Arranged Marriage: Stories (9 page)

You’d held the letter in your hand a long time, until it grew weightless, transparent. You could see through it to another letter, one that wasn’t written yet. His letter.

You knew what it would say.

Before he left for class this morning he had looked at you still crumpled on the sofa where you’d spent the night. He looked for a long time, as though he’d never really seen you before. Then he said, very softly, “It was never me, was it? Never love. It was always you and her, her and you.”

He hadn’t waited for an answer.

Wind slams a door somewhere, making you jump. It’s raining outside, the first time in years. Big swollen drops, then thick silver sheets of it. You walk out to the balcony. The rain runs down your cheeks, the tears you couldn’t shed. The nasturtiums, washed clean, are glowing red. Smell of wet earth. You take a deep breath, decide to go for a long walk.

As you walk you try to figure out what to do. (And maybe the meaning of what you have done.) The pills are there, of course. You picture it: the empty bottles by the bed, your body fallen across it, a hand flung over the side. The note left behind. Will he press repentant kisses on your pale palm? Will she fly across the ocean to wash your stiff eyelids with her tears?

Or—what?
what?
Surely there’s another choice. But you can’t find the words to give it shape. When you look down the empty street, the bright leaves of the newly-washed maples hurt your eyes.

So you continue to walk. Your shoes darken, grow heavy.
Water swirls in the gutters, carrying away months of dust. Coming toward you is a young woman with an umbrella. Shoulders bunched, she tiptoes through puddles, trying hard to stay dry. But a gust snaps the umbrella back and soaks her. She is shocked for a moment, angry. Then she begins to laugh. And you are laughing too, because you know just how it feels. Short, hysterical laugh-bursts, then quieter, drawing the breath deep into yourself. You watch as she stops in the middle of the sidewalk and tosses her ruined umbrella into a garbage can. She spreads her arms and lets the rain take her: hair, paisley blouse, midnight-blue skirt. Thunder and lightning. It’s going to be quite a storm. You remember the monsoons of your childhood. There are no people in this memory, only the sky, rippling with exhilarating light.

You know then that when you return to the apartment you will pack your belongings. A few clothes, some music, a favorite book, the hanging. No, not that. You will not need it in your new life, the one you’re going to live for yourself.

And a word comes to you out of the opening sky. The word
love
. You see that you had never understood it before. It is like rain, and when you lift your face to it, like rain it washes away inessentials, leaving you hollow, clean, ready to begin.

A PERFECT LIFE

B
EFORE THE BOY CAME
, I
HAD A GOOD LIFE
. A
BEAUTIFUL
apartment in the foothills with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, an interesting job at the bank with colleagues I mostly liked, and, of course, my boyfriend Richard.

Richard was exactly the kind of man I’d dreamed about during my teenage years in Calcutta, all those moist, sticky evenings that I spent at the Empire Cinema House under a rickety ceiling fan that revolved tiredly, eating melted mango-pista ice cream and watching Gregory Peck and Warren Beatty and Clint Eastwood. Tall and lean and sophisticated, he was very different from the Indian men I’d known back home, and even the work he did as a marketing manager for a publishing company seemed unbelievably glamorous. When I was with Richard I felt like a true American. We’d go jogging every morning and hiking on the weekends, and in the evenings we’d take in an art film, or go out to a favorite restaurant.
or discuss a recent novel as we sat out on my balcony and drank chilled wine and watched the sunset. And in bed we tried wild and wonderful things that would have left me speechless with shock in India had I been able to imagine them.

What I liked most about Richard was that he gave me
space
. I’d been afraid that after we slept together he’d either lose interest in me or start pressuring me to marry him. Or else I’d get pregnant. That was what always happened in India. (My knowledge of such things, of course, was limited to the romantic Hindi movies I’d seen. At home, we never discussed such things, and though my girlfriends in college gossiped avidly about them, they were just as protected as I from what our parents considered sordid reality.) But Richard continued to be passionate without getting possessive. He didn’t mind if I went out with my other friends, or if work pressures kept us from seeing each other for days; when we met again, we slipped into our usual comfortable groove, as though we hadn’t been apart at all. Thanks to the Pill and his easygoing attitude (it was a Californian thing, he told me once), for the first time in my life I felt free. It was an exhilarating sensation, once I got used to it. It made me giddy and weightless, like I could float away at any moment.

Eventually Richard and I planned to get married and have children, but neither of us was in a hurry. The households of friends who had babies seemed to me a constant flurry of crying and feeding and burping and throwing up, quilts taped over fireplace bricks for padding and knickknacks crammed onto the top shelf out of the reach of destructive little hands. And over everything hung the oppressive stench
(there was no other word for it) of baby wipes and Lysol spray and soiled diapers.

I guessed, of course, that there was more to child-rearing than that. Mother-love, for instance. I’d felt the flaming rush of it when I’d gone to the maternity ward to visit Sharmila, who’d been my best friend at work before she quit (abandoned me, I claimed) to have a baby.

Sharmila had pressed her cheek to the baby’s wrinkled one, to that skin translucent and delicate like expensive onionskin paper, and looked at me with eyes that shone in spite of the hollows gouged under them. “I’d never have thought I could love anyone so much, so instantly, Meera,” she’d whispered. And this from a woman who’d always agreed that the world already had too many people in it for us to add to the problem! So I knew mother-love was real. Real and primitive and dangerous, lurking somewhere in the female genes—especially our Indian ones—waiting to attack. I was determined to watch out for it.

Many of my women friends considered me strange. The Americans were more circumspect, but the Indian women came right out and asked.
Don’t you mind not being married? Don’t you miss having a little one to scramble onto your lap when you come home at the end of the day?
I’d look at their limp hair pulled into an unattractive bun, their crumpled saris sporting stains of a suspicious nature, the bulge of love handles that hung below the edges of their blouses. (Even the ones who made an effort to hang on to their looks seemed intellectually diminished, their conversations limited to discussions of colic and teething pains and Dr. Spock’s views on bed-wetting.) They looked just like my cousins back home
who were already on their second and third and sometimes fourth babies. They might as well have not come to America.

“No,” I would tell them, smoothing my silk Yves St. Laurent jersey over my own gratifyingly slim hips. “Most emphatically no.”

But I could see they didn’t believe me.

Nor did my mother, who had for years been trying to arrange my marriage with a nice Indian boy. Every month she sent me photos of eligible young men, nephews and second cousins of friends and neighbors, earnest, mustachioed men in stiff-collared shirts with slicked-back Brylcreem hair. She accompanied these photographs with warnings (I wasn’t getting any younger; soon I’d be thirty and then who would want me?) and laments (look at Roma-auntie, her daughter was expecting her third, while thanks to me,
she
remained deprived of grandchildren). When I wrote back that I wasn’t ready to settle down (I didn’t say anything about Richard, which would have upset her even more), she decried my crazy western notions. “I should never have given in and allowed you to go to America,” she wrote, underlining the
never
in emphatic red.

In spite of the brief twinge of guilt I felt when yet another fat packet with a Calcutta postmark arrived from my mother, I knew I was right. Because in Indian marriages becoming a wife was only the prelude to that all-important, all-consuming event—becoming a mother. That wasn’t why I’d fought so hard—with my mother to leave India; with my professors to make it through graduate school; with my bosses to establish my career. Not that I was against marriage—or even
against having a child. I just wanted to make sure that when it happened, it would be on my own terms, because I wanted it.

Meanwhile I heaved a sigh of relief whenever I came away from the baby-houses (that’s how I thought of them, homes ruled by tiny red-faced tyrants with enormous lung power). Back in my own cool, clean living room I would put on a Ravi Shankar record or maybe a Chopin nocturne, change into the blue silk kimono that Richard had given me, and curl up on my fawn buffed-leather sofa. As the soothing strains of sitar or piano washed over me, I would close my eyes and think of what we’d planned for that evening, Richard and I. And I would thank God for my life, which was as civilized, as much in control, as
perfect
, as a life could ever be.

The boy changed all that.

He was crouched under the stairwell when I found him, on my way out of the building for my regular 6
A.M.
jog around the rose gardens with Richard. I would have missed him completely had he not coughed just as I reached the door. He had wedged himself into the far end of the dark triangular recess, so that all I saw at first was a small, huddled shape and the glint of terrified eyes. And thought,
Wild animal
. Later I would wonder how
I
must have appeared to him, a large, loud, bent-over figure in pink sweats with hair swinging wildly about her face, ordering him to
come out of there right now
, demanding
where did you come from
and
how did you get past the security door
. Only probably he didn’t understand a word.

By the time I got him out, my Liz Claiborne suit was ruined, my cheek stung where he had scratched me, and my watch said 6:20.
Richard
, I thought with dismay, because he didn’t like to be kept waiting. Then the boy claimed my attention again.

He looked about seven, though he could have been older. He was so thin it was hard to tell. His collarbones stuck out from under his filthy shirt, and in the hollow between them I could see a pulse beating frantically. Ragged black hair fell into eyes that stared at me unblinkingly. He didn’t seem to comprehend anything I said, not even when I switched to halting Spanish, and when I leaned forward, he flinched and flung up a thin brown arm to protect his face.

What am I going to do with him, I wondered desperately. It was getting late. I’d already missed my morning jog, and if I didn’t get back to my apartment pretty soon, I wouldn’t have time for my sit-ups either. Then I had to wash my hair—there was a big meeting at the bank, and I was scheduled to make the opening presentation. I hadn’t figured out what kind of power-outfit to wear, either. I closed my eyes and hoped the boy would just disappear the way he had appeared, but when I opened them, he was there still, watching me warily.

I unlocked my apartment door but didn’t enter right away. I was afraid of what I might find. Then I said to myself,
How could it be any worse?
I’d been late to work (a first). I’d run into the meeting room, out of breath, my unwashed hair falling
into my eyes, my spreadsheets all out of order. My presentation had been second-rate at best (another first), and when Dan Luftner, Head of Loans, who’d been waiting for years to catch me out, asked me for an update on the monthly statements software the bank had purchased a while back, I’d been unable to give him an adequate answer. “Why, Meera,” he’d said, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise, “I thought you knew
everything!” I
smarted all morning at the memory of the triumph in his eyes, and when a customer asked a particularly stupid question, I snapped at him. “Are you feeling all right, Meera?” said my supervisor, who had overheard. “Maybe you should take the rest of the day off.” So here I was in the middle of the afternoon, with the mother of all headaches pounding its way across my skull.

I’m going to spend the rest of the day in bed, I decided, with the curtains drawn, the phone off the hook, a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne on my forehead, and strict instructions to the boy to not disturb me. When my headache gets better, I’m going to listen to the new Dvorak record which Richard gave me for Valentine’s day. Everything else—including calling Richard to explain why I hadn’t shown up—I’ll handle later.

As soon as I opened the door I was struck by the smell. It was worse than ten baby-houses put together. I followed my nose to the bathroom. There was pee all over the floor, a big yellow puddle, with blobs of brown floating in it.