It is incredible to fathom that my not-yet twenty-eight-year-old child may have this kind of money. But then, I never imagined I’d have a daughter who’d buy into the corporate world so uncompromisingly, though heaven help me if I should ever say such a thing to her. I also never lost my father at such a tender age, only to have him, inadequately I admit, replaced by a life insurance policy.
If I call Surinder, she will most definitely hang up. So Fee suggests I write. As I do not have her home address, I decide to write to her plush office in Toronto. Of course she still works there.
Dear Surinder,
Don’t throw this away. At least, please read it through before you do. I’m in a lot of trouble and need help, and I don’t have anywhere to turn except you. I’m sorry this is the case, but I must face the reality of my life.
About a week ago, the roof of my house fell in. The repairs will cost $35,000. I don’t have that kind of money. And I didn’t have insurance. I don’t need to tell you why. My financial situation has always been a problem.
A bank loan is impossible because no matter how they calculate it, I can’t afford the monthly payments.
If there is any way you can help me, I would be grateful. I could handle a very long-term loan if the interest rate was low enough. We could arrange this through an intermediary if you still do not want to talk.
But I hope you will. I am very sorry about our misunderstanding. It is not natural for a mother and daughter to be so distant, whatever their differences. Please write soon.
Love,
Mum.
I don’t mention the watch. It is, I presume, somewhere in the rubble of my home. It crosses my mind that I should find it and send it. But the gesture seems shoddy. What would be meant as a peace-offering would be taken as a sort of bribe that would cheapen what I hope is a straightforward and sincere, though painful, request for help, and an attempt to meet her halfway. Besides, I am still not ready to surrender the watch.
My hand shakes when I seal the envelope. It has been shaking since I wrote ‘Mum,’ pondering whether I had spelled it that way always, or with an ‘o’ so long ago. How quickly we become unaccustomed to our names when there is no one to use them.
I think about it over the weekend. On Monday morning, when Fee heads to town, I ask her to post the letter.
*
On the morning Ed Malone is supposed to begin, I wait twenty minutes. Thirty. After an hour, I know he is sitting on a deserted beach with a couple of cases of beer and a bottle of whiskey, drinking away my five thousand dollars. He tosses empty bottles onto barnacle- and limpet-encrusted rocks, laughing at the way the shattered glass glints in the tide pools. I hope the fool started his binge above the tide line so he won’t get swept out to sea when he passes out and the waves come in. How stupid of me to ignore the rumours. But then his lopsided form turns up ten minutes later. He has brought two men and a truck loaded with lumber.
“I thought you said eight-thirty.” I sniff, but nothing smells suspicious.
“I got held up by the waste disposal people. Everything needs a permit these days.” He lifts a corner of his t-shirt and scratches his ribs. He leaves behind a gritty smudge before the worn cotton falls back down. “First dumpster’s coming tomorrow morning.”
I sit on a piece of firewood. They unload the lumber, bow their heads together and discuss what they are doing. They measure, saw, hammer. And assemble a complicated structure of braces meant to hold up what is left of the roof and walls. When the workers are constructing a brace across the front door, Ed examines the foundation. He digs down a few inches and prods with a pointed tool. He stands, steps and bends his way along, a funny, crawling sort of dance in which his skinny butt features prominently. Despite myself, I almost laugh.
Neighbours I know to see but not by name, drive up the lane to witness the spectacle. I suppose they’ve heard the hammering, or at least, the news. When they find me there, too, they quietly slide their cars and trucks into reverse and back away.
Ed’s idea is to make the structure safe so I can retrieve my belongings and he can haul away the debris. “How much will that cost?” “Depends on what you throw out,” he says. “One, two grand?” “Maybe.” “More?” He shrugs. “Hard to say.”
“I’m wasting money,” I tell Fee and Mac as we prepare supper that night. “It’s all destroyed anyway.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t be so hasty,” Mac says.
“Perhaps I should fire Ed Malone and hire a bulldozer.”
Tutoring seems irrelevant, yet how can I ignore anything that produces money? Unless I tutor on top of her sewing machine, Fee has no space whatsoever. So I call the school. They offer a vacant classroom two afternoons a week, from the time school is finished until the janitor goes home. “Just until you get straightened around,” the principal says. “The board won’t like it, but I can fend them off for a few weeks.” I call my students. All seven agree to the new meeting place and schedule, though the girl who got the last slot mumbled something about missing the bus which I ignored.
It takes three days before Ed’s crew lashes together several blue plastic tarps, and fastens them to tree trunks, and to pegs hammered into the ground. My home looks like a gift-wrapped skeleton. Ed pronounces the site safe. “But I wouldn’t throw a square dance in there, if you know what I mean.” He promises to come every day while I am cleaning to make sure nothing shifts.
Still no word from Surinder, though she probably hasn’t even received the letter yet. When I sit on the toilet at Fee’s, I count the squares with first-aid tips on the Red Cross calendar that’s hung beside the medicine cabinet. Although it should take less than two weeks, it may as well be two years. The wait is excruciating.
I obsess over her reaction to my request. I do the calculations over and over in my mind. How much does a corporate lawyer make these days? What’s her rent? She couldn’t have much of a student loan to repay after all those scholarships. I urged her to reject the one from Mobil Oil but as usual, she refused to listen to reason.
And what’s she done with the life insurance policy? She dismissed it, angrily, at the notary’s office, though Graham and I had expected a much different reaction when we had planned for that moment – never expecting his death would arrive so soon. “I don’t need money,” she sniffed. “I can take care of myself.” “In that case, I can recommend a suitable charity,” the notary said through half-moon glasses without once looking up from his desk.
When Surinder and I were out on the street, I started. “Your father meant that money for you. You! So you could start your life on the right foot.”
I knew what it was all about. Her rejection of the money was a rejection of Graham and his values. She should have been proud her father was a draft dodger, not shamed into making stupid decisions.
“I can ‘start my life on the right foot’,” she answered, “without help.”
“What’s wrong with you? It’s –” I struggled to find the word I wanted. “– peculiar. This idea that somehow you can make your way in life by yourself.”
“So what do you want me to do? Give up? Do exactly what everyone tells me to do? That is not, in case you haven’t noticed, how you and Dad raised me.”
And it struck me, suddenly and with great force, that I had had this same conversation years ago with Amma. Though who had turned the table? Who had put Amma’s words in my mouth? I fell silent not wanting to betray myself further by repeating even more of Amma’s antiquated ideas.
In the end, I have no idea what she decided. It’s been nearly seven years since I’ve seen her during which time she could have spent the entire amount on designer handbags or lottery tickets.
I deliberate in solitude. I would love to ask Fee her opinion of my daughter’s financial situation, but my reckonings seem crass. Even if Surinder has the money, there is no reason why I should expect her help. Thou
gh the issue weighs heavily, as heavily as my discoveries in Dhaka – for those feelings do not fade, but flourish instead, as Luna, Shaheed, Hasan and Amma become part of a mountainous backdrop looming over my present situation – I decide to stop thinking about all of it, and get on with what I can.
Fee and I dress in ragged clothes. She ties a red bandanna around her hair. I push a metal wheelbarrow; she totes a couple of shovels on her shoulder. Together, we look like depression-era vagabonds in search of work, bumping over potholes damp with rain from a couple of nights ago. Thankfully, it is a mostly clear day, the air saltwater fresh, the spring sunshine warm. Blotchy clouds form a thin line that bends to the horizon. Our shirttails flap in the cool breeze.
Where I once grew vegetables, the dumpster squats, military green and monolithic. All things damaged beyond use or repair will go inside. As for whatever is salvageable or questionable, organized Fee points out corners of the yard, still dewy, where we will put them. Although she makes sense, there are too many piles, too many instructions, and before she finishes, I forget everything.
I open the front door, squared off now by the brace. It squeaks. The air inside, trapped under the tarp, is already humid and mildewy, much like my hotel in Dhaka. The covering gives an eerie bluish tinge to everything, as though we are looking through a dim black and white television screen.
Lethargy settles into my hips. I doubt I have the energy needed to step over the threshold. “Let’s get rid of it all. I don’t need anything.”
Fee steps around me. “You take your time.”
“But I just said I don’t want any of it.”
She picks up a greenish moccasin, its fringe raggedy as though chewed by a teething mongrel. Is it mine? I don’t recognize it. I shake my head and she throws it over my shoulder. It flops into the wheelbarrow.
“Good shot,” I say.
“Don’t just stand there. Get a shovel.”
*
I start with the table where I once tutored because it is closest to the door. It’s hard to recognize under all the plaster, dust and other unidentifiable debris. I locate a corner and pull. It’s stuck. I jiggle it. Nothing budges. I pull harder. Then something cracks, and rubble slides down. “Oooh, careful,” Fee says. I need her to help – the table’s impossibly jammed – but she’s busy in the kitchen, so I look for the chairs instead. I spot a tell-tale leg. A slab of layered shingles, rusty nails protruding like quills from the back of the lumber that binds them, pins it to the floor. I search for another, less dangerous chair.
As I pick through the waste, my thoughts drift to my last night with the Chowdhurys. When Luna’s rickshaw had disappeared onto the busy street after I had said good-bye to her, I never thought it would be the last time I would ever see her. I knew it was risky, and so did she, but we never imagined she would vanish. How different my trip to Dhaka would have been had she appeared at the event where I was speaking, or answered the door at the Chowdhury home, or been having tea at Beth’s place when I turned up. How different if she had come back after the war. If she had never run away with Razzak in the first place.
I move one broken item aside, place another on top, fill the space I have created with still more junk. I accomplish nothing. Fee, on the other hand, that industrious whirlwind, has found a drawer, which she fills, then empties outside in the designated piles, then fills again. She moves like a worker bee, removing load after load of debris.
Amma was so upset that night, and all I did was argue with Hasan. It seemed so important then to defend Luna. Besides, I always believed she would come back, and the family would accept her decision to marry Razzak. When did Amma’s fears that night transform into the realization that something was amiss with Luna’s story? How unfathomably horrible it would have been when Hasan also failed to return.
What happened to him after we parted? We had been so careful all the way to the airport, and though we had heard much, we had seen almost no one. If he had just retraced our steps, he should have made it home. The timidity of the rickshawallah which I had found so exasperating that night surely would have helped. He certainly wouldn’t have dared to venture anywhere near even the slightest danger. But perhaps they, too, had parted. I had no way of knowing.
I shake the memory from my mind and pick my way over to a heap of clothing. “Yech.”
I gather soaked, droopy clothes – jeans, shirts, jackets. Sour, cold water needs to be wrung from them. Then I expose the sleeve of a tie-dyed peasant blouse. A black and purple diamond design repeats itself on eggy yellow. Surinder made it, years ago, in one of those infernal clubs she was always joining, or a summer camp she insisted on attending.
Instead of sewing the usual apron with pansies embroidered on a pocket, or table cloth with fussy lace trim, or whatever outlandishly useless thing those counselors and leaders forced the kids to make, she tried to create something I might actually like. She gave it to me, her thirteen-year-old face alternately shy and defiant.
“Oh, wow,” I said, after a moment. Even the most thickheaded parent could see the love in each stitch, in every burst of colour. I hardly breathed as I held the garment, fearful any movement would spoil this fragile encounter, for she was at that age when the slightest twinge of muscle on my part could provoke a major argument. But wow was not the right thing to say, nor apparently was it appropriate to be so still. Surinder interpreted both as aversion. The flood of disappointment on her face is as fresh today as it was then. “You don’t have to wear it,” she said.
“But I want to. I like it.”
“Don’t say what you don’t mean.”
“No. I really like it.”
But it was too late. I’d already messed up.
I rarely put on that blouse. I didn’t want it to wear out, but its appearance also reminded me strongly of my dismal ability to reach my only child. Even now, soaked and smelly, it equally embarrasses and moves me. I pull it out of the tangle. Water trickles to the floor. I put it on a window ledge until I decide what to do with it. Everything between me and Surinder is a waiting game.
*
Fee has to go to the bank and then grocery shopping – Mac headed back north yesterday – so I am alone this morning. We are almost finished, thanks to my willingness to part with nearly everything. In my to-keep pile, I have the bed frame, a dresser, one chair, which I later found propping up a fallen bookshelf, the fridge and the propane burner, though the old tank is dented and unsafe. There are kitchen utensils, pots and pans, the big plastic box that holds the hammer, a few screwdrivers, two or three odd-sized wrenches, and gardening tools, and a mismatched set of margarine containers filled with nails, screws and other fasteners. I’m keeping the photographs. Though they are spoiled, Fee has promised to ask a photographer friend if the negatives can be rescued. The clothing in the dresser also escaped the deluge, as did some tinned goods. But I have no more books, carpets, bedding or linens. The textbooks I desperately need for tutoring are warped, torn and soaked. Anything ornamental that hung on a wall or rested on a shelf is not worth saving.
A gentle rain fizzes against the tarp like little bubbles. The shop light Mac hooked to a nail a couple of days ago is indispensable in today’s gloom. I angle it toward the corner where I used to sleep, so I can begin work under its harsh crescent moon.
How tranquil this corner once was. How thoroughly it allowed me to withdraw into it. I would sink into the silence, the darkness, and fall asleep. When I awoke, I would feel disappointed, as though I had lost something along the way. Once my refuge, I can no longer even rise in this unrecognizable corner.
I move stones and some plaster. Underneath lies a small cabinet where I placed my lamp and reading materials. Another keeper. Somehow, it has not been crushed. When its door resists opening, I force the tiny hinges. One snaps off and leaves a jagged metal edge.
There’s not much inside, but what’s there is intact. Some magazi
nes, an open packet of Christmas cards, two jewellery boxes.
In the turmoil, I have forgotten.
Graham’s watch, heavy and pliant as a sleeping child, still fits my palm. I run my finger down the crystal again, and find comfort in the constancy of the sad memories it invokes. What would Surinder make of this watch now? Surely she is too engrossed with her own importance to be as attached to it as she once was. Surely she has new amulets to remind her of her success and ambition.
“Hallo? Anybody home?” Silhouetted against the front door frame, lopsided Ed Malone pulls me out of my reverie. Faithful as a St. Bernard, he hasn’t missed a single day. “There you are.”
I tuck the watch under a splintered board whose former purpose is unclear. “Hi.” I know his routine: he’ll look up, down, and leave for another job. I have only a minute to wait.
“Everything okay?” Because of the drizzle, he’s pulled his hood up and I cannot see his face. His outline is bulbous like he’s been inflated. He saunters in a circle, alternately looking overhead, then down, as predicted. His wet boots squeak. Just one more minute and he’ll be gone.
He steps crookedly over a thick beam, and strikes one of the new braces with the heel of his hand. Thump. “Yup. Solid as a grizzly’s chest. No worries here.” He pulls his hood down, and hands on hips, he surveys the line where the walls meet the tarp. I still can’t see his face, lit as I am by the lamp, he in the dusky shadows. The rain continues to mutter. Graham’s watch calls my name.
Why isn’t Ed leaving? Tension mounts, but he’s still studying the walls. Doesn’t he have somewhere to go today? He better. He must. The watch glows, hums, sings out, until I wonder that Ed cannot hear it.
This Innocent Corner Page 17
