The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  “He’s outside waiting in his car for you,” Lala Aunty said.

  Mira imagined what embarrassing words Aunty might have used. (“Will you drive Mira back? She has no friends. Take pity on her please. And move the seat back, because she needs extra room.”) Out to the road she went, and checked for him in the cars, knowing he was watching her. A honk sounded and she went to it, squinting to see him behind the windshield.

  “Thanks so much for bringing me along,” she said. “I hope it’s not a huge hassle.”

  “Not at all,” he said, and immediately turned the radio on.

  Mira counted the songs that played. It was an inoffensive soft rock station with occasional excerpts of banter. They drove out of the empty residential streets and on to Yonge, and she thought of the conversation they would have had if, five years ago, she hadn’t pretended her brother wasn’t hers. She could have demonstrated her commitment to the community by discussing the dilapidated buildings of downtown Richmond Hill and how if only they’d replace the adult video stores with coffee shops and classy bookstores, the area could be revital-ized. She would have pointed out every baby in every stroller and every non-vicious dog and awwwed over them so he’d see her potential for motherhood and pet ownership. She could have identified the bands playing on the radio, so he’d see her as culturally attuned.

  After counting nine songs, she reached out and turned the radio off. The highway was empty and H raised his distinctive eyebrow at her sudden move. His shirtsleeve wrinkled as he turned slightly towards her, keeping his eyes on the road. He smelled like the gum he was chewing.

  “Once in high school, I came down to the kitchen and saw Ravi making one of those microwave pizzas,” she said. “The personal-size kind, you know, Lean Cuisine or whatever. He picked up the box and read the instructions. I checked it afterwards, like I actually took the box out from the garbage and read it myself, and it said you’re supposed to heat the pizza for two minutes, let it sit for a minute, and then enjoy! I was at the table eating crackers and Ravi read the box and put the pizza in the microwave and then he set the time on the microwave for twenty minutes. He waited there in front of the microwave, and it seemed like too long to me because I’d eaten a lot of crackers, and how long does it take really to melt some cheese? But I didn’t say anything. I stayed there to see what he’d do. It caught fire. He opened the door and there was a little flame and he blew on it a couple times and hit it with his hand and I guess the flame was small enough that it went out. It was smoking, the crust was all burnt and the cheese had gone past melting, it was congealed and the oil had turned it orange. Really, it looked like the face of a burn victim, and Ravi didn’t even look at it, he just started eating it, and clearly it was too hot and was hurting the inside of his mouth, and there was no way it tasted any good, but he just kept eating it. And I didn’t stop him, I just watched him eating this disgusting pizza, disgusted, like why doesn’t he know he shouldn’t eat that —”

  When she pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes to hold in her crying, he put his arm around her and pulled the car to the shoulder — like a gentleman (Aunty would have said).

  A COUPLE DAYS later he phoned her, saying he’d found her number in the campus directory. He invited her to a silent auction with him because, he said, “You seem pretty quiet,” and they went, using their scanty part-time earnings to bid on student-produced art, tickets to campus shows, dinners cooked by quirky local chefs. They won a dinner and had the meal in H’s apartment with his two roommates, who said, “H talks about you constantly,” and, “Wow you really are as gorgeous as H described,” while a man in a tie-dyed shirt served them plates of sautéed kale. “I have this issue,” Mira said, like a joke. “I can’t leave food uneaten on my plate.” “Um, why would you?” H asked. He seemed as pleased as though he’d cooked it himself. Mira had never eaten kale before, but the flavour was incredible! Better than candy! Better than samosas! She thought in exclamations; she wanted to write poetry with clichés about waking up from a dream, about food regaining its taste.

  After that, H and Mira began cooking weekly dinners together — Hungarian mushroom soup and beet salad and palak paneer. Mira stopped snacking in the afternoons so she’d be hungry enough to fully appreciate their efforts.

  They made pumpkin ravioli from scratch after H acciden-tally carved his jack-o-lantern so eagerly it collapsed. For Halloween they went as gold and silver. They dressed head-to-toe in their assigned colours, painted each other’s faces with makeup they weren’t sure was non-toxic, and wore squares of white cardboard on their chests with the symbols from the periodic table. He blended her name into words — mira-cle, mir-coincidence, mir-pressure; over time they stopped making sense.

  Before winter exams, they quizzed each other — she read him facts from her adolescent psychology book. “Can you believe we’re adults?” she asked, and he responded by pointing out that they could neither rent cars nor legally consume alcohol yet, though at least they would be able to drink soon, since they were in Ontario. She read him the parts that bothered her the most — about mother-daughter relationships, about the need for father figures, about developmental disabilities. They fell asleep together on Mira’s bed, textbooks over them like blankets. In the morning, Mira woke up next to H, with hot pink highlighter on her blue button-down. Nothing much romantic had happened yet; he’d kissed the side of her head a couple of times and occasionally draped his arm across the back of her chair. Mira wasn’t even sure if they were dating or just good friends, but he looked sleepily at the marker stain on her shirt and said, “You should probably rinse that with stain remover,” and he began to unbutton it, the pads of his fingers on her skin. He made excruciating eye contact, his eyes dark in the morning and his hair at all angles. Mid-unbuttoning, he stopped to collect the textbooks and notebooks and pens and highlighters in one single armful and placed them gently on the area rug. Then he lay back down and kissed her. He pressed one hand flat on the skin between her stomach and breasts and held her bottom lip between his teeth as he slid his hand slowly, firmly sideways. A small sound escaped from Mira’s mouth and into his and then her thoughts kicked in — oh god, I just moaned into his mouth and his hand is on my stomach and I should lie on my back so that gravity flattens it — so she turned from her side to her back and H lowered himself to kiss her stomach. She let him undress her and then undressed him, dropping their clothes with their study materials.

  In November, Mira happened to stand on a scale some- body had left in the dorm bathroom, and found she’d lost twelve pounds. She and H had been taking evening walks (digestive strolls, he called them) to a new Toronto destination each time — Chinatown, Kensington Market, the Distillery District — instead of what she used to do, which was watching library-borrowed movies on her computer while eating honey- roasted peanuts from the jar on her desk, dropping crumbs into the keyboard and constantly rewinding to rehear a line of striking dialogue. She’d stopped going home so often on week- ends, and thus avoided the heavy dinner party meals and her family’s limitless temptation of hidden snacks. And she often spent the night in his room, eating packaged oatmeal for break- fast instead of the dining hall pancakes.

  In hardly any time, she was just the size she wanted to be. One weekend, when homework wasn’t too heavy, she pulled a large selection of clothes from her closet and packed them neatly into a duffel bag. She took the old route (subway, go bus) home for the first time in weeks. She called out into the hall- way, but nobody was home, so she left her shoes on the front rug and skipped upstairs to the alcove in her mother’s bedroom where they stored the sewing machine. Under the cone of light from a standing lamp, she threaded the bobbin, selecting a thread from a rainbow of spools in her mother’s collection. She tried the pedal and tested out her desired switch on a scrap fold of fabric. She altered her clothing to make it fit, turning shirts and pants inside out to narrow legs and nip in sleeves. Ends of fabric and short inches o
f thread accumulated on the carpet and she swept them together in a pile using her bare toes.

  It was nighttime when her mother came home, and Mira was trying on a newly slimmed skirt and sweater in the full-length mirror behind the bedroom door. Her mother pushed the door open and jumped at the sight of her. “Miru? I didn’t know you were here. And I didn’t recognize you,” she said, holding her daughter’s shoulders, squeezing them, turning her around and watching the mirror. “I thought you were some stranger, hiding in the house.”

  “You were out?” Mira asked.

  “Yes, just got home,” she said. Her hands still clung to her daughter’s shoulders, and Mira wanted badly for her to let go. The hands were veiny and dark. It seeemed like everyone was aging; months ago, on a visit to Lala Aunty’s house, Mira had gone upstairs to use the bathroom because the main floor one was occupied, and on the counter she had seen an open box of hair dye, in a shade slightly blacker than natural. A pair of flimsy, transparent gloves hung over the box’s lid, darkened at the fingertips. Drops of dye had stained the counter, and later, Mira had noticed the sides of Lala Aunty’s scalp, simi-larly stained, the colour leaking over the hairline. Aunty had been in her forties when they’d all met, so she must be nearing seventy. Now, looking at her mother, Mira wondered guiltily, How old is she? She wasn’t exactly sure, and only then remem-bered that her mother’s birthday was only three weeks away. Aunty was organizing a party, and had sent an email, which moved further down the list in Mira’s inbox. Subtracting the years in her head, she figured out the age — forty-three — which wasn’t technically old at all.

  “It’s late,” Mira said to her mother. “Were you out with Lala Aunty?”

  “I was — well, I had a date.”

  Mira noticed now that her mother was wearing a green dress, though she never wore dresses, and gold earrings.

  That her mother had a date didn’t bother her. Now that Mira had found love, she had the generous feeling of wanting everyone else to find love, too. She understood finally why matchmakers wanted to make matches, and anyway it had been fourteen years since her father died and it was a bigger shock that her mother had waited so long, past the time when she was slender and long-haired and needed supporting and didn’t need reading glasses.

  “What took you so long?” Mira asked. She aimed for a jokey tone and held her breath for this to be the moment their mother-daughter relationship would advance into a mature friendship like the ones described in the sidebars of her adoles-cent psychology textbook. They would compare birth control pills and make fun of their boyfriends together.

  “It’s not like nobody wanted me,” Mira’s mother said. And then she told her about the men who had pursued her, the widows at dinner parties, the attempted set-ups by Lala Aunty, and the time twelve years ago when a man had approached her in the unlikely location of the mall parking lot, and proposed to her. “Come home with me to my mansion,” he had said, and held out a ring he’d just bought at Sears after observing her in the bedding section.

  “The bedding section? For God’s sakes,” Mira said. What a crazy, she thought, reminding her future car-owning self to lock the car doors when she went to the mall, thinking what a good, funny story who knew her mother was funny?), until her mother told her, with an expression of wonder at her old self, that she’d said yes, had looked at the three hundred thread-count sheets he held in a big plastic Sears bag in his other arm, that he had purchased already for their marriage bed, and followed him into his car — “But what about your car?” Mira asked, the safest, most inane question, and her mother just shrugged — and he’d driven her to his house, which was in fact a mansion, Tudor-style, coniferous-lined driveway, and she had stayed there in luxury for three days. “I didn’t sleep with him,” her mother said, “I just watched television all day while he went to work. I think he had a thing for Indians. But he was nice enough, and when I decided to leave, he let me leave.”

  “What about me and Ravi?” Mira asked, looking over at the clothing she had just sewn, at the still-hot iron on the ironing board, at the sewing machine light that she hadn’t yet turned off.

  Her mother waited, and grimaced before saying, “You were here.”

  “By ourselves?” she asked.

  But her mother didn’t answer, just looked at her as Mira stood up and brushed off her skirt, though there was nothing there — it was a comfort to feel the slim cylindrical shapes of her legs — and her mother grabbed her hand with her old dark, shrivelled one, like the forked branch of a tree, like a wish stick, but Mira shook it off and went to her old bedroom to check the bus times. She could still make it back to catch the last train. Her mother lingered behind the closed door, her feet two blunt shadows in the gap between the door and the carpet. Mira pictured two small foxes, sitting, thinking. On the bus back downtown, she tried to remember those three nights when she was six and her brother was eight. Was six not old enough to remember? She wondered what they had eaten, and whether they’d turned the house lights off before they went to sleep.

  TO H, MIRA confessed everything terrible she had ever done, how she had watched a home video of herself at age four, practising the piano in her living room while her brother sat on the adjacent sofa, colouring in the margins of a magazine, and when four-year-old-Mira finished playing, she turned and scowled at Ravi — for no reason — until she got his attention and then when he turned his head mildly around, she said, “WHAT?” in a vicious voice and banged her hands against the piano keys in what struck her now as hilarious discord, and then Ravi turned away but in the video she could see he was still watching her, his pupils stealthy in their corners, catlike. She quoted to H a line from a Komunyakaa poem about that tenuous state between innocence and experience, Where did we learn to be unkind? Where had she acquired that animal meanness; was it instinctive, innate? Where had she picked up that quality of voice she used only on him, the sound of it like an extended claw? From where had she taken that stinginess that embarrassed her now, that let her eat more than her share of whatever gummy snacks or slice of cake their mother had left for them — was it evolutionary? And what of the emotional stingi- ness, how she didn’t want to touch him, how she cringed from Ravi’s needy, forgiving, open arms, his childlike greed for affec- tion? “Gimme a hug!” he would say, and she still couldn’t do it. When he had tried to watch tv with her, she would, without look- ing at him, say, “I’m watching here,” an indirect command, so that if he complained to her mother, she’d be able to say she hadn’t actually told him to leave. She’d sometimes sat in the back of the car when he was driving, even if it was only the two of them.

  “That’s all normal behaviour for siblings,” said H, and he curled his hand comfortingly against the back of her head.

  “Yeah, but not when your brother has a disability. I’d cheat when we played Scrabble Junior, which is ridiculous, I mean, it’s not as though I needed to cheat, so I don’t even know why I did it.”

  “That’s a little awful,” H admitted, “but it’s not as though you still act like that now.”

  She had mostly grown out of that impulse to treat Ravi badly, but if her cruelty were a jar of infinite depth and she had poured and poured into it so quickly, so forcefully, could she ever, even in her delicate new contriteness, empty it again?

  “You’re a good sister,” said H, but it wouldn’t ever quite be true.

  ON THE AFTERNOON of her mother’s birthday, Mira was in H’s room. They were studying together on the floor, his text-books overlapping hers. H had physics on Monday, and her adolescent psychology exam was on Tuesday, but she already had her notes practically memorized. She had purchased a gift for her mother, a crystal water pitcher in the shape of an elephant. She put it in a white cardboard gift box, cushioned it with bubble wrap.

  “I have this fear,” she told H as she highlighted with her three-colour highlighter, “that I know is irrational.”

  “M
ir-rational,” he said, alphabetizing his flashcards.

  “Imagine I go home one day and Ravi is totally normal —”

  “You wouldn’t be happy about that?”

  “Well yeah, I’d be happy about that,” she answered. She was flipping backwards through the index of her textbook. Hypnosis. “Have I told you I can’t be hypnotized?”

  “I’ve hypnotized you,” he said with fake intensity. “That’s what the H in my name really stands for. What do you think he’d be like?” H asked. “Ravi, I mean. Non-autistic Ravi.”

  Mira imagined Ravi sixty pounds thinner, a med student hold- ing forceps to a yawning body cavity, or on the television, an expert on immigration, speaking in a speedy, low pitch, informedly, to an interviewer — “What this country needs is …!” slamming his fist on the desk.

  “He’d remember every terrible thing I have ever said or done to him.”

  She reached d in the index and looked for disabilities, but the textbook didn’t cover it.

  “He’d know you were just a kid and he would forgive you,” H said.

  She took her phone into H’s bathroom and called home. With her free hand, she arranged the selections of soap and shaving cream by the side of the sink. Ravi answered the phone and she asked if he could pick her up from the subway station. He was shrill and lethargic, distracted, always pacing — she imagined she could hear the slow clomp of his feet on tile. Twice she confirmed that he would be there. He was reliable, though sometimes he heard things wrong. But she couldn’t blame him for this, as she couldn’t quite blame her mother for wanting to escape, for her temporary vacation to a home more beautiful and a life less complicated than theirs.