Wreck and Order (19 page)

“Do you have any friends who are girls?”

Girls in school say they are her friends. They act in a nice manner to each other. But she doesn't trust them. They are jealous because she gets good marks in school and she has a boyfriend working abroad. They joke and say her boyfriend is ugly. And one time, her friends told her a lie that their exam was canceled. So she did not study and she did poorly.

“I don't have many close friends, either,” I say. I've always had women I could call up and go out with. I enjoy these interactions, but it would make me sad to characterize them as friendship—unless a given social activity was going to involve drugs or alcohol, I usually preferred to be alone.

My turn to pedal. I love the whir inside my body as the blood rushes to keep up with my legs. “So fast,” Suriya calls over my shoulder. “Fun!” We pass a still, green lake lined with feathery grasses. A duck walks through sticky, black mud toward the water, which makes grace of its clumsy waddle.

Suriya yells to stop and hops off the handlebars as the bike slows. The family that has a computer with Internet is not at home. Someone must have died, Suriya says. The only place they could possibly have gone is a funeral. It takes a few tries to explain to Suriya why I find that funny. Her laugh jostles her whole body. It's good to be alone with her. I no longer have the urge to flee her village, put on my pack and wait in the dust for a bus to come by, going elsewhere. If I leave, when will we see each other again? And it's nice to be able to simply imagine Jared's expressions of raunchy love piling up in my inbox, along with, perhaps, even a kind note about
Fifi
.

I wake up in the night with the sense that someone has entered our room. I blink at the darkness above my head, willing my eyes to adjust to the dark, then press my chin to my chest. A silhouette is just visible in the doorless doorway. Masculine, threatening. The vigor of my heartbeats drowns out my thoughts. I stay very still, waiting for the figure to make a move, waiting for my brain to wake up. He takes a step forward, into the moonlight. I still can't see his face, but the floppy hair and wide chest clearly belong to Ayya. Suriya is sleeping on the floor beside me, my frantic mind reminds itself. If he advances, I will scream.

But after staring at my bed for a while, he simply walks away. Fear gives way to rage. This has gone too far. If he's willing to approach me in the middle of the night, while I'm sleeping beside his sister, what would he do if he found me alone somewhere? I must stop this. I'm up and walking before I have any sense of how to do that.

Ayya is on the stairway leading to the ground floor. He turns at the sound of my footsteps. I tower over him from the top of the stairs. The half-moon reveals his face, surprised and open. “Leave me alone.” The harsh whisper grates my throat. “Stop spying on me. I'm here for your sister, not for you. I'm going to tell her what you're trying to do.”

Ayya knots his hands at the center of his chest and wrinkles his face. “El Akki.” The whisper barely reaches me. “Hello. Sleeping.” He's probably hoping I'm about to follow him to his bedroom. My anger reminds me of a phrase from my guidebook, which I used to say to men who harassed me on the street. “Palayan yanna!” Get lost!

I wait outside the bedroom for my breathing to calm. I'll tell Suriya in the morning. I don't want to disturb her few precious hours of rest.

I sleep late the next day and awake too hot to think. I have been reduced to the need for water on my face. The tank outside is almost cool, shaded by shaggy coconut trees. Frangipani petals are scattered on the ground, their Club Med loveliness smeared into a beige bruise on the dirt. I splash water on my face and begin to gargle the fuzz off my teeth. Suriya runs up. “Don't use the water, Akki! Pig rat died in the tank.” The swirl of water over my tongue stills. “I bring you well water.” She hurries toward the overgrown backyard. I spit. I do not ask what a pig rat is.

Suriya returns with a metal urn and stands with me as I wash. “El, can I ask you something?” Her voice is quiet and serious. Ayya must have spoken to her first. “Do you have some problem in the night?”

I pat dry my face and look up. “Yes. I wanted to talk to you about it. But I don't want to upset you. It's about Ayya.”

“Ayya, yes, he tell me—”

“Told me.”

“Told me he saw you in the night. You were angry or worried.”

“He was peering into our bedroom, Suriya. Staring at me. It woke me up.”

She puts her hand on my arm. “Does he scare you? Do not worry for that, El. Ayya walks in the night. Because in the army, he is a night guard. You understand? So he has the habit of not sleeping.”

I sigh, not wanting to hurt Suriya, hating Ayya for forcing me into this uncomfortable position. “I think he was lying, Nangi. Because he has also been spying on me in the outhouse, when I'm using the toilet or taking a shower.” Blanched, Suriya withdraws her hand. “I know this must be upsetting to hear about your brother,” I continue, “but it's probably just being a soldier has made him—”

“Akki, I need to speak with you. In a lonely area. Okay?”

“A private place,” I say, following her into the backyard, past the outhouse, into an overgrown mess of bamboo. She sits down on a log in a clearing. I take the opposite end, facing her. “El Akki. That was not Ayya looking at you. What was your word? Sie?”

“Spy.”

“Ayya does not spy.” She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “I hope you will forgive me, Akki. I have spy you.”

“Have spied on you.” I repeat the words mechanically, awaiting an explanation.

“Yes. It is me.” She speaks quickly, keeping her eyes closed. “The first time, in the night at Hashini-Mommy's house, I want to make sure you are okay. But then your lamp in the outhouse is so bright and I thought I can see inside without that I disturb you. Then I am
more
interested because I see only little bit—”

“What did you want to see?”

“Oh, El, I am embarrassed.” Suriya still has not opened her eyes. “I want to see white girl naked.”

Suriya is wearing her hair in perfect braided pigtails; her baggy dress comes to just above her ankles. Yet she sounds like she's about to hit up a strip club in Bangkok. I reach out and grip her hand. She opens her eyes, but keeps them cast downward. “Nangi,” I say, “it's okay. Honestly, that makes me like you even more.”

Suriya lifts her chin. “You have not angry?”

“Not at all. But you could have just asked me. I'm not shy about stuff like that.”

“But I am shy! I never dare to ask you.”

“Did you see what you were looking for?”

“Yes.” Suriya looks at her feet. “I want to know if you have hair. Because one time boys in my class have shown this photo of a naked lady. Some bad thing from the Internet. And one boy say me, ‘Ooh, do you look like that?' And another boy say, ‘No, I think she is hairy!' And the boys laugh. The lady in the photo has no hair! Just on her head. And I am worried that it is bad to have hair—in that place. But then I think, maybe it is only white girls who have no hair.”

“I guess I answered your question.” Suriya blushes. I laugh and jostle her shoulder. “Come on. I don't mind at all. Really.”

She faces me, biting her lip. “But how do girls become like that?”

I explain waxing and shaving and the gross American infantilization of women and sexualization of children. I want to make the practice seem as absurd as possible, to be the role model of a woman who is comfortable with her body just as it is. But if Suriya had been spying on me a few weeks earlier, when Jared was staying with me in New York, she might have remained confused. It is oddly unthinkable to me that I would go to the beach or on a date without undergoing uncomfortable, gratuitous hair removal.

Sometimes when I got a bikini wax, I would begin to imagine that the strips of hot wax were being applied and yanked against my will and I didn't know when it would stop, if ever, and I thought of the secret CIA prisons and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and Bagram and the so-called stress positions into which prisoners were shackled for hours and days until their shoulders dislocated and their legs broke, and all the other forms of torture happening all around the world at that very moment that were infinitely worse than forced genital waxing—which was, after all, not nearly painful enough to even exist as a form of torture outside my mind—and my lips and hands grew numb and I had to take long, deep breaths and the Russian lady would ask if I was okay, it was almost over, sweetie, just one more little strip.

A tiny purple bird lands on the log between Suriya and me, but flitters off when I turn to look at it. “You know,” I say, “I had a similar thing one time. With a boyfriend.” I haven't told Suriya about Jared, wanting her to think of me as a heartbroken woman slowly recovering with no one's help but her own. “He wanted me to look like the women on the Internet.”

Near the beginning of our relationship, when Jared and I were lying in bed after sex, he asked if he could wax my asshole. I was satiated and dreamy and openhearted. “Maybe,” I said. “Is it the hot wax part that turns you on, or—”

“I don't mean like that. Not as a sex act.”

I stiffened. “You mean you want to wax my asshole to make it
look
better?”

“I just think it looks hot when it's all bare.”

“And where have you seen all these bare assholes?” A thin, steel question.

“Relax, baby, I'm not thinking of other girls. I've just seen it in porn, I guess.”

I jumped out of bed. “Do you have any clue how much it hurts to rip out your hair by the goddamn follicle from the most tender area of your body?”

I glared at the floor as I pulled on my clothes. Jared sat up and reached an arm out to me. “I don't get it. You said I could when you thought it would turn me on.”

“I didn't realize I'd have to become your private porn star to turn you on.”

I repeat this line to Suriya, offering a chaste explanation of a porn star. “That is good, El,” she says. “So you did not see the boy again?”

Amma yells Suriya's name three times. I am saved from having to lie. We find Suriya's mother in the yard, looking alarmed. Suriya hugs her and speaks reassuringly. “She believe I am lost,” she tells me.

Amma is feeling well today and will be able to prepare lunch. So Suriya is free to study for her exams. She sits in the yard with her giant binder, trying to memorize a few paragraphs she must recite for the exam. I haven't changed my underwear in a couple of days and resolve myself to the necessity of laundry. As soon as I drop the matted knot of my clothes into a bucket, the soapy water turns opaque gray. I squeeze my orange T-shirt into a ball and rinse it out under the tap. It drips on the laundry line stretched between two squat palmyra trees. As I start to repeat the process, Suriya's mother comes up and pats my arm. She takes my shirt off the line and returns it to the bucket, into which she dumps much more detergent. With glad violence, she repeatedly dunks my shirt, beats it against a rock, scrubs it with a coarse brush, twists it into a tight coil, and wrings out the coil inch by inch. The cloth is nearly dry when she hangs it on the line. She smiles at me and gestures to the bucket. I imitate her with slow awkwardness. She presses the back of her hand against my cheek.

Suriya walks over and holds her mother around the waist. “She teaches you to be a good Sri Lankan girl,” Suriya says.

“She can try,” I say. I used to participate in psychology experiments to make an easy fifty bucks. The questionnaires asked me to rate from zero to ten how strongly I identified with certain feelings, such as
Think frequently about how I look
or
Feel certain that other people are talking about me behind my back
. I always circled ten for
Believe I should be punished for my sins
. I am the voracious girl in the legend that mothers tell as a warning to their daughters. To be good is to bear repetition and dissatisfaction without complaint, or only inner ones that affect no one but yourself.

Ayya runs toward us, dips his hands in the dirty water, flicks it on his sister, bounds away, shrieking, “Iyeeeee!” Suriya shouts after him and shakes her fist. Still smiling, Amma walks toward the kitchen. Her equanimity feels like a shield or reproach. It reminds me unpleasantly of Brian's family, the implicit pressure to maintain a state of perfectly reasonable happiness. My eyes reach for Suriya's. “Has Ayya ever told you anything about being in the war?” I ask, wanting to pierce the bubble of equanimity. “The kinds of things he saw or did?”

“Oh no. He does not tell me that. That is like code. Secret code for soldiers.”

“I'm sure your brother is a good soldier. But not all the soldiers are good. I heard a lot of things from Tamil people while I was traveling—that thousands of innocent people were killed and tortured and raped and lost their homes at the end of the war. And even now they have very little freedom.”

Suriya takes a skirt from the bucket and beats it against a rock. “Why do you not ask Ayya these things?”

“He doesn't speak English, does he?”

With subtle sarcasm, Suriya widens her eyes and points to her enormous English binder. “Of course. You can translate,” I say, more nervous than relieved. Suriya calls out for her brother. He emerges from the kitchen, eating a banana. My throat grows dry as he approaches. I haven't spoken to him since I told him to get lost last night. “I'm sorry—” I begin, but Suriya shakes her head no and addresses Ayya in Sinhala. “I explain it is my fault you are confused in the night,” she says. “Do not worry for that.”

I offer Ayya a wide, close-lipped smile, the same one I used to give the camera when I was a child, doing my best imitation of an acceptable photographic face. But now the very desire to be genuine makes me come across as aloof. Suriya explains to Ayya that I have traveled in Jaffna and am sad for the Tamil people. Ayya meets my eyes. His voice is tight and matter-of-fact. I should not feel bad for the Tamils. They are so rich. So many Tamils are living abroad and sending money back. They are luckier than the Sinhala people.