Good Indian Girls: Stories (5 page)

He was gone before I could tell him, and I was left alone.

I have since stopped leaving the apartment. Sunil continues to visit and brings with him food. So much of it I can’t eat. I don’t know why he brings notfood. When I asked him to stop, he shook his head. “You must eat,” he demanded with a madman’s self-confidence in his own delusion. I knew he was sick and I questioned if I wanted to allow him entry anymore. Perhaps he would infect me. Perhaps the notwords would become words again. The thought terrified me. NotIndia would become India, the notSoviet Union would reform.

There is little room left for food anyway, even notfood. There are more notwords than words in the world, and each day I find others. I am reduced to reading only the junk mail, and what Sunil sometimes leaves, a magazine or a newspaper, but it breaks my heart to open them. It’s spreading, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Soon there will be no room
left, soon they will overflow, escape again, back, back . . . Where can I possibly put them all? My apartment is almost full. The bathtub is crowded, as is the nottoilet, and all the closets and all the sinks, and all my notplates and floors. Even under the bed, and all my jacket and trouser pockets. The house is swimming in them. On the rare occasions when I open the door, I shore up the clippings by forming a short storm wall in the hallway. It’s the only way to stop them from spilling out onto the landing and escaping back into the world.

Recently I found a letter from my sister. I have no idea how long it sat among the clippings by the door. The postmark was from two months ago, and I don’t know how it came here. It was clearly from my sister. Her name was in the top left corner, but even now I’m afraid to touch it. It’s addressed to a notperson. I carefully cut the name out and pasted it to my front door. Through the small hole in the envelope I saw the green of dollar bills. I was sure I’d seen the notname other places. On a driver’s license I found in the kitchen drawer, and on a checkbook. Maybe he once lived here.

Good Indian Girls

ON TUESDAY NIGHT, LOVEDEEP RETURNED FOR A SECOND
evening
TO
the de-cluttering class she had, two weeks previous, persuaded herself would bring order to her life and aid in accomplishing a list of modest goals. Gain self-confidence. Find a better job. Fall in love.

“De-cluttering,” the flyer promised, “empties more than the closet and the desk. It starts you on a road to shedding years of negative habits and self-sabotaging behavior.”

The class was led by a rake-thin woman with close-cropped, blonde hair who sat Indian-style on a metal desk. The room was usually reserved for karate classes. Glossy posters lined the walls, outlining positions and moves. The early arrivals helped the instructor unfold stacked chairs and carry the heavy metal desk from the utility closet so as not to scuff the floors. Lovedeep was an early arrival, and before the first meeting, as she unfolded one chair after another and set it softly on the wooden boards, the instructor smiled privately at her. When she walked to the front to formally sign in, the instructor leaned in close and whispered, “My heart is Indian.” She had always wanted to go there, but never had. Except in past lives, of course.

“I’ve lived there before. I feel it in my blood.”

The confidence angered Lovedeep. She turned and walked hurriedly to a seat and looked out with studied indifference through the window. Beyond the rows of parked cars and the uniform line of trees shielding the highway, a deep blood red soaked the sky.

That night she dreamed of a naked old man in a cowboy hat hopping cross-legged from one feathery cloud to another while his knees streamed blood and his limp penis flopped menacingly between his hairy thighs. The dream must mean something and she told herself to write it down and think on it, though she never did, and a week later, trying to recall it, all she could remember was a floating cowboy hat taunting her from the heavens. The memory held an erotic charge, though why, Lovedeep could not say.

The first week’s class had ended with a group meditation. Only by emptying the mind, the instructor said, could you successfully empty the closet.

Saying that, she began chanting. It was some sort of Indian-sounding nonsense. Lovedeep kept her eyes wide open the whole time out of a rising fury. When it was over, she told herself she would not return for the second week and instead would write a fierce letter of complaint to the school. In any event, she no longer required a second week. The most important of her goals was now considerably closer to being achieved.

She was on the road to falling in love.

He sat two rows in front during that first week, tossing his head absently from side to side, scratching his neck, and leaning back to yawn. Standing and turning to exit when the instructor announced the break, their eyes met and he grimaced at her. The grimace telegraphed both boredom
and complicity. Lovedeep assumed he was equally irritated by the instructor’s new age quackery.

Outside, in the parking lot of the strip mall, he told her his name. It was Ian. Amid high fluorescents shimmering against polished car bodies, the name sounded irresistibly exotic.

“Do you like it?” he said, nodding his head to indicate the class.

“The instructor’s an idiot,” Lovedeep said. “It’s a waste of money. I don’t know why I came.”

He nodded, saying nothing. He had driven from over fifty miles away, just for this class. He liked to get out of his own town, away from people who might know him.

“The highways are empty this time of night,” he said. It was as if he was revealing one of the secret laws of the universe.

Before the break was over, she had written her number on a torn corner of scratch paper and offered it to him. He stared at it, “Lovedeep?” and thrust it into his trouser pocket. “What kind of name is that?”

“Indian,” she said defensively.

“Oh.”

“Have you been there?”

“I’ve never thought about the place.” He spoke dully, with a lack of excitement, as if signaling he wasn’t one of those guys hunting after the latest fad ethnicity to date and notch onto his belt of conquests.

After she handed him the phone number, his right hand began to shake visibly. “Are you alright?” she asked.

He didn’t know what she was talking about, and she told him that his hand was shaking.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said. “It’s not shaking, it’s perfectly still.”

It began to shake more violently after he said that. His whole arm seemed to be undergoing a series of uncontrollable spasms.

“See,” he said.

He must be shy of his disability, she thought, and decided not to question him further.

“Oh, yes,” Lovedeep said. “I can see it now. It’s not moving. It must be the light.”

“There’s a lot of people in India,” he said.

“There is.”

“A lot of people must die? People must die and no one cares?”

She had never thought about such an India before, an India of countless thousands dying every day. It conjured an image of bodies stacked on bodies, like the movies the first horrified GIs took of the concentration camps in Germany after liberation. In her mind, the stack of bodies grew ever higher, until the ground itself could no longer support the weight, and the continent sank into the warm southern waters under the pressure of so much dead flesh.

“It’s a cruel place,” she said finally.

She followed him back into the class. All the while, his arm shook violently.

Lovedeep worked at a medical billing clearing house, passing bills from one vendor to another, double-checking for errors, cross-billing or overpayment, recommending recalcitrant accounts for collections action. The adjoining cubicle was occupied by Marjorie, whose job was similar, and though Lovedeep had been here for only two years, Marjorie had worked at the firm for eight. Why she had never applied for promotion, Lovedeep never asked and Marjorie never
ventured. They worked at the end of a pointless L-shaped room, where the architect, perhaps having drawn himself into a corner, had left a sort of void. Few people ever had any reason to turn the corner where their desks sat together and say hello. Was this why they had become friends? Because fate had swept them both into this unpeopled hinterland?

Marjorie’s desk was littered with bric-a-brac, photos, toys, the remnants of countless lunches swallowed while surfing the internet. New trash appeared daily, invisibly, as if Marjorie herself took no part in the accumulation, but that, having been washed down river, it reached her cubicle and found it could travel no farther. It stopped, having struck a dam. This thought disturbed Lovedeep. She feared she too would be consumed eventually, that the trash burying Marjorie’s desk would overflow and fill hers, that together they would be drowned. It was because of this fear that she’d taken it upon herself to draw Marjorie out and become her friend, believing Marjorie’s particular stagnation could be alleviated by companionship.

The day after the first evening of the de-cluttering class, Lovedeep told Marjorie about Ian. Marjorie said she hoped he would call, and she wanted to hear all about it, but that Lovedeep should not get her hopes up. More damage had been done in the world by false hopes than by anything else, she said, though she did not elaborate on this statement with specific evidence. Lovedeep, despite noticing this lack, said nothing.

The class was held on Tuesday night, and therefore Lovedeep expected Ian to call on Thursday afternoon. She’d given him her landline number, not her cell, which she kept at the office. He would leave a message and she would call him back on Thursday evening, after she’d had a drink with
Marjorie, and they would make plans for either Friday or Saturday night.

On Thursday afternoon, using her cell phone, Lovedeep dialed her home phone every quarter hour, expecting to find a message from Ian. Her spirits rose when she called for the seventh time and found the line engaged. Someone else was calling. Previously, the few times she’d found her phone engaged, she’d become afraid a burglar was at that moment sitting on her bed and making calls to his many overseas lovers and inviting all the other local felons over to ransack the apartment. Of course, it was always only her mother, asking if she was coming to visit that weekend or complaining about her father.

Still holding the phone to her ear while the busy signal beeped, she tapped the wall of her cubicle and Marjorie’s head appeared. “It’s him,” Lovedeep said. “He’s leaving a message.” Marjorie nodded and made a motion to smoke a phantom cigarette and threw five fingers into the air. “Right,” Lovedeep nodded, “see you out there.”

A minute later, Lovedeep called home again. The message was from her mother.

She stood outside next to the sign reading SMOKING AREA and told Marjorie her father’s knees were hurting again. “Bad, is it?” Marjorie said and blew smoke into the air. “Not very,” Lovedeep said. “Mom worries.” Marjorie told a dirty joke about a priest with a bum knee, a young boy and a tuba player. Lovedeep never understood Marjorie’s jokes but she always laughed as if she did. This time was no different.

Neither spoke about Ian’s non-existent message.

Lovedeep decided this was done out of tact on Marjorie’s part, but worried later if Marjorie simply didn’t care.
Because Lovedeep had spent so much time cultivating Marjorie’s friendship, Marjorie was her only friend at work, but she remained troubled over whether Marjorie felt the same toward her as she did toward Marjorie. It was Lovedeep who telephoned Marjorie when the two were not at work, and it was Lovedeep who invited Marjorie to go out for happy hour on Thursday nights. The Thursday night happy hour included half-priced margaritas and complimentary personal pizzas and bread sticks. On Friday night, by comparison, only peanuts were on offer and the drinks were merely a dollar off.

Several weeks earlier, she had asked Marjorie why she never invited her to happy hour, and Marjorie said plainly, “You say it first,” which was true. The following Thursday, Lovedeep decided to wait for Marjorie to say it first.

Her routine was to wait until after lunch, and on the Thursday of the experiment, Lovedeep was able to wait an additional twenty-seven minutes before she broke down and invited her friend to happy hour. But Marjorie had other plans that night, she had a date. “When were you going to tell me?” Lovedeep said, barely able to conceal her hurt. “I didn’t know it mattered,” Marjorie said. “I promise to tell you about it tomorrow.”

Tomorrow arrived and Marjorie said nothing.

This silence was the cause of no small resentment on Lovedeep’s part, but she felt she could not quiz her friend, for Marjorie had promised, and asking would only raise the specter of the broken promise between them.

On the following Thursday, when it came time to ask Marjorie to happy hour that night, Lovedeep was unable to articulate the request. Her mouth froze and she stood before
Marjorie’s cubicle as if before a judge’s chair, paralyzed, finding it suddenly difficult to breathe.

A half hour later, the two women stood leaning against the stucco exterior of the building, smoking Virginia Slims, and Lovedeep listened as Marjorie spoke for ten uninterrupted minutes about a neighbor’s dog that had barked all night long. It wasn’t Marjorie’s neighbor, it was a friend’s neighbor’s dog, and Marjorie’s indignation was on her friend’s account, not her own. Walking back inside, Lovedeep wondered, if a dog had kept her awake all night, would Marjorie’s indignation have been equally forceful. It was not a question she wanted to find an answer to, and sitting back down, a weight descended on her. It was a feeling of dull nausea.