Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

—

After one morning like this, I got a letter from Suriya. She was now taking exams to become an English teacher, so our letters and occasional phone conversations were very important to her success, as she put it. The most uncomplicated happiness I felt in those days came from editing her letters; along with my brief, safe descriptions of life in New York (the tall buildings! the celebrities! the pizza!), I would send a list of grammatical errors she’d made and their corrections (“I have not time for fun” to: I don’t have time for fun; “I miss my brother in whole my soul” to: I miss him with all my soul; “You are helpful me” to: You help me).

This letter began: “In these days, I face so many problems. Yet I still alive.” (“Am still alive,” I wrote at the top of my list of corrections.) In her boardinghouse, she had been assigned to share a room with a classmate who was not as smart as Suriya and jealous of her success. She hid Suriya’s books and assignments just before the bus came in the morning, so Suriya had to go to school unprepared. Suriya complained to the boardinghouse owner and requested a different room so that she could keep her belongings safe. The owner scolded Suriya for being proud and thinking she deserved better than the other girls and said other bad things that Suriya did not wish to record, she wanted them out of her head so they would not harm her personality as an adult woman. Suriya decided to leave that bad place. She packed up her things in a box and left it in the corner of her room and then took the long bus ride home to her parents’ house, where she lived for one week until she could find a new boardinghouse, missing classes and getting far behind in school. After she settled into a new boardinghouse and returned to the old one to fetch her belongings, the box was gone. She asked the landlady for her lost things and the lady hit her and told her to stop making problems in her house. So Suriya had to move into the new boardinghouse with only the clothes on her back. She lost her one pair of socks and one good skirt and one good pair of shoes, and she had to wear dirty sandals and dirty pants to school and the boys all laughed. She did not have books to participate in class and had to stay in the classroom during the lunch period, to study the books then. She felt as if she lost everything in a strange and outside area from her home. (“Outside area from my home” to “foreign place” or “place far away from my home,” I wrote.) She called her brother, who was working in the army, also far away. He said, “Think what you have and do not think what you don’t have. Once I have money, I will bring you new garments.” (“Think OF,” I wrote. “And we usually say clothes, not garments.”) After speaking to her brother, Suriya made up her mind and hid her sadness. She studied hard and was first in all of her exams. The girl who stole her belongings made poor marks and will never have success. The boardinghouse owner who hit her has no friends because she is mean. So Suriya does not mind that they treat her poorly. They do not hurt her life. I put the letter down and was quiet and still. If I were going to concoct an inspirational tale about overcoming adversity, Suriya would probably be the star. But I didn’t have to concoct anything; Suriya was real.

I made the mistake of reading the letter to Brian when he got home that night, wanting to share Suriya’s sweetness and wisdom. “Sounds kind of suspicious,” he said. “That’s, like, a classic sob story. Seems like she’s trying to get money out of you.” I hadn’t even considered sending Suriya money, I so rarely thought of practical solutions to anything. Partly to spite Brian’s cynicism, I wired her one hundred bucks. A few weeks later, she mailed me a dozen handmade greeting cards, decorated with pressed flowers and stickers, each with a different message: Happy New Year! Happy Birthday! Merry Christmas! God Bless You! “I wish to return your money in the future,” she wrote, “once I be a real teacher.” (“Once I am,” I wrote back.) “But until that day, you can sell these cards in a shop in New York City. They will be expensive in your country, no?”

I showed the cards to Brian, hoping he’d be as moved as I was. “Good for you,” he said, as if I’d passed a test.

—

I started seeing Jared regularly after Brian presented me with a ring at the top of Bear Mountain and listed reasons he wanted to marry me in French, a language he didn’t speak. My present recklessness was justified by the severity of the future limits I promised the sunny, windy mountaintop I would respect. Every few weeks, Jared would fly to New York and stay at a motel near our apartment. Brian worked ten-hour days. Jared and I had so much time to ourselves that I often forgot we were doing anything wrong.

I didn’t need a psychologist to tell me my fear of marriage was the result of my parents’ romantic misery. So I tried to ignore it. I was afraid of most normal things — talking to people, for instance. Brian was a stable, successful, attractive, loyal man who wanted to marry me. Saying yes was not an emotional question. It was a question of not ruining my life.

—

I took another shift at the bookstore to punish myself for neglecting Fifi . My favorite coworker was a gaunt older woman with spiky white hair and huge gray eyes. We sometimes got beers at the bar next door to Barnes and Noble, and she’d tell me about the sex she had in high school. She never wanted a boyfriend and she never wanted to kiss on the mouth. “No kissing!” she commanded the boys she brought home and screwed (her word) under the kitchen table while her mother snored upstairs, too muted by codeine to hear anything. She’d grip the wooden legs and close her eyes tightly and focus only on the sensation between her legs. I pictured her turning her face away when it was over, refusing to meet the boy’s eyes as she told him to be sure the lock was pushed in when he let himself out. Now she was almost sixty and lived alone. She was all fucked out by the end of high school. Anyway, it wasn’t worth risking AIDS and she’d rather not screw at all than get screwed by Saran wrap. While she stocked books, she sang softly to herself. She always had several novels going at the same time, one from every aisle, bookmarked and restored to their rightful place in the alphabet whenever the boss came by. She loved her morning bagel and her afternoon espresso. She wore loose, solid-colored dresses that swished around her athletic frame. No breasts. Cancer, she told me. I wondered who had cared for her. She never talked to her parents and her brother was in rehab in Colorado. I looked for signs that she was unhappy, that her ostensible ease in the world was actually resignation to loneliness. But I never saw a chink in her social self, no glimpse of a private life hidden at great cost. So why was I scared of becoming her? I enjoyed her company, but there was always this voice in my ear — the calm, reasonable male voice — warning me that her life was empty, an embarrassment, that it was all right for me to stock books and work the register at thirty, but that a middle-aged, solitary salesclerk led a life of shame.

—

At Brian’s office Christmas party, men and women alike congratulated me on my catch, told me how lucky I was, Brian was such a great guy. Of course they didn’t have to spend a weekend with him when he was withdrawn and self-absorbed, barely registering my presence, exhausted from giving his best self to his coworkers and clients. I had these thoughts consciously — I even wrote them down in a notebook I kept hidden at the back of my desk drawer. But this thinking didn’t seem like an indication that I shouldn’t be with Brian specifically. Rather, the distance between the good impression Brian made on acquaintances and the disappointment he caused me at home seemed a confirmation of my belief that marriage was a secret so painful you had to keep the secret even from yourself.