by Ben Marcus
“The wife,” he said.
The wife has see-through skin and grainy eyelids bruised by nature. When she wakes, there is all this sand between her lashes. Daughters, too, there are—brown and knobby daughters, dozens of them, Scotch-taping bangs and walking through the house in their underwear.
She told her father a girl had kissed her once, and not a girl really, but a woman, a teacher, a small, dark, trembly woman who followed all the games at school, running herself breathless up and down the playing field.
“How did it feel,” her father asked, “to kiss a woman?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “The woman turned teacherly and took me by the shoulders.”
* * *
“You are such a show-off,” T said. “You are vain. You are braggy.”
She told her father about these girls she knew who were in love with each other. They let her watch them kiss at the lake after swimming. Their kissing was not so dry or hard-seeming as the kissing she remembered with her teacher, and she spoke of the blond abundance of the girl-girl curled outside a high-cut suit; but there was so much smoke in the car by then, she did not know if she imagined the square and heavy ends of her father’s fingers, or if she saw or had hold of his fingers, of the whorled dead-white ends of his fingers, tips weighted as surely as a line, deep fishing, plummet of fat in the black-green water—what was that thing he said he caught? Lifted out of the water and beating against her as it had, the fish curling and uncurling in the heat of her hand, did it have a name?
“Tell me about your boyfriends,” her father said. Her father asked, “Who else besides the character who gets you this stuff?”
“Just the character,” she said, and she called the character T because she didn’t want to give him a name. A name could get them all in trouble. “T is just a hairless boy—doesn’t need to shave,” she said. Same age, but not her size. Smaller, prettier—T had a lean girl’s face, sharp angles, good bones. The hammocked skin underneath his eyes fluttered when he kissed. “I look,” she said.
Her father kissed her, his dry lips slack against her own and soft. Gentle enough, this time; she could have looked, but she was shy: ready to move in what ways he moved, toward her or away, a lot depending on the things she brought him. That is what she thought at least, that is what she told him, but her father said, “No, no, no.”
Her father said, “My problem is, I’m tired.”
Another boy, another car, she used to let him feel her up just so long as she could sleep. “The night shift,” she said to her father, “is such a bitch. You’re always tired. I can’t talk,” she said, and she kissed her father. She opened her mouth to him and worried her hand inside his coat and felt the warm damp of his shirt, the hard back and heat of her father. Here was no girl-boy, but heavy muscle and bone, soft, wide shoulders and something like breasts. She liked to push against and rub her face between her father’s breasts. She rubbed her face in him: lemons and gin and earth and smoke. His springy hair was in her teeth, everywhere springy, and fragrant and wet and tasting of nails. Yes, the metals in my mouth, she said, are singing.
She told T she couldn’t remember where she had parked her car.
That was why she was late, she told T. This was another time she couldn’t remember. They had driven around and around, she and her father, looking for the street. “Honest,” she said, but T didn’t believe her, and he put his hand under her skirt to prove it.
T said, “You are so fucking easy to get at,” which she supposed was true, the way she dressed, the way she Velcroed shut, ready to unravel at a tab for a boy—any boy, or that was what T said. “I can see through your dress,” T said. “I know what you’ve been doing.”
Under the watchful eye of a man whose name she did not remember, she took off her skinny bra. He only wanted to look, the man said, and touch her, just a little.
“You would like my mother,” she said to the man. “You should see my mother.”
“Should I be ashamed?” she asked her father. The lady and her dog were gone; only skin-colored fence acted guardrail on a road: no view.
“Of what?” he asked.
Third party to things, watching, scattering other women’s charms like seed and clucking in a backward shuffle was how she saw herself, asking, “Do you like that woman? Did you see her breasts?”
Her father said, “I like your breasts.”
* * *
Full snub-nosed breasts, nipples tightened to the size of quarters in the cold, she liked these breasts, too, and girls with boy chests and ribs showing through, which wasn’t the way she was made, or maybe it was—she wasn’t sure, even though she looked when she was being touched. She knew these feelings. The damp press and hurtful weight of a man’s head against her collar—beard, no beard—she had known this.
“Everyone else,” she told her father, “seems to have what I want.”
Her father said, “My daughters are the same.” Spoiled girls, they were using Daddy’s credit cards to clean beneath their nails, asking, Can we? Why don’t we? We should. Her father said, “I don’t think of you that way,” and he pressed the heel of his hand against her hip as he might to push away, to push off, hard body arched, moving stiffly in the cold waters just off the rocks.
The summer houses were shut up for the winter. November, midday, and the black lake level against the yellow shore. “We could go there,” her father said, but they stayed put, in his car, and used the things she brought.
T said, “Even your mother wants it,” and she was surprised.
T said, “Oh, come on, everything you fucking do on that night-shift fucking job is crooked.”
“What do you do,” she asked her father, “when you are not with me?”
He said, “You don’t really want to know,” and he drove her to an unfinished place and pointed. “I have something to do with that.” She saw a building, girders, rags, nets, menacing vacancies. Her father pointed. “Nobody’s home,” he said, “but that’s not my job.” Rocking the car easy over the scrub-board road, raising dust, her father said, “We’ll never get this thing finished.”
Dust settling on the canvased shapes, Dumpsters and cinder block, the whole wild modern array of it—amazing.
“Amazing,” she said to her father, looking out the window and back at him: the whiteness of his collar against the blaze of neck, the creases darkened, almost black. At his throat, he wore a tie knotted tight as a knuckle.
Maybe he draws the buildings; maybe he warehouses nails and joints, figure-eight pieces, metal supports. Who knows? The way her father palmed the wheel of his fat car, he might very well be a crook with a crook’s car, much like an office, plush and neutral, her father’s make, coppery glitter and paneling that might or might not be real wood. Black and gold buttons for everything; the music on the radio—never clearer. Only decide, decide, please. You pick, no you, was the way she was with her father, first word always yes to everything he asked about. Yes, I did. Yes, I will.
Yes when he surprised her, coming up almost to her house and pointing to a shut eye. “Do you believe my wife did this?” he asked, the good eye blinking and teary and strained. “Can you come out with me for just a while?” Yes.
Yes, Dad: The name warmed her every time she used it to his face, so that she rarely used this name—or any other to his face. Instead, she signaled him. She gave directions in the way she touched him, sometimes saying, “You” and “You” when she was tired and wanted to let him know she would, all he had to do was ask, but not tonight. Tonight she wasn’t feeling well.
“But yes,” she said to her father. She was always saying yes to her father, and only when she was away from him did she wonder, Does this make sense, my father? Driving all the way to her and home again and to her again in a night, driving to where she worked and waiting for her in the lot until the morning—did her father make sense?
“Twice in a night, it happened,” she said to T. “I get confused.”
Sh
e said, “But I like what I am doing. I wanted to be in something hard. I wanted to be up all night.”
* * *
“You’re so fucking out of it,” T said, and all the other boys said, too. “How do you know one man from another?”
The heavy-lidded eyes, the brittle hair and color of her father: first off, these things, and his voice she knew. The juicy sweetness of his voice when her father was drinking, the way even the words came unbuttoned, the way he said her name, she could be done in by this much about him.
Also the money he gave her—and why not?—presents between the covers of oversized matches: Don’t strike in gold from O’Something’s bar.
“Are these from us?” she asked her father, holding up matches. “Have we been here?”
“You,” she said, in the car again, free to speak and ready—even her earlobes oiled, every part of her clean and cleaned. She could get off looking at and petting the hair on her arms. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What are you doing with a wife who beats you?”
“Oh,” her father said, and he was sad, or he was tired. Hard to give it up, the look out onto water, someplace to go. Neighbors far apart on either side—not seen until the winter, then sighted in the forked spaces: women standing at windows waiting to be seen. “But it is hard to see them,” her father said. “The glare hurts my eyes, and the bog of common plants—the sappy heart-shaped greeny danglers—beads the windows. Nothing happens, besides,” he said. “I don’t know why the wife is jealous.”
She said, “The light in rooms like that puts me to sleep. I know the daughters,” she said. From schools and summers, she knew them, diving for soap chips in the boathouse, she and the daughters playing to know what it felt like. The winner held the soap between her legs the longest—oh, yes, she remembered everything about this game. The way it ticked inside of her. “I wanted to melt down soap,” she said. “But all of us girls got to play,” she said. “We all got to fold our hands over the burning part.”
They switched places. Her father tipped the seat and shut his eyes. She said, “I’m my mother’s daughter. I want more than others.” The way it was for her to wake up in the morning: the reason you think you have been here is you have been here. “I don’t want it the same,” she said.
“Everyone I know is broke,” she said. “The night shift doesn’t pay much. My boyfriends never work.”
“And your mother?” her father asked when she had already told her stories: grandfather and uncles making house calls on her mother and scolding the poor woman before they made it better, every day less charmed by her mother, opening their wallets, saying, “This has got to stop. There is only so much we can take.”
“Do you remember at all? Do you remember her at all?” She said, “Nothing has changed.”
Her father said, “I can’t get excited when I think about your mother.”
“I am shivering,” she said, and he was, too. She could see the cold in his shoulders and in her arms resting on his shoulders; and both of them, she and her father, white, blue-white—November still—and the horizon cindered thin, burnt-out, quite black. She put her bare foot against the car-door window and said, “Look at my leg.” No-color sky, battered grasses. After a while, she asked, “Is this doing anything for you?”
Her father smiled. He said, “I’ve had better,” which made her laugh, his saying, when what did he know?
“Just ask me how many times,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you.”
She said, “I’m always in love with someone.”
* * *
Her father said he meant it, he was tired, and she put her hands on his face to feel the bristle grown in driving just to get away—a day, a night, another day, as he had said.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she said.
Her father asked her, “Do you think I look young, or do you think I look like some old guy who got his eyes done cheap?”
“Look at my feet,” she said, parked near the boat launch to a lake they didn’t know, iced over, gray-white, no clear shoreline. “Look at the footmarks I’ve left on the window.”
“Such white feet,” her father said, and he put his foot over hers.
“Have I told you this before?” she asked.
But T didn’t answer, bapping pencils against her head and dancing to his made-up music.
Her father said, “Find some music.”
“Not that,” her father said. “And no to that, no, no”; then he forgot about the music or was indifferent to it; she could stop at anything she liked.
“But do you like it?” she asked her father.
“Do you like this dress?” she asked. “These shoes?”
Her father said, “It’s hard for me to see. My eye still hurts.” So she drove again, and she told her father what it was as they passed it, and in what connection to him were these women at the end of narrow drives in houses near the water. She spoke of aproned Annes and pretty Susies. “You knew them,” she told her father.
Her father said, “Did I?”
Her father said, “I don’t miss many people.”
* * *
She said, “I don’t understand how you can stay with a wife who beats you.” There, running after her father down the hallway in his story, was a small woman with a small head and a racket in her hand. Why did he stay with this woman? she wanted to know, and he never answered her, or not that she remembered. What could he have answered, besides, married to a woman such as this: marigoldy hair and bright mouth. After all those daughters, the wife still blushed. Some sweet name it was, flicked loose from the roll, a Cathy, a Jane, ring guards clanking on her wedding finger.
She said, “You should live with me.”
She said, “Maybe you don’t want to know this, but it doesn’t take much.” She was talking numbers—two and three a week, once that many in a day. “And I’m not very big,” she said. “A bigger woman could take more.”
“Once, here at the park,” she said, driving her father slowly through the main streets of the town, pointing out where she had been. Here, the last time, with some doper—boots and lots of hair—the two of them on the roof, overlooking the entire fucking wayward county. She said, “Oh, Dad, anyone with what we had could have seen everything, too.” Mother and one of her guys in her Mustang or her Bronco—the woman turning in cars as fast as she did men—grandfather and the uncles honking close behind. Keep your wallet shut; sign nothing; say you don’t speak the language. She said, “What do I care about those guys? They’re not looking out for me.”
“I know who lives there,” she said, and she pointed to insinuating driveways, raked gravel, money. She told her father she was easily coaxed into cars, at times even asking for it, waiting in obvious places for something to happen, in bedrooms and bathrooms, at doorways with lots of traffic. She said, “I can be dumb sometimes. I don’t always know what I am thinking.”
Look at the shoes she wore and the dresses.
Mother’s mother was still sewing flaps on the cups of the girl’s brassieres, so she would look flat, more boy-girl than girl, as if that were going to change things, as if there weren’t other ways to do it. “I know lots of ways,” she said to her father. “Look,” she said, and she lifted up her shirt. “Look at what the lawn did to my back.”
She showed her father something else that she had brought, but he said, “No.” Her father said, “I don’t feel like it today.”
T said, “The shit you deal wears off too fast.”
“What do I care?” she said. “There are always men somewhere with money. I’ve got my grandfather, remember. I’ve got my uncles.”
A friend of a friend had a place for them to go in a big-enough town where a lot went unnoticed, but her father said, “No. I don’t feel like it today.”
“No,” her father said. “No, I have no place to keep it. Just let me kiss you,” he said, which she did. Arms crossed and eyes shut tight in the cold of the car, she moved a little closer to him and wait
ed for the blow.
WHEN MR. PIRZADA CAME TO DINE
JHUMPA LAHIRI
In the autumn of 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family. His name was Mr. Pirzada, and he came from Dacca, now the capital of Bangladesh, but then a part of Pakistan. That year Pakistan was engaged in civil war. The eastern frontier, where Dacca was located, was fighting for autonomy from the ruling regime in the west. In March, Dacca had been invaded, torched, and shelled by the Pakistani army. Teachers were dragged onto streets and shot, women dragged into barracks and raped. By the end of the summer, three hundred thousand people were said to have died. In Dacca Mr. Pirzada had a three-story home, a lectureship in botany at the university, a wife of twenty years, and seven daughters between the ages of six and sixteen whose names all began with the letter A. “Their mother’s idea,” he explained one day, producing from his wallet a black-and-white picture of seven girls at a picnic, their braids tied with ribbons, sitting cross-legged in a row, eating chicken curry off of banana leaves. “How am I to distinguish? Ayesha, Amira, Amina, Aziza, you see the difficulty.”
Each week Mr. Pirzada wrote letters to his wife, and sent comic books to each of his seven daughters, but the postal system, along with most everything else in Dacca, had collapsed, and he had not heard word of them in over six months. Mr. Pirzada, meanwhile, was in America for the year, for he had been awarded a grant from the government of Pakistan to study the foliage of New England. In spring and summer he had gathered data in Vermont and Maine, and in autumn he moved to a university north of Boston, where we lived, to write a short book about his discoveries. The grant was a great honor, but when converted into dollars it was not generous. As a result, Mr. Pirzada lived in a room in a graduate dormitory, and did not own a proper stove or a television set. And so he came to our house to eat dinner and watch the evening news.
