by Amy Waldman
The papers’ local news, like local life, tended to be blander. Changes in immigration rules. New Bangladeshi businesses or local associations in the New York area. Bangladeshis victimized by crimes or, in smaller type, arrested for them. Felicitations from local politicians for holidays and festivals. For a while after the attack, of course, the content had included stories about new immigration difficulties, threats to mosques, the detention of Muslims. But over the last year that sort of news had started to fall off, as if little by little everything might be returning to normal.
But now this Mohammad Khan had won the competition to design the memorial to Inam and the other dead. At Mr. Chowdhury’s, she squeezed the bag of rice into the bottom of her handcart. The store owner was arguing with Dr. Chowdhury—no relation—over whether the effort to take away Khan’s victory mimicked Bangladesh’s history. They didn’t include her in their discussion, so, as usual, she eavesdropped.
“It’s just like 1970,” Dr. Chowdhury said, smiling at Asma in greeting. “What Pakistan did to us, not wanting to recognize the election because it didn’t like the result. Exactly the same. America should be better.”
“This wasn’t an election,” Mr. Chowdhury said. He was an imperious man, undemocratic himself, Asma thought. “It was just a small group of people deciding. Because if it was an election, you think Americans would vote for a Muslim? So it’s the opposite. They tried to give it to him without an election. Now Americans are saying they don’t want him. We had the majority then; they have it now.”
“We wanted freedom. They want to discriminate.”
“Perhaps, but it’s not a parliament. It’s just a memorial. I don’t blame them for not wanting a Muslim name on it.”
“There will be Muslim names on it regardless,” Dr. Chowdhury said, jerking his head toward Asma, who was pretending to scrutinize the bitter melons.
“All I know is that in Dhaka, five thousand people would be living in the space they’ve set aside for it.”
Asma bridled at this comment. Her husband had no grave. Only in this memorial would his name live on. Only there could his son see it, maybe touch it. A parliament of the dead deserved respect, too.
Pulling her handcart of groceries, she walked home, replaying their argument in her head. She knew well the history of which they spoke because her father had been a part of it. When the military overseers of Pakistan had refused to allow the winning party in Bangladesh—then East Pakistan—to form a government, her father had put down his textbooks, left the university, and joined the fight. Hundreds of thousands, millions of deaths later, Bangladesh had its independence. His stories had made a deep impact on Asma as a child. She had resolved to be as brave, only to learn that as a woman she wasn’t expected to be.
At her building, Asma began the onerous task of carrying her bags of groceries up four flights, then coming down for the next batch. She left the bag of rice—twenty-five pounds—for last. It weighed less than her son but seemed harder to carry. As she heaved it from the cart, a few grains spilled onto the ground. Looking closely, she found a small hole in the bag’s corner and a trail of slim white dashes leading back to the front door. Outside, more rice. The birds were already pecking at it. With a sigh she turned the bag upside down to make sure no more grains would escape, put it back in the cart, and followed her own trail back to the store.
Bravery, she thought as she walked, wasn’t about strength alone. It required opportunity. Wars came rarely. She reminded herself of this whenever she had questioned whether Inam was as courageous as her father. Her husband had been born at a different, less momentous time. It was hard, in daily life, to find the right cause. She had learned this for herself.
Once she was married and settled in Kensington, Asma had decided she wanted to work. The request, unconventional, left Inam hesitant; even, in his mild way, apprehensive. It was also implausible: she had only a high-school education and spoke little English. But he approached a Bengali pharmacist on Church Avenue, a Hindu named Sanjeev, whose daughter-helper had just left for college, as he told everyone who came through the door. Sanjeev agreed to give Asma a try. He was safe: a respected man whose wife and sister-in-law also worked in the pharmacy. Asma would be his wife’s assistant, helping to count out the pills for prescriptions. The work was dreary but relaxing, and she took great pride in her precision. Sanjeev’s wife scoured her work for mistakes until she saw that Asma made none. Counting did not preclude absorbing the activity of the pharmacy. For a time, she knew more about the neighborhood’s ailments than Mrs. Mahmoud did. Sanjeev was like a doctor, she would tell Inam at night. Everyone came to him for advice, not just Bangladeshis but the black people, the Spanish people.
Sanjeev’s only fault, from what she saw, was his stinginess. He would almost never extend credit to anyone, except for a few Hindus he knew. People would need a prescription before their paycheck or government check came in, but Sanjeev demanded cash up front. One day she decided to say something. Her father had often loaned money to people for no interest. He would not have approved of Sanjeev, she was sure.
“Sanjeev-uncle,” she said, trying to be very polite, “I don’t understand why you won’t give more credit. You know these people; I know these people. You know where they live.”
He looked at her as if she were his daughter talking back to him, then said lightly, “If you think they’re so worthy, why don’t you extend them credit?” Sanjeev knew full well she had no money to lend. Her hands shook as she counted out pills for the rest of the day. That afternoon she thanked him for employing her and never returned. Inam, a little appalled at her impetuousness, went to make peace with Sanjeev. Asma could never be convinced to do the same.
Back at the store, she showed Mr. Chowdhury the hole in the rice bag.
“This is an old trick,” he said gruffly. “You took out a cup, then you come say it leaked and want a whole new bag. It won’t work. I know all the tricks.”
Almost speechless with anger, she dragged him out to the street and showed him the rice, which feet and wind and fowl were already scattering. They walked together for half a block, until he asked, “This trail goes all the way to your building?”
She nodded vigorously, relieved he understood.
“You fool!” he said. “You dreamer. How did you not notice sooner?” He berated her at length, accusing her of reading newspapers while she walked instead of watching her rice.
“I didn’t think it would run away,” she said, which angered him more.
Mr. Chowdhury refused to give her a new bag, and she stewed all the way home, wishing Inam were alive to fight for her, although in truth she didn’t know if he would have. “Maybe you tore the bag when you put it in the shopping cart,” he might have said, not to suggest she was in the wrong but rather that anyone could have been. To him a cup of rice wasn’t worth a fight. To her every grain was.
Yet she yielded to Mr. Chowdhury in the matter of the rice. As a woman, she had to.
“Paul,” the governor said breathlessly.
Bitman was on her elliptical machine in a black velour sweat suit. It was seven-fifteen, an hour when Paul would have preferred to be contemplating the soft hillocks of a sleeping Edith’s rear country. Summoned for breakfast at the governor’s New York City pied-à-terre, Paul had put on his suit and bow tie. An aide offered a glass of orange juice and pointed him to a chair.
The governor was watching herself on television. “Even if Mr. Khan is not a security threat—and there is no reason to think he is—his finding his way to victory in this anonymous competition reminds us that radical Islamists could use our democratic institutions and our openness to advance their own agenda,” the governor on the screen was saying in a CNN interview from the previous day. The governor next to Paul nodded in time to her own words. The rise and fall of her legs suggested a riverboat churning. “As a woman, I can’t stay quiet about that danger, given that if Islamists were to take power here, it is women who would bear the brunt of
our lost freedoms. As you may know, Wolf, I joined a delegation of female politicians on a visit to Afghanistan last year …”
“Geraldine, I’m surprised at you,” Paul said, unable to help himself. He had known the governor for more than twenty years, known her late husband for even longer. When Joseph Bitman died, bequeathing his wife his fortune and his unrealized political ambitions, Paul had been one of her early and ardent supporters. He had backed her from her first run for the legislature all the way to the helm of the state, and not only out of friendship. Her brio and clarity of mind impressed him, as did her cobbling from left and right her own unpredictable center. She was New York’s first female governor, a first that led her to think of others. She wanted to be president.
“Read my senior thesis from Smith, Paul”—there was heavier breathing, more strenuous pumping: the machine had shifted to a sterner cycle—“it might alleviate your surprise. ‘Hegemonic Hierarchies in the Women’s Movement.’ I was worried about women being oppressed by women. My concern about Islam is entirely consistent with that.” Consistent, too, Paul thought for the first time, with her patronage of Bob Wilner: she hadn’t appointed the lawyer, her former aide, to the jury knowing a Muslim would win, but his stridency on the issue couldn’t have been a secret to her.
A pinkish glow; a seed pearl of sweat on her brow. Paul studied Geraldine from the side—her coiffed hair, a rich, lustrous artificial auburn from which her nickname, the Fox, was partly derived; a handsome aquiline profile that would suit a coin.
“To be honest, I’m surprised at you,” she said.
“Meaning?”
“You don’t have a grip on the process.”
Her meaning was clear. Khan’s assertion that he had been asked to withdraw from the competition had taken Paul aback because he had striven so hard not to ask Khan to withdraw but only to insinuate that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if he did. So Paul had immediately issued a statement saying he had made no such request. This was Error Number One. Error Number Two was issuing a clarifying statement in which he said that he had not called Khan a liar, which was what reporters inferred from the first statement. The upshot of both statements was to confirm that Khan’s design had, indeed, been selected by the jury, which meant Paul had to find a way to introduce Khan after Khan had already introduced himself. He was having to rebut accusations that the jury had attempted to thwart Khan’s selection, even as the families shouted that the jury should have thwarted his selection.
“It’s a tricky situation, Geraldine, which is why I don’t think heightening the fear is helpful—”
“The fear is there, Paul. The fear is real. And the sense out there in Middle America, whose sentiments, I don’t mind saying, happen to be of interest to me these days, is that the jury doesn’t understand the fear. They should, given that they’re mostly from Manhattan, and look what happened here, but they don’t.” Her pace was slowing, her ruddy color still deepening.
“My jury isn’t at fault here. It was an anonymous competition—you know that.”
“I do, but polling is showing that 70 percent of Americans don’t. People need someone to blame at a time like this. They’re not consoled by abstract notions of process.”
Geraldine had not called him here for breakfast, Paul realized, since there was none on offer. She had called him, out of friendship, to warn him that she was going to target his jury—a bunch of Manhattan artists, elite as they come—as much as the Islamist threat. There were all kinds of protests he could make against this beyond the anonymity of the entries. Most of those artists hadn’t even wanted the Garden. But the governor, with her man on the jury reporting back to her, likely knew that.
“And don’t forget that I have the final say, Paul.” He made no reply. When she’d asked him to chair the jury, she had urged him to make sure most of the jurors were artists, professionals. “We don’t want a bunch of firefighters deciding to put a giant helmet in Manhattan” had been her words. In private, of course. She had vetoed the campaign, led by Sean Gallagher, to have a jury of family members. They would bicker, she was sure; she would gain nothing by choosing among them. Claire Burwell, the only family member on the jury, was picked because her Ivy League credentials and art collection comported with the other jurors’ sensibilities. The notion of public input—the hearing, the comment period, the governor signing off—had been written into the process to give the public the illusion they would be heard, when in fact they were being led. Token modifications to the winning design could be made, but the jury’s selection would stand, blessed by the governor.
But now the bickering was here, on a scale unforeseen, and Bitman was clearly determined to profit from it. She wasn’t rewriting the rules, Paul thought, so much as interpreting them with a new and cynical literalism.
Her cool-down period was over. She stepped off the elliptical, motioned for the towel draped on Paul’s chair, and kissed him lightly on the cheek in farewell.
Staring down at her first column, Alyssa Spier had imagined herself as Carrie Bradshaw: golden hair tousled, cigarette in hand, petite, tank-top-clad frame perched on the bed, pithy comments filling the laptop screen. But Alyssa’s one-bedroom smelled, as it always did, of the farted exhaust of the Indian restaurants around her building. Curry Hill, they called her neighborhood; she called it Curry Hell. More than the odor, a sideways glance at the mirror demolished the fantasy. She was in nubby sweatpants and an extra-large T-shirt from a 1992 Bruce Springsteen concert (could it really be that old? could she?). She had a few pounds—okay, more than a few—on Carrie, perhaps because she had substituted a bag of Mint Milanos for the cigarettes. Her hair was unstreaked, not to mention unwashed. And she was severely hungover. Drinks with Chaz, her new editor, had felt more like a hazing than a celebration. He drank four martinis, lining up the empty glasses, Rockette-like, before him. She surrendered after two, despite his ribbing, but that was two too many on an almost empty stomach, since Chaz apparently subsisted on gin alone. The handfuls of pretzels she wolfed down when he looked away proved a meager levee. She had puked three times during the night. Then there were their subjects, hers and Carrie’s. Sexiness must come easily when your topic is sex and the single woman. Pondering terrorism—or “the Muslim problem,” as Chaz called it—didn’t exactly make for a seductive scribe. Nothing to do but press on. She was who she was, although these days, she wasn’t exactly sure who that was.
Less than a week ago, she had been a mere reporter, scraping for scoops. She was dogged, which was how she got the Muslim tip-off, but she was one of a crowd—no illusions there. She hustled lawyers and aides to politicians and limo drivers and anyone else who might have a lead, using a wheedling voice and a knowing air to extract what she could. She called sources to joke and gossip even if there was no news to be had, making them feel like she was their friend, or maybe mistaking them for hers.
But now she was a Columnist—she always imagined it capitalized. Chaz had tossed out the idea amid the frenzy around her story. It was a way to hype the scoop, get as much play out of it and her as possible. Her ego warmed to the idea. They had already taken her picture, which thankfully flattered more than this morning’s mirror image. Now she needed the words.
Chaz, last night, had given her some tips on how to proceed. The most important quality in a good columnist, he explained, was certainty: “No ‘he said, she said,’ just ‘I say.’” She should seem to have answers. “People want to be told what to think,” he said, swilling his martini. “Or they want to be told that what they already think is right.”
But her habitual itch wasn’t for telling people what to think but for finding out what they didn’t know. Her mind kept straying to that meeting of the families at the high school, to her blowing it with Claire Burwell, turning her hard. Alyssa knew sometimes she got a little desperate without meaning to and that it scared people. She never felt it coming, only saw the wreckage afterward.
This line of thought took her, as it often did, to Osc
ar. He was the News’s—maybe the city’s—best law enforcement reporter, surprisingly dapper for a short, squat man with square, black-rimmed glasses and mere tussocks of hair. He composed himself each day: an ironed shirt, a vest of subtle plaid or black, a natty tie. He wore well-cut cuffed pants and oxfords, always shined. He believed in the gym. He had a large nose and squinting eyes, and yet carried himself as if unaware of his own unattractiveness. They spoke the same language, a callous patois peculiar to reporters: a building collapse was a “great story,” a fire that scattered families along with the ashes “the most fun they ever had.” Outsiders hearing this might be shocked at the coarseness. But these stories were their quarries, not their tragedies. Alyssa had mistaken this tribal bond for something more, and for a brief period Oscar permitted such entertainments. Then the other shoe, the rejecting shoe, dropped, and it hurt like hell. A new newsroom, a fresh start: it would be easier not to see him.
Like a scratched record—it depressed her that she was old enough to scavenge similes from vinyl—her mind kept returning backstage at the high school. An energy secretive, charged, angry vibrated between Claire Burwell and Eileen Gallagher. Alyssa sensed it now as she hadn’t then, when she’d taken off in pursuit of Claire. She’d never circled back to the mother. “Eileen,” she wrote on an envelope close at hand, and drew a box around the name. She wondered where Mrs. Gallagher went to church.
