Bone and Bread (23 page)

“Put it at the end of the row. Otherwise it ruins the symmetry.” The hing was in a Ziploc baggie wrapped inside a yellow plastic bag, which in turn was stuffed into an airtight glass Mason jar. Mama had been a firm believer in its healthful properties, and it went wonderfully with lentils, but hing was like the world's final fetid onion stagnating in a ditch, determined to leave its annihilators one last harrowing trace of its existence. It smelled, pervasively.

“Hmm. System or symmetry.” Sadhana passed the jar from hand to hand as she weighed it in both senses. “Crazy to keep it, when neither of us uses it much anymore.” But even as she spoke, she put it back where we had kept it since we moved in.

“Maybe we should,” I said, swallowing the last bite of risotto and patting my stomach. Mama always said hing was good for staving off indigestion. I had persevered a few bites past sufficiency, but exceptions could be allowed on holidays, even unacknowledged ones. I poured myself more wine before checking to see if Sadhana's glass needed to be refilled.

Her plate, next to mine, looked full.

I forgot the wine and watched her as she bent to her task of sorting. All at once, I became suspicious. She was washing and drying the outside of each spice bottle before putting it into place. The baggy grey sweatshirt she wore after dance classes or the gym had become a kind of uniform, over a pair of loose cotton pants. Lately, I had rarely seen her wearing anything else. Her eyes were bright and large.

I stood up. “Hey,” I said, moving closer to her. “Let me help you with that.”

I grabbed her and felt my fingers sink into the jersey until they reached the narrow rod of her arm, slender as a hanger. With my other hand, I pulled at the bottom edge below her waist and saw the top sweatshirt layered over two more below. Her hipbone protruded from her pelvis like a door jamb, and I gasped. Her fingers scrabbled at the edge of the counter.

“Sadhana.” For a moment, I felt dizzy. “No.”

She pulled away and her elbow swung up like the wing of a bird trying to take flight. “God, get off!” she screamed. “Get off me!”

I clung to her. “Not again. We're not doing this again.” Her arm felt fragile in my grip, and though I worried about breaking it, it only fuelled my ferocity. Because of the brittleness of her bones, she had already had to contend with a hairline fracture in her wrist.

“Are you listening, Sadhana?” I could have been shouting or whispering — it felt like there was not enough air in the room to tell. But she heard me. My lips were right next to her ear.

“Tell me,” I said.

She fainted.

She spent two nights in the hospital with a nutritional IV, but we decided to stick to outpatient treatment. She didn't want to lose the semester, even though it was her rabidness over her classes that had probably caused the crisis in the first place. She bargained her way into it by pledging utter commitment to getting better and absolute compliance with all my rules: high-calorie meals at the table under my watch, twice-a-day calls from the payphone on campus, no more than two dance classes a week. I had a little more time on my hands since Quinn had started kindergarten — more even than I would have liked, because everything that there was, every new surplus of time and effort, was turned only to my sister. All my spare solicitousness and every extra hour of listening ears.

Mostly, I agreed with her that it would be better for Quinn if she stayed home, as I dreaded the thought of taking him to the hospital to see her.

Of all things, it was the referendum on Quebec separation that pulled her out of the slump, like a bright lure dangled into placid waters. It caught all of us in the mouth, and none of us could stop yammering. Yes or no,
oui ou non
, or as on the billboards,
OUI
or
NON
. There was the currency issue, the question of the Mohawk lands. There was the press release to recruit Quebec soldiers for the army of their new homeland-to-be. There was nobody without an opinion, and for Sadhana, stuck in the new rut of only her and her disease, it was the perfect thing to help hoist her out. It was French or English, in or out, and even having no allegiance except to the great ideal of coexistence became hard with all the speeches and promises flying back and forth.

The thing with the referendum was that it was impossible not to care. Between our neighbours down the hall who glued a petition to their door (for what, exactly, we never could determine, but we knew it was something to do with Anglo rights after we saw our francophone building manager mocking them for their supposed oppression) and the blue and white flags draping the balconies of the building across the street, it was hard to stop thinking about it.

Not that Sadhana wanted to, anyway. “If Mama were alive,” she said, “she'd support separation.” Whenever I heard the word
separation
, I pictured the whole province cut adrift, floating off somewhere north to Labrador, the island of Montreal left on one long tether as a compromise for the city folk who hadn't wanted to leave. It made me panicky, because I wasn't a strong swimmer.

“Like you?” I couldn't quite keep the derision from my voice. My sister, the separatist.

“Yes, like me.” Sadhana was ensconced in the papasan chair where she'd taken to sleeping among a complicated arrangement of cushions. When she got that thin, it was almost impossible for her to lie down comfortably with her own bones.

“Doubtful,” I said. Mama was all for diversity, for inclusion. She used to say that every different language in Montreal was like tuning your brain to a different channel. The full cable package. It was a strange comparison, considering she'd never owned a television. “Mama hated all that
pure laine
stuff. You know that. And she loved Canada. All of it. French and English both.”

Sadhana pursed her lips, an arrogant kind of expression, I thought, for someone who could barely hold up her own head. She looked older when she got that skinny, her hair sparser and dull, and it was hard not to defer to her when she had both the look and the grit of an old woman. “It's a whole different issue,” she said. “It's self-determination. You remember how she supported the Basques.”

“That was only because of that Basque mail carrier.” A chatty moustachioed fellow who used to come up for Mama's mint tea, he was much beloved for bringing us fruit chews and cancelled postage stamps.

“No,” said Sadhana. “It was the whole principle of the thing. Just think about it.” She was in good spirits then, fuelled entirely by her perception of herself as inhabiting a moral high ground already sanctioned by our dead mother. She'd even gone back to working on a sweater she'd started knitting in high school during her first stay in the hospital, a project we used to joke was so tedious that she started getting well just so she wouldn't need to finish.

I was the one who realized we'd actually lived through the last referendum, when Mama was still alive. Deciding we needed to take a less speculative approach to current events than using bits of news overheard in the elevator as the launching point for hour-long quarrels, I'd brought up a day-old newspaper left in the lobby by one of our neighbours. Shoving aside a pile of Quinn's picture books from the library, I spread out the paper on the table with a great deal of crinkling importance and had just started reading when I spotted a sidebar with a mini history lesson.

“The last referendum was in 1980,” I said, blinking with surprise, calculating. We would have been seven and five. Sadhana paused mid-stitch, mouth falling open. “We should be able to remember it.”

But we didn't. To her credit, however much she wanted to retain the idea of Mama's support for separatism, Sadhana didn't bother fabricating a sudden memory. But the fact that we had no actual recollection of Mama's allegiances didn't stop us from fiercely debating them. Neither of us admitted aloud that our inability to remember Mama's position meant she had probably stayed well out of it.

“Did she bake a cake with a maple leaf on it that one time?” I asked, closing my eyes to try to remember. “I can picture something red and white.”

Sadhana smirked. “I think that was supposed to be Strawberry Shortcake.”

So Sadhana knitted and argued and got more cheerful every day. Then we disagreed again, as we watched the poll numbers going up for the separatists, and Sadhana started eating breakfast and the sweater had a full sleeve and even a cuff. And then we argued more, and she was eating twice a day and she was so merry and almost normal-looking that she rolled the one-armed sweater around both needles and the ball of yarn and put it back in its grocery bag in the closet. Neither of us had managed to produce a single definitive memory of Mama's allegiance. We were at a stalemate until it occurred to me that we could simply ask someone.

“Why don't we call one of her friends?” I said. We'd let Mama's friends slip away, all the ladies who used to look in on us. Deana, Sylvia, an older lady named Elise, and the one who used to bake us pineapple upside-down cake.

Sadhana shrugged. “You feel like looking them up?” She meant tracking them down, since in most cases we didn't know their last names. We'd have to try and feel our way to where they used to live. Ringing doorbells. We decided to forget it.

The day of the “
Non
” rally, the big demonstration staged as a love letter to keep Quebec in Canada, I dressed in my federalist best: jeans and a white shirt, topped with a khaki sunhat emblazoned with an embroidered red maple leaf. I hoped the message for unity was clear, but Sadhana, ever the mind/body dualist, thought the hat implied a kind of top-down dictatorship. At the last minute, we both changed into white dresses, the way Mama used to clothe us before we were old enough to start objecting.

We walked downtown together through a sea of blue and red. There was a kind of shared expression I kept catching on people's faces, people on both sides of the cause, of a mingled sense of purpose and exhilaration. On René Lévesque Boulevard, the crowd was dense and we had to squeeze and wriggle our way through, murmuring our thanks and goodwill to the people who let us move ahead. We saw a bunch of high school students carrying hybrid Canadian flags, with bands of blue on the inner edges of the red fields. As we got closer to the square, we passed a row of unfamiliar-looking red and white city buses, dozens and dozens of them, with Ontario licence plates. “Ottawa,” Sadhana guessed.

My sister had tears on her face, which shocked me. “This is really something,” she said.

By the time the ballots were counted, and Quebec had voted to stay in Canada by the slimmest of possible margins, Sadhana was out of danger.

It was my idea to have a talk with Quinn about his grandmother. It was the anniversary of the day she'd died, and I was sick of the reefs these charted dates kept throwing into our course as we tried to navigate the basic waters of staying alive, of staying happy. I was going through a strange spell of reading about mysticism and it made me feel closer to Mama, as though dates and blood and ritual were things that mattered. I had an underlined copy of Rumi and a box of incense and a new-found sense of wonder at the world that I thought might be something like the way Mama used to feel all the time. Sadhana was dubious but had agreed anyway, if only because she didn't want to be left out.

Quinn had become very interested in our family since he'd started the first grade. He was puzzled as to why his classmates had relatives like grapes on a vine, fat bunches of them, the connections spreading and spilling out in all directions. A girl named Penny had told the class that she could trace her family back to Henry VIII. Another girl, Violet, was descended from Huguenots. Sadhana and I were helpless to offer anything in response to this superfluity of hereditary data. Quinn knew there were reasons why he didn't have more family members around, but he was frustrated by the gaps in our knowledge. He was always wanting more, more, more.

We had a summit meeting ahead of time, at the grocery store. “We'll tell him about Mama,” I said. “Everything we remember and everything she told us about her parents.”

Sadhana scooped up two handfuls of oranges as I pushed the cart ahead to the cereal aisle. “What about Papa?”

“Him, too.”

“And Ravi?”

“When he's older.”

Sadhana tidied up the living room, putting away the new yarn and knitting needles she'd brought home the day before. Skeins of wool in emerald, raspberry, goldenrod. She told me she'd joined a knitting circle.

“Do they know you've been knitting the same sweater for five years?”

Sadhana laughed. “They don't. But I'm going to start something new.” Then she pulled out the photo albums, the Bhagavad-Gita,
and a recipe for cheddar cornmeal biscuits, a treat Mama used to make — batches of soft yellow batter cut and baked into stars. “I don't want to cry my head off,” she said. “Okay?”

I agreed. Every time I cried in front of Quinn, I felt like the goalie on a losing team, letting in points and sinking the game as my teammate watched. I wanted to be like my own mother, who never wavered in front of us. Before Quinn turned three, I'd comforted myself with the thought that he wouldn't remember. Now my recourse was to imagine that eventually every breakdown would start to meld together into a single memory.

We gathered in the living room, a Karen Dalton record on the old hi-fi, and sat Quinn between us as we showed him photographs of his grandmother. He'd seen a few framed ones that we kept out, and he likely thought of her, if he thought of her at all, as in those same few images, a woman who was only ever petting a goat or standing beside a giant redwood tree or waving from the end of a dock, with a squinty smile and the wind blowing her red hair like a flag over the water. I think that calcification had happened to me and Sadhana, too, because the albums hit us like a revelation. We were almost beside ourselves.

“Oh my gosh, look at her dress,” said Sadhana. It was Mama as a girl in Ireland, in a dark, lace-collared dress, like a porcelain doll. She was posed on cobblestones in front of a Victorian house with ornamented eaves.

“That looks like a normal dress,” said Quinn.

“It is,” agreed Sadhana. “Just not for her.”

There were other photographs that amazed us, mostly Mama's teenage sojourn back to Florida, her birthplace. There were pictures of alligators and cranes, of Mama grinning against backdrops of swamps and orange groves, and beaches stretched against turquoise strips of ocean. Then one from San Francisco, with her arm wrapped around the waist of another young woman, both of them in white summer dresses, and another showing a group of about twenty long-haired men and women in tree pose, their hands pressed together against their chests as though in prayer, a few leaning slightly as they tried to balance on one leg. Mama was standing the straightest and was the only one laughing.

The last time we'd looked at these photos together, Mama had been showing them to us. We hadn't touched them since her death, afraid, maybe, of the kind of anguish they'd set off. A crisis spoiling our prolonged, sedate misery.

Quinn had to tug at the albums to get a proper view, so absorbed were we in looking and looking. Both Sadhana and I had lapsed in our explanatory narration; we were now speaking only to each other.

Then Quinn spoke up. “Are there any pictures of my father?”

I froze. “No,” I said at last. I felt caught off-guard. “No, there absolutely are not.”

“Oh,” said Quinn. “Okay.”

“Beena,” said Sadhana. Her voice was gentle. Abnormal. “Maybe we should —”

“No,” I said, though I did not know what she was about to say. “No.” We were already at the last page of the album. “That's that.” I closed it and got up to put it away. When I returned, Sadhana was watching Quinn.

“It's okay,” said Quinn. “Don't worry. Are you sad?” He patted her on the back. Both of us would rub the small of his back when he got worried about things.

“A little bit.” Her life, and mine, just one long mourning period. “But no, not really. I'm okay, baby.”

“Promise not to be sad anymore?” said Quinn.

My sister and I looked at each other. “It's time for bed,” said Sadhana.

That first time Quinn asked about his father, I had the unreasonable sensation of having been a failure. I confided this to Sadhana after Quinn was asleep, and she told me I was being ridiculous.

“It's not because you're not good enough. It's a natural thing for him to wonder about.”

I supposed she was right. Quinn was six years old and in the first grade. If anything, it was surprising that he hadn't asked earlier.

The next morning, I discovered Sadhana and I had different tactics when it came to talking to Quinn about Ravi. I sat him down with a bowl of cereal and told him that his father had been very young, too young to be blamed for his actions.

“He panicked and ran away,” I told Quinn. I focused on the corn flakes, softening in their sea of milk. “He probably regrets losing us.” I sometimes believed that. I pictured Ravi, whenever I allowed myself to think of him, as trapped in an arranged marriage in which he was fond of a wife who secretly despised him.

Quinn blinked. The morning light bounced off his glasses. “Then why hasn't he tried to find us?”

From behind us in the kitchen, Sadhana said, “Because he's a shirking piece of crap who's too afraid to face up to his responsibilities.” She turned on the blender and stared Quinn down as if daring him to cry.

“Okay,” he said, nodding. But he was quiet on the walk to school, and as soon as we kissed him goodbye at the gate, Sadhana began defending herself.

“There's no point in coddling him,” she said, as we turned back down our street. “Better to know the truth than to have your illusions shattered later. Some people are bad.”

I let her words echo in my head and waited for them to land on something. “It's not that simple.”

“Okay, how about this, then?” Sadhana paused to let a truck pass. “Some people aren't worth knowing.”

Not being sure enough myself of anything to do with Ravi, I had a hard time when Quinn pumped me for details. He started asking again the following year, one evening while Sadhana was at her knitting circle. There was so little I remembered. I told him the basics about the romance that had blossomed outside the bagel shop. Though I did embellish ever so slightly, just enough so that I could use a word like
romance
at all. For some reason, it was easier to talk about while Sadhana wasn't around.

“He played hockey. He liked salt-and-vinegar-flavoured popcorn,” I offered, remembering our one excursion to the movies and how Ravi had pulled a seasoning shaker out of his bag, wielding it with liberality. “And his father was a doctor.” Ravi had spoken once or twice about his parents' anticipation that he would go to medical school and how he was already steeling himself against their disappointment.

“My father works like a dog,” he'd said. “For me, business school, then management. One day I'll be a CEO. Either that or prime minister.” I didn't know what a CEO was, but I didn't want to ask. I had a hard time picturing Ravi as a manager. He was my uncle's worst employee.

“Well,” I said to Quinn, who was by then sitting on the footstool with as much straight-backed attention as a dog waiting for a treat. “He wanted to be a businessman. Or a politician.”

“Okay. What else?”

“What can I say? We talked about the Pixies more than we did about the future.”

“What else?”

I thought hard.

“He could blow smoke rings. And whistle through his fingers. And he didn't usually show his teeth when he smiled.”

“What else?” Quinn's dark amber eyes were relentless behind his frames.

There wasn't much else. He wore white briefs with a red stripe on the band. The treads of his shoes had a pattern of swirls stamped into the rubber. He had a canvas bag he'd bought at an army surplus store. There was a trace of a cowlick on the crown of his head. Almost everything I had was a clue I could skim off the surface.

“That's it.”

“Did you love each other?”

I decided to be truthful. “No. Not yet. We were just starting to get to know one another.”

But as I lay in bed that night, I wondered. What had happened to the young man I had expended so much energy trying not to think about? He had been so cool, oh so cool, and so afraid. So irresolute. His large, curling lips and the languid way his bottom jaw would shift to the side in scorn. His parents, too, had been only too willing to allow him to keep shirking his duty, at least as far as I knew. They had never contacted Uncle, and we had never pressed them, either. But I remembered their dignity, their rigidity, that day on their doorstep, and I did not think they would have let him go so easily. He could have run off, and maybe he really did. But he would have come back.

The apartment seemed to hum, then pulse around me as I blinked in the darkness and struggled to follow the thought through to its end. Rolling over on my left side, I let the rush of my anxiety flow out until I could detect what felt like a conclusion circling, then knocking up against the side of a drain. Too consequential to slip through. Ravi was not gone, not vanished forever, as I'd begun to hope. He was probably even in Montreal.