Marriage of a Thousand Lies Read online

  When Appa and Laila Aunty finally leave, Amma washes their teacups by hand and puts them away in the cabinet that needs a fresh coat of paint.

  I walk up the navy-carpeted stairs to my old bedroom where Grandmother now sleeps. It’s a long, narrow blue box with two gable windows that cut through the slanted roof. My old computer, the bookshelves that used to hold my textbooks, they’re all still there, resting heavily against the walls. Even my wrought-iron bed that’s gritty from too much dust. And if I squint through the darkness, my sister Vidya’s high school final art project—a metal sculpture painted bright orange—sits where it always has on the window ledge.

  I can just make out a mound under the blankets, rising and falling with Grandmother’s breath. I watch until my breath matches hers, then sneak back downstairs to help Amma wipe down the kitchen counters before bed. The carpet soaks up my footfalls like sand.

  Grandmother gets up early the next morning. By the time I come downstairs, she’s sitting on a folding chair in the living room, watching a Tamil news show about the American election. On the screen, Obama smiles and gives a speech about healthcare reform while Tamil subtitles scroll underneath his face. Grandmother hunches from age, her skin melted into many little wrinkles. Her smile reveals three missing front teeth—one more than the last time I saw her—and a mouth permanently stained red from chewing betel leaves.

  She was a beauty in her day. The very few photos she had taken—one of her marriage and one of her graduation—show a smooth-skinned, round-faced girl with pearls laced through her bun. She wears a grand saree and smiles coyly into the camera. When I was little, I thought she was some kind of heiress. She laughed and set me straight. “Those are plastic beads in my hair,” she said. “And that’s a simple cotton saree.” For weeks I stared at the photo, wondering how the camera could transform a working-class girl into a princess on the page.

  I bend down and she kisses me with one long sniff on each cheek. She smells like baby powder and betel juice. I sink into the couch and check my phone. Still no contact from Emily. Already my insides feel fuller, some of the thinness filled in by travel. Outside, through the sliding-glass doors to the water-stained deck, Amma’s vegetable garden lies cushioned by the overgrown backyard. In middle school I had taken the mean notes that kids slipped into my locker and buried them under that garden, in between the neat rows of cabbages and carrots.

  Grandmother tells me the plot of her favorite show, a Tamil soap opera, and I try my best to follow. My Tamil isn’t the most fluent. Kris and I don’t use it at home. I can understand fairly well but I have an accent when I try to speak. My stomach can’t make the guttural sounds Tamil demands. My speech comes out sounding too flat, too delicate, too American. Tamil needs to be spoken deep and strong with big lungs.

  “How are your studies?” Grandmother asks, switching to English.

  I snap to attention.

  Grandmother smiles. She was once a teacher at a Catholic school in Sri Lanka, fluent in English. Now she only uses it when she thinks I’m not listening or when she really wants me to understand.

  “I’m not in school anymore, Ammamma.” I tell her this every time I visit, but she forgets. “I work at a company now.” I don’t. I got laid off months ago. I haven’t even told Amma yet.

  She nods slowly—my American accent takes a while for her to process—and squints again at the TV. Obama has stopped speaking for a biscuit commercial with a white-skinned woman and her long, straight black hair that slips across her back like water.

  “Your Amma had to go to work,” Grandmother says.

  “How do you feel? Does it hurt?”

  “I always hurt.” She shakes her head when she speaks, as if she’s shaking the syllables from her mouth.

  “But the fall. Do you hurt from your fall?”

  She looks at me, and I can see the way her eyes are fading to clear at the edges, fast losing their deep burgundy color. “Fall? I didn’t fall.”

  Grandmother was the first in our family to benefit from Sri Lanka’s free higher education system. She got a degree in English and dreamed of teaching at a private school. She married one of her university professors, seventeen years her senior, who promised to let her teach after marriage. And he did, for a year, before she got pregnant. Grandmother’s first maternity leave stretched and stretched until it swallowed the rest of her life.

  •••

  “She said she didn’t fall,” I say to Amma when she comes home from work.

  Amma’s face looks like a deflated balloon. She once looked like Vidya, my prettiest sister, thin and oval-faced. Now Amma is stiff with experience, her flesh choking her bones with too much skin. She purses her lips.

  “She gets like that sometimes,” Amma says. “Forgets things. She’s getting older.”

  Grandmother dozes on the couch. Amma has told her she’s only allowed to climb up the stairs to go to bed at night, and down them in the mornings. We keep our voices low. Amma unpacks her lunch bag, the small container of rice and curry that she takes to work every day, an orange or banana, and a tiny portion of Greek yogurt with sugar that she claims tastes like the yogurt they made back home in Sri Lanka. Amma eats a lot of foods because they’re like the ones she used to eat as a little girl. She even goes out of her way to find smaller, more tropical bananas at Stop & Shop.

  I fill up the electric kettle and wait for the water to boil for Amma’s after-work tea. Kris and I tried to continue high tea after we got married but it never stuck. Our tea had a weird aftertaste like plastic, too sweet, too bitter, too dark, too light with too much milk. Kris isn’t a fan of the dark Ceylon tea that Amma drinks. He wants expensive tea from stores run by white hippies, stores that sell tea leaves mixed with dried herbs and fruits. I can’t stand them, the teas that are too weak and not sweet enough, teas that come with their own accessories.

  I check my phone for any contact from Emily. Nothing, no texts, no calls. I put the phone away.

  “Can’t you live without your phone?” Amma says.

  I set out three mugs in a row and put a tea bag in each. When the kettle dings, I pour hissing water into the mugs. The tea bleeds into the water.

  Amma washes out her lunch containers in the sink and sets them to dry on the towel that covers part of the blue Formica counter. The once-tangerine kitchen walls are faded from all of Grandmother’s oily cooking.

  I hold each tea bag by its string and bob it up and down in the water until the liquid is dark like oil.

  “Nisha’s coming by today,” Amma says.

  My heart speeds up at the name. I squeeze out each tea bag with a spoon and put it into the sink.

  I first met Nisha in fourth grade when we moved to the same school district—me from Virginia where my sisters and I were born, Nisha from London. She had a strong English accent back then, one she lost over the years. Back then, Amma and Appa had an explosive relationship—they were either having tickling matches and cuddling on the couch, or shouting from across the room and banging doors.

  “She wants to see you,” Amma says.

  “Great.” I pour milk into one of the mugs.

  Amma clucks her tongue. “Heat that up first.”

  “I already poured it.”

  “It’s not tasty when you just pour it cold.” She takes a glass measuring cup from the cupboard and pours more milk into it. “You can have that tea. I’ll heat this up for mine and Ammamma’s.” She puts the measuring cup into the microwave, punches in two minutes, and sits down at the kitchen table.

  I wait for the microwave, pour the newly-heated milk into the rest of the tea, and add two spoons of sugar to each cup. Grandmother is borderline diabetic but she’ll be damned if she’s going to drink unsweetened tea. She says the artificial sweeteners taste funny, and she always knows when we try to trick her.

  Grandmother comes hobbling out of the living room to
the sound of my stirring the sugar. Amma helps her climb onto one of the stools.

  “You should grow out your hair, Vidya,” Grandmother says.

  I set the tea mug down in front of her.

  “That’s Lucky,” Amma says. “Not Vidya.”

  “You made good tea, Lucky,” Grandmother says, taking small sips.

  •••

  Amma calls me into her room. She rummages around in her antique armoire that once belonged to Grandmother—teakwood carved with hibiscus flowers, the only inheritance Amma owns. A bookshelf next to the armoire holds Tamil romance novels on the very bottom two shelves and framed paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses on the top shelves, each painting draped with a fabric flower garland. Amma burns sandalwood incense every morning when she prays, and the smoke swirls around the room for the rest of the day, working its way into hairs and fabric, lingering like a sweet something at the backs of throats. Here’s the truth: I don’t believe in gods.

  Amma holds out a silky beige shirt. “Wear this. You’ll look nice.”

  The shirt shimmers through my fingers, cool to the touch. Amma waits with her hands crossed at the wrists, watching me. When I don’t make a move, she walks over to me and I remember how thick she is, how she can easily block a doorway.

  She pinches my bicep between two fingers.

  This again.

  “Your arms need to be soft, Lucky. Your arms are too hard.”

  I pull away. I worked for years to get my triceps to bulge.

  She sits down next to me. “You need to think about the way you’re looking to others.” Her eyebrows make an arc across her face. She pets my hair, a shoulder-length frizz. I try hard not to flinch. “This is just too short.”

  “Shyama—”

  “Shyama’s hair is past her shoulders. You’re bald!”

  I scratch a place where my jeans are starting to fray.

  Amma pats my hand. “You’re not a child anymore, Lucky.”

  I concentrate on the loose thread.

  “With Nisha’s marriage,” Amma says, “the groom’s family will look at everyone around her. Even you.”

  The words erase my thoughts. “Nisha’s getting married?”

  “That’s what she’s coming to tell you.” Amma holds out the shirt.

  I take it and pull it on over my black tank top. The fabric slides cold against my skin.

  “You look like a lady,” Amma says. “Pretty.”

  In the mirror, the silk flows around my chest and the pouch of my stomach, small white flowers embroidered into the fabric. I pull at the front of it so it doesn’t hug my chest.

  “Stop fussing,” she says.

  “I look like—”

  “Like a lady. You are pretty.”

  The word makes me squirm. Pretty is girls like Shyama who get married to the men their parents pick out, girls who never play sports or talk loudly.

  Amma kisses the top of my head and smiles.

  •••

  Nisha comes by for dinner, her thin torso swimming in an Indian cotton tunic. She’s a good girl in the same ways that Shyama has always been a good girl. Nisha helps Amma heat up food, gets water for everyone, and makes cheerful conversation during dinner. Around her, I slouch even more than usual and forget to sit with my legs closed. Amma hisses at me to sit up straighter, to keep my knees together, to eat without spilling anything or making any noises.

  “Sit up, Lucky,” Amma says. “I don’t know what Krishna sees in you. You’re like a boy.”

  “Vidya’s getting married,” Grandmother says.

  “No,” Nisha says. “I’m getting married.” She giggles and looks down at her plate. She looks like the girls in Tamil commercials—all perfect makeup and practiced allure. She has a face pinched in the center, her eyes close to a long, straight-bridged nose.

  “He’s a good guy,” she says, and looks back down at her plate.

  I don’t know how she can eat with her fingers when her nails are so long and painted. She’s gotten her nose pierced since the last time I saw her.

  When we were young, Amma would drop me off at Nisha’s house when she went to work. We played in the green space behind her apartment building, replaying scenes from our favorite Tamil movies. Nisha loved movies starring Rajnikanth, a man hero-worshipped by most Tamils. Rajnikanth would leap out of burning buildings and beat up fifty henchmen to get the girl in the end. Outside, behind the apartment building, I leapt out of cardboard boxes and climbed trees, beat up imaginary villains and saved Nisha. She pretended to wear extravagant sarees and we sang duets like they did in the movies.

  After dinner, Amma and Grandmother watch Tamil game shows in the living room. Nisha and I talk in the guest bedroom. The bed sags and tips us toward each other.

  “I like your shirt,” Nisha says. She looks at me out of the corner of her carefully-painted eye.

  I shift in my seat and press myself against the headboard. Cold permeates through my shirt. I can make out a trace of the jasmine perfume she always wears. Muffled TV music works its way through the walls.

  “How’s the husband?” she asks.

  “How’s Simmons?”

  Nisha’s on her third post-college program. So far she’s quit pharmacy school and nursing school. Indecisive. Or just flighty.

  “Boring. I hate living at home. It must be amazing to live on your own, just you and your husband. Must be romantic.”

  I bite down on my laugh.

  She slaps my arm. “It’s not funny.”

  The room is too hot but my fingers are freezing.

  I sometimes wonder what it would’ve been like if we’d both come out in high school, if we would’ve tried dating for real. But Nisha was afraid even then. Even when we were by ourselves, she’d never acknowledge what is was that we were doing. I’d like to think that I would’ve come out, if she’d been willing, but that’s just another lie.

  Most people think the closet is a small room. They think you can touch the walls, touch the door, turn the handle, and walk free. But when you’re inside it, the closet is vast. No walls, no door, just empty darkness stretching the length of the world.

  Even during our on-again, off-again high school fling, Nisha never stopped pretending to like boys. She had a rotating string of boyfriends, but none that she actually seemed to like or want.

  She watches the screensaver of Amma’s computer and smiles with only her mouth.

  I sweat cold patches into my shirt, but my skin feels too small.

  She stares unblinkingly at her knees. “My parents arranged this. The marriage, I mean. He’s from India.”

  “When’s the wedding?” The words feel foreign, unwieldy. My tongue can’t wrap around the syllables.

  “The engagement ceremony is in a few weeks.” Nisha draws her knees to her chest. Her lips shimmer with a remnant of pink gloss, most of it eaten away with the meal. I try to remember what it tastes like.

  “The wedding’s in December,” she says.

  My tooth cuts skin. I lick away the blood on my lips.

  This was bound to happen. Nisha’s parents have been desperate to find a guy since I got married to Kris. As far as anyone knows, Kris and I fell in love.

  I tried to tell Nisha once, the truth about Kris and me. It was on the morning of my wedding, and I was terrified. But Nisha refused to hear it. She kissed me on the cheek to silence me, and left the room. That was four years ago, and after that I didn’t hear from her.

  Nisha scoots closer and presses up against my side. I wrap my arms around her. She puts her head on my shoulder.

  “Do you want this?” I ask.

  She breathes in and out. I press my cheek against her head. The words sink in. Nisha is getting married. The wedding’s in December. Wedding. Married. Nisha.

  “Sometimes I wish you were a boy,” Nish
a says.

  A wedding that wouldn’t be a lie. A true marriage with love, and children, and nothing extra on the side. It was hard to imagine.

  Here’s the truth: Sometimes I wish I were a boy, too.

  The three of us—Amma, Grandmother and I—prowl around the house for days like cats in a cage. We run into each other in the turns of hallways. We close doors too fast. Grandmother reminds us of the pain she’s in, but denies that she fell down the stairs. A wheezing cough buds in her throat. She tells me every day to grow out my hair.

  During the day while Amma’s at work, I sit with Grandmother and watch her watch TV. I tell Amma I’m working from home. She believes me, and doesn’t ask about the graphics tablet and pen plugged into my laptop. When I was a programmer, I worked from home most of the time. Amma doesn’t know that I haven’t worked for months, that my only source of employment has been drawing commissioned digital art. The gigs pay enough to shut Kris’s face about contributing to the household, but I’m not artistic like my sister Vidya, who could manipulate pigments and shape stories with her hands, make scenes out of nothing. She’s the real artist. I can’t do what she did, but I’m good enough to bring to life the orcs and gladiators and mermaids of teenagers’ dreams.

  When she watches TV, Grandmother chews betel leaves with an acrid, spicy mixture that scratches the inside of my nostrils. She’s done this since I was a kid visiting her in Sri Lanka.

  She wraps the thick, veined leaves around red-soaked coconut gratings, softened areca nuts, slaked lime paste, and spices I can’t name. After meals she chews coconut gratings that smell like perfume, mixed with candy-coated fennel seeds for fresh breath. Amma doesn’t approve, always scrunches her face and turns her head, but I’ve always loved watching Grandmother’s mouth ooze with red juice that she spits into a metal cup. The liquid clangs against the metal, her aim honed.

  She let me chew after my twenty-second birthday, when she first came to live with Amma from Sri Lanka. I couldn’t stomach the sharp acidic flavor that spread over my tongue. I had to run to the trashcan to spit it out. I learned instead how to fold the betel leaves, how to chop and soak the areca nuts, which mixtures went with what, what kind Grandmother liked.