Before We Visit the Goddess (10 page)

Blanca and I work at Nearly New Necessities on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Just a pinch short of thirty hours, she says, so Mr. Lawry doesn't have to give us benefits. But she doesn't care because she's almost done with her beauty school courses, and the manager at the Hair Cuttery, who's sweet on her, said she can start working for him as soon as she gets her diploma.

I'm happy and sorry, both. Ever since I wandered into Nearly—soon after I took a semester off from college, a semester which stretched into a year and then another and some more—Blanca has been a good friend. No. In the interests of truth, I must modify this statement: at this point, Blanca is my only friend.

Sometimes when Mr. Lawry is particularly contentious, I think of quitting. My boyfriend Robert could get me a waitressing job at Pappasitos, where he has connections. With tips I'd be earning twice as much. We could move to a bigger place. This is important because lately our one-bedroom seems to be shrinking.

I feel guilty thinking this. Just last week, after I told Robert I'd had a rough day, he sat me down on the couch, put my feet in his lap, and rubbed them with peppermint oil until they tingled. I could see why he's the most popular massage therapist at Bodywork. But what touched me the most, pun fully intended, is that he was willing to do this for me at the end of a long day spent wrestling with flesh.

In the mental conversations I can't seem to stop having with my mother (which are the only conversations we have anymore), I ask,
Can you imagine Dad ever doing this for you, even before he decided to leave?

My mother responds with one of her sayings:
He who laughs last laughs longest.

No. She turns her face so I won't see her tears, and I feel rotten.

I don't think I'll quit Nearly anytime soon. I love navigating its cavernous interior, replacing on hangers pants that have fallen to the floor, folding curtains into a compact squareness, rummaging with missionary zeal to reunite a lost sandal with its mate. I sweep the ancient feather duster over escritoires, andirons, a Jesus statue with an index finger chopped off. Sometimes I stay on even after my shift is over, running my hand over stains and rust-tattoos, imagining the adventures these objects had before they ended up here, their tribulations when they leave. Once in a while I take something small, a saltshaker that's lost its pepper partner, a talking doll that makes a strangled sound when you pull on the cord attached to the back of its neck. I carry it around in my car for a few days, and then I leave it in a freeway underpass so a homeless person can have it.

So far I've only taken things that no one else wants, but I can feel something growing in me, restless and cresting like a storm wave. I find myself watching the Jesus statue. One of these days, I'm going to snag it.

When people bathe in the Ganges, I once read somewhere, or maybe my mother told me, their sins are forced to leave them and wait on the banks because the river is so holy that nothing impure can enter it. The sins will repossess the bathers when they climb out, but as long as they're immersed, they're free of sorrow.

Nearly is as close to a holy river as my life can get.

After our first fight, I made a list to remind myself why Robert is special:

4. He's a great cook. (I'm not.)

3. I love his hands. I've loved them ever since he ran them over my naked back at our very first meeting. (This is not as risqué as it sounds. I was at Bodywork for the Weekday Half-Hour Special, which Blanca had bought me as a birthday gift.) He gave me a full hour and then invited me to dinner. Over souvlaki and ouzo, we discovered that we shared a passion for sci-fi movies. A month later, he asked if I'd move in with him.

I knew it was too soon. Plus I'd never lived with a man. Yes, I said. Oh, yes.

2. He's an intriguing mix of contradictions. He loves literature. (On our first date, we discussed Paul Auster.) Yet every Friday night he gets together with his high school buddies to play pool. Sometimes it bothers me, how he has these different compartments in his life. (He hasn't introduced me to the Friday buddies. Not that I want to meet them. But still.) I wonder which compartment he's placed me in.

Are these frivolous reasons? How about this one, then:

1. Robert is nothing like my father.

At three p.m. Mr. Lawry perches his hat, a startling spinach-green, atop gray corkscrews of hair and informs us—as he does every afternoon—that he has errands to run. He leaves Keysha, his favorite, in charge and exhorts Blanca and me to use our time gainfully by price-tagging a box of kitchen supplies. We know he's going down to La Cariba, where he will get happily intoxicated, but we're careful to pretend ignorance. We understand the rituals of subterfuge.

Keysha pops her purple bubblegum and says, “Don't you worry, Mr. Lawry. We be just fine.”

With Mr. Lawry's departure, an air of truant hilarity settles on Nearly. Blanca and I eat pakoras and read the classified ads from the
Indo-Houston Mirror
out loud to each other. Keysha, who's getting married soon, uses the store phone to call her mother in Amarillo to discuss bridesmaid gowns. (“Ecru? Mama, you serious? We going for hot pink.” She punctuates her sentences with a flurry of jingles from the bells woven into her braids. “Uh-uh. No bows. Definitely no bows.”)

“
Sister Shireen, god-gifted problem solver
,” Blanca reads. “
Will remove curses, reunite loved ones, heal marriage and business.
”

I read, “
Parents looking for match for fair-skinned homely Punjabi lady doctor
.
Must have green card. Prefer 5
'
8
''
but 5
'
4
''
ok.”

Then Blanca says, “Dios, Tara, look at this one.
Family requires respectable Indian woman with car to take care of Mother over long weekend.
That's what you and Robert need, a bit of distance-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder.”

“You want me to babysit an old woman all weekend?”

“Not just any old woman. An old
Indian
woman. It'll be like staying with your abuela.” Blanca knows that my grandmother died about three years ago, right around when I left school. I never met her. When I was younger, I used to ask my mother about her all the time, but she'd mostly change the subject, until finally I gave up. I don't think about her much nowadays. I have other problems. But Blanca's obsessed with my lack of family and always trying to remedy the situation. “Maybe she'll teach you how to cook some proper Indian food. El Roberto might fancy that.”

This reminds me of my discussion with Robert this morning, the one that ended in me walking out of the apartment. I didn't slam the door, but only because I am not that kind of person.

“Oh, very well,” I say.

I'm late for my interview, having been lost twice since I got off the freeway. The geometric houses, the look-alike pruned bushes, the subdivision names—Austin Colony, Austin Glen, Austin Crossing—make me feel like I'm in some kind of suburban funhouse. Really, I should feel right at home, having grown up in the suburbs myself, but I am no longer that girl.

Finally I park my beat-up VW next to a Camry that stands, docile and squeaky-clean, in the Mehta driveway. I am attired in clothes that Blanca culled with care from Nearly's stock: shapelessly loose slacks (“You don't want to show no legs, trust me, legs get employers all worked up”) and a deep pink top with puffy sleeves to cover my scorpion tattoo. I hear the disembodied laughter of the gods:
Who's the fuchsia hippo now?

Mr. Mehta opens the door: neat side part, navy blue pants, shirt buttoned to his neck, brown leather sandals, kind of Stepford-husband-meets-Walmart. He's about five-foot-four. I feel like I've stepped into the wrong ad.

“It's six twenty-five.” He jabs at his watch. “Your interview was at six.” His eye falls on the silver ring inserted into my left eyebrow, which I refused to let Blanca remove, and his mouth puckers.

“For heaven's sake!” a female voice clangs from the room beyond. “It's not like you have ten other candidates lined up.”

Heartened by my invisible champion, I lie my way through the interview conducted by Mr. Mehta and his wife, a surprisingly glamorous woman several inches taller than him, her hourglass figure draped in a chiffon salwar kameez. No, I don't drink. No, I don't do drugs. I've never had an encounter with the law. Only when they ask if I have a boyfriend do I stumble. I know the right response. But if I deny Robert, something will go wrong between us, I just know it.

“Yes,” I say.

Mr. Mehta's Adam's apple bobs in agitation, but his wife touches his arm. “We can't be picky. We only have two days left before the Masala Cruise.”

From the back room: “Yes, yes, no need to be picky. Just dump the old woman with whoever shows up, so what if they suffocate her with a pillow and steal her jewelry. Why don't you kill me off yourselves? Then you can go on all the Masala Cruises you want.”

Perhaps I've been overly optimistic about my champion.

“You're hired,” Mrs. Mehta says. I wait for them to introduce me to my charge, but they hurry me to the door. I tell them I need half the money up front, as Blanca advised. When Mr. Mehta hesitates, the voice snaps, “You mean you're ready to leave me at the mercy of someone you can't trust with a few measly dollars?”

The reason for my fight with Robert is a stuffed raccoon. He won it from Victor, his best buddy, the result of a pool-playing bet involving something called a bank shot with throw (the intricacies of which I fail to grasp), and installed it on our chest of drawers two weeks ago. Apparently, the raccoon is valuable. More important: Victor had shot and stuffed it himself, and he was terribly cut up at having to part with it. He offered to buy it back from Robert for two hundred dollars.

“And you refused?” I eyed the creature with disbelief. Its upper lip was lifted in a snarl, and one front leg was shorter than the other (though that could have been the result of Victor's taxidermy). It appeared ready to spring off the chest of drawers and launch itself upon us.