An Unrestored Woman

by Shobha Rao

  * * *

  Two days later I was walking past a group of girls who were standing just beyond my locker. One of them pointed and the other giggled, and the third turned in my direction and said, “You know what you are, Ann-ju?”

  It’s Anju, I wanted to say, not Ann-ju. Anju. Like un-der, like un-til, like that book we’re reading in English class, un-abridged.

  But she was smiling for all the world as if she were about to tell me a grand and wondrous secret. She relished each word as she said it: “You’re a slut.”

  I might’ve smiled. The word was so perfect in its way. Slut. It was a wave pounding a shore. It was Sean leaving my mouth. It was the membrane around my heart, tearing.

  * * *

  Funny what only a few years of marriage does, the way it blinds you. I’d leave them together, alone, while I went to pick up milk at Fairway, or a bottle of wine at West Side. “Don’t start without me,” I’d sing over my shoulder while Meena chopped vegetables and Vikram smiled over his newspaper or his medical journal or his television. “Don’t worry, Anju-like-un-dulate,” he’d say.

  It was a joke between us, from the very start. “But it’s two syllables,” he said on our first date. “How can you mess that up?”

  I shrugged. “Friends I’ve known for years still get it wrong.”

  “You’re a linguist. That must drive you mad.”

  “I give them a homophone,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “An ‘un’ word. Like un-like.”

  “Or like un-cork,” he offered enthusiastically, and then quieter, looking for a long moment into my eyes, “Or like un-believably beautiful.”

  I laughed. “You’re a cornball.”

  “How un-kind of you,” he said.

  “Stop.”

  “What? You’re un-impressed?”

  We were at Candle Café. Vikram was doing his residency at Lenox Hill, and he’d asked me to pick the restaurant. It was winter, early evening, but already dark. Snow had fallen earlier in the day but now there was only a shimmering stillness. Taxis flashed by the window, people wrapped in scarves and thick coats trudged past, a distant truck rumbled, and yet the stillness was complete. As if the yellow-lit restaurant, our tiny table at its center, the overstuffed warmth of our wool sweaters, and even the bitterness of our coffees formed a supreme and cardinal quiet, like the very center of a storm, and we only had to go on, to simply go on, for the stillness to continue.

  * * *

  The next time the doorman found me—a week after the incident in the elevator—I was sprawled next to the trash bins, in the basement of our building. I didn’t mind the stink of rotting food. Nor the concrete floor damp with runoff from the leaky bins. The light directly above was burned out but the other one, at the opposite end of the narrow hall near the elevators, lent me the feeling of being in a cave. Hidden, wounded, savage. This time I remembered exactly how I’d gotten there: I’d been drinking a glass of wine. Well, a bottle. And then another. Vikram had been called to the hospital, a car accident. One of the passengers in a taxi had been carrying a bouquet of flowers and one of the stems—on a hydrangea, maybe—had punctured her heart. “But how?” I asked him. He was putting on his shoes. “How should I know?” His eyes scanned the counter for his keys. “Maybe they were going at high speeds.”

  “But a stem?”

  “Anything can be a weapon,” he said, sighing impatiently, “if you’re going fast enough.”

  “Maybe it was one of those plastic sticks. You know, the ones they use to hold up the plants.”

  It had been a week since I’d found out about him and Meena. We three had been at the party together. I’d left the room and when I’d come back in, they’d been standing in the opposite corner. A crowd of people separated us but I’d had a clear view of them, though neither had looked up to see me. They’d laughed about something Vikram had whispered in Meena’s ear and then—with the sure intimacy of lovers—he’d taken hold of her wrist. Brought it close to him. It had been a slight gesture, tender, and yet its familiarity, its insistence, had been sexual. I knew, then. I had lived for an entire week, knowing.

  “Who the fuck cares whether it was a stick or a stem.” Vikram was at the door, his coat over his shoulder. He took a long look at me, taking in my pajamas, my uncombed hair, lips stained red with wine. This sudden change in me, over the past week, went unquestioned, unprobed by him, as if he’d lost interest not only in me but also in the basic machinery of marriage. “What does it matter?” He sighed and dropped his head as he opened the door. “Her heart is punctured.”

  * * *

  I was the one to take Meena to get her first abortion. She’d called me and said, “Anju, I missed it.”

  “Missed what?” I asked, thinking she was talking about a class. She was in college and I was in graduate school at CUNY.

  I picked her up at her dorm. She stepped through the door wearing sunglasses, a straw hat with a bright green band, and her hair in pigtails.

  “You look like you’re going on a hayride.” I didn’t know what else to say. My eyes passed over her stomach and up to her face. But she was looking away, out the window. Her shorts crept up her thighs; their earth-brown flesh embarrassed me. I saw her as a man would see her, felt a shudder, a thin and submerged lust, and thought, How dare you dress like this? Today, of all days.

  When we got to Dobbs Ferry, there was still an hour until her appointment. We bought coffee and sandwiches at a café and drove to a trail along the Hudson where we sat on a bench. Meena drank in silence. I gazed straight ahead at the river. It was thick with summer runoff, and drifted languid and sallow with afternoon heat. “Do you remember that kid?” Meena said after a long silence. “The one who lived behind our house?”

  “Who?”

  “Sean. Sean something.”

  “Finley?”

  “Yeah. Finley.”

  “What about him?”

  “You remember that day? Behind that tree?”

  Yes, I remember, I wanted to say, I remember everything. “No. What day?”

  Meena smiled. “I was called a slut till the day I graduated high school. Can you believe it? From third grade all the way to high school.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say. In the distance, on the other shore, was a group of kayakers. They seemed about to push off and I watched them with a keen longing: their colorful kayaks enclosing them, their shouts and laughter as they called to each other. “It got to where I didn’t know if I was trying to prove them wrong, or to prove them right.” She laughed.

  One of the kayakers reached the middle of the river, and the others followed. Tiny waves lapped at the sides of the kayaks.

  “Are you afraid?” I asked.

  She turned toward me. “Of what?”

  And I knew she wasn’t afraid. Had she ever been afraid? Fear—sometime during that afternoon with Sean Finley—had left her body and settled into mine.

  * * *

  Meena was a sophomore in high school, and I was about to leave for college, when our parents visited friends in Buffalo and left us alone for the weekend. As soon as their car had pulled out of the driveway, Meena smiled and said, “Let’s have a party.”

  I was eighteen, had been accepted for early admission at Dartmouth, and yet I knew Meena would have her way. There was nothing I could say that she wouldn’t find a way around. “Come on, Anju, it’ll be fun. You can invite that friend you have, what’s her name?”

  “Celia.”

  “Yeah. Invite Celia.”

  “What if Mom and Dad find out?”

  Meena stared at me. “Who would tell them?”

  By nine o’clock that night, over thirty people were at our house. More carloads seemed to arrive every few minutes. The kitchen counter filled with bottles of alcohol; one group of freshmen was doing shots in the dining room. A stereo blasted through the rooms, and all the windows were swung open to the warm summer night. Yet, even in the midst of the crowds of peo
ple drinking and shouting and sweating, I could smell the loamy, humid scent of the creek. I leaned out the back window. The Finleys had moved long ago but the creek still flowed between our houses, a beguiling, silver thread. Its tinny ramble, cloaked beneath the other night sounds—the crickets and frogs and rustle of birch leaves—felt to me like a greater music than the one coming from the stereo.

  “Hey,” a voice said behind me. I turned. A boy I recognized from the swim team. “You don’t have a blanket or something, do you?” His skin was alabaster, and his light hair and blue eyes haloed in the moonlight.

  “Why do you need a blanket?”

  “One of the girls is cold.”

  “It’s eighty degrees out.”

  He smiled mischievously. “We filled a tub with ice. To hold the liquor. She fell in.”

  I sighed loudly. He followed me to the upstairs linen closet where I handed him a blanket. As he started back down, he called to me, still smiling, “Hey, I know you. Aren’t you Anju like un-happy?”

  “Fuck off.”

  People were upstairs too. A clump sprawled on Meena’s bed, smoking. Another group congregated around the bathroom door. A girl shrieked and ran past me. On the second floor, the air was still and hot, and the music wailed as if through a long tunnel. I felt strange, as though I were in an unfamiliar house and had to find my way out. I was also dizzy from the beer I’d drunk, and as I walked through the rooms I strained to hear the sounds of the creek. By the time I opened the door to my parents’ room, my head throbbed, and the heat pressed against me like a wall.

  At first I thought the mounds on the bed were coats. Then I saw movement. I leaned to close the door and that’s when a hand reached out and pushed the sheets away. I saw the boy first, a boy from my junior year math class. Below him was Meena. He stirred above her with small grunts, but Meena was turned toward me. Half her face was shadowed by his body but her eyes were alive to me, watching me with an intensity that quieted all other sounds.

  Then she smiled a half smile and her hand left the bed and reached toward me.

  Neither one of us blinked. I saw the slope of her breast, its glistening peak. The gold granules of her skin, so like mine. As I stared, a stillness settled on me like a blanket. Her hand remained. In her gaze, in her outstretched hand, seemed to be the thing that had eluded me all my life, a gesture of such pale and abiding love—thin as gauze—that I nearly stepped forward and took it.

  The moment passed. The boy looked over at me and laughed. Meena punched him in the chest and told him to hurry. I slammed the door shut, terror and disgust rising. My legs quivered as I descended the stairs. In a week I would leave for college. I would never return home to stay. My visits would become shorter and shorter. I would study abroad, in France, and would move then to New York and through a string of lovers and heartaches. But something of that night would always remain.

  The next afternoon, after I’d cleaned the house and taken all of the bottles to the curb, Meena woke up, put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and went out. She came back twenty minutes later with an ice-cream cone. I sat watching her. “Did you want one?” she teased.

  After she’d flattened the top of the ice cream, she raised the tip of the sugar cone to her mouth and bit into it. Then she sucked the rest of the ice cream out, like marrow.

  “You’re disgusting,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “The way you eat that ice cream.”

  She licked a drop of ice cream from the corner of her mouth and smiled. “Are you sure it’s the ice cream?”

  I stood up and left the room.

  * * *

  I was curled in a hollow between the trash bins as the doorman stood over me. The wall behind me was warm and rough and cool all at once, like sand. After drinking the two bottles of wine, I’d drifted to sleep, dreamed that I was lying on a beach. The dark horizon in the distance pushed against the shivering gray sea. Shards of moonlight rusted and fell away. I could even see myself, marooned on the shore, lit by the white sand like the forgotten lamp of a firefly.

  When I blinked my eyes open, Jenkins was shaking me. “Wake up, my dear. This is no place for a lady.”

  I looked up at him at the word lady. I could feel the crusted edges of my lips, my rancid breath, my body bloated with despair. He lifted me to a slumped position. His skin was dry, flaky, like the wings of a butterfly, and his face contorted with the effort of pulling me up. I let go of his arm and leaned against one of the trash bins. I thought: I’ve tried to travel so far from Albany, so far from the girl at that party, and yet here I am again, breathing in a loamy, humid scent.

  “Let me take you upstairs,” Jenkins said.

  I studied his face: his eyes nested in wrinkles, slippery and placental as newborn birds; his sagging cheeks; shattered capillaries wandering across his skin like lost tribes. The forlorn white wisps of his hair reminded me that I had a husband, and that I’d lost him. Jenkins sat down next to me among the trash bins. We sat in silence for a long while. My head felt light, airy, and I closed my eyes to settle it. I supposed it was the scent but I saw the creek again, and Meena’s hand reaching toward me. And the fear returned. The fear that maybe it wasn’t what I’d imagined all these years. Maybe she’d wanted me to join them; that was all.

  “Why is it,” I said, “that some people hold us like they do? Whatever they do only makes us love them more. Did you ever know anyone like that?”

  “I did, once. In India. In Pakistan now, I suppose.”

  I grinned. “Maybe we have a gift for it.”

  He fell silent. I recalled that long before we’d moved to America, years before the afternoon with Sean Finley, when Meena was five and I was eight, we’d been walking home from school and had cut across a stranger’s yard. We’d bought snacks at the stall outside our school gates: one rupee’s worth of spiced peanuts and fifty paisa for two thick slices of cucumber sprinkled with tangy amchur. Meena had finished her cucumber and was eating the peanuts one by one. “I only want the round ones,” she said. “You eat the halves.”

  “Why can’t you eat them?”

  “Dimple said they’re diseased.”

  I threw the bitter end of my cucumber on the ground and scooped out a handful of peanuts. “You’re both stupid.”

  We ducked through a stand of lantana and came out onto a sloped ravine choked with camphire and thorny hawthorn bushes. I held the branches with two fingers while Meena passed through. We reached the base of the ravine, a fallow bed of dirt and silt. The dirt kicked up as we walked, griming our white socks with a thick coat of our mother’s wrath. We rarely walked along this stretch of ravine, usually staying on the road until our block, where the ravine was flatter and not so wild.

  Meena was in front when the three boys came toward us. They must have heard us and come from the backyards of one of the houses. I’d never seen them before, though they weren’t much older than me. Two looked like they might have been brothers, with the same slanted forehead and thick features and oily hair, and the third—standing behind the other two—was thin and rakish, holding something I couldn’t see.

  “Give me that,” one of the brothers said, raising an eye toward our cone of peanuts. At this, the rakish boy needled his way between the brothers and now the three were standing in a row and I saw that he was holding a baby bird. It was hardly bigger than a marble, with wet pink skin and a yellow beak. Even from where I was standing I could make out its delicate gray wings and dark, pulsing organs, its thin cry frantic and clipped like a clogged whistle. The boys were entirely blocking the path at the base of the ravine. The only way to get around them was to slip and slide up one side and down the other. I could do it alone, but Meena wasn’t fast enough. I was thinking all this as I looked at them, from one to the other, all in a row. The one in the middle was tallest, so their heads peaked, like a greasy triangle, and I almost laughed. I realized I wasn’t scared. That realization was like being handed a weapon, like stealing the keys to a cage
.

  “It’s up to you,” I said. “Which do you want more?”

  The boy in the middle narrowed his eyes. “Which what?”

  “The bird or the peanuts?”

  He stared at me in disbelief. Then he brought the arm holding the bird imperceptibly closer to his chest and laughed. “Both.”

  “That’s not one of your choices.” I stepped forward and closed my hand over his. He jumped back but the bird was very still. Then it began to struggle. I closed my fist tighter. The boy was turning his hand this way and that, trying to wrench it free. The other boys rushed in and tugged at my wrist. I squeezed harder. One of them pushed me. My legs stiffened, grew roots. The bird pressed against our fists. Its tiny wings buckled, and something wet oozed between my fingers. Someone pulled my hair. But I clutched with all my might, held the boy’s hand as if it were the last hand I would ever hold.

  He let out a sudden loud yelp and sprang back with an “Ow!”

  The bird dropped to the ground like a pebble. The boy’s palm was bleeding where the bird’s beak had pierced it. The bird writhed, then stilled.

  We stood like that for a moment and then I stepped over the bird and strode through the column of boys. Meena followed. We walked in silence for some minutes and then, when we were nearly at our house, she said, “You killed it, didn’t you?”

  I wiped my hand against my skirt and didn’t say a word.

  * * *

  “We should go,” I heard Jenkins say. “It’s getting late.”

  My eyes were closed. I was still with the bird, the boys, Meena, and the ravine that bound us together like brushwood. I thought of that afternoon, and of everything that had come after, and opened my eyes. I saw a dirty, thin strip of window above the bins, facing an alley. Beyond the window was only a hard brick wall, and I wondered if I could be that girl again. Was defiance temporary, like a gust of wind that lifted you once, then set you down? Or was it always there, inside of you, like a small dinghy tied to the harbor of your heart, waiting, at the ready, to launch?