Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  Deana drove right over in her boyfriend’s car. We had all the lights in the apartment blazing. Uncle was working downstairs, because nothing could close the bagel shop, not even this, the end of the world, and Travis, the second shift manager, had come up twice to check on us. The first time he came up with his condolences. The second time he came up with a long face and a cooling glass casserole dish of cheese and noodles his wife had fixed for us. Sadhana was putting it, uneaten, into the fridge, and I was watching out the window as Deana parked the car in the tow-away zone in front of the store and tripped up the steps of the side door. I buzzed her up.

  When she got upstairs, she was already crying, great black triangles of mascara bleeding down under her eyes. I was so numb I almost asked her what was wrong.

  “I’m here, sweetpea,” she said. She slung her huge shoulder bag onto the floor. “And I’m so sorry.”

  She held open her arms, lips trembling, then folded me into an embrace that widened to include Sadhana, who pounded over to us in her sock feet. My sister and I had stayed up the whole long night after leaving the hospital, weeping and dozing by turns, first on Sadhana’s bed, then on opposite sides of the room after Uncle silenced a sudden screaming match. He’d spent the night on the couch, since it was too late to drive home to the suburbs. Terrified by the sudden emergence of his huge, angry face, Sadhana and I had stopped fighting and stopped talking, too. All morning we’d been fretting and weeping alone in different parts of the apartment. But squeezed together on the front mat by Deana, neither of us pulled away, and I was relieved. I closed my eyes and leaned in to smell Deana’s scent of pears and powder and Sadhana’s dirty hair. It didn’t feel like Mama hugging us, because Deana was much taller than both of us, and Mama had been almost a full head shorter.

  Deana let us go to wipe her eyes, and then she said, “I’m starving. Have you guys eaten? I have to eat when I get upset or I turn into a demon.” She kept one arm around each of our waists and propelled us into the kitchen. When Sadhana told her about the casserole, she let go and rushed on ahead of us.

  “Sit down, sit down,” she called. “You shouldn’t have to do anything. Do you want some? Are you hungry?” From the back she looked a bit like Mama, though she was younger, in her twenties, and her hair was a bit lighter, more gold than red. She was an extraordinarily pretty woman. She had fine, pale hands and a wide, hilarious mouth. I knew that when she subbed for Mama, the new students sometimes asked if she was her daughter.

  Sadhana and I sat at the kitchen table watching Deana spoon noodles into a bowl to reheat. She was telling a story about our mother. I wondered how she could go so quickly from crying to talking to bustling around, when the pain of it all was stabbing me in the chest, in the throat.

  She was saying, “I took my first yoga class from your mother. My first class ever. I’d just graduated from high school. Did you know that? She took one look at me and knew I was in pain. She invited me to stay afterwards for spiced tea with milk, and I told her all about Mike, my crummy boyfriend.”

  Deana turned on the oven and popped her bowl inside. I was worried that the porcelain would crack and looked over at Sadhana, but she was intent on Deana, or at least staring in her direction.

  “I started training with your mother, and I left Mike.” Deana sat down and reached across the table to squeeze Sadhana’s hands, which were lying on the table, knotted in a hard knuckle lump. My sister barely blinked. “It must have been about seven years ago. And I’ve never looked back. Your mother even helped me quit smoking.”

  “How did she do that?” asked Sadhana. She was gazing past Deana now, at some indefinable point of interest in the direction of the refrigerator. It was calming, somehow, to watch Sadhana, the way she had of sailing forward into something but keeping herself separate. For my part, I was afraid to stir or ask a question. Anything that kept us moving ahead in time without Mama.

  Deana shook her head. “I’ve no idea. I swear, she must have hypnotized me or something. I still don’t understand it. She just told me not to do it, so I didn’t.”

  She took her bowl out of the oven, though the food could not have been hot but only warmed. She ate while we watched. Every once in a while she would swallow and look up at us and smile, and Sadhana and I tried to smile back. I could guess what my face must have looked like by seeing my sister’s, which was pale in the cheeks and dark in the eyes. Quivering and dry and too soft in the mouth.

  If Deana saw the thinness of our rallying, she didn’t show it. To me she said, “I’m going to stay as long as you need me.” I nodded, and she went on, “I mean it. I’m not leaving you guys one second before you’re ready for me to go.”

  “Okay.”

  She got up from the table, looking beatific in her blue jeans with the gold glinting in her hair, like an angel sent to save us. But then she was leaning over the counter with her hand over her face, tears flowing. It was as though once she had eaten she remembered why she had come, and she started breaking down again, just as she clinked her empty bowl into the sink.

  We learned a lot about her in those weeks, about her father the pig farmer, her brother who was in the navy but wished he could be a pilot, her mother who taught piano to all the children in the neighbourhood. She talked and talked, and her voice became a thread that was pulling us along. It was nice to have her there, filling up the silence. We did not stop to wonder why her heart went out to us in our trouble, for to us our trouble was the whole world. It was only puzzling that the rest of the world was not there with us.

  She slept in Mama’s room, and we slept in there too, taking turns next to her and on a pallet on the floor piled with blankets. She breathed through her mouth while she slept, and I liked the windy sound of it, loud and even. In the night, she kicked off all the sheets and it was cold with the breeze from the window she kept open, but Sadhana and I didn’t complain or give up our turns in the bed. We stayed up later and later, until it was normal for us to be waking up around noon. Sometimes Deana left while we were still asleep and went home to see her boyfriend Freddy, and then she would come back with another bag of clothes or a bunch of new records to play.

  There was nothing to do, after the funeral. Deana and the other ladies divvied up Mama’s yoga classes and cancelled some. Uncle still ran the store, like always. It was summer, so there was no school.

  I was getting better at frying eggs. We ate a lot of fried-egg sandwiches. Sadhana took to heating up beans from a can and frying bologna that we dipped in mustard, small suns of yellow squirted on our flowered plates. I don’t know where we got the idea to eat that way, as Mama’s way of cooking had always leaned to whole grains and stews and lots of vegetables, but Deana seemed to think it was fine. When she cooked, she made spicy spaghetti or fish sticks. We ate a lot of bagels from the store, since they were free. My stomach started hurting most of the time, but Deana told me it was only because I was sad. In between telling stories and playing records, she seemed almost as tired and sorrowful as we were.

  She got the idea one Friday night, from looking at Mama’s box of candles, that we’d have a candlelight dinner. She’d found them in the cupboard when she was looking for clean towels. “Candlelight makes everything look better,” said Deana. “Even food.”

  I was all for it, but Sadhana disapproved. She traced her fingers over the lid of the box, covered with lilac paper doilies and curling silver ribbons. A strange remnant of our crafty years, but canny enough to be obviously Mama’s handiwork. Sadhana reminded me that we weren’t allowed to touch the candles.

  “I’m sure that was just for safety reasons, honey,” said Deana, who was listening. “It’ll be okay.”

  Sadhana shook her head. “No, it’s not just that. These were our mother’s meditation candles.”

  “Really?” Deana pried the top off the box. Inside was a jumble of white tea lights, tapers of every colour, and pillar candles in gradient sh
ades of dark purple.

  “Lovely,” said Deana.

  “She made those ones.” Sadhana pointed.

  Deana reached past the candles she’d indicated and took out two of the tall orange tapers. “These two will be perfect. Don’t you think?” She was asking Sadhana, who nodded. Deana took them, and Sadhana carried the box to our room and shoved it under her bed. I followed her.

  “They need to stay in a cool, dry place,” she said when she turned and saw me looking. “They’ll melt otherwise.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in meditation.”

  “That’s not the point.” Sadhana looked ready for a fight, but I didn’t press it. She could get fierce about loyalties, and anyway, I knew how she felt.

  Back in the kitchen, Deana had found two Christmas holders, sprigged red and green around the base with fake holly. She’d placed them on either side of a large serving dish atop the burgundy linen tablecloth, and there was ketchup in a little blue bowl with a tiny spoon beside it. She’d found the cloth napkins, too.

  “See?” said Deana, putting in the tapers. “They match the Kraft Dinner.” She lit the candles with a lighter in a beaded case she pulled from her pocket, then flicked off the lights. In the dimness, the pale wax matched the food, just like she said. Creamsicle orange. I asked her why she had a lighter if she had quit smoking.

  “For occasions like this one,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and I realized it wasn’t only in her looks that she reminded me of Mama.

  We all sat down, but then Deana got up to put on a Carole King record. She said, “I can’t stand the sound of people chewing and swallowing. Even you guys. Even me.”

  As she came back, the end of her hair passed close to the flame, just as Sadhana bumped the candleholder reaching for the ketchup. The taper wobbled twice in its stand and connected with Deana’s hair. In half a moment, the flame licked up the end of her ponytail as a dozen strands of red-gold hair sparked and blackened and shrivelled to dust. I gasped, but Sadhana quickly clapped the hair between her hands and it was out.

  I stood up. “Oh God,” I said. “It was an accident. Are you okay?”

  Sadhana pushed back her chair from the table.

  “Are you okay?” I said again. There was an awful smell, and Sadhana had her hand muffling her nose.

  Deana was unruffled. She inspected the end of her ponytail. “Oh, I have a lot of hair. No big deal. But that was a close one. No more candles for us, I’d say.”

  I let out a breath. Deana smiled and patted the turquoise seat of my chair in invitation until the vinyl started squeaking. Then she blew out the candles. “Don’t worry. It’s safe now.”

  I sat and started eating, and Sadhana edged in a little closer. Deana tucked up her feet so she was sitting cross-­legged. “Did you know hair is growing all the time?” she asked. She pointed the drooping end of her ponytail at each of us in turn. “It’s dead tissue. It keeps on growing even after you die. Just like your fingernails.”

  There was a small noise from Sadhana, who let her fork clatter to the floor as she bolted from the table. I heard our bedroom door slam.

  “Oh no,” said Deana in a hushed voice. “Your mama.”

  Deana thought we should cry as much as we wanted, and she cried right along with us, at the table, on the couch, in Mama’s room in the middle of the night. When Sadhana or I was racked by sobs, nose streaming, Deanna would weep silently, one arm around my shoulders, or one hand rubbing the back of Sadhana’s head. Sadhana and I never cried at the same time anymore, except at night.

  One night I woke in the dark from a dream about our parents, both of them alive together as I had never known them, except when I was very small and almost too young to remember. I barely breathed, trying to keep still and cling to the strange elation as it faded. I heard Sadhana cough and then sniff twice, and as I came back to an awareness of my body, I could tell without opening my eyes that we were alone in the room. Something about the weight of the bed I was lying on. Deana must have needed to drive home for something.

  Sadhana said, “Bee? Are you awake?”

  “I was just dreaming.”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” She sounded choked. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “It was the most beautiful dream, Sadhana. Mama was there, and Papa, too. They were fine. We were going to a park, I think. I don’t know. We were all talking. They were happy.” Mama in her green pioneer dress with the high collar and Papa in his wedding garb, the embroidered white sherwani of the photo on Mama’s dresser — and wearing a bowler hat. I wondered where my mind had picked that one up. Even as the glow of the dream faded, I felt as though I’d been given a message, or at least a bubble of peace we could enjoy until the air ran out.

  There was a pause, and then my sister in a hoarseness, saying, “You don’t know that they’re happy. They’re dead. They’re dead, Beena. Wake up.” There was a rustling as she rolled over in her sleeping bag, probably to face away from me, but I refused to open my eyes to check.

  Uncle came by from time to time, but he couldn’t look at us straight on. Sadhana said it was just that he didn’t know what to say, the same thing that kept our friends away and made the clerks at the grocery store stuff our items into paper bags lickety-split, without any chitchat.

  One time when Deana was out, Uncle came in and left his shoes on and stomped through to the kitchen where he began exclaiming over the dirty dishes on the counter. “What is this pigsty? Where is that woman? How did your mother raise you?”

  “We were just about to do them, Uncle,” said Sadhana. “See how we stacked them into piles?” I was amazed by the fluidity of her lies. We were no sooner about to do the dishes than we were about to wash the windows or clean out the rain gutters.

  On Sundays he brought us cash for groceries. He always handed it over in an envelope with my name on it, with a warning to me to keep close track of the contents. “You and your sister,” he said, “you go yourselves to the store. I am making you responsible.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” I said, but every time after he left I gave it to Deana without even opening it. She was looking after us, and the money was her job. With all his business sense, Uncle should have been willing to accept a little collateral financial damage to keep us off his hands, but maybe he couldn’t resist trying to hang on to such a good deal.

  One day the phone rang and it was Freddy. He never said hello, only “Deana there?” but this time all he said was, “Put her on.”

  I could tell it was a bad conversation. Deana was backing up as she listened, shrinking into a corner of the living room. She started out loud, then got quiet. Sadhana and I were lying on the rug playing an endless game of Crazy Eight Countdown, and I had just changed suits to hearts, a killer move for me, when Deana noticed us staring. She covered the mouthpiece by sticking it close to her chest and told us to go to the store to pick up stuff for burritos. She fished a ten-dollar bill out of her pocket and handed it to Sadhana.

  When we came back, she was in the bath. Sadhana took the groceries to the kitchen and left them on the table. Whole-wheat tortillas, a tomato, and a head of lettuce, because we weren’t sure what burritos were. Then we heard Deana crying in the bathroom, little sniffling sobs like sneezes, and when I tapped on the door, she told us to come in.

  The bottom of her hair was hanging down into the tub, below the water, but the top of her head was dry. It seemed wrong and disorganized. Her clothes were lying in a little heap on the bathmat, and she had a glass beside her on the floor, beaded with condensation.

  “Hi,” she said. She hunched forward, arms crossing, elbows on knees, brow resting on the back of her wrist. Her hair swung forward to either side of her face, like heavy drapes. “Don’t be frightened. I’m just sad.”

  Sadhana perched on the edge of the toilet seat and I crouched on the lit
tle stool that Mama used to sit on when she washed our hair. Deana had more freckles on her body than Mama had had, a wide patch spreading down her back from the base of her neck.

  “I wish your mama was here,” said Deana.

  This had become the usual refrain for us, more like a chorus to a silent song we’d all agreed upon than any longer a specific lament. Saying it was like a charm, or a secret handshake.

  “Me too,” said Sadhana and I at the same time. That was the amen.

  It turned out that the car Deana had borrowed from Freddy had been impounded without any warning at all except for the growing stack of parking tickets pulled out from under the wiper and tossed into the back seat. But she was caught off guard and Freddy was furious, and there was no way to get to the impound lot unless she could find someone to take her and lend her the money to pay the fee. I wondered if she would ask me to try to get the money from Uncle, and I knew I would if she asked. But she didn’t.

  She paddled her arms up and down a bit in the water. “It’s Deana soup in here,” she said. “I feel like a boiled carrot.”

  “Limp and orange,” guessed Sadhana.

  “You got it.”

  She made a move to get up, and we handed her some towels that, though no longer clean, had been refolded by Sadhana, who had the best knack of the three of us for getting crisp corners. Deana rubbed herself dry until she was pink and wearing something close to the tired expression that passed for smiling in our apartment. By the time she had her jeans on, we’d developed a game plan. She had the towel around her neck like a prizefighter, but she looked dazed enough to seem like she’d already been punched out.

  “You’ll go straight home and apologize again, then kiss him until he forgives you.” This was Sadhana’s advice. “Wear something really sexy.”