Habitations, page 6
“I want to have my own salon one day,” Alba had told Vega one afternoon. She was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing Gabriel. “Naomi says you have to be good at math, and I always made As and Bs. I only left school for a year when Gabriel was born, then I came back and finished.”
Alba had a gentle expression that reminded Vega of one of the deer from the Amar Chitra Katha comic books she read as a child—pretty and wide-eyed and bewildered. Talking to her always made Vega feel a little bit sad, and she wasn’t sure if this was because Alba’s hopes for herself were too small, or because they were too ambitious.
“Maybe Alba can move in with us,” Vega said to Naomi one Sunday night. “We can take care of Gabriel while she takes her cosmetology courses.” They had just returned from Stamford, and she was sitting on the couch, watching Naomi change the lightbulb on their floor lamp.
“She’d practice all her makeup skills on you. She thinks you’re pretty. She told me she wishes she had your curls.”
The compliment, even though it was only channeled through Naomi, made Vega suddenly disoriented. Earlier that afternoon, Eddie had asked Vega, “So, you like our girl?” He was playing a game called Duck Hunt, which Vega found disturbing, though she couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen. Daniel, next to him, was wordlessly firing. Occasionally, he would yelp. Vega still hadn’t figured out the limits of Daniel’s English. She had only ever heard him speak in Spanish, aside from the shy greeting he always gave her. The only person he seemed to talk with of his own volition was Eddie.
“We’ve become close friends,” Vega said.
Eddie shot some more ducks, then said, “She’s a genius. You know she finished college in three and a half years? She went from Colombia to Columbia. You know many people who can do that?”
“I don’t.”
Eddie nodded, then reached over and tousled Daniel’s hair. “I don’t either. That’s what I mean when I say genius. Maybe that’s why you like her.”
It may have been a meaningless comment, but it startled her, and she was relieved that Daniel didn’t seem to pick up on the exchange. Now, she said to Naomi, “Nobody wishes they had curls. They only think they do.”
Naomi set the old bulb on the ground. “I have curls.”
“Yes, but yours are short. That doesn’t count.”
“I shaved my head when I was in undergrad. When I came home, I thought my mother would scream at me. But she actually laughed. She said I looked like a chihuahua.”
“I’m sure it looked nice. In its own way.”
“No. It didn’t. Turns out, you don’t really know how your scalp is shaped until you shave your head.”
Vega collected the discarded bulb, the empty box, and the tattered plastic wrap. Then she pulled the last remaining beer from the fridge and poured it evenly into two glasses. When she came back to the living room, Naomi was sitting with her back against the wall, her arms wrapped around her knees.
“It’s brighter in here,” Vega said.
“That was the point.”
Vega handed her a glass and sat next to her, the molding from the living room wall digging into her back. She thought, as she had on the evening she moved in with Naomi, that if she were given the chance, she would stay in that apartment forever. There would be no graduate program or student visa ticking towards its final days. There would be no reason to pack her bags, to ever move again.
* * *
One November morning, sitting at their rickety table over bowls of cereal, Naomi said, “Don’t you have a birthday coming up?”
Vega’s twenty-second birthday had passed the previous week, quietly and uneventfully, marked only by emails from her parents and Gayatri. Promise that you’ll do something nice for yourself! Gayatri had written, and Vega assured her that she would. Instead, that night, she canceled her standing plans with Zemadi and Halima, ate cheese toast and a can of tomato soup for dinner, and went to bed early—relieved that Naomi was working, that the apartment was empty, that the day was finally over. Ashwini had died five years ago, in late October, and it wasn’t just the anniversary of the loss that haunted Vega, but the fact of birthdays in general. For their entire shared lives, she and Ashwini had been three and a half years apart. Vega hated being reminded of the widening gap between them. Each year she arrived at another age Ashwini would never be.
“I don’t really celebrate,” she said. “I’m from a very poor country and we can’t afford birth records. Let alone cake.”
Naomi laughed. “This will be your first party, then. I’ll cook. Or we can potluck. Monty can bring a cake. You can invite your other girls.”
Naomi had only met Zemadi and Halima once, when they all ran into each other at the library, but the conversation hadn’t gone much further than introductions, and Vega only realized, looking back, that she should have made more of an effort to merge her two social worlds. But the thought made her uncomfortable. She wasn’t embarrassed by Zemadi or Halima, but theirs was a different type of friendship. Every few weeks they went shopping together at a Pakistani-run store called High Fashion next to Penn Station that sold sweaters and skinny jeans, all for under fifteen dollars, and offered a steeper discount if they bought in bulk. They talked about food and clothes and fluctuating waistlines. They were open about constitutional habits. A few weeks, earlier, Zemadi had announced, “I bought a sandwich from that Morningside Grocery and I’ve had loose motions all day. In the middle of class I had to excuse myself. But I walked all the way to the toilet on the third floor, because that is the only one where there is any privacy.” Halima had nodded, knowingly. “Best toilet is in the financial aid office. It’s always very empty. Of course, I go first thing in the morning before I leave for class. That’s always my habit. But if I have an emergency, financial aid is the best option.”
Monty was the first to arrive the next Friday, bringing a case of beer, a homemade carrot cake, and a boy who looked no older than sixteen. “It isn’t what you might think,” he whispered to Vega in the kitchen when the boy, Ezekiel, went off to use the bathroom.
Vega was horrified. “What did you think I thought?”
“I just mean, it’s not anything like that. He’s my roommate’s nephew but he’s staying with us, and I’m watching him for the night. The family kicked him out. Literally, they dropped him at the Amtrak station in New Hampshire with one change of clothes. They’re religious nuts. He had gay porn in his room. Or so they said, but he won’t talk about it. The point is, we’re all taking turns keeping an eye.”
“Is he okay?” Vega asked.
Monty shrugged. “For now. I mean, define okay.”
Vega felt a new tenderness for Monty. A few weeks earlier, he had come to the apartment with a carton of coffee ice cream. Naomi was still in class when he arrived, and he put the ice cream in the freezer and set about scrambling eggs for their dinner. Somehow, over the course of their conversation, Vega told him the story of the woman on the train who had pulled out her breast.
“Shit,” he said. “What did you say?”
“Nothing, really. It made me sad, though. Maybe that’s why I still think about it.”
“Well, yes, it made you sad. But it’s also kind of beautiful. Like, here you have this woman breaking the silence around her body and her struggles. And she chose to open up to you.”
“It’s entirely possible that she opens up to everybody. She could be sitting on a Bangalore-bound train right now, revealing her nipple to a stranger.”
“Well, maybe. But probably not. Maybe you gave off that vibe. Like, here I am. Confide in me.”
Halima and Zemadi arrived, overdressed, with too much makeup on and a pot of biryani. “PST,” Zemadi said, tilting her head toward Halima. “Pakistani Standard Time. I was ready one hour back.”
The fanfare embarrassed Vega, but everyone else seemed at ease, making her wonder if there was something wrong with her. If she was incapable of revelry. The only person who appeared to share her discomfort was Ezekiel, who stood in the corner, turning the knob on one of the light switches until Monty gently pried his hand away.
Since their coffee table wasn’t big enough, they all gathered with their plates on the floor. Monty told the story of one of his co-workers, who had broken a wineglass and sliced his hand open that afternoon. “And so we go to find the first aid kit, but there isn’t a first aid kit. The shift manager can’t find it. And I’m like, ‘This is basic occupational safety shit. You are actually required by law.’ ”
“The difference between my home and this country,” Halima said, “at least, in this respect, is that in Pakistan, there are no occupational safety standards or any such thing. Shops will not keep a first aid kit. But you can send somebody to fetch something if there is an emergency, and there is a pharmacy on every corner. Here, you will stand there and bleed. There is nobody to help you.”
It was the kind of generalization that Halima was prone to, but the group nodded along anyway. Zemadi told the story of a woman named Liz, from Vega’s Poverty and Mobility course, who had stopped Vega in the hallway after class and asked whether honor killings still took place in India. Zemadi hadn’t been there for this conversation, but Vega mentioned it to her afterwards, not because she found it offensive—as Zemadi seemed to—but because she thought it was so earnest, so refreshingly honest.
“She had read an article,” Zemadi said. “And she wanted Vega to speak on behalf of one billion people. If I had been there, I would have asked her, ‘Do you hold yourself personally responsible for the Salem Witch Trials?’ ”
“It didn’t particularly bother me,” Vega said. “In some ways, I appreciated it. How many questions do any of us have, on a given day, that we are too embarrassed to ask?” She stared across the table, where Halima was spooning extra rice onto Ezekiel’s plate like an overbearing aunt. He looked so small, so orphaned, so pathetically out of place at a dinner party made up of twentysomethings. She felt a knot in her stomach—rage, or sadness, or a combination of the two. What kind of people abandoned a child in a train station? She had a memory of her mother sitting next to Ashwini at night, stroking her hair until she fell asleep. What was the point of all that love if Ashwini was just going to die? It wasn’t an investment in the future. Ashwini wouldn’t pass any of those memories down to her children. And yet.
“It’s important to note that this wasn’t some passenger on the subway,” Zemadi said. “This was a graduate student. In sociology.”
Vega tore her eyes from Ezekiel. If nothing else, he was eating. Halima was seeing to that. “I think she was an undergraduate,” she said. “And honor killings do still happen. I’ve never known anybody who has been a victim, of course, but it would be disingenuous to say that the practice is obsolete.”
“I worked at an animal shelter over the summer,” Naomi said. “My manager was really into narcoterrorism.”
“I hate that type,” Monty said. Vega had no idea what he meant by this, so she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why she found the comment funny. She had long had a disproportionate reaction to this type of humor—casual throwaway lines that other people seemed to scarcely notice. She and Gayatri once had a chemistry teacher who, among his malapropisms, frequently used the word “tit-bit.” Vega had never laughed at this directly—she found it particularly cruel to laugh at teachers—but whenever Gayatri imitated him, she fell apart. Now, the memory surfaced.
“Anyway,” Naomi said, “I let it slip that I was born in Colombia, and all he wanted to talk about was Pablo Escobar. He used to always bring up Escobar’s hippos. Did you know Escobar kept hippos?”
“Everybody knows that shit,” Monty said. “He had a zoo of them.”
Vega wished that he wouldn’t curse so much in front of Ezekiel. She tried to make eye contact with him, but he was concentrating on his plate. Then Ezekiel said something quietly, and Vega couldn’t tell if he was speaking to himself or the group.
A few seconds later, Ezekiel repeated himself, more audibly now, and Vega realized that he hadn’t been speaking to himself as much as rehearsing his words. “What happened to the hippos? They shot them all?”
There was a pause, as they all processed the question. “No way,” Naomi said, at the same time as Halima said, “Don’t think such dark thoughts.”
“Hell no,” Monty said. “Big-ass animals like that? They’d trample any hunters who tried to get close enough. The government made them a sanctuary. They’re living in the wild.”
Ezekiel nodded. Halima spooned more biryani onto his plate.
After dinner, Monty and Vega took over the dishes and Naomi packed up leftovers. In the living room, Zemadi and Halima were setting up the Scrabble board and explaining the rules to Ezekiel. “I don’t know why they’re bothering,” Monty said. “You girls are missing half the pieces. I tried playing last week. You have no vowels, basically.”
Naomi laughed. “You say the craziest shit. You’re telling me you came by last week when nobody else was here, set up the Scrabble board, and counted out the vowels.”
“Except I didn’t have to count them out. I could tell you were missing pieces. The bag is light.”
“How did you know they were vowels? The tiles all weigh the same.”
“I just knew.”
Naomi closed the fridge door, still laughing, and Monty swatted her arm with a towel. Watching them, Vega felt a tug of yearning. She wanted to know somebody that well, to be adored in the way Monty and Naomi seemed to adore each other. She wondered if she and Ashwini might have become close as adults. Maybe Ashwini would have followed her to the States. They might eventually have lived together. More likely, they would have had separate lives, in separate cities. They would have traveled to visit each other. They would have met each other’s friends.
Naomi drifted into the living room, and Monty turned to Vega. “You ever been homeless?” he asked.
The question surprised her. “No. I haven’t.”
She expected him to continue the conversation. Instead, he took the last bowl from her hands, dried it, and placed it in the cabinet. Later, he set the cake on the coffee table, sloppily frosted with a single candle in the middle, and insisted that they sing for her.
“It isn’t even my birthday,” Vega protested.
“I made this damn cake, girl. If I say we’re gonna sing, we’re gonna sing.”
“Vega’s not into birthdays, Monty,” Naomi said. She was sitting on the floor, carefully sliding the Scrabble board to the corner of the room. Vega stared down at it. The game, it seemed, had been off to a slow start, a collection of small words with little value: be, yelp, pig.
Ezekiel spoke again, his only contribution since his question about the hippos. “I was born two days before Christmas. December twenty-third.” He was sitting between Halima and Zemadi, looking like a little boy bolstered by his big sisters.
They were all quiet for a moment, and Zemadi spoke first. “I suppose the next birthday to come is yours, then.”
They announced their birth dates and confirmed this, then Monty slid the plate in front of Ezekiel. “Go on, little man. Blow out your candle.”
6
Vega had been looking forward to the holidays. Even in Cleveland, where little made her happy, she had loved the snow—the anticipation of it, staring at it through the window, the miracle of watching it disappear in her hand. But in New York, she quickly learned there was no snow, only endless cold. And by the middle of December, she was beginning to find the thought of Christmas depressing. Naomi was working longer shifts at the bar. And as the campus emptied, it all felt like a taunt—a national gathering to which she wasn’t invited. She attended one holiday party, a sparsely attended event for Gifford fellows held at the International House, and spent the evening locked in conversation with two Polish chemists about the challenges of grant-writing. She kept wanting to extricate herself, less out of boredom than an anxiety that they were speaking English for her benefit. She left early in the evening with two unopened containers of pad Thai and the remains of a box of red wine. “You’d be doing us a favor if you took it,” the coordinator said—a cheery French Canadian law student named Sylvie. “We’d expected a bigger turnout.”
One morning, in the kitchen, Naomi said, “You’re coming home with me for Christmas, right?”
“To Stamford?”
Naomi poured hot water into her thermos. “You got a better offer?”
Halima was going with Adnan to visit relatives of his in Rhode Island, and Zemadi to her college classmate’s home in Boston. Both had invited her to join them. “These Boston people are rich,” Zemadi said. “Big house in the suburbs. And they love Asians. They’re always traveling to Agra or Angkor Wat or wherever. They’ll be happy to have you.” Vega said she would consider it, though she had no interest in spending the week in a house full of wealthy strangers. It sounded lonelier than being alone.
She and Naomi were the only ones in the train car on Christmas Eve. Naomi pulled off her woolen hat and shoved it into her coat pocket. Vega hugged herself and rubbed her hands together. She wore her down jacket, pulled from a stockpile of donations at the International House, but was still miserably cold.
“Monty was supposed to come too,” Naomi said, “but he and his roommates are staying behind, so they’re all spending the day together.”
