Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  Jumi hugged Walt, who frowned out the window at the murky river, and said, “They say hi to you now and completely ignore me.” He turned around and rewrapped Jumi’s towel around her hips. “Sometimes, it’s better not to say anything. We don’t always have to agree. You don’t have to take everything to heart.”

  GAME

  After she’d stroked his scar a hundred times, Walt confessed to Jumi. He hadn’t thought any woman would want him. His foreskin had wrapped so tightly over his broad tip, he’d pulled back the flap to pee. He’d funked through high school until his father cornered him by the ferns. Only after surgery did Walt chat up a cheerleader. “That’s why,” he grinned, “I’ve got so much game.” Jumi grunted.

  “Your game is zero game.”

  Jumi screwed her windows against the first frost and crawled under a quilt. She’d never planned a wedding. Too much time at bus stops with sixteen-year-olds and their babies. At the restaurant with Punjabis and whities licking their lips. Sure, she’d mooned at boys in class—cream-and-honey-and-coffee-skinned boys—but who looked at a nerdy flaca? “Bronx boys,” she muttered into Walt’s chest, “may be the most beautiful boys in the world. But they’re also the rudest.”

  Vero was more romantic than Valentine’s Day. She trolled wedding sites for dresses with Princess Di trains, for venue dates at El Rincón. She teared up when repeating The Legend of Camus: how he’d hitchhiked from Colombia to Mexico, been smuggled on a donkey cart here, sent money for his brother’s schooling.

  “Are you sure your parents will like him?” Jumi said.

  Vero shrugged. “My dad picked my mom from a chorus line. What’s he gonna say?”

  “Doesn’t Alberto worry?” Jumi said.

  Vero snapped her chocolate bar and gave Jumi half. “Alberto says, ‘if you can do something, why worry? If you can’t, why worry?’”

  No one told them about the memory of places. How even the river, waiting-waiting, would gurgle up a thousand-year warning. That land and loss are constant. That forgiveness is the hardest trick of all.

  DOGS

  Maybe it began the March night she swept the glass animals he’d gifted her off her desk. They smashed into shards so luminescent, she wanted to roll about in them. Rise armored with colored glass. He froze at her laptop, where he’d been clicking on a game. She hated how he was the popular one, just ’cause he was some rich kid? He knelt by her cot and sobbed. “You don’t know how I feel about you.” She crackled onto the glass. “No one knows how you feel about anything.” He wanted to bash her dark eyes in. Wasn’t she the one who wept in closets? Homesick, scholarship kid, cold-ass town. Yet he’d soap her down, toast cheese sandwiches, watch I Love Lucy clips till she uncoiled. He spread his arms. “Doesn’t it mean something that you push but I stay put?”

  Maybe it was the evening he thumped shampoo into her scalp and muttered. His boys had caught her talking to the dance professor. She slammed off the knob. Stalked dripping to her room. Was she under surveillance? He tried to draw her in by the mirror. “Calm down! You’re yapping like a Chihuahua!” She jerked away and yanked open drawers. Did he think they were the prince and the pauper? At least the prof wasn’t a stuck-up . . . he kicked the soccer ball at her ankles. “I get it! You people are the unsung dogs of Asia!” The ball bounced off the drawer and struck the mirror. Teetering . . . toppling . . . smash! Their startled faces scattered over the floor.

  Their fingers bled as they picked up the jagged pieces.

  “My mom picked my dad because he had I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y!”

  “Your mom’s dead! Stop romanticizing the past!”

  “At least I don’t worship whiteness!”

  “At least I don’t follow made-up gods!”

  Walt dumped glass into the bin and jabbed the message button on her answering machine. The voice of her high school buddy graveled out: “I probably shouldn’t say this, it being Valentine’s Day and all . . . but oy gevalt! I fucked a girl today! I felt like the President conquering China.”

  Jumi shivered on the floor. Walt yanked the cord from the socket. “How the hell do you call me a dog and not him?”

  Maybe it was the nights after, the funk between them turning their bed ballet into half-hearted hop. He couldn’t get it up as much—“You’ve lost so much weight,” he cried as he crushed her under him—she got off only one way now—facing away from him, cowgirl style, longing for trees that trembled up branches. Would they, she gasped, bloom?

  She asked Vero a few hours after she walked in on her, topless and giddy, under Camus. Vero slipped on her glasses and sat back in the papasan like a therapist. “Just come out and tell him, Jumi. I. Need. More. Lovin’.” Camus leapt between the girls and pinned Vero back onto the cushion. “Just say, lemme show you how it’s done.” Vero clasped Camus securely as he settled onto her lap, and Jumi squinted past them, into the dark, where sakura buds were curled against the frost.

  LOVE ALONE

  The day they dropped theses into boxes, ice slithered off roofs. Thawed the Charles into sludge. But Jumi, riding the T for hours, wept in Chinatown and couldn’t say why. Not even to the black man who sat on her bench and said, “Is it that bad?” When she kept sobbing, he said, “Now, now. It’ll pass.” Several minutes later, “I better go before I get arrested. You take care.”

  Walt sipped coffee in the sun-dappled Square and tracked the wind. Boys hurling Frisbees, girls lingering in dresses. On his lap, purple orchids for Jumi. Under his loafers, sharp cobblestones. Over his head, the sudden, open sky.

  They slept back to back and browsed work sites secretly. Till the breezy morning Jumi poured him a cup of bitter Assam. “Can you believe it? Dancing in the foothills for a year!” Walt scalded his tongue and stared out her window. The Charles churning, churning. “You wanna live in la-la-land.” Jumi hugged his head. “Visit me. I promise you’ll like it.”

  The few times they slept together, they woke with one kid sprawled on the floor.

  “What did you expect?” Vero said. She tiptoed to a tin of condensed milk on the shelf. “You’re so skittish.” Jumi rubbed her temples. “I’m so tired I can’t think straight.” Vero frowned at the tin. “This turns to dulce de leche at home.” She shoved it back. “You pick. Por ejemplo, I get tired of listening to Alberto talk about electronics and sports. But he makes me laugh. He’s devoted. And he gets sick of all this.” Jumi kicked the soccer ball. “For real?” Vero paused the ball. “I got a research grant to Peru. We’re talking about phone calls, visits, the whole deal.”

  When Jumi brought up Camus, Walt stabbed his dining hall pudding. Jumi pulled out the knife. “Forget India! Your friends think I’m lucky you visit the Bronx!” Five jock girls slid to the table’s other end. “I bought a plane ticket already, okay?” Walt said. “I’m teaching near your home next year, got it?” Jumi scraped back her chair. The Azores ladies in their hairnets were wiping down tables, listening in. They had told Jumi: Walt was bonito, he would be rico, she could dance por sempre. Walt cupped her face. “Throw me a bone, Jumi. No one can live on love alone.”

  ETA TIERRA

  Graduation day, the Sanchezes flew up—ay que frío eta tierra—and cheered in The Yard. Vero had marched to the front row, right on time, but Jumi, who had woken up late, trailed the last file to the back. She looked around for her father’s small stature, stern face—kot asa Baba?—but it was Camus who clapped her eyes gotcha! from behind. After the Latin speeches, the English speeches that sounded Latin, my kids trooped back to change into jeans. Camus, cornering Mr. Sanchez by the papasan, rapped his favorite song about big ol’ booties by good ol’ Mix-A-Lot . . . a normally beaming dentist, Mr. Sanchez clutched his belly as if in labor.

  Mr. Saikia met them at Pho Pasteur, where he shot Walt dirty glances over the menu. Walt gorged on vermicelli as if it were his pre-execution meal. Mr. Sanchez happily overpowered the silences with tales of his yacht. The hour—Walt’s brother talking to Mr. Saikia as if one of them were retarded, Camus down
ing beer as if he’d found an oasis, Jumi explaining for the nth time this dance in a war zone thing—ended on the restaurant threshold. Brattle Street, where the kids had skidded over so much icy doubt, was a glittering curlicue of stone. As the Sanchezes chattered about airport shuttles, Mr. Saikia turned into a bitter wind, which tossed Jumi’s words over the Singhs’ guarded faces. “See you soon?”

  Walt was left standing alone, gazing from one tide of backs to another.

  DOUBLE-FAULT

  She summered on Orchard Beach, watching the elliptical dips of the gulls. When some island guy came up to even her skinny ass—blunt stare, cajoling talk—she flirted till shutting down into a book. “Ninety-nine percent of the time,” she told Vero on a visit, “I’m on top. Is that normal?”

  “How about it’s sweet?” Vero said, slipping on her sunglasses. In her Yankees T-shirt and cutoffs, Vero drew glances to her guitar hips, her cavalier recline. “Ay chica.” She rose and shook off sand. “Stop kicking him to the curb. Decide and be done with it.” She strolled to the sea rim and rung Camus.

  August. A gold-skinned pão sauntered up as she lay reading Strangers of the Mist. He asked for the bathroom in mangled Spanish—she gazed around at the vast sand and bush—he grinned. They spent the day pacing the strip, comparing notes on Nova Iorque, capoeira, goddesses. He told her his grandmother was an Indian and belted orixa songs at the sea. They drove to City Island, where they shared fried calamari and tossed fries up to the frenzied gulls. At dusk, they parted on the Island Bridge, the Brazilian blushing at Jumi’s eager lips.

  August. Walt smoked blunts with his brother. Cruised downtown with his buddies. Ogled strippers with creamy tits, endless legs. Hit tennis balls with The Other Asian, Scott Lee, a Korean frog about half Walt’s height and color. The very last game, Walt called Jumi.

  “I don’t know what happened!”

  She set her basket of sandy clothes on the washing machine.

  “I had him. Two sets up, a break in the third. Then my knees buckled. I sank right there on the court. When I got up, I was a different man.”

  Jumi dumped the clothes and slammed the lid. “We all lose sometimes.”

  “You’re not listening!” Walt cried. “I kept double-faulting, hitting easy balls out. He demolished me.”

  Chug-a-lug the machine thrummed. “Next time,” she said. “We can’t always get what we want.”

  “I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “I can’t believe I lost.”

  THE MOON

  If India was another planet, the Northeast was its moon.

  Jumi danced weekly on makeshift stages, in Guwahati fields, Naga villages, Shillong churches. The ruddy cheeks, brushstroke eyes made her want to pull Walt through the phone. “You would fit in here!” But their phone connections were so fuzzy that Walt only heard half her sentences. “We cancelled the tour to Imphal last minute because of a bomb blast,” she said. He heard, “We tour Imphal last because it’s a blast!” When he called the Imphal hotel with card after card he’d bought in Indian groceries, the receptionist giggled, “Hasta la vista, baby!” Jumi, eating momos in a Kohima hotel, fell asleep to the cop flick Paap.

  “Family obligations,” Walt said for Diwali and stayed in Massachussetts. Jumi rattled on a Jeep to Kanchenjunga, a crisp blue peak that marked the Old Silk Road. Her travel mates, boisterous Bengalis who swapped tiffins of fish curry and rasmalai, cheerily informed her she was a typical backward Northeasterner. She clutched the door as they zipped around misty hill passes and prayed for life, liberty, and the pursuit of peace. But at the Gangtok Monastery, Jumi wandered the red halls and felt her gut surge. She wanted to ruin every shaven monk who strolled by: spare faces, maroon robes with flame shirts peeking through. She shitted so long over holes she thought she’d grown new thigh muscles, stopped shielding her rear from men who leered. “Ah, sexy, sexy shit!”

  Then, at an Arunachali dance performance, she met a prince. A punk rock-loving, Johnny Walker-drinking prince who invited her to museums, parks, cafes. Who steered her and his hounds in a Jeep along the lush riverbank, across cow-ridden bridges, past elephants lumbering from forests. Who sang full-throttle to Bob Dylan, who slapped his knees at goofy jokes, who studied Jumi sideways as if she were a marvelous alien visiting his planet. It struck her later as an old-fashioned courtship—whole villages watching, whispering—that fizzled out. Because she had to tour; because she’d be gone; because Walt called every Friday. I miss yous and what’s news that left her dizzy. “Why do you sound so weird?” he said. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Mostly, the moon made her gasp. Emerald hills capped by clouds. Girls click-clacking striped shawls on looms. Blackouts when folks lit kerosene lamps and spoke. Names that belonged to the jobless and the junkies, the fighters and the fucked who crouched at town edges. The names weighed on Jumi as she danced, so that she felt like a puppet. The dances themselves, once rich with twirl, seemed desperate. Or, as two French tourists put it, “so simple an animal could do them.”

  FAT KID LOVE

  Walt’s parents stared at the crooked streets, bargain stores, shambled tracks, and said, “Parkchester looks like a war zone.” Indeed, those first brutal months, the kids stampeded over Mr. S. Kids who seemed more invested in Dungeons & Dragons than in the Constitution. Who said basketball was more practical than the UN? Who remembered mack lines—mami, you so fine you make a n—— God whine—rather than his PowerPoint words—decorum, restraint. Who didn’t know what to make of Mr. S: Pancake Face, Ching Chong, Tiger Woods? Walt pointed to his brown forearm and said, “See? I’m also Indian.” The kids neck-bobbed about the classroom, slapping their mouths in war chants.

  “Welcome to my childhood,” Jumi said.

  For Christmas, she broke up with him. The thirtieth time. He zombied through the American Civil War, then graded till bedtime. When he couldn’t sleep, he drank vodka shots and jogged to Jumi’s parkway. Heaved on a bench till a crackhead, rising-falling, asked for change. When she called him a month later, pleading for one more chance, he sighed. “Jumi, I can’t play this game anymore.” When she yelled at him about his spoiled ways, he yelled back that he’d known she’d regret it. “Fine,” they cried. “I’m over it!”

  Then there were days the children sprang forth like llamas. Little blond Nathan punched him in the hallway. This too shall pass. L’chaim! Little Boricua Miriam pulled him down by his tie. Cheer up. You could die. Days when rap became a revelation: the rhythms that sounded like trains, the monotone delivery that unfolded into witness, the surprisingly rosy-and-blue ballads. Why Jumi had said 50 Cent had penned the world’s most romantic lines, lines he’d half-heard when she called him sweet cake, lines he overheard his kids singing daily to each other. I love you, they shouted. I love you, they drooled. I love you, they prayed. Why he saw with sudden clarity masks drop from faces. Who parented parents; who got locked in basements; who, no matter what, would run through the cracks.

  He lay on his bed, listening to the number four rumble by, and a seismic shift shot through him. He couldn’t even save himself.

  BURNT

  Their last supper at Kebab King, he told Jumi about the Austrian girl. A teacher who had drunkenly admired his exotic skin, exotic lips, exotic eyes. Who didn’t have Jumi’s hang-ups: brown girl secrecy, self-loathing, rage. Who was twice as beautiful, twice as troubled, twice as worldly. “I don’t know why she chose me,” he said, frowning at the calamari. Jumi patted his shoulder. “She has good taste.” He jerked back and scowled at her hand. “You look burnt.”

  They tried talking on the phone, as he plowed through his last teaching year and she danced at a Jersey theater. But when he yelled about the time and money he’d wasted on her, how he was better than ninety-nine percent of dogs she’d meet, she said nothing. Later, she wept before the mirror. Her dark skin! Her tiny limbs! Her broke ass! Her father drove those evenings from the restaurant, a routine that grayed his hair. “You are my blood, you are my heart, you are my star,” he bent
over her. But she couldn’t hear any of it.

  She cut Walt off and danced like a madwoman. He checked in with friends who’d attended her shows: how did she look? Was she with someone? He gave her email to girls who’d gossiped about her, who suddenly wanted to befriend them both. He left a voicemail rant, saying he was “appalled and disgusted” she’d slept with his Korean friend. She considered telling him Mr. Do-Gooder had hidden her from his church friends, had a pecker the size of a pinky, which explained his pious airs. She called to say, “You think your name is stamped on my forehead? How many girls have you slept with?” Walt snapped, “if you act like a kindergartener, I’ll treat you like one,” then hung up.

  She called once more, the night her father lay in the ICU. She sat on a stool, every jump of the heart monitor kicking her own guts, and said, “What if he dies?” Walt could only talk about cheating on Anna, about how he and Jumi got derailed, about how, years later, they might’ve worked. “Are you listening?” Jumi asked and Walt cried, “I’m talking for once! It’s your job to listen!” After she gently pressed the receiver, she counted how many times the pump by her father’s head sent air into his lungs, the plastic bag of blood by his feet circled in and out his sides. She touched the veins spidering over his wrists as snappable as hers. Deeta, can you hear me?