly at the American joggers who trotted by the apartment in the mornings and say, “See how the Americans run—not like at home where nobody breaks into a sweat unless they have to.”

She accompanied him to airy museums and glossy galleries, where he jotted down copious notes in his small yellow notebook. He particularly liked to look at paintings with just lines and squiggles thrown around. When she first saw one of these, she giggled and said she had seen better pictures drawn by schoolchildren at home, and he had replied huffily that she didn't know anything, that these paintings were abstract art and please not to simply gas about things that she knew nothing about.

Although she loved to tease and make fun of certain of his mannerisms (his stooped walk or the way the hair on his head stuck straight out in the mornings), she was deeply in love with her husband. She loved everything about him, from the way his arms cradled her at night to his amazing inability to carry a tune—any tune—in the shower. As for his modern views, she regarded them with the affectionate indulgence reserved for the harmless eccentric. Till one day he went too far.

“You really should get a job,” he said primly one summer evening when it was so hot that she had brought the blue and white fan to the counter in the kitchen. She almost burned her hand turning over the
chappati
.

“You mean another job in addition to cooking and cleaning this apartment with three men living in it?” she cried.

“American women have careers, just like American men,” he replied, squaring his shoulders proudly. “But even in your village, the women worked in the fields with the men, did they not?”

The thought of spending her days with total strangers, so foreign to her, filled her with apprehension.

“Everybody knew everybody else in the village.”

“We will have enough money to move. Just think, only you and me, without having to listen to Murugan and Shankar snoring like demon kings every night.”

That gave her pause. It would be good, no—more than good. She would be able to walk around in her nightie all day if she felt like it or wash and dry certain of her garments in the bathroom without embarrassment. And of course, as her husband had said, a peaceful night's sleep would be wonderful.

“But what kind of job will I get? Even you, with your bachelor of arts in English literature, are working in a restaurant as a waiter.”

He walked behind her and placed his chin on her shoulder. “Don't worry, I have an idea.”

The next night he came home flushed with the good news that he had found her a job. The owner of the restaurant where he worked also owned a string of motels and needed an English-speaking receptionist to work the night shift at one of them, and he was willing to give Reshma a chance.

“I have to work through the night?”

Her husband replied that it would be just to start and that they paid more for the night shift.

“Try it, nah,” he pleaded.

The following night, they took a long bus ride to get to the motel. Her husband left her there, saying that he'd be back in the morning when her shift ended.

The motel was a twenty-room single-story building; the rooms linked to each other by a gravel path and were painted a dusty blue on the outside. The small beige office that she would be working in had one heavily barred window, and all customers had to be buzzed in through the front door.

She was given a white cotton blouse with a small coffee stain on the front left pocket, a black skirt that was too big for her so she had to use a safety pin, and a small name badge that said Hello I'm Karen. The plump, butter-colored Indian man who was training her and who would be her coworker through the night said that of course he knew her name wasn't Karen but it was better to use American names.

“Make easy for them,” he said, pointing at his own nametag that said Hello I'm Dan even though she knew his name was Avi.

She began her training by learning to work the motel telephone switchboard—how to answer the phones, how to transfer calls to rooms, and so on.

“You have good English,” Avi said approvingly, after she had smoothly transferred several incoming calls to the right rooms with the right words.

“I practice with tapes,” she replied modestly.

Then he showed her how to fill the reservation information into the big black book that they kept inside the front drawer by the register.

“Computer kaput,” he said, “so we use book.”

With their first customers, she learned to operate the credit card machine and with the next, count out change in cash. In this establishment, the customers paid up front.

At about midnight, two young men in plaid shirts rented a room, and soon other cars began to pull up into the parking lot. The sound of music, voices, and laughter punctured the night and soon they were fielding complaints from neighboring rooms.

“They are making too loud party,” Avi said. He made a warning call, after which the noise subsided, but not for long. Avi called the room again.

“Sorry, but to please be quiet or leave this place.” They did neither.

“Out of room, or I call poh-leece,” threatened Avi, with his third call. Reshma felt her heartbeat quicken. Didn't the customers rent the room to sleep in? What was going on?

Then at about one thirty in the morning there was the sound of a fight outside that same room, and Avi, followed by a scared Reshma, ran outside to try and break it up. In the ensuing confusion of shouts and loud gestures, Reshma was pushed by a man in a banana-colored shirt and fell heavily down onto the dusty ground. Avi immediately helped her up and brought her inside the office but she could not stop sobbing. So he took her to the back room where a small cot had been set up, and she did not leave the cot or the room for the rest of the night but lay there listening to the police sirens come and go in the parking lot outside.

The next morning, she emerged from the room her mind made up. She gave the blouse and the skirt and the Karen badge back to Avi and said she was sorry but she was too scared to work here. When her husband came to pick her up, she feared that he would be disappointed that she had quit after not even one night of work. But back at home, after she told him what had happened, he put one arm around her shaking shoulders and said it was okay, of course; she had done the right thing.

And that he would find her somewhere else to work.

The new job was at a twenty-four-hour convenience store. One of the Indian waiters at the restaurant that her husband worked at, Kumar, doubled as the night-shift clerk there.

“Night shift again?” she asked, already worried.

“Very good money,” he replied.

Again, the store wanted somebody immediately and so the next evening found them waiting at the bus stop. They had to change buses twice and it took such a long time to get there that Reshma fell asleep for part of the way.

Kumar, a tall young man with a neatly kept beard, was waiting for them outside the corner store. There was a long line of other stores, all shuttered for the night. Her husband wished her luck and said that he would return in the morning.

“New manager wants to see you,” said Kumar, shrugging. They walked up a flight of dark stairs behind the store and into a small, dimly lit room, where a man with brown bushy hair sat behind an untidy desk and sorted through papers.

“You the new girl?” he asked and she nodded.

“Yeah. I need to see your ID to make sure you're legal an'all.”

She looked at Kumar, who shrugged again. She reached into her bag and gave him her navy-blue Indian passport, the only form of ID she had, and thought that she was lucky to have brought it with her.