Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

We stood there in silence, the water lapping all around us, the paddleboat knocking against the post. I looked at my mom; her arms were folded. Panic caught me by the throat.

“Where’s the postcard?” I asked.

She said nothing.

I met her at the end of the pier, and she stepped aside, looking down at the water.

“Leave it,” she said, taking urgent hold of my arm. “Come back with me.”

She had tossed it into the water. My mom had tossed my world into the water. I felt a strange, slow lightening as my eyes scanned the surface, as I imagined its ink bleeding, its cursive unspooling to a line as flat as the distance from one person to another.

But as soon as I spotted the postcard drifting away, white side up, I plunged in after it as if by instinct (I’m not a swimmer), flailing and plowing until I felt it between my fingers. For we are bound, sometimes against our will.

I heard my mom yelling my name as I dog-paddled the few feet back to the pier. With one arm and both legs, I hugged the first slimy post I could grasp. She was kneeling above me, pulling on my shoulder as if she could hoist me out of the water, but I shook her away. She sat back on her heels, a rivulet of mascara down her cheek. “Give me the card, then,” she said. “I won’t throw it again, I promise.”

She extended her hand, my mom, as she always has.

But I didn’t give her the card, not immediately. I hung on to the post and listened to the faint murmur of the party in my waterlogged ears. Earlier in the evening, someone had asked her where she planned to honeymoon, and she had shrugged, saying, “Oh, not too far away.” I thought of Kirk’s Nashville photographs — the guitars, the tulips, the sights I had seen before — and all the far-flung journeys they could take instead if only they were free of me.

•

Since that day, I’ve secured an apartment and a full-time job at Red Carpet Cinemas, where for eight dollars an hour I stand behind a glass window and slide tickets through a cut-out hole, half price for seniors and children under twelve. Over time, I hope to acquire the funds to resuscitate the Review , but as bills accumulate (one of my roommates wants HBO on Demand), this hope grows ever distant.

Sometimes, on my lunch break, my mom visits. She and Kirk have been traveling again, and most recently they returned from the Bahamas with three straw hats. I hung mine on a nail in my room.

My mom looks good in her hat, her skin tan and varnished from the sun. She keeps asking if she can see my new place, but I keep telling her that I still have to put my room together, even though it was put together the day I moved in, with just space enough for a narrow bed and my father’s desk.

My mom is given to worrying about me, but she’s happy all the same. She’s in love. I can tell because of the bill she signed at lunch the other day. Anna Bäumler , the umlaut not unlike a colon my dad once placed after my name on a birthday card with Superman on the cover, flying through the air beneath the words HAVE A SUPER-HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Exhibit D: Birthday Card from Prateep Pachikara

Some might mistake the colon as a formal mode of address, used for letters of application or complaint. But note how this colon was made by a double stroke rather than a double stab. I have scanned and magnified each dot fourfold, revealing the slight eyelash left by the lingering pen. A double stroke, a double blink, a fond quickening of the heart.

• •

In his first week at Renaissance Gardens, Mr. Panicker divided all the nurses into the black ones, the white ones, and the mannurse, but never called any of them by name. Knowing names, it seemed, would root him there indefinitely.

His cousin Preeti had campaigned loudly against the move. “Our people don’t use these kennels,” she informed his son.

“Whose people?” Sunit said, scowling into the rusty insides of Mr. Panicker’s toaster oven. Sunit and Preeti had flown in to help pack up the house and organize a yard sale. Mr. Panicker was sitting at the table, watching them, his knee still too weak to help.

“You don’t understand,” Preeti said. “You were raised here.”

“And you didn’t find Dad blacked out at the bottom of the stairs.”

“We’re only trying it out,” said Mr. Panicker. He fingered the border of a CorningWare dish, the first plate he ever bought in this country, ugly and indestructible. “I might join Sunit in New York. We’ll see.”

“You hear things about these places,” Preeti said. “Nasty things. People messing with people. People shooting people. You don’t know.” She pressed her lips together to demonstrate that she knew a great deal.

Though Mr. Panicker had yet to witness a shooting at Renaissance Gardens, Preeti’s mantra had taken on a foreboding truth. The enrichment activities held little resemblance to the descriptions touted in the brochure, next to photographs of gently amused residents. The pranayam breathing sent him into a dizzy panic, while all around him residents huffed like angered bulls. He avoided Wii Wednesdays in the rec room, where people stared slack-jawed at the television, lurching around like marionettes. His rock garden resembled a pyre of turds.

Most of the time, Mr. Panicker watched Perry Mason marathons in his room. When he was not watching Perry , he was leaving message after message in Sunit’s voice-mail box, addressing the deficiencies all around him, such as the dimensions of his room, which was so narrow that if he sat in his armchair and crossed one leg over the other, his foot hit the baseboard of his bed. “How am I supposed to cross my leg? I talked to the nurse about moving to a different room, but she says they are full.” At the end of the week, Sunit’s voice-mail box announced that it, too, was full.

There was one complaint Mr. Panicker couldn’t imagine conveying to his son. The female neighbor to his right was carrying on with the male neighbor on his left.

It was a nocturnal affair. On certain nights, Mr. Panicker would hear the careful click of her door lock, followed moments later by the click of his. For the next thirty minutes, Mr. Panicker had no choice but to stare at the light fixture overhead while the flex and squeak of bedsprings intruded through the wall. The woman was quiet, but toward the end, the man issued a morbid groan.

During the daytime, Mr. Panicker made sure to rush as much as his knee would allow past his neighbors’ rooms. He wanted no leery, yellow smiles attached to such sounds, no details bolting him to this place at all. Some faces he could not ignore, like that of the receptionist who lifted her stenciled eyebrows whenever Mr. Panicker approached, knowing full well that his only inquiry, his constant inquiry, was whether Sunit had called.

In the second week, Mr. Panicker looked out his window to find an ambulance parked outside the front entrance. A gurney carrying a sheeted body waited behind it. Mr. Panicker went out into the hall and found the door to his neighbor’s studio propped wide open. People were passing slowly by, peering into the empty room, where not a square foot of space remained on the walls, thick with framed photos, Hoosier pennants, a giant periodic table — so many places for the eye to dwell that the man might have succeeded in forgetting where he really was. Beneath the bed were a pair of red velvet booties, toes pigeoned inward.

Struck by a sudden sense of trespass, Mr. Panicker hurried down the hall, to the dining room.