by Nafisa Haji
“Will you put these in the fridge for me?”
I took the eggs from her. Her eyes were dark and beautiful. And full of sympathy.
“You’re alone. Why don’t you put those in the fridge and come over to my house for a visit? I’ll make us some tea.”
I couldn’t think of any reason to say no. I put away the eggs and followed her across the street. She led me into her house—painted yellow on the outside, with white trim—and into her kitchen. I watched her put the water to boil. She opened cabinets and drawers, laying out teacups, saucers, and spoons.
She gave me a quick glance. “You were crying? When I rang the bell?”
I nodded.
She sat down at one of the chairs at the kitchen counter, pointed to the other one for me to sit on, and asked, “How old were you when you last saw your father?”
“I was a baby—like one and a half—when he left my mother.”
She shook her head as the kettle of water began to whistle, and stood to turn the stove off. Then she frowned. “The tea. I can make it any way you like. But our way is different. I cook it with milk and spices.”
I frowned back. “Where are you from?”
She smiled. “Pakistan. Which is next to India.”
“Oh.”
I watched her scoop tea leaves into the kettle, along with whole spices that she named out loud. “This is cardamom. See? These pods?” She split them open as she dropped them into the kettle. “A very good breath freshener. And these are cloves—not too many of these. They’re strong. Cloves are good for a toothache. They numb the pain. And cinnamon. Now, I’ll let the water boil again, with all the tea and spices. Then I add the milk and let it all simmer together. That’s the way to have tea.” She rocked her head side to side and sighed before sitting down again. She propped her face up in her hands and focused her eyes on me, sparkling eyes that reminded me of Grandma Pelton’s.
“My mother’s in India,” I said.
“Is she? India and Pakistan used to be one, you know. Before Independence. Before Partition. What is your mother there for?”
“She’s a missionary.”
“A missionary? Oh.” There was a long moment of quiet. “Catholic?”
“No. Just regular Christian. My grandfather’s church—he’s evangelical—it’s nondenominational.”
She said, “Ah,” with a frown, but I don’t think she knew what I was talking about. After a second, she said, “I went to a Catholic school. A convent school, for girls. Run by nuns.”
“You’re Catholic?”
“No, no. I am Muslim.”
“Oh.” Now I was the one who didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Tell me, Angela, how old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen? Only two years older than my son.” She stood up and turned off the stove. I watched her use a little strainer to catch the spices and tea leaves as she poured out two cups and brought them to the kitchen table, where we sat. “Normally, the tea is made with the sugar boiled in also, but I have stopped taking sugar myself.” She pushed the sugar bowl in my direction and watched me put in a spoonful and stop. “Oh, no, no. This is your first cup of chai. Have it properly. With lots of sugar.” She was doing the job herself, adding another two heaping spoonfuls to my cup as she said, “You are a skinny little thing. No need to worry.” She stirred my tea for me and then wrapped her hands around her own cup and sat back to wait for it to cool. “It was brave of you to come to see your father.”
“Brave?” My voice croaked. My face crumpled. She stood to get some Kleenex and patted me on the back. After a few minutes of bawling, I said, “He—he won’t even talk to me.”
“Hmm.” She put her hand on her chin and stared out the window. She seemed to be speaking to herself. “Yes. That’s the thing. When so much time has passed in silence—so far away—it is hard to know what to say. Too hard. He was probably shocked to see you. You were so young when he left. And now—you are already grown up. You know, when you are older, it is easy to look in the mirror and live in denial—you don’t see those wrinkles, you tell yourself that those white hairs are just a trick of the light. But children—there is no escaping the truth when you have children. That time is passing. They grow so fast, mocking the best of intentions. I imagine your father always meant to come back for you, to get in touch. But time—and circumstances—got away from him. And then you showed up—not the little baby girl that he left behind. A grown lady instead! With what kind of ideas and opinions about him, he has no idea. What could he say to you? What explanations would answer such a gap?” She turned to face me again and smiled. “Listen to me—philosophizing about what is none of my business! There is this, also—Todd is a very shy man. Very quiet. He probably needs time to figure out what to say. Time—such a cheap word for one as young as you, I know. But so precious to those of us who have seen its wings spread in full flight.”
“You know him really well? Him and Connie?”
“Todd, not so well. Connie and I are friends. We go for a walk together every day.”
“She’s mad, isn’t she? About me coming?”
“Not mad. Surprised, I think.” She was frowning a little, shaking her head again. “Was she— did she make you feel unwelcome?”
I didn’t answer her.
After a minute, she picked up her cup and took a sip. I did the same.
“Mmm. This is delicious.”
“You like it? Very good. You come tomorrow also. I’ll make it for you again, okay?”
My dad came home around three o’clock that day. Michelle was with him. A little while later, Cory came home on the school bus. By the time Jake the handyman showed up with his toolbox, the house was beginning to feel like a train station—like any second a whistle would blow. My father waved Jake off into the bathroom to start work, made the kids a snack in the kitchen, and then hustled them out to the car, remembering me on the way out the door.
“Uh— I’ve got to run Cory out for baseball practice. And Michelle has piano lessons. You want to come?”
I nodded and followed them all out to the car. We dropped Michelle off first. Then, when we got to the ball field and Cory jumped out of the car almost before we were parked, my dad didn’t follow him. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel, tapping his fingers for a minute, eyes on the field in front of us, and then reached behind him to get his wallet out of the back pocket of his pants. He flipped it open and passed it to me, saying, “I—I want you to see this.”
It was a picture—the kind they take at Sears, Ron holding on for dear life to a baby version of me, both of us awkwardly arranged on a block of green carpet in front of a big-screen picture of bright green, leafy woods. Mom had a bigger version of it framed and kept on the mantel. There was a white paper crack running right through the middle of this copy that hers didn’t have. I stared at it for a long time, waiting for him to say something.
Finally, he did. “I—I know that I didn’t—welcome you yesterday. Not the way I should have. That picture—your mother sent it to me in ’Nam, after you were born. I carried that picture around with me there—and ever since. It was—it was like a lifeline. What kept me going.” He was tapping his fingers on the wheel again, his eyes straight ahead. “I—I don’t know what your mother told you about—about why I went away.” He paused to look away from the field to me—for just a second—and then his eyes were back on the boys throwing, catching, batting, and running. “I came home from the war in kind of a fog. I—I wasn’t paying much attention to what was around me. To you and your brother or your mom. I was lost. In my head. I couldn’t talk about it. About anything. I—I didn’t think anyone would understand. And I didn’t have it in me to try and make them. But what was inside was dangerous. Bottled up and toxic. Did your mother tell you about the time I hit her in the face?”
I shook my head vigorously, my jaw dropping a little before I pulled it back up again.
“One time, in th
e middle of the night. I was asleep. She must have moved or something. The next thing I know I’m sitting up in bed, on my knees, my fist pulled back to give her another one and she’s crying and there’s a mark on her face that got darker the next day. I didn’t even know. I wasn’t even awake. That terrified me. I couldn’t stay there and be that guy who put the fear in her eyes. So, I left. I don’t want to make any lame excuses. My leaving had nothing to do with your mother. Or you guys. It was—it was what I had to do. I had to get away and be by myself to try and figure things out.”
“But you did? Figure things out?”
“No. Not really. But I learned to live with that.”
“Why didn’t you ever come back?”
“I—I couldn’t. I couldn’t come back.”
“How did you meet Connie?” I was making an accusation.
“We met in Washington. At an antiwar rally.”
I frowned. “Antiwar?”
“Yes. I don’t know how I ended up there. It wasn’t like I started out to make some kind of statement. I hated all those rich college kids trying to get out of serving. But I—I didn’t disagree with what they had to say about the war itself. That was part of why I left. Everyone I knew—when I came back—everyone thought I’d done this great thing. Serving my country. And I did do that and I was damned proud of it, too. I went to Vietnam to do what my father had done. And his father before that. To serve and honor my country. And I did what I had to while I was there.” He stopped talking for a long time. And then started again, suddenly, “You know, the truth is that war isn’t complicated. It’s about killing. Killing is the whole purpose of it, avoiding getting killed yourself and killing others in order to do that. But no one ever wants to talk about that. It doesn’t make for polite dinner conversation, you know? Heck, I wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it anyway. All I knew was what I didn’t know. Before I went to ’Nam, the world was black-and-white. And when I came back, all I saw was gray. Everything I’d seen and done came back with me. No one understood. And I didn’t want to have to make them understand either—how could I, when I didn’t understand it myself?”
“And Connie? She understood?”
“Yes. Yes, she did. I didn’t have to explain anything to Connie. Because she was there, too.”
“In Vietnam?!”
“She was a nurse. She served over there. She’d seen it all. She knew.”
“Oh.”
“But that,” he pointed to the picture in his wallet, still in my hand, “was always with me. All these years. It’s—it’s how I remembered you both. Yesterday—it was a shock to see you. That you’re—that you’re not that little baby anymore. That was hard.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “You have every reason to be angry—to hate me for not being there for you for all these years. I have no right to ask you anything. About why you ran away. About why you’re not in school. But I want you to know that I’m glad you’re here.”
He didn’t say anything else. Neither did I. We just sat there and waited for Cory’s practice to be over. Then we went back to pick up Michelle.
What Deena had said that morning—about time—had already made me decide to stay. What my dad said in the car—that just seemed to prove her right. I don’t know if Deena ever talked about our conversation with Connie. I think she may have. Connie was really nice to me that night, telling me I was welcome to stay for as long as I wanted—that both she and my dad wanted me there. I’m not sure I believed her. But her saying it made me feel better—even if it made no difference to how I felt about her.
That time I spent with my dad in the car was the only time we ever talked about him walking out on Mom and us. It wasn’t some kind of corny magic moment—that point in a movie or TV show where everything falls into place and becomes all right. But it helped make things more normal. It got us over the awkwardness. The next day, when he got home from work, he went out into the yard to do some weeding, trimming, planting. At first, I thought he was just trying to avoid me. But then he asked me if I wanted to help him. And we talked—a little. Just about stuff we were doing right then. He told me about what he planned to do in the yard next. Then he put the radio on—tuned to K-EARTH 101, I remember, and we listened to oldies from the fifties and sixties. It was nice.
Until Connie came home. I was glad to have that afternoon and others without her. No matter how nice she was and in spite of what my dad told me about her, I couldn’t really be comfortable around her. I’d get real quiet and watchful when she came home. Like I was trying to find something that would justify how I felt about her. She and my dad seemed to have a real good marriage. That didn’t make her any easier to like. They never seemed to fight or even disagree at all, except once—about Jake the handyman.
“You have to talk to him, Todd. He’s taken more than a month already, and he said he’d be done in a week.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“The other day, I smelled liquor on him. He could fall off a ladder and get himself hurt. He could sue us. I understand what you’re trying to do, Todd. Helping these guys out. But I don’t think we should be inviting every one of these strays you pick up into our home.”
“Jake’s a good man, Connie. It’s not easy for him. You know that.”
Connie sighed and shook her head. “You’re the one who’s a good man, Todd. Honestly. Impossible to argue with, which can be darned irritating. But a good man for sure.” I saw them smile into each other’s eyes and had to look away or be sick.
Connie had good reason to complain. Jake never turned up when he said he would. And when he did, he started things and then left them unfinished for days—leaving a toilet out of order once so we all had to use the master bathroom. Another time, he took a door off its hinges and left it propped up against a wall for days before showing up to put it back on. The windows and doors in the living room were taped off for weeks with no sign of him showing up with any paint.
One time, in the yard, my dad told me that Jake was a Vietnam vet, too. He’d served at the very end of the war. “By the time he came home, most people didn’t even remember that we were still in a war, much less think that there was any way left to win it. He had it even tougher than I did.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“I check in with someone I know at the VA hospital every once in a while,” my dad said. “To see if there’s any way I can help out. There’s too many of these guys—like Jake—walking around, wounded in a way that no one notices.”
The next time Jake came over, I saw him in a different way. Before, I’d avoided him as much as possible, taking off for Deena’s house whenever he showed up in the mornings, so I guess I hadn’t really seen him at all. Now, I noticed how much younger he was than my dad, in his late twenties. He had blue eyes and straggly, long hair. He was shy and kind of mumbled when he talked. It was hot that day and I made him some lemonade. He was so grateful, you’d have thought I’d cooked him a five-course dinner. After that, I made a point of saying hi to him when he came.
My mother called a couple of times from India, in the mornings, when no one else was home.
“Are you okay, Angie?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
“And—your father? He—he must have been happy to see you.”
“Yes.”
“Well. I’ll be home in a bit, Angie. I hope you’re home, too, when I get back. I’ll be there in time to celebrate your birthday.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What about school? Are you going to school?”
“No.”
“Angie?”
“What?”
“Do you have any plans? For the future?”
“No.”
“Well. There’s time, Angie. I hope you think things over carefully. In the meantime, maybe it’s a good thing. This chance you’re getting. To get to know your dad.” I had already told her everything about him—about Connie and the kids. She’d asked, “Is he happy, Angie?”
“I don’t know. I guess so,” I’d said grudgingly.
“I’m glad.”
Every time I went over to Deena’s, we’d have tea. It was funny—but those visits kind of stood apart from everything and everyone else. I mean, she was Connie’s friend—that alone was enough reason to hate her as much as I hated Connie. But I didn’t. Right from that first morning, I couldn’t. Having tea with Deena is what I remember most about the time I spent in Los Angeles. I went over only in the mornings, so I never hung out with her family—I don’t even remember seeing her husband. She had a daughter, older than Michelle and younger than Cory, and a son. I only remember what her husband looked like from the family pictures on the mantel.
Sometimes, she was cooking when I came over. I’d watch her slice onions—so fast, I worried she might chop off a finger—and fry them, tossing in bright red and yellow spices that crackled and popped. She would always apologize for the smell.
“I am so sorry—I got a late start cooking today. Our food is delicious. But it stinks when it’s cooking. Frying onions and spices. The smell gets into hair and clothes—be sure and take a shower when you get home. Or you will smell like a spice shop!”
I would whiff it all in with pleasure. “I think it smells good!” I’d say.
She’d laugh and give me some to try with a warning that I would ignore. “You are not used to the spices—your mouth will burn.”
The first time I tried one of her curries, with some rice, every opening in my head sprang a leak. I waved my hand in front of my mouth, trying to fan down the flames, and tearfully asked for a glass of water.
“No, no. If you have water, it will be worse. Try to resist. If you must have something, put some yogurt on the side of your food and mix it in with each bite.” She was scooping some, plain, onto my plate.
