Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

When my dad came in for the meeting, he could see what drove my studies: Sister Lorraine. Pert, pretty, short-haired, slim-fingered, citrus-smelling Sister Lorraine. I don’t recall her face so well anymore, but it’s her aura I remember, a beatific glow for all those who earned her favor.

Which I had not. My dad listened to Sister Lorraine’s concerns, stroking the ends of his mustache between thumb and forefinger, something I occasionally mimicked during class, though there was only a single tentative whisker on the corner of my lip. That day I kept my clammy hands in my lap.

My dad began to report to Sister Lorraine what he had read concerning the field of garbology, explaining that refuse analysis informed a range of fields, from marine biology to corporate espionage. “So the question, Sister, is not ‘What kind of child is interested in trash?’ but ‘What does this child hope to find in the refuse?’ ”

The word “refuse” still murmurs in my mind, a delicate, scholarly term hovering just above my eight-year-old reach. My dad turned to me, as if it were my chance to reveal what I was looking for. I went warm with embarrassment.

Later, in the car, he confronted me with the obvious. “Nuns can’t get married, you know.”

“What about in The Sound of Music ?” I said.

“She married Captain Von Trapp, not one of the Von Trapp children. That would be a very different movie.”

I sank down, small in my seat.

We stalled at the railroad tracks, the signal blinking and clanging while the traffic arm lowered to block our path. “You are a strange bird,” my father observed, studying me as if trying to put a name to my face. “I was, too.”

I saw the similarity as a good thing, but my dad looked lost in murky thoughts. The signal flashed red in the corner of my eye; I could feel the roar of the oncoming train beneath my feet. He held me in his gaze and then, with a sigh, let go. “Come on, already,” he groaned, just as the train whooshed by.

Those were the days leading up to his death, and in that time, my father drank no more than usual. He left us no note. That morning, as I hurried out to catch the school bus, I glanced at the closed door of the guest room, but how could I know then of the pills in his pocket, half in the bottle and half down his throat? How could I know he wouldn’t wake up, dress, and step into the shoes he had left by the door, because in his pajamas and robe he was already gone?

•

At the engagement party, I was stuck at a table with Kirk’s mother. She glowered at the surroundings — the tiki torches staked around the lawn, the paper lanterns strung along the wooden stairs that led down to an artificial lake, blurred by mist. She had me bring her a gin and tonic from the bar and kept chewing on the straw even when she wasn’t sipping. “Why are you sweating so much?” she demanded of me. “And you keep looking around. Who are you looking for?”

“Kirk,” I said.

“Oh.” She rolled her eyes. “Good luck. He’s probably chasing after your mother.”

And Kirk was wisely avoiding his own. I resolved to corner him in an hour or so, when he’d be tipsy enough to feel magnanimous about my proposal. I kept my notecards in my pocket in case I were to lose my train of thought; between them I’d paper-clipped my dad’s koala postcard, to use as a visual aid.

My mom had no idea about my plans. She was busy circulating between kitchen and party and wine cellar, steering children away from the tiki torches. At one point, as she was talking to someone, Kirk came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder, and she rested her hand over his without turning around to see who it was. I don’t know why, but that small gesture made me feel something other than hatred or envy — maybe warmth, and a little sadness.

I excused myself from Kirk’s mother and descended the stairs to the lake. I stood at the end of the little pier where a paddleboat was bobbing on the water. Before me the lake seemed to widen in a gray-black haze, and all at once uncertainty swept over me, as it still does sometimes, because I seem to find comfort only in fragments, because there is something impossible about shoring them into something larger, just as there was something futile and frightening about the borderless world beyond that lake, how the sky exhaled and expanded with no outer limit, the stars slipping farther and farther away, like everyone I loved.

I took out the first notecard and mumbled my way through my introduction: Kirk, I know we haven’t gotten along in the past … come to an understanding … scriptology is central to my life … my father … a few samples from his persona-file … my father …

“Vijay, time for cake cutting!”

I turned to find my mom easing her way down the last few steps in her heels. She stopped short of joining me on the pier and gave a winning smile, her teeth lacquered with wine. “What are you doing down here, Viju? Practicing your toast?”

“What toast? You didn’t say I’d have to give a toast.”

“You weren’t going to say something?” She looked slightly crestfallen. I joined her on the bank. “Then what’s that card you were reading?”

I tried to shrug my mom away, which only heightened her interest; she snatched the notecard from my hand. It seemed childish to grasp for it back so I stood there as she read it, watching her face cloud over.

“You won’t understand without the visual aid,” I said, pulling out the koala postcard and handing it to her.

She looked at the card in her left hand and the card in her right, as if they had materialized out of nowhere. “This is what you were planning to say?”

“Just to Kirk. It won’t take long, I promise. I just wanted to show him this thing, see …” I pointed out the initial between Prateep and Pachikara , but as I tried to gather myself beneath my mom’s simmering glare, all my thoughts split apart like kaleidoscopic shards and re-fused into bright new patterns: suddenly the J seemed a mysterious glyph of some kind, its two loops freighted with greater meaning. I remembered first learning of lemniscates from high school math; it struck me as miraculous and maddening at the time, the idea of an upper limit always approaching a number, nearing ever closer but never quite attaining it.

It was some time before I noticed that my mom was watching me, stricken. “You can’t give me a day, Viju? Not one day?”

“Look at this one.” I tapped on the koala postcard, still in her hand. “See how steeply slanted those letters are, which is directly proportional to low self-esteem …” She turned the postcard over in her hands, staring blankly at the koala, and walked past me, stopping at the end of the pier. “And if you’d read Volume VI, you’d know that the concave, counterclockwise outer loop indicates an urgent regret, plus the gap — the chasm , really — between the P and the a— ”

She turned to me, and I stopped. I’d never seen her shoulders slump like that. Even after my dad’s funeral, she’d held herself straight and worn her grief like a veil that merely dimmed her view of the world. “Viju, when did you stop taking the pills?”

This I didn’t see coming, but I tried to sound casual. “Oh, the Anafranil? Long time ago.”

“Why?”

“It really messed with my head.”

“Your head is already a mess!” she cried. I must have looked scared for a second because she lowered her voice. “If you don’t want the Anafranil, then we’ll meet with Dr. Fountain and try some other medicine.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“What maybe?”

“Those are my decisions, Mom. I’m a grown-up.”

“Oh, so grown.” She leveled me a sad-eyed smile, and it made me feel like a kid again, a boy who didn’t realize how bad things really were. “I can’t go ten feet without worrying where you are.”