Bright Lines

by Tanwi Nandini Islam

  He pulled her closer, swiped a condom from her bedside table.

  “Wish we could listen to music,” he said. “Maybe we should just wait to do it in my house.”

  She ripped the wrapper with her teeth. “We can’t wait.” She handed him the condom, uncertain.

  He slipped it on and rubbed himself on her thigh. She took a few deep breaths and closed her eyes.

  Malik grinned and she grinned back. She looked up at him as a drop of his sweat fell onto her cheek. The silver cross on his neck brushed her mouth, and she opened to swallow it. She clasped the charm under her tongue like a thermometer. Rays of morning sun filtered inside her eyelids. Somewhere, far away, she heard the crackle of thunder.

  She opened her eyes to find Malik’s face stricken with fear.

  “Oh shit,” he wheezed. He jumped out of bed and froze, then brought a finger to his lips.

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  Her locked door rattled furiously.

  “Charu!” yelled her mother. “How many times must I tell you not to lock the door? You took my thread! I have fifteen bridesmaids’ eyebrows waiting!”

  “One sec, Ma!” said Charu. “I-I’m getting dressed.”

  “You are already awake? You must be hungry,” said Hashi. “Hurry up, child!”

  Go go go! Charu mouthed to Malik, pushing him inside the closet. She grabbed the spools of thread and opened the door a sliver to drop them into Hashi’s extended hand.

  “What is the matter, are you getting sick?” asked Hashi. “Let me make you breakfast now. Come. Ella will join us.”

  “No!” yelped Charu.

  “No?”

  “I’ll do it. I’ll make brunch for all of us.”

  “You sound like me,” said Hashi, laughing. She pinched Charu’s cheek. “It’s still early, child. Get some sleep.”

  As soon as Hashi’s footsteps faded, Malik broke out of the closet. He headed toward the window. “Fuck this,” he mumbled, looking down at the drop from the tree.

  “I need to get downstairs. I forgot Maya is sleeping in Ella’s room.”

  “Looks like it,” said Malik, pointing out the window. There lay Ella, snoozing on the patio tiles.

  “Ah, that’s her usual weird,” said Charu.

  “I’m out, sugar.” He leaned out to set his foot on a branch and then grabbed another to steady his hand. Feeble and slick with dew, the smaller branch snapped. Sparrows shot out of the tree and he lost his balance and plummeted down, somehow managing not to scream. She heard a thud against the wet mulch Baba had set under the tree. Malik sprung up without turning up to look at her, his cutoffs falling to his knees.

  He shuffled around the side of the house onto Cambridge Place.

  Charu heard the B52 bus whoosh by, and she crossed her fingers that Malik would hail it in time before her mother caught him. From her bedroom window, she looked again at her sister snoozing in the backyard.

  “Shit.”

  * * *

  Charu ran down the stairs, past the living room and kitchen, through the sliding glass door. Ella snoozed against a vine-covered cucumber trellis. In sleep, she shed her grumpy awkwardness. She was strangely handsome lying there. Charu bemoaned her curves. Why had she not inherited the lanky build of the Anwar line like Ella and her mother? Charu put on her sister’s glasses, and held her face close to Ella’s ear.

  “You know, you look good without those glasses,” Charu said, in a nerdy voice.

  Ella’s eyes popped open. “You scared me!”

  “Second time I’ve done that today.”

  “I’m . . . tired,” said Ella, squinting up at the sky. She rubbed her eyes and sat up. “I need my glasses. I need water.”

  “You are blind,” Charu laughed, peeling off the glasses. She dangled them in front of Ella. “Not giving you these unless you get your ass up and help me cook brunch.”

  “Come on, Charu, just give me the damn glasses,” said Ella, swiping them back.

  “What time did you get to bed? I passed out.”

  “Do you . . . remember anything?” Ella asked.

  “Valium isn’t for kids?”

  “Not funny, you addict. Where’s your boyfriend? And who the fuck is the chick in my room? You know I like to keep my shit private.”

  “First of all—chill the fuck out.”

  “Chill the fuck out? You ask me to hang with you and Malik. Then I get to sit there watching you two freaks act like it’s normal to start fucking when someone’s right there. And when I try to get sleep like I wanted to all along, there’s a stranger sleeping in my bed. You know I can’t sleep, bitch; I’m not going to chill the fuck out.”

  “Bitch? You’re a bitch!” Charu smacked Ella’s chest in surprise. She and Ella had never once had a true tussle, and it was odd to begin so late in life. Ella didn’t even curse much. She looked at her sister’s face, all dirt streaked and wet. Pitiful. Charu took a breath. People told her that one of her best qualities was that she never stayed mad. This was some grudge-worthy shit, but she didn’t want to lose the title.

  “I came down here to check and see if you were all right. You slept outside. Come on.”

  “There was a girl in my bed.”

  “Come. Meet her.”

  Charu led Ella inside to meet Maya. The girl lay on her belly, legs crossed upward, black nail-polished toes curled, at home in Ella’s bed. In her hands: Ella’s copy of German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 volume, Kunstformen der Natur, a book of biological lithographs.

  “To see the world like this you’ve got to be a genius,” she said, closing the book on Cyanea annasethe, the tentacled jellyfish. “I’m Maya.” She extended her hand to Ella, but didn’t get out of her bed.

  “Jellyfish reminded Haeckel of his dead wife’s hair,” said Ella.

  “And here’s my infamously morbid sister, Ella,” said Charu. “Maya’s going to stay with us for a few weeks.”

  “Hi,” said Maya, waving.

  “And you were going to tell me this when?”

  “Don’t—” warned Charu, but Ella didn’t seem to hear her.

  “There’s a stranger in my bed and you’re telling me she’s staying with ‘us’ for a few weeks? You mean with me. You mean, ‘Ella, handle this shit while I’m busy fucking around,’ literally fucking an asshole who can’t climb a goddamn tree—”

  “So, Ella, I’m figuring things out,” interrupted Maya. Her voice was hoarse, as if she’d smoked a pack of cigarettes. “My father doesn’t . . . want me to go to college.”

  “Not just college—she got into Berkeley, and he wants her to stay home!” cried Charu. “It’s a fucking travesty.”

  “I deferred a year to figure shit out. My father wants me to stay home because Mema’s got lupus and my twin brothers are devils, so you can imagine—oh goodness!” Maya caught sight of something outside the window.

  “What?” asked Charu, hopping onto the bed for a better look.

  “Seems your boy left part of himself behind,” Maya said.

  The three of them leaned into the window. Sitting in the mulch, translucent and forgotten, Malik’s rubber.

  “Disgusting.” Ella left the room, slamming the door behind her.

  “At least it wasn’t used,” Charu called after her.

  4

  Ella sat outside on the stoop watching their block. There was a curious chain of seven matching pink racer bikes locked in front of the downstairs garden apartment, which housed Hashi’s salon. Streamers and baskets adorned the bikes, and on all but one, a single cardboard placard hung from the handlebars, spelling C-A-R-M-E-N. In front of the apartment building across the street, neighbors were barbecuing hamburgers on the sidewalk with a portable grill, blaring “Saturday Love” from a Caprice Classic. Dr. Duray, the retired dentist, rested on a lawn chair and sa
ng lyrics from his original ditty, “The Girls on Cambridge Place Are Oh So Pretty.” He waved at Ella, and she waved back.

  “Want some barbecue, girl?” he called over to her.

  “No thank you, sir,” she said.

  He nodded his head side-to-side the way the elderly trailed their words, but stopped singing his song. She wondered if he’d lost his muse upon seeing her. Barbecue. The word made her want to hurl. Uncontrollable trembling and nauseating heat had eaten away most of her morning. She couldn’t shed the image of Malik and Charu’s contorted bodies from her mind. Ella heard Charu’s glossy words—You look really good without those glasses—echoing inside her. Noonday sun emblazoned their block, and the brownstone steps singed Ella’s bare feet. A pack of teenage girls pranced through the bursting arc of water from a hydrant broken open, sundresses plastered against their supple bodies. Ella felt a burning shame return and turned her gaze to her neighbor’s scarlet oak tree. All parts of the tree were completely green—the shiny leaves, bushy tail-like catkins, the immature acorns—with no hint of the rich autumnal red the leaves would turn in just a few months. She squinted for a closer inspection—the female flowers grew on much shorter spikes than the male catkins; all at once, the monoecious Quercus coccinea bore male and female parts. She’d worried about leaving Ithaca, she realized. She felt much more at home in nature, hiking in the woods, alone, listening to Debussy on headphones. She volunteered at the student-run farm. She had even considered staying over the summer, to serve as a manager in the Market Garden project. Along with other students and volunteers, Ella could plant and harvest a two-acre vegetable plot and herb garden, and then market the produce at local farm stands.

  But she couldn’t bear the idea of not coming home.

  Staying in Ithaca meant no Anwar and Hashi, and no Charu. After the whole family dropped her off on campus for freshman orientation, Ella had refrained from inviting Charu again. She knew that her cousin would undoubtedly provoke the oversexed undergrads, the frat boys, dorks, and potheads in her dorm, and that would make Ella—sad.

  Her glasses slipped down her sweaty nose, and everything became blurry. All the parts of the scarlet oak morphed into one large, green mass. A thick, smoky breeze shook the tree, and it appeared to expand immensely, then contract. It did this many times, and Ella saw each phase of the tree’s metamorphosis. With one cycle of expansion and contraction, the tree bore foliage; a second time, there were flowers. The final expansion sprouted acorns, followed by a final tightening that produced the seed. All the parts of this oak sprouted from one archetypal plant, which took on multiple forms. But in essence, it was all one being. Ella pushed her glasses back up. The tree was just as still as it had been before.

  There was a loud popping sound coming from the garden apartment—a champagne cork shot upward—and Ella found herself walking down to her aunt’s salon.

  * * *

  Peeping through the vestibule door, Ella saw the mélange of thread, hair spray, and toasted bridesmaids painted and waiting. The bride, a young girl of twenty, stood in front of a mirror, gazing at the hive of hair frozen in place.

  “Beautiful, no?” said Hashi, nudging the girl.

  “Carmen’s getting married!” whooped one of the bridesmaids. The laughing women rushed toward the door, billows of satin and taffeta nearly knocking Ella over.

  “Excuse me.” The party of seven paid no mind to her as they made their way to their matching bicycles. They hitched their dresses above their bottoms, revealing old-fashioned bloomers. They hopped on and pedaled to the Presbyterian church around the corner, hollering as they rode.

  Hashi grimaced. “Please do not sweat off the makeup!” she called after them. She bumped into Ella as she turned back toward the house. “Ella!” she exclaimed, as if she were the one person who could have surprised her.

  “I’m sorry, I was just . . .” Ella began.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  Hashi squinted at her, calculating, tapping her chin with her forefinger. “Come,” she said. She flipped the Open sign to Closed, and locked the salon entrance.

  “Sit down, my dear,” she said, gesturing to the chair at the sink. “Take off your glasses. Close your eyes.”

  Without her glasses the hair dryer chairs appeared as globe-headed robots; bottles of shampoo and hair spray became an army of pawns. It dawned on Ella that in her whole life with the Saleem family, she could count the number of times she’d come into her aunt’s salon on one hand. She closed her eyes. She felt the chair pump backward so that her head lay on the cool ceramic sink, Hashi’s tea-tree-flavored breath on her face, her slight and saggy bosom pressed against her shoulders. It sounded like Hashi was rubbing her hands together; a moment later she felt warm olive oil on her head. Hashi rubbed it in, softening the frizz, then ran water through her hair and massaged in a musky shampoo. The water sent a chill down her back. Hashi lifted her head to roughly towel her dry. She brought Ella to one of the salon’s high chairs and spun her around. Hashi selected a pair of scissors and began snipping away dead hair; in minutes the back of Ella’s neck pricked at the air of the fan. She ran her hand over her hair—it was short, like a boy’s. An odd feeling, not unpleasant, and rather uncertain, tickled her. She heard a faucet run—it sounded like the bathtub—Hashi had gone into the bathroom.

  Ella heard Hashi coming back into the room. Hashi grabbed her hand and said, “Follow me.” She led Ella into the bathroom and then Ella, eyes still closed, heard what sounded like stirring ice in water. Then, the sound of a knife chopping—no one chopped like Hashi—and the air became infused with the scent of cucumber and mint. More stirring.

  “Ella, take my hand, and when I say step, you step,” said Hashi. “Step!”

  She took one step and her right foot was submerged in freezing water. “Aaah, shit!”

  “Step!”

  She put her other foot in.

  “Do not move. Do not open eyes,” Hashi commanded.

  Ella heard the snipping before she felt her clothes being shorn off.

  “Uh . . .” she managed to say, stripped naked and mortified. Hashi pressed her hands into Ella’s arms. With one swift motion, she dunked Ella in the water.

  “Raaaah!” Ella shuddered violently.

  She remembered her route to New York from Dhaka with Anwar and Hashi. She had never met them before, but distinguished them by smell: Fried Onion Uncle and Talcum Powder Auntie. Want the window seat, child? Talcum Powder Auntie offered, and Ella had nodded yes. On the plane, she’d leaned against Talcum Powder Auntie’s gardenia-scented underarms. After many hours had passed, out the small rounded window, she watched clouds shape-shift into Hans Christian Andersen characters. Somewhere over Arabia, cumulus clouds turned into a wedge of migrating swans.

  In Berlin, they switched planes. Skin pale, eyes blue and hard. She spoke not a word, not even as her ears popped on the descent and the burning orange-yellow runway lights welcomed her. Talcum Powder Auntie offered her a cotton swab dabbed in attar of roses, a clean and crisp scent—deafening sound of wheel scraping asphalt.

  Outside, it was December, and unbearably cold.

  Hashi drew Ella’s head up and out of the ice water, then back in again. Every aperture constricted. Underwater, the floating cucumber slices resembled Frisbees in a gray sky. Mint swam around like seaweed. She blew bubbles and spat water out.

  “This lets the heat out. You have done very, very well.” Hashi enveloped her in a towel that felt like it had been baking in an oven. Ella collapsed against her.

  There was a light in the darkness—it appeared red and blue at once, and dissolved into a million flashes. The hot towel worked its magic.

  Hashi handed her a bundle. “Wear this.”

  Ella felt her way through the articles. A shirt made of linen. The other piece was of a stiffer material—a pair of trousers
. The new clothes were laundered fresh, but gave her the same sensation as pulling old vinyl out of the sleeve.

  “And here,” said Hashi, handing her a pair of tinted aviator glasses.

  Ella put them on. The glasses were more stylish than her old pair. She caught herself in the mirror. She looked like her father in the photograph, but softer and marked with her mother’s lashes and full lips. Her hair: a short, masculine Caesar cut that brought out her chiseled features. Would Charu like it?

  “An utter incarnation of my brother. Mashallah! These are your father’s old clothes. I have been saving them for you.”

  Ella took off her father’s glasses—she’d started to get a headache—and held her aunt’s hand. She saw Hashi’s face, stern and lovely, and felt a comfort with her aunt for the first time since that plane ride. Without thinking, she squeezed Hashi’s hand.

  “What is it, Ella?”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Ella replied, looking down. She fingered a tortoiseshell button.

  Hashi cleared her throat. “Your father often fell into long silences, sometimes for days on end. I never could penetrate this quiet, as much as I would tug his hair, try to make him laugh. This changed during the war. Training with the freedom fighters in the Mukti Bahini, meeting Anwar, and of course your ma, Laila, pumped this fire into him. Afterward, when little had improved for the poorest in our country, he fell into a dark depression. But when you were born, Ella, something took over him, like wood kindling on a stove, where it’s warmest deep within. You know, he called us just to let us listen to the new baby, the first one in our family. ‘Listen, listen to this little giggler,’ he told us. And you laughed into the receiver. Oh, I don’t have words for what we’ve lost. All I do know is that something will change. Something great will happen to you, Ella. Someone great. This will fill you up.”

  Ella patted down a wrinkle in the shirt. She did not yet have the words. All her life, she had never felt pretty. Now, the person in front of her was perhaps the truest she had ever felt to her insides. If they were alive . . . It was a refrain she avoided as resolutely as she avoided Charu. She wondered if they would see themselves in her, if she would be this way if they were here. She probably would never have left Bangladesh. She doubted she would feel anything for Charu if they were alive. Right? Ella doubted she could be sure about that.