Bright Lines

by Tanwi Nandini Islam

  Anwar smiled. As usual, Ella did not seem to be expecting anything from him and said nothing.

  “Shall we eat?” he finally said, patting her shoulder.

  Ella appeared at ease. She half-smiled at Anwar. “Yes,” she said.

  They savored Charu’s lunch in silence. Anwar watched everyone at his table. Hashi looked at their daughters with pride, and he felt the old marvelous suffocation of being in love. He even appreciated his brother, who ate with the rapidity of the very poor or imprisoned and shot disgusted looks all around, except at Maya, who chewed her food as if she wanted to savor every bite. Anwar took everything in: We are quite a perfect flower, constructed of both male and female parts—I must write this down. He grabbed a pen from his pocket and scribbled his musings on a paper napkin, looking up to see Charu and Ella sharing a grin, Hashi staring at him with a sweet look, Aman plagued by his eternal seclusion. Maya nodded at Anwar, as if sensing his feelings. He wiped the corners of his eyes with the tissue. The ink bled, blurring his notes.

  6

  Some said the backyard in 111 Cambridge Place had been a makeshift graveyard for the souls who overdosed on its grounds. The most popular tale was about a young boarder back in the seventies, born and raised minutes away, who grew up to be a jaded revolutionary, losing his way after his friends were imprisoned or started using. He belonged to the latter lot, but did not die during his binges. Instead, after a brilliant recovery from cocaine-induced cardiac arrest, the young man awoke in the hospital, feeling alive and refreshed. His brain had swelled up to twice its size and then shrunk back down. A miracle, said the doctors. But the young man had inherited a new affliction of the brain. You could show him a flashlight, a pencil, or crack rock, and he could tell you what inanimate objects were. But he could no longer tell the difference between a rose or a radish or a puppy. He’d lost his sense of the living world.

  When Ella first heard the story back in fifth grade, she’d been sure the young man had gone mad with confusion, unable to decipher whether to smell or eat or love something. Sometimes she thought that if the man had lost the ability to tell living things apart, his old relationships (to his dealer, his lovers, his friends) would have faded.

  Then he would have no longer been haunted by his desires. It could be considered a blessing.

  Ella broke soil with her shovel, scared of uncovering bones, though she knew everything had been upturned years ago during the renovations. It was three in the morning, three weeks after she’d arrived home for the summer. Insomnia worsened with the constant nightly presence of the sleeping girl, Maya, who had politely offered to sleep on the floor. Ella told Maya she didn’t mind sleeping outdoors, and slept on the hammock unless it rained. She hardly saw the girl anyway. Maya spent her days working and returned very late at night, only to sleep. Ella let her in through the sliding door in the kitchen. If her aunt and uncle were aware of the girl’s presence, they did not say anything to her or Charu.

  Since returning home, Ella noticed just how preoccupied Hashi and Anwar always seemed to be. Her aunt lived in her salon, busy with summer weddings and beauty regimens; her uncle spent the brunt of the day in the apothecary and his nights upstairs in his studio, busy cooking up products and smoking pot, the smell of which wafted outside the attic window, straight into the backyard. He’d asked her if she wanted to spend some days working at the apothecary, but she declined.

  As the rest of her family made their way to bed, Ella lay outside on the jute rope hammock tied between the hibiscus trees. First, Hashi and Anwar’s light went off, around midnight, and then Charu’s, an hour later. There had been no visits after Malik’s spill out of the tree, and Ella suspected the kid had been scared out of his wits. It all made for a very moody and short-tempered Charu, who had graduated from Brooklyn Tech and was now busy meeting up with school friends Ella didn’t know. At night, Charu kept to herself in her room, sewing her “independent” clothing line and blasting music until Hashi yelled at her to quiet down.

  Around two thirty, Aman’s late-night television marathons dwindled, and Ella found some peace. Their uncle’s night-owlish ways would make it hard for Malik to enter undetected, as Aman took frequent smoke breaks in the garden. Malik wouldn’t risk it now, since he was Aman’s employee.

  Just as everyone’s lights turned off, their tenant Ramona Espinal’s blinked on, enough for Ella to make out her silhouette in the window.

  * * *

  Ella dug a compost hole deep enough to fill with scraps from dinner and peat moss. Their garden was built in a circle. Anwar had first envisioned the garden as a compass. He’d built a wooden shed on the eastern side of the circular garden. Jutting out of this shed were birdhouses, drawing a menagerie of kestrels, meadowlarks, sparrows, bluebirds, and scarlet tanagers (a rare treat) for water and seed. He believed his compass became a vital hub in the birds’ migrations. Like an old-world astronomer, he placed a tiny magnetic needle in each water tray.

  Inside the shed was a walk-in refrigerated vault lined with drawers holding hundreds of seed packets, resembling the card catalog in a library. Her uncle’s preoccupation with conspiracies had taken on a life of their own after her parents’ murder. It was a miserable period in his life, when he believed apocalyptic demise loomed around the corner. Depressed and mourning, Anwar stocked up on seeds, preparing for the end of days, fancying himself a builder of a botanical ark. By the time Ella arrived in the States, Anwar had already collected two hundred heirloom seeds.

  Before Ella had left for her sophomore year, she and Anwar devised a plan to build a Linnaean flower clock. You could tell time according to blooming patterns, as different flowers opened and closed at different hours of the day. Sunflowers towered happily in the center, constant and uninformative as far as telling time was concerned. Anwar had planted morning glories, field milk thistle, white water lilies, and garden lettuce. All of these would bloom between five and seven in the morning. That’s about as far as he had gotten with the clock. Aphids collected on the cerulean morning glory blooms. The tiny pests oozed clear pellets of shit all along the petals and stems. Luckily, Ella was prepared to fight the buggers, a common summertime pest in their garden. She’d ordered a batch of butterfly larvae from her university entomology department. Madeleinea lolita, a natural enemy of aphids. The species’ blue hue matched that of morning glories, its name drawn from its discoverer, Nabokov. Ella had reread Lolita a dozen times last year. It was assigned in her sophomore literature elective, Monomania in Modern Literature.

  Ella slipped on a pair of latex gloves and removed the larvae from a brown paper bag. She planted the tiny sleeping nuggets into the ground, as a small prayer. One day, they would metamorphose, escape into the world as something altogether different. They would eat away at the pests that plagued the nascent blossoms. Ella covered the larvae with topsoil, and mixed in some green clover manure. It seemed fitting: The garden clock was a disheartening example of letting an idea turn to shit. Ella packed the earth with her hands. Night gardening made her feel light and heavy, all at once. She was sick of sleeping when everyone worked, lived, loved.

  The full moon struck whitish flowers with an eerie beauty. Night blooms—that’s what Ella would plant. She fetched seeds from the vault and set them down in dirt, wondering if they resembled the packet pictures. She planted evening primrose, night phlox, and the papery white moonflowers: night-blooming cereus, flowering tobacco, Datura inoxia. Jasmine, Anwar’s favorite, lined their fence, far enough away to not compete. On each packet was a file tab sticker tagged with Anwar’s loopy handwriting, notes on each variety:

  Datura inoxia. Sacred to the Aztecs (toloatzin),

  Smoke leaves and flowers for asthma (Ayurveda).

  Chosen hallucinogen of thuggees.

  All parts are poison.

  The mash of lentils and soil and cucumber peel flooded her nostrils, and she removed the gloves to feel the earthy mixture ooze betw
een her fingers. She gave the seedlings a gentle hosing and flushed her hands clean of muck. In her sweaty white T-shirt, Ella lay on the hammock and swung from side to side to make a breeze. Her brain refused to turn off, afraid that the stillness would encourage forbidden thoughts.

  She pulled her father’s glasses from her jeans pocket. It was silly, wearing these. She’d bought new copycat frames—tinted gray aviators—with her prescription, since his overcorrected her vision. But she soon realized that wearing Rezwan’s frames provoked her hallucinations. This had happened half a dozen times since Ella’s makeover. She thought about how Charu had embraced her, teary-eyed, with an ecstatic “Now we have to go shopping, El!” And true to her word, Charu bought her tailored slacks and shirts from Fulton Mall, and even made her a shirt based on one of their purchases. Ella hadn’t even gone with her, but all the clothes fit perfectly.

  Ella looked at the garden, everything heightened by her father’s glasses. Four Benadryls, or sleeping candy, as Charu called it, didn’t work. She yearned for company, for someone to talk to, but there was no one she could think to call.

  A beeping sound came from her bedroom window. She switched back to her own glasses and went inside to investigate.

  She slid open the door and tiptoed through the kitchen and living room, trying not to creak the floorboards. She went into her bedroom. The alarm clock read quarter past six. The beeping had stopped. She cracked her bedroom door open and saw Maya whispering her prayers, knelt in prostration. Remarkable, how Maya set her alarm for so early. As Ella took a step backward, she heard:

  “Ella?”

  “Don’t let me interrupt you.”

  “No, wait. I’m almost done. This is the part you ask for stuff.”

  Ella waited for her to finish. After a few more whispery requests, Maya turned her head to the left, then the right, then clasped her hands once more. As she rose up her knees popped like bubble wrap, and she laughed.

  “Eighteen going on eighty,” said Maya.

  “I’m going back outside.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  * * *

  “So this is what you spend your nights doing?” Maya shook her head at the mess of soil, flowers, empty packets of seed, and puddles of hose water on the patio tiles.

  “I’ve got something of a sleeping problem.”

  “A summer job might help with that,” said Maya. “I still can’t believe Charu and you aren’t working.”

  “I should be helping out Anwar, but I haven’t been . . . in the mood. Is that what you do during the day?”

  “Yeah, I work over by Fulton Mall, at Finish Line, the sneaker store. Now I’ve got an outrageous collection of kicks.” She lifted up a foot—they were polka-dot Nike Air Force 1s, but that was about as much as Ella knew about sneakers.

  “Shouldn’t you be asleep if you have work?”

  “Today, your sister and I are taking a beach day. Haven’t been once this summer. You should come.”

  “I’m not a beach person. Not a water person at all, in fact,” said Ella.

  “Then just sit on the sand.”

  Long, wispy leaves budding with tiny purple flowers burst out of a crack in the tiles. Ella looked closer. It was a mugwort infestation. “Since you’re awake, grab a shovel and shears,” she said, kneeling on the ground in front of the weedy overgrowth. “Loosen the base with the shovel, then pull, pull, pull.” She demonstrated but the mugwort stem broke in her hand. “Sometimes . . . it takes more . . . effort,” she grunted, yanking harder and falling back on her rear. “Then, just shear it as close to the root as possible.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s called mugwort. These little purple yellow flowers are pretty, but too much of it isn’t. You’d be surprised; if you press oil out of mugwort, you get a pretty good herbal remedy for anxiety, cramps. If you let it simmer in ninety-proof vodka, it makes a tonic. It’s got thujone in it, same chemical compound as absinthe,” said Ella. “It’s good toxic, psychotropic toxic.”

  “You get drunk?”

  “Not really. Sometimes.”

  Maya grabbed the shovel from Ella and thrust it into the ground, loosening the mugwort from the tile. She did this a few more times, squatting as she did so. “It’s not as easy as it looks, but it’s all in the legs,” she said, snipping the mugwort free. She glanced at Ella. “You could do this all day, huh?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  * * *

  Above them the sky lightened to a more luminous gray and they resembled gravediggers, undiscovered in the morning, uprooting weeds that collected at their bare feet. Neighborhood sounds broke the silence between them—the halt and screech of sanitation trucks and whistling workers, dogs shuffling with their walkers, bodega gates grinding upward and open to commuters, who, with morning coffee in hand, disappeared underground onto the rumbling trains. Maya wiped her brow and peeled her veil, using it to wipe sweat from her neck. One minute pious, the next a regular girl—Ella caught herself staring.

  “Your eyes have glazed over,” said Maya, noticing that Ella had stopped digging alongside her. “Time for you to get some rest.”

  “What about you?”

  “You’ve got all those books in your room. I’ll keep myself busy.”

  Ella nodded and folded her glasses, tucking them into her shirt.

  She went to lie on her hammock and didn’t wake up until noon, when she heard Charu’s voice:

  “Yes, the beach! I’ve been, like, twice this summer. Let’s go to Brighton Beach! Sexy Russian dudes who might be gay or just Russian. Pierogies and sour cream!”

  Ella could make out Charu and Maya sitting on canvas lawn chairs across the backyard, and from the splash of color on bare skin, it looked like they were wearing bathing suits.

  “More like Russian mafia,” said Maya.

  “We could ride down Bedford,” called out Ella.

  “She shows a rare display of spontaneity!” yelled Charu. “Good!”

  “Let’s go to Riis beach,” suggested Maya. “It’s less crowded and less Russian.”

  “What’s your issue with Russians?” asked Charu. “What’d they ever do to you?”

  “Rather than get undressed with someone’s eyes, don’t you like the idea of being naked on the beach?” said Maya. “Nice and private and naked?”

  “No,” Ella said, just as Charu said, “Hell yes!”

  * * *

  To get provisions for their trip, they made a pit stop at the corner bodega, the famously misspelled 24 Ours and Co. The yellow, weather-torn awning was a familiar landmark in the neighborhood. They walked past a group of boys straddling bikes, leaning against the wall. Two of them muttered, “Damn, girl,” in unison at Charu. She’d waited to turn the corner from their house to slip off her jeans, and now she sported a miniskirt. Inside the bodega, two cats lazed near the cold drinks, a motherly calico and a cross-eyed albino kitten. They were the feline watchkeepers of the obese shopkeeper, who was arguing with a teenage girl holding a bag of plantain chips and a peach iced tea.

  “Mister, I told you I wanted a brown bag, not one of them black plastic joints!” The girl shook her head; the plastic beads tied to the end of her cornrows rattled.

  “No!” the man yelled from behind a plexiglass counter. He noticed Maya and lifted a tobacco-yellowed finger, wagging it like a schoolteacher. “One dollar,” he said.

  “Give her a brown bag, first,” said Maya.

  “Fine, fine,” said the man.

  “Thank you, miss,” said the girl, as she walked out.

  Maya picked up a large bag of spicy corn chips, a couple of rolls, and sliced ham.

  “You eat ham?” asked Ella.

  “My first babysitter was a Puerto Rican girl. I begged her to let me eat ham and
cheese sandwiches and one day, she finally did,” said Maya, chuckling.

  “I just started eating pepperoni last year and now I’m addicted,” said Charu.

  “You gonna eat this? Ain’t you a Muslim?” asked the man.

  “Yup,” said Maya, pulling out a twenty.

  * * *

  A bike ride from 111 Cambridge Place to Riis beach was a thirteen-mile adventure. Ella wasn’t one for beaches; she was never sure of what to wear. Bikinis, never. One-piece bathing suits were unforgiving and uncomfortable. She could have finished the ride in forty minutes, but between Charu’s bicycle (a Wicked Witch of the West–style cruiser; there was no speeding on that thing), and the monster camping backpack Charu had her carrying, Ella found herself at the end of their cycling line. The backpack was stuffed with a sheet Charu had patched together from old T-shirts, the ham and chips and soda, Ella’s boom box and soccer ball, sunscreen, and a change of clothing for when they came home that night. They rode behind Maya, who had made trips to this beach before. Her hijab sailed behind her like a kite, as if she might levitate. The three of them coasted down Ocean Avenue, then turned onto Flatbush Avenue, until they crossed the rickety bridge into the state park. On the boardwalk they hopped off their bikes, and walked down to the beach. Maya stopped a few feet away from the wet sand. “Here’s good,” she said, spreading Charu’s patchwork sheet.

  Ella hurled the backpack onto one corner of the sheet and used her soccer ball and boom box to hold down opposite corners. She took a seat by the boom box. The sound of waves crashing matched Ella’s mood and she took off her glasses to see the world enveloped in streaks of black and white. She stretched her legs and tipped the ball toward the water.

  Charu yelled, “I’ll get it!” She caught the ball from a wave and threw it back to the shore. She jumped into the water and whooped with delight.