Sugar, Smoke, Song

by Reema Rajbanshi

  I slam the dashboard with both hands and Yusuf turns to stare. “You think I don’t get called names? Gook, sand n——, or straight up n——! You know what you shouldn’t have been doing? Yelling at me while I was driving! I told you that freaks me out!”

  Yusuf slouches and I throw a twenty at him. “You’re real good at fighting, aren’t you?” he snarls, then steps out to pump gas, while passersby, mostly Mexican families, look worriedly at me massaging my forehead.

  I’m remembering the first time Yusuf and I talked, not the club night he’d shown me his paintings on his flip but the weekend after, at Anita’s birthday party. Yusuf had walked through the front door wearing a white shirt and a somber expression, as if showing his beautiful self were a difficult gift he were conferring on us all. The other guests, mostly tipsy scientists, stared as the most dazzling human being in the house followed me around. I too wondered, Why?

  “It’s nice to see you,” I’d said.

  He’d laughed. “So polite.”

  I handed him a plastic cup of pinot, then rushed to my private bath mirror. Hair un-frizzed? Check. Sarong straightened? Check. Eyeliner not blurred? Check.

  When I inched back to the kitchen, Jasmine, a buxom punk rocker I’d met in voice class, was rattling off her number, the names of all her black friends, the list of painters she knew in Sac-town. Yusuf was studying her quizzically, cradling his cup in both hands, then turned to me, a grin popping out of nowhere. “You know what they say about Indian women?”

  I braced myself by sitting on a barstool. “We are the hairiest?”

  “They are the most beautiful in the world. Maybe I can paint you some time.”

  “I do nudes,” Jas said.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said, taking my hand and brushing over the palm. “Looks like you’ve been through enough.”

  “I’m not afraid of paintbrushes,” I said. “Or of you.”

  His hands were rough and dry, exactly the way I’d imagined a firefighter’s hands to be, but cold. Just then, the house had churned, the partygoers scrambling out the door with their plastic cups, across the street, to the cleared-out parking lot. There, a safe distance from a few cars, Jas corralled two fire-breathers, one long-haired bearish Viking and A Girl with Some Kind of Tattoo lookalike. They’d dipped their sticks in a soda bottle of gasoline, then slipped them in their mouths, finally spewing columns of fire up into the placid Davis sky.

  Tonight, it’s only nine when Yusuf pulls us into my carport, the street bumping with Friday night hip-hop and punk rock, the asshole neighbors brawling because some dude hit on some other dude’s wife. I wait in the seat, hoping for a miracle reconciliation, but Yusuf tosses my keys in the back, slams the door, and walks off down the driveway. I step numbly by the carport column and count the beats till his long line merges into the alley shadows, beyond the nodding gardenias and the neighbors’ fenced-in noise.

  SMOKE

  Those first work mornings—farm furrows awash in light, crows lifting like a black veil from the trees, in hundred-degree heat that shimmers up the road, where folks walk in a perfect line—I feel, maybe this is where I’m meant to be. Truth is, so many of us have come here unannounced. My first learner this morning is a lanky Rwandan man with bloodshot eyes that seem like they’ve seen too much. It isn’t until I’ve explained the rules, until I’ve taken down his Biography basics, until I’ve tested him with the first batch of words that I realize. He is my landlord’s gardener, the man who has quietly repotted my dying alyssum, watered the parched soil so that the lone lemon tree stands fragrant and yellow.

  “Are you that Tim?” I say.

  His eyes gleam. “I am that Tim.”

  I pair him with an older white lady, a retired schoolteacher who has brought us sugar cookies. She stammers a bit in the beginning, as if she is the immigrant in a new country, and we may reject her application after all. Tim makes a few jokes about the heat to ease her and as they chew the cookies, I say what I always say. Good luck, you will be fine, stay in touch.

  Over the summer, I find most of the learners have modest goals. Write a paragraph. Use the phone directory. Pay the bills. Some, who have left families behind in Rwanda or Cambodia or Mexico, want to write a letter. The grammar is off in various ways, but almost always, I read: I miss you, I am doing something here, write me back.

  Every evening that I drive between Woodland and Davis, the flat of the valley seems even thirstier under the stark blue sky. The radio stations always talk about the drought, how the water table is at the lowest it’s been in several years, how the valley is bursting into flame. I never call Yusuf, who will repeat how “fire is a demon, how water is a weapon. I never realized until I came to America.” I want to call Deeta, to ask him a riddle like he’d ask me as a kid, what did the farmer’s son see in common between love and learning and land?

  At the interview for the job, the library ladies in their neutral blouses and dark sneakers had asked across the table, “Why do you care about this work? You could be making more back East. It says here, you want to work with singers.” Impulsively, I said my grandparents hadn’t been literate, that I was luckier than anyone in my family had been. When those ladies dropped Iraq and unreadable around me before they dropped me from the job, they must’ve concluded I was an uppity New Yorker anyway, but back then, they paused with their pencils perched on a checklist I never saw and turned away as if storing what I’d said for a rainy day.

  Yusuf never asks about my work, though the night I began complaining about the words I bump against, he says, “Why are you doing these odd jobs for these crackers?”

  “Are you saying I should leave town?”

  “You take everything too literally and seriously.”

  “That’s not what most people think. Plus I’m way funnier than you are.”

  He rolls his eyes and tells me to turn on the dresser light, show him whatever it is I wanted to show him. It’s a New York Times article on soldiers in Somalia, and though he’s narrated to me the differences of tone and tribe and war among Somalians, Ethiopians, and Kenyans, he’s silent. He takes the laptop from me and clicks carefully through each picture. Lanky men in swaths of cotton, rifles slung over their shoulders, before fields of green-gold-black. “See,” I begin, pointing to one byline. But Yusuf pushes aside my hand and mumbles, “A twenty-four-year-old . . . who trans . . . transports goods.”

  “Between borders,” I whisper but Yusuf has clicked to the next page.

  SONG

  They say Cesaria would open her concerts by standing center stage, cigarette in one hand, glass of cognac in the other. Tick-tock five . . . ten . . . taking satisfied swigs of that cig, sipping ever so surely that pungent black liquor. As if this were some potent rite to open her cords, pump her belting breath, let the public know exactly what she were made of: not sugar and spice and all girls nice but sugar, smoke, song.

  They say The Barefoot Diva of the orphanage sang on world stages—Lisbon, Paris, New York—as she’d sung in the Cabo Verde taverns and streets where she’d come up. Her voice never sounded harsh the way smokers’ will, or languid the way drinkers’ do, but deeply smooth, sweetly paced, even when singing about the untranslatable. Morna, coladeira, funaná: always those undertones of homesickness. The papers on her death mused how she never let the fame get to her but never questioned how she knew which was stage—which was sand, what is grand—what is shit, how scales other than pentatonic protect a bluesy heart.

  SUGAR

  And yet. The very next Friday, a sunny make-up Friday, Yusuf and I dress for Lake Berryessa. We’re dawdling over folded prints at the bed’s edge when he confesses: he fought again with Zuleikha.

  “The way she yelled! ‘How could I throw you in her face,’ she said!”

  “Why did you even call her? I feel like a dumb bitch.”

  “I thought we were friends,” he says, rolling a white wifebeater on to match my tank. “I told her I was on a date.”

  “Sh
e acts like she has some claim on you. She’s still in love with you!”

  Yusuf turns away, ducking his bashful smile, but preens side-to-side before the bath mirror. “I’m a Greek god,” he laughs, and winds toward me. I turn my back to him, so he can trace the birds tattooed down my spine, and wait for his firefighter’s hands at the very bottom. They force in heat, pushing me down—he goes—and whispers, “Thatta girl. Stay right there.”

  Even my car, Yusuf eases round the crags to the lake, where my friends’ve warned me not to go. “Indian burial ground,” they say. “Full of lost souls. Haven’t you heard of the Zodiac Killer?” The way folks glance over as Yusuf and I clamber up the rocks, they must be conjuring: the squaw and the slave, here come The Browns, who’s the twelve-year-old, who’s her molester? Yusuf rolls his eyes but mocks the bearded Chicano who dusted me off when I stumbled onto shore: “Maria, Maria, whatchu doin’ with that n——? Come to Papi.”

  Because I’d asked for this thistled hike, Yusuf riffs as he steers us round the motorboat fiesta dotting the longest stretch. “Yo, this is some bougie hippie shit. Look at the white boys owning the water. You sure you don’t wanna be hanging with them? Why am I so nervous—you’re just a little girl.”

  And yet. As I thread through seaweed and driftwood on the stretch’s quieter end, Yusuf sloshes three yards behind, smoking a Marlboro Light. Black dogs, like so many pampered pooches in these boonies, bound toward me, and I trip over my sunken feet. As if I’d self-baptized, I rise soaked and zombie-walk on, toeing for shells or stones that might change my luck. Yusuf laughs—“Pa’lante! I like your attitude”—and scoops me up—“Put me down! I don’t need your help!” I punch—but sand spills out my cutoffs and Yusuf laughs so hard he nearly keels us over. I can’t help laughing back when he rolls us under an oak, its shadow merging with Yusuf’s own, and shouts at the sun. “Look at how America’s brought us to our knees! I used to live in a palace! God, give me a break! Give me a girl!”

  “My ex,” I say, “told me he was leaving me for a white girl. I’m not putting up with that colored boy psychosis anymore.”

  “You remind me,” Yusuf says, “of my Eritrean girl. Small and fierce. She cheated on me with a brother.”

  When I tell him brothers don’t notice me but old white men look at me like shank, Yusuf says, “Filet mignon. White boys’ll give you five babies, then leave you for a supermodel.”

  “Brothers pull that shit too.”

  And yet. As flames fan and crackle over the valley’s matchstick brush that August, I’m the one hunting for Yusuf. On an afternoon errand to downtown Sac, I park in the narrow lot of a Whole Foods and wander—half-breathing, half-hoping—to the back counter where he’s said he works.

  Sure enough, he’s hamming in his green duds behind the sirloin and salmon, explaining prices to the white-swathed Ethiopian women with a cart. I know he sees me because he tries too hard not to look sideways. As the ladies discuss prices with each other, I walk up. “Do you have any fish?”

  He grins. “I’ll keep something in the back for you.”

  “I thought you might be gallivanting.”

  “No fancy words here. And no lying.”

  The ladies are assessing us now and when I begin backing off, he says, “Where are you going so soon?”

  Truth is, I’m shy suddenly and burning with the possible read of jealous girlfriend, which I never thought I’d stoop to being. Truth is too, I want to watch Yusuf undetected, so I lurk about the grocery like a shoplifter. Browsing aisles of canned beans, Mexican spices, dairy I can’t digest. He cuts statuesque even as he’s grumpily winding back and forth from the meats to the freezer door. I look up at myself in the monitor: scarved in a black puffy jacket, small, bookish. A year later, when I see Yusuf’s new girl, an Ethiopian woman built like me but who works alongside him, I won’t wonder as I do now what he wants and what he doesn’t.

  But the most surprising truth I don’t learn until my tutoring gig resumes and Yusuf’s tackling night classes again: history will Braille right under you. Davis is chilling into California Winter—no telltale snow—still Yusuf, insisting all work and no play makes Yusuf a dull boy, steers my car to the downtown Czech pub where we met. It’s there, as we cross the wood gate, just two yards between them, that Yusuf and some barstool blonde swivel toward each other—it’s then I feel the frisson in their fists, I see their daggers of love. Yusuf slinks like a cowed dog round the column, she lifts her arched brows, her lovely lashes like a proud flag, and I march into the reggae that throbs from the turntable-styled bar. “I’m Nirmali,” I say, and the way she grips my hand, announces “Zuleikha,” I know she’s the tougher bird.

  She is, about-facing and bobbing off into the crowd, while Yusuf drinks Corona after Corona and I jab the mint in my rum.

  “You look unhappy,” he says. “Let’s just go.”

  “Did you know she’d be here?”

  “I swear I forgot.”

  “I don’t want to be some pawn in whatever’s going on between you two.”

  “You have no idea! I haven’t even held that girl’s hand in a year.”

  Yet he rises twice, fifteen minutes, then twenty, to smoke on the porch where she sits, blowing steam up, steadily ignoring him.

  She isn’t beautiful, just a girl who knows the price of her booty and blonde, whereas strangers stop to tell me I’m a gem, and tonight, I almost believe it. Yusuf’s painter fingers slipped purple silk on my bronze skin, feathers between my black curls, glossed my eyes into emerald wings. Yet, this is precisely how I recognize their love: I am the showpiece he brings in order to sit at her table.

  Later, in the blunt light of my sparse room, my dress crushed over his jeans, my thighs pried apart like a clam, he murmurs, “Such beautiful, beautiful legs.” I know it’s my ear his tongue licks but I wonder which bird he craves. When I ask him how he likes it, he flips me and runs a hand past the scars circling my hips. “Good,” he says. “Very good.”

  SMOKE

  Every month we Skype, Deeta forgets to adjust the computer screen. All we see of his low head are owl eyes searching. Ma, who perches at the screen’s side, who pats her molting hair, listens for the love I won’t utter before gliding away. Every month we count, on both hands, Deeta’s procedures and Ma’s shots. Three angioplasties, one triple bypass, a couple stents. Morning insulin, midnight snacks, Ma shaking as she slices a banana in the kitchen. Criminal Minds, a habit Ma and I still share, flickers on Anita’s television behind each screen chat, stalling me in wakefulness I can never leave behind.

  When I call Henna to bridge the years, she says, “Ma will have to retire soon. What will she do if Deeta dies? An old Asian immigrant woman with ten years of savings?”

  Suddenly I can’t remember Henna’s numbers: promises, promotions, absences. “I’m not planning to run out on anyone,” I say.

  “Do you have any savings?” she says. “I can’t raise kids and take care of them.”

  I stare at my chapped hands, unsure if I’m more ashamed of myself or her.

  “Don’t tell me another story, Nirmali,” she says and hangs up.

  My first visit back to the Bronx in a year, right before Yusuf jostled me on African Night at Little Prague, Deeta drives Ma and me to Orchard Beach. A gray June day, so the lot is nearly empty, save for the ginormous white tent by the exit road. Harlem All State Circus, the letters painted on the side read, and Deeta, who likes to repeat names aloud, says, “Harlem! In the Bronx!” Ma squints at the tent, at the beach, then stares at the sky.

  They pace forward without me, their parallel powerwalk along the boardwalk, at a careful distance from the still warm Atlantic tide. I plop myself at the edge of the curb, between the courtside fence and the parking lot, which is when the acrobat and his little buddy bike by. He looks surprisingly like Yusuf, with a lion’s crown of twisties, those large lashed eyes, and that limber grace.

  “What are you doing here all by yourself?” he says.

  �
��I wish I knew.”

  He bikes before me in circles, grinning, and his seven- or eight-year-old friend trots after him tirelessly.

  “I’m an acrobat at the circus. You know what that is?” Acrobat Man drops his bike, cascades backward toward the cars in a series of handstands and somersaults and cartwheels. He does the whole tumbling dance back my way, panting not a bit as he lands on one knee before me.

  “How about it? Two free tickets for the pretty lady? Come on Saturday,” and he gives me two slips of paper.

  “I don’t know . . .” but he is already biking back to the tent, lifting a hand without glancing back. His little copycat waves too, his back halfway turned, still peeking.

  When Ma and Deeta steer the car out the lot, I hunch unbelted behind Deeta’s seat and say, “Did you forget about me or something? I thought I’d never find you.”

  They don’t answer—Ma gazing stony-faced at the sea, Deeta coughing and clenching the wheel—but as we pass the blue-and-white tent, I say, “I got invited to the circus.”

  “Really?” Deeta says genially. “You should go.”

  “Who,” I say, “would I know there?”

  “It might be fun,” Ma says. “Maybe you will meet someone.”

  “What if they ask me to join?”

  Ma laughs. “Is that any different from what you do now?”

  SONG

  They say Edith Piaf was raised in the streets, and the streets rushed into her that sound. Boisterous, salt-of-the-earth, unapologetically Padam! in a tiny thing they called The Sparrow. They say, when she made it to America, audiences hated her black dresses, her somber expressions, her incomprehensible French. But her undisguised pain, they say, was why so many Others adored Piaf, what gave her that bust-the-roof power and that power its c’est la vie face to those who could sing high-and-hard with her.