Originally published by Carve Magazine, May 2003, Raymond Carver Award Finalist

by Rebecca Brams

 

The day Sankara and his wife arrive in America, she tells him her name is now Eileen. She tells him her old name is dead. She asks him never to use it, not even in his thoughts. Sankara tries. After all, it is his fault she is alive. They both know it.

They stay in a tiny apartment attached to the Hindu Community Center in Queens. At first, the women of the Center come to their apartment. The women come wearing their finest black silk saris and carrying tin dishes full of rice with almonds and homemade cheese in spicy tomato broth. They sit at the table with his wife, their ringed hands folded on the waxy tablecloth. Sankara sits with them for a few minutes. He sits and listens to their murmurings, their quiet reverent talk. One has been to Gujarat before. He nods. Another had a cousin there. Lost in the earthquake. The woman touches a finger to her eye, leaving a streak of dark eyeshadow. Eileen brushes crumbs from the table into her cupped palm.

Sankara makes excuses to leave the apartment. He goes downstairs and sits on a bench in the litter-strewn park across the street, like the old men do. He sits near the playground so that he can hear the children laughing and shouting. But he can’t watch them. That’s too much.

Coming back up the stairs, he hopes to find the women still sitting together. He hopes to hear his wife laugh. Just one note of laughter. He misses the sharp-sweet sound, the way she always seemed to be surprised by her own voice. But the visiting women pass him on the stairway. They step past him delicately, the fabric of their saris rustling. They do not meet his eyes.

Here, Sankara and Eileen go out together to do the food shopping in the cramped aisles of Herb’s Convenience on Duffield Street. At home in India, Eileen went to the outdoor market with her brothers’ wives. There, everyone she passed knew her. They knew her as the daughter of the cloth merchant, the sister of doting brothers, the wife of the man who had gone to University for one year. Then she grew round and flushed, and they knew her as the mother of the twins, the girls who slept in the same crib and intertwined their fingers in each others’ jet black curls.

One day, Sankara and Eileen are out for one of the long wandering walks they take here. They hold hands as they walk, like the American couples do. They are both wearing gloves, and the stiff feel of her hand disturbs him. But he holds it anyway. He wants to touch her. In the shop windows, Sankara watches their reflections. He watches Eileen turn her head away from the bassinettes and strollers that crowd the sidewalk. They come to a large store with windows full of clothing. The clothing looks ugly to Sankara, the colors harsh and artificial, but Eileen wants to go inside. She comes out of the store a few minutes later, her eyes brighter than he has seen them in months.

“Will you give me some money?” she asks.

At home, Eileen carried money with her. It is only here, where they hear stories of women being attacked on the streets, that Sankara holds all the money in a wallet in his pocket, fingers clenched tight around the thin cloth. He gives her the wallet and leans against a brick wall. The sunlight is bright in his face, a chill in the wind reminding him of the season – very early spring. He gives himself up to memory, as he often does in these short idle days. He thinks about their baby girls, born a year after the wedding. “Good luck twins,” Eileen’s mother had said. Sankara used to love holding them both at the same time, a weighty mass of hands grabbing his ears, feet kicking his belly, drips of spittle on his neck. He loved to breathe deeply the earthy smell of their tiny, perfect curls.

Eileen comes out of the store with a bulging plastic bag in her hand. She looks different, as if she has left the last part of herself that is familiar to him on the other side of the swinging door, under the fluorescent lights. She doesn’t show him what is in the bag, and he doesn’t ask.

“I want to go,” Eileen says the next morning, as she fixes them tea and toast.

Sankara looks around the apartment. The walls are bare and stained a rust color near the steam pipes in the corner. “They gave us another two months,” he says.

She puts the kettle down on the burner. “I want to leave here. I can’t stand it around them anymore.” Sankara knows she is talking about the women who used to visit, the men with their solemn eyes.

“They’re trying to be kind,” he says.

She shakes her head, a few strands of dark wavy hair falling into her face. “But they look at us. The way they look at us. I can’t stand it.” She pulls the comb out of her hair and for a moment it spills over her shoulders, reminding him of the smell of the garden in the early morning. Their moments together, out in the cool shadows by the fountain, before he left for the shop with her father, before her mother’s voice called about some household task.

Eileen twists her hair back up and fastens it with the comb.

They’ll leave then. He’ll do whatever she wants. He asks if she wants to go to Los Angeles, to her cousin. Eileen’s cousin had married an American girl. They called him on the satellite phone the rescue workers brought in, after they realized he was the only one left out of both of their families.

Eileen doesn’t want to go to Los Angeles. “Too many of them there,” she says.

“Where then?”

“Somewhere different. No tall buildings, lots of space.”

They sit in silence, their eyes on the plates of toast in front of them, the hard lump of butter. They are both thinking of the American movies they have seen, the wide prairies and desert lands which must be waiting out there somewhere, certainly not here in New York. Sankara lets himself fall into the idea of fresh air, of working with his hands, of being useful again. The habits of his grandmother’s village. All lost when he moved to the city, tried University, married Eileen, worked for her father in the narrow shop full of the dusty smell of cloth.

Three days later, they move to Indiana. They take the train until it stops at a town they like the look of, and they get off. They buy a chicken farm from Sally Anne Wilson, an 80-year-old widow with wiry tanned arms going to live with her son in town. The cousin in California wires them money for the down payment, no questions asked. Eileen says he is probably happy that they aren’t moving to Los Angeles, probably relieved that he doesn’t have to explain his homeland’s ideas of hospitality to his American wife.

Their first morning on the farm, Eileen opens her small suitcase, pulls out the plastic bag from the New York store, and removes a pair of denim overalls. She dresses in the overalls, a dark green shirt underneath. Sankara sits on the small lumpy bed left behind by Mrs. Wilson and watches her. He watches her brush out her hair, lifting the brush over the silver buckles as if she has been wearing jeans with a bib her whole life.  He watches her put the cheap saris they were given in New York into the suitcase. In India, she had a closet full of bright satin and silk. She slides the suitcase under the bed. She folds other American clothes, a few more shirts and two pairs of jeans, and stacks them on the bare closet shelves.

Their first customers come and go. Sankara tends the chickens, transported back to his boyhood whenever he enters the coop and breathes in the earthy air. Eileen scrubs down the house, removing all traces of dust, and greets the customers when their pickup trucks drive into the yard, past the leaning willow tree. A weeping willow, Mrs. Wilson said.

Eileen bakes and takes plates of sweet things to the neighbors. She drives their battered blue Chevy, bought cheap from Mrs. Wilson. Sankara finishes the chores, showers, and sits on the porch steps waiting for her to return. His hair is slicked back and he feels cleansed after toiling all day in chicken shit and his own sweat. Finally, Eileen comes home, the headlights of the car illuminating the willow. As she walks toward him, Sankara is struck by how beautiful she looks. Her hips press against the fabric of her jeans, her shirt follows the curve of her waist, her breasts swing slightly against the cotton. He feels desire rising inside him like hope. They are young, he tells himself. They can start anew, plant a big garden in the summer, make love with the windows open, maybe someday have babies sleeping in a crib between the strong walls of the old farmhouse. Eileen glances at him as she walks by, but then her brown eyes slide away from his. He stands and follows her into the house.

“I was thinking I could kill a chicken and you could make tandoori tonight,” he says.

She turns to face him. In the narrow hallway, he can feel the warmth of her breath against his neck. She smells like dust and dried sweat and butter.

She touches his face, her palm resting warm on his jawbone for a moment. “I don’t have the spices,” she says. She turns and walks down the hall. She switches on the bedroom light and closes the door. He is dizzy in the dark hallway without her.

The days are getting longer and warmer. The air is soft on Sankara’s bare arms and freshly shaved face. Eileen takes the car and drives off down the dirt road to deliver eggs. It was her idea to add deliveries. They have enough money to buy furniture now, he tells her. But she shakes her head and so they live around the rough wooden pieces that Mrs. Wilson left behind. He hardly sees Eileen now. He wakes in the morning and goes to do chores. When he returns at lunchtime, there is a plate of food in the refrigerator and a note about deliveries. In the afternoon, he sees the car return, then leave again in a cloud of dust. He goes in for a glass of water and finds a note about buying groceries in town. In the evenings, they sit outside on the porch steps, balancing their dinner plates on their knees. They sit silently until the fireflies dart in the long grass around the willow tree. Then Eileen gathers up the dishes and goes inside.

Once or twice, he tries to put his arms around her as she stands at the sink. At home, that was their sign, and she would leave the dishes for the morning. They would shut the door to their bedroom, light incense, and tease the tiredness out of each other until finally, pressed back to back, they let sleep overcome them. Now, she is stiff and still. He sees her fingers tighten on the rim of the plate she holds. After a moment, he releases her and walks down the hall to their bedroom. He hears the water running for a long time. When it shuts off, the still of the house is oppressive.

Later, Sankara will have no memory of meeting the neighbor across the street. He will have only a vague impression of a man with a face red like raw meat. He will feel proud that the neighbor was of no interest to him. At least he has this – that he is the kind of man who respects borders.

The neighbor is of no interest to him until, one hot summer afternoon, Sankara is taking a break on the porch when he notices a peek of dusty blue between the trees that shade the neighbor’s driveway. He puts down his glass of water and walks to the road, then across it. He pauses at the beginning of the drive and looks at the car. His car, the blue metal covered with dust from the dirt roads. He walks down the drive towards the man’s house and his car. He peers into the backseat of the car and sees two flats of eggs sitting in the sun. He looks up at the house, a one-story ranch-style house, stucco chipped off in places, window shades drawn tightly against the afternoon sun. A small, weedy lawn in front. He turns and walks back across the road. That night, he tells Eileen that he is worried about the eggs spoiling as she drives around in the heat. She is sitting at the kitchen table counting the money from the day.

“Maybe you should stop the deliveries,” he says. “Until it’s cooler.”

She looks up at him. Her head is tilted slightly to the side. Her hands flip the bills one by one onto the table.

“What do you want from me?” he says.

Her hands slow for a moment but she keeps counting. She is counting in English; he can tell by the way her lips move slightly, foreignly, around the silent numbers.

“I’ll do anything,” he says.

But she will not forgive him. He already knows it. She will not forgive him for having called to her that morning, for having drawn her into the garden so they could hold each other for a few minutes before he went off to work. She will not forgive him for choosing her, for making her live.

She finishes counting and pushes the stack into the middle of the table. “Two hundred twenty dollars,” she says.

His chest feels so dense, so heavy. His legs soften beneath him and he sinks into the chair across from her. He is crying, soft gentle tears that slide down the sides of his nose.

“I’ll change my name,” he says. “I’ll be Sam, you can call me Sam.”

For a moment, her eyes look brighter. But then she looks down at her hands. “You won’t really be Sam,” she says. “You’ll still be Sankara.”

“You’re still…”

“No,” she says. “No, I’m truly not.”

Her lashes are dark sparks against the spread of her cheekbones. He longs to bury his face in the smooth skin of her neck, to let his tears run down between her breasts. He wants to fling the comb out of her hair, wrap his fingers in it, pull her close, to make her see him. To make her love him again.

“Can’t we give each other a little comfort,” he says. But she doesn’t answer.

Then there is a night when she does not come home for dinner. He cracks open a few eggs and sizzles them in a pan and eats on the porch. He looks across the street at the neighbor’s dark house, full of a strange, deep anger. When she comes home, he confronts her on the porch. He speaks to her roughly, tries to assert himself. He talks about duty. He says I’m your husband. She says nothing. Finally, in desperation, he says “Don’t you have anything to say.”

“We were meant to die together,” she snaps. “All of us. It was destiny. But I had my duties, I had my obligations to my husband, and so I came to the garden. I left my babies in the house and I came to you.”

His hand comes up to strike her across the face. He is aiming for the bridge of her nose. But the hand stops and falls against his side. She is biting on her lower lip, like she used to do when she was nursing one of the twins and the baby hurt her.

“You can’t say that about the garden,” he says. “That was our time together.”

“It was a mistake,” she says.

She tries to walk past him, but he puts both hands on her waist and stops her. “There are no mistakes,” he says. He squeezes her waist, the flesh is firm under his hands. “We’re still young. There’s still life ahead.”

She turns fast, breaking his hands off her. “I have no husband now,” she says in his ear, as she passes.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to him the night she doesn’t come home at all, but it is. He opens the small suitcase he brought from New York and takes out a bottle of liquor that he had bought in the city, when he was unsure when the overwhelming need would come over him to lose thought and memory. He drinks half the bottle quickly, staring out the bedroom window at the bright circle of light emanating from the porch, illuminating the shriveled flowerbeds, forgotten since Mrs. Wilson. When he is good and drunk, he pulls Eileen’s suitcase from underneath the bed and opens it. Sinks his hands into the silky saris, brings them up to his face and breathes in their smell. The cool fabric catches on his skin. The saris smell like the Indian spices that Eileen has never bought here. He runs his hands along the sides of the suitcase. Pulls out a small bottle of lotion and puts it on his hands. They soak up the stuff quickly and then he smells like jasmine. He finds a packet of letters from the cousin in California, most of which he has seen. A few of them are more recent. Eileen hasn’t shown them to him. But he reads them anyway – dull stuff, obligatory chatter. The last one is dated two weeks before. He guesses that Eileen hasn’t written back, but she might have, what does he know about such things now? When he wakes in the morning, his back is stiff from sleep, the suitcase is under the bed, and Eileen is in the kitchen cooking breakfast.

She moves out the next day. She says she is taking just her clothes and the car. She says she’ll still do the egg deliveries, if he wants. Sankara can’t stand to be in the house. He goes into the chicken coop and watches from a hole in the wooden wall as she drives across the street, the car disappearing behind the row of scraggly trees. He goes out to repair a fence, tries to sweat his way out of thinking. But he finds himself standing still, staring at the grass by the road swaying in the hot breeze. That evening, as he sits on the porch with a bottle of beer cold in his hand, he sees a figure emerge out of the darkness by the willow. She walks into the light. He looks up at her, doesn’t stand, figures what is the point? They are beyond all the chivalrous gestures he could possibly muster.

“Sam,” she says.

He looks down at her feet, brown and dusty in her sandals, the hem of her jeans hitting the old soft leather. They could be back at home, and her feet would look exactly the same.

“Sankara.”

The chirping of the crickets sounds loud in the silence.

She says, “I just came to say I’m sorry. But being together is just a reminder. It’s better this way for both of us.”

He thinks that if she makes one step towards him, he will howl, weep at the thought of her smell, the warmth of her body, the way her shoulders rose and fell when they dug the babies’ crib out of the wreckage. And he cried too, their tears dried salt stains on each other’s clothing. How she shrank in his arms when the quaking finally slowed to a gentle sway. In the garden, where they had been kissing in the slanting morning sun. The dust cleared. He saw the house. Tumbles of concrete blocks. He couldn’t make sense of it. Where were the rooms, the boundaries that defined his life? One wall stood – the foyer. The mirror still hung, its heavy gilt frame rocking. She twisted against him. He couldn’t let her go. Next door, a woman was wailing, a dense, animal sound. He didn’t want to hear it. He wanted to hear hope. But from their house, only silence.

Eileen’s feet do not move from the edge of the circle of light. He looks up into her face, to her eyes full of compassion, but no love. He stands and goes into the chicken coop. It is dark there, and he rests for a moment against the splintered wood. Then he feels his way over to the corner where the largest hen sits, and he gathers the bird in his arms. She goes quietly, leaves the only home she has ever known without a cluck, though the other hens shuffle around uncomfortably as he moves between them. When he walks back to the front porch, Eileen is still there. He moves close to her, holding the bird between them.

“Shanta,” he says. She turns her head away from him as if he has hit her. She tilts her face up to the sky. He imagines she is seeing past the branches of the willow, past the stars beyond them, all the way back home. Has she learned this like he has? When she looks back at him, her dark eyes glint with tears.

He steps closer. He holds the hen out to her, feeling the warmth of the bird leave his chest. For a moment, he is uncertain that she will take it. But she does. He settles the bird into the cradle of her arms. Her eyes are shut, she is biting at her lip. For a moment, they stand, only inches of air separating them, she swaying gently. Then she opens her eyes and looks directly at him. “Sankara,” she says softly. “Thank you.”

She turns away from him and walks down the drive with the chicken in her arms. He can hear her quiet sobs and the sound of her sandals shuffling in the dirt. She crosses the road and sets the hen down by the scraggly trees at the beginning of the man’s driveway. A few moments later, he hears the sound of a door squeak and then shut. The hen stays just across the road, her figure dark against more darkness, as the crickets sing on, the cool of night settles in, the wands of the willow brush gently across the earth, the stars rotate and turn in the galaxies above, and, on the other side of the globe, the sun sweeps across the bright blue sky, over the sound of children laughing and women moaning, the wisps of smoke still rising from the piles of burnt rubbish and the smell of hot oil and spices.

Finally he turns and walks away.