Marriage of a Thousand Lies Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by SJ Sindu

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sindu, SJ.

  Marriage of a thousand lies / SJ Sindu.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-790-2

  eISBN 978-1-61695-791-9

  1. Lesbians—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Sri Lankans—United

  States—Fiction. 4. Immigrant families—Fiction. 5. Choice (Psychology)—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title

  PS3619.I5688 M37 2017 813’.6—dc23 2016047187

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For all my families—blood, chosen, desi, queer—

  Marriage of a Thousand Lies

  When I was nine I wanted a short-sleeved button-down shirt. Amma refused to buy one from the boys’ section, pushed me instead toward the pinks and butterflies in the girls’, so I told her I needed one for a school play. I wore it open when I biked down hills, the wind slipping its fingers through the loose weave, cooling my sweat through my tank top. My best friend Nisha told me I’d make a cute boy, and her words squeezed something deep inside my bones, pried loose the skin between my legs. Pin pricks. Needles. My first lie.

  The Game

  Music pumps from the walls and jumps off the tin roof tiles. Gay night at the local dive, and it’s a clash of rainbow shirts against walls of dusty license plates. College lesbians and blue-collar queers slide around each other in the hot, coffin-shaped bar. Hands slip numbers over sticky tables, roaming thumbs hook over edges of rough denim, drunken tongues on beads of sweat, lips mix over whispered lies, skin on skin without room for truths and this is why we’re here.

  “Two o’clock,” Kris says. “Don’t look.” He leans my way over a tall, spindly table and sips his long island iced tea through a stirrer held between his teeth. His hair, which he grows out into a swoop over his left eye, falls down between us like a curtain. We’ve both taken off our wedding rings. Mine rests in a tiny glass tray in our bathroom. Kris’s is placed carefully on his nightstand next to his multivitamins.

  The walls vibrate with the bass, bouncing across my skin. I drink my beer and check my phone, wondering if it’s my ex calling, but it’s only my mother.

  “Your two o’clock, or mine?” I say.

  “Mine.” Kris shakes the hair out of his eyes and points at my phone. “Is it Emily?”

  “No.” I put my phone back in my pocket. It’s only been a couple of weeks since Emily and I broke up, but the time has stretched me out. My insides feel ragged and thin. I want the dance floor to swell up with people, the music to climb inside me and wipe my brain clean.

  Kris stares hard at his glass, now mostly filled with ice, the dark tea slurped down to the last inch. Even at twenty-seven, he is still all angles that push at his clothing.

  I drain the last of my beer and walk toward the bar. Kris’s two o’clock is a man sitting at the table next to ours in a Red Sox hat and a white Hanes shirt. He holds his Bud Light to his lips but doesn’t drink.

  I walk up next to a woman on a bar stool whose sad eyes droop down at the outer corners like they’re going to tip the pupils right out of her face. My phone buzzes. I ignore it. The woman smiles at me, her mouth edged in red lipstick. I could take her into a bathroom stall and push her up against the cold brick walls. I think of that red, red mouth gaping open, lipstick smeared, fingers clutching at me, lips slippery on my fingers and mouth.

  I smile back. She slides her bar stool closer and touches my arm when she talks, her fingers tingling the skin where I’ve pushed up the sleeves of my button-down. Kris would say it was worth it. A fuck’s a fuck, he would say.

  My phone buzzes. Amma again. I leave the woman smiling and walk back to where Kris is standing, stirring the ice in his glass around and around. This is the first time we’ve gone out in months—my unemployment and his busy work schedule as a second-pass message editor for a greeting card company keeps us out of the bars and at home doing normal married people things like Amma always wanted. Kris spends his nights trying to write his own greetings and staring at the cards framed over his desk, the few he got published when he first left engineering and started in this business. I spend my nights drawing commissions for horny suburban fanboys with money to waste—too-thin elves facing off against tentacled monsters, custom Sailor Scouts, coy anime girls frolicking at the beach, well-endowed geishas undressing in dimly-lit rooms.

  “So?” Kris says. He tips his glass back and shakes an ice cube into his mouth.

  “The one at the bar? I don’t think so.”

  “A fuck’s a fuck.” He holds the ice cube between his teeth and talks around it. “Emily’s getting laid. Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Shut up.” I wish I had bought another beer so that I’d have something to hold onto, so that the cold of it could take my mind off the ache in my stomach. My hands grasp at the air.

  The man in the Red Sox hat stares hard at Kris through the darkness of the bar.

  “Emily was no Nisha,” Kris says. He raises his empty glass. “To Nisha, your oldest and truest.”

  I feel the outline of my phone through my pocket and think about calling Nisha.

  “Red Sox Hat seems interested,” I say.

  “He’s drinking a Bud Light.”

  “A fuck’s a fuck.”

  I haven’t spoken to Nisha since my wedding, haven’t had a meaningful conversation with her since we graduated from high school four years before that. I tap my fingers on the table. What would she say if I called her now?

  “He’s not bad looking.” Kris tucks a piece of hair behind his ear and looks again at the man, letting his gaze linger. He crunches down on another ice cube. “He’s coming over.”

  Red Sox Hat puts his enormous biceps on our table, which creaks under the pressure. He’s younger-looking close up, probably still in his early twenties, still in college. Kris sits up a bit straighter.

  The man smirks at me and says, “Can I buy you a drink?”

  Before I can react, Kris reaches across the table and folds his fingers over my wrist. My phone buzzes.

  “This one’s mine,” Kris says.

  Red Sox Hat gets up off the table and looks from Kris to me and back to Kris. “My mistake.” He walks back to his table.

  I wrench myself from Kris’s grip. He puts his forehead in his hands.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I thought he was looking at you.”

  Kris nods to the table. I rub my wrist where he held it. We have an agreement that he’ll intervene if guys hit on me, but he overdoes it.

  “I knew these boots were a bad idea,” I say. Kris had picked them out. “I look straight.”

  “How’s this for a greeting? Roses are red, violets are blue.”

  “Is now really the time?”

  “Every guy I like just wants to sleep with you.”

  “Wonderful. You should write greetings for a living.”

  Kris lifts his head up and catches my eye. We laugh at the same time. Our heads tip toward each other and we clutch the table for support. Some of the thinness inside me fades. I feel almost solid.

  •••

  Back in our two-story cape outside of Bridgeport, Kris and I run on autopilot like we do every night when neither of us is getting laid. I track down one of our favorite Indian movies in a stack of DVDs on top of the TV, the cases lost or in storage or thrown acciden
tally into the recycling. Kris noisily makes Maggi noodles on the stove. We act against a backdrop of crawling-orchid wallpaper with curtains and light switch plates that match seamlessly. The talk of painting when we first moved in gave way to an affectionate tolerance for the pantheon of flowers that fly awkwardly across the walls, the permanently clogged fireplace, and the bathroom where every surface is mirrored—Kris’s favorite place to shower with his rotating collection of boyfriends and hookups.

  We settle down in the dark with our steaming bowls of Maggi. Kris leans his head on my shoulder and we watch Kajol, the heroine, run around somewhere in Europe—snowcapped mountains behind her—while wind rips through her saree and scatters it behind her like a flag. The whole song sequence is a dream in the hero’s mind as he stares at the full moon and strums his cittern, depressed that the girl he loves is getting an arranged marriage. His balding father sits down beside him, squints at the moon, and tells him to go after her. “The bride belongs to the man who brings her home,” he says.

  Kris’s phone rings.

  “It’s Laila Aunty,” he says, handing it to me.

  I pause the movie and get up from the couch. Laila Aunty is the woman that my father married after he left Amma. I can never talk to her sitting down. Her voice on the phone is hushed in a tone she hasn’t used since my second-oldest sister Vidya ran away with a black man from Kentucky.

  “Lakshmi,” she says. “You are home, no?” Laila Aunty adds “no” to the end of all her sentences—residue from her British schooling.

  I hate her voice.

  “I’m home,” I say. I walk into the kitchen. My feet slip with sweat.

  “You should call more.”

  I’ve never called her. If I feel the need to hear Appa’s voice, I call his cell directly.

  “I’ve meant to call,” I say. “I’ve just been very busy.” I wipe my hands on a dishrag and throw away a condom wrapper that was on the counter next to the microwave. I feel naked, like she can see through me and into the house, like she’s judging the piles of dishes that only get done when Kris puts on his big yellow gloves and sanitizes them all with scalding water because he doesn’t believe dishwashers can do the job right. My empty beer bottles stand in clusters on the kitchen table. Recycling spills from the corner trashcan. Laila Aunty would faint if she could see it.

  Laila Aunty coughs. “I have some bad news, Lucky.”

  I pick up a cup that may have once held tomato juice. It slips and lands with a thud against the stainless-steel sink.

  “Your grandmother is in the hospital. You need to come home, no?”

  •••

  I drive to Boston that night. I miss the city. Muggy air billows from the mountains and seeps into the car. Dingy clouds hang too low over dry patches of grass. Masspike plays hide and seek around tufted green hills. I always forget how narrow the streets are in the old towns just north of Boston, how you can almost stick your hand out of the car window and ruffle the next driver’s hair. Speeding in Winchester feels like scraping the edge of a cliff, moment after moment of narrow escapes and near disasters, chasing the turn of the road, inches away from being swallowed by the night and not caring one bit, one flick of the wheel on Arlington Road and a cold lake awaits, who do I have to live for, a crash bang and blackness, a final note that sounds oh so good and true.

  Amma’s house sits at the end of Emerson Drive in Winchester—the house my parents bought before Appa got tenure at Northeastern, before Amma finished her dentistry certification—a tiny cape house with powder-green paint peeling off the siding, nestled in between other hundred-year-old houses with damp, unfinished basements that flood every spring with the river. This block is the cheapest in town.

  Through the lit window, I see Amma sitting in the kitchen waiting for me. Laila Aunty and Appa are there, too, milling around our old house like flies. Amma has her face in her hands. She puts her elbows on the blue Formica kitchen island, wearing one of her usual cotton nightgowns that button all the way down over her thick body. Her frizzy gray hair is pulled back from her face.

  I enter with my key. Everyone turns toward the door but no one moves.

  Appa’s thinning hair is dyed black, his skin leathery from his youth in Sri Lanka, dark and tough. He stands at the bottom of the stairs with his hands in the pockets of his pleated khakis, wearing a blue sports coat that’s starting to rub down to periwinkle at the elbows. Beside the faded orange walls of our kitchen, he seems softened, not diminished but simply worn around the edges like an old photograph. A thin scar snakes down his cheek. When I was little, I liked to trace its raised ridge with my finger and ask how he got it. The story changed every time.

  “You cut your hair again,” he says.

  He says it every time he sees me, though I’ve had it short for years. He clears his throat. He’s picked up smoking again.

  Laila Aunty eyes the two of us before she laughs—a high, tittering giggle that sets my teeth on edge—and comes to hug me. Her hair, as usual, is plaited modestly at the back. Her heavy gold earrings scratch my face when she pulls me close to her sandalwood scent.

  I stand there until she stops.

  “You’re too thin, dear,” she says. “But beautiful as always, no.” She pushes my bangs out of my eyes and rubs my cheek while I try not to pull away.

  Amma clears her throat. Laila Aunty shrinks back.

  Amma’s hug smells like vanilla-cake shampoo. Every year for her birthday, my sister Vidya sends this shampoo to Amma, no return address. And even though Amma pretends to throw it out, pretends that she’s too proud to accept something from her wayward, estranged daughter, we all know she fishes it out of the trash once everyone leaves, and uses it religiously until it runs out.

  Amma sits me down on one of the three stools at the kitchen island. Three is a strange number, and we always used to have someone standing during family meals, but the stools all match so Amma never wanted to buy a fourth one. She starts to make tea on the stove.

  “I can do that,” I say, getting up from the stool.

  She waves her hand. “No, no. Your tea is terrible.”

  I sit back down and wait for her to tell me about Grandmother. The news comes in little spurts. Amma speaks to the pot in which she boils the tea, and later to the cups as she stirs in the sugar.

  “She fell down the stairs. She’s getting so old, you know.” Amma pauses with the clink clink of the sugar spoon against the ceramic cups. “We went to the hospital.” Clink clink. “She’s fine, upstairs resting.”

  Laila Aunty studies the picture wall of my family’s frozen smiles. She stands for a long time in front of my oldest sister Shyama’s wooden plaques from high school: 4.0 GPA, National Merit, National Honor Society, Honor Roll all four years; framed pictures of Shyama graduating cum laude from Columbia, getting married, receiving her Master’s from NYU, holding her newborn son.

  Pictures of my second-oldest sister Vidya stop around the time she graduated from college. She wears tight clothes in her high school pictures, the prettiest one of all of us with her curls and Bollywood features, posing next to her sculptures and paintings.

  Photos of me are all braces and thick glasses, knobby knees and too-sharp elbows, except for the one of me in my Bharatanatyam dancing costume, shining with gold thread and jewelry surrounded by a gilded frame, giant, almost life-size. It’s the one picture where I don’t look awkward or gangly. I’m svelte, feminine, almost sexy, silk pleats pooling between my legs, my body in an impossible pose of movement. The dancer, the black sheep, fucked from birth, but the me in the pictures didn’t know it then.

  Amma puts a steaming cup of tea in front of me. My glasses fog up. I wrap my hands around the cup and soak the warmth into my skin.

  “This was a close call.” Amma takes her own cup of tea in a chipped mug that says “#1 Dad,” and takes a sip.

  Appa picks up the two ot
her cups and gives one to Laila Aunty. They get tea in delicate flower-printed teacups, which Amma reserves for guests who aren’t family. Laila Aunty goes back to studying the photo wall.

  Appa rubs nervously at his mustache, which he’s forgotten to dye black. “It would be nice if you stayed with your mother for a while, Lucky. She needs the help.” He clears his throat and brushes down his mustache. He rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, something he does when he’s ready to leave a place.

  Laila Aunty pretends not to notice. Instead she stares at a picture of my wedding, Kris and me looking like we’re about to start laughing—Kris in his white and gold turban, me dolled up in a thick red saree, us looking at each other, sharing what my mother thinks is a moment of love. My thali, the thick gold chain that Kris tied around my neck to signify our marriage, glints in the photo. The light of the flash reflects off the thali and onto our skins. Laila Aunty tips back her teacup and drinks fast, her neck ballooning out every time she swallows. The silence gets thirsty, settles on our shoulders like a winter coat.

  Let me tell you something about being brown like me: your story is already written for you. Your free will, your love, your failure, all of it scratched into the cosmos before you’re even born. My mother calls it fate, the story written on your head by the stars, by the gods, never by you.

  Everyone is watching you, all the time, praising you when you abide by your directives, waiting until you screw up. And you will screw up.

  I coasted by for longer than most people. Most stray early, dating in high school or wearing the wrong clothes, maybe piercing something they shouldn’t, drinking like hell in college. But then they shape up, put on a suit and go to their big-kid jobs in the swanky part of town, play middle management at biotech and engineering firms, or go to med school. They get married to other brown people and pop out some brown kids, buy a nice cookie-cutter house and everything is forgiven. As long as you follow your directives in the end, no matter how many lies you have to tell. But here’s the truth: I’m still lying.