Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

Two rooms open onto the upper balcony. One of them contains a bed piled to the ceiling with linens and saris and T-shirts. The light switch makes a hollow cluck when Suriya flicks it. A young man flicks a light switch on and off with the tip of his tongue to improve his oral sex technique in that “Self-Improvement” poem by Tony Someone, which my dad gave me when I was just old enough to be disturbed by my father’s placing thoughts of oral sex in close proximity to my own. But still I liked what my father suspected I would like — that the girlfriend dumped the boy after demanding he school himself in pleasure, that what he was really practicing was how to suffer. Tiny claws scurry across the floor. “I think rats make home,” Suriya says, and flicks the switch once more. A rowdy snore responds. A man is nestled between the wall and the mountain of multicolored cloth, his cracked hands resting on his stupendous belly. “My father,” Suriya whispers. Her voice tries not to apologize. “Come to put your bag in my room.”

Her room is large and empty save for another sheetless mattress. The small square window frames the top of a palm tree wilting in the late-day sun. “Hide your valuables,” Suriya says, and leaves me to order my things. I paw through my bag until my hand lands on my small stuffed whale, lopsided and covered in smiling frogs, sewn for my first birthday by my grandmother, two years before she died. The consolation of losing Brian has been sleeping with Whaley again. I’d shoved him under the bed the first time Brian slept over, and then could never find a way to casually reintroduce him. Of course many young women have worn teddy bears on their beds. I guess the bow ties and missing glass eyes add an appealing irony to the moments before a one-night stand. But there is nothing ironic to me about Whaley’s threadbare flippers or loose seams, revealing thin strips of crayon yellow, the color he was before my fitful sleep wore him into countless shades of beige. I hid Whaley from Brian because I still believe he’s real, meaning that when I wake up in the dark, panicked and lonely, a reject of my own thoughts, the half-moon of Whaley’s polyester body is always right there, smooth and cool and ready to receive my cheek.

When I was six, my mother took me on a whale watch in Boston Harbor. I brought Whaley with me, excited to show him where he came from. But as soon as we were on the open sea, I became afraid of holding him, imagining his tiny fins consumed by the opaque, frothy water. I didn’t trust myself not to throw him overboard. I did bad stuff sometimes, like opening the car door on the highway; I’d just imagined pulling the lever and then the door was flying open and Dad was screaming and swerving into the breakdown lane. I clutched Whaley with both hands as I peered over the ship’s guardrail. “Let’s reconnoiter the top deck, shall we?” Mom said as the ship moved farther offshore. Reconnoiter was one of my mother’s pet fancy words. Rec and oyder, rec and oyder. I sang the phrase to myself as I handed Whaley to my mom, so she could order him among her belongings while we went to wreck the deck of the ship.

Sitting on the edge of Suriya’s lumpy mattress, I wrap my passport in a skirt and rest Whaley on the pillow. Suriya will think he’s cute. Women here play with dolls and stuffed animals well into their twenties.

—

Downstairs, a woman sits with her legs outstretched, her silver-streaked black hair matted against the wall behind her. Ayya’s head rests on her thigh. The woman’s fingers are long and slender and play through Ayya’s hair. Suriya sits on the other side of the woman, her head resting on her shoulder. “Amma,” she says to me. The tenderness is almost obscene. “Hello,” I offer. A loud cough sounds above us, followed by the guttural yank of phlegm. Glistening spittle lands in the dirt yard.

Suriya stands. “I must cook.”

The kitchen is a vast chaos of cookery — empty display cases, a pile of bamboo spoons, rusted baking sheets. Suriya opens tall plastic containers until she finds rice, an onion, some dried chilies, a head of garlic sprouting long, green curlicues. She speaks to Ayya, menacingly. He hands her some coins.

In the store across the street, Suriya points to buckets filled with beans and vegetables. “Meka keeyada?” she asks. When no price allows her to relax her face, I insist on paying. We leave the store carrying dried garbanzo beans, coconuts, and mango. She makes me promise I will not tell her family that my money paid for this meal. “So many secrets to keep love, no?” She circles my wrist with her hand as we cross the street.

For the next several hours, Suriya chops and sifts and sautés on a single-burner hot plate. She walks back and forth from the well to the kitchen with a large jug resting on her hip, forcing her upper body nearly parallel to the ground. Ayya darts in and out of the kitchen, stealing handfuls of chickpeas and slices of mango. Suriya lunges toward him as he does a backward skip out the door, dangling the stolen food like a prize. “He not know how to work,” she says. “He only know how to play.” Which is true — her laughter or my rage?

Useless in the kitchen, I work on my translation, meaning that I read one paragraph several times and pity the sentences the undue anxiety of their current reader, who tries to say the word tournure aloud several times, distressed each time by her inability to create the sound she can hear in her head, telling herself that her French has not improved since junior high and she’d better give up on ever saying tournure or any other French word correctly because right now she sounds like a mentally ill gorilla trying to communicate with her zookeeper. I ought to just be translating. But I’m finding Fifi increasingly boring. A man takes in stray cats. He describes the color of their fur, their eating habits, their sleeping positions, the reasons for their names, the photographs he takes of them. A maliciously boring account, as if the narrator were exacting revenge on the world for refusing to accept him. And I undertook the translation with similar malice, set on distinguishing myself from the concretely productive masses. With my purposeless virtue, the line from the book that first made me fall in love with it: Il a atteint l’hésitation. Well, I perfected the art of hesitation, too. But at least now I know better than to congratulate myself for analyzing instead of acting. So stop analyzing Fifi ; just translate it. If I give up on this, what will I have? I’ll hit my mid-thirties without one thing to show for myself. My breath grows ragged at that thought. I sludge through the next two pages.

—

Suriya’s father walks downstairs, nods sharply at me, and points toward his daughter, who is placing a bamboo spoon in a steaming bowl. “English,” he says. “English.” He stares at me as a metal chain of unknown words clangs from his mouth. I feel like I have three nostrils or a missing eye, some deformity against which he must harden himself in order to bear looking at me.

Like Hashini, Suriya does not eat with us. She serves me a plate heaped with coconut sambol, rice, chickpea and mango curries, and then hovers over my plate with a spoon as I eat, replacing the curries with a flamboyant dollop as soon as I make a dent in one. I should play my part, saying how rasai everything is, this is the best curry I’ve ever tasted, just one more helping, how could I refuse? But I disrespect the stakes of the game too much. When Suriya tries to give me a third spoonful of mango, I stop her with my palm. “That’s enough. Really.”

She suspends the spoon a few inches from my eye. “At Hashini’s, you ate more.”

“It’s not hospitality to force-feed your guests,” I want to yell. “I’m just full,” I say.