Habitations, page 5
“I’m happy to,” Vega said. “And I’m not in a rush.” She had an optional orientation meeting that afternoon, a tour of the student health clinic that she had planned to attend because it seemed the responsible thing to do, in case of some eventual medical disaster. Now, she was happy with the thought of missing it. She wanted to run back to her dormitory, quickly pack her things, and move into Naomi’s apartment. She wanted to wake up the next morning in that tiny bedroom.
Naomi brewed a pot of coffee and they sat on the floor. Naomi did most of the talking. She described the jobs she had held the past year—at a bar and as an intake coordinator at an animal shelter in Brooklyn—while she applied for graduate school. Vega held the table in place, occasionally handing Naomi a tool, aware of her own superfluousness.
“Is this your first time in the States?” Naomi asked.
“I lived in Cleveland for two years when I was fifteen and sixteen.” She would have skipped that detail of her life if they were meeting in passing.
“Why Cleveland?”
“Family reasons. I don’t remember it well.” She rambled a bit, telling Naomi about the shock of winter, how she had hated waiting for the school bus in the cold, and Naomi nodded along, talking about her first winter in the States, how her mother had coated her cheeks with Vaseline. “I was only eight, though,” Naomi said. “It’s probably easier to move to a new country when you’re a kid than a teenager.”
Vega wondered how the conversation would be steered if she told Naomi about Ashwini. She had had this thought before, with Sanjay during her first term in Hyderabad, with the other Gifford students as they lounged on the couches in the International House dorms. But the words, when she practiced them, sounded at best like a non sequitur and at worst like a plea for attention.
“Where were you born?” Vega asked.
“Colombia. Outside Medellín.”
“How was it for you, when you came here?”
“I don’t know. I remember the details better than the big picture. We had more land and space in Colombia, and I remember missing that more than anything. And, of course, thinking we were going back and only realizing years later that we weren’t.” She turned her attention briefly to the table leg, then said, “We stayed with these people in Yonkers. The only thing I remember is that they had a pet rabbit. Their kids were in school, so I was bored during the day. They didn’t have any books in Spanish, and my mother wouldn’t let me watch TV. So, I just sat around and stared at the rabbit.”
“Does this story have a tragic ending?” Vega asked. She imagined something terrible. Naomi playing with the rabbit despite repeated warnings not to, inadvertently killing it. The guilt she would have carried with her into adulthood.
Naomi laughed. “No. Why would it?”
“Every time someone tells a story about animals, I think it’s going to end tragically.”
“No. It was alive and well when we left. The point was just that the rabbit is really the only detail I remember. I can’t tell you what those people’s names were. In the afternoons, after their kids came home from school, we would put newspaper down and let it out of its cage. So maybe that’s the tragedy. That I was eight years old, and the highlight of my day was watching a rabbit walking around a basement.”
“When we lived in Cleveland, my mother wanted to plant a garden, but everybody told her that unless she planted traps, rabbits would eat all the vegetables. And she wasn’t willing to set traps, so she never bothered with the garden. But then we never saw a single one.” She drew her knees up and rested her chin on them. “And with that, I think we’ve exhausted the subject of rabbits.”
Naomi laughed again. They were quiet as she finished the final leg and returned her screwdriver to the toolbox. Vega imagined sitting next to Naomi on that couch, their coffee mugs resting on the table, papers spread everywhere. She opened her mouth, trying to decide how to nudge the conversation forward, but Naomi spoke first. “Seven-fifty a month works for you?”
“Yes. That works perfectly for me.”
“Great. I have two other people coming by today, but I’m happy just canceling those. If you want the place, it’s yours.”
* * *
Vega found one of the few on-campus jobs available to international students. For five hours each week, she worked at the university bookstore, unpacking shipments of textbooks and course readers and stocking the metal shelves. Her co-workers baffled her; they were mainly undergraduates who existed in a world of mopey grievance, arriving ten minutes late for their shifts, complaining about the dress code requirements and lack of sick days. “This place is owned by Barnes and Noble,” James said. “That’s why it has a corporate mentality.” He was an earnest sophomore, a self-described Socialist who was often staring down and grunting at a marked-up copy of some political theory book—Select Works of Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. “Do you ever read non-European thinkers?” Vega once asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “Like, Mao and shit. I’ve read all of it.”
“I’ll try again,” Vega said. “Have you ever read a non-European thinker who is not Chairman Mao?”
“Sure,” he said. “Gandhi? But he was a fucking sellout.”
This was, Vega thought, essentially true. But it was one thing to come to this conclusion among her classmates in Hyderabad, another to do so with James. “If only India had morally upright leaders. Like Thomas Jefferson.” If she had searched her memory, she could have come up with a more obscure example, but that was the best she could do in the moment.
“Jefferson was a pig.”
“That was my point.”
She may have found him more irritating if the job itself was not such a revelation. Aside from her paltry tutoring stipend from the Madras School of Social Work, she had never before earned a paycheck, and when she cashed it at the campus bank every two weeks, she was astonished by the thirty dollars and ninety cents she received in exchange—twenty of which she gave to Naomi for grocery money.
They ate dinner together most evenings, usually seated on the living room floor, foods that Vega would later remember with a nostalgia that almost ached: grilled cheese with tomato, stir fry with frozen broccoli, pots and pots of black beans. Eggs in every form: scrambled with onions and peppers, folded into a tortilla, fried alongside more black beans. One Sunday, Naomi made popcorn and Vega watched, mesmerized, as the kernels mutated and blossomed under the glass lid of the pot.
“Explain something to me,” Naomi said. She was leaning against the wall, the bowl of popcorn on the table in front of her. It was cool outside for August, but the apartment was stifling, and they had cracked open the window. “How did you avoid learning how to cook?”
“Nobody ever taught me.”
“Come on. Weren’t people cooking around you? Didn’t you see it happening?”
“I also watched you affix a leg to a table. But if another legless table appeared in my life, I wouldn’t know how to begin.”
Naomi gave her a funny smile. There was between them, Vega sometimes thought, a hint of flirtation—but it seemed more likely that she was imagining it. Naomi had once referenced an ex-girlfriend named Camille who lived in Boston, and though Vega was curious, she didn’t know how to dig without sounding parochial. She had known of lesbianism as an abstract issue, a political matter. But in human form, that was something different. One afternoon, while thumbing through an anthropology textbook that Naomi had left on the coffee table, a photograph slipped from the pages. It was of a short-haired white woman, smiling comedically and pointing to a sign that read Beware of Pickpockets and Loose Women.
She stared at the photograph for a long time, taking in the details: the woman’s olive-colored tank top, the small tattoo on her wrist, the thin bracelet that looked to be made of braided twine. So, this was the type of woman Naomi would want, the type of woman she would fuck in whatever way two women fucked. Briefly, she pictured the two women entangled, Naomi lying on top. Then, she moved herself into the image. Naomi undressing her, her finger between Vega’s legs. She placed the picture back in the exact page and closed the book.
* * *
On Tuesdays, Naomi and Vega drank for free at a dingy bar called Connolly’s, where Naomi’s friend Monty worked. Vega wasn’t accustomed to alcohol. She had grown up under the pendulum swing of Tamil Nadu’s prohibition laws and she associated drinking with the long lines of bleary-eyed men outside of the TASMAC, waiting to buy state-sanctioned whiskey that was rumored to be laced with turpentine. But she quickly came to like the bitterness of beer, how loose and warm she felt after a pint. She liked the closeness she felt to Naomi the next morning as they made tea and toast, still dressed in the T-shirts they had worn the previous night.
“What’s the story with Indian men?” Monty asked one night. He was taking a smoke break outside the bar. Vega didn’t know what to make of Monty. Sometimes she found him endearing. At other times, his humor was overbearing—a bit too sexual and a bit too familiar. But he was the first openly gay man she had ever known (“A bit fuddy-duddy,” Rukmini sometimes whispered of Naren Uncle), so her discomfort around him made her wonder if she was the problem, if she was the type of person to be at ease with Naomi’s quiet lesbianism but put off by Monty’s brand of pert gayness. And this pressure to like him, in turn, made her self-conscious.
“Well, there is an abundance of them. For starters.”
“That is a good start.” He blew out smoke dramatically. “I’m just making plans in case I run out of options here and have to take my chances abroad.”
“I wouldn’t take my chances in a country in which a sodomy ban is actually written into the penal code.”
Naomi laughed. “She has a point. If you’re going to fuck some hot Ugandan or Indian guy, I would do it here. Or in a neutral third country.”
“Like Denmark,” Vega said. “I’ve heard Denmark is very open.”
“Well, aren’t you funny,” Monty said. Later, when Naomi was in the bathroom, he slid over to Vega’s corner of the bar and batted his lashes.
“Is this supposed to mean something?” Vega asked. “This thing you’re doing with your eyes?”
“You two are like a couple, you know that?”
Vega tried to look composed. She pulled her hair away from her neck and tied it in a bun. “We’re roommates, Monty.”
“I got roommates, too. You ever met them?” He elbowed her playfully. “You have not. So, you see my point. This thing the two of you are doing, it isn’t a roommate thing.”
5
Sociology of Industrialized Nations was led by Professor Steven Seltz, a man of heavy tweed and numerous publications on the German welfare state. Most of Vega’s classes were easy, a rhythm of short papers with tidy citations and animated discussions. But here, she felt like a fool. She knew nothing about the European Central Bank, had no opinion of Madeleine Albright or the Balkans. Oddly, Vega’s father had located one of Seltz’s articles at the library at Iyer Law College and had started following his career with an interest that, Vega sensed, Seltz did not typically inspire. “He co-authored an excellent book about coal plants,” he wrote Vega. “You can find it in the collection at IIT. When you next come, I will ask them to set it aside for you.”
She was one of two international students in the class. The other was an Afro Indian woman named Zemadi, who had been born and raised in Kenya but had completed her undergraduate at Mount Holyoke, and, unlike Vega, was schooled in American politics. Weeks into the semester, sitting on Zemadi’s couch and sipping overly sweetened chai, Vega realized that she didn’t recall the last time she had made a friend (she and Gayatri had known each other since primary school, and with Naomi, she wondered if their relationship—at least on Naomi’s end—was a function of proximity or obligation). In her early days at Sri Vidya, and then later in Hyderabad, she had watched people break into pairs and had regarded it with a sort of distance and inevitability. Of course, they would go off, and she would be left behind. What worried her then—though she hadn’t recognized it until this moment—was the same thing that worried her now: people liked her on the surface. She was nice enough and sharp enough. But when they really got to know her, they would find her boring, and maybe a little bit depressing. Now, she listened to Zemadi talk about her family, the foods she missed from home, the one place in Harlem where you could find decent East African food, though it was overpriced and mostly Somali. Then Zemadi asked, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
The question made Vega laugh. It was so endearing and childish, the type of question that people posed in books or movies but never in actual conversation. “I don’t. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. It’s a defining thing, isn’t it? Having a boyfriend.”
“Then I’m currently undefined. Do you?”
“Nope.”
Vega glanced at Zemadi’s bookshelf. “I read that during my first master’s program,” she said. “Nervous Conditions.”
“Did you like it?”
Vega paused. “I don’t know. I liked the character. But I’m not entirely sure I understood it.”
“It’s hard to appreciate African literature if you aren’t African. Maybe Indian literature is the same way. Europeans and Americans might pretend to like the books, but they don’t really.”
It was something Rukmini might say—the kind of overly simplistic comment to which Vega would vociferously disagree though she would suspect, deep inside, that Rukmini was right. “Maybe,” she said.
They settled into an easy friendship, along with a Pakistani public health student named Halima. On Wednesdays and Fridays, when Naomi was working, Vega ate dinner in one of their apartments—egg curries and greasy frozen parathas, or sometimes leftovers sent by Halima’s aunt and uncle in Queens. Vega welcomed these nights. With Naomi, she felt her life being propelled towards something uncertain and exciting. With Zemadi and Halima, there was an ease and a coziness, a freedom to fix herself a snack in their kitchens, to kick off her shoes and collapse on one of the couches. They watched terrible television together. She didn’t feel the need to impress them.
Halima’s fiancé, Adnan, was at the University of Massachusetts, earning his doctorate in English. There were artsy Polaroids of him scattered throughout her apartment—one in which he was leaning back in a chair and laughing, another in which he was blowing a ring of smoke.
“Do you think it’s odd that Americans don’t like to talk about poverty?” Vega asked one night. Their class that afternoon—a discussion of welfare reform policies—had been unusually stilted. Now they were at Zemadi’s place, making mushroom curry. Normally, Zemadi and Halima did the cooking, and Vega washed the dishes, but Halima was running late, so Zemadi set Vega up with the cutting board and a bowl of tomatoes and Vega got to work clumsily. She had learned, in her two months in New York, that she was a terrible cook.
“How so?” Zemadi asked.
“In class, people will talk about economic stagnation in Europe or Soviet food shortages. But if somebody brings up social welfare programs in the States, nobody speaks.”
“Well, they haven’t experienced American poverty.”
“Yes. But they haven’t experienced a European poverty, either. Yet they’re happy to talk about it.”
Zemadi was quiet for a bit, concentrating as she measured water for the rice cooker, and Vega wondered if she had said something inane, though she knew it was unlikely. Zemadi wasn’t inclined towards judgment and was, in that same spirit, impervious to embarrassment. A few days earlier, she had told Vega and Halima that, when she was in secondary school, she and one of her male friends had practiced oral sex on each other nearly every day for a full year.
“What do you mean you practiced?” Halima asked. “You practice tennis. Or penmanship. Not sex acts.”
Vega and Zemadi both laughed. “Sex acts,” Zemadi repeated, and Vega felt a new closeness to her.
“Like with anything,” Zemadi said. “We wanted to understand how to do it. There were no feelings between us. He wasn’t cute. He knew he wasn’t cute. But he was a funny guy. And nobody else was interested in touching me. Also, we both improved. By the end I was quite masterful.”
“What a waste, to bring such a skill to Mount Holyoke,” Vega said.
Halima winced, but Zemadi found the comment hilarious, and it occurred to Vega how much she admired this quality in people: the ability to laugh at their own follies and weaknesses and desires. Briefly, she considered telling them about Sukumar Reddy, but she couldn’t bring herself to.
“Americans are funny,” Zemadi said. “They love talking about the Depression, and how poor their grandparents were, and then everybody found factory jobs and pulled themselves up. Or they’re comfortable talking about third world poverty. But to talk about it here and now, it’s beyond their imagination.”
Vega still didn’t know what to make of American poverty. In Madras, water shortages were simply a way of life, and she had become accustomed to the faucet shutting off every evening and remaining that way until late the next morning. In the States, it ran heavy and full at all hours. When they arrived in Cleveland, she and Ashwini had been shocked by the orderly flow of traffic, the availability of functional toilets everywhere they went. Before stepping into the cafeteria of their school, Vega had never before seen people pick at a tray of food, then unceremoniously dump the remains in the garbage. Even in New York, there was surprising excess: free napkins at every corner store, tampons in the library bathroom, an air conditioner that blasted her flat at all hours. None of these she particularly needed, but they were indicative of a larger generosity, a place where it would be impossible to starve.
* * *
Every Sunday, she and Naomi took the train to Stamford, Connecticut, where Naomi’s mother and aunt cooked vats of beans and rice and a cheesy corn stew that Vega loved. Cousins piled in from their various corners—Hartford, Paterson, the Bronx. Years later, Vega would pass these names on the highway as she drove through the Northeast and would be reminded of the cream-colored linoleum floor, the smell of onion and baby powder, the unlabeled bottle of pink cleaning solution with which Naomi’s mother was always wiping down the table. She would think of Naomi’s collection of cousins: ten-year-old Daniel, curled up with a comic book. Eighteen-year-old Eddie, stomping across the living room in his paint-streaked work boots, coaxing Daniel to put down the book and play a video game. Eddie’s twin sister, Alba, with her infant son, Gabriel, and her cosmetology aspirations.
