Everything Was Good-Bye (6 page)

“To be, or not to be.” My voice snagged.

“Louder please,” he said, leaning against his desk. “And stand up.”

I stood up, clearing my throat above the rush of laughter behind me:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.”

Mr. Peters motioned for me to sit down and asked Tina to finish the soliloquy. She stood, without having to be asked, and offered a perform-ance that was almost as bad as her portrayal of Annie in the school musical.

Liam passed a note over my shoulder: “The correct answer is ‘Not to be in class’… meet me out front in five minutes.” A few minutes after Liam snuck out the back of the classroom, I followed; he was waiting for me in the parking lot.

“Where to?” I asked, tossing my books into the back of his ’67 powder-blue Mustang.

“The beach.”

“Are you sure your car will make it this time?” I asked, recalling the last time we’d skipped school together and ended up walking three miles to get to a pay phone. We’d waited inside that cramped phone booth for his friend to pick us up, safe from the steady rain that caused my hair to fall in dripping curls as we watched our breath settle onto the glass. Occasionally
Liam would reach over my shoulder and wipe the condensation with his palm, laughing nervously as we bumped up against each other; our laughter would suddenly turn quiet, our voices to whispers that made the glass fog with the heaviness of anticipation.

Liam started the car, a grin across his face as he looked over at me. I wondered if he too was remembering the last time we’d been so close and yet no closer. I popped the cassette from my Walkman into the deck—The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now?” blasting.

“Don’t worry,” he shouted over Morrissey’s drone. “We can make it. I just took it in to shop class this morning.” Mr. Conner, who spent most of his time flipping through
Playboy
magazines that were not so discreetly hidden within his curriculum text, never even noticed that Liam wasn’t one of his students. After half a semester, Liam had learned what he needed to and stopped attending, occasionally sneaking his car back in for tune-ups. It was during one of those visits that he found Mr. Conner’s collection of porn stuffed into a red tool box. He decided that he wanted to expose his classmates to the subject matter that absorbed all of Mr. Conner’s time and placed the collection of pornographic tapes among the hundreds of docu-mentaries that were housed in the audiovisual room. The tapes became legendary and were well guarded by the scores of boys suddenly volunteer-ing to be av monitors. When Liam told me what he’d done, I asked him if he’d kept any of the video tapes for himself and was glad when he replied, “No, I’m not into that shit.” I was relieved even if it was a lie.

At the beach I gazed over the edge of the pier, holding the railing with both hands. The water was calm, except for the speedboats that swept the greys into greens and the greens into browns. I imagined climbing over the railing and jumping into the water, sinking into the shadowy depths; kelp forests entangling my body, pirate ghosts capturing me for an eternity until I was reborn and transformed into a water nymph with threaded wings of seaweed tasselled with golden coins. I would be neither blue nor green, neither fish nor girl, but something magical and intensely beautiful.

Liam jumped behind me, pushing my shoulders. I tensed. “Scared you’ll fall in?”

My body tightened, resisting his hands. “Liam, don’t.” I shoved him away, swatting him with my backpack.

“Come on, I can teach you,” he said, already abandoning the pier and walking towards the bend in the beach that was bordered by tall grass and driftwood.

I trailed behind. “I don’t have a swimsuit.”

“Neither do I.” He walked towards the water, removing his clothing layer by layer until he was naked. The sun struck his body at an angle that reduced him to a thin black shadow lined in molten gold and yet when he looked back at me I could make out his smile. It was electric. He motioned for me to follow, but I refused, preferring to sit on a nearby rock, the tide splashing against me as he rushed into the surf. Watching him disappear and reappear in the water, I squinted against the twinkling light that reflected offthe water until my sight was infrared. I closed my eyes and leaned back into the breeze, listening to the sound of his strokes, the waves. I’d been too frightened to go into the water since last semester’s phys. ed. class. The boys had hooted and hollered at the white string-bikini girls who slipped into the pool. I’d sat on the edge of the pool with my arms crossed over my black maillot and watched the boys dive in, grab the girls beneath the water, and playfully tug at their strings. The girls feigned shock and outrage in giggles and wet back slaps.

When Ms. Richards saw me loitering along the side, she yelled at me to get in. I edged into the pool slowly, feeling for the bottom, fighting against the water’s attempts to swallow me. I bobbed along until there was no bottom for me to push against. My heart began to race as my legs flailed beneath me. I told myself not to panic, and in between mouthfuls of water, I told myself that I was fine. I felt like I was inside a wave: a hollow hum passed through my ears and over my head, until all sound was a dampened echo. The water above me punctured, a surge of pressure came towards me, and Liam’s hand reached for mine. “It’s okay, I’ve got you, you’re fine… you’re fine.”
Now Liam walked out of the water, silver and clean, his shadow falling over me. He flopped onto his back in the sand, sun-drying, eyes closed. I looked over at him, watching the heat radiate offhis skin until I felt its flush on my own skin, felt my own pulse deepen. I tried to stop looking but couldn’t. I’d never seen a naked man except for the ones in the
Playgirl
magazine at a 7-Eleven that Carrie had dared me to look at. All the men were oiled and erect; their expression, wanting and contrived. None of them were as beautiful and vulnerable as Liam.

“You should have come. The water was great.” I didn’t answer and quickly looked away as he got up and pulled on his jeans. I handed him his shirt; sand fell from his flesh onto mine like brown sugar. “You would have liked it,” he said pulling his shirt over his head. Patches of sand on his skin shimmered, the hairs on his body lit up like gold filigree.

I looked over his head into the sun. “Another time,” I said, and walked back along the shore, combing through the tidal debris with my toes. Liam came and stood next to me, skipping rocks along the water.

“Teach me to do that?”

“Sure.” He pulled a rock from his pocket and handed it to me, explaining that the rock had to hit the water at just the right angle and speed to skip. This was all about physics.

He stood behind me, rock in my hand, his hand on mine, imitating the motion a few times before pulling my hand back with his and freeing the stone. I counted the ripples as it skipped across the surface.

“See. Now you try it.” He handed me another rock and I held it in my palm for a moment before I lobbed it towards the horizon. I looked back at him quizzically when it plopped into the water.

“It takes practice.” He picked up a pebble to demonstrate. “You just have to snap your wrist faster.”

The breeze twisted my hair into ribbons. “Show-off!”

A rush of whitewater chased me from the shore and I retreated to a nearby log while Liam walked into the waves. He knelt down, etched something in the sand with a stick and watched the water take it away. I pulled my journal out of my bag and as I read my thoughts, hoped the tide
would pull them out to sea. Liam wiped his hands on his jeans and sat next to me. “What are you writing?”

I closed the book. “Nothing.”

“Can I see it then?”

I hugged the leather journal close to me. “No. It’s private.”

“Come on.” He reached over again, placed his hand on mine, tilted his head and looked up at me with a smile that curled on one side like the crest of a wave. “Come on, let me see.”

“Okay. But promise you won’t laugh.”

“Yeah, promise.” He pried the book from me and opened it to the dog-eared page. Sand from his fingers sprinkled across the page and settled in the crease as he began to read: “The smell of chai—fennel, cloves and cinnamon tucked me into my blanket like a seed in a cardamom pod… .”

“Liam, don’t read it out loud!”

“Okay, but I can’t read silently, never could. I can’t comprehend anything that way. Some weird learning disability… so I’ll whisper it, okay?”

I agreed, but before he continued, I took the book back. “I changed my mind.”

He reached into the sand and picked up a piece of paper that had fallen out of the book. “What’s this?”

I tried to grab it. “Give it here.”

He unfolded it and held it out of reach, mumbling the words as he skimmed the contents, announcing the highlights. “Your personal essay ‘The Have Nots’… has been awarded second place in our Young Writers of Canada contest… invited to Toronto to accept your scholarship prize… .”

I grabbed it from him and crumpled it into my bag with the journal. “What’s the matter? This is amazing. Why aren’t you happy about it?”

I shook my head and pitched my toes in the sand. “Because my mom won’t let me go.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.” I watched the tide roll over itself.

“Well, then, explain it to me,” he said, scrawling my name into the sand with the sharp end of a stone.

“Because Toronto is too far from home and because she thinks that writing is a waste of time and wants me to do something more
productive.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. She wants me to go to university, be a lawyer or a doctor, some shit like that.”

“You can’t let her tell you what to do. You’ve got to go. It’s what you want, what you’ve always talked about.”

“I wish it were that simple.” I scooped a fistful of sand, sifting it through my fingers like an hourglass. “Sometimes I just want to run away, you know. Figure things out on my own.”

“So why don’t you?” he asked.

I thought about Harj. I had almost admired her for running away, for doing what no other Punjabi girl before her had done, until I experienced the consequences of her leaving, felt the rawness of my mother’s tears, the ripples that her absence had created in all of us. Her choice to leave seemed to leave me with one less choice. “I don’t think I could ever outrun myself.” I picked up a rock and tossed it into the water, surprised that it skipped.

“You know, a lot of things that don’t make sense are done because people don’t question things enough.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll show you.” Liam got up and walked towards the railway track. I followed, stepping on the cross ties as he balanced on the edge. “The distance between these rails is 56 ½ inches, not because it’s the best-engineered width but because of the cultural engineering surrounding the gauge.”

“What are you talking about? What does a railway track have to do with me?”

“Well, the width of a railway track is based on the width of the wheel spacing on a horse-drawn wagon,
which
was actually designed based on the width of a Roman chariot,
which
was designed to accommodate the width of two horses’ asses. Technically, the tracks should have been wider; the trains would have been more stable and there’d be a lot less derailments. But no one ever even thought to make it differently. No one questioned anything.”

“So what you’re saying is that if we don’t question anything we’ll make asses of ourselves?” I laughed and shoved him from the rail. He got up smiling, dusted the sand offhis jeans and chased me along the dormant tracks towards the abandoned house that was the scene of many drunken teenage parties.

The house reminded me of home. Of the house my father had bought when he came to Canada, how abandoned it looked on the day that we moved away with the last of our belongings piled into the trunk of Mamaji’s Chevrolet Impala. When my mother locked the door and stood in front of the freshly sprayed graffiti that marred our leaving, I realized that in the face of such unyielding realities we had vacated my father’s dreams, taking only the emptiness that remained.

I ran up the porch steps and looked through the dirty glass that had been cracked and sparingly boarded. Liam tried the door. It shook but didn’t open.

“There’s got to be a way in.”

I followed him to the back of the house. “Liam, we shouldn’t.”

He pulled a loose board off the window and climbed in. “Go around to the front. I’ll open the door.”

As I entered, I covered my mouth with my hand. The house smelled like cat piss and weed. “Home sweet home,” I muttered. My voice resonated through the graffiti-covered walls and the only inhabitants of the house—a few pieces of decrepit furniture, that lingered in rooms like ghosts. “I wonder why whoever lived here would leave their stuff.”

Liam shrugged. He had taken a camera out of his backpack and was taking pictures. It was the newest of the old cameras he’d found at the thrift store the last time we’d ditched class. We always cruised the Sally Ann aisles and loitered in the furniture section, where we sat on settees with split upholstery, reading five-cent romance paperbacks, before checking out the antiquated electronic sections for yet another camera for his collection.

“Maybe it was easier,” he mused between frames. “You know, leave the past in its place… Hey, do you have a felt pen?”

I took my backpack off, pulled a felt marker out and handed it to Liam, who had put down his camera to read the writing on the wall—love, hate and lust all tumbling over each other towards the white space where he scrawled “Liam and Meena were here May, 1990.” Then he took a picture of it.

When I got home, Serena and my mother were in the bedroom talking in hushed voices. I pressed my ear against the door, trying to hear without being heard. Serena seemed upset; her tone rose and fell in broken words that I couldn’t make out. I wondered if she and Dev were fighting again and if she would really leave him this time. Just after A.J. was born, she moved back home for a month and lay on the couch in my mother’s housecoat watching reruns of
Dallas,
drinking countless cups of tea, her bruised ribs mending. “It hurts to breathe,” she’d told me. I nodded as though I understood, and in a way I did. Life was asphyxiating. Once Serena was well enough, my mother had called her mother-in-law and brokered her return. They came to collect her, drinking their tea in measured apology, and in return we all became good at avoiding asking her how she was; we learned to look away when we talked to her and pretended not to notice her vacant eyes and dramatic weight loss. Her body was pulled in on itself, flesh wrapped tight, calling attention to protruding bones and joints. Sometimes I’d reach for her hand and pluck bones like guitar strings.