Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

He’d been in the bathroom for ten minutes when I glimpsed Ivy’s Saab crawling up our driveway.

“Amit?” I said through the door. “Ivy’s here.”

Silence.

“Amit, you okay?”

“I’m not here, got it? Tell her I’m not here.”

“Where do you plan on going?”

“Don’t tell her I’m in the bathroom, Neel. Tell her I’m asleep.”

“That’s what I always tell her. She’ll know I’m lying—”

“Okay then, why don’t you tell her I just stuffed a fucking suppository up my ass and I can’t come out or else I might shit all over myself, huh? How’s that?”

The doorbell chimed.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

I opened the front door to find Ivy standing with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. Her hair was shorter, fringe over her eyes, which were lined and tired. “Oh, hey, Neel.”

“Hey, you!” I said, regrettably.

We hugged, then stood there, nodding at nothing. She looked down at the ramp of wooden planks beneath her feet, which Diego had hammered together. “Been a while,” I said.

“Yeah. Hey, how’s your writing?”

“Okay, I guess.” I leaned against the door frame, attempting a pose as casual as hers. “I finished a draft of my novel.”

“Really? What’s it about?”

“Brothers,” I said. “Basically.”

“Uh oh.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “A tell-all, huh?”

“Not exactly.” I felt a childish desire to impress her. “Actually it won an award. I’m supposed to go to Prague for this artists’ colony …”

“You’re leaving?” Her smile disappeared. “When? For how long?”

“In a couple months.” I scratched at a peeling patch of paint on the door frame. I still hadn’t discussed my plans with Amit, and here I was, unloading on Ivy. “I haven’t decided. We’ll see.”

“Wow,” Ivy said, but not in the tone I’d hoped for. “Good for you.”

She peeked over my shoulder at the tank. Moses was on his relaxation rock, his back to both of us.

Ivy said, “Still sleeping, huh.”

I shrugged, smiled weakly.

“All right, I’ll go.” Ivy lowered her voice. “But tell him he can’t sleep forever.”

She left me with a package for Amit — some PayDays, a DVD of Sense and Sensibility , and, oddly, a box of Darjeeling teas.

I removed the DVD. “You can probably have this one back.”

“Oh no, that’s his,” she said. “Yeah, he loves Sense and Sensibility . You didn’t know that?”

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, my dad helped Amit into the wheelchair and rattled him down the ramp toward the car that would take them to physical therapy. I spent those three hours in my bedroom, trying to write. Once, I used my brother’s computer and stumbled across a small, multicultural library of porn. I spent some time in the Asian division.

I also got to thinking about Caryn a lot, her bright, elfin eyes peering at me over a crappy hand of cards. She looked like a student herself, in jumpers and wool tights that rasped when she walked. Things had ended breezily between Caryn and me. She had gone home to Newton before I had a chance to tell her about my brother, and now I couldn’t find the words. So instead, in a late-night moment of beery loneliness, I e-mailed her my novel.

She sent a brief and instant reply: !!!

I figured that Caryn would make a better reader than Amit. He had always viewed my writing with a combination of bewilderment and dismissal, as if I were trying on a panama hat and had yet to glance in a mirror and see how ridiculous I looked. My dad told anyone who asked that I was a teacher.

Two weeks into my time at home, I called Caryn. Our conversation lurched from one piece of nonsense to the next — her new coffee press; what constitutes the ideal mug — and as the minutes gathered, my stomach began to jostle with dread.

“Well, I read it,” she said, finally.

“Yeah?”

“And I jotted down some notes.”

I found a pen, a notepad. “Okay. Ready.”

“So the first few chapters are great.” She paused. “But around page fifty or so, the story starts to sag.”

I wrote: page 50 → sag .

“Partly because you spend all this time on describing every little thing,” she continued. “And, I dunno, I’m not one for fussy prose, it’s just not my thing. Like here, with the playground scene on page sixty-three: while the four hobbyhorses, nostrils aflare and frozen, glared down on us in what seemed an apocalyptic moment . I marked a lot of places like that, where it feels like you’re trying too hard.”

“Okay.”

She recommended cutting a number of scenes. “The swimming pool thing, for example? Where the one brother doesn’t make it up the high-dive ladder?” I heard her flipping pages. “I didn’t see the point. Other than the fact that the younger brother is kind of a prick.”

“I dunno, it sort of seemed to paint a picture of the relationship right away, their relationship.”

“Yeah, but, it’s …” She paused, searching for the perfect word. “Boring. Also, how come they never talk about the mom?”

“I don’t know. They just don’t.”

This went on for half an hour. I drew a turd with a big bow on top.

In the last five minutes, Caryn seesawed her comments in the positive direction, trying to boost me with vague praise for my thorough characterization, my attention to setting, her voice full of pity and pep. By this point, I was lying on the couch.

As the conversation wound down, Caryn reassured me that the future was still bright. “It’s awesome that you’ll be around all those writers in Prague. Maybe one of them can give you advice.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I promised to write her from Prague. I could tell that she didn’t believe me.

“Good-bye,” I said.

“Good luck!” she said, and hung up, leaving me to ponder her word choice.

Early in the evening, Dr. Pillai stopped by with his wife. Dr. Pillai was an old friend of my dad’s, a nice-enough guy with a tussock of hair growing out of each ear, which Ruby Auntie somehow seemed to ignore. She thrust three plastic yogurt containers of Indian food into my arms, though we’d all but stopped eating Indian food after my mom died. I pushed the brothy containers deep into the fridge.

We gathered around Amit like careful pilgrims, even though he was in no mood for visitors. He’d just come home from therapy, which always wrung the life out of him. He lay on the bed, propped up on pillows, staring at the muted television, where a weatherwoman gestured to a series of pulsing suns.

“The PT,” my dad said, “she is tough.”

“That’s good!” said Ruby Auntie.

“Yeah, great,” Amit said. He gazed at the weatherwoman with detached interest.

“So, Neel,” Dr. Pillai said, “what are you writing these days?”

“A novel,” I said, nodding. Dr. Pillai blinked at me expectantly. “About brothers.”

“So a biography, then?” Ruby Auntie asked.

“Autobiography,” Dr. Pillai corrected.

“No, not exactly—”

“You should tell him some stories,” Ruby Auntie said to my dad, who said, “Oh yeah, definitely,” as if he’d been thinking the same thing for years. “Growing up in India, things like that,” Ruby Auntie suggested. “How many stories can a twenty-four-year-old have?”

“He’s twenty-seven and his brother’s a cripple,” Amit said. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t like that word,” my dad said.

“Too bad.”

My dad smiled apologetically in Dr. Pillai’s direction. “He’s just tired. He hasn’t been sleeping well.”

Amit narrowed his eyes at my dad, then lavished Dr. Pillai with a warm, toothy grin. “Yeah, I’m not used to sleeping on my side. But I have to, or else a fungus’ll start growing on my balls.”