What Lies Between Us (11 page)

The presence of boys also means other things. The hair on my legs is suddenly shameful, suddenly public, when before I had barely noticed it. Now there are the long fair hairless legs of the white girls gleaming below their cheerleader skirts to compare with my own limbs. I had been fair before; at home, the girls had called me sudhi, white girl. How ridiculous that name is now, in comparison with these actual white girls. Now I am clearly, irretrievably dark, and beyond that, hairy!

*   *   *

In our room Dharshi yells, “What about this for you? It's too big for me. You want it?” She throws a denim miniskirt at my head. I hold it up to myself in the mirror, see that it would come to the middle of my thighs.

“No way! I'd feel like a gorilla.”

Her head pops out of the closet, eyebrows questioning. “Gorilla?”

I gesture at my legs, say, “Hair!”

She's out now, gesturing at my pant leg. “Okay, let me see.”

I pull it up, displaying my legs.

She says, “Ah, I see,” and then, “So we'll have to shave you.” She pushes me into our shared bathroom, says, “Get in the tub, we have to use these.” She is pulling out razors, shaving cream.

“What? No way! Amma will kill me.”

“Okay, so you want to be a gorilla? You want people to look at you in PE and laugh and point?” She fills the tub and gestures at me. “Take it off.” I pull her borrowed T-shirt over my head. Stand there in my bra and skirt. She flaps her hand at me. “All of it. I've seen everything already.”

*   *   *

I sit in the tub, hugging my knees in the warm water. She squats next to me.

She says, “Okay, soap up to the knees.” I do it, shyly.

“Is it going to hurt?”

“No, silly. Okay, like this. Drag it along the skin.” She leans over the edge of the tub, puts the razor against the edges of my soaped-up leg, starts pulling it along the skin in a long, smooth stroke.

Later she runs her palm along the skin of my leg, says, “Yes, nice. Very nice.”

And then, while she is scrutinizing my face, her brow wrinkles again.

“What?”

“Your eyebrows. We have to do something about them too.”

“Oh no, no way, Amma will notice in a second.”

“Really? Are you sure? We'll do it very lightly, just a clear-up so you look a little less … Brooke Shields. She'll never notice.”

I make a choked noise.

She says, “Really? Do you think she looks at you, really looks?”

I'm quiet. She sees more than I think she does. I sit on the bed and her fingers pull and stretch the skin above my eye.

I squirm. “Oh god, oh god, is it going to hurt?”

“Well, yeah, if you jump around like that, I'll probably stab you in the eye.”

“Oh god.”

“Just settle down, okay?”

“Okay. Okay!”

I close my eyes and she goes to work. It is like being bitten by an insect several dozen times. I screech, “Argggghhhh!”

Afterward, I have to admit I look different, better, more American. I start performing covert operations, hiding an entire outfit under my own, pulling clothes off in the girls' bathroom, displaying my new hairless calves. And it is true, Amma never notices. She hasn't looked at me closely since we lost Thatha. She has looked at everything else, but not at me.

When we first came to this country she slept on the couch all day and all night. She looked shell-shocked and barely talked to anyone. Aunty Mallini and Uncle Sarath left her alone for a few weeks, but now they take her with them to the office. They are teaching her how to book flights, how to use a computer and talk to clients on the phone. She works almost every day now. When I do see her, she is exhausted.

Instead it is Uncle Sarath who looks at me closely and says, “What have you done to your face?”

“Nothing, Sarath Uncle.”

He stares at me, then says, “Ah, I see Dharshi has got at you with her tweezers. Trying to make you a proper American girl, ah?” He laughs. “Don't worry, I won't tell your mom.” Then he says, “How are you? What do you think of the US of A?”

I shrug. I cannot tell him everything brilliant and terrifying that has happened in these few months. But it's the first time anyone has asked, and for this I am grateful.

*   *   *

On the weekends other families come to gather around the table and the food. At Christmas we throw a big party. I have never celebrated Christmas before. On the island only Christians marked the day, but in America, it seems even a household of Sinhala Buddhists with a Buddha shrine in the alcove feel moved to celebrate.

Uncle Sarath brings a tree into the house. It sits in the living room shedding needles, releasing its scent into the air. There are presents under it wrapped in shiny paper. Amma and I have agonized about what to buy. We have spent hours walking the mall trying to understand what is appropriate. Our presents seem ridiculous. A perfume bottle for Aunty Mallini, a tie for Uncle Sarath. Clichés of the worst kind, but it's all we can think of to give. But when they open them on Christmas morning and exclaim in gratitude, we feel better, feel that we are in a kind of home, that we are indeed with family.

Various people come that night. There is a huge dinner, rice and curries made by my mother and her sister. Christmas cake, for which Dharshi and I had spent hours chopping fruits and nuts till our fingers ached. But now tasting the small rectangular pieces under their snowy coating of almond icing, we decide it was worth the trouble.

After the food is cleared away, they put on music. Aunties and uncles sing and hold hands like kids. A crashing of Christmas bells signals the arrival of Santa Claus, and the children's eyes grow huge. They had thought Santa was the exclusive property of their white classmates. But now here he is, wearing the proper red suit over the right belly, sporting the perfect snowy beard.

Old Sri Lankan Saint Nick sets himself up in a chair by the tree, picks up presents one by one to call out names. A six-year-old tugs at his mother's skirt to whisper, “Santa looks like Sarath Uncle.” And Santa, hearing this, roars, “Ho ho ho! That's because Santa Claus is Sri Lankan! Didn't you know that, little boy? Santa Claus flies through the air on his sled pulled by elephants. All that reindeer stuff they told you at school is nonsense! Elephants fly so much faster! It's a lonnnng journey from Colombo, but now I am here. Come and get your present, no?” The little one rushes up. His ideas about Christmas are now a little muddled, but he is much happier about this new version of the story. He will boast to his friends at school in the coming week that Santa Claus hails from the island, and they, finding flying elephants so much more evocative than reindeer, will have to agree.

*   *   *

On weekends Dharshi and I absolutely cannot go on trips to the grocery store or to the car wash with our parents because we have homework to do. We are at the kitchen table, our heads bent over our books, pencils working furiously as they get ready to leave. Aunty Mallini says, “Okay, ladies, both of you study hard. You have those math tests next week.” Uncle Sarath ushers them out, winks at us behind their backs as they all leave. We wait breathless, heart-thumping minutes, our ears wide open for the sound of the car starting, the garage door closing behind them.

When we are sure they are really gone, we run into the living room. We turn on MTV and sing as loudly as we can into hairbrushes, jump from one end of the couch to the other. We cock hips and leer lips in the mirror. We are material girls; we just want to have fun. We are Billie Jean in faded denim with fluffy bits of lace in our hair and black plastic bands encircling our wrists. We are Billy Idol platinum blonds walking like Egyptians on Manic Mondays. We tease our hair into giant sprayed edifices, draw long curling tails on the corners of our eyes. But when they come home, we are again safely parked at the kitchen table, studious, dedicated studiers of algebraic equations.

*   *   *

Some nights I wake to Dharshi shaking me hard, her fingers tight around my upper arms. I am startled awake, breathing furiously, the beast that sits on my chest slipping away reluctantly. She says, “Shh, shh.” When I'm quiet, she says, “You were dreaming. You cried out. Your dad, I think.”

I nod. She says, “You said a name … Someone else.”

My voice is rusty. “What name?”

“You said Samson, like that guy in the Bible. You said it very clearly. You were saying no, over and over.”

I say, “I don't know anyone like that.”

“Okay.” But she doesn't believe me. It is clear in her eyes as she turns away. It lies between us now, the first secret.

*   *   *

One day while both of us are lying on our beds reading, she says, “So what's it like?”

“What?”

“You know. Sri Lanka, the motherland, our ancestral place?” She says it with a roll of the eyes, but I realize that here is something I can give her. Here is something lacking for her. She had been there only once, in the nightmare after my father died, but she is asking me something else—not how it is to be there for two weeks as an outsider, a tourist, but what it is like to live and belong there.

“It was beautiful. We swam in the river and I had a best friend, Puime, she and I, we were so close. And I miss speaking Sinhala. And Sita's cooking. She could make the best moju.” I stop, guilty for evoking all these lost and buried treasures.

“Whose cooking?”

A vision of Sita at the gate as we left, small and tired, waving as if her arm would fall off. Punch at her side. A sharp stab through my heart. But also the realization that I was not the only one who had lost home and gained America. Dharshi too had lost certain things, and for her, these are losses she doesn't even know she has sustained. I try to explain it all to her. But I know it is futile. She grew up in this soil; her shade of flower has taken on the colder tint of this air. Leaving is an act that cannot be undone.

*   *   *

We sit on the couch, watching
Gilligan's Island
, our feet resting on each other. She teaches me the joys of afternoon cartoons and how to eat Oreos. “Like this,” twisting apart the cookies, her tongue languid in its swirl across the cream center. We walk to the drugstore for rainbow-flavored ice cream, delicious synthetic sweetness. We sit, heads close together over a single cassette tape recorded off the radio. We play and rewind and play and rewind, all the while our pencils scribbling like crazy to write down the lyrics, to penetrate the mystery exactly. We fill notebooks with lyrics. We transcribe parts of our favorite Wham! song so that we can reenact the video: “Young guns, having some fun/Crazy ladies keep 'em on the run.” In those days she was the whole of the continent for me. “One, two, take a look at you/Death by matrimony.” She is George and I am Andrew and we strut through the living room feeling dangerous and free. She twirls and glitters and I, star-struck, emulate her every move.

*   *   *

I hear Dharshi and my mother talking in the kitchen. Usually they just tolerate each other as if my mother can't deal with having another daughter and Dharshi can't abide the idea of a second mother. But now I listen and hear Dharshi say, “Aunty, who is Samson?”

My mother says, “Why, Dharshi?”

There's a pause that Dharshi doesn't fill, so my mother says, “That's the name of our servant back in the old house. Why do you want to know?”

Dharshi says, “No reason.”

I wait for her to tell my mother that this is the name I cry out in my sleep. Sometimes in horror, sometimes in something far from horror. But she doesn't say it and I walk into the room and they both look at me. My mother with steely eyes asking whether I have revealed the secrets that will destroy us. In Dharshi's eyes is knowledge, as if now, without my saying anything, she knows everything.

 

Nine

The white man opens the door with a flourish and my mother and I walk through the two-bedroom apartment, noting the worn magenta carpet, the windowless bathroom, the chilly rooms. He says, “It's not much, but the rent is good and your daughter's school is close enough.”

And then we are alone, Amma and I. We have never been alone together in this way before. As if set adrift on an ice floe in this enormous new continent. We live together, both of us haunted by a place, absent people we must never speak of.

*   *   *

America: It is like being reborn as a blank, like being outside history. People look at me and then look past me because they cannot place me. They think I am Indian or Mexican. Innumerable conversations invariably follow this precise trajectory:

Person:
Where are you from?

Me:
Sri Lanka.

Person
(
confused and incredulous, sure he/she has misheard
): Where?

Me
(
in the monotone of a person delivering lines
): It's a small island twenty-two miles off the southern coast of India.

Person
(
relief dawning in his/her eyes—a familiar word; visions of samosas, chai, and women in bindis
): Oh, so it's
part
of India.

Me:
No, no, it's a separate island. It's its own country.

Person:
Oh.

Me:
It's a separate independent island nation. It has nothing to do with India.

Person:
So is it Hindu or Muslim?

Me:
Neither. It's primarily Buddhist. But there are Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

Person
(
eyes glazing over
): So it's not a part of India?

The social studies teacher says, “And as another marker of their primitive state, these people eat with their hands. They haven't discovered cutlery yet.” She shows a slide of a family of Australian aborigines around a fire, the absence of forks and knives marking them as other, savage, frightening. I think of our dining room in Kandy, all of us gathered together. Sita bringing steaming dishes to the table, the luxury of my fingers moving through rice and curry. So this is what they think of us. Entire civilizations derided because of the way we choose to tackle our food. It feels unfair, but I'm careful after that. No outsider will ever see me use my hands. Always I will be proper and formal, employing my knife and fork.