Good Indian Girls: Stories (10 page)

Mom looked at me across the dinner table. “Don’t talk like that in front of your father.”

Papa was sitting to one side of the dinner table, in his own special chair, a big baby chair, a bib printed with pastel-colored unicorns around his neck and a small table at his elbow.

“What did I say?”

“You know exactly what you said,” Mom said.

I did know. Sikhs don’t smoke. It’s one of the rules. Like Sikhs don’t cut their hair and Sikhs don’t drink. Smoking one cigarette is almost as bad as killing someone.

“Who told you he smoked?” Dad said.

“No one. I thought that was why he couldn’t speak.”

Papa grinned at me each time I spoke.

“He was in the army,” Dad said. “Things happen in the army.”

I nodded, “Oh,” and went on eating.

Johnny jabbed me in the ribs. “Shit for brains,” he whispered.

Suddenly Mom made a face.

“Oh god,” she said.

A thin stream of urine was dripping from along the edge of Papa’s chair and he grinned broadly at all of us now.

“He’s your father,” Mom said to Dad. “You clean it up.”

The next day, Mom bought twelve boxes of Depend undergarments. I watched as she stacked one after the other in the cupboard under the stairs. I could tell she was angry. She punched each one into the wall, like she was shoring it up against a flood.

“Can I try one on?” I said.

She ignored me and punched the last box into place, slapped her hands together, and turned and bumped straight into me as she was walking out.

“You,” she said.

“Can I try one on?” I said again.

“They’re not for you.” She slammed the cupboard door.

“How many people did Papa kill?” I said.

“What?”

“Papa? How many did he kill?”

Mom considered me with distaste. “You and your questions. Is that all they teach you at that school?”

She turned away and walked into the kitchen. It was time for Papa’s lunch.

That school
was a special needs school. I had started there two years ago. I talked too much, asked too many questions, couldn’t concentrate; the doctors said one thing, gave me pills; Mom said I needed discipline; Dad looked around for the right kind of school. We were all girls. Half the universe was erased the moment we walked through the gates. It didn’t bother me, I liked the school well enough, except we learned little and were left mostly to ourselves, to taunt and tease and make up stories as we liked, and during recess we would
wander in circles through the courtyard and pretend we all had futures which the bright ones amongst us knew we didn’t.

When Mom was gone, I climbed into the cupboard, switched the light on, a dim, bare bulb, and closed the door behind me. I opened the first box, pulled out one of the adult diapers and held it to the light. It looked exactly like a baby’s disposable diaper, only larger, as though it was made for a mutant, the kind they used to make bad movies about in the fifties. Two blue buttons were sewn to the front to hook it up with. I pressed it to my face. It smelled of plastic and cardboard and glue.

I pulled my jeans off and my panties down and slipped into the diaper and buttoned it up. I felt anxious and excited as I stood there, hunched over because of the low ceiling. The plastic felt warm against my skin. I dug in my jeans, produced a pack of cigarettes, Kools, and a book of matches. I tapped one out against my wrist, placed it in my mouth, and lit it. I stood there for a minute smoking, thinking something should happen, something magical and strange. I should instantly be transported into another dimension where the rules of the universe were reversed, where black was white, where up was down, where the world I knew had never so much as been imagined.

Because there I was, standing in the closet, smoking, wearing an adult diaper.

But nothing happened. I stubbed the cigarette out, pulled the diaper off, and replaced it in the box.

Johnny was in the backyard, playing on the swing. Papa sat in the shade in a deck chair, his pink turban lopsided on his head. I could tell he was watching Johnny from the way his head moved back and forth with the motion of the swing.

I found Mom in the kitchen. She was chopping chicken with a cleaver.

“Can I put the diaper on Papa now?” I said.

“Don’t be silly.”

“It’s for training.”

“Training?”

“I’m planning to be a nurse.”

Mom looked at me with concern. She always did when I voiced any ambition.

She shook her head. “I want your father to do it.”

I was leaving when Mom said, “What’s that smell?”

“What smell?”

“Come here.”

She pushed her nose into my hair. My heart began to explode in my chest.

“New shampoo?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Peppermint. Like gum.”

Dad appeared late at dinner that night, one arm around Papa, whom he helped down the stairs. When Papa was settled in his special chair, Dad poured himself a large whisky, no ice, and drank it in a single toss. He poured himself a second before joining us at the table.

No one spoke out loud. Only Johnny and me whispered almost silently to each other.

“Fuckwad,” Johnny said.

“Butt plug,” I said.

My name that night was Cassiopeia.

Later, I heard Dad on the phone.

“I hate him,” he said.

I was listening in on the extension downstairs as he talked to his sister. “If I could . . .”

“Yes?” she said.

“I would.”

“What?”

“I don’t have the guts.”

“He’s an old man,” she said. “He’s our father.”

“I know.”

“I hate him as much as you do,” she said. “More.”

“Yes?”

“I couldn’t. Not ever.”

“I know.”

“You won’t do anything?”

“I’m a coward,” Dad said.

I stopped listening when he said that. I hate cowards. I returned the phone loudly into the cradle and walked up the stairs to my room and banged my door shut.

Soon after, I heard footsteps outside my door. I knew it was Dad, I recognized the way he walked. I could sense him standing there, holding a hand up as if to knock. He stood there for about a minute before I heard the steps move away.

From that day on, when Dad called his sister, he used a cell phone.

I cut school at lunch and returned home to an empty house. I thought I’d watch the afternoon movie. I shouted up and down the stairs. “Mom, Papa.” No one. Maybe Mom had taken Papa out. I walked upstairs, excited by the freedom. I could hardly remember a time when I had the house entirely to myself. I stripped down to my underwear, slipped the pack of Kools into the elastic of my panties, lit a smoke, and began dancing along the hall.

First into Johnny’s room, then Mom and Dad’s, finally into the spare bedroom, where Papa slept.

I waltzed into Papa’s bathroom. “My name is Andromeda,” I sang.

He was lying on his back on the floor, pants around his ankles, arms waving weakly. His turban was knocked off his head and the room smelled foul, of old man urine and feces.

“Papa?” I said. “What happened?”

His eyes widened at my nudity and he threw a hand forward, attempting and failing, with an unsteady gesture, to block his view.

“It’s okay, Papa,” I said. “It’s only me.”

I felt oddly brave standing there, like a soldier marching into battle. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. Crouching on the tiles and over his knees, I reached forward across his body and took hold of his turban. My plan was to replace it on his head, but the moment I lifted it, I pulled back. I watched his mouth tense and his eyes open wide with longing as he followed the passage of the cigarette, and then, for a second, his skin brushed mine. It felt dry and cold and cracked. A rattle emerged and I sensed him convulse.

I raised the pink turban, settled back on my haunches, and instead of replacing it on his head, fitted it onto mine.

It was large for me and slipped down over one ear and partially covered my right eye. I tapped a second cigarette out against my wrist, lit it and took several puffs, then leaned forward and slipped the cigarette between his lips. This was what he wanted, what he had wanted all along. His face transformed. The sternness disappeared, replaced by a giddy look of surprise, and there he was, a child again.

He lay there, trembling with his eyes closed, the cigarette in his mouth, and I watched as his hand found his penis and grabbed hold of it roughly. It only took him a second to come.
A tiny stream of goopy white liquid spread from the tip of his penis down its length. His hand once again drifted to his side and his body flagged. Within a minute, he was asleep.

“Send him to your sister,” Mom said. “You can’t be expected to take all the responsibility for this—for this—!”

We were gathered at the dinner table, all of us in our regular chairs, even Papa was there, the unicorn bib, now covered in turmeric-colored stains, tied inexpertly by Dad around his neck.

After Papa had fallen asleep that afternoon, I eased the cigarette out of his mouth and left him there, alone on the bathroom floor, hoping he would sleep until Mom returned. I spent the afternoon walking along the edge of the highway, where the roar of tires on blacktop drowned my thoughts. Mom did find him. His hand was resting where he’d left it. I could hear her from my room, shouting at Dad when she told him. “He was doing
that
—in his own shit!” I took up a position at the railing where I could listen more easily. “He always hated you,” Mom shouted, “and now he’s come here so he can hate you properly.” Dad was silent for a long minute and I crept down along the stairway, hoping to catch his words.

“I know,” he said finally in a soft, defeated voice.

“So—?” Mom said.

Dad walked to the sideboard and poured himself a drink.

“He can’t hurt anyone now. He’s an old man and he was never much of anything, even when he was young. He’s come here to die. We should let him.”

I stole back up the stairs, full of remorse, for Dad, for Papa, for all of us, for our sad, cowardly family. I’d be the one with courage, I decided, I wouldn’t flinch. My name that night was Hecate, three-headed goddess. Dog, snake and horse.

“I can’t send him to my sister,” Dad said, responding to Mom’s demand, as we sat there at dinner. “She has a family.” Around us, at the table, we were surrounded on all sides by the great empty cavern of the house.

Johnny whispered as they talked. “Douche bag,” he said.

“And you don’t?” Mom said. “You don’t have a family?”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Dad said.

“What did he
do?”
I asked. Even though I knew what had happened, I wanted to hear the version they’d give me.

“Nothing,” Dad said.

“Asscrack,” Johnny whispered.

“Then what way did you mean it?” Mom said.

“You’re twisting my words.”

“What did he do?” I said, louder this time.

“Shit licker,” Johnny whispered.

“Nothing!” Dad said, suddenly very loud. “The old bastard never did a thing in his life!”

We all fell into a momentary silence. Even Johnny stopped whispering.

Papa took hold of his plate in one hand and with a wild grip held it high. His stare moved violently from Dad to me and back again. Finally, he let the plate fall and it crashed with a loud thud on the floor and shattered. Warm dal spilled out across the carpet.

Dad closed his eyes.

“I’ll clean it up,” I offered.

Mom threw an arm out and gripped my wrist to stop me from jumping to my feet. “No. I want your father to. This is his problem.”

“I’ll do it after we eat,” Dad said.

“I just meant today, Dad,” I explained. “Not before.”

“Oh—.” Dad stood and poured himself another drink and returned to the table.

“But he was a soldier,” I said. “That’s something.”

“He wasn’t even in the army. Not the real army. He was a mechanic. Or something. I don’t know. He never told me.”

“That’s still something,” I said.

Dad groaned. “He never killed anyone. Not on the battlefield. He doesn’t even know how to fire a gun.”

I watched Papa silently. His lower lip was curled in anger and now he looked at me, eyes filled with accusation.

“It’s very simple,” Mom said. “You pick up the telephone and you call your sister.”

“And say what?”

“He’s your father too. That’s what you say.”

“Cocksucker,” Johnny whispered.

“Nothing?” I said.

“What?” Dad said.

“He did nothing?”

“Yes. Except he got a medal once. I think. By accident. He saved someone by accident. He was very proud of it.”

“You tell her that he’s her father too,” Mom said. “You insist.”