The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (59 page)

“What?”

“You just said ‘nuts.’ ”

Amina moved away from the window. “My parents. It’s weird. They go everywhere together now. The garden, the porch, probably the bathroom for all I know. It’s like they’re dating or something.”

“That’s sweet.”

“No it’s not. It’s like having the sun set on the wrong fucking side of the sky.”

Dimple was quiet for a moment. “How are you doing?”

Why did everyone always ask that? “I’m fine.”

“My mom said last night was awful.”

“When are you telling her about Sajeev?”

“What?” Dimple’s voice bowed up in surprise. “I don’t know. I mean, that’s the last thing we need to think about right now, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it just better to tell everyone and be done with it?”

“God, Ami. Compared to everything else going on? It’s practically a nonissue.”

“I mean, especially if you’re still planning on eloping after the show.” Amina paced around the room. “Because a wedding might be nice, you know. For everyone to think about.”

“What, like a distraction?”

“No,” Amina said, even though that was exactly what she meant.
Was it really so bad to want something to look forward to? She opened up Akhil’s armoire and saw a grimy version of her own tired face staring back at her. “When do you get in?”

“Midnight tonight. We’ll come over in the morning. Who is that?”

“What?”

“Ami, seriously? Have your ears melted? Your doorbell just rang.”

It rang again. Prince Philip began barking like his back was on fire.

“Shit.” Amina looked down. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her damp armpits smelled mildly like coffee. She looked around the floor for her bedroom slippers.

“Do you want me to call back?”

“No, I’ll just see you tomorrow.” She dropped the phone in the cradle and hurried down the stairs just as the ringing switched to knocking.

“Coming!” she shouted as she approached the door, and this unleashed a torrent of disapproval from Prince Philip, who seemed to be auditioning for the role of ferocious guard dog on the other side of it.

“Thank God,” Jamie said when she opened it, eyes looking back at the bared teeth. “Your dog is about to go Cujo on me.”

“Oh!” Amina crossed her arms over her chest. “Hey!”

“Can you help me out here?”

“SHUT IT, PRINCE!” Amina shouted, and the dog looked immediately sheepish, tail wagging. He sniffed Jamie’s pants.

“Prince like the singer?” Jamie watched him nervously.

“Like Prince Philip of England.”

“Ah.”

The dog wandered away, and Jamie looked at her expectantly.

“You look great,” Amina said.

Actually, he looked like a banker on a business-casual day—chinos, checked shirt, and good leather shoes, face the kind of clean-shaven that felt rubbery—but still.

“Yeah? Cool. I wanted to look nice to meet your parents.”

“Ha!” Amina tried to tamp down the flare of panic between her ribs. “Of course. Yes. And they want to meet you, too! We all do. I mean, not me, but you know, have you meet them. The thing is, though, it’s just not really a good time.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Jamie said. He took a step back, glancing at his car as if he were going to get back in it, and for a moment Amina thought it would be that easy. Then he shrugged. “I mean, I get it. I really do. Which is why yesterday when we got off the phone I just thought,
You know what? It might never be a good time. So I might as well just go over
.”

She was nodding like one of those nodding dolls, the ones that go from cute to stupid in about a second. She stopped. “Weird.”

Jamie frowned.

She shook her head, tried again. “We are weird right now. And the house. It’s …” She looked down at the good leather shoes. The good leather shoes were not going to like what was passing for normalcy behind the front door. Amina sighed. “It’s fucked.”

“Amina.”

It seemed like a bad idea, looking right at him. It seemed like the inevitable first step toward some tedious, emotional conversation about how bad things were getting, how shakily she’d handled them, how long it had been since she’d showered. But when she looked up, there was something sympathetic and a little amused in his eyes, and she found herself backing up. Jamie walked inside. He looked around slowly, lingering on the windowsills, the furniture, the chair with the clocks. Overnight, Christmas lights had been laid on the floor on either side of the hallway so that it lit up like a merry runway.

Amina pushed her hair behind her ear. “It doesn’t always look like this.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want some tea or something?”

“Sure.”

It was funny to have him walking behind her, his height out of context in her house. She felt like she needed to point out lighting fixtures, doorways, to push the walls a little farther apart. They went into the kitchen, where Thomas had crammed the countertop with candles of all shapes and sizes that morning, despite Kamala’s vocal disapproval. Amina turned the kettle on and retrieved a paper bag, opening it with an efficient snap. She began dropping the candles into it.

“Pretty house,” Jamie said.

Amina gave him a look.

“No, really. It’s obviously not, you know, in its best state right now, but it’s still nice. The trees are huge.” He looked into the courtyard. “Is that …?”

“A halogen lamp wrapped in Christmas lights. Yes. It’s funny how that’s the one that gets people. What kind of tea do you want?”

“Anything. Actually, decaf if you have it.”

She finished with the candles and rolled the paper bag tight, setting it down on the floor. At the back of the cabinet, she found an old herbal sampler and pulled out a bag of chamomile for him and a Red Label for herself. She turned on the kettle. “You hungry?”

“Nope.”

She walked a few paces toward and away from the stove. She could feel him watching her.

“I’m fine,” she said preemptively. “I mean, I haven’t showered in a while. Or slept, really. And I keep worrying about my parents doing something crazier than they already have, but that’s just, you know. Fine.”

“Crazier?”

“You know, like pushing the fridge into the garden. Or burning the house down.” She laughed self-consciously, and sat. There was something sticky on the countertop, and she scraped her nail against it, aware that Jamie was still watching but unable to stop.

“So how is he?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe fine? Maybe metastasizing?”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” she said, and felt a little pop in her chest when he reached across the counter and held her hand. The water heated with a quiet roar. “Was it like this with your mom?”

“Not really.”

“Just the part where she covered the whole house in lights?”

Jamie squeezed her hand.

When the teakettle screamed, Amina poured water into both cups, thinking of all the other things she had assumed would kill Thomas one day. The smoking. The scotch. Some kind of extremely
rare blood-borne disease that he’d get but save the rest of the hospital from with a final heroic act.

“I guess I just didn’t think it would be like this,” she said out loud.

“Yeah.”

“No, I mean … it’s not like I never thought about how we would die. When I was a kid that’s
all
I thought about for a while—when it would happen and who would be next and how it would feel. I was sure one of them would disintegrate just from having to get up every day and take a shower. That part is the worst. But we made it past that, you know? I just thought we were in the clear.”

She heard Jamie get up and come around the counter, and jumped a little as his hands settled on her shoulders. She did not want to cry, so she didn’t, she just kept her chin tucked to her neck and let Jamie pull her into a backward hug, his long arms folding around her, his newly smooth chin pressing into her neck.

“And half the time, I don’t even know what’s real anymore,” she said, quieter now because it felt like the kind of secret you keep. “All these days start feeling like one really long day, like there’s no difference between being awake and asleep, and nothing will ever make it end, except that it’s ending, and I know that, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do about it.”

“I love you,” Jamie said.

“Your face feels like a girl’s.”

His hands folded around either side of her rib cage, holding it in place, and a bolt of relief moved through Amina, leaving her acutely aware of how fragile and strange and necessary breathing was. She leaned back into him.

“I was just caught off guard yesterday,” he said. “Over the phone. I’m bad on the phone.”

“Yeah. Why is that?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s because I grew up thinking the government might be listening in. It makes me paranoid now.”

“Because the government doesn’t want you to love me?”

“Something like that.”

The front door opened, the jangling of Kamala’s bangles sending them apart.

“Hello?” Amina called out, straightening her shirt. “Ma?”

“It’s me,” her mother said. “Someone came?”

“It’s my friend Jamie.”

The soft thud of Kamala’s feet hurried down the hall, and then suddenly she popped through the kitchen doorway, all sari and tennis shoes and braid and scrutiny.

“Hi.” Jamie stuck out his hand. “Jamie Anderson.”

Kamala looked at his hand but didn’t take it. “What are you doing?”

“Ma!”

“What? I’m just asking if he wants to stay for dinner!”

“No, no,” Amina said quickly. “He just dropped by.”

“Dinner sounds great,” Jamie said.

“What?” Amina turned around.

He squeezed her arm gently, saying to her mother, “I’d love to have dinner, Mrs. Eapen, as long as I don’t put you out.”

“Not out!
In
. I’m cooking.” She turned to Amina. “He likes fish or chicken?”

“I like both,” Jamie said. “And actually, I love to cook, if you don’t mind having me in the kitchen.”

Kamala wrinkled her nose, squinting from his shoes to his shoulders. “We’ll see.”

CHAPTER 5

T
hey made a feast. Or rather, Kamala made a feast, instructing Jamie on how exactly to cut each vegetable before she threw it into one of many pots, and answering “some” every time he had a question about how much spice she was adding. How they’d managed to make so much in just over two hours was inconceivable, even with Jamie helping, but there it was, sprawled along the dining table like edible treasure, two kinds of curry (chicken and fish), four sides of vegetables (cabbage, carrots, beets, and cauliflower), pooris, lime rice, regular rice, salad, raita, and an entire array of glossy chutneys.

Thomas insisted on not leaving sight of the garden, so he and Amina made a hasty table from plywood planks and sawhorses, and half an hour later all four of them floated in the darkening green grass between the house and the tomato plants.

“So tell me,” Jamie asked, letting Kamala serve him thirds of everything, “why is it that South Indian food is so much better than North? Is it the spices? The rice-based thing?”

Kamala leaned in to expound on her favorite subject, and Amina
sat back. At first, it had been strange to see everyone sitting at the same table—like watching a play where she knew too much about all the actors to believe anything they said. But as the day melted around them, as the early-evening sun poured gold into the fields and Jamie kept asking the kind of questions her parents enjoyed answering, she felt herself enjoying the meal, or at least not worrying through every second of it. It helped that they had put the table in the middle of the field, giving Thomas a clear view of the garden. He seemed calm and focused, albeit with two pairs of binoculars (regular and night-vision) on the table beside him.

“And we live better, too,” Kamala said, finishing up a small diatribe that pinpointed reasons as varied as better cows (for finer paneers and ghees) and better genetic makeup (“far superior” Dravidian taste buds). “What laughing? No jokes! Thomas, tell him! Everything is better when you’re not constantly worried about the cold and the dust and the crazy Mughals slaughtering everyone!”

“Kamala has always been an excellent cook,” Thomas said, adeptly sidestepping the historical assertions. “First time she cooked for me, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”

“And when was that?”

“Nineteen sixty-four. We were just married, staying at my mother’s house for one month before we got our own flat.” Thomas scraped his plate with the pads of his fingers. “You remember, Kam? How Amma had to bribe Mary-the-Cook to leave the kitchen to you?”

“What leaving? She stood there huffing and puffing over everything I did, telling me I am cutting onions wrong and too much of cloves and the biryani will be too wet!”

“It was perfect,” Thomas said, shutting his eyes like he could still taste it. “Best I’ve ever had.”

“And what year did you come here?” Jamie took a sip of beer.

“Nineteen sixty-eight. JFK to St. Louis airport to here,” Kamala said, plotting the points across her plate with her middle finger. “I was just pregnant with Amina. We went back to get Akhil a few months later.”