Unaccustomed Earth Read online

  “Let’s wait this out for a few minutes,” Amit said, panting for breath. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  In the entryway, on a bulletin board, was a list of room assignments for the wedding guests. He left Megan standing there, reading the names on the list, while he went to the bathroom. All along the hallway the doors were open, beds stripped, sheets folded up on top of them. In the bathroom, the shower stalls, separated by slabs of gray marble, still had beads of water on them from the morning’s use. When he returned, Megan was no longer in the entryway. He began walking down the remaining length of the hall and found her in one of the rooms, perched on the edge of a desk. She was looking at a xeroxed sheet of paper that someone had stepped on, leaving the dusty imprint of a shoe’s sole. “The brunch ended at eleven,” she said.

  The arrangement of the room was familiar to him but things had been redone since his time here. There was a new fire alarm, blond wood furniture. The mattress looked firmer, without the black-and-white ticking he remembered. There was a tan carpet covering the floor. The shade half-pulled on the window was fresh, with a ring attached to the string. The effect was more sanitized, less charming, a lot like the inside of the Chadwick Inn. He opened the closet, barely deep enough for a hanger.

  “You know, we should have just stayed here,” Megan said. “We would have saved two hundred dollars, and I wouldn’t have spent half the night worried you’d vanished into thin air.”

  He closed the closet, then shut the door to the room. There was no way to lock it from the inside. “My fault for trying to have a romantic getaway.”

  “But this is so much more romantic.” She spoke objectively, but he also detected a note of regret. When he turned to her she was preoccupied, slightly frowning. She had removed her glasses, raised her fleece pullover, and was wiping the delicate lenses on the T-shirt underneath. Her pulled-back hair was slick against her head, her cheeks flushed from running. She held out the glasses in front of her face, inspecting them before putting them back on. “Was it in a room like this that you had sex for the first time?”

  It was something, after all these years, that she didn’t know about him. In spite of her anger his past still preyed on her, if only because she hadn’t been a part of it. “I didn’t have sex at Langford. Anyway, it was a boys’ school back then.”

  “I refuse to believe there weren’t ways to sneak girls in.”

  “There were, but I never did. I’ve told you a million times I was miserable here.”

  “What about Pam?” Megan asked, folding her arms across her chest, glancing over at the bed. “Did you ever have sex with her?”

  “No.”

  She took a step toward him, looking at the shirt that clung coldly to his body, then directly into his eyes. “What, then? Something passed between you two, it’s obvious.”

  “It was nothing, Meg. We were friends and for a while I had a crush on her. But nothing happened. Is that so terrible?”

  The information fell between them, valuable for the years he’d kept it from her, negligible now that he’d told. Through the window he saw the workmen in the rain, folding up the chairs and stacking them onto a cart. He went to the window and pulled down the shade completely, darkening the room. Then he turned back to Megan, close to her now. He kneeled on the floor and put his arms around her legs, pressing his face against her jeans. She did not walk away as he feared, did not detangle herself from his awkward embrace. Then he felt her hand on top of his head, her long fingers grazing the gray hairs of his skull, and instantly, powerfully, he felt an erection. He began to kiss her legs, grasping at her belt loops and pulling her down so that she was kneeling on the carpet, too. He put a hand up against the thick inseam of her jeans, knowing exactly what it was like to touch her there, the combination of skin and bone and hair. He looked at her and he saw that although her face was turned away, she had relaxed her body, adjusting herself to accommodate his hand.

  “We can’t do this here,” she whispered, and yet she was tipping back her head, allowing him to push up her fleece pullover.

  “Why not?” He was kissing her neck now, and then her mouth, strong, open-mouthed kisses that she was returning. He took her hand and placed it under his belt.

  She looked at him then, with slight tenderness, and shook her head. “It’s a dorm room, Amit. Kids live here.”

  But he continued, guiding her hand to his belt buckle while forcing off her clothes, the fleece, the soft T-shirt below that. Her hair came undone. He pulled down her jeans, revealing thighs that were chilled and reddened, as if from a sunburn. They took off their shoes and socks, a mess of wet grass clippings falling onto the carpet, then positioned themselves on the mattress. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d done this outside their apartment, outside their bedroom, where they were always nervous that the girls would walk in. They were nervous now, but they were excited, too, knowing they could get caught. He entered her and felt her hands on his back, warming him, her ankles around the backs of his legs, and the shock of her tongue in his ear. She offered to turn over, knowing this was the quickest way. But he wanted to face her. He placed his hands on her hips, over the stretch marks that were like inlaid streaks of mother-of-pearl that would never fade, whose brilliance spoke only for the body’s decay. He put his mouth to one of her breasts, flattened and drained after nursing two children, tasting the film of perspiration that had gathered. Her breathing became audible and then she cried out, loudly enough for anyone in the neighboring rooms to know what was taking place. But no one discovered them, no workmen came to clean up, no guest from the wedding strayed in, no little girls intruded giggling into the room. He came inside her and sat up, knowing they could not linger. He was looking at the clothes they needed to put on again. Megan’s eyes were on his face, an arm stretched in front of her and a hand pressed to his chest, as if to prevent him, now that they were finished, from collapsing on top of her again. But he hoped that he was forgiven, and for a few moments they remained together on the narrow bed in the little room, his heart beating rapidly, vigorously, plainly striking the skin of her palm.

  Only Goodness

  It was Sudha who’d introduced Rahul to alcohol, one weekend he came to visit her at Penn—to his first drink from a keg and then, the next morning in the dining hall, his first cup of coffee. He’d pronounced both beverages revolting, preferring Schnapps to the beer and emptying a dozen packets of sugar in his coffee cup. That had been his junior year of high school. When she was home the following summer he asked her to buy him some six-packs, planning to have a party one weekend when their parents were going to be in Connecticut overnight. He’d shot up to six feet, braces off his teeth, whiskers sprouting around his mouth, dark pimples occasionally studding his cheekbones, her little brother in name only. She went to a local liquor store, helping Rahul divvy up the cans between his room and hers so that their parents wouldn’t discover them.

  After her parents were asleep she brought some cans into Rahul’s room. He snuck downstairs, bringing back a cup of ice cubes to chill down the warm Budweiser. They shared one cupful, then another, listening to the Stones and the Doors on Rahul’s record player, smoking cigarettes next to the open window and exhaling through the screen. It was as if Sudha were in high school again, doing things she once hadn’t had the wits or guts for. She felt a new bond with her brother, a sense, after years of regarding him as just a kid, that they were finally friends.

  Sudha had waited until college to disobey her parents. Before then she had lived according to their expectations, her persona scholarly, her social life limited to other demure girls in her class, if only to ensure that one day she would be set free. Out of sight in Philadelphia she studied diligently, double-majoring in economics and math, but on weekends she learned to let loose, going to parties and allowing boys into her bed. She began drinking, something her parents did not do. They were prudish about alcohol to the point of seeming Puritanical, frowning upon the members of their Bengali cir
cle—the men, that was to say—who liked to sip whiskey at gatherings. In her freshman year there had been nights when she got so drunk that she was sick on the streets of campus, splattering the sidewalk and stumbling back to her dorm with friends. But she learned what her limits were. The idea of excess, of being out of control, did not appeal to Sudha. Competence: this was the trait that fundamentally defined her.

  After Rahul graduated from high school their parents celebrated, having in their opinion now successfully raised two children in America. Rahul was going to Cornell, and Sudha was still in Philadelphia, getting a master’s in international relations. Their parents threw a party, inviting nearly two hundred people, and bought Rahul a car, justifying it as a necessity for his life in Ithaca. They bragged about the school, more impressed by it than they’d been with Penn. “Our job is done,” her father declared at the end of the party, posing for pictures with Rahul and Sudha at either side. For years they had been compared to other Bengali children, told about gold medals brought back from science fairs, colleges that offered full scholarships. Sometimes Sudha’s father would clip newspaper articles about unusually gifted adolescents—the boy who finished a PhD at twenty, the girl who went to Stanford at twelve—and tape them to the refrigerator. When Sudha was fourteen her father had written to Harvard Medical School, requested an application, and placed it on her desk.

  Sudha’s example had taught her parents that there was nothing to fear about sending a child to college. Rahul took it in stride as well, not overly anxious as Sudha had been the summer before she’d gone away. He was almost indifferent to the changes ahead, his attitude reminding her that he’d always been the smarter one. Sudha had struggled to keep her place on the honor roll, to become salutatorian of her high school class. But Rahul never lifted a finger, never cracked a book unless it appealed to him, precocious enough to have skipped third grade.

  At the end of the summer, Sudha went to Wayland to help him pack, but when she got there she saw that there was nothing left for her to do. He had already stuffed his bags, filled some milk crates with records, grabbed sheets and towels from the linen closet, wrapped the cord around his electric typewriter. He told her she didn’t need to go all the way to Ithaca, but she insisted, riding beside him as he drove his new car, their parents following behind. The campus was on a hilltop surrounded by farms and lakes and waterfalls, nothing like Penn. She helped unload his things, carrying boxes across the quadrangle along with the other families of incoming freshmen. When it was time to say good-bye their mother wept, and Sudha cried a little, too, at the thought of abandoning her little brother, still not eighteen, in that remote, majestic place. But Rahul did not behave as if he were being either abandoned or liberated. He pocketed the money their father counted out and gave him as they parted, and he turned back toward his dormitory before Sudha and her parents had pulled away.

  The next time she saw him was Christmas. At dinner he had nothing specific to say about his classes, or his professors, or the new friends he’d made. His hair had grown long enough to conceal his neck and to tuck behind his ears. He wore a checked flannel shirt, and around his wrist, a knotted woven bracelet. He did not eat the enormous amounts Sudha still did when she sat at her mother’s table. He seemed bored, watching but not helping when Sudha and her mother decorated the tree with the ornaments she and Rahul had made when they were little. Sudha remembered always seeming to come down with the flu over Christmas break, collapsing once she was free of the pressure of exams, and thought that Rahul might do so, too. But later that evening, finding her upstairs where she was wrapping gifts in her room, he seemed to have perked up. “Hey. Where did you hide it?” he asked.

  “Hide what?”

  “Don’t tell me you came home empty-handed.”

  “Oh,” she said, realizing what he meant. “It didn’t occur to me. I just thought, since you’re in college—” It was true, it hadn’t occurred to her this time to stick a six-pack into her bag. She preferred wine now, a glass with dinner when she went out with friends in Philadelphia, but she did not expect it when she came home to Wayland.

  “I’m still not old enough to buy anything here.” He glanced around the room as if it might contain what he sought, looking at her closet and her chest of drawers, at the bed that was covered with wrapping paper and a box from Filene’s containing a nightgown for her mother.

  “Trip to the liquor store?” he suggested, sitting on top of the bed, crushing some wrapping paper she’d unrolled. His hand sifted through the gift tags, the tape, picking up each item and then dropping it again.

  “Now?” she asked.

  “Do you have any other plans for the evening?”

  “Well, no. But Ma and Baba are going to think it’s weird if we go out all of a sudden.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Didi. You’re almost twenty-four. Do you really still care what they think?”

  “I was about to get into my pajamas.”

  He picked up the scissors, his eyes focused on the slow opening and closing of the blades, as if discovering their function for the first time. “Since when did you get so boring?”

  She knew he was joking, but the remark hurt her nevertheless. “Tomorrow, I promise.”

  He stood up, distant again as he had been at dinner, and she felt herself faltering. “I guess it’s still open,” she said, looking at her watch. And so she’d gone, lying to her parents that she needed to get something last minute at the mall, Rahul saying he’d drive her there.

  “You’re the best,” Rahul told her as they headed into town. He rolled down the window on his side, filling the car with freezing air, and fished in his coat pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He pushed in the lighter on the dashboard and offered her one, but she shook her head, turning up the heat. She told him that she’d applied to go to London the following year, to do a second master’s at the London School of Economics.

  “You’re going to London for a whole year?”

  “You can visit me.”

  “Why do you need another master’s degree?” He sounded distressed, and also disapproving. It was the sort of reaction she expected from her parents. Her parents hadn’t allowed her to do a junior year abroad at Oxford, telling her then that she was too young to live in a foreign county alone. But now they were excited by the prospect of Sudha going to London, where they’d first lived after getting married and where Sudha had been born, talking about visiting and reconnecting with old friends.

  She explained that LSE had one of the best programs in developmental economics, that she was thinking of doing NGO work, eventually. But Rahul didn’t seem to be listening, and she was annoyed with him, with herself, really, for agreeing to go out so late at night. “You want a six-pack?” she asked when they got to the liquor store.

  “I’d prefer a case.”

  In the past she had paid for things without a second thought, but she was aware, now, that he did not reach for his wallet.

  “And a bottle of vodka, too,” he added.

  “Vodka?”

  He drew another cigarette out of its pack. “It’s a long vacation.”

  Their parents were in bed by the time they returned, but Sudha insisted they hide things as they had before. Thinking that their mother might have reason to enter Rahul’s room for the weeks that he was home, to clean up or put away his laundry, she kept the liquor in her room, a few cans at the back of her closet, some in a gap behind a bookcase, the bottle of Smirnoff wrapped in an old pilly sweater in her chest of drawers. She told Rahul it was safer that way, and he didn’t seem to care. He took a couple of cans for the night, pecking her on the cheek before he left her, not insisting when she said she was too tired to join him.

  He had been born when Sudha was six, and the night her mother went into labor was the first sustained memory of her life. She remembered being at a party in the home of one of her parents’ Bengali friends in Peabody, being left there overnight because her father had to take her mother straight to Bosto
n without the suitcase Sudha had helped pack containing the toothbrush and cold cream and robe her mother would need in the hospital. Though Sudha understood that a baby was about to be born, had felt it with her hand as it sometimes threatened to pound clear through her mother’s belly, she was terrified nevertheless that her mother, moaning with her forehead pressed against a wall, was dying. “Go away,” she said, when Sudha tried to stroke her mother’s hand, in a tone that had stung. “I don’t want you to see me this way.” After her parents’ departure the party continued. Sudha was expected to play in the basement with the other children, among the washer and dryer, as dinner was served to adults. The host and hostess did not have children of their own. Sudha had slept on a cot in a spare room containing no permanent furniture other than an ironing board and a closet devoted to cleaning supplies. In the morning there were no Frosted Flakes for her to eat, only toast with margarine, and it was then, during that restrained and disappointing adult breakfast, that the phone rang with news of her brother’s arrival.

  She had been hoping for a sister but was delighted nevertheless no longer to be an only child, to have someone help fill the emptiness she felt in her parents’ home. The few things they owned were always in their places, the two most current issues of Time in the same spot on the coffee table. Sudha preferred the homes of her American friends, crammed and piled with things, toothpaste caking their sinks, their soft beds unmade. Finally, with Rahul’s arrival, there was a similar swelling and disorder: his lotions and diapers heaped on the top of the dresser, stockpots clattering with boiling bottles on the stove, an infant’s strong, milky odor pervading the rooms. She remembered how excited she had been, moving her things to one side to make space in her bedroom for Rahul’s bassinet, his changing table, his mobile of stuffed bumblebees. Toys and other gifts accumulated in the crib he would eventually use; her favorite was a stuffed white rabbit that played a tune if a key at its throat was turned. She had not minded when her mother came in in the middle of the night to comfort Rahul, sitting in a rocking chair, singing a song in Bengali, something about a fishbone piercing the foot of a little boy, a song that would lull Sudha back to sleep also. Birth announcements were bought at the drugstore, the card of Sudha’s choosing, and she helped to put them in their envelopes, dampening stamps with her father on a wet sponge. Countless photographs were taken—Rahul sleeping in his bassinet, being bathed in a plastic tub—and she took it upon herself to arrange these in a special album, with a blue denim cover because he was a boy.