Bone and Bread (7 page)

“What about meat? How long is it since you've had it?” Sadhana had caught on to my idea. Keep Mama talking until she'd forgotten what we'd done, what we still had sitting on the table in front of us.

“Longer. Since before I lived in California.”

“Do you miss it?” Sadhana and I had had hamburgers once at a birthday party, though we'd made a pact never to confess. I'd gotten sick anyway.

Mama looked thoughtful. “I miss roast chicken like my mother used to make.”

“What did it taste like?” asked Sadhana.

“Heaven,” said Mama, closing her eyes.

“But you don't eat animals anymore.”

“That bird,” said Mama. “Maybe that one bird, I would.”

“After all, it would be dead already,” I said. Mama swatted in my general direction as she got up from the table. Heading back out to start the fire, she handed me the bottle. “Put it away, girls, and come outside.”

The cabin, built by geography professors on sloping land, vibrated with each step she took down the porch stairs. Once everything had stopped shaking, Sadhana raised her glass. “And?”

I had to laugh. I picked mine up, too. “And.”

We drank them fast the way Mama did.

It was in spite of all this that we turned out normal. That's what Sadhana said, though her observation came about the time I was in grade nine, when she was just turning twelve and I was just turning fourteen and had more than a few ambitions about just how much more normal I was going to become. She meant Mama's strange philosophies, her uncanny enthusiasms. The way we'd battled over our lack of a television and how Sadhana used to beg to go over to her friend's place to watch
Punky Brewster
until she learned that a well-timed lie could avoid one of Mama's earnest eye-level interventions.

We were sitting around a table draped in bright red crepe, at our mutual birthday dinner. As Mama made flourishes on the cake in the adjoining kitchen, squeezing sugar roses from the pastry bag and singing Pete Seeger, my sister was explaining how miraculous it was that we had come out on the other side of our childhood with a passable claim to ordinariness, with no outward signs of outlandishness or zeal. We were both in high school now, in the other half of the cement-block building where we'd started in kindergarten. In the green and yellow hallways of jostling, slouching, hollering teens, seventh-­graders like Sadhana were reminded of what it was like to be the lowest of the low.

“Think about Emann,” she said, “and Judith-Christianne.” Sadhana regarded Emann, who wore a headscarf, and Judith-Christianne, a timid girl whose mother packed copies of
The Watchtower
into her lunch bag, with a strange pity. “We got off easy.”

“I don't know,” I said. Emann was sporty and smart, not to mention twice as popular as I was.

“Mama is not like other moms,” my sister said. “I don't know if you've noticed.”

We had made a pact that we would not invite anyone over because we were, just then, exceedingly embarrassed by our mother. There was the little white turban, for one thing, that she rarely wore outside anymore, but often still wore at home. And there was the time she was on a mono-diet of bananas and herbal tea and Jennica Moore came over and saw so many banana peels in the garbage she asked if we kept a monkey.

“It's a religious thing,” I'd told her, while Sadhana glared. “I mean, a health thing,” I amended. “Cleansing. You fast from one full moon to the next and eat nothing but bananas.”

“That is super weird.” Jennica Moore looked really shocked and was glancing around our kitchen as though hoping to find something worse. I saw her eyes pass over the bronze Nataraja
statue of Shiva dancing and the Indian Buddha floating on a pedestal of lotus blossoms, both presiding over the room from a mint-green wall shelf. Laid out between them was a Tibetan prayer wheel on a wooden handle.

Sadhana said, “I know, right? Really weird.” Jennica was her friend, and I just happened to be at home. Anything I said wrong could and would be held against me.

That was when Sadhana began talking about Mama as though her ideas were a kind of contagion, a viral pattern of thinking that would alter us, in obvious and irrevocable ways, into earnest, off-kilter versions of ourselves, wearing all white to strengthen our auras or writing down our dreams to decode messages from our unconscious selves. I was not altogether against these ideas, these versions of me that might be closer to my mother, but I could see Sadhana's point of view. Being like Mama in the world would be a bit like throwing yourself to the wolves.

In the campaign for normality, hair was the next frontier, and while we waged war against our unibrows, Mama was rooting for the other side. Though she no longer abided by all the pronouncements of the holy gurus, the practices concerning hair happened to coincide with her own wisdom. She was adamant that we not cut it and wept the day Sadhana came home with a shoulder-length ponytail. My sister kissed our mother's cheek before dropping the scissored end of her braid into Mama's palm. “Here's a little bit of God's precious creation,” she said lightly.

There was a particular look of shocked horror on Mama's face that always made Sadhana laugh.

It was the same month that Mama discovered our bag of disposable razors in the cupboard under the sink. She brought them to the breakfast table with an attitude that was half-quizzical, half-disappointed. Mama had stopped shaving her legs in the sixties, even before she converted.

“I can't stress enough how unnecessary this all is,” she said, regarding the pink plastic Bics with a degree of mournfulness. “Why do you think you need to do what everyone else does?”

I felt my cheeks flushing as I hesitated, while Sadhana said, too fast, “We don't. You're right.” I gave her a quick look and saw that she was trying to finish the conversation.

But Mama was satisfied. “You're perfect the way you are, kittens,” she said, cupping my face as she tilted it up with her cool hand. “It's what's inside that matters.”

So we started concealing our stash in the bedroom. Razors, wax, Nair, tweezers, all stowed away behind a row of Nancy Drews on the bookcase. I had a qualm or two, thinking about what Mama had said to us, but Sadhana staved off any hesitation.

“She's a redhead,” said my sister, shrugging. “What does she know about moustaches?”

That year Mama gave us each a blank notebook for our birthdays. “Stay in touch with yourselves,” she said, without a trace of wryness, “if not with me.” It was possible that she sensed how our idea of her had started shifting. Each notebook had a bright woven cover and delicate pages the colour of coffee stains.

Sadhana hugged hers to her chest. “I'm going to use mine to keep a journal,” she said. “And you better not read it.”

“I wouldn't,” said Mama. “I wouldn't dream of it.”

“I know, Mama. I meant Beena.”

“Fine,” I said. “Same goes for mine.” I wrote
DIARY
on the flyleaf and announced that I was going to hide it in our room, though I thought it seemed like a chore to write about things that had already happened.

Mama bought one for herself that she was going to keep beside her bed for writing down dreams. Elise, one of her yoga-teacher friends, did dream analysis. Of Mama's strange recurring dream of brightly coloured parrots tumbling from the sky, Elise had said, “There's nothing waiting for you in heaven that you don't already have on Earth.” As she related both the dream and its interpretation, it was clear that Mama was eager to hear what Elise might say next. She left us to rinse the plates from the birthday dinner and bid us an early goodnight, patting her stomach. “A full belly is better for dreaming,” she said, laughing. “Wish me luck.”

After we could hear Mama's light snoring, my sister dared me to hide Mama's turban. Sadhana had wide-open, mischievous eyes that spoke of a post-cake sugar rush.

“No way,” I said. There were some things Mama could joke about, but that wasn't one of them.

But Sadhana wasn't to be put off. “Chicken,” she said, and while I wondered if I really was, she ran and shoved Mama's turban into the bottom of the laundry hamper and returned to our bedroom in a fit of giggles. Although Mama had mostly stopped wearing it outside by the time we started school, she still wrapped her head before doing yoga. She said it helped keep the bones of the skull in place and channel positive energy.

“I wear it for all the reasons that your uncle wears it,” she said as she scolded us the next morning. “And why Papa used to. For the reasons all proud Sikhs wear it. It is a very courageous thing to do when so many people around you despise you for it. Or even attack you. Or your business.”

“Your business,” I repeated.

“Do you remember the fire?” said Mama, and we nodded. “Well, that happened because somebody didn't like seeing Uncle behind the counter in his turban.”

Sadhana raised her eyebrows. “I thought that was an anti-Jewish thing done by neo-Nazis who were too stupid to realize who was running the bagel shop.”

“Really?” I said. For some reason, my sister and I had never talked about the people who had set the fire. Maybe because we were too afraid.

Sadhana tucked her feet up under her. “Yeah. I remember Uncle trying to wash off the swastikas.”

“The swastika isn't just a symbol against Judaism anymore,” said Mama. “It's a symbol of intolerance and prejudice against all kinds of people.”

Sadhana said, “Bagel haters, then. Anti-bagelists.”

I cracked up, and Mama looked severe.

“Do you think there was anything funny about the fire?”

I fell silent.

Mama said that for most people there was a difference between claiming to believe something and actually showing you believed it by changing the way you looked. “It's different from wearing punk or hippie clothes, which are mostly just a fashion statement. A turban is anti-fashion.”

When Mama showed such startling awareness, it only made me more worried for her. For it seemed that her way of living, of always seeing the best in us, was more precarious than I could ever have imagined.

At a certain point, if you had asked my mother, she would have said that she was lucky. She had lost her parents and her husband, and her dead husband's brother regarded her as an interloper, and her world, which must have once seemed so open, so boundless and unpredictable, had soon narrowed to the domestic sphere of two inexhaustible little girls. Nevertheless, she considered herself one of the most fortunate people she knew.

“I have loved and been loved, and every day that goes by, I am grateful to be alive.” She explained this to us with relentless patience over supper or during bathtime or while brushing out and braiding our long black hair. Before bed, she sometimes still pointed out her lucky star, that blinking repository of wishes we strained to see through the glass. “When you are all grown up, my own loves, you might find out how blessed we are.”

In anyone else, it might have seemed as if they were trying to convince themselves. But Mama claiming her own good fortune was like a master artist declaring a work complete, one long, thoughtful pause after flinging the final blotch of paint at an abstract canvas. Saying it made it so, for who was there to say any different?

But I thought I knew better. The older we got, the smaller Mama seemed, not only because we had grown, but as we needed her less and less, she, in turn, seemed to miss Papa more. She didn't speak about him any more than she used to, but I could tell she was sad. Her narrative impulse had returned. Whenever she made her spiced tea after breakfast, she began to tell us stories about her parents.

“They were American,” she said. “Did you know that? From a little town in Florida, so humid you could count the droplets as they hung in the air.”

“But you're from Ireland,” said Sadhana.

“I am. They visited Galway on their honeymoon and decided to stay.”

Mama described how her parents had bought an old house in disrepair and converted it into a tiny hotel they named the Quarry, since the yard was choked with stone. Mama's father learned how to balance rocks, filling the backyard with virtuoso towers of stones, their massive weights improbably balanced end to end. Inside the hotel, the front and back staircases were lined with Mama's mother's clock collection. The floors were covered in multicoloured rag rugs she'd made during three Florida summers squandered inside by the fan.

“I bet you miss it,” said Sadhana. She was better than I was at interjecting during Mama's reminiscences. Whenever sadness clung to Mama's voice, I became nervous and silent.

“I do,” said Mama. “Almost as much as your grandmother's roast chicken.” Mama never seemed to remember that we already knew everything about the chicken.

The chicken in its ideal form, the sense memory as described by our mother, might have loomed even larger than our grandparents in our collective mythology.

“At least missing something means you remember it,” said Sadhana, and I looked at her in surprise.