Habitations, page 12
“The first years must be the hardest,” Vega said. “I wondered about this for Shoba. After the baby was born, especially. I wondered who she talked with. Even now, she must be lonely.”
“Maybe,” Sudha said. Vega glanced behind her. The girls had both dozed off, Anjali’s head against the window and Maya’s on her sister’s shoulder. “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” played from the speakers. It was an awkward soundtrack to the drive, now that only she and Sudha were awake. Sudha didn’t seem to notice, though. “The thing is,” she said, “you rely on people because you have to in the beginning. So, it isn’t quite lonely. When you stop needing people is when it becomes lonely. That’s what I think.” She finally turned off the music. “Do you think you’ll want to come back?” she asked.
“I do,” Vega said, and she told Sudha about her loose doctoral plans.
“Your parents must be proud.”
“I haven’t done much of anything yet.”
“Nonsense. You have a purpose. What else is there?”
The drive was shorter than Vega expected. She navigated, using the directions Mohan had emailed the previous week from an account that, at the time, had made her laugh: mohan.engineer@aol.com. There was nobody with whom she could have shared the joke. Only Gayatri would have found it funny, but it was the middle of the night in Madras. She considered forwarding her the email, but it seemed an unkind thing to do, to make fun of a man who had opened his home to her upon her arrival.
* * *
Vega was wrong to assume that Shoba was lonely. The front door was open, and people spilled onto the lawn. A cluster of girls, Maya’s age, played tag in the corner. Maya broke loose and joined them.
“Who are all these people?” Anjali asked.
Sudha hushed her. “Don’t be rude,” she said. But Vega had been wondering the same thing. Everybody was distinctly South Indian, almost all speaking Tamil. It was the reverse of watching a film with a familiar cast—strangers dressed as people she ought to recognize.
Shoba was standing beside the front steps, wearing a peacock-blue sari, surrounded by other sari-clad women. When she saw Vega, she broke away from the group and ran towards her, exclaiming over the gift. “It was enough of a present that you came!”
“It’s nothing,” Vega said. “Really.” As always, Shoba’s effusiveness made her feel guilty. Sudha was the one who had actually purchased the gift. She had stopped at the mall on her way from the office and returned with a pink dress and a three-pack of baby socks. “I bought size two,” she had said. “You always want to go a size larger with children this small.” Vega had nodded and thanked her, half listening to the advice, which she could not imagine would ever be relevant to her life.
Shoba spoke with Sudha as though they were old friends, thanking her for coming, and for taking such good care of Vega—prompting Vega to wonder if the two women knew each other, if there was some connection she may have missed between them. To Anjali, she said, “The older children are in the basement. We have a Ping-Pong table.” She waved them inside to the dining room, where the table was crammed with pots of sambar and avial, and aluminum trays of lemon rice, chole, raita. “Aruna made the idlis. You’ve met Aruna? Please eat. There’s too much food.” She seemed happier, more vivacious than Vega had ever seen her. She ran quickly to the kitchen to check on the kesari—reportedly also being made by Aruna—then walked Vega and Sudha through the house, showing off the new curtains in the nursery, a series of family photographs hanging on the hallway wall, and a floral-patterned address book she kept next to the telephone. “I know so many people now. Just look.” She opened it up to a page in the middle, the letter L, filled to the midpoint. “I meet somebody, and immediately I write their number.” But it was the change in the baby that most surprised Vega. Tara was seated on Mohan’s lap, dressed in a red pavadai and chewing her fist. When she saw Shoba, she smiled and raised her arms so eagerly that she nearly lifted herself into the air.
“She’s lovely,” Vega said. Though she found children sweet and interesting, she had little interest in babies, and her observations of Shoba’s early months of motherhood only diminished their appeal. But Tara was radiant. When Vega last saw her, she had clung to Shoba with a primal desperation. Now she was playful, burrowing into Shoba’s neck and smiling, then allowing herself to be lowered onto the floor. They had shaved her head for her first birthday (Shoba had mailed Vega pictures of Tara’s annaprasana, in which she was starkly bald), but now her hair framed her face in soft, perfect curls.
“She’s a good baby,” Shoba said. They watched her take clumsy steps towards Mohan, then fall onto the carpet. “She’s happy. Easy.”
There was a man seated next to Mohan, dressed just as Mohan was, in brown slacks and a white shirt. He made clucking noises to Tara, then held his hand out and pulled her up. They watched her step forward once, tentatively, then steady herself and run to Mohan’s lap.
* * *
Sudha and Anjali left to go shopping, but at the last minute, Maya asked to stay behind at the party. She had met some girls her age and they were tearing across the backyard with later plans for a Hula-Hoop competition. “I have to be there for it,” Maya said. “I promised. And they need an even number.”
“You don’t mind keeping an eye on her?” Sudha asked.
“As long as I don’t have to compete,” Vega said. Now, she called Maya inside to eat, watched as she wolfed down her food, then made a plate for herself and found an available seat on the living room floor where the guests had formed a circle. When she’d first arrived and scanned the room, she thought that nobody at the party was her age, that she was at the midpoint between the teenagers huddled in the basement and the mothers crowded in the kitchen. Of course, Shoba was younger than she was, but Vega considered Shoba an anomaly—a child bride from a small town, who had become pregnant in the manner of child brides from small towns. Now she realized most of the women in the room were in their early twenties, mostly paired with one of the trouser-wearing men. In that crowd, Shoba and Mohan were indistinguishable. Vega, in her skirt and sleeveless kurta, was the one who stood out.
Two women beside her were discussing kitchen renovations, and she wondered if she should interrupt to introduce herself, when the man who had been seated next to Mohan sat next to her. “That’s your daughter?” he asked.
Vega stared at him blankly.
“The girl with the dupatta. You were getting her food.”
Vega considered pointing out that she would have had to have given birth at fifteen in order for nine-year-old Maya to be her daughter. Instead, she said, “I don’t have any children.”
“You’re from Madras?”
“Yes.”
The man switched to Tamil and introduced himself as Suresh. “Mohan and I were in school together. Their baby is like my own daughter.”
It was a surprisingly tender comment. “She’s really a lovely baby,” Vega said.
“We’ve met before, I think. We studied together at IIT, maybe?”
Vega laughed. “You’re most certainly confusing me for somebody else. Though I did visit the campus often. My friend Gayatri studied there.” She always enjoyed her weekends at IIT, in part because she liked Gayatri’s friends. But Suresh struck her as the dullest type of IIT graduate—a man who had spent his childhood singularly focused on gaining admission and had nothing to show for himself beyond that achievement.
“Which hostel did she stay?”
It had been three years since Vega set foot on the IIT campus, and it surprised her how quickly the name came back to her. “Sarayu.”
“That’s where we’ve met, then. I was in Narmada. We held events together, the two hostels. We had a Holi party every year. Perhaps you were there.”
To Vega’s relief, Mohan and another man bounded into the room, and Suresh was dragged into a conversation. She stood to clear her plate. In the dining room, Aruna was setting out bowls of kesari.
Sudha and Anjali arrived in time for cake, and in time to see Maya and the tangle of girls perform a play called “Dragon Princess,” which they insisted they had spent the afternoon rehearsing, though it all seemed impromptu. Afterwards, Vega went into the kitchen where Shoba was packing leftovers into ziplock bags. “You want channa? We have too much. Even cake we have.”
Vega shook her head. “It was all lovely, though. I ate too much.”
“You met Suresh. He’s almost a brother to Mohan.” Shoba told a winding story about an apartment they had all shared in New Brunswick. Despite Vega’s protests, she pressed a bag of lemon rice into her hand. “I’ll invite him next time you come,” she said.
In the car, Sudha glanced in the rearview mirror and whispered to Vega, “Anjali looks nice, doesn’t she?”
Vega turned around. The nose ring was so small it was barely detectable, but Anjali seemed so placid, so content, that she did, in fact, look nice.
“You saw somebody you know?” she asked. “The man you were talking to?”
“He recognized me from Madras, but I don’t recall him.”
“That’s how New Jersey is. Everybody is connected from back home.” Sudha looked in the mirror again. “Rakesh is going to scream when he sees the nose ring. But who cares?”
12
Naomi was a shade tanner and had put on the slightest amount of weight. They hugged for a long time, Naomi swaying side to side. “Holy shit,” she said when she pulled away. “It’s really you.” She looked lovely. Vega wanted to hug her again. To sink into her.
“Did you think I would send my understudy?”
“I had my fears. I don’t know.”
They had originally planned to meet the following weekend. Naomi was housesitting in Flatbush for the summer and was back and forth between there and Stamford until her program started at Penn. She had sent Vega the Flatbush address, and they had confirmed the time. But on Sunday, two days earlier, Vega mapped the distance between Stamford and White Plains and sent Naomi a message. What if we meet over the next few days? I’m only twenty minutes away. She sent the email quickly, before she could talk herself out of it, worried she was being too eager. But Naomi wrote back a few minutes later. Sure thing.
They took the rear exit out of the Stamford train station and walked towards the parking lot. “If you have time, I was thinking we could go for a drive,” Naomi said. She unlocked the door of a worn-looking maroon car.
“Is this yours?”
“I had to buy a car when I was in Austin. I should have offered to pick you up. I was so distracted this morning that it didn’t even occur to me.”
“Are you busy with classes?”
“No. I’m actually just adjuncting this summer.” She turned at a stop sign, then said, “Oh. You mean, is that the reason I was distracted?”
“I don’t know what I meant. I’m just saying anything that comes to mind because I’m nervous.”
“I’ve been nervous since we got in touch.”
Vega stared at her as she drove. “Do I look different to you?”
Naomi laughed. “A little bit. I don’t think you wore your hair loose when we lived together. It was always in a braid. Maybe there are other things. I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“Because you look a little bit different. I was just wondering if you were having the same experience I was.”
Naomi pulled onto the highway. It was strange watching her drive in the same way, Vega imagined, it would be strange to see her jump rope or turn a cartwheel. An ordinary skill suddenly announcing itself.
“I think that was our issue last year, right?” Naomi asked.
“What was our issue?”
“You and I not having the same experience.”
Vega didn’t answer. The highway split into a two-lane road marked by signs that held no meaning to her, for landmarks she had never heard of: Downtown Norwalk, the Goddard School of Westport. Sometimes, she liked being in a place that was foreign to her. Other times, like in this moment, it unsettled her. In her first months in Cleveland, she had been gripped by the peculiar fear that her parents would kick her out of the car as they wound through the gray maze of streets that surrounded the hospital, and she would never be able to find her way back. She had forgotten that fear until now.
“Would you say that’s accurate?” Naomi asked. “You felt one way and I felt another?”
“I would not say that’s accurate. No.”
They turned onto a narrower road, and then into a gravelly lot. Naomi parked the car and turned to Vega. “Then what would you say happened?”
“Do you realize we’ve spent the duration of the time we’ve known each other doing things that are familiar to you?”
Naomi looked puzzled. “You mean because I used to bring you home?”
“No. Not just that. I moved into your apartment. And then, everything from there. You had been living in New York for years. You knew how to fix coffee tables and cook. Every time we took the train, I was following you. I was always going someplace you had been countless times. Even now. Do you know I don’t even know how to drive a car?”
“I trust you’re going somewhere with this, but I really don’t know where.”
“You have ex-girlfriends, Naomi. If I wanted to acquire an ex-girlfriend, I wouldn’t know how to begin.”
“You date a woman. And then you end things.”
“It isn’t a joke. There’s an imbalance between us. I could not have brought a girlfriend home to my parents. They have no frame of reference. I would have had an easier time explaining to them that I’d become a gold prospector. Or an aerobics instructor.” Even as she spoke, Vega was aware that none of what she was saying was true. Her parents didn’t care about frames of reference. They had always loved her simply and without condition. Vega was the problem. She could not imagine surrendering herself to a relationship, allowing herself to be happy, when she knew the likelihood—the real and mathematical likelihood—that the relationship would end. She couldn’t bear another loss.
The beach was rocky and gray, beautiful but cold-looking. There was a group of mothers with their young children, and an elderly couple walking a dog, but it was otherwise empty. She and Naomi made their way to a small, sandy inlet and sat down. Vega slipped off her sandals.
“I should have brought something to eat,” Naomi said.
“You don’t always have to feed me.”
“I did think about this, after I left. How you managed to eat.”
“I moved in with Halima. She did most of the cooking.”
“I’m glad you found your way. I mean, in general. That you weren’t alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. But I missed you. I thought about you constantly.”
“That makes me feel like I wasn’t crazy. Like I wasn’t imagining things.”
“No. You weren’t.” Vega wrapped her arms around her knees.
“You cold?”
“A little bit.”
Naomi slid closer so their legs touched. She slipped her hand into Vega’s skirt—a red wrap that Vega had worn constantly in Hyderabad, and that still reminded her of Hyderabad—and put her hand on Vega’s bare knee. Vega felt herself softening. She could have this. She always forgot, until the moment she was touched, just how much she loved being touched.
“Could you tell me something?” Naomi asked. “And be really direct?”
“I think so.”
“Could you give this a real chance? Be with me? Have a relationship?”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to answer.”
Naomi’s right hand moved upwards, her finger sliding slowly just inside Vega’s underwear. “Is this what you want? Just to fuck?”
It wasn’t a fair question, Vega thought. What she wanted was so detailed and far-fetched that it would have embarrassed her to say it aloud: an apartment with Naomi in Philadelphia. The two of them in graduate school. Evenings on the couch, reading each other’s dissertation chapters. In this fantasy, she was a sexier, bolder, less fearful version of herself. She and Naomi kissed in public. They went to wine bars. They had a small and perfect circle of friends.
Naomi was behind her now, her left hand inching up Vega’s shirt, her thumb grazing Vega’s nipple. She thought again of Sukumar Reddy. Do you want to fuck me outside? But she did want to fuck Naomi outside. She wanted to fuck her loudly, on that cold sand, not caring who walked by. The woman and her children. The couple and their dog. She said Naomi’s name, over and over, the final time nearly shouting it into her ear.
Naomi played music on the way back—a loud, dissonant, male voice, all the songs sounding exactly the same. They didn’t talk until they reached the White Plains train station.
“You didn’t need to bring me all the way here,” Vega said. It was an inane comment. Naomi had offered, over and over, to drive Vega all the way to Sudha’s house. And Vega had insisted that she was fine, that she could easily call a taxi.
“I don’t mind. It doesn’t make a difference.”
“Will we see each other again? I can still come to Brooklyn.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Of course it is. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”
Naomi touched Vega’s lower lip, then dropped her hand. “I really like you, Vega. I don’t know if there’s a more artful way of saying it, but it’s the truth. I just like you. I’ve liked you from the minute I met you.”
“I know that,” Vega said, realizing only later, on the train, what a small and incomplete response that was.
* * *
She and Naomi planned to meet on the second Friday of July. That morning, when the family was out of the house for Maya’s soccer game, Vega stood in front of Sudha’s full-length mirror wearing a black-and-white cotton dress she had bought in Hyderabad—at the time, with Sukumar Reddy in mind. It cut low and clung to her breasts. Later, walking the ten blocks from the Atlantic Avenue station to Naomi’s Brooklyn apartment, she felt something rising in her, akin to the feeling she used to have when her period approached, a light cramping, a feverish awareness of all the parts of her body she wanted somebody to touch. Over the past few days, her fragmented thoughts of Naomi had developed into a clear plan: she would go back to Madras, find a job, then begin her doctoral applications to Penn, Temple, and Columbia. She could picture this life in perfect detail. The apartment she and Naomi would find together. Their shared bookshelf. The glow of their lamp in the evenings. The different version of herself—the sexy, bold, fearless version—that would love and be loved by Naomi, without the constant fear of impending loss.
