Arranged Marriage: Stories (34 page)

“Mom.”

The voice from behind startles me. I swing around to face it and am struck by a sudden dizziness. The floor beneath my feet is rippling treacherously, preparing to dissolve.

“Do you feel OK?” Dinesh’s hands grip my upper arms. His fingers are strong and confident with youth. “Mom, are you
drunk?”

I can’t focus too well on his face, but I hear the shock in his voice and beneath it a surprisingly prim note of disapproval. It makes him sound almost …
motherly
. I want to laugh. But then he sniffs, and his face changes, its features wavering as though seen through water. “What’s with all the fumes in the garage? Mom, what were you
doing?”

His voice shakes a little on the last word. I notice with
surprise that he’s wearing a blue pajama outfit that I bought him sometime back. Along with his tousled hair, it makes him look unexpectedly young. Afraid of what I might say.

I want to respond with something positive and significant, perhaps something about how I love him too much to abandon him no matter how enticing suicide might seem. I want to hold him tight like I used to when he was little and there had been a thunderstorm. But all I can manage is to whisper, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Whoa, wait till I get you to the bathroom,” Dinesh says. He wedges a shoulder into my armpit and half drags, half carries me to the sink—so dexterously that I wonder if he’s done it before, and for whom. He holds my head while I bend over the sink, retching, and when I’m done, he wipes my face carefully with a wet towel. Even after he finishes, I keep my eyes tightly shut.

“Be back in a minute,” he says. He shuts the bathroom door—an act of kindness, I think—behind him.

In the mirror my face is blotched, my eyes swollen. I stare into them, feeling like a complete failure. I’ve lost my husband and betrayed my friend, and now to top it all I’ve vomited all over the sink in my son’s presence. I think of how hard I always tried to be the perfect wife and mother, like the heroines of mythology I grew up on—patient, faithful Sita, selfless Kunti. For the first time it strikes me that perhaps Mahesh had a similar image in his head. Perhaps he fled from us because he wanted a last chance to be the virile Arjun, the mighty Bhim. And for a moment I feel a sadness for him, because he’s going to realize it too, soon enough—perhaps
one morning when he wakes up in bed next to Jessica, or as he throws her a sidelong glance while maneuvering the Mazda into a parking spot—that the perfect life is only an illusion.

Dinesh is back, with a red plastic tumbler which he fills with water. “Drink this,” he says in a tone I myself might have used when he was a sick child. I raise the tumbler obediently to my mouth. The water is warm and tastes of toothpaste. Even without looking at him, I can feel him watching me, waiting for some kind of explanation. I can feel, too, the fear still rising from him, can almost see it, like the waves of heat that shimmer off summer pavements at noon. But I can’t think of a single thing to say. So I stand there under the loud, accusing whirr of the bathroom fan, staring at the worry line gouging Dinesh’s brow (he’s got that from me), running my finger along the edge of the empty plastic tumbler.

Slowly an image takes shape somewhere behind the stinging in my eyes. It is so disconnected from what’s going on that I think I’m hallucinating from all the carbon monoxide. It’s a fired clay bowl, of all things, simple and unadorned, its glaze the muted brown of fallen leaves. For a moment I’m confused, then I recall that I saw a slide of it in my spring Art Appreciation class, I’ve forgotten the time period and the potter’s name, though I know he was someone old and famous. I turn the bowl around and around in my mind till I come upon what I’m looking for, a small snag on the paper-thin lip, and I hear again the teacher’s nasal New York accent telling us that this was the master potter’s signature, a flaw he left in all his later works, believing that it made them more human and therefore more precious.

“Mom!” Dinesh’s voice breaks through my thoughts. There’s an anxious edge to his voice. I realize he’s been asking me something for a while.

“Sony,” I say.

“I said, how did your evening go?”

I pause for a moment, tempted. Then I say, grimacing, “I made a mess of things.” I’m surprised by the lightness the admission brings. In the rush of it, I daringly add, “I’ll tell you about it if you want. I could make us some hot
pista
milk. …” I reach out to draw him to me, a little afraid that he will pull away, will say,
Nah, Mom, I got stuff to do
. But he lowers his head so that his bristly hair tickles my cheek and gives me a quick, awkward hug.

“Sounds OK to me.” He is smiling now, just a little. “Hey, Mom, you haven’t made
pista
milk in a long time.”

Later I stand over the stove, stirring the blended pistachios into the simmering milk, watching with wonder as it thickens beautifully. I know there will be other fights, other hurtful words we’ll fling at each other, perhaps even tonight. Other times when I sit in the car, listening to the engine’s seductive purr. Still, I take from the living-room cabinet two of the Rosenthal crystal glasses Mahesh gave me for our tenth anniversary, and when the creamy milk cools, pour it into them.

Tomorrow I’ll start a letter to Mrinal.

The glasses glitter like hope. We raise them to each other solemnly, my son and I, and drink to our precious, imperfect fives.

GLOSSARY

The words below are from different Indian languages (mostly Bengali and Hindi). Some words, such as “bearer-boy” are Indianized British expressions from colonial times.