What Lies Between Us Read online

  * * *

  In the morning the driver comes. I say goodbye to the river and the garden, the house and the dog. I hug and kiss Sita one last time, hold on to her and feel like I will choke until finally she pushes me away, wiping her face with her sari pallu. We get into the car and behind us she waves goodbye, Punch at her side. I watch until they are tiny and then we drive away from Kandy and down into the hot, crowded press of Colombo. A week later we leave the island. Framed in an airplane window, it lies below us, its palm trees waving goodbye, its long white beaches like lit crystal, its bustle and boom forgotten. It turns smaller and smaller until from this distance it is a garden blooming in the sea. I put my forehead on the cold window to say goodbye to both my father’s ghost and the threat of Samson. On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure. Then we trace a path between the tempest-tossed ocean and the canopy of stars and are carried into a new world.

  Part Two

  Eight

  We land in Fremont, a suburb in Northern California full of wide-open freeways, a sky that turns plum at dusk. This is a place where life is lived inside houses on silent streets and in strip malls. There are some sari shops, a few “ethnic” restaurants, but the predominance of brown skin, of Afghanis and Pakistanis and Indians that will come to mark this place, is far off in the future. We are few and far between. These are lonely days full of misunderstandings.

  In those first few weeks I saw unbelievable sights. A woman walking down the road with a small black dog on a leash, a plastic bag in her hand. At home a dog like this, a mutt, would be left to wander by itself. It might be beloved, but no one would leash it and walk it. It might perhaps follow at its owner’s heels, but only a dog of some preciousness, a discernible breed, would be put on a leash and led. But much more than the dog, what catches my attention is that mysterious bag in her hand. Full of what? I watch astounded as she stoops down behind the dog’s lowered flanks, the plastic bag spread wide in her hand, and scoops up shit, ties the bag, and walks away. As if the bag is precious, as if the dog has bestowed upon her a treasure that must be carried home and savored. How impossible to imagine, in this richest country of all, that people are saving dog turds? For what possible purpose? My imagination boggles at the question until Dharshi, my guide to everything in this new place, explains.

  There are other, more serious differences. On the island we were fixed in place from birth. We knew where we fit. You were this person’s older sister, that person’s second cousin on the father’s side, that one’s oldest cousin. Names would tell you everything about a person’s placement in the complex familial and community matrix. The naming described your destiny from birth to burning.

  In Sri Lanka, when two strangers met, they asked a series of questions that revealed family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrived at a common friend or relative. Then they said, “Those are our people, so you are also our people.” It’s a small place. Everyone knew everyone.

  But in America, there are no such namings; it is possible to slip and slide here. It is possible to get lost in the nameless multitudes. There are no ropes binding one, holding one to the earth. Unbound by place or name, one is aware that it is possible to drift out into the atmosphere, and beyond that, into the solitary darkness where there is no oxygen.

  * * *

  But before all this, we stumble off the plane, jet-lagged and dazed, into America. In the arrival lounge are Aunty Mallini, Uncle Sarath, and Dharshi. And my story of America always starts with Dharshi.

  We drive a maze of freeways through an alien world, and at the house she says, “You’ll share with me,” and leads me to her room. It is a cave, one wall covered floor to ceiling with posters of singers and bands in random jumbled order so that they overlap like a thick, scabbed skin. There are more huge posters on her closet door. It’s amazing. None of my friends back home have anything like this. I go close to look, hear her say, “You like music?”

  Nodding. Oh yes, I do. I like anything she likes.

  She says, “Okay, this is Paula Abdul. This is George Michael. This is—”

  “Duran Duran.” There they are, hanging right over my new bed, in their huge-hair and eyelined glory. It feels like a prophecy. I hear Puime’s words in my head. Maybe magic things are possible here.

  Sweeping her hair from her eyes, she says, “Well, good. I didn’t know if you’d know anything.”

  We have twin beds next to each other, mine bought when it was clear we were coming. I fall into it and sleep until the next evening, my dreams a tumble of time zones and clouds, and when my eyes open, she’s sitting on her bed reading, like a tiny pixie. When she sees I am awake, she says, “Let me see your clothes.” So I stumble out of bed, pull open my suitcase, and take out various things bought at the Colombo shops, some sewn especially for me.

  At each piece she wrinkles her nose and grimaces and finally says, “My god, are you really going to wear that stuff?”

  I shrug. “I don’t have anything else. I can’t have new ones. Amma spent so much for these. What’s wrong with them?”

  She frowns and says, “They’re not from here. No one wears things like that here.”

  My face falls.

  She says, “Okay. Look, why don’t you take some of mine. Let me see…” She bounces off her bed and pulls open the door to her closet. It is stuffed full, clothes jumbled in piles on the floor and askew on hangers, hung double and triple. She starts pulling out clothes, throwing them at my feet, a white minidress, a pair of denim overalls, a gray sweatshirt with the neck cut dangerously aslant. I look at the mess falling at my feet. It is the first act of generosity in this new and generous place, but I say, “Amma will never let me wear any of this!”

  She turns to look at me and screws up her eyes. “You think my parents let me dress like this? Are you crazy? They have no idea. You just wear it under your clothes, then you take the top stuff off just before you get to school.”

  I stare at her. “What? You mean, at school? What about uniforms?”

  She sits down hard on her bed, a pair of emerald-and-yellow-striped leggings in her hands, and says, “What uniforms? We don’t have uniforms here!”

  * * *

  The first day of school. A blur of faces and places. English spoken in an unfamiliar disjointed way. Only weeks later do the syllables come into focus and lock into their proper place.

  The English teacher pauses to take me in. The skirt that hangs in folds to my midcalf, the shirt buttoned to my wrists, a pair of white tennis shoes and socks on my feet. I hadn’t taken Dharshi’s advice on a covert outfit; instead I had let Amma choose my first day’s outfit. It has not been a success; no one has talked to me all day. They have looked at me as if I am not just from a different country but from a different planet. He says, “Let’s see. So you just arrived?”

  “Yes, sir, we came two weeks ago.”

  “You don’t have to call me sir, you know. And your English is very good.”

  “Yes, sir. We speak English in Sri Lanka. The British came and taught us.” It is a cheeky thing to say, but I can’t help it.

  My mother and I have come armed with English; we have at least that much, unlike so many who have come without it. I can’t imagine what it would be to come stripped of the carapace of language. In this one way, history has rendered us lucky.

  * * *

  I am fascinated by the girls. Girls with hair teased into stiff spiders crawling high off their foreheads, girls with eyes magnificently mascaraed and deeply shadowed. Walking into any girls’ bathroom is to enter a hissing, stinging cloud of Aqua Net. There are girls standing with their heads between their legs shaking out their layered manes into a storm of spray. There are girls leaning into the mirror to paint their eyes, their lips. Their clothes, their hair—it is all dazzling. How do they go through this ritual of choice every single morning? If I had more than a few clothes, choice would paralyze me.

  But I am learning that the rules are dif
ferent here. These girls don’t put their arms around each other as we did at home. Boys do not hold hands. Friendship is prescribed by the rules of separation and space between people’s bodies. Instead, it is girls and boys who do these things together, who walk around in couples, their arms linked, or even kiss against the wall of lockers. The first time I see a kissing couple, I look away, sure that a teacher will burst out and slap the two, haul them by their napes to the principal’s office, where their parents will be called, thereby bringing shame upon their families. When none of this happens, when nobody around me even notices, I see that I have indeed come into a brand-new place. Then I stare, mesmerized by the ease of it, the way bodies fit together so fluidly. I can’t imagine that ease. It is hard enough to get used to the presence of boys. I have never before been around them in this casual, easy way. In class, it is hard to concentrate. There are so many of them everywhere. I sit lower in my seat, hoping no one will notice my accent, my clothes, my overwhelming difference.

  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. Aun
ty 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.