If Today Be Sweet

by Thrity Umrigar

  “Hey. You still there?” Percy’s voice came crisp and urgent on the phone.

  Sorab exhaled. “Yup, I’m here. You know, bossie, I think you have the right idea—working for yourself, getting divorced when things don’t work out, and trying your luck again.”

  Percy had heard something in his voice, as he’d known he would. “What’s the matter, Sorab? Everything not okay at home?”

  “Oh no, I mean, everything is reasonably fine. It’s just that, Susan and I…that is, it’s hard, you know, having Mamma with us for so long. I mean, it’s the first time she’s been here by herself since Daddy’s death. And, I don’t know, it’s just not as much fun as when he was around. And Susan keeps asking me what Mamma’s plans are, whether she’s going to settle here permanently or not, and I don’t know the answer myself. It’s like every time I try to pin Mamma down, it’s like trying to spear a fish, you know? She just wriggles and moves out of my grasp. So, you know, well, sometimes it causes friction between me and Susan.”

  Sorab could hear Percy frowning on the phone, as he did when he was concentrating on something. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you about this myself. Just was waiting for the holidays to get over. If she’s going to stay, I need to file papers soon asking for an extension at least, depending on what she decides. You know what the damn INS is like—the continents will rejoin before we get an answer from them. She really must decide soon, Sorab.”

  “I know. I know. But to be honest with you, bossie, I don’t know what it is—whether Mamma is depressed or something. Or maybe she was just used to Daddy making all the major decisions. But she seems paralyzed. One day, I get the feeling that she could live here, even be happy here. But the next minute she’ll say something about her beloved Bombay and how she’s looking forward to her bridge parties when she returns in February and then I don’t know what to think. It’s driving Susan crazy, also.”

  “Women,” Percy said. “Women. Just goes to show, at any age they’re still the same—indecisive, unpredictable, irresolute. And isn’t it funny how everyone always misses Bombay as long as they’re not living there? But listen. I’ll talk to her, okay? You guys are coming to Homi and Perin’s party this week, correct? I assume you’re bringing Mamma to the party? Good. I’ll try to say something to her then. As her lawyer, I need to know.”

  “That would be great. Maybe she’ll be less evasive with you.”

  “Maybe I should have a talk with demon woman, also. Tell her to treat my best friend with more respect.”

  Sorab snorted. “Respect? That woman wouldn’t know how to spell the word.”

  “Too bad you can’t divorce your boss. I think they should start a whole new category of people you can divorce—bosses, teachers, immigration officials, parents, children, pets, landlords, Tom DeLay, Donald Trump, Wal-Mart greeters. After all, why should the joy of divorce be restricted to spouses?”

  Sorab grinned. “I feel a new lawsuit coming on.”

  “Yeah, a class-action suit, representing ninety percent of all Americans.”

  Sorab pulled into the circular driveway of Tropez and parked his car in front of the black sign that said VALET PARKING. “You know something? You have the same idiotic sense of humor that you did in high school. Remember how you used to drive poor Mr. Singh nuts with your limericks and puns?” He handed his car keys to a young man in a tan shirt.

  “Hey, you just made a pun yourself. Singh and nuts, get it? Singh means ‘peanut’ and you said—”

  “I get it, I get it,” Sorab groaned. “Ae, listen, I’m at the restaurant. I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Go. Have a good time with your lovely wife. And tell her about my standing invitation—if she gets sick of you, she can always marry me instead. I’m sure Julie won’t mind me taking another wife. I mean if the Muslims and the Mormons can—”

  “I’ll tell her,” Sorab interrupted. He cast an eye around the restaurant for Amy, the dark-haired girl who usually seated him. “And hey, Percy—thanks for everything. As usual.”

  “No mention. Us guys have to stick together against these wicked women with their wily ways. Listen, don’t worry. I’ll talk to Tehmina mamma. We’ll get things sorted out, okay?”

  As he hung up, Sorab’s eyes fell on Susan at a table near the window. As usual, she had brought a book to read while waiting for him. On their first official date, he had been stunned when Susan had shown up at the restaurant carrying a novel, and had misunderstood her reasons. Did you really think the date would be so boring you’d have to read? he’d asked her. But after all these years together, Sorab knew how shy Susan could be and how she hated waiting alone in a restaurant or in any public place. The book provided a welcome escape.

  Susan looked up and spotted Sorab across the room. Shutting the book, she waved. Inexplicably, Sorab felt his throat tighten. Good old Susan. How solid, how substantial she felt after the brittle superficiality of Grace Butler. Susan would never use a word like brilliantastic. Susan was home, a harbor, a refuge from the gaudiness of the world.

  As he crossed the restaurant to meet his wife, Sorab felt his body relax for the first time all day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hi, hon,” Sorab said, bending down to kiss his wife on the cheek. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I was all ready to leave when Grace decided she had to talk to me just then.”

  Susan smiled. “It’s okay. I figured you were running on Bombay time.”

  Was that a slam? Sorab gave his wife a closer look. These days, it was impossible to know what Susan was really thinking. That old closeness, where he could read Susan’s thoughts and complete her sentences for her, seemed elusive now. And suddenly he felt the loss of that intimacy acutely, as strongly as he still felt the loss of his father, eight months after Rustom’s death.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Sorab. It was a joke. I told you it was okay. Stop being so damn sensitive.”

  This was not the way he had envisioned this evening going. The whole point of the dinner with Susan had been to spend some alone time together, away from his mother’s benign but obtrusive presence. But two minutes into it, and already he was on the defensive, feeling much the same way as he did at home these days. Shit, he thought. Might as well have stayed home and saved myself fifty bucks. Cheaper to be miserable at home. He remembered his earlier encounter with Grace Butler and had the same feeling of the conversation galloping away from him. How did women do this? he wondered. How did they make a man feel guilty about taking a much-deserved vacation? How did they make a man who was about to shell out good money for dinner feel like a piece of shit for arriving five minutes late? He looked around for a waiter, unwilling to let Susan see how much her words had upset him.

  “Hon,” Susan said, cupping his hand in hers. “Listen, I’m…”

  But just then the waiter, a new guy whom Sorab didn’t recognize, came over to take their drink order. “Margarita, on the rocks,” Sorab said. “With salt.”

  “Make that two,” Susan added. Her hand still covered Sorab’s.

  She turned to him as soon as the waiter left. “Listen, let’s just start again, okay? I feel like we got off on the wrong foot.”

  He made a conscious effort to shake off the gloom that hovered around him. “Okay.” He smiled. “So picture me entering the restaurant, okay? And here’s me bending down to kiss you. And I’m saying, ‘Sorry, hon. Traffic was a bitch this evening.’”

  “And I say, ‘God, Sorab, you look drop-dead gorgeous tonight. Say, how about if we skip dinner and you know, um?’”

  “Your place or mine?” he said, happy to play along.

  Susan’s eyes were green and golden in this light. “I’m afraid it will have to be my place. Your place has a little boy and his elderly grandmother and a goldfish.”

  His voice was husky. “And what will we do at your place?”

  Susan licked her lips. “Anything you want. Anything. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

  Despite Susan’s playfully exaggerat
ed slutty impression, Sorab felt a slight stirring in his groin. “Darling,” he said. “I’m beginning to think that skipping dinner is a great idea.”

  They were laughing as the waiter set down their drinks and took their meal order.

  “Boy, this place knows how to make margaritas.” Susan sighed. She took a long, hard gulp. “You know, I kinda wish I did have a place of my own—just a getaway place when Cookie and—and everything else—gets too much to handle.”

  He had heard what she hadn’t said. “Mamma was being difficult today?” he asked quietly, dreading the answer.

  “No, not really. I mean, she was gone shopping most of the day with Eva Metzembaum. Turns out they went to the farmers’ market. God knows why. She came home loaded with fruits and vegetables. As luck would have it, I went grocery shopping after work today. So now we have bushels of tangerines and about five hundred pounds of okra at home.”

  Despite Susan’s valiant attempt to keep her tone light, Sorab heard the frustration in her voice. He felt a moment’s irritation at his mother. Why on earth did she have to go to the market on her own? She was forever telling Sorab that Cookie didn’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. Was this her way of rubbing it in? His mother could be passive-aggressive, he knew that. All bloody Parsi women were.

  To Susan he said, “She was probably just trying to be helpful. You know how much she wants to pull her own weight within the family.”

  Susan sighed heavily. “I know. Sorab, I know. It’s just that—why can’t she help in ways that are useful? I mean, the things I expect her to do—like clean the bathtub after a shower or vacuum on occasion, those things she won’t do. Do you know that I have to rinse out the tub every day before I can take a shower? And I’ve told her so many times, ‘Mamma, if you want to help, please take over the vacuuming.’ But she waits until I finally bring out the machine. And then she insists on pulling it away from me.”

  Sorab felt the familiar rush of heat in the back of his neck that he felt each time Susan said something critical of Tehmina. He heard the frustration in his wife’s voice, but behind his eyes there was another, older image—of his mother bent over the kitchen counter chopping onions, her face flushed from the steam from the pressure cooker and the sting of the onions. Do you realize that my mother spent—wasted—her entire youth cooking and taking care of five other people? he wanted to say to Susan. Dad and myself, my grandparents, and later, Percy. And that’s not counting all the street urchins and stray dogs that she fed. Surely she has earned the right to relax in her own son’s home? As for not rinsing out the tub each time, my mother lives in an apartment that has not seen a fresh coat of paint in twenty years. It’s not meanness, Susan, it’s just that the thought doesn’t even occur to her. And I’m too embarrassed to tell her to do it. Besides, I hate the thought of my mother, with her bad hip and all, bending over that tub, looking for every telltale gray hair. I don’t want her to feel like she is a guest in our home. I want her to believe this is her home.

  “What?” Susan said. “You think I’m being a bitch?”

  Not for the first time, Sorab marveled and bristled at his wife’s perceptiveness. Even as Susan became more shrouded in mystery to him, she could still read him like a book.

  “No, not a bitch. Not that at all. It’s just that…”

  It’s just that…there are some things, some thoughts so elusive that they wiggle like fish out of the web of words. Some differences were so great that they were beyond language, beyond explanation. How envious Susan had been when he had first told her that his mother had always had servants. That the fisherwoman and the newspaper boy and the baker and the butcher all made their morning rounds to the house, delivering their wares. How easy, how luxurious Susan had imagined his mother’s life to be. And yet that’s not how he remembered her life, at all. What he remembered of his childhood was a blur of ringing doorbells and raised voices and his mother’s tired, flushed face and the complaints of neighbors and the haggling with the vendors and the arguments with the servants and the chain of unexpected visitors and demanding relatives who dropped in without calling first. And somehow, like the conductor of a mad orchestra, his mother had to manage it all—had to tame the crashing protests of the cymbals, hush the under-the-breath rumblings of the percussion, console the aggrieved wail of the violin. He had never asked and his mother had never said, but Sorab knew that Tehmina would have willingly traded in the servants and the vendors who came to her door for a dishwasher that didn’t complain, a vacuum cleaner that didn’t ask for a raise, a supermarket where the prices were fixed, a clothes dryer that didn’t talk back, a food processor that chopped onions without leaving a trail of tears in its wake.

  He looked at Susan, trying so hard to understand him, and he felt the gap between them as enormous as the distance between Bombay and Ohio. How to explain to his wife the rift that opened up in his heart each time there was a conflict between the two women he loved most in the world? How to describe to her his first few years in America, when he had felt that rootlessness that only immigrants feel, so that he felt as if his head was touching the skies of America while his feet were rooted in Bombay, as if he was straddling two continents. He had looked forward to his dreams in those days, because in his dreams he could look out of his apartment window and there would be his father’s old Ambassador parked on the snowy street. Or Mamma was cooking him fish curry rice in the tiny kitchen of his Ohio apartment. In his dreams, his fingertips still touched his old life. Sorab wanted to tell Susan about how, for years, he had longed for his life to be seamless, how he yearned to have all his loved ones under the same roof. And how, after his mother and father began to visit him in Ohio, he had finally felt whole, complete, seamless.

  “What’re you thinking, honey?”

  Sorab shook his head briskly. “Nothing. I mean, that is, well, I am just sorry that things are not smooth between you and Mamma this time, you know?”

  Susan’s lips disappeared in a thin line. Had she always worn this icy expression of displeasure? Sorab wondered. Or was it simply more frequent and noticeable these days?

  “I’m sorry, too,” Susan said. “I—I just don’t know what’s gotten into her during this visit. She’s just so—I don’t know—obstinate or something this time. Like I try to help, but she just doesn’t seem as free and outgoing as she has in the past.”

  “Or maybe she’s just hurting,” Sorab snapped. His voice was hard but he didn’t care. “Did you ever think of that? After all, the woman’s just lost her husband of almost forty years.”

  Susan stared at Sorab openmouthed. Her eyes glittered with tears. “That’s so not fair. That’s a real low blow, Sorab. You think I’m not aware of the loss that she’s suffered? Hell, you think it’s been easy living with you the last eight months, the way you’ve been moping around? Oh, I know you try to hide it, honey, but I know you miss your father. And here’s a news flash—I miss Rustom daddy, too.”

  “Susan,” Sorab started. “I’m sorry.”

  “You-all ready to order?” It was the new waiter, and for a moment Sorab hated his guts. Bloody interrupting idiot.

  “Go ahead,” he said to Susan. “What would you like?”

  He turned to his wife as soon as the waiter had left. “Honey, listen to me. I know things are rough now. I…I honestly don’t know what to do to make anything easier on anybody. It’s just such a hard time. You know, I wish Mamma would decide what she wants to do, once and for all. It’s the bloody uncertainty that’s killing me.”

  “Speaking of which,” Susan interrupted. “If she does decide to settle in America, we’re going to have Rosalee come to clean every week, instead of our usual every two weeks, okay? This is the one thing I’m going to insist on, Sorab. I don’t care if—”

  “I thought we’d already decided we’d do that,” he said, hearing the coldness in his voice. “Why are you bringing that up again, Susan?”

  “Because I know you think I’m being too nitpicky about the h
ouse. I know you don’t get it, my need for a clean bathroom and a neat house.”

  “Susan, please stop treating me like I’m some third-world bumpkin. What do you think, I don’t appreciate a clean bathroom? It’s just that other things—like peace at home, f ’instance—matter as much to me. You don’t know how you come across with Mamma at times—like you’re some white-skinned princess ordering her underlings around.”

  “Listen to you. Just fucking listen to yourself.” Susan’s voice was loud but he resisted the urge to ask her to lower the volume, knowing it would only infuriate her more. “We were talking about the house and suddenly you’ve brought race and global politics into it. Honey, I married you knowing you were a—how’d you put it?—a third-world bumpkin, okay? And what the color of your skin has to do with my not wanting hair in my damn bathtub when I take a shower, I don’t know.” Susan was choking on her words now, using the cloth napkin to wipe away the hot tears hovering below her eyes.

  “Dammit. This is the last thing I want to do tonight, get into a fight with you. All I was trying to tell you is…” He stared at her dumbly, miserably, not sure of how to salvage the evening. “Maybe asking Mamma to live with us is not a good idea,” he mumbled finally. “Maybe she needs to go back home at the end of her six months.”