Unaccustomed Earth (18 page)

“Oh,” she said, realizing what he meant. “It didn’t occur to me. I just thought, since you’re in college—” It was true, it hadn’t occurred to her this time to stick a six-pack into her bag. She preferred wine now, a glass with dinner when she went out with friends in Philadelphia, but she did not expect it when she came home to Wayland.

“I’m still not old enough to buy anything here.” He glanced around the room as if it might contain what he sought, looking at her closet and her chest of drawers, at the bed that was covered with wrapping paper and a box from Filene’s containing a nightgown for her mother.

“Trip to the liquor store?” he suggested, sitting on top of the bed, crushing some wrapping paper she’d unrolled. His hand sifted through the gift tags, the tape, picking up each item and then dropping it again.

“Now?” she asked.

“Do you have any other plans for the evening?”

“Well, no. But Ma and Baba are going to think it’s weird if we go out all of a sudden.”

He rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Didi. You’re almost twenty-four. Do you really still care what they think?”

“I was about to get into my pajamas.”

He picked up the scissors, his eyes focused on the slow opening and closing of the blades, as if discovering their function for the first time. “Since when did you get so boring?”

She knew he was joking, but the remark hurt her nevertheless. “Tomorrow, I promise.”

He stood up, distant again as he had been at dinner, and she felt herself faltering. “I guess it’s still open,” she said, looking at her watch. And so she’d gone, lying to her parents that she needed to get something last minute at the mall, Rahul saying he’d drive her there.

“You’re the best,” Rahul told her as they headed into town. He rolled down the window on his side, filling the car with freezing air, and fished in his coat pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He pushed in the lighter on the dashboard and offered her one, but she shook her head, turning up the heat. She told him that she’d applied to go to London the following year, to do a second master’s at the London School of Economics.

“You’re going to London for a whole year?”

“You can visit me.”

“Why do you need another master’s degree?” He sounded distressed, and also disapproving. It was the sort of reaction she expected from her parents. Her parents hadn’t allowed her to do a junior year abroad at Oxford, telling her then that she was too young to live in a foreign county alone. But now they were excited by the prospect of Sudha going to London, where they’d first lived after getting married and where Sudha had been born, talking about visiting and reconnecting with old friends.

She explained that LSE had one of the best programs in developmental economics, that she was thinking of doing NGO work, eventually. But Rahul didn’t seem to be listening, and she was annoyed with him, with herself, really, for agreeing to go out so late at night. “You want a six-pack?” she asked when they got to the liquor store.

“I’d prefer a case.”

In the past she had paid for things without a second thought, but she was aware, now, that he did not reach for his wallet.

“And a bottle of vodka, too,” he added.

“Vodka?”

He drew another cigarette out of its pack. “It’s a long vacation.”

Their parents were in bed by the time they returned, but Sudha insisted they hide things as they had before. Thinking that their mother might have reason to enter Rahul’s room for the weeks that he was home, to clean up or put away his laundry, she kept the liquor in her room, a few cans at the back of her closet, some in a gap behind a bookcase, the bottle of Smirnoff wrapped in an old pilly sweater in her chest of drawers. She told Rahul it was safer that way, and he didn’t seem to care. He took a couple of cans for the night, pecking her on the cheek before he left her, not insisting when she said she was too tired to join him.

He had been born when Sudha was six, and the night her mother went into labor was the first sustained memory of her life. She remembered being at a party in the home of one of her parents’ Bengali friends in Peabody, being left there overnight because her father had to take her mother straight to Boston without the suitcase Sudha had helped pack containing the toothbrush and cold cream and robe her mother would need in the hospital. Though Sudha understood that a baby was about to be born, had felt it with her hand as it sometimes threatened to pound clear through her mother’s belly, she was terrified nevertheless that her mother, moaning with her forehead pressed against a wall, was dying. “Go away,” she said, when Sudha tried to stroke her mother’s hand, in a tone that had stung. “I don’t want you to see me this way.” After her parents’ departure the party continued. Sudha was expected to play in the basement with the other children, among the washer and dryer, as dinner was served to adults. The host and hostess did not have children of their own. Sudha had slept on a cot in a spare room containing no permanent furniture other than an ironing board and a closet devoted to cleaning supplies. In the morning there were no Frosted Flakes for her to eat, only toast with margarine, and it was then, during that restrained and disappointing adult breakfast, that the phone rang with news of her brother’s arrival.

She had been hoping for a sister but was delighted nevertheless no longer to be an only child, to have someone help fill the emptiness she felt in her parents’ home. The few things they owned were always in their places, the two most current issues of
Time
in the same spot on the coffee table. Sudha preferred the homes of her American friends, crammed and piled with things, toothpaste caking their sinks, their soft beds unmade. Finally, with Rahul’s arrival, there was a similar swelling and disorder: his lotions and diapers heaped on the top of the dresser, stockpots clattering with boiling bottles on the stove, an infant’s strong, milky odor pervading the rooms. She remembered how excited she had been, moving her things to one side to make space in her bedroom for Rahul’s bassinet, his changing table, his mobile of stuffed bumblebees. Toys and other gifts accumulated in the crib he would eventually use; her favorite was a stuffed white rabbit that played a tune if a key at its throat was turned. She had not minded when her mother came in in the middle of the night to comfort Rahul, sitting in a rocking chair, singing a song in Bengali, something about a fishbone piercing the foot of a little boy, a song that would lull Sudha back to sleep also. Birth announcements were bought at the drugstore, the card of Sudha’s choosing, and she helped to put them in their envelopes, dampening stamps with her father on a wet sponge. Countless photographs were taken—Rahul sleeping in his bassinet, being bathed in a plastic tub—and she took it upon herself to arrange these in a special album, with a blue denim cover because he was a boy.

There was not the same documentation of Sudha’s infancy. In London, after she was born, her parents had rented two rooms in Balham from a Bengali landlord named Mr. Pal, and it was he who had taken the few baby pictures of Sudha that existed, wearing a white lace dress intended for a christening but that her mother had simply thought pretty. Mr. Pal had opened his doors to her parents when her mother was pregnant with Sudha, providing refuge from their previous landlady, an elderly British woman who did not allow children under her roof. Her parents told her that half the rentals in London in the sixties said
WHITES ONLY
, and the combination of being Indian and pregnant limited her parents to the point where her father considered sending her mother back to India to give birth, until they met Mr. Pal. To Sudha this story was like an episode out of a Greek myth or the Bible, rich with blessing and portent, marking her family as survivors in strange intolerant seas.

Four years later they moved to Massachusetts, her father transferring from Badger to Raytheon, transporting no evidence of their years in London, no trace apart from her mother’s fondness for the McVitie’s biscuits she ate every morning with tea and her lifelong belief in the quality of British brassieres, which she asked friends in the UK to mail her every so often. None of Sudha’s toys had made it on the journey across the Atlantic, no baby clothing or bedding or keepsake of any kind. In grade school, when Sudha had been required to present her autobiography to the class, a project for which the other students brought in blankets and scuffed shoes and blackened spoons, she came only with an envelope containing pictures Mr. Pal had taken, boring her classmates as she stood at the front of the room.

None of this mattered after Rahul arrived. Sudha had slipped through the cracks, but she was determined that her little brother should leave his mark as a child in America. She sought out all the right toys for him, scavenging from yard sales the Fisher Price barn, Tonka trucks, the Speak and Say that made animal sounds, and other things that she’d discovered in the playrooms of her friends. She asked her parents to buy him the books she’d been read by her first teachers,
Peter Rabbit
and
Frog and Toad.
“What’s the point of buying books for someone who can’t read?” her parents asked, legitimately enough, and so she checked them out of her school library and read them to Rahul herself. She told her parents to set up sprinklers on the lawn for him to run through in the summer, and she convinced her father to put a swing set in the yard. She thought up elaborate Halloween costumes, turning him into an elephant or a refrigerator, while hers had come from boxes, a flimsy apron and a weightless mask. At times she engaged with Rahul’s upbringing more than he did—it was she, too heavy by then for the seats, who would swing in the yard after school, she who spent hours building towns out of Lincoln Logs that he would destroy with a gleeful swipe of the hand.

Though she doted on him and adored him, she began to envy him in small ways. She envied him for his lean limbs while she grew slightly pudgy once her period came, and she envied him because people could call him Raoul, that he could introduce himself in crowds without questions. She envied him for his beauty; even when he was a child there was a clear sense of the handsome man he would become. His face defied the family mold. Sudha, with her father’s rounded chin and her mother’s low hairline, was transparently their offspring, but Rahul looked little like either of them, his genes pulled not from the surface but from some deeper, forgotten source. His complexion was darker, his skin an unmistakable brown, his pronounced features lacking the indeterminate quality she and her parents shared. He was allowed to wear shorts in summer, to play sports in school, things her mother considered inappropriate for a girl. Sudha supposed it was a combination of his being a boy and being younger, and her parents being more at ease with the way things worked in America by then. Sudha had no fondness for her younger self, no sentimental affection for the way she had looked or the things she had done. What she felt was an overwhelming sense of regret, for what exactly she did not know. She had looked, of course, perfectly ordinary, her black hair worn in pigtails or braids, grown to her waist one year and cut like Dorothy Hamill’s the next. And she had done ordinary things: attended slumber parties and played clarinet in the school band and sold chocolate bars from door to door. And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she’d made.

Thanks to Rahul there was also someone else to witness the perplexing fact of her parents’ marriage. It was neither happy nor unhappy, and the lack of emotion in either extreme was what upset Sudha most. She would have understood quarrels, she believed she would even have understood divorce. She always hoped some sign of love would manifest itself; the only things that consoled her were a few pictures taken during their London years. Her mother looked unrecognizably slim, hair styled at a salon, a woven purse shaped like a cornucopia dangling from the crook of her elbow. Even her saris were glamorous back then, tightly wrapped to show off her figure, patterned with a spidery brown batik. Her father seemed vaguely mod, wearing suits with narrow dark ties and sunglasses. Those were the days, Sudha, supposed, when immigration was still an adventure, living with paraffin heaters, seeing snow for the first time.

Wayland was the shock. Suddenly they were stuck, her parents aware that they faced a life sentence of being foreign. In London her mother had been working toward a certificate in Montessori education, but in America she did not work, did not drive. She put on twenty pounds after Rahul was born, and her father put away his mod suits and shopped at Sears. In Wayland they became passive, wary, the rituals of small-town New England more confounding than negotiating two of the world’s largest cities. They relied on their children, on Sudha especially. It was she who had to explain to her father that he had to gather up the leaves in bags, not just drag them with his rake to the woods opposite the house. She, with her perfect English, who called the repair department at Lechmere to have their appliances serviced. Rahul never considered it his duty to help their parents in this way. While Sudha regarded her parents’ separation from India as an ailment that ebbed and flowed like a cancer, Rahul was impermeable to that aspect of their life as well. “No one dragged them here,” he would say. “Baba left India to get rich, and Ma married him because she had nothing else to do.” That was Rahul, always aware of the family’s weaknesses, never sparing Sudha from the things she least wanted to face.

Another semester passed before she saw him again. She was accepted at LSE, and in June she came home to Wayland for a week. During her visit, Sudha gave herself fully to her parents, watching Wimbledon with her father on television, helping her mother cook and order new blinds for the bedrooms. She was always in the house, while Rahul drifted in and out without explanation. He was waiting tables part time at a seafood restaurant out in Scituate, thirty-five miles away, sleeping most days, working dinner shifts, out with friends after that. These were no longer friends from high school, boys Sudha had known since Rahul started kindergarten. Instead, they were people he met working at the restaurant, people he never bothered to invite home.