Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

My heart was still pounding when Dhit parked the bike outside my guesthouse. “Are you okay?” I asked him.

“Fine. No problem.” He took a deep breath and began a speech that sounded rehearsed. He had met many women in his life but never any woman like me, he could have many girls in his village, his mother was always making matches for him, and they were fine girls, but I was the only woman he could ever love. He took small gasps between his hurried sentences. He wanted to marry someone exactly like me. He hoped that the next time I came to Jaffna I would stay for longer, our time together was so short, he wanted to spend more time with me, much more time. Next time I came, he would arrange for me to rent my own house, and during that time he wanted to be with me — really be with me, I understood, right? — committed or not committed, it didn’t matter to him.

His face was huge, light brown against the darker night. His eyes were teary. His rice belly, as he called it, pressed against the buttons of his shirt. I felt the presence of the soldiers a few feet away, with their guns and stop signs, their slight longing for the boredom to end and fear that it would.

“No, no, no,” I said. “I only want to be friends with you, Dhit. Just friends.” A porch light flicked on. My guesthouse owner walked out and glared in the direction of our voices.

“Maybe we can still be together. Just as friends.” Dhit tried to smile but it only forced tears out of the corners of his eyes. I looked away and again offered to pay him for his translating. “No.” The word was fierce, almost angry. Could he at least have a hug? I queasily submitted. He pulled me too close and pressed his mouth so firmly against my cheek that his inner lips wet my skin. I pulled back, but his grip was firm on my lower back. I pushed against Dhit’s shoulders to disengage, turned my back to him and started walking away. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed getting to know you and your family,” I said. “Please tell them thank you and goodbye.” I forced myself not to run up the stairs to my rented room.

Before bed, I looked through the random collection of strangers’ sorrow and rage that filled up my notebook. I told myself the fragments were meaningful.

KANDY

I was elated to be back at Rose Land, drinking tea in the courtyard, listening to the chanting at sunset, buying king coconuts and pineapples from the vendors in town. A young woman approached me as I was sitting on a bench one morning, enjoying the steady stream of families with ice cream cones and monks talking on mobile phones under the shade of umbrellas. “Oh, hi, hello. How do you do?” she said. “Can I practice English with you?” She grimaced against her nervousness. She was wide-faced and petite in too-big clothes — washed-out jeans and a pink T-shirt that said TRUE LOVE FOREVER. After weeks of being harassed by rickshaw drivers and trailed by unknown men, the relief of a girl’s face close to mine made me laugh as I said “yes” and “please” too many times. “Thank you,” she said. “I never risk to speak with a foreigner before.” She told me her name and placed her hand around my wrist to lead me across the street. We went to an underground bakery, where Suriya ordered us chocolate ice cream and neon sugar water advertised as orange juice. She insisted on paying, even though she was only eighteen and her parents had health problems that made them unable to work and her brother, a soldier in the Sri Lankan army, used almost all of his earnings to pay for Suriya’s college classes and boardinghouse rent.

I stiffened at the end of her tale of woe, waiting for her to ask me for money. Instead she leaned forward and said, “Can I do something?” Her wide cheeks were dotted with blackheads the size of freckles. She wiped ice cream off the tip of my nose and then sat back, her small breasts shaking under her loose T-shirt in time with her long, loud, illogical giggle. “My mother and father will be so happy I am speaking English with you,” she said when we finished our ice cream. “I think I have the strength to talk to you because — I must change my life. It is boring.”

I felt a crass almost-embarrassment for Rilke, as if he’d stolen the most famous line of his most famous sonnet from a twenty-year-old chatting with a stranger in a language she barely knew.

“What is your life like?” I asked Suriya, circling the bottom of my glass with my straw.

An endless succession of schoolwork and chores at her secluded boardinghouse, where she shared a room with the stern owner’s ten-year-old daughter. In fact, she had to be going or the owner would be angry. “When you come to my parents’ home, I dress you in a sari,” she said as we left the restaurant. “You are so pretty, like doll.” Her pupils were huge, like the perfectly circular eyes of a teddy bear. Maybe it was that openness that made her so relaxing to look at. When we said goodbye, Suriya had me write out my email three times and my phone number and my address in the United States.

CARPINTERIA

Waves of cold fear made me dizzy as I waited at the baggage claim for my filthy backpack filled with filthy clothes. Everyone around me was beautiful in a way that looked expensive and tiresome. I was immediately desperate for Jared to take me away from how much I did not want to be home.

“Baby, baby, baby,” he said when I showed up at his door. We had loud, fast sex and then got drunk at our favorite bar, sharing a stool and laughing so loudly people shot us dirty looks. On the walk home, he grabbed my wrists and pulled me into the shadow of an awning. “Turn around,” he said in the voice of sexual command that I never thought to disobey. Reflexive generosity, I suppose, in response to a clearly stated need. Freedom from the pause, the self-conscious gap between thought and action. Which was exactly what Shirmani had given me. Not that I was thinking about any of this at the time. I just turned around and leaned my forehead against the display window. Mannequins with spindly legs and sunken tummies grinned out of the darkness on the other side of the glass. Jared put his sweatshirt over my head and tied it at the nape of my neck, tight enough to leave a ring around my throat. My eyelashes caught against the fabric when I blinked. “This is what you get for making me miss you so much,” he said. Blood rushed to my groin.

He walked me home that way, holding my wrists tightly at my back, jerking me down one silent street after another. A minivan started following us, and Jared released my hands so I could lift the sweatshirt off my head, smile, and wave to show this was all just a game. I was a child making herself invisible by covering her face with her hands. As soon as the van was gone, we started playing again.

By the time we got to his apartment, the air under the sweatshirt was hot and thin. My wrists hurt. Jared kept murmuring words I couldn’t hear, ignoring my protests, fishing through his pocket for his keys with his free hand, until I cried out for him to let me go. He released my wrist and then brought his fist down on my left shoulder. As he unlocked the door to his apartment, I stuck my index finger through a hole in my panty hose and traced a tiny circle against my thigh. I had chosen wrongly in a way that made me interesting to myself. I felt I could handle the wrong choices better now, that I could live the old life in a new way.

In the morning, when I told Jared that my shoulder felt bruised where he had hit me, he said he hadn’t hit me that hard, he would never hit me that hard, oh my god, he had missed me so much, was I really here, would I stay forever, did I want to hike to that swimming hole and go skinny-dipping today?

“Yes, please. But let’s not bring beer.”