by Sara Dillon
A cat; late 1970s
That time, almost thirty years ago, my parents liked it that I was at Saint Theo’s, that I was the best of the best students, never anything less than an A. Well, what was not to like? They even liked Calvin after a fashion, laughed at the way he called out Louis, Louis, so loud it could be heard all over our neighborhood, as Louis came sailing over the backyard fence. Calvin could genuinely enjoy one of Daddy’s ultra-sweet whiskey sours; Calvin was, they thought, a good sport. Gramma’s ideal for me was that I would find someone who “understood” me. I never liked the sound of that.
Just as Daddy spoiled her, Gramma also spoiled him, and told me that I had made him so proud, so proud.
In my last year at Saint Theo’s, I set up a kind of perfection.
I was ready to go; the seasons cooperated. I directed Molière, in French. I painted portraits of Calvin. I sat in the semidarkness with my complete Shakespeare. I found everything. And then Calvin gave me a cat.
It was a frightening cat, and I didn’t want it; it was wild, feral, truly it was. It was tiny and white but very vicious, and it seemed to hate me, despite the fact that I tried to be very good to it. It would burrow down into the bed covers and attack my legs and arms. I went about with red scratches; just having the cat there troubled me; I asked Calvin if I could give it back. At first, I thought it was a girl and called it Feline. Then it seemed more boy and I switched to Felix.
I had been allotted a small, very old room of my own in what they called the Language House, where as I remember you were not supposed to speak English during the day, or some such rule. My view was out on the old polo grounds, and there were willow trees framing the long expanses of grass. I put my drawings up on the wall; a clear symbol, as I rarely, before or since, put anything up on my walls. I generally never move in. I am always ready to go.
There were bunkbeds, so I could choose whether I would sleep up or down on a particular night.
I wasn’t sure what I would do when I left Saint Theo’s; perhaps an MFA, maybe more travel. I applied for fellowships, half-heartedly, casually, not paying much attention to nice typing or clear statements of purpose. I wasn’t worried. I was bothered by not being able to like the cat.
When Madina gets mad, she says, I wish that was not in the world!
And I too wish that Sandy had not been in the world. I don’t like the chapter on Sandy. I don’t like the story of Sandy. I wish that Sandy had not been in the world.
I wish that Calvin had not chosen that particular cat.
I wish I had stayed in my room in the Language House and then gone and done my MFA and never got that fellowship. I wish all that. And, yes, if wishes were horses.
Pattaya; 1976
I wondered where Sandy was from. That was my first mistake. In most cases, it was no problem to at least figure out generally where someone was from, but in his case I couldn’t tell.
And thanks to Gramma, perhaps, I had no box into which to put experiences. I hadn’t learned one thing worth knowing about life apart from myself; the sensory process of waking up and being surprised by new things, happening one by one in succession. I had no perspective, could not see people as part of a pattern, perhaps I had missed that part of schooling that makes children put the blocks and umbrellas and shapes in patterns of two one two, or three one three one two and so forth.
And I had that unfortunate thing about kissing.
And Calvin did not rescue me.
And there was the cat, Felix.
I had no immunity, no basis to understand what Sandy was saying. I’d never known anyone who spoke like that. It all backfired so completely, and there I was, with my silly little plan, all on my own.
I think I wrote him a note that said something like, Where are you from?
There was some complex scheme of go-betweens, some Libyan student whose task it was to bring a penciled reply on a saucer, or some such device. We spoke for the first time on one of the great porches overlooking the polo park.
I’m leaving here soon, yeah, said Sandy. He had come to Saint Theo’s on an English language course.
Then we could live a year in a week, I said, stupidly, absurdly, having no idea what I was doing. It was meant to slot into my little comings and goings, my kiss thing, my motifs. But it certainly did not.
That Sandy didn’t kill me, actually and in a manner of speaking, is quite astonishing, thinking of it now. It was a textbook process, but I simply knew nothing about it.
Sandy’s family had fled the Punjab for Southeast Asia in the late 1940s, and bought a string of fabric shops in Thailand. Sandy had been pals with GIs during the Vietnam War, and spoke English like an American. He wore a black jacket; he smoked. He only wore a turban when with his family at home.
Sandy figured out in just a week or so how to make everything I had ever done or wanted seem small and sordid. You see, with good reason I don’t like this story of Sandy.
Sandy visited my perfect room.
I tried to get Calvin to take back the cat; it became a bitter issue between us.
Sandy finished each of his sentences with the word yeah; I went to see the guy, yeah. Or, I wrote to that dumb girl, yeah.
According to Sandy, there was someone waiting for him in California, a girl from Hong Kong who was all ready to set him up with a car and an apartment.
Well, I said, we can spend a week together, and I will remember you.
Sandy went for that for a day or two, then scowled at me about it. Well, that’s talking like a prostitute, yeah, he said.
And with one fell swoop, I was in Sandy’s world.
He wrote to the girl in California, and told her that he would not be coming. He had a new love, in this cold place. That was me.
His first order of business was to prevent me from talking to Calvin. I hate the look on that guy’s face, yeah, he said.
I saw Calvin from a distance and ran after him. I’m not supposed to be talking to you, I said. Please help me, please do something.
But Calvin, like everyone else, was cross at me for this new motif. Except that it wasn’t merely that.
And then, I got the fellowship. It came through. I could spend a year studying literature as I chose. As to where, well, yes, Ireland. I’ll go there for you; I’ll do everything for you, Sandy said. I’d die for you, yeah, he said, and flipped the end of my hair, laughing. My family will go wild, but I’ll do it for you. Friends from all over the world came in and out of his dorm room; the young men from Libya who said they were heading home to serve the Colonel, Thai guys in orange-lined parkas with fur around the hoods. Sandy remained stubbornly underdressed in his black jacket. He used lots of lotion on his face and hands. He strolled around his room in a silky bathrobe. You’d look great in this, yeah, he told me, referring to the robe. He hated the cat and told me to get rid of it, give it back to that damned guy, he told me.
Sandy was not a new motif. I was afraid of him. I didn’t fully understand that I was afraid of him, but I was suddenly constrained and timid, and careful of what I said. Things were moving very quickly. Sandy was making plans, and telling me about the heartbreak of the dumb girl from Hong Kong who kept calling him.
Sandy had huge stacks of photographs. Photos of the now former girlfriend at a festival, photos of the family fabric shop in Pattaya, photos of his sister Gurmeet used for distribution to her marriage candidates. He told me all about his family, his nieces and nephews, their nicknames, how his sisters kept the weight down by running up and down stairs, how they played tricks like putting too much salt in the food when his oldest sister was serving a meal to her in-laws.
I’ll take you there and dress you right, he said. We’ll pick out beautiful fabric with little flowers. He held up his fingers and rubbed them together, as if to better see the flowers. You’ll look fine; we’ll get rid of this stuff you wear, yeah.
There seemed to be no way to make Sandy leave. If I told him that it had been nice, but he needed to go, he would accuse me
of being a flirt, a phony. So I said nothing and thought that even if he stayed for a few more months, I could escape and move on. It was a bad ending to Saint Theo’s; everyone was disappointed, they thought I was off chasing a motif, this time betraying everyone, upsetting mild-mannered Daddy just as I was about to walk away with every graduation award one could.
I handed Calvin back the cat, scratching and biting. I shed some tears, and part of my life was at that moment over.
It is not a good story, this one.
I brought Sandy home to meet my family. For some inexplicable reason, my mother found him to be what she called effeminate. Perhaps it was the brown silk shirt with the Nehru collar. He was already planning how we would spend the year in Ireland, but I convinced him that I couldn’t tell my parents yet. I pretended to them that I was returning to Ireland to become a scholar of the Irish language, and that Sandy would be gone. Don’t worry, I said, it will all be over soon. This cut down on hysterics.
But alas, it was not so.
Sandy followed me to what he called a godforsaken, terrible place, with no fancy hotels or good places to eat, or beautiful fabric shops, or cinemas showing Indian movies with gorgeous girls floating on rafts in Kashmir.
Funny enough, many years later Ireland became much more of a place Sandy would have liked.
To avoid Ireland, we went often to England. We wandered around London and shopped in the spice markets. We met old friends of his, and he told me joyfully that their families had decided to accept me. My friends are all writing to me, asking how tall you are, he said, laughing. You lucky dog, they write to me. Dumb guys.
In the oddest of ways, I’d been forced to escape with Sandy. Sandy had hatched an elaborate ruse, according to which he would enlist the help of the airline crew and I would meet him inside the plane, never telling my parents that he was coming with me.
I said goodbye to them on a hot night in Boston.
I am sick, I kept saying to them.
You’ll be fine, they said. You’ll be just fine, you’re always like this when you’re nervous.
I entered the plane and saw Sandy’s head tilted sideways into the aisle of the plane. I felt some huge curtain come down in back of me, and I was hidden from everyone’s view.
All I can say of that year is that I learned to make a very fine curry.
It was in London that he, of course, began to hit me.
No one took pity on me, or even thought of doing so. Who would pity the adventurer, for such I was considered, albeit in a circumscribed sort of way. I was thought to have all the luck, to be able to pick and choose, to be daring. I’d fallen into my own trap, but that might be good for the soul, and no one, but no one, thought to rescue me.
Dublin awaited like a stage set; in the country I had left some years before, then returned to with Calvin. It was there; the grey stone walls of Dublin, still unruined and undemolished, and then the train rides into the grassy green evenings, and then the West, the same, still unspoiled. Clement and I exchanged letters often, but I didn’t tell him that I was going to Ireland; I didn’t want to have to bring Sandy to meet them. I preserved all of them there, silent and separate from me, and did not approach.
Sandy accused me of flirting with men on the bus; on every bus trip, every stroll down the street, I was making eyes at men. His family wrote him letters, What are you doing, our dear Sandy, in that God forsaken place, you know what those places are like after the British leave, there is nothing, get yourself out of there, the girl is trying to fool you, our dear one, you are breaking our hearts.
I’m doing it all for you, yeah, he said to me again and again.
We rented a garden flat, and I became a prisoner on that suburban street, far away from anyone, so silent during the day. I watched the feet pass by at street level, now and again, forward and back. The late afternoon sun came briefly onto the navy carpet, then the sun was gone again. I never went out into the yard. When I went to the shops, it was always with Sandy.
He read all my letters before I did, and said that he suspected I was hearing from Calvin. I remember the way that damned guy looked at you, he said.
I cut tomatoes and potatoes at the sink. I learned about garam masala, dhania, jeera, haldi and paneer. The windows steamed up as I cooked. Sandy left and came back, left and came back.
It is a wonder Sandy did not kill me, as he came close enough.
I was supposed to be going to lectures at Trinity, supposed to be opening up the green world of the West, doing research on story telling. I went to class a few times, in my long homemade skirts, but then Sandy would hit me and I couldn’t show my face outside.
Sandy is not a good story, and I would like to cut it short, very short.
He told me every day that if I left him, he couldn’t get out of there, that dump, with no good hotels and no restaurants except those serving pot pies, couldn’t rely on his pals in England, they would laugh at him, being taken in by this witch of an American. I would have to wait until the year was over, would have to wait until the end of the fellowship, he was counting on me, I’d made promises.
I kept promising I would marry him to make him stop trying to kill me; we would publish the banns in the back part of the paper; the blurry ad would appear, the details, let all object who might, and then just beforehand, I would somehow find a reason why it couldn’t be that day. Sandy would fume and rage, and then we would start over again.
One day he told me he had flushed all my poems down the toilet; he attacked my typewriter with an umbrella until the keys were all mangled, the inexpensive light blue typewriter on which I’d written about Hamlet and John Donne.
I’ve stopped you from saving all that disgusting stuff, he said. I want to get out of here and read something heavy, some philosophy, the Gita.
Funny enough, when at last it was about to be over, I found the poems rolled up in a ball in the closet. He hadn’t put them down the toilet; I wasn’t sure why. But that day I thought it was all gone, John Merrill and Calvin and the poetry seminars. I lay in the back room, the bed clothes of unfamiliar fabric. I kept planning for escape, but my suitcase was under guard.
I divide it up into scenes, only several. That way I make it shorter, because this is not a story that can go on, who could bear it? It is hors de narrative.
Of all stupid things, I feared being asked to pay back the fellowship if I left; and I feared Sandy’s family blaming me for leaving him in the lurch if I disappeared.
In those days, in the town of Clifden, you had to pay an extra fifty pence to take a bath in a B & B; there was nothing to buy but hats smelling of sheep. How Sandy hated it; it reminded him of depressing post-colonial locales in northern India. He made fun of everything, he lamented the hotels of Thailand, and his friend the Colonel with his stable of girls in the brothel. I moved out and went to stay in a room in a new Dublin suburb; Sandy lied his way into getting my number from Trinity, and phoned me every five minutes, until the landlady requested me to leave. He was waiting for me at the end of the drive.
Once I thought he had broken my rib, so I went to the doctor and told him I’d fallen off a bicycle.
At Christmastime, I secretly made my way to the airport and somehow got on a flight to Boston, and then eventually to Vermont. I arrived unannounced at the door, one holiday night, in the cold dark, walked through the garage, quiet, smelling of oil. Everything was the same; Daddy watching Canadian hockey on television, Gramma wringing her hands.
She never mentioned Sandy to me. Not a word.
I spent a week at home as if nothing had happened; no one mentioned my return to Dublin. One night before I was to go back, I held onto her and said, Please, please don’t make me go back. I’m scared; please, don’t make me. Do something.
She frowned and said, But what about the scholarship, all that money you would have to pay them back?
And so, I returned to Dublin. Sandy forgave me for leaving, at least for a few days.
To be fair to myse
lf about it, no one had ever told me that anyone like Sandy existed. I just didn’t know. The news had never reached me. For Grandma, men were good to their wives, she often described husbands of their acquaintance as being so good to that girl, the girl being the wife. Daddy if asked would have had a more worldly view, I feel sure now, but then again, probably assumed that I would never meet anyone like Sandy, or pay him the time of day if I did. But as for being trapped in a room, cowering in the corner, being accused of everything under the sun, a liar, a flirt, an unresponsive log, making a bloody fool of him, of such situations I’d not been told a word.
And somehow the months of intolerable Irish dampness passed into spring. I was invited to attend the grand finale of the fellowship year, in Bruges I think, picturesque Bruges, to meet all the other fellowship awardees. Sandy took the invitation as a secret code, designed with my complicity, to lock him out of the festivities. I wrote with Sandy looking over my shoulder, Could my fiancé attend the reception and events in Bruges; they wrote back rather coolly that if necessary he could be accommodated as well.
We found ourselves over there; I remember watching from the train window, an old man on a bicycle moving slowly, peacefully down the Flemish dawn, along an unpaved avenue lined with perfect poplars.
And we searched for a dress for me to wear to this event, a dress that Sandy would approve of. How he hated my clothes—the old sweaters, the tired looking boots. He told me constantly that one day we would go to his family’s shop in Thailand, when he could trust me to meet them properly, and we would pick out fabrics with beautiful little blue flowers and they would make me so many dresses. Then I would be right.
He told me about his friend the GI who had married a Thai girl and how every night she knelt at his feet and said, I thank God for my husband. Sandy would laugh over it and take out their photographs; he always had new piles of photographs.
