Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  “I’m probably making something of nothing,” she says. “Let’s change the subject. Where’s Fred these days? Is he off as well, on some mysterious trip?” Fred, Paige’s husband, was absent more frequently than Rand. Unassuming and bespectacled, he seemed more interested in antiquities than in his rumored work with the clandestine service. He and Rand had always been chummy; Fred was an eager audience for all Rand’s archaeological show-and-tell. They had traveled together into Kurdish territory, into wild places unsafe for women and children, and they had spent hours huddled in the corner of this very room, discussing one arcane object or another.

  “He’s quite well, I believe, though not at all mysterious,” Paige says. “He’s at Catal Huyuk as we speak, digging around in the dirt, happy as a clam.”

  For some reason these words strike Grace, in this moment, as simply too much to be borne. “Oh, come on, Paige,” she says. “Do we always have to be so Byzantine? I mean we all know. It’s not exactly a secret what he does.”

  Paige lays out an untidy cross of cards on the sofa in front of her. She is occupied with them for several minutes, turning them up and then down again, clucking a little in her throat.

  She looks up at Grace. “What he does?” she says finally. “He’s an anthropologist. Publishes papers regularly. Lectures at the university. What did you think?”

  Grace stares at her. It seems incredible, even outrageous, that at this juncture Paige would keep up these pretenses. After a few moments of stilted silence Grace vacates the couch and lifts her coat from the back of a chair. She brushes the cat hair from it automatically and stands awkwardly before shrugging it on.

  “Think,” says Paige, without looking up, studying a card with two naked, androgynous figures depicted on its face. “Think hard.” The card is one Grace had often hoped for in readings—the lovers—but she’d learned that its meanings were mercurial, and not necessarily benign.

  What Paige suggests is not lost on her, but quite suddenly something else occurs to her as well. “All this,” she says, still holding the heavy coat, gesturing with it. “Bahar. Firdis. This isn’t a surprise to you, is it? I haven’t told you anything you didn’t know.”

  “I think,” Paige says reflectively, “that Bahar really meant it as a kindness. Helping this friend you’d spoken of so often. Someone else could have been found just as easily. It wouldn’t have mattered had you refused. Not in the slightest.”

  Despite her tone, Grace thinks she sees in Paige’s eyes a flash of recognition, of understanding, some sliver of tenderness or pity: she seems to see that on Grace’s part, all this had really been no more than a display of feathers, a show of influence.

  “But that isn’t true,” Grace says. “She never expected me to say no, she didn’t allow for that, not for a minute. She never does.”

  “Maybe not. But it really doesn’t matter anyway. You didn’t say no. And if it eases your mind at all, it is not your maid’s baby that is now with your friend. That didn’t quite work out. So you can comfortably forget all this. In fact, you can pretend it never happened.”

  Grace stares at her, bewildered.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What I said. Bahar took a different baby to your friend in Germany. Firdis’s child is now with relatives in Istanbul.”

  “And Firdis knows this?”

  Paige shrugged. “I don’t think so. It’s a little complicated. Anyway, Grace, you were never important in this to Bahar, not really.”

  As Grace stands there, mulling all this, a matted Siamese cat steps daintily across her shoes and makes her jump.

  FOR DAYS after that, Grace goes around in a fog. It’s brought on obliquely by Paige’s revelations and Rand’s continuing absence, by Ahmet’s withdrawal, by the distant, worrisome matters of Edie and the child, but also by a bottle of pills that Paige had given her that same afternoon, and suggested she use to “take the edge off.” Certainly they work—they quiet her racing heart and send little messages of calm through her jangling nerves, they facilitate long afternoon naps and a sense, if not exactly of well-being, then of disaster indefinitely postponed. But there is danger in this, and Grace knows it. She takes the pills sparingly and eventually cuts them with a kitchen knife into tiny chips, with the thought of policing herself.

  She cannot help but wonder, in lucid moments, what it is about her, Grace, that creates these impossible situations, these complicated human snarls. The lives of other people seem so straightforward. If she thinks about any of it for too long Grace finds herself reaching for fragments of the little pink pills—one and then another—with their promise of temporary, muzzy-headed peace.

  So when Paige appears at the door a week after their conversation carrying a casserole and puts this ridiculous scheme to her—the idea that they will all drive out into the countryside late at night and learn to take the wheels off cars—Grace is less than enthusiastic. A number of women have been invited, some exercise to make them all more self-sufficient, or so goes the advertising. They will drive out beyond the city, Paige says, and take turns changing a tire. Once, Grace might have found this a reasonable entertainment, but now it seems like the absolute height of absurdity. Fancy Dress, says the invitation that comes to the apartment later by messenger. Evening gloves. Still, Grace does not see how she can possibly decline.

  She drops the invitation on the kitchen counter and fumbles in her pocketbook for the pill bottle. Firdis has quit, suddenly and without any coherent explanation. Rand has vanished—he has been gone nearly two months—and Canada is utterly a stranger. From the inside of her head to the unfamiliar, muscular curve of her legs, Grace finds her daughter bewildering. Grace watches her surreptitiously, wondering what ever will become of her, of them. When they talk, or when they are close to each other, Grace will get a whiff of her scent—her girlish, horsey, filched bath-salts odor—and feel an odd catch in her throat. It might be anything, that feeling. Savage and indefinable, it could be love, possibly, or the other.

  It seems to Grace these days that Canada’s eyes hold too large a question, too vast a worry, and that her hair, so long unnoticed by Grace, is now sleek, tended by hands that are suddenly knowledgeable and adult. She cannot imagine where these skills came from, or the budding breasts she sees beneath childish blouses, or the bracelet around her wrist that Grace did not buy. Canada’s Turkish is better than her own now, like her German years earlier. She has her father’s dry wit, and, out of nowhere, his sudden, overwhelming shyness.

  Later that afternoon, reading a book at the stables, the heat turned up high in the little red car, Grace is surprised to find herself missing Rand. How strange. She thinks of all his charms, lost or long forgotten. She remembers the pride she had in him so many years earlier, the way he looked in his uniform, the private jokes they’d shared. And, with the forgiveness of nostalgia, and the renewal of affection that comes on the heels of a close call, her husband begins to seem like not so bad a bargain after all.

  Some afternoons Grace and Bahar stand in the cold beside the ring and watch Ahmet circle it astride one of the bigger, more spirited horses. Often Canada trails along behind him, or points her mount toward some obstacle he has indicated with a finger. Bahar leans with her elbows on the splintered railing, her chin propped in her fist. Now Grace sees fresh angles in her old friend, flaws she had quite overlooked. Bahar returned from Germany having gained several pounds—the strudel, no doubt, and the bratwurst, and the beer. Though she is not as perfect as she’d once seemed, she is characteristically breezy—the alarming information Grace had relayed about Edie’s history seemed barely to faze her at all.

  “She has some talent,” Bahar says, watching Canada ride.

  “Does she?” says Grace, with blank and honest surprise, for such a thing had not occurred to her.

  But overall there is new quiet between the two women, a sense that much has been said or silently agreed to and little remains. Now they speak of the most pedestrian things—Bahar
even speaks of her boys, of their behavior at school, their wild ways amid her delicate furnishings, and of Ali and his ever-busier practice. The subject of orphans does not arise between them; the matter of Firdis goes undiscussed.

  Once, Bahar says this: “It is only a matter of time before your maid becomes pregnant again. Mark my words.”

  Grace says nothing of Firdis’s absence and replies easily, “If that is the case, I don’t wish to know about it.”

  They laugh for longer than the moment requires, and their mirth seems to sum up all the thoughts they have decided not to voice, all the blame and accusation, the possible disasters, the barely averted calamities.

  And there has recently been some news from Edie herself. She has returned to Saudi Arabia and she and Greg have reconciled. The baby—whoever’s it is, wherever it came from—has gone with her and Edie writes a few bright, delighted letters about the joys of motherhood. Where Firdis’s baby may be, the details of it, its disposition, who knows?

  When Grace opens these envelopes, photographs slide out with the stationery. Bahar keeps several of these—“For the scrapbook I am making,” she says with what seems to be sincerity, but this may merely be what she thinks is expected of her. The pictures show Greg, Edie, and the child among Edie’s old furnishings, or on a busy street with shopping bags, or once, the baby alone, teetering listlessly atop a camel festooned with ribbons. When Grace studies them, she feels both relief and exhaustion—they’re an unwelcome reminder of her foolishness, the dire repercussions and possibilities that seem to lie just beyond their plain white margins. Grace wonders, too, if there is something about this baby—in its vacant eyes and strangely clenched hands—that does not seem quite right.

  Edie’s letters recount the tedium of infancy and child rearing, the discomforts that Grace feels she’s just barely recovered from herself, though all that was years ago. Edie has questions Grace can no longer answer: at what age should a baby babble, smile, grab for dangerous objects? Grace skims these with a little shudder, sensing Edie’s vague, unspoken worry, then folds them away to reply to at a later date. It is easier to let it slide, to relegate Edie and Greg and those memories to a back corner of her mind, among the clutter and debris of other lost friendships and homes, all those distant, splintered recollections.

  ON THE evening of Paige’s excursion, Grace dresses hastily. She takes from the back of a drawer a pair of evening gloves that are on their way out anyway—one pearl button missing, some stubborn soiling at an elbow. She chooses a dress she doesn’t much care for, one already somewhat overexposed.

  She waits at the appointed time just inside the heavy glass door of the lobby, scanning the street for headlights. In her hand she carries a small evening bag—tissues, lipstick, a jeweled compact that had belonged to her mother—and wears on her feet a pair of evening sandals she will not much mourn if they are altogether ruined. In the bag is also a letter from Edie she received that very morning—she intends to discuss the disturbing contents with Paige. But really, Grace does not expect much excitement from the evening: several hours of forced gaiety in the backseat of a car, a bottle passed among the occupants, the eventuality of winding up the evening at the Officers’ Club with a story to tell, minimally grease-stained and not much enlightened on matters of automotive repair.

  Grace knows most of these women, some better than others. They wind out of the city in a little caravan, driven by their silent, uniformed chauffeurs. Grace shares a car with Paige and several others; their dresses rustle together, they edge their shoes off and curl their stocking feet in the gritty pile of the carpet. Paige has brought champagne, someone else an ornate flask of expensive scotch. They leave the city lights behind them and for a while the conversation is about children and husbands and the absurdity of this particular expedition, which they seem almost to have forgotten they undertook willingly.

  Grace wishes to be nearly anywhere else. In fact, for most of the ride, she finds herself thinking of Rand, and of certain quiet evenings before the insanity of diplomatic life overtook them. She thinks, for instance, of the little apartment she had lovingly maintained before they were married, the amateur meals she cooked for him there, pretending to be grown-up. They’d played cards after dinner and he showed her his repertoire: his fancy shuffles, his sleights of hand, his many disappearing tricks.

  She remembers the first time he left in the middle of the night: it was in Baghdad, before the war, when everything was still contented and lovely. She can recall the way the cool tile felt on her feet as she slid from the bed they shared in the middle of the night when the baby cried. He didn’t have that suitcase yet—not packed, not ready to go at a moment’s notice—and when the call came she’d risen from bed with him and gone through the drawers to help. She took out his dark folded socks, his snowy underclothes: she took his second uniform from the depths of the closet and brushed its stiff shoulders free of lint. She remembers his excitement at the prospect of what lay ahead, his thrill at the stealthy, midnight nature of it all. She liked that sudden spark in his eyes, and they shared something like an intoxication as they knelt together in the near dark, whispering so as not to wake the baby. She found an old suitcase in a closet and knelt on the floor beside it while he shaved hurriedly in the bathroom. The light was warm on the bare floors and the sight of the bed—rumpled, still holding their shared heat—made her nearly purr with pleasure. She felt a reluctant, reawakened love for him, the almost-ache of his approaching absence. She imagined the cool of the night air beyond the arched gate of their garden, the swaying palms, the car idling there on the street, waiting to take him away.

  Where are you going?

  I don’t know, he told her. Can’t say.

  She had thought then of the not too distant desert and the night lights of the city, illuminated somewhere beyond her view, outside her imagination, far from the warm little room with the crumpled counterpane and the sleeping baby, the open suitcase on the floor, its contents lovingly stowed, his toiletries neatly packed in the silky elastic side pockets, socks rolled by her own slim hands.

  And since it had all still been between them then—desire, affection, good feeling—she’d pulled him down beside the gray suitcase and made love to him on the floor, her gown riding up around her hips, their bodies sliding and catching against the tiles, while he protested and then succumbed, chuckling, his lemony soap and his smooth skin warm and redolent against her neck.

  Then he was gone and the bed felt different—both worse and better, emptier and more full. His departure left a pretty ache, a small, coin-size hollow at her center, and she thought of him abroad in the world without her, thought of him moving through airfields as dawn broke and climbing onto cold metal transports—huge, whirring, dangerous—that would lift him into the air and carry him away, a suitcase his only anchor to her, their baby, their brand-new, freshly minted life.

  IT’S QUITE cold and Grace’s evening coat does not properly break the chill: little handfuls of snow beat up against her face, her ankles feel frozen through. The sky is grimy with stars. The women stand on the side of the road and take turns handling the tire iron. They heft it in their gloved hands, remarking, Oh it’s cold! or Beastly heavy, and then pass it along. There are perhaps seven of them there—pretty, snow-blown figures in evening dress, a little tipsy from the ride, laughing, stamping their feet.

  They are waiting for someone to call this whole thing off, for Paige to shepherd them back into the cars for cognac and petit fours, to give the order for the Officers’ Club. But still they linger, pressing their nearly bare feet to the hard earth, grabbing their coats closer. The drivers stand a safe distance off, deliberately unhelpful, smoking. In the dark their cigarettes glow and fade; a brief, arcing ember flares as a spent butt is tossed to the ground, a cascade of sparks.

  And then Paige is leaning down with the heavy iron to undo the lug nuts. They hear her pant in the darkness, the noise of unfamiliar exertion.

  Simone says, “You
have got to be kidding me. Those tires are perfectly good. They got us here.”

  Then the sound of the nuts striking the ground, of Paige saying, “Someone get those, we don’t want to lose them.”

  Scrambling, fingernails on gravel, swearing, the clicking of the weighty little objects in someone’s hand. Grace has her arms folded at her chest; the wind ruffles her hair, bites down on her neck.

  Someone puts an object into her hands. The women have taken off a front tire and Paige is bent over awkwardly, wheeling the spare from the rear of the car.

  The tire iron is heavy and cold; the chill penetrates the silky, slippery fabric of her gloves. Grace balances it in her hands like a stick of dynamite.

  “Here,” says Paige. “Come over here and I’ll show you.”

  Grace approaches. She hears the gritty noise of her heels in the dirt, the swish of her gown against the material of her coat and her sheathed legs. The women stand huddled together around the car; there is the glug of liquid in the flask, laughter, Simone’s peevish voice. The drivers in their dark uniforms are little more than a smudge at the edge of her vision.

  She bends, feeling the wind between her legs and a gentle fizzing in her veins; she’d swallowed two of the pink pills before leaving the house. She pulls her hands free of the gloves, wraps her bare hands around the icy metal cylinder. Paige holds a flashlight and a cone of light plays over the bare wheel well, the tire discarded on the ground, the spare she has balanced against her knees. Simone’s feet, in ridiculously high-heeled shoes, are shifting back and forth; her ankles disappear beneath the velvet folds of her gown.

  Through the dark, Simone’s voice says, “So, I guess Rand is off traveling again?”

  Grace doesn’t answer; she is trying to figure out the purpose of the tire iron, which slips and shifts uncooperatively in her cold hands.