by Galaxy Craze
“Slow day.” He untied his scarf and hung it on a coatrack. “Anyone phone?”
“Just Mum.”
He unbuttoned his coat, turning away from me to hang it on the rack over his scarf. I had the key and the money in my hand. “What did she have to say?”
“She just wanted to say hi to me.”
He looked at me from where he stood. “I got you a cheese and tomato sandwich. You like that, don’t you?”
I nodded. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Thanks, Dad,” he said, mimicking me.
“And a delicious strawberry tart from the shop up the road.” He turned the lock on the door and headed to the back of the shop where there was a mini kitchen behind the door. It was bad manners, he said, to eat at the register, in front of customers. It lowered the tone.
He opened the door. While his back was turned I slipped the money into my pocket and put the key behind the picture frame.
FOURTEEN
The ashram school began. The schoolhouse had not been built yet, so our classroom was the porch of Lotus House.
In the past, children on the ashram had gone to the public school in Rosemont, but there had been some incidents last year. A few of the students had used racial slurs toward Summer and her younger sister and brother. One of the boys in Summer’s class had spat on her. His spit landed on her bare shoulder, and for the rest of the day she held her hand on that place, covering it like a scar.
Brad and Dylan had gotten in fights with a group of boys. One night, the ashram gates were toilet-papered and spray-painted. They wrote WELCOME TO FREAKY TOWN! DEVIL WORSHIPERS AND FAGGOTS LIVE HERE.
After this, Parvati said the children would be taught on the ashram. A rectangle of ground had been broken behind the temple, and funds were being raised to build the school there.
In the mornings, Mum, Eden, and I ate breakfast together in the dining hall and then we walked to our classrooms. From the porch of Lotus House, I watched my mother and Eden walk to his classroom in the house across the pond. He wore the rucksack from his school in London. Mum kissed him good-bye at the door of the house and waited while he went inside with the other children. Afterward, she ran to the kitchen, where she would spend the day cooking for Parvati.
There were only four of us in my class: Sati, Summer, Molly, and me. We sat at a small table with Kelly at the head. I sat next to Sati, and Summer and Molly sat across from us. I felt Sati touch my thigh under the table while Kelly handed out an article she had photocopied from a newspaper.
I reached down, touching Sati’s fingers, and she pressed a small piece of paper into my hand. I glanced down, reading the note. I’m so happy you are staying here.
I smiled at Sati, crinkling the note in my hand.
Through the window, the sun fell in golden patches between the trees. In the frame of the window, the light and the trees looked more like a photograph than something real.
After school, Sati and I carried our books to the stables. We fed and brushed the horses and gave them clean water, and then we sat down on the bench to do our homework.
When we were finished with our homework, we climbed the ladder to the hay loft. She taught me things to do with my tongue that she had learned from her boyfriend in Denver. She taught me to give a blow job by sucking on her finger.
Sometimes we pretended to be other people. Sati was the handsome riding instructor and I was the student. I lay down on the floor and she was the doctor, examining me. Once, I found her near death at the foot of a tree from eating poisonous berries and I had to revive her with kisses. Sometimes, while we kissed, I pretended she was the boy at the dairy in Scotland, but this was a secret I never told her.
On the weekends we took walks through the grapefruit grove and sat by the river. When we were away from the stables, she took my hand in hers. Sometimes, a large golden dog who hung around the stable followed us.
Once he found a turtle crossing the path and carried it up in his mouth. “Drop that!” Sati yelled as she chased him, but he swerved between us and ran ahead, dropping it now and then to sniff and lick the turtle’s shell, but when we were near him he picked up the turtle and ran away with his nose and tail high in the air.
The afternoon sun set behind the treetops, and mosquitoes and flies hovered around us. Sati swatted a mosquito on her arm “That’s the only thing I’ll ever kill,” she said. We sat by the river, dangling our feet in the cool running water. The dog lay in the shade of a nearby tree. He had grown tired of the turtle and dropped it somewhere along the way.
When I looked at the stream disappearing through the trees, I thought of it as a road. I thought of Sati walking alone through the woods to the pay phone at the gas station and how I would be too afraid to walk there alone.
Our feet touched in the water.
“Sati?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you start liking it here? I mean, when did you stop wanting to leave?”
Sati shrugged. “A couple years ago, I think.”
“Why? What made you like it here?”
“I guess it was God.”
“Oh.”
Sati stared at the water, at the gray rocks beneath. Her hair fell straight around her face, and the sun reflected softly against her skin. I wondered what she was like when she first came here four years ago. What she was like as she walked by herself through the woods.
In Scotland, I used to dare myself to walk off the marked trail and into the woods. I was tempted to try to get lost. Tears came to my eyes when I thought of how much my mother would miss me when I was gone.
“She disappeared in the woods,” the police would say. I imagined my father, his face turning gray when he heard the news. He would turn the lights out in the shop, lock the front door with shaking hands, and rush down the street. How much more would they love me when I was missing? I could feel the tightness, the embrace of being found.
In the woods I imagined that I would stumble upon an abandoned but furnished cottage, pick the berries that grew outside, and roast vegetables for dinner. There would be fresh clean water running by. None of this would take any effort; I would just know how to live in the woods.
I dared myself, stepping carelessly off the marked trail into the leaves and trees and sky, but after only a few steps I would panic and rush back to find the orange markers on the trees.
The school days were divided into hour-long classes of math, English, history, science, music, and art—the same as my school in London. There was one class we didn’t have at my old school, it was called Current Affairs and Contemporary Issues.
We read an article called How Not to Be a Consumer. We watched a documentary about the Nestlé company selling baby formula in third-world countries. We saw an underground film that a friend of Kelly’s from Brown had made, about animals in research laboratories, but we made her turn it off just before a scientist was about to drill a hole into a monkey’s head.
Sometimes we had this class sitting in a semicircle on the porch. Kelly let us make orange juice smoothies from a tube of orange concentrate mixed with bananas and ice, so it came out thick and frothy. We drank the smoothies and ate rice cakes with almond butter and honey on top.
Our favorite subject in contemporary issues was Kelly’s Sweet Sixteen party. There were one hundred guests at the party. They had a DJ and angel food cake with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. Kelly and her four best friends spent the day at a beauty parlor having their hair and makeup professionally done. Her boyfriend picked her up at her house with a corsage.
Molly and Summer, especially, loved to hear about Kelly’s life in Beverly, Massachusetts. They asked her to bring in photographs of her house and family, to tell us about her summer vacations in Maine and the names of her childhood friends. Molly asked her to describe the bedroom she grew up in, and I could see, as she listened, that she was arranging the furniture in her head, like a dollhouse.
Molly was three and Summer was five when their parents came to the ashram, so th
ey only had vague memories of their lives before. They could not remember living in their own house or having their own bedrooms. What was the school prom? What did Kelly’s mother make for dinner every night? Did all girls have Sweet Sixteen parties? They chewed the erasers at the end of their pencils.
We all wanted to hear about Kelly’s boyfriend Dave Mahony, the quarterback on the high school football team. But Molly and Summer’s interest in Kelly’s life, the way they sat knees to chest, reminded me of the nights in London I stayed up with Greta, listening to each word she used to describe her boyfriends. Sneaking a look inside her red suede purse while she put Eden to bed upstairs: a folded ten-pound note, Doublemint chewing gum, dark red lipstick, cigarettes, a pink plastic lighter, a black Filofax, and a purple polka-dot pen with purple ink….
Before we left for California, Greta had stopped by the shop with some “exciting news.” She had gotten a callback for a television commercial and her agent had phoned to tell her they thought she was really great, perfect for the role.
“It would run on all the stations,” she said.
“All three?” Mum said, almost sarcastically.
I was still angry at Greta. Sometimes, I woke up furious in the middle of the night with a tight feeling in my throat.
Dear God—I mean, Dear Parvati—Please do not let Greta be on television. Can’t they see how mean she is?
I would repeat this over and over, like a spell. And I believed, in a way, that I could cast a spell.
Then I was awake, thinking about Greta, and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I lay in bed next to Eden and Mum, listening in the dark to the sound of their breathing.
Through the open window, the sound of the insects rose like a curtain around us. From where I lay, I could see the moon and my favorite star, the one closest to the moon.
It was already October, and the weather in England would be turning cold. Eden and I had only spoken to our father once since he left for India. He had telephoned from Delhi, and I stood in the kitchen, saying, “Hello. Can you hear me, Dad?” The connection was so bad all I heard was crackling and echoes down the line. Like the wallpaper in the linen closet, a surprise when you open the door, this was becoming the pattern of our lives.
In the dark, I counted on my fingers, trying to figure out what time it was in London and what would be happening there. At midnight, in California, the girls in my form would be waking up, dressing in their uniforms, eating bowls of cereal in their kitchens.
I imagined Samantha Fenton and Sheba Marks standing in the drizzle in the school courtyard, talking about my glamorous new life in California. I imagined the whole school was talking about me, the way I had imagined the audience was watching only me in the Christmas play.
I had never been cast as the lead in a school play, but even when I was one of the three angels, come to see the baby Jesus in the manger, I thought the spotlight was shining on me. I stood onstage in my white dress with gold wings, waiting, as though at the edge of a cliff, to deliver my one line: “I have come to bring you myrrh.” The line that everyone would remember. They would say as they left their seats at the end of the play, “Who was the girl who played the part of angel number three?”
I hoped I was missed, but I knew I probably wasn’t. Over the years a few girls in my form had left; some had moved away, others had gone to boarding school, but they were never missed for long. The memory of them faded over the summer holidays and was replaced by the excitement of the first day of school: new girls and returning girls, sitting at their desks, hanging their coats on their hooks, writing their names in their books.
My closest friend, Julia, left last year. She had won a scholarship to an academic all-girls public school in Ascot, where they wore brown tweed smocks in all types of weather. When I saw her on holidays she had dark circles beneath her eyes and little time to spend with me.
Before we left, I told her we were going away on holiday to California and would be back at the end of August. I wondered if she had telephoned or come knocking on our door.
I wondered as I lay awake at night, if our grandfather knew where we were. What had our mother told him? I tried to remember, but the words kept changing.
“We’re going to America, for a holiday,” she would have said.
“To visit your mother in New York?” he might have asked.
Anne, her beautiful mother, his ex-wife, who had left him years ago for a more exciting man.
What had she said? I couldn’t remember now.
Did she say, “No, we are going to visit my friend Renee. She lives on an ashram.”
“An ashram?” he would say, looking at his daughter in a peculiar way. “A guru? I’ve never heard of such nonsense.”
She would not have told him; it would only have led to arguments over the phone. Still, we went away and we were his only family. We were a small family; leaving felt like breaking a plate.
An ashram was a place Grandfather would never understand. He wouldn’t even try. He went to church occasionally. He respected the importance of religion in other people’s lives, but he was not deeply interested in it. Psychiatrists and the very religious were kept in the same basket. Church was a place you visited at Christmas and at Easter, to hear the choir, gaze at the high ceiling, and greet old friends and village acquaintances, so they could see that you were still alive. Church was to be kept at a distance, like a handshake.
Mrs. Stirling believed in church. She believed that if you went to church at least three times a week, and not just for the coffee and cakes afterward, you would be granted a place in heaven when you were dead and buried.
God did not live on an ashram. God lived in church. The Church of Scotland, mainly.
I could hear her gossiping about us at the Sunday coffee hour.
“What has she done this time?” a friend would ask, as she stirred her tea with a concerned frown between her eyes.
“She’s run off to an ashram in California with those two children and hasn’t even telephoned her own father! Och, and after all he’s done for her.” Mrs. Stirling would shake her head in disbelief.
“Hasn’t she always been a bit odd?” her friend would say.
“Just like her mother. The apple never falls far from the tree, I tell you. But it’s such a shame. Bernard is a fine gentleman, and she’s his only child.”
“Is he worried about them?”
“Oh, he’s not the type to complain. If my Julie ran off to an ashram I would be on the first flight, dragging her home by the scruff of her neck, but Mr. Bruce doesn’t interfere. And to think, they haven’t even telephoned! I wonder if they’ll be home by Christmas?”
The concerned woman stirring her tea nods sympathetically. “Well, the poor girl, Lucy. I remember quite clearly when Anne left them. I saw Anne that day at the station, standing in her tweed coat and hat, a foxtail around her neck, wearing lipstick in a shade not suitable for a woman her age. I said, Where are you going, Anne? She said, I’m off to Harrods, to buy some sugared ginger for tea.
“With your luggage? I said to her. Well, she only nodded and looked away. Would never give me the time of day. I remember Anne even in our school days, prettier and thinner than the other girls; she always thought too much of herself. She stood so close to the platform edge, the toes of her shoes hung over, and I remember thinking, If there’s a sudden gust it will blow her right over onto the tracks.”
“Her death might have caused the two of them less pain,” Mrs. Stirling said, then quickly crossed herself. Mrs. Stirling, a God-fearing woman with a shard of glass inside. “Well, I’ll be in church most of next week,” she said, “so I will pray for them all.”
FIFTEEN
There was a game my mother and Caroline played. It was an old wives’ tale my mother had learned from Nanny Hannah.
In the small house Sati’s father had built, Caroline took off her wedding ring. My mother pulled out a strand of her hair and tied it to the ring. Sati and I sat on the floor watching them.
Caroline lay back on the sofa, her head propped up on a pillow, watching as my mother dangled the ring from a string over her belly. If the band circled clockwise, it was a girl. The other direction meant the baby was a boy. We sat without speaking as the gold band slowly began to turn at the end of the string.
Caroline sat up with excitement every time she felt the baby move inside her. She held my mother’s hand in her hand, pressing it against her belly, so that she could feel the baby move too.
They stayed up late into the night, picking at leftover tea cakes and breads my mother would bring from Parvati’s kitchen, talking about childbirth and babies. My mother suggested names, but with each name came a reason why it shouldn’t be used: a mean girl in grade school, an alcoholic aunt. They sat up all night, throwing out names like cards.
While our mothers stayed up late talking in the dining hall, Sati and I would go back to her house. There was a game we liked to play too.
The first time it happened was by accident. We had come running out of the pond and fell on the path and were covered with sand, so we went back to her house to take a shower, but her mother was in the shower, so we ran a bath instead.
We sat across from each other at either end of the tub. The water was hot and full of bubbles. Sati told me to open my legs. I opened them slightly, but she put her hands on my knees, spreading them farther apart until they fell against the sides of the bathtub. She moved her hands down my thighs, to the center, and pressed the palm of her hand between my legs. She put her finger inside of me and rubbed her hand slowly up and down. I felt my eyes open wide. Then I closed my eyes and felt myself press against her; she moved her hands faster. I thought I would scream and held my mouth closed. The water was warm. My face grew hot as I pushed myself harder against her hands.
I felt a shudder, a pulsing. She kept her hand still between my legs, and when I opened my eyes, with a feeling of water running through me, she leaned forward, kissing me on the mouth, and told me to do it to her.
