The Newlyweds (27 page)

But Craig only nodded in an enthusiastic way. “These days a lot of people are going for the foam mattresses. They don’t sound comfortable, but you’ve got to try one. They actually developed this stuff for NASA—there’s a whole scientific explanation I could give you, but most people just like to lie down and judge for themselves. There’s one right over here.”

Amina thought of saying that George was an engineer, and might like to hear the scientific explanation, but she was afraid the salesman might ask where her husband worked. Instead she followed George to a king-size bed with a polished wooden headboard and a price tag encased in plastic: $2,499.00.

“We’re looking for a queen,” George said. “Just the box spring and the mattress.”

“This is the RhapsodyBed, top of the line,” the salesman said. “Try it out. No charge for a nap.”

George lay down on the bed, but Amina only sat carefully on the edge.

“Do you see what I mean?” Craig said. “She could be jumping up and down over there, and you wouldn’t feel a thing.” He turned to Amina. “Don’t be shy.”

Amina lay down on her back, as far from George as possible. They were facing the store’s front window, and shoppers with bags eyed them as they passed.

“I’ll give you a minute,” Craig said, “and you can come back and take a look at the box springs. We have plenty of nice ones, although they’re not going to feel like the Rhapsody.”

When he was gone, Amina sat up quickly and lowered her voice. “Who pays twenty-five hundred dollars for a bed?”

“No one,” George said flatly. “They just do it so you feel like you’re getting a bargain later. It’s comfortable though.”

“Sit up,” Amina whispered. “People are looking.” But George remained on his back.

“So what.”

“They think about
that
.”

“I think about it, too,” George said in his normal voice. “But we don’t do it.”

Amina looked at her husband, who was staring at a ceiling fan rotating above their heads, the dark brown wooden blades of which were tipped with brass. She was startled to see the expression on his face, somewhere between laughter and fury.

“We did it the other night.”

“Will that happen again?” His eyes remained on the fan.

“When we’re married—after my parents get here.”

George exhaled sharply. “How exciting.”

“You’re the one—”

“I
know
. It’s my fault—I screwed up.” He looked at her. “Hey, do you even know that word? ‘Screw’?”

Amina started to get up, but he grabbed her shoulder. She thought of shaking it off, running out of the store—and then where? Even if she managed to locate the car in the lot and calm down enough to drive it, it wasn’t as if she had anywhere to go.

“Look—don’t,” he whispered. “Please. I’m sorry—I shouldn’t’ve said that. You just—you have all these plans. Do you ever just, you know—”

“I thought that’s what you liked about me—how I’m so practical.”

George dropped his hand. “I did—do. I just sometimes feel like it’s about your plans more than me.”

She looked at him as if she didn’t understand—an old habit. But of course she knew what he meant.

“Like, I’m just a piece of the puzzle.”

“At first we were puzzle pieces. Now we’re the puzzle.” She hadn’t meant to be funny, but George looked at her and laughed for real.

“I think everybody is, when they get married,” she continued. “Even if you live together and all of that.”

George lay down again. “You might be right.”

“You’re just guessing about the other person until then.”

He smiled.

“What?”

“Let’s get it,” he said.

“What?”

“The bed—the Rhapsody. Why not?”

“Are you crazy?” She saw Craig watching them from across the room, noticing her husband’s sudden good humor. If he approached them now, she was afraid George would hand over the credit card.

“We wouldn’t do that even if you were working. You’re not thinking.”

“No—I’m not.”

She did the percentage instantly. “That’s an eighth of our savings.” George put his arms behind his head, as if he owned the bed already. “More or less.”

“It’s the price of two airline tickets.”

George’s expression changed suddenly. He gave her a look that made her wish they could start the whole day again from the beginning.

“Yeah,” he said. “When you put it like that.”

A family of four had stopped outside the plate-glass window and was having a conversation, gesturing toward George and Amina on the luxurious bed.

He had turned his head away, and so Amina touched his shoulder.

“Please sit up.”

He glanced at the family but refused to meet her eyes. “You only care how things look.”

Amina stared at her husband, prone on the bed. She didn’t know how you could live with a person for three years and still have such a wrongheaded idea about her personality. What George was describing was everyone she knew at home, her extended family and all of her girlfriends from school. Amina was the one who’d done everything her own way, ignoring their endless whispering. How could he fail to see how hard she had worked to escape it?

She was thinking of how she might explain this to him when the salesman returned.

“It’s hard to get up, isn’t it? You know, the foam mattress can be used on a more economical bed frame. If you like—”

But George had gotten up and, without a word, was already walking out of the store.

“Thank you,” Amina began. “We need to—”

“Think it over,” Craig finished for her. He reached out to shake her hand, and the touch of a strange male palm, which had become so routine that she hardly thought about it, suddenly felt as embarrassing as it had the first time she’d been expected to do it.

Craig handed her a card, which she realized she was still holding fifteen minutes later, when she and George were seated at Friendly’s with thirteen dollars’ worth of chicken sandwiches, fries, and soda, not speaking or even looking at each other. She put the card in her purse, thinking of the thousands of similar cards her father had hoarded over the years. If she were at home she might give it to him:
Here’s the card of the man who sold us our mattress
, and her father would be impressed by the raised red lettering, would save it in one of the neat stacks in his bureau drawer, organized according to his own invented system. When she was little she used to like to watch him sort through them, laying them out on the bed in her parents’ room, frowning and speaking very softly to himself, as if they were a divining tool only he could read.

6
The interviewer, a friendly young woman with red hair and beautiful teeth, began by asking Amina the number of stripes on the flag. Amina started to explain the significance of the thirteen stripes, but the interviewer laughed and said that was extra credit.
The questions that followed were also among the easiest on the list:
Who is the vice president of the United States? When do we celebrate Independence Day?
There was no mention of Native Americans or checks and balances. When George picked her up afterward, Amina was able to tell him she’d been awarded a “seven out of six.”

A few days after the exam, her parents received their medical clearance from a doctor near the embassy in Baridhara. Now that the only hurdle was the visas, Amina began preparations for their arrival in earnest. When George had first lost his job, the only benefit either one of them could see was that he would be able to come along and help to bring her parents back to America. It would certainly be much easier to manage their anxiety and make all of the arrangements if he were with her. In the past he had always been a calm and efficient presence, unlikely to be fazed by the kind of setbacks they were sure to encounter once they got to Desh. By the time she arrived, she would be a U.S. citizen, complete with a blue passport, but Amina didn’t have any illusions. If there were a problem at the embassy, God forbid, it would be an enormous help to have her white, native-born American husband standing next to her in line.

She had instructed both her mother and father to use “Mazid” as a surname on the forms, although it was properly her father’s nickname and not a last name at all. She preferred the sound of it to “Gazi,” her father’s family name, and had already used it on all of her own documents. In addition to talking them through each piece of paperwork on the phone, Amina spent a portion of every day packing gifts for her relatives. The gifts were things she’d been accumulating during the three years she’d been in America, and so she didn’t have to feel guilty about buying a lot of presents now that George was unemployed. She had been storing them in the large, purple suitcase in the room where she now slept, and the suitcase was already three-quarters full.

There was the Anaïs Anaïs eau de toilette that she’d bought from overstockperfume.com, along with six Dole pineapple juice boxes, two canisters of Wegmans protein powder, and a single box of Ziploc bags (just so that her mother could see what they were). For her father there was a digital wristwatch made by Sony and three bulk packages of 100 percent cotton Fruit of the Loom underwear and socks. Of course her parents were almost definitely coming right back with her,
and all of the things she was bringing were available here in Rochester. Still, she reminded George, it was impossible to know how long it would take to get her parents’ visas. She thought it was better to bring everything with her; that way she could have the pleasure of giving them unfamiliar things.

She had bought colored soap shaped like seashells for her nanu and all her aunts, pens that wrote in six different colors, and plastic head scarves for the rain. There were travel alarm clocks, green-apple candies, and “handmade in Rochester” lavender sachets. (The last was something Eileen had suggested, and although she’d accepted them politely, she was sure no one at home was going to be very excited about some sweet-smelling seeds in a handmade muslin bag.) Her nanu was also getting a bottle of Active Senior multivitamins, the label of which showed a white-haired grandmother in a red tracksuit playing tennis; even if her grandmother distrusted the foreign vitamins, Amina figured that the label as an artifact would be worth the weight of the bottle. There were NY Giants T-shirts for her male cousins, and neon rubber bangles for the girls, and there was her own favorite purchase: a box of twenty pressed-tin Christmas ornaments painted to resemble common American birds, which she had bought on sale last December 26 with the thought that they could be individually presented to anyone she might have forgotten.

The suitcase had already been packed and repacked several times when her parents finally received their visa interview date: August 17. Amina and George immediately went online to look for tickets, but they were even more expensive than they’d been three years ago, the routes byzantine in their complexity.

“We better be sure the dates are right,” George said. “If we have to change them, there’s a two-hundred-fifty-dollar fee per ticket.” His voice was resigned to the potential expense in a way that was worse than if he’d complained.

“It will be the first time they’ve ever flown,” Amina apologized. Recently her parents had offered to come to America on their own, a disingenuous move that she wished she’d never mentioned to George. She could see he hadn’t let go of the idea, as he trolled through flights with two and three stops, and she was afraid he didn’t understand why it was impossible. Her mother was unpredictable; she’d passed
her medical exam, but who was to say she wouldn’t have one of her outbursts during the interview? They were supposed to get their visas immediately afterward, but if there was a problem, her parents could be kept waiting indefinitely. Even if everything went perfectly, she couldn’t imagine what they would do in the massive Dubai airport for six hours, or how they would find the connecting flight to New York once they left the Bangla-speaking attendants from the first flight.

“I’m worried about them in the airport for all that time.”

“We’re not going to be able to sit together,” George said.

If she were pregnant, she thought, he wouldn’t argue. He would assume she needed him with her. Her period hadn’t come since the night they’d shared a bed, and although she tried not to think about it, she hadn’t given up hope.

“These prices are without the tax,” George said.

Her own first flight, from Dhaka to Dubai, had been crowded with rude young men going to the Gulf to work, fingering cheap local phones that would soon be useless, desperately trying to prove their own worldliness to one another. One of these had been seated next to her, and so Amina had been forced to pull out her copy of
Jane Eyre
(the only book from her O-level preparations with which she hadn’t been able to part) and turn the pages regularly during the entire three hours to be sure he wouldn’t speak to her.

That experience had made her doubly pleased when her seatmate for the longer flight had turned out to be a completely different type of Deshi: a middle-aged woman, beautifully dressed in a hand-embroidered top and slacks, with a great deal of gold jewelry. At home Amina had been satisfied with her outfit—a blouse with a collar, jeans, and the University of Rochester sweatshirt George had brought her—but now she suddenly felt sloppy. Her neighbor carried a soft black leather handbag, from which she pulled various amenities: a tube of hand cream, individually wrapped antibacterial towelettes, chewing gum, and bottled water. Her food she carried separately in an insulated bag with a zipper: some sort of dry vegetable, mung dal, rice, bananas, and a paper-wrapped package of homemade pakan pitha. She refused everything the flight attendant offered, except more water, and did not offer Amina anything to eat, even though she obviously had more than she needed. Her mother would have
been appalled by this display of bad manners, but it made Amina smile. Clearly this woman had become an American already, and if she could do it, why couldn’t Amina?

She pulled out
Jane Eyre
again, as a conversation starter rather than a deterrent, but the woman reclined her seat and put a mask over her eyes. Amina wasn’t sleepy, and she had found a song she loved: “Original Sin,” by INXS (which she’d referred to as “Inks” soon after she’d arrived, making George laugh). As she listened, she wished for George’s grandmother’s diamond ring, which might have made her seatmate remove her mask and reveal herself more open to conversation.