by Kim Echlin
I had begun to feel our difference of twenty-two years. My children were almost grown, and he was nearing sixty with dark rings under his eyes. I sometimes felt a passing tenderness for the familiarity of him which turned to vapour in the heat of his first impatient word. But there was an ease between us that night as we sipped tea together, and he had a whisky. I said, Come to New York with us this year. Take a few days before you go to London. Asif and Lailuma would love it. You’ve never met Katherine.
Dry ice. He set down his glass and said, I hate New York. You know that. How can I drop things at work? People depend on me.
I was still irritating sand in his shoe.
I ignored the swift rupture, as I had ignored such moments for years. Ali paid the bill, and we made our way through the cold toward home. Inside the front door before I hung up our coats he said, After this trip, you won’t take the children to New York anymore. They need to concentrate on their studies. I’ll have a tea before bed.
Asif was standing at the doorway and I saw him register the command in Ali’s voice. I remained silent, not to argue in front of him, and I was ashamed of my silence. My boy moved like Ali and I sometimes heard him ordering Lailuma.
I said to him, Treat your sister with respect.
He answered back hard and fast like Ali, I do.
Already he seemed to think this was how things had to be.
I gave Lailuma for her thirteenth birthday a pair of shoes with red heels from a New York boutique, remembering my own first pair of real silk stockings and going to the Metropole with Abbu and Mor. Lai’s best friend was French and they shared clothes and still played with their dolls if they thought no one would see. They began to go to movies with friends from school, and were top students and busy with dance.
Ali said to me, I do not like her to wear makeup. Why did you give her heels?
I tried to persuade him, Ali, she’s doing well and she studies Quran with me, and her friends are nice. Let her grow a little now. Children are different here.
She needs to be more modest. You encourage her.
He wanted us all to go to Pakistan. The city was much changed and violent and people moved with fear through the streets. Mohajir refugees lived in spreading slums. Islamists were closing down the nightclubs and theatres. Daily there were bombs and murders and my in-laws rarely left their neighbourhood. Teenaged boys with guns protected hotels and shopping malls. There were meant to be elections in December and Benazir Bhutto would run. She had promised to repeal the Hudood Ordinances and return to a parliamentary system. But the opposition of the generals was strong. I wanted the children to feel the sea air on the beaches, to visit the shrines, to hear the call to prayer. I wanted to show them my old school and Saint Patrick’s cathedral and Zelin’s. But not yet.
Ali said, They need to know where they are from.
They are from here.
Asif needs to begin to meet our business associates, he said.
He is fifteen, Ali.
His eyes were razors. I said, Why don’t you take them for a short visit? They are grown up now and will be no trouble to Ammi-jaan. But you must bring them back well before the elections.
I want you to come.
Ali, I am not ready. Please.
Your uncle was good to you, he said. My mother wants to see you there. Someday she will not be able to travel.
I know, Ali. I have hard memories. The children are old enough to not be a burden. You take them.
Always you are stubborn.
I arrived an hour too early at the airport to pick them up. It had been a wonderful fifteen days on my own in Montreal. I went to the theatre with Monique, played at an open stage with Jean, took extra shifts at the Queen Elizabeth. I did not cook and I slept in after coming home late.
Monique said, Why aren’t there any holidays in the wifecontract? Everyone else gets holidays.
We laughed as we used to and now I was longing to see Asif’s bright eyes, to smell Lailuma’s teenaged hair. I watched people walk out from behind the airport’s thick glass doors, their greetings and cries of excitement and disappointment, each different as a fingerprint. I thought, Next time I will go, accept my destiny with Aunt and Uncle. It is a long time to stay angry. I would like to show my city to my children.
I waited and watched. The sliding glass doors opened. Asif, looking fearful and tired, walked through beside Ali. He seemed taller to me and muscled like a man not a boy and I experienced, as I often did, a fleeting surprise because my mind was crowded with the details of his childhood.
Where is Lailuma?
Asif’s arms were around me and he whispered my name, Mor, as if it could protect him. Then he released me and stepped back. Over his shoulder I was looking into Ali’s determined eyes.
I left her with my mother. She is staying in Karachi. You cannot control her.
III
Pursuance
KATHERINE
Midnight for me, nine P.M. for him. T got on someone else’s phone in California and called me. He could not sleep. He was thinking of coming back to New York. A call I’d had a thousand times before.
He asked, Wanna hear something?
I lay in bed listening to his sax. I got up and put the phone by my keyboard and played him a new piece I was writing called “Soror Song,” about a nun who wrote five letters from a convent to a French guy who deserted her.
That’s real pretty, Katie. How’re the kids?
Dexter got himself a job at the Jefferson Market Library. Did you know it used to be the Women’s House of Detention? Bea got herself into LaGuardia Arts for dance. She’s getting beautiful, T.
How ’bout Jimmie?
Dexter helped him find a double bass in a pawn shop and gave him the money for it. Dex hung a curtain around his part of the room. He says if he’s getting into law school he’s gotta study.
Jimmie playing?
He’s into things, T. He disappears and I don’t know where he goes. Igor caught him shoplifting and called me and said, I work eight days a week and I never own a house in this country, that boy not stealing here. I told Jimmie, How could you steal from anyone? And especially from our friend. I told him to go work for Igor to pay him back and he did for a couple of weeks and I can’t make him do anything so he must have felt bad.
He going to school?
In the front door and out the back. You should come and help out, T. You’ve been away a long time.
You don’ want me the way I am, KK. Put Jimmie on the phone.
He’s not here. Come back, give things a chance.
You don’t want me right now, babe.
Heroin sneaks up fast. At first it’s warm bath bliss, your lover-god swinging with you in a sweet and mellow hammock. Then you crave that feather-soft first time again, but you can’t get it and the more you try, the more it betrays you, gives you a taste, is over, and you can’t get there so you try more. It sucked T down fast. He’d been handling all the other stuff for years but junk was killing him. He said, I’m standing in hell’s door, babe, existence is fragile, violent, stunning. I answered, It’s not romantic, T. I am hearing about you and you know what your friends are saying? They’re saying, Hey, saw T, he’s not doing well. And I keep telling them, Well, help him.
I sent him money when I had it but I knew it was getting poured down a rabbit hole. I never told the kids much, only, He’ll be back soon, or He’s on the road, or Take the cards you’re dealt. My kids took me in through their skin and I wasn’t going to let them take in bitterness. Parents carve pain into their children if they’re not careful.
I said, There’s programs here, T. There’s one at the church I’m playing at. Remember Judson Memorial?
Not my style, Katie, I’ll go in a room and do it. How come you playin’ in a church again?
I met the pastor on Washington Square, Howard Moody. He was driving around in a van with cookies and coffee and a warm place for the hookers to have a break. A girl called over from the van that she�
��d seen me playing at the Gate. Howard came out and said, Want coffee? He’s got a southern accent and short-cropped hair and big sticking-out ears and he looks like a marine. He’s written a lot about civil rights. He calls the girls his invisible congregation.
He gave me the latest copy of his street magazine, Hooker’s Hookup, and I asked the girl what show of mine she’d seen and it turned out her john was a big jazz fan so she’d seen me play a lot. Howard said, We have jazz at the church. You should come over and play. We can always use help.
I told him I worked late most Saturday nights, and the prostitute laughed and said, Like me and even I make it to Moody’s church sometimes.
I made the mistake of saying, I played a Baptist church in Canada for years.
Howard said, Our pianist called tonight to say he wouldn’t be in for the service tomorrow. Any chance you could cover?
So I was stuck. A damn jazz-loving hooker is the reason I started playing for Jesus. For free no less.
I felt good making T laugh and then Bea woke up, and ran in full of sleep, Is that Daddy? They all knew the latenight calls, the tone in my voice. I handed her the receiver and her face opened, Daddy! When are you coming back? Listening to half of it, I heard all the things she wanted him to know about her dance and school and was he coming for Easter, and then, Okay Daddy, and she held out the receiver so we could all say together, Sweet dreams, Sweet Pea, tempus fugue-it, baby, fiddly doo diddly dee.
After she went back to bed he said, She sounds good. Why are you writing about that nun?
Mariana Alfcoforado loved her suffering because it made her feel alive. She wrote to her lover, Keep making me suffer cruel torment.
She only got five letters? That’s it? Must have been some guy.
You all are, I said.
How’s the story end, babe?
She lived the rest of her long life in the convent and renounced her lover for God.
He laughed, said, It’s midnight, babe.
I said, It’s three in the morning here. And I gotta play soon.
He said, Katie, you made a pretty song there. Don’t give me up for God.
We could be generous with each other three thousand miles apart. I liked floating in music and darkness on his voice, just T ’n me unspooling around dying stars and dawn.
I worked hard like any man. I kept moving on to the next new thing. I was a sideman for whoever paid. Raising our kids, everything was urgent and necessary, and it took twenty years of attentiveness. Then it was done. Like crumbs on a table. Wipe. Gone.
In the morning, Bea came out while I was making my instant coffee before I ran over to Judson. I asked her, Do you know where your brother is?
One’s in bed.
The other one.
Not there.
Want coffee?
She had a comforter around her and she was wrapping her toes in it and shuffling along the floor. She said, I’m going to marry someone who sticks around.
She said what came into her head. There were moments when I felt like sliding down the wall and giving up. But I thought, I used to sneak out to play the bars.
I have to go, Bea. Come to church if you want.
I’m going back to bed. You and Daddy on the phone kept me up half the night.
She sounded like a satisfied old lady and looked like a messy teenager and I loved her. Jimmie came in with his bass on his back and he hadn’t slept. I said, I’m going over to Judson. Why don’t you bring your bass along. Let’s swing that church. I’ll split the fee with you.
I figured I could find some money somewhere. He surprised us both when he said yes. We played the service and Howard asked us to stay for coffee. He said to Jimmie, Would you come back again?
I came by accident today.
Then Jimmie drank his coffee down in one gulp and said, This scene’s too white for me.
Howard said, You know, when I came here twenty years ago I had a talk that I’ve never forgotten with a man who pulled open his collar and showed me a six-inch lynching scar on his neck, put there by the Klan. He told me those Klan members met in a Baptist church and worshipped the God I worshipped. And he asked me, What in the name of decency or reason, white boy, could persuade me to believe in the God you’re trying to defend? Well, that question silenced me then, and it has always stayed with me.
Jimmie asked, So, what you doing here?
Howard said, That old man’s question feels like a door without a doorknob. I keep working here because I figure that God might open it from the other side.
Jimmie let himself get pulled in by Howard. He started playing for Judson benefits and for the dance shows. He liked to call Howard white boy in front of me. I told him to be more respectful but Jimmie said, He knows I’m joking, as if Howard weren’t there and Howard said, Sometimes people got to free themselves from us.
I said, I’m half Chinese, Howard. And he’s only half black. Who the hell is the us you’re talking about?
All southern charm Howard answered, Well, dad blame it, Katherine, I always knew there was something different about you.
I had to laugh. It was easier than being at my wits’ end about Jimmie. With an angry teen you have to be willing to be tested, cold water relentlessly flicked against a hot griddle, someone checking out the temperature.
MAHSA
I pleaded. For weeks I cried, I screamed, I called Ali at work until he would not take my calls. I slept in Lailuma’s room.
You do not listen, he told me. How can you be a good mother the way you are?
Behind his burning eyes was a new shine of rage. Fifteen years in the same bed but I was still discovering what he was capable of.
She talks back, he said. Like you. Ammi says she needs to be controlled.
Poisonous viper Ammi-jaan. I screamed at him, You can’t do this to please your mother, and now he was shamed and he grabbed my wrist.
I will not tolerate Asif hearing you, he said. Control yourself!
The way you are.
I telephoned Ammi-jaan. Lailuma’s voice was pleading behind, Ask when can I come home.
Ammi-jaan said, She is fine. I am taking good care of her. Try to please him more.
I hated myself. All those years of trying to create whatever it was that we called our family, waste, waste. There were no bruises. He hardly raised his voice. None of that was necessary to break us.
I lied to everyone, to Lailuma’s school, to her friends. I told them her grandmother was sick, that she needed to spend some time with her. I said, It is our way. Family is important. I saw how people doubted but wanted to believe me. I took advantage of people’s sympathy. I was Lailuma’s betrayer.
When I called Katherine and told her the truth, she said, Go get her.
She understood nothing, how could she, but to hear her voice made me cry. I said, They will hide her passport. That’s what they did to me. I can do nothing there.
Katherine said, Really? They took your passport? When?
To force me to marry Ali. Katherine, I have to get Lailuma back.
Let’s hire a kidnapper.
Her wildness made me feel better.
What are you going to do?
Asif does not speak at home anymore.
You’ve got to get her back.
We talked about lawyers, about how Ali’s family would hide her, about trying to shame Ali at work. I was afraid of all Katherine’s ideas.
I said, He might give in if I comply. His mother won’t want her there forever.
What does he want you to do?
He thinks I should be home. He thinks Lai should be more modest. It’s our culture.
Come on, Mahsa. That’s not culture.
I wanted to hate her for the first time. We had always accepted everything about each other. What did she know of where I came from?
Finally she said quietly, My mother used to say, It’s the way things are. But it isn’t. Why should a person be anything but free.
I was afraid for Lai.
He wants me home.
Mahsa, leave.
I could turn my heart to stone and forget I had children or I could go back to him and comply.
I said, It is possible that I will not see her again.
Get another passport to her. And money. We will find a way.
They could make Lailuma disappear.
After a long silence Katherine asked, What are you going to do?
I’ve got to bring her home.
*
I cooked Ali’s favourite dishes and dressed in a shalwar kameez that Ammi-jaan had given me. We sat together at the table and I said, Today I quit the hotel.
Why?
I don’t need to work. You provide well for us, Ali.
With negotiating eyes he looked up and asked, Did you quit the university too?
It is the end of term already. I won’t teach next term. I told Jean.
My heart was breaking.
He put a forkful of chicken in his mouth and said, What about playing with Katherine?
My heart sealed up in rage. I answered, I have no need to go to New York anymore. I want to be here for you and the children.
I loathed the sound of his chewing. When his plate was empty his eyes fixed on me and his neck arched back like a snake with an unstitched mouth. He said, I will have tea in the living room.
He was asleep when I went in so I left the tea beside him and went back to the kitchen to finish cleaning up. When I returned, his cup was empty and he was dozing again and I put my hand quietly on his knee and said, Ali, come to bed.
In the bedroom I unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off and placed his familiar hands on my waist as I took off my top. I unbuttoned his pants as he was kissing my breasts and I pretended to be aroused. In bed I pulled him to me and waited for it to be over. I was dry and it hurt but I made no sign of pain and pretended pleasure.
