Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

The sample above speaks volumes. Note the incomplete a and o , how the two ends of a line yearn to meet. However despairing the words that precede it, the a and o reveal a man in search of something, or someone, a man who has not yet drained his deepest cisterns of hope.

I tried to appeal to my mom in private, the day after her return from Nashville, but she was standing over her bathroom sink, smearing a sliced grape all over her face. She’d read somewhere that grape acids would tighten her pores, and she wanted to look good for the wedding. She planned to grape her face every other day until the Big Day.

“That’s a lot of grapes,” I said, without waiting for her to tell me exactly how many. “Can we talk about the Review ?”

“Come here, Viju.” She flapped her hand at me. “Closer.”

I thought she was going to hug me. Instead she swiped the grape across my forehead and laughed.

“Mom, I’m serious.”

“Are you ever not serious?” she teased, and tossed the deflated grape into the trash. She exercised her facial muscles by widening her mouth, knitting and raising her eyebrows. Meanwhile, I explained a few of the diverging schools of thought I would explore in the personafile: Did the prongs of the double e indicate charges of excitement or alarm? Was L height and y length directly or inversely proportional to extrovert behavior? Was she actually siding with Kirk on this one?

“I am on both sides,” she said, same as when Kirk and I feuded over the benefits of organic produce. Eventually she stopped buying the grocery strawberries we both once loved, the super-sweet diploid mutants, and started bringing back from the farmers’ market a carton of sour red nubs. Then, as now, she repeated the same refrain: “Kirk is just thinking about our future.” This time, she added: “He could find you a job, you know.”

“I have jobs. I have lots of jobs.” I was happily getting by on an assortment of pet-sitting and telemarketing gigs, reluctant to leash my days to a normal nine-to-five. I lived with my mom out of both financial necessity and professional convenience, since my dad’s study was the base of my operations. I used the bottom drawer of his gray metal desk to archive all his handwriting samples, compiled from a multitude of sources — viz., old address books, tax returns, receipts, electric bills, grocery lists, aerogrammes, and a yellow Post-it on which he’d scribbled an unattributed quote: “… by the Lord God of hosts, the Holy, who made you of the happy breed and me of the stricken, He alone knowing the aught of making mortal things, I am lonely! ” Everything in my project was filed chronologically; subfiled according to Professional, Personal, Financial, or Miscellany; and sub-subfiled according to recipient. And out of this would grow, piece by piece, a mosaic of my father.

“Wait,” I said, alarmed. “What’ll happen to the house?”

“We’ll sell it. Kirk has more than enough room for the three of us in his place.” What Kirk has is a white colonial propped up by Doric columns in which there are more bidets than books of substance. “We’ll have the engagement party on the lawn.”

“But the desk, you have to let me keep Dad’s desk. I think, Mom—” Here I took her sticky hand. “I think Kirk might like the Review if he gave it a chance. If he really read it. Or if he took the time to listen to what I’ve noticed about his checkbook, because in all those signatures, his B ’s are turning into lemniscates, which, according to the literature, suggest dizziness and lack of pause or breath.”

My mom removed her hand from mine. “What were you doing with his checkbook?”

“I found it in his desk. Last time I was there.” I hesitated. My mom’s nostrils were flaring: a bad sign. “I needed to know something about him.”

“Then just talk to him! Did you ever think of that?” She frowned at the counter and shook her head, as if refusing to envision what I’d done. “You should not go snooping around, Viju. Kirk will tell you what you want to know. He’s very open. He doesn’t just”—she searched for a word—“disappear for a whole day.”

She was referring to my dad. True, he had had a tendency to seclude himself from time to time, though we always knew he was in the guest room. He would lock himself in and answer to no one, not when I crouched down to speak through the crack, not when my mom set a cup of chai by the threshold. The mug sat there, cooling. Sometimes I stood with my ear pressed to the door, but he always told me, coldly, to leave him alone. The next morning, I would find him brewing coffee or whistling at his desk. When asked what he had been doing in the guest room, he always gave the same perky excuse: “Just lying down.”

A few months ago, my mom went snooping through my dad’s study, alarmed by the number of hours I was spending down there. In my dad’s desk, she discovered a mission statement — five pages, handwritten, erudite but sloppy in places — in which I detailed my earliest theories on i dots and t strokes. Somewhere in there, I may have mentioned the resemblance between my dad’s writing and my own. I may have written along a margin: Do certain types of t ’s, like certain disorders, run in the family?

Soon after, my mom made my first appointment with Dr. Fountain. (Before her, it was Dr. Dan, and before him, Dr. Golden, whom I actually liked, in spite of the halitosis.) As far as my studies were concerned, Dr. Fountain showed a condescending interest. I could never read what was going on behind her eyes; they were the sharp, devoid blue of an antique doll.

She tried to diagnose me with trauma-related stress disorders. Unfortunately for Dr. Fountain, I didn’t hear voices. I never considered cutting myself. I didn’t wash my hands two hundred times per day with two hundred packaged bars of soap. Over and over, Dr. Fountain asked me about my dad, how I found him, what I saw, how I felt. I gave clear answers. When our time was up, she scribbled a prescription for a drug whose company rep had probably wined and dined and plied her with samples the week before. (I tried the little pills, oblong and caution-tape yellow, but they doused every bright idea I had. My brain went to putty, stretching in all different directions at once, slackening. I had deadlines to meet, articles to write. I went off the pills immediately.)

Dr. Fountain showed specific interest in the one item I offered her — a postcard of a koala bear wreathed in white fur, beside the words “G’day mate!” On the back, my dad had penned a note to my third-grade teacher, Sister Lorraine, which I’ve reproduced here.

Exhibit C: Koala Postcard from Prateep J. Pachikara to Sister Lorraine

This is the last known record of his writing, dated March 3, a week before his death. Luckily, I saved the postcard in my binder’s plastic sleeve, charmed by the koala but oblivious to the signals within the writing itself — viz., the clockwise curl at the beginning of my V , which unravels to a straight and sterile line in his notes to others, but here, so much emotion is clutched in that tiny rose before the plummeting fall, the confident pivot, and the upward rise and arch that hangs over the i like a protective branch.

Sister Lorraine had called the meeting because of my fresh interest in sorting through garbage. Cafeteria garbage, classroom garbage: nearly every wastebasket held my interest if Sister Lorraine had passed over it. From the bin beneath her desk, I recovered a comb with broken teeth, a return receipt for wool socks, a cup of wild blueberry yogurt scraped so clean she must have been starving. After I was caught poking through the trash in the faculty bathroom, Sister Lorraine found a litter museum in my locker.