A Life of Adventure and Delight
Page 15
“I want to marry you,” I immediately said. We were both in her kitchen, in jogging shorts. I had imagined this day coming, and my saying this.
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
“I love you.”
As I told her I loved her, I felt, as I often did with Betsy, that what I was saying was a lie, a melodrama, a way to capture her, that things would not work out, that I was being foolish, that I was acting as if I didn’t understand the reality of the situation, except that I did and was willing to break things and make things very bad just so I could get her.
Tears slid down her cheeks.
“Why are you this way?” she asked.
Seeing her pain, I was thrilled to be sharing an important moment with her.
“I love you. I want to marry you,” I said, as if it explained everything.
Betsy turned around and walked away. After a moment, I followed her into her bedroom. She pulled her sports bra over her head, pushed down her shorts, and pulled back the sheets of her neatly made bed. She lay down on her left side, holding a pillow against her stomach, and closed her eyes. I didn’t know what to do. I sat on the bottom corner of the bed.
After a while Betsy began to breathe deeply and evenly.
I got into my car to go home. As I drove, I was scared. I felt that Betsy would leave me. I also felt that our relationship was hollow, that it should end, that it consisted of my pretending various things and of her being bullied by my pretense into various halfhearted agreements.
I thought of going to my mother and telling her that I wanted to marry Betsy, that she had to come with me and make a formal traditional offer. I thought that if I did this, if I took my mother and did the things that are done when a match is proposed, I would be acting like someone who had behaved honorably. I would be showing that I meant what I said.
I took the Metropark exit and went to my parents’ house.
My mother tilted her head to the side and stared at me. Sun was coming through the kitchen window. She had just bathed and her curly black hair was dampening the top of her green blouse. “Will you come with me to talk to her?” I said, my voice squeaking. “I love her.” The Hindi word for love sounded silly outside the movies.
“Will you come today?” I asked.
“What is the hurry?” she said quietly.
“There is a hurry.”
My mother stared at me. “Did you put something in her stomach?”
I didn’t answer.
“She’s educated,” I said. “She’s from a good family. Her parents are still married.”
“Boy or a girl? You know?”
“No.”
She sighed. “Boy or girl, both are family.”
This was the first time I had thought of what was inside Betsy as a baby, as a child, as a member of my family.
My mother and I left for Iselin to go to the Indian jewelry stores. It was evening and the sky was darkening, and where the Indian shops start on Oak Tree, there was a banner above the road and traffic began to get very slow as men and women led their children across the middle of the street, looking at the cars and holding up their palms to signal stop.
In the car, I phoned Betsy. It was strange to call her with my mother present. “It’s me,” I whispered on her answering machine, and I thought about the baby inside of her. The poor thing was not loved the way a baby should be loved.
“She won’t kill the baby, will she?” my mother asked. Many of my female cousins had been forced to undergo abortions when they learned their first child was a girl: to my mother an abortion seemed an unmediated cruelty.
“I don’t know.”
Inside the jewelry store, amid the crowd created by the mirrored walls, my mother and I sat on stools and looked at jewelry sets.
“What kind of earrings does she like?” my mother asked.
“Light ones. She says her earlobes are delicate.”
“Does she like rubies or emeralds?”
“Emeralds. And she likes things she can look at more. Rings or bracelets more than earrings or necklaces.” It surprised me to realize I knew these details about her. I felt a surge of grief because I knew my relationship with Betsy was probably going to end. I wanted to tell my mother details about Betsy. Both of her parents had worked, and for dinner Betsy and her sister would heat hot dogs for themselves. Her mom would call hot dogs “tube steaks.” Betsy liked to do laundry and fold clothes but not to vacuum. If she had to choose between tennis and swimming, she would choose swimming.
Betsy agreed to meet with us—me and my mother. We sat on her white sofa in the living room, and she placed a tray of tea and cookies on the coffee table. When I had called her to ask if I could see her, she had said, “I am so angry,” and her voice had been hard. “You didn’t behave like a good man. I should have done something to take care of myself, but you didn’t act like a good person.” Now, she was polite. She told my mother how nice it was to meet her.
My mother put the red box with the jewelry on the table. She opened it to show the gold necklace and the earrings and the bracelets on the red velvet. “Daughter, I hope you will hear our request to marry Pavan. He will be a good husband. He is loyal and hardworking.”
Betsy looked at the jewelry once and then back up to my mom. “Mrs. Mishra, I am not ready to get married. I like Pavan, but I don’t want to marry him.”
My mother was silent for a moment. “Daughter, will you consider marrying him?”
Betsy looked at us. “I don’t wish to get married,” she said softly.
“What he did was not respectful. It was not kind. But good things can come from things that start badly. God is there in everything. He is there in the good and the bad.”
“I will think, Mrs. Mishra, about what you have said.”
My mother was silent for a while, then, in an almost pleading voice, she said, “Daughter, the baby is part of our family. It is part of your family, too.”
BETSY DID NOT WANT ME to come with her to the doctor. I called her several times the day of the appointment, but it was dark out before she finally answered the phone. “It went fine,” she said. “I’m just tired. I’m going to sleep.”
My parents and I held the funeral ceremony for the baby on a weekday morning at the Sri Ram temple near Princeton. We sat in a far corner, hidden by pillars. There were only a few people in the temple. We had picked a weekday morning so nobody would ask what we were doing.
I sat across from the pandit. There was a fire between us, and he directed me to cut a ball of dough with a string and feed various stones by touching them with drops of milk. I was wearing a suit and it was uncomfortable there on the floor. My parents sat behind me watching.
“What is the baby’s name?” the pandit asked.
I didn’t know how to answer and I was silent, then my mother spoke. “We hadn’t given it a name.”
I started crying at how selfish I had been. I had been cruel and indifferent and had learned nothing from my own life. I put my hands over my face.
“It’s all right,” the pandit said. “We will call it Baby.”
Later, in the car, I drove and my father sat in the front passenger seat and my mother sat behind me. We were on Route 27 when my mother reached over my shoulder and slapped me, hard. Her hand hit my face and ear. Her breath was loud. She reached over and hit me again. I thought, Good, I should be hit.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the support of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation. Without these foundations a very difficult task might have been impossible.
I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for my employer, Rutgers University–Newark, which has given me time off to let me finish this collection. I also want to thank my wonderful and supportive colleagues in the English department and creative writing program. Ray Isle was the primary reader for most of these stories. His g
ift as an editor is almost supernatural. Lorin Stein also helped with these stories. I am glad that he told me to abandon two out of the three stories I sent him.
Jill Bialosky, my editor at Norton, has been my champion since the very beginning. There could be no better house than Norton.
Lee Brackstone, my editor at Faber, acquired the first book I ever wrote and has been endlessly patient. I remember the first time I walked past the Faber offices (long before I had written a book) and felt deep hatred toward the company because I felt so small compared to Faber’s history. How strange to be published by them now.
Last but not least, I want to thank my agent Bill Clegg. He has helped me in many ways, of which selling my writings is only one.
ALSO BY AKHIL SHARMA
An Obedient Father
Family Life
A LIFE OF ADVENTURE AND DELIGHT is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Cosmopolitan” and “If You Sing Like That for Me” were first published in The Atlantic. “Surrounded by Sleep,”
“A Life of Adventure and Delight,” “We Didn’t Like Him,”
“A Heart Is Such a Heavy Thing,” and “You Are Happy?” were first
published in The New Yorker. “The Well” was first published in The Paris Review.
These stories have been revised from their previously published versions.
Copyright © 2017 by Akhil Sharma
All rights reserved
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