Habitations, page 8
Vega went into her room, lay on her bed, and cried so heavily that her chest hurt. She fell asleep, disrupted by a series of strange dreams, filled with remixed memories from her childhood: her mother holding her over the pit toilet on a train; peeling almonds at her kitchen table; Ashwini walking ahead on the street, then turning a corner. Vega running behind, trying to catch her. That was the dream that snapped her, frantically, from her sleep. When she stepped out of her bedroom in the morning, she saw that Naomi’s things were gone.
7
Halima didn’t ask any questions. She had been using her spare bedroom as a study, and by the time Vega arrived, had already moved her desk and bookshelf into the living room. “I was planning to rent it in the fall anyway,” she said. “You’re doing me a favor.”
Vega filled her spring schedule as tightly as possible. In addition to her four sociology courses, she registered for introductory Arabic, because it was one of the few language classes in which there was available space. Halima patiently helped her with the script, praising her penmanship even when it was crooked, helping her pronounce the letter gza. “Very, very close,” she said. “It’s just a bit more guttural.” Aside from the bits of Telegu that she tried to pick up when she lived in Hyderabad, Vega hadn’t studied a language since her passive days learning Hindi at Rhodes School. She found it was satisfyingly mathematical, with none of the debate and friction of social sciences.
She woke up every morning thinking of Naomi but managed to put off her fantasies during the day—first an hour here and there, then the full duration of a class—the way she imagined smokers prepared for a long flight. But when she was alone in the apartment, she still touched herself, remembering the peculiar wonder of being with Naomi. Her two fingers sliding inside her, and then her tongue. She reminded herself that she was the one who had ended it. She had made a choice. Sometimes, this thought brought her comfort. Most of the time, it made her feel lost, utterly alien to herself, wanting both to fuck Naomi and to never see her again.
One February afternoon, at Morningside Grocery, she ran into Erick—a lanky white graduate student who had sat across from her in Sociology of Industrialized Nations. She had stepped in to escape the cold. He was buying a cup of coffee.
“Vega Gopalan, right?” he asked.
The use of her surname, and the sound of it in his accent, confused her for a moment. “That’s right.”
“So, what did you think of Industrialized Nations?”
“I love them,” she said. “I vastly prefer them to poor ones.”
He paused, then laughed. In class, she had found Erick grating. He had a way of sitting back professorially. When other people talked, his mouth was always slightly open, as though he were waiting for his chance to interject. But he also struck her as legitimately brilliant. Once, he had launched into an analysis of the Suez Canal so detailed and winding that she sensed that even their professor was a bit lost. Now she watched him as he tore open a packet of sugar and poured it into his coffee. She didn’t find him attractive, but there was something appealing about exchanging easy banter with someone you once found intimidating.
That night, she ended up in his apartment, watching a documentary on the construction of the Panama Canal. “I’ve actually seen this one already,” she said.
He looked at her sharply. “Really?”
“I’m joking.”
They ordered Thai food, and as they set out the containers, she said, “You seem to have a keen interest in canals,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“You talked about the Suez Canal in class, if I recall.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Doesn’t everybody like canals?”
“No. I mean, history and infrastructure. Having an idea and turning it into something that shapes the world economy.”
She started to disagree with him, to explain that she was much more interested in the impact of grassroots initiatives than large-scale projects, but he had already turned his attention back to the documentary. After a few minutes, he pointed to the screen—a still image of Teddy Roosevelt saluting a crowd. “Now that’s a progressive. Regulating big business. Strengthening the economy and pushing our interests abroad. Not being afraid of a fight.”
The sex was the same as it had been with everyone except Naomi—exciting only in the moments leading up. He took too long fumbling with the condom—a brand she recognized from the free bowls in the library bathroom. Afterwards, they lay in his bed surrounded by his college hockey trophies and stacks of John le Carré novels. If she had been more drawn to him, she might have found those details endearing, an insight into another side of his character. But the room was dank. It smelled faintly of mildew. He politely asked if she wanted to spend the night, but seemed relieved when she declined.
* * *
Zemadi began dragging Vega along to a weekly lecture series in Knox Hall. The topics were esoteric, with long titles punctuated by colons that Vega thought could be expressed more succinctly. In Pursuit of Home: How Cross-Border Networks Affect Returnees’ Migration Intentions; Emergent Boundaries and Identities: Asian and Hispanic Panethnicity Compared. She liked to tease Zemadi about these lecture topics. “On the Selecting of Outerwear,” she said, watching Zemadi pull on her coat. “Weather-Related Decision-Making Among Contemporary African Graduate Students.”
But she found the events strangely comforting. She was particularly drawn to the types of subjects Reddy had flippantly called “the soft social sciences”—issues not of life or death or disease, but of longing or statelessness. She listened to stories of Filipina migrant domestic workers, transnational adoptees born in Ethiopia and raised in the States. “We’re supposed to recognize how lucky we are,” one woman said. “We’re supposed to realize that we were rescued from a life of hunger and poverty and unwantedness. But we have to acknowledge multiple truths; there is something missing when you’re taken from your country.” Days before the enrollment deadline, she dropped her Statistics course and instead registered for a class called Race and Making America. As usual, she had little to contribute to class discussions, but the books drew her in. One afternoon, in a cramped corner table at Max Caffé, she began reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, going back to her apartment only when the café closed and finishing the book long after midnight, barely able to keep her eyes open, but unable to put it down. She returned, over and over, to the author’s description of sex: I had not considered how physical the act would be. I had anticipated long kisses and gentle touches. But there was nothing romantic about the knee which forced my legs open, nor in the rub of hairy skin on my chest. In the bathroom, she stared at her ashen face and red eyes, embarrassed that this page, of all pages, of all she had read about war and migration and health disparities, was the one that affected her the most.
* * *
In India, she was one of the darker-skinned girls, a fact that she wore proudly. In New York, she looked faded, her skin flaking and her lips painfully dry. She was reminded of Cleveland, when she would study the tips of her hair and find them brown and splitting, like a dying crop.
“It’s the climate here,” Halima said. “You need Vaseline. And when was the last time you did an oil bath?”
“I didn’t even bring any hair oil with me.”
“All you need is coconut. How do you maintain curly hair without using oil?”
They were seated on the couch, reading a copy of Vogue. The previous tenant received a wealth of subscriptions that still arrived each month. Cooking Light and Good Housekeeping, they recycled immediately. National Geographic and Newsweek Vega skimmed out of obligation. But they poured over Vogue together. Halima’s tastes had evolved beyond High Fashion. On Sunday afternoons they walked to Housing Works, where Halima looked through racks of strappy heels and tank tops, trying to put together some approximation of what they saw on the pages. Vega sorted through scuffed soles, examined shirts to ensure they weren’t missing buttons. She tried on dresses she knew she would never wear. They roamed the makeup counters of Macy’s and came home with lipstick samples that Halima, with her pale skin and brown-tinted hair, was able to pull off. On Vega, they looked garish.
One afternoon at Macy’s, she saw an Indian girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, following her mother around the appliance section. There were plenty of Indians in New York, but the ones Vega saw were either university students or professionals in their twenties or thirties, riding the subway dressed in medical scrubs or navy suits. This girl wore a long braid that dangled over her shoulder and a hooded sweatshirt. Vega watched her trail behind her mother, looking bored, studying anything of relative interest—a canister of rubber spatulas, baking sheets—idly running her fingers over the bar codes and nodding to whatever her mother was saying, in the manner of someone who knew she wasn’t being spoken to, but spoken around. Vega left the cosmetics section and walked behind them. The mother was speaking Gujarati, and she could make out a few Hindi cognates.
She trailed behind as they rode the escalator to the third floor, watching as they sorted through racks of girls’ sweaters. Sometimes, the daughter would pull something from the rack and carry it over for her mother’s approval. She noted how the space between them expanded and shrunk as they walked, how the mother inspected seams and examined the quality of the fabric, how the daughter swung her arms—gangly, overgrown, still more a child than a teenager.
That night, she sat on the kitchen floor as Halima worked coconut oil into her scalp. Halima’s fingers weren’t nimble and rough like Rukmini’s. Instead, she was slow and painstaking, separating Vega’s hair into sections and gently brushing out the tangles. But Vega was reminded of those long afternoons, anyway, seated next to Ashwini, the room thick with the smell of neem oil, Rukmini’s sharp, black comb scraping her ears.
“Your hair will be lovely in the morning,” Halima said. “Nice, soft curls.”
She slept with her hair wrapped in one of the thin Kerala towels Rukmini had packed for her. The next morning in the shower, she rested her forehead on the tile as she let the water run down her back. She wanted to feel something, anything, good. In place of Naomi, she tried to imagine Erick’s hand, then his tongue. She put her hand on her breast, then slipped her fingers between her legs. Through the closed door, she could hear the blare of the morning news, Halima talking back to the television and rummaging for something in the closet. The phone rang. The microwave beeped. She tried to orgasm, but nothing happened.
* * *
One Friday evening, Halima asked Vega to come to her fiancé’s aunt and uncle’s house in Queens. “You seem lonely,” she said. “Maybe it will be a nice break.”
“I’m not lonely.”
“You have a multitude of social engagements?”
“I didn’t say I was busy. I only said that I’m not lonely.”
Halima waved off the distinction. On the subway, she told Vega the story about the library at the University of Massachusetts, where she had spent the previous weekend visiting Adnan. Vega hadn’t done much that weekend. She had gone shopping at High Fashion with Zemadi, then—because Zemadi had plans with some friends from undergrad—spent the remaining day and a half working on a paper and eating the leftovers that Halima had left in the fridge. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t enjoyable, either. Was that what loneliness felt like?
“The university wanted to build the tallest library in the state,” Halima said. “Twenty-eight floors. But after one week, the bricks started crumbling. Do you know what was happening?”
“Ghosts.”
“Idiot. Nothing of the sort. The architect hadn’t accounted for the weight of the books. So they’ve had to cordon off the top floor. It can’t be used because the architect did not have simple common sense. Americans are like this!”
Vega laughed. “This can’t be the real reason.” It was the sort of indulgent conversation Sukumar Reddy would want to engage in. If he were telling the story, though, he would add fictional layers that elevated his heroism. How he had seen the blueprints and tried to caution the architect—a pompous white man who refused Reddy’s advice.
“It’s one hundred percent true,” Halima said. “Adnan has a clipping of an article. I’ll have him send it.” She changed the subject, describing an eyebrow-threading salon where she wanted to go after dinner. “The family is asleep by nine o’clock anyway.”
The aunt, Nur Chachi, had been a Montessori teacher in Karachi. “You know Montessori?” she asked, in a slow, excruciatingly patient Urdu. “All mixed ages. They have them in India?”
“Yes, Aunty. They do.”
“I was head teacher there,” she said, switching to English. Here in Queens, she had worked briefly as an assistant in a Head Start program. “The children here, no good. Too much behavior problem.” She took in tailoring now and showed Vega her most recent job—a child’s dress, a sequined affair with a torn zipper that she had mended by hand.
The uncle, Faisal Chacha, drove a taxi, though he had been an accountant in Pakistan. “Six days each week,” he said, pushing a plate of pakoras towards Vega. In English, he asked, “You’re married?”
“No, Uncle.”
“Get married. Be like this girl. She has a good future. You have a good husband, then you don’t have so much work. Take care of the house, the children. Husband gives good support.”
Vega wondered what support Faisal Chacha expected from Adnan, a man completing his doctorate in poetry. But she went along with it. “That’s good advice, Uncle.”
Over dinner, Nur Chachi proceeded with a list of questions: What work did Vega’s parents do? Were they Hindu? Did she have brothers and sisters? At the last question, Vega steadied herself. “No, Aunty. I’m the only child.”
Nur Chachi pointed to the wall, lined with framed photographs of what appeared to be the same boy: as a toddler being swung into the air; at age seven or eight, holding a baseball bat; as a teenager on a podium, receiving some award. “Like our Javed,” she said solemnly. “Only child. We had only him.” For a terrible moment, Vega assumed that Javed was dead, until Faisal Chacha said, “He’ll come soon. He has chess club.”
As promised, Halima led Vega afterwards to a shop called Thread House, at the center of a strip mall, located next to a garish-looking boutique called Rahul Fashion Bazaar. Inside, a Punjabi woman named Komal waved Vega to a chair and tilted her head back.
“Not too thin,” Vega said. “I like it to look natural.”
Komal tucked one end of the thread between her teeth and begun winding it around Vega’s eyebrows. In Hindi, she asked Halima about wedding plans.
“Coming along,” Halima said.
“You’ll do waxing here? Before the wedding.”
“I have a lady in Karachi who does it.”
Komal grunted. She finished the threading quickly, scattering bits of eyebrow hairs across Vega’s face, then handed her a small mirror. “Better, no?”
Vega grudgingly accepted that it was an improvement. “Yes. Thank you.”
“You need lip?”
“I usually do my lip on my own.”
“On your own isn’t working. You’re South Indian?”
“Yes.”
“That is why you have mustache.”
“Do both,” Halima said.
“I don’t think I need both.” But Komal wasn’t listening. She ran the thread over her lip, then held up the offending hair as evidence.
The waxing took place in a back room, behind a curtain, where a woman, who looked Tibetan or Nepalese, slid Vega’s underwear to the side and, using a tongue depressor, smeared one side of her vagina with a warm, honey-like substance. “You have too much hair,” she said. “Your husband has no problem?”
“I don’t have a husband.”
The woman pressed a piece of paper against the matted hair and pulled it loose. Vega winced. “When you have husband,” the woman said, “you come every week. Make him happy.”
Halima was jittery after leaving the Thread House. Wedding talk seemed to be making her nervous, and she spent the walk complaining about Adnan’s mother, a woman who was taking an abrupt turn towards religious adherence and was suddenly insistent that Halima wear a long-sleeved bridal lehenga. “And she used to be a biology teacher,” Halima said. “Now she’s lecturing everyone about virtue.”
They climbed the steps to the subway station and settled on a wooden bench. “Whatever happened to your roommate? She had to move so abruptly?”
Neither Halima nor Zemadi had mentioned Naomi in the month since Vega moved into Halima’s apartment and, though Vega was grateful for their silence, she sensed they must have suspected something. She could not guess what they suspected; what had transpired with Naomi must have been beyond the bounds of Halima’s imagination.
“She has a fellowship in Austin.”
“This semester?”
Vega wondered what would happen if she just confessed everything to Halima. She thought about Naomi so often that she was hardly aware she was even thinking of her, but there was always this faint presence in her mind, this reimagining of their lives together. Maybe it would be a disaster to tell Halima this. Or maybe it would be a comfort. “The fellowship starts in the fall. I think she needed to save money.”
“Next question. Why isn’t there a man in your life?”
Vega wasn’t ready to move on from the subject of Naomi, but she wasn’t sure she had a choice. “Because I don’t want a mother-in-law dictating my sleeve length.”
“Come on. You aren’t lonely?”
“Aren’t you? You’ve been to Massachusetts only three times in the past year.”
