Habitations, page 29
Vega wanted to counter that point—an instinctive reaction to any claim that life was harder for boys than for girls. But she had nothing to say. Safia seemed enveloped in the small and comfortable world of her family. Earlier that evening, she and Asha had made oatmeal cookies with Adnan’s help, then she had given Asha a tour of her tiny bedroom, introducing her stuffed animals one by one. Karim had sat in the corner of the living room with his Legos, quietly assembling a series of black and gray towers.
“If we can move to a proper university town,” Halima said, “something more cosmopolitan, then we can make a nice life.” She took a deep breath, then wiped her eyes with her napkin, smearing a line of kohl across her temple.
“I’m sorry, Halima. I’m sorry for you and for Karim.” She imagined Halima and the children trudging through Montclair, how wonderfully inconspicuous they would be in a town like that. How happy they could be.
Halima breathed slowly, steadying herself. “I don’t blame Adnan. He’s working so hard. I can’t allow him to feel guilty, especially because there is no immediate solution.”
They were quiet for a bit, then Vega said, “The children will become more comfortable here. For better or for worse, they’ll become American.”
“Maybe. I think about this so often. If we stayed in Lahore, I would be worried every time I went to the market or dropped the kids at school. And we would be living off paise from the university and at the mercy of student protests and faculty strikes. But in another way, we would be happy. It’s an imperfect trade. It’s always an imperfect trade.”
* * *
The following spring, Vega was invited to present at a conference at the University of Michigan. She flew with Asha to Newark Airport, where she met Suresh to hand her off. He spun Asha around, then tugged her braid. “Your brother keeps asking for you!”
She giggled. “He can’t talk, Appa.”
“Oh, he can. He’s a very smart baby. He keeps asking, ‘Where is my akka?’ ” He zipped Asha’s coat, then adjusted her hood. To Vega, he said, “I wish you had time to come home. Rupa hoped to see you.”
“Next time I will. Please give her my love.”
Her connecting flight didn’t leave for another two hours, and she had hoped they could linger. She had woken up at four in the morning and desperately needed a coffee. But Suresh seemed to be in a rush. There was talk of an ice-skating trip when Tara and Veena finished school. Vega pictured him in his Dockers and button-down, making his way tentatively around a rink. She felt a peculiar urge to give him a hug. Instead, she kissed Asha goodbye and watched them disappear down the escalator.
Michigan was frigid. She had brought her winter coat, dug up from a box of clothes she reserved for trips to New Jersey, but the wind whipped through it. It tangled her hair and chapped her knuckles.
At the welcome reception, she made a cup of tea and searched for familiar faces. It was a pure sociology conference, and she knew not to expect Naomi. She saw Charles, her former colleague at LSU, who showed no interest in her casual updates from the department. He talked, instead, about his training for the Boston marathon. “People ask me how I qualified, because I came to running late in life, you see. They ask me, ‘Charles. How did you pull this off?’ You care to know?”
“Yes,” Vega said. In a way, she was curious. She had never seen Charles look so animated.
“Eight-hundred-meter sprints. See, if you’re a distance runner, that’s counterintuitive, to practice sprints. But it’s what you’ve got to do.”
She ran into a cluster of Indian academics she had met or emailed over the years. Among them was a quiet woman named Nirmala, who slipped away from the conversation. Later, at lunch, she introduced herself as a former nurse who now operated a fistula clinic in Bihar. “It isn’t politics-work,” she said. Her English was shaky, and Vega would have shifted the conversation to Hindi if not for the two white women sitting at the table. “Our funding comes from aid groups, only. USAID, but then also church. American church, they will send checks. We sign form saying we do not have abortion, but that is no problem. Sometimes baby die because of labor problems, but not because of abortion. But we try, always, save mother and baby.”
“You are, of course, pro-choice?” one of the white women asked. “As an organization, you believe in women’s reproductive freedom?” In the calm of the table, the question sounded accusatory.
“Ma’am, yes. But church money is very easy for us because we don’t have to write such big grants and then do so much reporting. So, of course, we must take.”
“Right,” the woman said. “I understand bureaucracy exists. But for you to sign away your right to perform abortion, aren’t you undermining women’s rights in other ways? I mean, as a feminist, which I presume you claim to be, how can you allow your organization to grow fat from donations of American churches?”
“Not fat, ma’am. We have a lean operation. If women want abortion, they can go elsewhere.”
“I believe Nirmala is offering a perspective on fundraising that American institutions don’t have to consider,” Vega said. “Certainly not American universities.” She wanted to offer a steelier defense, but before she could say anything further, the woman threw her hands up. “I mean, this has American hegemony written all over it.”
Nirmala shifted in her seat. The other woman at the table opened her mouth, then closed it. Vega thought of Emily, her constant stream of fundraisers for inoffensive causes: childhood diabetes, cancer research, holiday toy drives. Sometimes Vega wanted to prod her to think about the context of these matters. “It really is rooted in American agricultural practices, isn’t it? We really need to think about the problem of air pollution and environmental regulation. It puzzles me that wages can be so low in such a wealthy country. Does that ever puzzle you?” But the effort never went far. In the end, Emily just smiled sweetly, and Vega tossed in ten dollars.
The other woman broke the silence. “You provide care during recovery as well?” she asked. She had a British accent.
“Yes, ma’am. We don’t send home immediately. Women stay for full healing time. And then, if they have children, we have small school where they can study and be with mother as she heals.”
The discussion splintered into small side conversations. That evening, Vega was walking into the hotel lobby when she saw the British woman sitting at the bar. She waved Vega over. “God, that was brutal, no? That lunchtime conversation.”
“I spoke to her afterwards,” Vega said. “The woman, Nirmala.”
“How is she doing?”
“I think, like any of us, she would have appreciated more respect for the work she does.” Vega paused and worked through her next thoughts. “Americans don’t always realize the compromises that organizations in the global South have to make. I’m not an expert on Indian NGOs, by any means. But I sense that Nirmala is engaged in work that is difficult beyond the comprehension of anyone else who was seated at that table.”
“I do realize that. I should have stopped Kate at the time, but I was so surprised by it all. She really is a reasonable person. And an excellent professor. We actually drove in together, a few of us. I was giving a talk at Oberlin, where she teaches. Anyway, I’m just rambling right now.” She shook her head. “I’m Ellie.”
“Vega.”
“In any case, I don’t know what came over her. I don’t know her to be so abrasive.”
Privately, Vega had a few theories, chiefly that a woman like Kate might feel license to be abrasive to a woman like Nirmala, though she would be nothing but collegial to a woman like Ellie. But she figured she had already made her point.
Ellie gestured to the bartender. “Will you have a drink?” she asked Vega.
“If you’re having one.”
Vega ordered a red wine, and Ellie a whiskey soda. As the bartender poured the drinks, Ellie said, “I’m an adoptive mother myself. So I can’t speak to the trauma of childbirth. But we don’t know how to talk about motherhood in academic circles, outside of dry policy talk.”
“I’m the only mother in my department,” Vega said. “Fathers abound, of course.”
“It’s not so bleak at Bryn Mawr, where I am. I can’t really complain. Supportive colleagues, good health care, etcetera. And I’m a single parent, so every bit of that helps.” She went on about conference travel, her mother who had moved from Liverpool earlier that year to help with the children, the politics of adoption and her experiences with Ethiopian agencies. Vega found it all interesting enough, but it was difficult to pay attention because a realization was slowly forming.
She took a sip of her wine, then asked, “How long have you taught at Bryn Mawr?”
“Forever, it seems. This is year ten.”
“I lived in that area for a bit. In New Jersey. After my daughter was born, I completed a semester of coursework at Montclair State.”
Ellie’s face looked stiff. A forced calm. “I know that university well.”
Vega’s head was starting to hurt. She flagged the bartender, ordered a water, and drained it quickly. “So did you always want to have children?” she asked.
“God yes,” Ellie said. “I always wanted to be a mother.”
That night, Vega went down the well-trodden path of looking up Winston online. She read his syllabus and course reviews and studied his hundreds of Facebook pictures: vacations to Zagreb, Napa, Jamaica. At a conference at Harvard, smiling his impossibly white smile. And then, she found the one piece of evidence that confirmed her suspicion; it was an acknowledgment from an academic book published eight years earlier, when Winston was still married. I’m grateful to Winston Kinney and Ellie Martin for the use of their beautiful home.
31
One September morning, Asha declared she no longer wanted to go to school.
“What about all of your friends? They will be so sad if you don’t go. What about Lila and Sophie? Who will they play with?”
“Each other.”
“Your teacher will miss you. Who will be line leader?”
“I’m not line leader anymore. I was line leader last week.”
She cried in the car and clung to Vega’s hand at the door. And though she was calm in the afternoons when Vega picked her up, it seemed more a calm of resignation, as though her sadness had faded to a general malaise. Heartbreakingly, she often forgot what day it was. As soon as she woke up, she would ask, “Do I have school?” Vega dreaded the answer she had to provide five out of seven mornings.
Suresh came to town in October—a whirlwind forty-eight hours—and they sat outside at a strip mall café, watching Asha peel the layers from her chocolate croissant, everything ending up on her shirt.
“You seem tired,” he said.
“Not tired,” she said. How to describe it? Lonely? Detached? She didn’t know the Tamil word for either.
“You’ll tell me, no, if there is anything you need?”
“There’s nothing, Suresh. Really.” She had tried to tell him about Asha over the phone, but always stopped short. She didn’t know how to find the right balance, how to sound concerned without being alarmist. And some days, Asha seemed better. Not quite happy, but not miserable either. Vega had emailed Asha’s teacher, who reported there was no reason for concern. “She’s happy as a clam!” she wrote. “She does her work and actively participates!” Why worry him if the problem would resolve itself?
On the night he left, Vega sat next to Asha on the couch and pulled her onto her lap. She kissed the top of her head. “You’re ready for school tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Asha. I don’t want you to be sad. That isn’t an acceptable way to be in life. Life has to be happy at least some time. Most of the time, really.”
“I’m not sad all the time. Only at school.”
Vega looked down at her. She looked older suddenly. She had been taking swimming lessons at the YMCA and her legs were longer and thinner, the hair on them dark and stubborn-looking, and she had started chewing her nails. Vega could already see the surfacing of the things Asha would spend her life trying to suppress. The habits she would try to break. The body hair she would wage endless battles against.
“There’s a boy I hate,” Asha said. “He touches me.”
Vega felt her breath stop—an idiom she didn’t realize was a literal possibility until that moment. When she regained it, it surprised her that she could speak.
“Asha. You need to tell me about this.”
“I hate telling it.”
“Have you talked about it before?”
“I told my teacher.”
That bitch, Vega thought. Happy as a fucking clam. “Asha. Please talk to me. Where does he touch you?”
“With his finger and sometimes his pencil. He licks his pencil and touches me with it.”
“I mean, where on you does he touch you? Where on your body?”
“I don’t want to tell.”
“Asha!”
Asha looked up, small and infantile again. “In my ear,” she whispered.
* * *
Details trickled in. “He’s mean,” Asha said. “He calls people fat. He puts library books in his backpack but doesn’t read them. He just takes them so nobody else can. He told Sophie he was going to come to her house and kill her cat.”
“Kill her cat?”
“Yes.”
There was a flurry of communication. Emails to the teacher, then formal responses with the principal copied on the message. At night, Vega lay in bed, unable to sleep, her image of Max growing more and more monstrous. She thought of the men on the campus parking lot years back. In her mind, Max was a smaller version of this—camouflage pants and a vacant stare. Make us move. Mexican bitch.
One rainy Tuesday, Vega sat in a conference room in the main office across from Max’s mother and the school dean, Ms. Evans. Max’s mother was skinny, freckled, and young, wearing flower-printed medical scrubs and snapping her gum fiendishly, looking in desperate need of a cigarette. “You understand the behaviors that concern us?” Ms. Evans asked. “We have a strict no-bullying policy in our school.”
Max’s mother picked at her cuticles and nodded.
“We’re going to work on a plan,” Ms. Evans continued. “I’ll sign his behavior report every day, then he’ll bring it home for you. In the meantime, of course, he’ll be reassigned. To a new desk partner.”
Vega repeated the word reassigned to herself. It sounded bleak and Communist and cruelly clerical. She imagined Max being sent off by train.
Outside, Max’s mother told Vega, “I’ll whip his ass when we get home. He knows not to touch a girl.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Vega said. She thought to add that it wasn’t the fact of Asha being a girl that concerned her, but there didn’t seem a point. And, upon reflection, she wasn’t even sure if that was true.
“His daddy’s Honduran. He’s your color. That’s why Max wants to be gangster. He’s back in Honduras. He has another wife and a kid. Max is telling me, ‘I’m gonna go live with my daddy. I’m like, ‘How the fuck you gonna get there?’ ”
Vega looked at her, horrified, unsure where to begin.
“I give him everything he asks for. He has Mario Kart. Nikes. I let him watch horror movies, but we have to watch them together, you know? But he just asks for his daddy.” She stared straight ahead, then said, “That’s what’s fucked up about kids. The only thing they want is the one fucking thing you can’t give them.”
* * *
Ellie sent her a warm and collegial note, asking Vega to get in touch if she were ever in the Philadelphia area. It was an invitation of friendship, and Vega knew she should send a thoughtful response, inquiring about Ellie’s children and sharing an anecdote about Asha. Under other circumstances, Vega thought, they could have been friends. She waited a few days, then drafted a brief message, equally warm, but noncommittal enough to end the correspondence.
Instead, she connected with Winston over Facebook, intending not to write him but to let their virtual friendship simply exist. But before the end of the day, he had sent her a message: Been too many years, my girl! Tell me everything.
There was no reason to mention Ellie. She couldn’t have suspected anything, and even if she had, she seemed to lead a full life. Two children, tenure at Bryn Mawr. She sent him a bland update on her courses and research. Then she added, “You remember I had a daughter? She’s seven now.”
Maybe he would commiserate. It was possible he and Ellie had adopted together and then divorced, that her two children were his as well. But he made no mention of fatherhood when he wrote her back.
Come to New York and see me. Blow off some steam.
* * *
On the day before her flight, she dug up the three pairs of nice underwear she had bought during her brief interlude with Seth and drove to a threading salon housed in the garage of a middle-aged Gujarati woman. Rationally, she knew that she could not sleep with Winston, that it was morally compromising even to imagine it. But when she reread his messages, she remembered the soft roll of his accent, the way he pronounced her name, the sandpaper-like feel of his hands. And it seemed ridiculous, self-punishing, to not at least plan for the possibility.
The woman at the salon waved her in without looking up. “You have special occasion?” she asked in a bored, nasal voice that suggested she asked this of all her clients and didn’t particularly care about their answers.
“No,” Vega said.
She waited her turn on a plastic chair next to two women, a mother and twentysomething daughter. “They seem so ill-suited for each other,” the daughter was saying.
“You mean, because she is a very ugly woman?”
“Ma!” The daughter laughed. “That’s not what I said.”
Vega sat back and closed her eyes. She imagined an adult Asha, her thick American accent. Ma! If she spent another ten years here, that would be the span of Asha’s childhood.
