The Meagre Tarmac

by Clark Blaise

  Of course I am the only true American in the family. The Beast was born in Bombay. He conveniently forgets this fact. I have my sliced red pepper, celery and carrots. Tiffy is scarfing down on the fried food.

  She breaks the silence. “This is really good!” and my mother is pleased. This is the daughter she should have had. “All we get at home is greasy soup with noodles and pieces of vegetables swimming around in it.”

  I could say all we get is the same stuff, chopped and fried in the same spices, every day for all eternity. I stopped last year. His Lordship is drinking a beer. The Beast has a Coke; Tiff, Her Ladyship and I have iced tea.

  “Chinese food is very good. I have many Chinese friends,” says His Lordship. So far as I know, all he has is Al Wong, his friend since graduate school, and Al and Mitzi come over once a month and they go to Al and Mitzi’s once a month, and they play bridge.

  “Chinese food very healthy,” says my mother.

  “Especially deep-fried egg roll,” says The Beast. Don’t say it, I pray, but out it comes: “I mean egg loll and fly-lice.” He never disappoints. Tiff doesn’t get it.

  “Chinese people are like Indian people,” His Lordship explains. “Very loyal to family. Children very loyal to parents, parents very protective of their children.”

  Tiff looks to me for help. “I never thought of that,” she says.

  “I think we’re very Greek, actually,” I say.

  Mother says, “Greek people eat meat wrapped in leaves.”

  “Greek myths,” I say.

  “What myths?” His Lordship weighs in. “All European myths are comic book versions of Indian myths.”

  “I was thinking of Atreus,” I say, to deafening silence.

  On the walk back, Tiff asks, “What’s that Atreus thing you said?” Just the usual incest and slaughter, I answer. Gross, says Tiff. Then she says, “your dad and Al Wong actually rented a house in Palo Alto? Lots of hot action, I’ll bet.” Among Chinese, Al Wong is a little bit famous.

  But she doesn’t know my father. My father and hot action — in the linguistic interstices, all things are possible, I guess. And the third guy, a Parsi, went back to India. But then she says, “You won’t get mad if I ask a personal question?” My life is nothing but very personal secrets. “Go ahead,” I say.

  “You and Borya, you’re getting it on, aren’t you?”

  “Getting it on? What does that mean, exactly?”

  “I don’t care if you are or if you aren’t. I was wondering about, you know, his thing. How big is it?”

  “Big, meaning long, or wide, or what? It’s a meaningless question, Tiff. Big as a function of his pinky finger? Big as a function of his arm?”

  “Forget about it,” she says. And I wonder if she already knows that she’s next. And Tanya Ping is lined up, just after her. “Just, what’s sex like?”

  It’s like a puppy of some rough, large breed that just keeps jumping up and licking your face. It’s shaped like a candle, without a wick. Of course, Borya’s Jewish, so the shape’s a little off. “It makes you sleepy,” I say and Tiff nods, “that’s what I thought.”

  Maja Skojewska was Maja Pinska. “I grew up in a very liberal Jewish family,” she told me, in our informal Russian “classes”, and when I’m her age I’ll probably be saying, “I grew up in a Hindu family.” Madame’s idea of Russian lessons is to talk of her life, in Russian, interjecting Polish and English and before too many weeks she says, “See? You just asked me that in Russian!”

  Her father was a schoolteacher, a great admirer of India. That’s why she and her sister, Uma, have Indian names. When the Germans came to the school to get him, the priest said, we already turned him over. And there he was all along, working in the same school, only sooty black from shoveling coal. The Germans couldn’t imagine a Jew working like a Pole, dirtying his hands like a Pole. Her husband-to-be was also a schoolteacher, a Polish Catholic (not to be redundant) but after the war he went to university, then to Moscow State for more study and after two books, he was invited to Oxford, and that’s when they made their escape. The idea that little Maja Pinska would be eighty years old and tending her garden in California is testimony, she says, to a kind of stubborn life force.

  On her table are bananas so unblemished that I thought they were wax. “That’s the first thing I noticed when we got to England,” she says. Bananas! And the thrill of peeling a banana has never left her, after fifty years. And we sit a few minutes in silence, and she leans towards me and says (I’m sure it’s in Russian, but it’s as clear to me as English), “You know, Borya will drop you.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I don’t approve of what he does, but then I say, it’s better you learn from him than from these boys I see on the streets.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Sometimes I think of Madame’s life, and mine, and that it’s all a kind of trigonometry of history. Her life is a skyscraper, mine is just a thimbleful of ashes, but our angles are the same. My adjacent side is just a squiggle, and my opposite side barely rises above the horizon. But the angle is there. I feel that I can achieve monumental things if I can just live long enough.

  Even with all his money, it took Al and Mitzi fifteen years to leave their cottage in Cupertino and splurge on a 23rd-floor apartment in downtown San Francisco. It’s all glass, 360° panoramic views of the city, the Bay, the bridges, the Marin Headlands, Berkeley and Oakland. No interior walls, but for the bathroom and two bedrooms. They also have a country estate in Napa. Some evenings when the fog rolls in, we’re suspended in a dream, disrupted only by bridge-table small talk. Other nights, the city sparkles. Al pours me a small glass of plum wine. Tonight, my father complains of his job. He’s in nanotechnology, and his responsibilities are shrinking fast.

  “Have you thought about something new?” Al asks. “I mean really new.”

  “Yes, I have,” His Lordship responds. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard such a thing. He always defends continuity. His father spent forty years in Maharashtra State Government service. What really new thing could he possibly do?

  Every now and then, when Mitzi and Her Ladyship are out of the room, Al Wong will say, “What do you hear from our old friend?” He’s got a needle, and he uses it. I can tell it’s a jab to my father’s self-esteem, but I don’t know what it means. I think there’s a lot of sado-masochism, not nostalgia, in their friendship. Sometimes it’s good to be a quiet, studious, Indian daughter; I’m just furniture. Except for Borya and Madame, I’m accustomed to being ignored.

  Most of the time, they just sit and complain, drink some wine and play their bridge. After half a glass, my mother will say, “What was the bid? I’m feeling so light-headed!” Al and my father were in grad school together and started out at PacBell together, and my father’s still there. Al decided to go entrepreneur, and bought a computer franchise. He sold that at just the right time and bought and sold a few more things at their peak, and then he bought a hotel in Napa. He built it up with spas and a gourmet restaurant and hiking trails, and then he opened a winery: AW Estates. The hotel is where young Bay-Area Chinese professionals want to get married, or at least honeymoon or go on weekend getaways. He says there are so many young Bay-Area Asians at his hotel that it’s like a second Google campus. AW Estates pinot is what young Chinese professionals drink. He’s even got a line of plum wine for the older folks, a girl like me. Every thing he touches turns to gold.

  I don’t know how it started, but tonight there’s an edge, an identifiable complaint, coming from my father. “I’ve been thinking,” he starts, and he leans forward, perhaps aware that I’m sitting ten feet away. “I’m thinking my children disrespect me.”

  That’s the news? Al says, “Mitzi and I never wanted children.” Once they made that decision, she went to law school and now she’s a major litigator.

  “I blame this country,” says my father.
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  “It’s in the culture,” says Al. He came from Hong Kong. “We can’t live their lives.”

  “I believe my son is dating a person without my permission. I believe he is involved with a most inappropriate young lady.”

  That’s when Al says, maybe to break up the seriousness, “By the way, guess who’s back from the East? Now she’s an accountant. I’ve hired her to do my books.”

  And then, just from His Lordship’s grimace, it all makes sense. There was someone in those days of hot action in Palo Alto. Tiffy Hu smelled it out, and I’ve spent thirteen years in a fog. It’s so exciting, so unexpected, I want to jump up and pump my fist.

  “I think ...” my father says, then pauses, “I think that we must leave this country.”

  If furniture could speak, it would shout, “What?!”

  “Hey, man, that’s an extreme reaction,” says Al. “I’m not talking of that one. I have been a bad father. Things have been going on under my nose, outside my control. Asian children should never be allowed to stay in this country past their childhood. I may have already lost my son, but I can still protect my daughter. If I can save one from shame and humiliation I will at least have done half my job.”

  I clear my throat. “May I speak?”

  His Lordship stares across the living room, as though an alarm clock he’d set and forgotten about had just gone off. Truly, I am invisible to him. “Pardon me, but that train has left the station.”

  “We’re not talking of trains,” he snaps.

  “Okay. That horse has left the barn.”

  I never thought I would, under any circumstance, defend my brother. His Lordship, says, “Kindly keep your opinions to yourself. You are not part of this conversation. This is about your brother.”

  I’m up against something that is irrational. I can’t argue against it. “No, it’s not! It’s not about him. That genie is out of the bottle. It’s about me, isn’t it?”

  Al Wong passes his hand between my father’s frozen gaze, and me. “Vivek,” he says, “she has a point.”

  Some day I want to ask Al Wong, what was it that happened in that house in Palo Alto? What caused my father to cast a lifelong shadow on this family?

  “Go to your mother,” my father says. I don’t go directly to my mother. My fate in this family is, as they say, fungible. I approach the sofa where His Lordship is seated. “Let me say one more thing. If you try to make me go back to India and if you stop me from going to Stanford and you try to arrange a marriage with some dusty little file clerk, I’ll kill myself.”

  Things have been frosty these past few days. The Beast is back in Santa Cruz. While I’m at work on my ap History, and my parents are watching a rented Bollywood musical, the phone rings and my father picks it up, frowns, then holds it out towards me. “It’s your teacher,” he says, and I expect a message from school, maybe an unearned day off, but it’s Borya. He says, “Madame is asking for you.”

  I tell him I have no way of getting there. And why would she be asking for me?

  “I am driving,” he says, an amazing concession. He is not a hopin- the-car Californian. He’s a skater, not a driver. I didn’t even know he has a license.

  Normally, I would never ask to leave the house after dark, but when I say, “Madame Skojewska is asking to see me. Mr. Borisov will pick me up,” my father barely lifts his eyes from the television.

  “Where will you be?” he asks. I write down Madame’s address and phone number. They don’t know that Borya lives in her basement.

  I recognize the car as Madame’s, usually parked and dusty in her garage. She revs the engine once a week. It’s been over a year since she bought a gallon. “A gallon a year, if I need it or not,” she joked.

  Borya starts out in English, “We go to Stanford Hospital. Madame has ...” he strikes his chest, “heart.” Stanford Hospital is where I was born, but this doesn’t seem a commemorative moment. And then, it must have occurred to him that we are not at the ice rink and that no one is watching, and that my months of Russian instruction permits adult interaction; he grabs my hand, kisses it, and says, “you know how she loves her bananas. She walked down to Real Foods, bought two bunches, and on her walk back home she suddenly collapsed.”

  When we arrive at the hospital, he says “They said she was going, tonight.”

  She’s in the ICU, under a plastic tent. It reminds me of the flaps on baby-strollers, the plastic visors, the baby warm, secure and sleeping while rain is pelting. Just like that, sweet mystery of life and death. One day we were chatting like old friends, See, you just asked me that in Russian! and I felt I belonged in a time and place I’ll never see, I’ve never had a student like you, you sit so quietly, you don’t repeat words, you don’t ask why we say it the way we do — you just start speaking it like a native, like someone reborn.

  A student like me is accustomed to praise from her teachers. But that’s not the point; the point is, I impressed her and she’s the only teacher I’m likely to remember. I remember years of teachers’ meetings, standing alone at the edge of the classroom while a teacher pulls my parents aside. I see her gesturing, and my parents shaking their heads. What did she say about me? I ask when we’re back home and my mother says, Some nonsense, and my father says You have a good head, but you are prone to dreaming and you must work harder, or you will fail. I know it’s about the evil eye; I might accidentally hear some praise that will turn my head from proper feminine modesty.

  “You know what she said about you, even today? Even this morning when she was headed out to buy her bananas? She said, ‘Borya, living long enough to teach that girl Russian is the greatest privilege of my life.’”

  We stand behind the glass and it seems that Madame’s eyes are open, and shining. I raise my hand and flutter my fingers; it’s all I can do. Do svidaniya, Madame.

  I think I know what it was, back in that rented house in Palo Alto when my father and Al Wong and the Parsi guy were Stanford students and my mother and the baby Beast were still in India. Al knows, Mitzi knows, my mother knows. He wants to go back to India because someone from his past, a woman perhaps, has suddenly come back. Some long shadow of shame has shaped our lives. It’s about him, not me, though I’m the one who will pay the price.

  When Madame died, I started thinking of other teachers.

  When I was very young — five, I’d guess, in pre-school — I discovered algebra. First, it was the word itself, it tasted good in the mouth, like something to eat or drink. Fortunately, I had a teacher, “Miss Zinny” we called her (I think her good name was Zainab, and we were the only two South Asians in that class), who didn’t laugh when I asked her what algebra was. The next day she brought her college math book and we spent my naptime working out the problems. I remember the excitement, the freedom in a phrase like “Let P stand for ...” or a declaration like “let A=C+1.” Solve for the value of c. The consolation of algebra; everything is equal to something else. It was something I couldn’t explain, but it’s what I felt a few years later when I learned about imaginary numbers. It’s about seeing the nine-tenths of the iceberg, and not being afraid. What I remember is the equals sign. Everything in the world can be assigned a value, and has an equivalent. I went home and told my mother, “Let p stand for potato. Let r be rice.”

  “Then wash the rice, please,” she said.

  THE DIMPLE KAPADIA OF CAMINO REAL

  MY HUSBAND IS IN INDIA. He says “back in India” and he’ll call for me to follow as soon as he’s found a job and a flat. It seems that I’ve spent my life waiting for his phone calls. Twenty years ago it was: I have found a house for us. I have put in for your papers. You will be coming to California in three weeks. Tell Jay I’ve seen cowboys and Indians in California. Get a good new bag and pack it. Now I wait for another call to put our Camino Real house on the market and take Pramila out of school and prepare her for a new life in India. There are many
good convent schools, he tells me. I know there are many fine convent schools — I went to one at her age — but her needs are not like mine. She’s supposed to start at Stanford next year, the youngest student (13 years, ten months) they’ve ever taken.

  “She wants to go to Stanford for pride reasons only,” my husband says. “She’ll learn. Pride is not good in a girl.”

  He thinks he can make all of this happen while he’s on his normal two-weeks’ vacation and two additional weeks’ deferred vacation- time. All the years we’ve spent here, and he still lives in the India we knew, when American dollars and a Green Card opened every door and “foreign-returned” meant you could command your destiny. Now Jay is going to university in Santa Cruz, and our daughter is starting at Stanford, and the Camino Real house is silent and even a little dusty because I don’t see the need to keep it clean or even livable. Pramila barely eats, and I can get by on fruit and curd. Half the time, I don’t know if she’s home or not. No radio, no television. I miss the pounding of male urination, because with men around I know there’s something predictable in the house.

  Yesterday I went up to Macy’s in San Francisco to replace a dead battery in my watch. Of course I didn’t have to take a train to the city and there are places in Stanford and San Jose that are closer, but I don’t associate San Jose with adventure and freedom, and these days I’m totally free, and restless. Macy’s on Union Square was practically empty. A Mexican worker was polishing chrome and glass with just a squeegee bottle of blue liquid and a long rag. Salespeople were standing around in clumps of three and four and the islands of jewelry, the bottles of fragrance and the watches stood unattended. Only the Mexican kept moving and his polishing rag left a kind of glow behind him.