Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “Do they think I’m really sick? Like, unconscious?”

  “Why on earth would they?”

  “Well, when Cora Davidson was in the hospital, she was in a coma. Nobody could visit except family.”

  “I don’t know what they think.”

  Sadhana took so much perverse pride in her own lying that she never stopped to consider that someone else might be untruthful. She leaned her head back against the wall and started counting the ceiling tiles aloud. She would rather do anything than her homework, which was piling up on the nightstand. Uncle had threatened to stop picking it up.

  Finally she got bored and fell asleep on her side, cheek resting on her closed fist as if about to sock herself in the jaw. She always slept that way, as though ready for battle with a pack of sudden dream assailants.

  The next time I visited, Sadhana complained about how they kept the bathroom doors locked. She wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom at all after meals, not until at least an hour had elapsed. “And sometimes even longer,” said Sadhana. “Some of us here on the ward have metabolisms slower than evolution.”

  “That’s good, then.” She was still being fed via a tube, but maybe tubes had scheduled mealtimes.

  “No, it isn’t.” She was almost pouting. “Neither the metabolisms nor the bathrooms.” She motioned for my purse. “I know you still carry around that blush compact of Deana’s.”

  Mirrors were another commodity on the ward. I handed over my bag and she excavated its contents with bony-­fingered precision until she extracted the compact and flipped it open. Her face had so far escaped any obvious signs, which was maybe why none of us had grasped her illness. She looked normal and pretty, if a bit angular. Based on what I’d learned about her disease, I expected to see a sign of deep dissatisfaction as she looked at herself, but instead she seemed impassive, her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted. Almost surprised. She pressed her fingers to her temple.

  “Sometimes I’ve just got to go, you know? God. Just because someone is in the hospital, it’s not like they’ve agreed to surrender all their rights. I’m pretty sure habeas corpus still applies.” Ninth-grade law was her favourite class — probably because she loved anything that could help her sound more sophisticated than fourteen.

  “That’s if you’re arrested.”

  “Unlawful detention,” said Sadhana, shaking her wrist with the hospital bracelet at me. “What do you think this is?”

  “Nazi Germany, obviously.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Well.”

  She had another complaint, that she could always hear a laugh track playing faintly in the background whenever she tried to fall asleep. Like in a sitcom. I found this worrisome.

  “It makes me feel like we’re all just actors. Like someone’s waiting somewhere for me to deliver my punchline.”

  “Have you told the doctors?”

  “I’m not psychotic, Bee.” She waved her arms, the worst wasted part of her, and I flinched, but she didn’t notice. “It’s the televisions. And the walls.” She tapped one. “Paper thin. Right, Laur?”

  Laurel was her roommate. I liked her. She was a deadpan brunette who described herself as a misanthrope. I had to go home to look up what it meant. Most of the time she ignored everyone unless asked a direct question. Occasionally she offered a cutting but amusing remark.

  “Shut up.”

  Janet, one of the other girls in the hospital, had short, bleached blonde hair with dark roots. Every time I saw her, the roots got longer, until her hair was half and half, the bleached parts and dark parts. Sadhana said she spent ages doing her makeup, the black liner around her eyes and her dark red lipstick. I saw Janet outside smoking sometimes, with one of the orderlies, and she puckered her lips in what I thought was a kiss, but it was pink bubblegum ballooning out in a sticky throb. I told Sadhana I liked her hair.

  “Nobody likes that,” she said. “Even Janet doesn’t like it. But they won’t let her out to get it done.”

  Getting out required a mix of weight gain and emotional stability that still eluded my sister and most of her companions on the ward. She would not take food by mouth, and once I saw her flail against a nurse who was trying to replenish her feeding bag. Reason seemed to have fallen away from her, like the hair that came off her head in clumps.

  The longer she was in the hospital, the more questions she came up with. She wanted to know exactly how many parts of her were unique. Only her fingerprints and her retinas? Or the backs of her hands, the infinite web of near-­invisible lines on her skin that dried out like an elephant hide when she got out of the bath. Toe-prints? What was there about her, about any one of us, that was special? That could only be once and never again?

  “Surely there are similar snowflakes,” she said. “Similar fingerprints.” She splayed her hands next to mine and we squinted together at the whorls and dashes.

  Then Sadhana wanted to uncover the meaning behind the saying “the world is your oyster.” She wanted to know if it meant an oyster you could eat or an oyster that would make pearls. “Principally,” she said, in an imperious and ridiculous manner, “if it is a culinary or a decorative idiom.”

  Presumably because, if it had to do with eating, then it was a piece of advice that could have no relevance for her, but if it had to do with shoving crap into a dark place and then forgetting about it until it had turned into something better, well then, that was something worth thinking about.

  “That would be your style of things, Bee,” was her comment on that when I told her.

  “Very funny.”

  I looked up the oyster thing. “It’s from Shakespeare,” I said.

  “Typical.”

  “It’s about pearls. Just sitting there for the taking.”

  “Huh.”

  “I guess it means that getting what you want is easier than you might think.”

  I went looking for Ravi. It was in September, four months after he’d left his job and Uncle had gone to his house to find him. I was huge, on my way home from a visit to the hospital to see Sadhana. She’d glared and sulked and picked a fight over apricots, which she claimed were better than plums. She was always talking about food, and she was always querulous. It was becoming usual to leave visiting hours with an aching jaw from talking too much and the disagreeable sense of having lost a battle. If I were a better sister, maybe I would have managed not to get sucked in. But I could never resist. Looking at Sadhana’s ragged limbs, the tart juiciness of a waxy plum seemed worth defending. While I was pregnant, my love for them was almost pious.

  On the way down to the lobby, a pregnant couple got into the elevator with me. The man had his hand on the woman’s stomach, which was the same size as mine. Enormous.

  “Boy or girl?” he said. It took me a minute to realize he was talking to me.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “You’re not going to find out?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” The way they were looking at me, I wondered if this was even allowed, to not find out. To not even be curious.

  “It’s helped us figure out what to buy.” The woman smiled at me. “For our boy-on-the-way.”

  I nodded, trying to figure out what baby boys needed that could be different from baby girls. Maybe something to do with how they peed, different diapers or something. But they were still looking at me, waiting.

  “Oh, a boy,” I said finally. “That’s nice.”

  They beamed.

  “Names?” said the man.

  “What?” It was as though we were running lines in a script I hadn’t seen before. Every time I paused, they peered at me with a curiosity verging on concern.

  “Have you thought about names?”

  “No. Um, how about you?”

  “Matthew,” said the woman. “Or Lucas.”

  “That’s nice.”
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  The man had moved his hand from her stomach to the crook of her arm, to her shoulder, to her hip. He was never not touching her. Then the elevator doors opened at the ground floor and they said goodbye, wishing me luck before moving as an indivisible twosome towards the parking lot. I went out the other door, to the bus stop.

  It was the first of a few conversations like that, at the hospital and on the street, with different strangers, some pregnant but mostly not. Outside our apartment, I never felt a moment’s reproach or judgement for being a teenage mother-to-be, just an earnest and sometimes intrusive interest in the baby. My extra weight, I was realizing, made me look older than I was. I had decided to start wearing an old gold ring of Mama’s on my left hand.

  I sat down on the wooden bench, reading graffiti scratched into the sidewalk by an enterprising vandal who had gotten to it while it was still wet. Crystal and Jon V. FOREVER 1987. I kicked a pebble across the declaration. There was something about the elevator couple. Their calm, their utter absorption in each other, in the life they were creating. Their love.

  A bus was pulling up on the other side of the street, and I surprised myself by hurrying across the road to catch it, even though it was headed in the opposite direction from where I needed to go. It was going to Ravi’s neighbourhood.

  I sat down next to an older lady who had a kindly look about her. She was wearing a camel-coloured hat with a cluster of pink flowers, and a heavy wool jacket. She offered me some cheese. “It’s good for your teeth,” she said.

  I hesitated a moment, then held out my hand. She shook out some curds into my palm.

  “Thank you.”

  “Good girl. Big girl. Too many skinny girls having babies these days.” She nodded at a little boy across the aisle, whose mother was scolding him for wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “Too many allergies.” The little boy stared at me, his upper lip still shiny with snot. I looked away.

  The woman pulled out a Bible from the folds of her jacket. It was a cheap one, the kind that people give out on the streets, but small and light and almost ideally made for carrying in one’s coat pocket. I thought about this, the appropriateness of the edition, and clung for one moment to the idea that she was going to use it to tell me something diverting and relevant and not at all crazy. She licked her thumb and flipped open the thin blue cover. “Have you heard about Jesus Christ?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m going to read to you from a part about the Resurrection.”

  She read aloud. I tried not to listen. The other passengers were staring, and the cheese felt like putty in my mouth. I swallowed.

  “This is my stop,” I said, and it was.

  She stopped mid-word and put the Bible down on her lap, helping me out of my seat with a violent, two-handed shove against my lower back. “Consider the name Didymus,” she said as I got off the bus. “Or Thomas, if you like.”

  Ravi’s house was on the other side of the mountain from where we lived. I’d looked up his address in Uncle’s files. There were a lot more houses in his neighbourhood than there were walk-up apartments. Some people even had lawns with little fences around them.

  I stood on the doorstep and rang the bell. His mother answered, then looked at me and called something over her shoulder, and his father came, too. They were both very good-looking, and his mother was wearing an emerald sari woven with golden thread.

  I felt abashed. “I’m looking for Ravi.” I wondered for the first time if they had lied to Uncle. “Is he here?” The thought that he could be inside, watching television or even doing his homework, sent a wave of dizziness over me, and I grabbed at the banister.

  His mother just barely glanced at my stomach. His father looked up and down the street and then over his shoulder into the house behind me, as though considering asking me inside.

  “Go away,” said Ravi’s mother.

  My sister aimed to succeed in everything she undertook, and in being sick, she surpassed everyone’s expectations. Where other people would have submitted to treatment as the path of least resistance, Sadhana fought to preserve her illness with an intense resolve, as if rescuing a child from a burning building. Though at first she had gained weight, she revolted against recovery just as she was nearing ninety pounds. Talk of outpatient treatment or of going back to school to see her friends had the opposite effect to what the nurses may have intended. The disease, the refusal, was the only companion she wanted.

  Later, when whatever had been animating her had carried her past beauty, past intent and the possibility of stopping of her own accord, Sadhana told me not to feel sorry. The doctors had more or less given her up, or said they had, to try and frighten us. The progress she’d made into food and formula had regressed back to the feeding tube through her nose, until digestive issues and her own temper tantrums scuttled even that means of taking in calories.

  Sadhana lay in her hospital bed on a pillow of stringy hair, worrying the tape around her nutritional IV. “Worst-case scenario, I’ll see Mama and Papa again.”

  That made me jealous, too. She was sick, dying even, but she was as calm as a news anchor the way she talked about things.

  She turned her head away from me. Her arms were laid out over the sheet as though they no longer belonged to her, tubes of bone and skin flecking pale and dry over every joint. “Tell your baby about me when it’s born,” she said. It was a week before I was due.

  “What will I say?”

  “Tell him,” she said, turning back to me and wincing. Her neck was frail. Her fingers reached up to touch my belly. “Tell him I was pretty cool.” Then she started laughing, and I joined in, and I knew because we had been happy for a moment that she would get better.

  “You’re going to live forever and ever.”

  “Whatever you say, Bee.”

  The nurses let me stay over because, according to her chart, Sadhana was in critical condition. But they didn’t know what I knew. I set up two chairs to face each other so I could rest my ankles, and there were plenty of blankets because the skinny girls were always cold. We pulled the curtains around our side of the room and whispered all night, until the nurses came to shush us.

  “If you can’t be quiet, we’re going to have to separate you girls.”

  Sadhana held tight to my sweaty palm in the cool of her slim grip. “Don’t bother,” she said. “You can’t.”

  The birth was not traumatic. My body was already a balloon through which my spirit seemed to wander. I’d been heavy before the pregnancy and had gained fast, which only added to the gap, the drift between who I thought I was and who I looked like from the outside. My thighs that chafed together, and the heavy bosom. My belly button that had popped out like the lid of a juice container, the kind that might have been tampered with. Something that had slipped open and spoiled. My toes were strangers to me. I felt as though I had flesh blooming everywhere. I wondered if it was possible to have fat ears, the extra flesh squeezing out the sound. Or maybe I had always been a bad listener and I was getting worse. The doctors and nurses kept saying the same things over and over as if I hadn’t heard, and perhaps I hadn’t. Breathe, breathe. Push, don’t push. It seemed normal, in a way, to be prodded and poked, to feel the fingers of strangers slipped inside me, like oblique messages into an insensible letterbox. To feel like a tangential participant in a project we were all grappling with: the extraction of a small life from its shell. Of a painful growth from its host.

  Nobody was there with me. I had called a cab and left a note for Uncle in the bathroom, tucked under a scented candle on the back of the toilet. He’d go in there sooner or later. When the cab driver didn’t want to take me, I lied and said I wasn’t in labour, though it must have been obvious. He was afraid, I suppose, of a mishap in the car, or an expensive cleaning bill. I shoved my money at him before he started the meter, as I backed in behind him, determined to keep silent. A plastic
bag with a few things hung from my wrist, which, as I jostled myself in, spun itself into a tourniquet bracelet that bit at my skin.

  I had put on my white nylon jacket that no longer buttoned. As a pregnant girl in 1989, I had lucked out, fashion-wise. At nine months, I was only at the very limit of things I already owned. That Saturday night it was a huge pink sweater and black leggings. I was making little moans that I tried to disguise as coughs, holding my fist up to my mouth, teeth digging at the side of my finger. I was wearing earrings, too, big black plastic hoops, because that was the kind of thing I did when I was home alone for hours and hours. Got dressed up, fooled around with makeup or different outfits. Stupid.

  It was late on a Saturday when I called the cab, past midnight. I’d been pacing the length of the apartment, stopping here and there to clutch at a chair, press my forehead against the edge of a bookshelf as a contraction seized me. I’d drawn a bath but couldn’t manage to get in. When I stood and then crouched, I felt a throbbing zip up and down my legs, lighting them up like neon tubes, like pain as a gas, as a substance that could be breathed in, that could fill up any space. And my whole body bent and glowing with it, a sign in a dark window spelling out I REGRET THIS. I felt like something might suddenly open up where it shouldn’t. At one point, I found myself on all fours under the kitchen table, huffing like a dog, grit under my palms and the certainty that we didn’t sweep enough. At last, a reason to care about hard-to-reach places. Uncle was down at the shop because he liked to show the staff how to handle drunk people, and I was trying to hold out as long as I could. I knew that I didn’t want to go to the hospital too early. Be checked, dismissed, and ordered back home. I couldn’t afford the cab fare.

  When I arrived at last, having inflicted no injury upon the taxi driver’s upholstery, I was ushered through reception with some urgency, more flurry than I’d expected. I had waited long enough, not too long, but long enough for things to be coming together, or, rather, apart. I tried to say something about my sister, that Sadhana was a patient who would want to know I was there. There was some confusion, a notion that she’d brought me and then wandered off, or was possibly in the bathroom.