The Girl With Borrowed Wings

by Rossetti, Rinsai

  I flinched straightaway. He didn’t react. His eyes were on the road. With one hand he adjusted his sunglasses.

  I let myself think the words again. Daddy . . . And still nothing happened. I found that I could breathe almost naturally.

  I didn’t say anything to him, though. I couldn’t. I watched him uneasily until we got home, and then I escaped straight into my room. Didn’t Anju know how . . . wrong it would be to say those words to my father? That night I was so disturbed, I couldn’t read. My fingers went automatically to a book on my shelf, but the minute I opened it I threw it down again. My thoughts couldn’t settle on anything except what Anju had told me about Sangris.

  Sangris. That was a word I could latch on to. I would see him at the midnight beginning of next Monday. I sank down onto my bed.

  I wanted to love Sangris. I thought of the heather and the sunflowers and the almond-scented tree, and I was taken aback by how much I wanted to love him. I could see, dimly, as if through a foggy glass wall, what it would be like to be with Sangris. I had caught glimmers of it, from time to time—that shade of red I couldn’t hold inside of me.

  I didn’t eat at dinner. I couldn’t. My father was sitting opposite me, and the disgusting words still hung in my head.

  I left the dining room early. I went into the kitchen. My mother was sitting alone at her table. I hesitated. She’d married him, there must have been something, once. I knelt beside her chair. “Mom,” I whispered.

  She turned her eyes to me in mild disapproval.

  “Mom, do you . . .” I lowered my voice still further. “Do you love him?”

  As I said it I realized that I desperately wanted her to answer yes.

  Her eyes, usually narrow and black, shot open wide in shock. She looked at me as if she thought I was being coarse. I thought I was too.

  “Who?” she said suspiciously.

  “My dad,” I whispered.

  Her mouth dropped open. “Go to your room,” she said.

  I stood uncertainly. “Don’t tell him,” I pleaded.

  I knew she would.

  “Go to your room,” she said.

  She turned back to focus on the surface of the table. I was at the door when she said, “Besides, don’t you assume that I went after him.”

  I jolted to a halt. I was afraid that if I looked directly at her she might stop talking, so I only half turned, staring at the door frame. “Sorry?”

  “He loved me. Chased me,” she said quietly, speaking fast. “He’ll never forgive me for that.”

  I couldn’t picture my father that way at all. “I don’t—”

  “You think he would’ve chosen me if he didn’t adore me? For his precious future daughter, wouldn’t he want the best possible woman as a mother?”

  I’d never considered that. I wasn’t able to keep my eyes on the door frame anymore. I swiveled. She was still hunched over her table, a strand of black hair frizzing out of her bun. We looked at each other.

  “What happened?”

  She didn’t speak for a moment. Then—“No one can live up to his expectations,” she said, and twisted her mouth into something that was almost a smirk, except that it was sad. “You know that, yes?”

  I opened my mouth to reply, probably something clumsy and eager, but a change in Mom’s face made me spin around.

  He was right there.

  My heart contracted. “I—”

  “Go to your room,” he said to me. His expressionless eyes were on my mom.

  I went. Through my closed bedroom door I heard them talking in low tones. I felt as if my clothes had fallen off in public. I sat on the bed, heart racing. Something was going to happen.

  After half an hour, when he’d finished with her, my father came in. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me like I was a baboon in a zoo. “Do you have something you want to discuss with me?”

  I shook my head. Then I said, apologetically, “I was just asking.”

  “Why?” he demanded.

  “Because . . . we never use the L word in the house. I was curious.” I kept my eyes on the floor as I spoke.

  “‘Love’ is a very private matter,” he said. Like rude body parts.

  “But I’m family,” I said. “A daughter wants to know about her parents.”

  From the look on his face, you would think I’d just asked to hear a graphic blow-by-blow account of how I’d ended up in my mother’s body.

  “Don’t be disgusting,” he said. The door slammed shut behind him. With a real bang.

  He didn’t talk to me for the next few days. He kept his distance, looking at me guardedly, as if I was a bomb that might explode at any minute and spew messy fluids all over the room.

  On the last day of the week, Wednesday, Anju said to me, “Have you done it yet?”

  I didn’t need to ask her what she was talking about. I’d been having nightmares about it. “He’ll be furious,” I whispered.

  She hit me on the arm. I jumped in my flimsy plastic chair.

  On Thursday I kept myself closed in my room. I still couldn’t read. My books had transformed into lumpy, dead things. I sat on my bed, closed my eyes, and concentrated on coating my mind in steel. I needed armor for my ordeal ahead. I thought of the sunflowers and of the Nenner who could be bold. It didn’t seem to work. I thought of being able to give Sangris my love, like a gift, when Monday began. But it was like visualizing how beautiful a unicorn would be. It didn’t actually help.

  I planned to say the words to my father on Sunday, the last possible day. I didn’t know how I would do it, though. Maybe I’d just blurt them out and run. Lock myself in the bathroom or something. The fact is that no one in my family ever smiled sappily, or held hands, or touched. No one used pet names. And no one in my family ever said “I love you.”

  On Friday, the last day of the weekend, my mother came into my room. It was the first time we’d spoken since the kitchen, and I was shy. I expected her to be awkward too, but even though her words were my father’s, if anything, she spoke to me more easily than she had in years. “You will come grocery shopping with us today,” she said. “Your father decided that you should get out more often.” So that I wouldn’t be stewing dangerously in my bedroom, thinking about forbidden things like the L word, she meant.

  “All right,” I said, because I didn’t have a choice.

  In silence we got into the car. In silence my father drove us to Al Lou Lou Center. I sat in the backseat, watching my father’s reflection in the rearview mirror. I remembered him telling me that, above all things, Frenenqer Paje should be meek. And love, in my father’s eyes, was something violent and indecent. This was about more than his idea of propriety, it was about his idea of me.

  So what was his idea of me? What was I? I couldn’t put it into words. The sunflowers, the sky, me cutting out my heart for him. I kept my eyes on my father’s reflection.

  I trailed behind my parents while they walked through the crowded, air-conditioned aisles of Al Lou Lou Center. I was deep in thought, and I didn’t feel my feet as I walked.

  “Push the shopping cart,” my mother said to me. I pushed it.

  My father took his sunglasses off. His eyes were old and crinkled behind them. “Do we need detergent?” he said. He was always vague on household matters. My mom did everything.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “All right. Frenenqer, go get some detergent.”

  It was just down the aisle. I floated through the crowd of strangers and took hold of a handle. My parents watched closely. “Not that brand!” said my mother. “Get the red one.”

  The almond-scented tree in the sky, that awful tight feeling I’d had in my stomach whenever Sangris had tried to be soft with me, unable to want him because I’d known I had to slap him away, the harder the better, before I could respect myself. And I was only seventeen now. What would I be like in ten years? In twenty? I glanced over my shoulder at my father and found him watching me.

  I was watching me too. Fa
lling into the wadi in Oman with my shirt rushing around my skin, Sangris’s eyes amber on Heritage as he struggled to tell me something important, and most of all, the closet with the cobwebs, crying after the kiss, horrified that I might have come close to feeling warmth. And my father calling me disgusting, slamming the door. Like I’d done to Sangris in the closet. Like I’d been doing to myself since I was eleven.

  And that’s how it happened that, very simply, I came to understand everything I needed to know about my father. He wasn’t some enormous mystery. How could a person like him come into being? Like this, just like this.

  I carried the detergent back.

  “Put it in the cart,” Mom said. Where else would I put it?

  “Do we need stationery?” my father said. Ye gods, he really was clueless, I thought. This must have been the first time he’d come grocery shopping in months. Usually he just sat at the computer at home. I envisioned him as a thin, dark spider, controlling the strands of his web without moving out of his chair.

  “No,” my mom said.

  “We never need stationery,” I said.

  He gave me a stern look. He thought I was showing disrespect. “Frenenqer, get us some milk.”

  I was familiar with the brand this time. I went to get milk, then walked back. I put it in the cart in front of my father.

  “All right,” he said, “do we need—?”

  “Dad,” I said.

  He didn’t respond for a moment. He was taking a huge carton of yogurt from my mother and putting it in the cart. People milled all around us. “What?”

  My heart throbbed hard.

  “I love you,” I said.

  He jumped a little bit. His gaze quickly flickered to the strangers standing around. Many were dressed in intimidating white dishdashas. They might have heard me. “Er, that’s nice,” he said. “Go get some flour.”

  We didn’t need flour. I watched in amazement as the man who had controlled all of my movements for every year of my life squirmed like a stuck bug. His gaze was fixed on the floor.

  “Didn’t you hear?” I said, raising my voice. “Daddy, I love you!”

  A couple of heads turned.

  “Frenenqer,” he growled, “we will discuss this when we get home. Go fetch some flour.”

  “You silly daddy,” I said. “We don’t need flour.”

  He found my tone of affection disrespectful. “Frenenqer—”

  “He is silly,” I said to a random passerby. She looked away and quickened her step.

  My father dragged me into a corner and slapped me across my face. Quick and flat. He didn’t want anyone to see, but he didn’t particularly mind if they did. “You’re too old for this nonsense,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, touching my stinging cheek. “I love you anyway.”

  “Is this your idea of fun?” he said. His voice was frozen. It was the voice that always made me feel as though I’d swallowed cold lead.

  It didn’t do that today. I’d seen his flash of embarrassment. Even now he was slightly awkward. He kept his eyes too steady on my face, afraid of showing weakness. Human. He was human and capable of being embarrassed. A grouchy old man. I burst out of my body, soared up high.

  “You’re not omnipotent at all,” I said to him.

  “What?”

  I grabbed the sleeve of a passing woman. She turned and looked at me in surprise. I said to her, “I love my dad.”

  My pulse was so giddy, flying so fast, that I could afford to feel a spurt of real affection. “He’s forty-seven and his name is Tiberio,” I said. “He’s an ordinary person.”

  She muttered something in Urdu and dashed away.

  That stunt earned me another slap.

  “Fine,” I said, my left cheek burning. “I’ll keep it in the family. I won’t tell anyone other than you and Mom that I love you.” The more I said it, the more I felt as though I was kicking down walls, an incredible kind of power.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he said. He grabbed at the cart and held it between us and the stream of people, like a barrier.

  I had never seen my father mortified before. I nearly pitied him. And that was the best thing in the world, because it meant that he was reduced to something pitiful.

  “I’m done,” I said. “Let’s finish grocery shopping.”

  I was obedient Frenenqer for the rest of the night. I still got sent to my room without any food and a strict command not to read, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t have eaten or concentrated on reading anything anyway. My blood was humming in my veins.

  He wasn’t a god. Not even an overpowering father who could make me cramp up all my feelings into a painful knot. He was just a man. Just a repressed man who, in his own way, was a dreamer, who had sat beside sunflowers and thought that he ought to fix nature, and who had made me in his own image. But I wasn’t his imaginary daughter, I was real. I wasn’t going to turn myself into him, not anymore.

  The next morning he wouldn’t look at me. Mom came out and arranged the breakfast dishes and all the table mats around him in their proper order, and finally he was back in his safe, organized spot, like a person frozen in time. But he looked pale. Or maybe he always looked pale and I was only seeing it now.

  For seventeen years, I’d been a plant growing straight toward his sun, or at least that’s how he wanted to see me. Did he realize he’d lost his project now? Or was he still holding on to the fantasy? Was that why he wouldn’t look at me?

  The thought made me sad. I tried to chat with him, following all his rules. I even held my spoon properly. But it didn’t work. He ignored me until I let him be. As calmly as he kept himself clamped down, my father, I saw, had the sort of mind that scratches incessantly at itself.

  At last I set my spoon down and just looked at him, really looked.

  His hair had been sheared close to the skull, but it curled anyway, and his face was long. He had wrinkles, just about every kind except laugh-lines.

  My eyes moved down. His fingers were carefully positioned around the handle of his fork. It seemed more important to him than eating, I realized.

  I wondered if he’d had a similar parent. Maybe it went all the way back through our family tree, a disease inherited from the first ancestor unable to deal with an uncontrolled life, transforming child after child into a bulleted list of rules.

  Except I’d broken away.

  My father went on avoiding me a little uncomfortably for days afterward. If I loved him, that meant I didn’t fear him; and if I didn’t fear him, I couldn’t respect him the way he wanted. My love had disgraced him.

  As for my mother—I think she looked at me with a kind of awe. She saw that I had done something, but she didn’t really understand what.

  I didn’t get to tell Anju about my triumph because she was gone from school. She had already finished her last week. But I knew she would keep her promise at the moment when Sunday turned to Monday. Anju was always reliable. That was why she’d made such a good secretary. She would do this last thing for me.

  Saturday and Sunday went by dizzily. I was adjusting to myself. No itch in my back. No imaginary, pointing fingers. No pretend wings either. I didn’t feel them pulsing and bulging at my back anymore. I was light enough not to need them. The heat pressed in and the wadis were dry and scaly and the color green was actually a dull shade of khaki. But it didn’t matter. I waited for the birth of Monday. Trembles went through me constantly. I told myself to be patient. Maybe, even if I had healed, I still wouldn’t fall in love with Sangris. And it wouldn’t come suddenly. I tried not to push myself. I was too afraid. For all I knew, breaking my father’s spell might not have helped.

  But I felt different. More open. I waited for midnight with a quick, fluttering feeling in my stomach. The excitement came more easily and more naturally than I expected. It crept up on me when I wasn’t looking, and at seven o’clock on Sunday evening I found myself in the bathroom, staring worriedly at the mirror. He probably wouldn�
��t like my new hair. My mother had hacked through it with an old pair of scissors so that it hung straight and short, just below my chin. And my glasses—I’d been too absentminded to wear contact lenses lately. I put the glasses away and used my contacts for the first time in months.

  Automatically, I felt embarrassed for being so vain. Then I stopped myself. I didn’t want to be embarrassed.

  I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I took stock of myself. I’d never been so nervous while waiting for Sangris before. But surely that was a good sign too.

  I paced and paced.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In Which There Is a Dark Green Room

  By ten o’clock I had changed my mind. My parents were asleep in their room. The house felt empty. The light in my bedroom was artificial and too brittle. I went out into the hallway, put on my shoes, hesitated for an instant with my hand on the knob, and then, softly, let myself out the door.

  I didn’t want to pace alone in my room for the next two hours, and I didn’t want to wait. I planned to go to Sangris for once instead of waiting for him to come to me. Anju’s house was only a few streets away. Because I wasn’t stupid, I had taken a shawl from my room and used it to cover my head. In the darkness, it could pass for a veil, and it made me less likely to be disturbed by men in their cars.

  The night outside was hot and still, as though the world was holding its breath. I set off down the street, clutching the shawl around me. The moon was round and tinged with gold, and the streetlamps were everywhere, burnishing the palm trees with a warmer glow. Bright lights of cars slid by. Of course I had never walked to Anju’s house before, but I knew the way. The only problem was that there were no traffic lights or crosswalks on the streets (nobody ever walked outside, so why have crosswalks?) and I had to wait for a lull in the flow of cars and simply run.