Seven

by Farzana Doctor

  He stomped down to the basement, and I crept upstairs to check on three-year-old Zee, who was fast asleep despite all the yelling. I watched her breathe and wept for the end of my good life. Then I headed to the kitchen, unfriended Ian, and turned off the laptop. I considered padding down the stairs to talk to Murtuza, but I knew it would be pointless. His questions and thoughts and feelings would swarm around me like angry wasps and I’d be unable to do anything but bat them away.

  Murtuza slept on the basement pullout for three days. Each time he emerged to look after Zee or make himself a snack, I attempted impromptu explanations, wishing I was more articulate, had rehearsed a few repentant lines. I’ve never been good at communicating my feelings when overwhelmed. He moved back to our bedroom but wouldn’t talk to or touch me for another three days, despite my pleas and cajoling. Then, at last, on the seventh day, he threatened to end the marriage unless we saw a professional. He quoted facts and figures about infidelity and the importance of seeking immediate help. It was probably Murtuza who told me the statistic about cheated-on partners looking for clues.

  Dr. Stanley met us together for the first session, during which Murtuza did most of the talking. I scanned the spacious office, which was mostly outfitted with Ikea furniture. Between nodding at Murtuza’s statements of why we were there, I mentally listed: Malm, Hemnes, Ektorp, Flöng, some of the items that fill our home. For years after we bought our bed, we referred to it as our Brimnes, our private joke. When had we stopped doing that?

  During the following week’s one-on-one session that she called an “assessment,” Dr. Stanley wore her steel-grey hair in a single braid down her back, instead of loose, as she’d done during the couples’ session. She recommended that I break off contact with Ian, and I pouted and told her I’d already completed that act of contrition. She might have misinterpreted my stiff embarrassment as lack of guilt because she leaned forward in her seat and spoke loudly, perhaps thinking that her increased volume would help me comprehend the gravity of my situation. She insisted that I commit to owning the cheating, and I imagined it was like an expensive, later regretted, purchase. I understood what she was getting at but couldn’t help protesting, “But I didn’t even kiss him! I didn’t get to do anything! Nothing actually happened between us during those two months of messaging each other!” I was like a snot-nosed kid who’d been caught before tasting a shoplifted candy bar.

  “Do you wish you had?” She puckered her lips and nodded, perhaps in an effort to look sympathetic. Had she ever cheated on the bald guy in the portrait on her desk? Maybe she understood my longing?

  “Yes and no. I never wanted to hurt Murtuza.” I didn’t meet her gaze and instead focused on the hypnotic blue lines winding their way through her area rug. I wondered what its Ikea name might be. Then my hour was up.

  Murtuza had his own individual session that week. I asked him how it went and he said, “Fine. You?” I said my session went fine, too.

  A week later, Dr. Stanley began our session with a monologue mostly addressed to my side of the room. She suggested that I was seeking something lost, something left behind that wasn’t literally Ian, but a part of myself that I’d once expressed with Ian. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but my eyes welled up in response.

  Murtuza took my hand, and his own eyes moistened, his black lashes made even prettier by his tears. I hated myself for hurting this man with pretty eyelashes. I hated myself for almost sabotaging my marriage to this man with pretty eyelashes.

  “Shari, you were younger when you and he … first met. You were childless, free. Now you have no time for yourself. You go to work, deal with teenagers all day, then come home and take care of a toddler, and after that you have to spend your evenings marking horrible essays. You don’t see your friends like I do, even though I suggest it.” He turned to Dr. Stanley and repeated, “I suggest it all the time. She never listens.”

  Then he exhaled, and as though remembering that he was trying to be patient, turned back to me. “You don’t get away to conferences like I do. Maybe that’s the part you’ve lost. Time for yourself.”

  The therapist nodded, crossed one slender pantsuited leg over the other. “You’re on the right track, Murtuza. Sharifa, how do you feel about what Murtuza has just said?” My thoughts swirled too quickly in my head; it was too much for me to be on the spot like that. I nodded in agreement so that Murtuza wouldn’t think I was being obstructive.

  The next evening, Murtuza brought home a wall calendar and we began marking off slots with a green dry-erase pen. I signed up for a weekly hot yoga class. I had drinks with friends a couple of times a month. We instituted a Friday date night and asked my parents to babysit. I did feel better, I had to admit; the stresses of work and mommying a three-year-old mellowed.

  A few months later, during our final session, Murtuza referred to the affair as my “tipple with infidelity,” like it had been a delicate sip of sherry instead of the three hundred and forty-one messages he’d read over two desolate hours. I still don’t know if he was being sarcastic, the way he is sometimes. I hope he was attempting gentleness, the beginning of forgiveness.

  I wasn’t tempted to chat with Ian anymore, but every so often I did miss our nightly correspondence, those messages tinged with innuendo, with the “what are you wearing?” and “I loved kissing you” and the “do you remember when we …” The little bit of cyber-naughty.

  When I blocked him the night Murtuza discovered us, I didn’t know that what I’d yearn for most was just that, the small exciting moment at the end of my day.

  After ten minutes of teeth-brushing, flossing, and changing into my least boring nightie — the black cotton knee-length with the lace neckline, definitely not bought at Forever 21 — we are in bed.

  “How are you?” he asks, his usual way of starting.

  “Fine.” I smile nervously, wondering if I am the least bit alluring. After nine years of marriage, I still don’t have any moves. What if I were to say, “I’m on fire for you!” or the opposite: “I have a headache”?

  He kisses me, the peppermint on his breath reminding me that our dentist appointments are next week.

  His hands rove over my back and then under my nightdress. I copy his movements, feeling for the waistband of his boxers and the fine hairs on his slim buttocks. He rolls on top of me, sucks each of my breasts, always the left, next the right. I like it when he does that, and I breathe deeply, getting caught up in the moment. His mouth travels over my belly and lingers a few moments lower down. I think about the bottle of lube I recently bought and that I haven’t yet overcome my shyness to tell Murtuza about.

  “Ready?” he asks, cupping my right breast.

  “Okay,” I reply.

  I try to relax. My friend Anita showed me her copy of a self-help book called Mating in Captivity, and I imagine that Murtuza and I are a pair of orangutans at the zoo. Then I feel weird for getting aroused by imagining we are orangutans at the zoo.

  After a few minutes, Murtuza grunts and rolls off me, panting.

  “Want to try the toy?” He purchased the vibrator years ago. He’d read an article about how, after having a baby, it was good to spice things up in the bedroom. We’ve tried it a few times, and while the sensation is pleasant, it is uncomfortable to have Murtuza apply the device to my vulva and wait expectantly for me to climax.

  “No, I’m satisfied. That was good, Murti.” I peck him on the cheek and get up to use the bathroom. When I return to bed, he lifts the covers and wraps his arms around me.

  Early on, when Murtuza sporadically asked about my lack of orgasms, I reassured him that it was because we were still new. Then I said it was because I was pregnant, and then because I was a sleep-deprived new parent. And then he went out and brought home the vibrator and I finally admitted that I’d never had an orgasm, ever, not with anyone. This revelation soothed him somewhat, the problem clearly not about him but me. He’s never said so, but I suspect that he’s had much wilder sex with a
ll the women he was with before me.

  In my twenties, I read books about it. Attempted various positions. Insisted on oral sex. Spent a hundred dollars on toys. Now, I find it easier to accept things as they are, rather than perseverating on an unfixable problem. I can enjoy sex for what it is instead of looking for what’s missing.

  After my confession, he encouraged me to try again. “You’re in your thirties now. Maybe it’ll be different.” Over the next couple of years I went along with his experiments: new books, new positions, new toys. I held a thin, golden thread of hope that maybe he was right and things could change.

  Each effort was embarrassing, and the more we tried, the less I enjoyed myself, my bits the subject of his prodding and probing. “Look, I like it best when we do the regular stuff,” I insisted.

  And so here we are, post-coitus, sleepy. The sex was fine, and he is always considerate to check if I want more, and I always say no, happy enough to curl up with him afterward. I sniff his sweat, a mix of his deodorant and something else warm and musky, and fall asleep.

  THREE

  I’m on my way to meet Mom for a stroll through East River Park. After selling our Edison, New Jersey, house, and buying a Murray Hill condo last year, she’s wanted to explore the city and go on excursions with me.

  The bus is packed, its passengers a study of mobility and dislocation. If I could get everyone’s attention, the way I used to do in my classroom, having to yell twice before they’d stop and listen, I’d do a hands-up exercise: put your hand up if you speak a language other than English at home? If you were born outside of the U.S.? If you are Muslim? Jewish? Hindu? Buddhist? Druze? A brown lady in a bright blue hijab sits in front of me, fanning herself with her Vogue magazine. An African American youth beside me slumps over his phone, his fingers typing furiously. He giggles, perhaps in response to a joke, and then glances self-consciously at me. I smile at him and turn my attention to the middle-aged white woman across the aisle surrounded by half a dozen plastic grocery bags. On this late August day, I smell sweat, floral dryer sheets, coconut oil, curry, and pizza.

  Who are all these people? I never tire of this exercise.

  I did attempt the hands-up activity in my classroom at the beginning of last year, during an introduction to the history of immigration.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” I asked them.

  “So what, miss?” Maria, from El Salvador, queried. The rest stared back at me with trademark teenager demeanours: a combination of blank and sullen.

  I told them it wasn’t like this when my family arrived over thirty-five years ago. Toby, whose family originated from Ireland, screwed up his face and shot me a look that said, Wow, you’re old.

  While diversity is not exactly celebrated, things have changed. When we immigrated, we had to assimilate but just the right amount — my parents didn’t want me to become too Western. I wasn’t ever sure where the balance point was on that see-saw, but I followed their lead the best I could. We attended the masjid a few times a year. I figure-skated and snuck smokes and beers with my friends. I wore shalvaar kameez to social functions on the weekend and jeans to school.

  I’m glad Zee has the opportunity to grow up with the kind of mix on this bus. Perhaps she won’t wonder where she belongs (the U.S.? India? Nowhere?), the way I did, and sometimes still do.

  I know that the upcoming trip to India will be complicated, as travelling to the “homeland” has always been. I’ll breathe it in and cough it out. I’ll feel grounded just in time to come home and be disoriented. It’s not culture shock as people typically understand it, but its reverse: when I return to the States, the place I’ve lived almost my entire life, India will have made me a foreigner again. It will remind me of my outsider status, disrupt the forgetting, wake me up to the fact that the balancing act does require effort. For a time, I will be as self-conscious as the teenager beside me, trying to remember how to be invisible as I venture through the city.

  Mom meets me at the door in lavender and teal spandex. While she fills a water bottle, I wander into her solarium and peek at a watercolour-in-progess.

  “Hey, this is good, Mom! You’ve really captured the sunset.”

  “Oh, it’s just my homework for class this week.” She pushes off the compliment.

  She and Dad retired a few years back, both from high-level banking jobs, but it wasn’t until after he died that she learned how to enjoy her non-working time. Before that, the two of them were aimless in retirement. They planned cruises and safaris but didn’t take them. They puttered around their expansive home, cleaning and making small repairs. Twice a week they dropped off large plastic containers of the food Mom cooked but they couldn’t consume. And then Dad collapsed while he was out in the garden, and she was in the shower. His heart stopped long before she could phone 911.

  I drove to the house that day, missing the highway exit on the way there. I pulled open the screen door, half-surprised to not find Dad sitting at his spot at the kitchen table. A numb shock got us through the first few days.

  A week after the funeral, she lamented, “I should have known.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She palmed her face and sobbed. I put my hand on her shoulder, wishing I could contain the shudders moving through her. “His father died of cardiac arrest when he was in his late sixties. I should have forced him to go on that Alaska cruise we’d always meant to take. He’d say ‘later.’ Or ‘soon.’ I should have known there wasn’t going to be much more time.”

  A month after that, she listed the Edison house and bought her East 38th Street condo.

  Our stroll is turning into a power walk along the river. I pause, realizing I’ve been whinging about my upcoming trip for much of it.

  “I guess this is a first world problem,” I mutter proactively. My mother recently learned the phrase at the food bank where she volunteers and now peppers our conversations with it.

  “Well, yes, sure. But I can see why you’re nervous to go away for eight months! I would find it difficult to be in India for that long. Short visits — three to four weeks — are nice, but I’ve always been happy to get home. Back to my routines.”

  Mom, Dad, and I would travel every three years, for three weeks, our visits from mid-December to the first week of January. We were so regular that relatives could plan weddings around our vacations. My paternal grandfather died the day after Christmas the year I turned thirteen, and my cousins later joked that he’d scheduled his heart attack and subsequent demise so we could attend the burial.

  “Yeah.” I use the bottom of my T-shirt to wipe my brow. I’m winded, but my retiree mother looks fine.

  “The only time we went longer was that first trip back, when you were small. We were there all of July and then you stayed in August. Remember? The weather was horrible! So we switched to winter visits after that.”

  “I do remember how hot it was! Didn’t I get sick a lot that trip?” My skin prickles with the memory. I pause under an elm’s canopy to cool myself.

  “Yes, I think so.” She gazes up at the green leaves above us. “But not at the beginning. I think you got a stomach bug toward the end of the trip, after we left.”

  I nod, the recollection seeming true, yet I don’t really remember. I resume our walk, this time at a slower pace.

  “Well, the university has been gracious to let Murtuza teach his course off their usual schedule — starting in September instead of July.”

  “They know non-locals can’t cope with monsoons. The locals barely can manage it.” She grimaces, perhaps remembering when she was one.

  “You never want to live there again?” When I was a child, she and Dad had occasionally talked of retiring in India.

  “Never. What would I do there?” She gestures at the river, as though to say, I have all this. I don’t know what she means but sense not to ask.

  “I’m going to be bored, aren’t I?” When I first began planning the trip, it seemed a perfect transition from teaching to my consul
ting. However, I’ve grown accustomed to a manic eight-to-three-thirty schedule, followed by three hours of marking after dinner, ten months each year, for the past dozen years. Now that I’ve rested for six weeks and know I never have to go back, I wonder how I’ll deal with eight months of downtime.

  “You do like to be busy.” She shoots me a knowing look. “Perhaps you can start the consulting work early, from Mumbai? It will give you some income while you’re away, no?”

  “We’re all right financially.” I remind her that we used my part of Dad’s inheritance to pay down the mortgage, and she nods, looks away. I change the subject. “And Lenore says she won’t need me for her new gig until April. It’s a contract to review the state’s home-schooling policies. For now, she just wants me to get familiar with them, which I’ve had to do, anyway, because I’ll be homeschooling Zee in India.”

  “Won’t that fill your days, then?”

  “Sort of. From what I’ve read, it’s much less effort with one child than a classroom. I’ll give her projects and assignments, and supervise her through them.”

  “Well, what about you? Why not have your own project? Your MA was in history. You used to love research. I always wondered why you didn’t do a PhD instead of becoming a teacher. Remember that thesis you wrote?” She’s referring to my study of nineteenth-century Indian immigration to North America.

  “Uh-huh.” I bristle at her elitism. We’d argued when I’d applied to teacher’s college. You’ll have so much more money and status as a professor, she’d insisted.

  “What I mean is that you could create your own research study while you are there.” She backpedals, “You’ve always been curious about family history, no? Why not record it? I doubt anyone has.”