Wreck and Order (28 page)

“Please don't close your heart to me,” he said. “You are the best friend I've ever had.”

And the night when the spider woke me up in some motel bed I was sharing with Jared. At first, the skin on my arm felt something like wonder at how wide apart the creature's legs were, how many there were, how slowly they walked in perfect concert with one another, creeping, trying not to disturb me. And then it was at my throat and I was wide awake and shrieking. “Get it off! Get it off!” Jared thrashed out of bed and turned on the light. I jammed my finger in the direction of the black body escaping across my pillow on long, strong, gauzy legs, one of which Jared grabbed between his thumb and forefinger. The spider dangled, its free legs pawing the air and its fuzzy head stiff and protracted, while Jared's wide eyes darted about, landing on the glass of water beside the bed. Into the water Jared flicked the creature. Stillness. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back to me, peering into the glass. Remnants of disgust and outrage at the sensation of the spider's legs on my throat competed inside my chest with shame at the frivolousness of my outrage. Jared's shoulders began to shake, his head bent forward, he sputtered and opened his mouth wide, did nothing to stifle his sobs. “He tried so hard,” he said. “He was trying so hard but the water was too much for him. He wanted to live so bad. He just wanted to live. He was trying so hard but the water—” He kept talking as I took the glass from his hand, pulled him down to me, held him, murmured it wasn't his fault, he had done nothing wrong, I was sorry, I was so sorry, I didn't know how to not be always freaking out, how did a person stop always freaking out, I didn't know, I was sorry. He slept and I held him and then sometime in the early morning I became the sleeper, he the holder.

No. Must not think of that. Must choose memories that harden not soften me, must tell myself a story in which he is simple and bad. Fierce determination to get to a place of steadiness. I do not get to keep my love for him.

The tinny ice cream cart song trickles past. Suriya's name is in my inbox, too. She has written me three notes, all saying the same thing: “Elsie Akki, my mother has died. Can you come to my home please? I hope you are receiving this mail. God bless.”

My mother had a manuscript of unpublished poems written by a friend of hers in college. She would get them out when she was in one of her moods, lay the pages on the kitchen table and pick them up at random, silently mouthing the words with a deliberateness I found annoyingly melodramatic. One time I snatched the page out of her hands. “My father took me at the same time every day,” I read aloud.

“Her father raped her, that's what ‘took' means there.” My mother fidgeted with the edge of the tablecloth. “There was Satan worship. A cult. Anne is complicated. A bird—a large bird of prey—slaughtered over her. The blood dripping on her. She was naked, a little girl. Something happened to her, some thought, something kind of good for the first time. Darlene, too, she has a master's degree, she is
very
smart, she never could understand Anne's poems. Some kind of Satan worship, a large bird of prey. The men wore hoods. But there was this good thing.”

My mother often told stories in fragments like this. When you asked for clarification, she would respond in more fragments. I dropped the piece of paper back on the table and poured myself a glass of orange juice.

When my mother moved across the country with Rick, she brought the box of Anne's poems with her. I saw it on the backseat before they drove off, Rick gripping the wheel in one hand and a plastic travel mug that said “Dunkin' Donuts” in bubble letters in the other, my mother's hair pulled back into a diamond-studded barrette, tears rolling down her cheeks and catching in the thin ring of excess skin around the base of her neck, her biggest insecurity.

Not long ago, I asked my mother if she still had the poems. “Oh yes.” She started to repeat her fragmentary take on Anne, how complicated she was, even Darlene did not really get her, the bird of prey, the Satan worship, the little girl with blood—

“Do you still talk to Anne?” I asked.

“God no. Not since college.”

“Why do you care about her poems so much?”

“I wouldn't say I care about them
so much
. You just don't throw away something like that.”

I want my mother to be a deep person, to matter in some way aside from having pushed babies out of her womb. But she doesn't want to be deep; she wants to be happy. She answers the phone when I call. And she did bring me on those whale watches and to that Cambodian temple. She cannot be more than she is. Of course I've had this thought many times before. It's Psych 101 stuff. But now, riding the bus to Amma's funeral,
god bless, god bless
tolling in my mind, I feel the thought rather than think it.

Ayya is waiting for me at the bus stop. He raises one hand. “We happy you come here,” he says, enunciating too deliberately. It's clear he's been saving these words. He takes my backpack and I follow him across the street to Suriya's house. There is a coffin in the empty front room attached to the kitchen. As Ayya carries my bag upstairs, I walk to the edge of the box. Suriya's mother has been dressed in a white sari and gold jewelry. Her face is made up with kohl around her eyes, cakey whitening powder, red lipstick. Her lips are upturned, but the smile belongs to the living; Suriya's mother is nowhere near this room. I'm permitted the preciousness of the thought because I have no attachment to Amma's specific body.

“Come,” Ayya says, and leads me to his neighbor's house, where it seems the whole village is gathered in the front yard, laughing and talking and squatting over plates of food. Children chase each other, running figure eights around the grown-ups' legs and shrieking when they get caught. I find myself smiling as I enter the yard. But then I see Suriya's face, an island in the chaos of limbs and voices and consumption. Making eye contact with her is like staring at a blinding light. “El,” she says, and takes my hands in hers. “This is my auntie's house. We must come here for meals. During funeral days, we cannot eat in our home. Or we will become sick. One time there was a woman in our village who fed her child during a funeral. All the people told her no, but she said, I don't believe old stories, baby is hungry, and she gave some rice milk. And then that baby becomes so sick. He must live in the hospital. So we cannot take meals at our home until the funeral is finish, okay, El? Very important.” She speaks quickly, tonelessly. Her English seems better than ever. “Okay, El?”

“Yes, okay. I'm happy to see you. I'm so sorry.” Pause. Silence. Try again. “There are so many people here.”

“Yes, there are many. Because my mother is kind.”

I look away from the wounded gape of Suriya's eyes. “Where is your father?”

“He is in the bed. Like baby. In these days, I must do everything for him. I give him to eat and wash his face. He is not moving. When we learned she has died—the sound that came from his mouth, El. It eats my heart.”

A short woman with wide, flat nostrils gives Suriya a plate of oil cookies. Suriya stares down at the cookies as the woman speaks to her in Sinhala, gently at first, then more emphatically. At last the woman takes the plate from Suriya's hands and walks toward the kitchen. “I don't know what that woman is saying to me. I am to do something with those cookies. I think.” Suriya's mouth barely moves as she speaks. I want to pull her toward me, but my body offers no assistance. I stare at the dirt clinging to my swollen toes.

“What happened, Nangi?” I ask. “How did she die?”

“She had a tomb in her womb. And she had blood coming from her breast. Like milk. Except blood instead.”

“Did she have cancer?”

Suriya closes her eyes, her thumbs pressed against her temples. “My head is a ghost's garage.”

We dress in white on the day of the funeral. Suriya irons the family's clothes on the upstairs patio, holding each item of pristine cloth to the light and turning it about in search of creases. As I start to tie my hair back in my usual haphazard bun, she looks at me in alarm. “Akki? Shall I fix your hair?” Her mundane concern makes me giddy with relief.

Three monks from the village temple come for the service. They stand in front of the casket in worn robes, eyes softly unfocused, hands clasped before them, a little too poised. The oldest one speaks for a short, dreary while. When he stops, Suriya's father raises a golden pitcher into the air. Suriya and Ayya place their hands atop his, and together they tip the pitcher downward, letting the water it contains fall into the dry earth below Amma's coffin. A willingness to give up the most precious thing, maybe. Allow the heart to break because that's how the heart survives.

Suriya's spine curls toward the ground, an unseen weight pulling her down. Her wail reminds me of the time my auto-rickshaw driver ran over a puppy in Colombo and then laughed at my anguish over such trivial suffering. Ayya takes Suriya by the armpits and pulls her upright. His chest absorbs her howl. I don't realize the service has ended until people begin to crowd around us, patting Suriya and murmuring words that are probably trite but necessary before heading into the cloudy day. Suriya's father and brother stand on either side of her and pull her up the stairs to her room.

Hashini and her husband walk over to me. I put my hands in front of my chest and bow. Hashini smooths down my hair. Rajesh grins and nods vigorously. Suriya's wails continue from her bedroom. Ayya comes down the stairs and hurries to me, pointing down the road to the eating house. “Take a meal,” he says. “Please.”

“I go to Suriya,” I say, accidentally mimicking her English.

I find her lying on her side, clutching at the sheet, her mouth opened wide, shrieking soundlessly. How much of my adult life I have passed in this position, for reasons that seem so wasteful now. I lie beside her, my butt falling off the small bed. I take her hand in mine and press our clasped hands against her chest. Her heart pounds through her back. I can admit to myself now—in feeling, if not in words—why I was irritated when Suriya spoke of her mother's illness. It seemed almost sweet to die, compared to choosing to leave. I had no idea; I still don't. I breathe loudly and slowly. I can't think of anything else to do. Only after it grows too dark to watch the large, slow bounce of palm leaves through the window does Suriya quiet. I loosen my grip on her hand as her cry loosens into a thin, slow wheeze.

When my eyes open many hours later, Suriya's back is still pressed against my chest. The white pit of the sun fills the window. Suriya yawns and fidgets her way to wakefulness.

“I want tea,” she says. “Okay, Akki?”

After she leaves, I cross my legs under me and sit still for a while, waiting for the ache to become nothing more than an ache.

The front yard is empty, the tent and casket gone. Suriya is in the kitchen, ladling thin, beige batter into a small pan on the electric burner. The batter hardens into a bowl-shaped crepe. “Do you like hoppers, El?” she asks, handing me a full plate.

I love. I bite into the thick, spongy center, soaked with spicy coconut sauce. I ask Suriya to tell me how to make these, for when I'm back in the States.

“So easy,” she says, swirling the pan to even out another spoonful of batter. “Rice flour, coconut milk, one egg. Or two eggs. Or no egg, if you don't have. Salt. Little oil. Hopper dust.”

“Hopper dust?”

“Yes,” she says evenly. I miss her usual exclamatory inflection. “Mix in a bowl and cook in a hopper pan.”

Suriya's father walks in, wearing the same clothes he wore at the funeral. She straightens her spine. Her voice is too cheery as she tries to hand him a plate of hoppers. He scrunches his small nose as if smelling something rotten, turns his back to us, addresses the doorway. The words march in a slow, loose line, following orders out of habit.

“My father is angry with me,” Suriya says when his hunched shoulders disappear through the door.

“Why is he angry this time?”

“Because my mother loved to make hopper meals. He says to me, ‘Everywhere I see her remembers and her moments.' This is my father's sad. But I need her remembers and her moments.” She stirs up the batter, which I will clearly not be able to reconstruct at home. “You know the parable about the woman with a baby that died, El? And she ask Lord Buddha to make that baby live again?” The Buddha told her he could make a special medicine if she brought him mustard seeds from a house in which no one had ever died. The mother went from house to house, clutching her dead baby, begging for the seeds, receiving instead story after story of loss. Finally she buried her son in the woods, sad and okay. A miracle of acceptance. “I need to think of my mother's small things, to remember them all,” Suriya says. “But I must balance small things with big ones. Do you understand?”

Yes. No. I look at her closely.

“What are you thinking, Akki?” She slides a hopper onto my plate.

That your goodness is not make-believe, not part of any machine.

“What a good cook you are,” I say.

“You only say that because you are my friend. I have so much to learn.” She nibbles the crisp lip of a hopper. “Can I ask you for a help, Akki?”

“Of course.”

“I would like to talk to my boyfriend. He wrote me that we can talk with the Skype. You can help?”

At the house with a computer, I check my email while Suriya plays with the owners' baby. Joe from
Carp Weekly
has written back. He has cancer—“of the goddamned tongue! What a fuckin' wanker God is”—and he's taking time off from work. The good news is that Donnie will do pretty much whatever Joe asks—“you don't cross a cancer patient”—and Joe was happy to call in a favor for me. As usual, the paper is in dire need of good editors. Donnie would be glad to have me back on staff, and I'd be salaried. Starting at $40,000 with benefits, a number that sounds to me like success. I'll have to edit the What's Hot? section in addition to the In Memoriams—“ladies' handbags and cocktail recipes and the like. At least that's what it is now. Let's just say, there is ample room for improvement.” I hear the words in Joe's determined, self-contained tenor. So. That's what I'll do.

But—Jared. I cannot live in his town. I would never escape my thoughts about him. Anyway, I ought to be teaching impoverished children how to farm or trying to make plastic out of recycled fingernail clippings or becoming the first Buddhist nun who is also a sex educator or biking across the U.S. to raise awareness about Tamil oppression. I wish I would do any one of those things, I really do. But I won't. Maybe I could move to Montreal, finally get good at speaking French, work at a bookstore or coffee shop or something. My forehead drops into my hand. Enough ideas. Do what is before you. Take the newspaper job, but don't live in Carpinteria, live in a nearby town—maybe that tiny, gorgeous one with brightly colored cottages and vegetable gardens in the yards and cheap rents because the cliff above it is inching year by year closer to landslide. Return to the work you had when you were twenty-two, knowing now that no greater life is beckoning from afar. I've always been right here.

After I set up a Skype account for Suriya, I sit outside with the owner of the Internet café, as Suriya calls this house with a computer. He has a large, silly chin. “Your name?” he asks me.

“Elsie.”

“Your country?”

“U.S.A.”

Time passes. Whorls of dust agitate the pale sky.

“Your name?” he says.

“Elsie.”

“Your country?”

“U.S.A.”

I am an ordinary person with an ordinary life. Even my acceptance of ordinariness is ordinary, the undercurrent of so many “big books.”
Madame Bovary
,
War and Peace
,
Freedom
. The mistake is always the same: trying to live the life one has in one's head instead of the life before one, which is endlessly generous if you humble yourself to it as the only possible means of fulfillment. But isn't there something condescending about being told by great artists that ordinariness leads to happiness? Those who create art that preserves their lives from the dull, repetitive labors to which the masses are confined tell these same masses to labor joyfully. Plato's Noble Lie, retold endlessly. But that kind of ordinariness is not what the man in white robes was talking about in the meditation center in the mountains as the candles flickered and the insects sang and my ass went numb on a thin, hard, overused cushion. What was he talking about? Stopping. Wondering. What am I doing right now. Is it necessary. He was not talking about doing any particular thing. I could stay at the newspaper until I'm old and gray, or come back to Sri Lanka and teach English, or write a novel about a totally imaginary person who has nothing to do with me, or translate a French book that even a non-suicidal person might enjoy. The point is to pay attention to what's real, not to my imagination. To remember that it's enough just to sit on a train, seeing, hearing, bouncing, dozing, thinking, letting the mind go blank. That's love, too, a kind of love. It seems possible to love like that all the time, but then—Suriya walks out of the house. I stand and ask if she was able to reach her boyfriend. Seeming not to hear, she loosens the bun at the nape of her neck to let her hair fall down to her knees, shakes her head, reins the stringy, black mane back in. I offer to bike home and she barely nods, just hops onto the handlebars, the same way I glided into my dad's car after spending the afternoon in Dan's attic in high school, when he sang me radio love songs and made me believe I was the most beautiful girl in the world.