by Nisi Shawl
§
The perfect wife would flush these down the toilet. Or better, tell her husband everything.
You drop the vial into the drawer. Under it is a sheaf of papers covered in tiny print. Warnings, overdose, side effects. In red pen across this, Lakshman has written BE CAREFUL.
You shove that into the drawer too, resolving to tell Ram, to work out what to do together. Hoping you won’t have to admit everything.
You’d left him nursing a drink in the living room, wondering why his brother left; you fetch a glass of water and ask if he’s coming to bed. He says, “Later.”
You go back to bed. The pills are white, engraved with Xs. You step out of the circle.
§
You dream of floating, weightless, and wake with cheeks strange from smiling. Your neck’s not stiff. You wiggle your head back and forth, alive after all.
Later you dance, and you dance, and you dance.
The single pills stop working far too soon. You can’t focus. You can’t sit down for long. In your dreams you’re falling, always falling, never touching earth. You want to scream at Ram. Some nights later, unable to sleep, you take a second pill and fall back, smiling again.
Light behind your eyes becomes a plane of perfect triangles, white, black, white, black, and the most beautiful golden deer you’ve ever seen steps out from geometry, from stories, looking straight at you with one hoof raised. You call for Ram. The deer startles, bounds away over triangle grass and triangle bushes, a green too sharp to grow: traffic lights, cellophane, glass.
You’re not asking him to chase it. You know this tale too well, and its green is from too far a land. But Ram doesn’t wait to hear you; he just says “Later,” and runs after the deer as though it was Lakshman, and maybe it is. Lakshman is gone, after all.
Ram is beautiful as the deer, kurta glowing white against that cutting green. And though you know he’s gone and you’ll soon hear his scream, you cannot stop smiling.
§
“I thought we’d see a dance show for your birthday,” says Ram one day. “But I’ll have to work late. Maybe next weekend?”
You beam at him. Five pills last night; resentment lives outside your glass-lined cage.
“—Are you all right?” The frown on his face makes you giggle, then sneeze. The house is full of sharp-edged dust these days. “Of course I’m all right,” you say, but someone’s voice is screaming those words and someone’s tears blur the sight of someone’s fists pounding, pounding against Ram’s white kurta as he holds you.
§
Faces glare through the lattice. Tens, hundreds of faces, all the same, ten heads on one man leering at you, reaching for you through fragile interwoven triangles. “Rama will come for me,” you tell the faces.
They laugh.
And you knew all along that Ravana was waiting, that you courted him. Only triangles keep him away, now; white pills and knife-edges and the hope of Ram.
Who wears Lakshman’s face, sometimes.
You scream curses. Someone shakes you, holds you. Smudge-eyed, frightened, as he never is in tales. With triangles in his hair and dirt-green walls behind him, and that dead antiseptic smell underneath. For an instant he is blue. You snicker.
“Sita,” he says in a tenth of his voice, “where have you gone?”
6. Rescue
The monkey people had engineers who could build a bridge to Lanka. To win their aid, Rama helped their king’s brother kill him and usurp his throne. We’re told this was honorable, but maybe he just did anything he had to. He needed Sita back. Then.
§
You wake in a room not your own, dressed in clinical widow’s white. The bed, blanket, IV drip are sharp-edged with green, and the many-headed demon comes back in every counselor who talks you down—to four pills, three, two.
You taste his copper sweat in the air. You hear him speak from five mouths at once. He’s hurting you. You dream of him, reaching for you while you stand at the edge of his tower. You think of stepping off that edge, and hear yourself crying for Mama.
You fall into yourself instead.
The tower is gone. The rehab people are just people now; people who help you build a bridge that Ram can cross.
And he comes, scared, stubborn, too tired for heroism, cutting through every face the demon wears. You walk through fire to stand with him again.
Lakshman, he says later, told him about the pills. The anger in his voice is a thin skin over hurt. “What did I do wrong,” he says, “that stopped you talking to me?”
You say, “When were you there to talk to?”
He loses a breath, crumples, like you punched him in the stomach. You start to stammer an apology. He reaches out to cup your cheek. “No,” he murmurs, pain shimmering in his eyes, “Please don’t say sorry. Not for being right.”
He stays till they chase him out, and he comes back and back again. He sneaks Hindi films in on his laptop; and when you dance along, sitting up in bed, he dances with you.
7. Sanctuary
The story ends here, sometimes; the demon vanquished, Ram triumphant, reunited with his perfect wife and returned from exile to reign in peace.
And sometimes it goes on: Lord Rama’s people start whispering that Sita has been tainted; it is shameful to keep a wife who’d been under another man’s roof. Rama listens to his people.
And exiles her again.
§
The doctors say a lot of long words that mean the drug hit you unusually. Their lips thin when you explain this to Ram, and they add that you never should have been medicated in the first place. They suggest a change of location to help you recover.
“To lower my chances of relapse, they mean,” you say. Their lips thin again.
Ram ignores them. “I’ve been wondering,” he says, “if you might heal better back home. With your parents. Or in an ashram, maybe? With simple food and clean air and peace.”
His wistful tone speaks of jasmine, of rain on fresh banana leaves, but the words stop your breath. You know this version of the story. Once Sita goes to the ashram, Rama will never take her back. He’ll take the twins she bears, but he’ll hesitate over her—and she will give up. She’ll call on the Earth her mother one last time; the earth will open under her feet, proving finally that she is pure.
You think of falling into safe earth, of cool dark-smelling damp.
You think of what you’d lose.
You call Mama, tell her. Everything. You talk and cry and talk into the phone, and she is silent for so long you think the call has dropped. “Mama?”
“I’m here,” she says.
“What should I do?”
“You should come home, beti,” Mama says. Her voice is old and thin. And calm. “But tell me one thing first. Where is home?”
§
Even the old tales end two ways. Why not a third?
“I’m not leaving,” you tell Ram that night, “unless you come too.” Your finger is on his lips before he can protest. “Call Lakshman back,” you say. “You know he’ll take over here if you ask. What you maybe don’t know is that he wants to. Let him help us, love.”
He looks at you, hopeful, uncertain; no more perfect than you are. Blood pounds in your ears. “Come home with me,” you say. “Home where I can dance. We’ll start a different story.”
His lips find yours, and you say no more.
Free Bird
Caren Gussoff
Mamo had strong ideas about baXt, luck.
Finding a coin minted in one of our birth years was lucky. Picking up a rock with a hole in it was lucky. Seeing a butterfly was lucky. Carrying a packet of salt in your purse was lucky. Catching a falling leaf was lucky. Listing lucky things was lucky.
Feeling lucky was lucky.
And, as my mother would sit and watch natural disaster unfold on the television—footage of the hills outside Austin on fire, earthquakes cracking the Washington monument, major river floods in the Upper Midwest, and hurricanes pounding the
Gulf—she would reiterate how I, her foundling daughter, was the luckiest of all.
“We could be any of those places,” she’d say. “But we aren’t.” She’d reach out to touch me or stroke my hair, and if she couldn’t reach me, just hold her palm in my direction. “Our road luck finds us here.”
Meaning that instead of chasing baXt po drom, luck on the road, like the rest of the Gypsies, Mamo and Tate and Roxy and also, by choice, Mamo’s brother Marko, his wife Gracie, and our grandma Olive Dei—were tied here. In one place. To the trailers rusting a ring into the ground behind the façade propped against the converted mother-in-law house that Mamo and Aunt Gracie split right down the middle. They used it as an ofisa—one half for Mamo’s life-coaching business and one half for Gracie’s fortune-telling parlor.
My family didn’t want to take the chance that if my people came looking for me they wouldn’t be able to find me on the road like Rrom find each other.
“If you’d been gadjo,” Dei told me, “we wouldn’t care. They throw away everything. But your people saw how we are for our children, and that’s why they trust us with something so precious and beautiful.”
I was also a complicated victory for Mamo. She wanted her children to have an education, stability, choices—easier with a permanent address. That meant less travelling, no matter how you did the math.
And I was a perfect excuse, a reasonable explanation, a watertight alibi to put down roots that made her look good. She wanted her daughters to straddle worlds, between Rrom and gadjo. And if luck would have that one of her daughters was between two worlds, this—and literally—another, that was how it should be.
Ω
Roxy drove into the deep orange sun like she could outrun twilight. I crossed my arms and stared meaningfully at the speedometer like the dutiful big sister. Roxy ignored my staring like the naughty little sister. She was enjoying our once-in-a-lifetime sisters’ road trip too much.
“I’ve got music,” Roxy said, as if that was what we’d been talking about, and reached behind the seat where she’d stashed her tote bag. She held onto the wheel with one hand, bouncing the truck like a boat close to shipwreck. I grabbed the wheel as Roxy pulled out a CD and shoved it into the stereo. “A friend made me this.”
I began cursing out my sister and her driving, but “Free Bird” started and she turned up the volume to drown me out. “I love this song,” she shouted and sang along loudly: “When I cleave your face tomorrow, will you dismember me?”
I stopped staring at the speed and laughed at my sister. To reciprocate, she slowed down the truck a bit. “And Candace Bergen cannot cha-a-a-ange.” Roxy slapped the steering wheel as she sang.
But we grew silent when the song slid into its five-minute outro, and then into a love song I didn’t recognize. I glanced at my sister and scratched my little finger. “A friend made this for you?”
Roxy didn’t answer, but she clicked the volume down a few bars, just low enough to talk. “So,” she said. “What do you know about the chav from Barstow who Tate’s importing to sniff at us when we get back home?”
I couldn’t tell if I had made my finger itch by scratching it, or if I had just noticed that it was itching. I licked my finger and wiped it on my pants. “I don’t know much. A real Rrom baro California family.”
“Tate will have one of us married off yet.” She glanced at me, as if there was a question which one of us it would be. “I don’t want—” Then she glanced at me again. “Are you scratching?”
“No,” I said. “Maybe. No. Definitely not.” I was. “Do you have any lotion on you?”
“In my bag,” Roxy answered, and started to turn around to reach behind her seat again.
I grabbed her arm. “I’ll get it.” I pulled the bag onto my knees. Inside was a tumble of papers and a scarf that let out puffs of perfume when I moved it. Towards the bottom was a tube of cocoa butter. I rubbed some onto my hands. It stung.
It was starting. I wanted to scream.
The next exit had a truck stop and diner at the bottom of the off ramp. We pulled to the pumps and in the fluorescent light my hand looked as pink as the ham we’d had for dinner.
“Fuck,” Roxy said. She looked at me briefly, concerned for my feelings, and then said it again.
“I can probably make it,” I said.
“Fuck.” Roxy sighed a few times. “No. You’d be miserable and I’d be miserable that you were miserable.” She leaned down to her bag, gathered at my feet. “This road trip is off. You want to call Mamo, or should I?”
I looked at my hands. “I can take a bus home.”
“Don’t be stupid, Rovli.” Roxy sighed again, then put on a brave face. “Go get ice. I’ll call Mamo.” She reached for me, but I had the door open, feet on the ground. “It’s OK, Kiz. It really is.”
It wasn’t. “No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
Roxy pulled her phone from the depths of her bag. “It will be.”
Ω
Some stories aren’t meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles. In the telling, mundane stories become colorful, colorful becomes fantastic, fantastic becomes legend, and legend becomes myth. Some stories aren’t meant to be beautiful or mythic, they are meant to be true—chachi paramicha—and so those are better not told.
Mamo can tell me every detail up to and after finding me. It was too humid for Seattle and the rains wouldn’t come. Lake Union smelled like swamp gas instead of salt and fish. She was seven months pregnant with Roxy, who had settled right on her bladder. She and Tate hadn’t made it out of the trailer and into the truck when she had to go to the bathroom. She wouldn’t make it back to the trela, and Gracie had a client in the office. So Mamo waddled next door to the empty lot to squat. The lot had been empty for years, iced with green moss, plenty of private areas to let loose behind the support beams that held up the Interstate.
Mamo ran towards a beam, but then she saw me and called for Tate. After that, she said, her memories were fuzzy, like she was very drunk or dreaming. I was lying on a rock under a tree, she said, sleeping soundly, and shimmering as if I were wet. My legs were too long, stiff and loose like bell clappers when she picked me up. But I opened my eyes and wrapped my arms around her like I was much older than the three months I seemed to be, and from that moment, she says, I was theirs.
I peeled for the first time when I was five. It started on my hands and feet. Mamo immediately ruled out a burn or chicken pox; she knew those well. She hit the internet for articles about allergies, rashes, and eczema, as long scales of silvery skin peeled away from me in sheets to reveal shiny pink beneath. My mother soaked me in oatmeal baths, rubbed olive oil into my skin, put me in the sun, protected me from the sun, and decided, after looking long and hard at hundreds of photos of skin diseases, that I had plaque psoriasis.
Tate watched me rub my back against the garden wall like a molting snake and said, “She doesn’t have soreitis, Mala. She’s—” He didn’t finish his sentence because he caught me looking at him, stopped cold in the middle of a scratch.
He’d say this same thing many times throughout my life: “She’s….” He’d usually end by saying “…my girl,” and hug me in his hairy arms. That moment he said, “She’s fine,” and went over and picked me up, flipped me onto my tummy and rubbed at my itchy skin with his beard until I laughed with relief.
Later, I knew what he had been going to say each time. Alien. She’s an alien, Mala, doing whatever aliens do. But he never said it. Not once when I could hear, and probably not ever.
My psoriasis, whether or not it was psoriasis, was one of my more convincingly human quirks. It was if I’d been built by someone who’d read about humans, but never actually seen one. My growth spurts left me nearly seven feet tall. I had pores but never a blemish or a pimple. My hair was naturally shiny but all one flat color, like a cheap dye job. My toes and fingers
were all the same length. And I had no lines across my palms.
This disturbed my Aunt Gracie the most. Mamo respected Aunt Gracie’s profession above and beyond the cultural tradition of it, the encyclopedic knowledge of human nature one had to have to be successful, and the long gold earrings Gracie wore, and the thousands of scarves she draped and tied all over her half of the ofisa. But, Mamo said, her phen had started to believe her own shit.
Grandma Dei tried to put the whole issue of my palms to bed one family dinner, looking up suddenly after one bite of her meatloaf and announcing that my palms were blank canvases upon which only I would carve the story of my life. “And we should all respect that,” she finished, looking at Gracie.
Ω
A bag of ice was two dollars. I could lay my hand in it, then my arm, then my other hand and arm, and spare Roxy my fidgeting and moaning during the trip back to Seattle. I also bought Roxy two extra-big packs of peanut butter cups and a liter of iced tea, partly as apology and partly to keep her awake enough to drive.
By the pumps, Roxy was talking quietly into her phone, and something about the way she slid her foot back and forth over a loose rock and shielded her face told me she wasn’t speaking to our parents. Her short hair stood up in electrified spikes that made her look extra pretty and a little sad.
I slid into the passenger seat and arranged the candy and tea on her side, each one at a right angle to the other. I waited for her to be done.
When she opened the door, she glanced at the seat and smiled. “Thank you,” she said, then placed my gifts between our seats. She passed me the phone as she climbed in. “Call Mamo. I haven’t yet.”
I waited until we’d merged going north and dialed home. Mamo answered, the television blaring as it did every evening until Dei fell asleep, and she knew immediately as soon as I said hello.
“None of us will go,” she said. “We will stay here. It’s a bad omen anyway.”
“Ma,” I said, “I’ll be fine. You all should go. And take Roxy down too. I’m fine; it’s nothing different.” And I was fine, and it wasn’t any different. I’d itch and peel and then it would be over. My skin would be sensitive to lotion or perfume, and then it’d be another day. I didn’t need or care for an audience, and in fact would hide in my part of the trailer beneath a soft fleece blanket until it was done. Then I’d shake out the sheets and the blankets and it’d be over. Until it happened again.
