Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“I don’t mean like that. Not as a sex act.”

I stiffened. “You mean you want to wax my asshole to make it look better?”

“I just think it looks hot when it’s all bare.”

“And where have you seen all these bare assholes?” A thin, steel question.

“Relax, baby, I’m not thinking of other girls. I’ve just seen it in porn, I guess.”

I jumped out of bed. “Do you have any clue how much it hurts to rip out your hair by the goddamn follicle from the most tender area of your body?”

I glared at the floor as I pulled on my clothes. Jared sat up and reached an arm out to me. “I don’t get it. You said I could when you thought it would turn me on.”

“I didn’t realize I’d have to become your private porn star to turn you on.”

I repeat this line to Suriya, offering a chaste explanation of a porn star. “That is good, El,” she says. “So you did not see the boy again?”

Amma yells Suriya’s name three times. I am saved from having to lie. We find Suriya’s mother in the yard, looking alarmed. Suriya hugs her and speaks reassuringly. “She believe I am lost,” she tells me.

—

Amma is feeling well today and will be able to prepare lunch. So Suriya is free to study for her exams. She sits in the yard with her giant binder, trying to memorize a few paragraphs she must recite for the exam. I haven’t changed my underwear in a couple of days and resolve myself to the necessity of laundry. As soon as I drop the matted knot of my clothes into a bucket, the soapy water turns opaque gray. I squeeze my orange T-shirt into a ball and rinse it out under the tap. It drips on the laundry line stretched between two squat palmyra trees. As I start to repeat the process, Suriya’s mother comes up and pats my arm. She takes my shirt off the line and returns it to the bucket, into which she dumps much more detergent. With glad violence, she repeatedly dunks my shirt, beats it against a rock, scrubs it with a coarse brush, twists it into a tight coil, and wrings out the coil inch by inch. The cloth is nearly dry when she hangs it on the line. She smiles at me and gestures to the bucket. I imitate her with slow awkwardness. She presses the back of her hand against my cheek.

Suriya walks over and holds her mother around the waist. “She teaches you to be a good Sri Lankan girl,” Suriya says.

“She can try,” I say. I used to participate in psychology experiments to make an easy fifty bucks. The questionnaires asked me to rate from zero to ten how strongly I identified with certain feelings, such as Think frequently about how I look or Feel certain that other people are talking about me behind my back . I always circled ten for Believe I should be punished for my sins . I am the voracious girl in the legend that mothers tell as a warning to their daughters. To be good is to bear repetition and dissatisfaction without complaint, or only inner ones that affect no one but yourself.

Ayya runs toward us, dips his hands in the dirty water, flicks it on his sister, bounds away, shrieking, “Iyeeeee!” Suriya shouts after him and shakes her fist. Still smiling, Amma walks toward the kitchen. Her equanimity feels like a shield or reproach. It reminds me unpleasantly of Brian’s family, the implicit pressure to maintain a state of perfectly reasonable happiness. My eyes reach for Suriya’s. “Has Ayya ever told you anything about being in the war?” I ask, wanting to pierce the bubble of equanimity. “The kinds of things he saw or did?”

“Oh no. He does not tell me that. That is like code. Secret code for soldiers.”

“I’m sure your brother is a good soldier. But not all the soldiers are good. I heard a lot of things from Tamil people while I was traveling — that thousands of innocent people were killed and tortured and raped and lost their homes at the end of the war. And even now they have very little freedom.”

Suriya takes a skirt from the bucket and beats it against a rock. “Why do you not ask Ayya these things?”

“He doesn’t speak English, does he?”

With subtle sarcasm, Suriya widens her eyes and points to her enormous English binder. “Of course. You can translate,” I say, more nervous than relieved. Suriya calls out for her brother. He emerges from the kitchen, eating a banana. My throat grows dry as he approaches. I haven’t spoken to him since I told him to get lost last night. “I’m sorry—” I begin, but Suriya shakes her head no and addresses Ayya in Sinhala. “I explain it is my fault you are confused in the night,” she says. “Do not worry for that.”

I offer Ayya a wide, close-lipped smile, the same one I used to give the camera when I was a child, doing my best imitation of an acceptable photographic face. But now the very desire to be genuine makes me come across as aloof. Suriya explains to Ayya that I have traveled in Jaffna and am sad for the Tamil people. Ayya meets my eyes. His voice is tight and matter-of-fact. I should not feel bad for the Tamils. They are so rich. So many Tamils are living abroad and sending money back. They are luckier than the Sinhala people.

“There are only Tamils living abroad because they’ve been displaced,” I say. “A lot of people lost their homes or had to escape from the fighting. I heard about one man who swam all the way to India.”

Ayya believes that I met some kind people in Jaffna — caught up in my argument, I don’t register how well Suriya is translating — but the Tamils are not all kind. Can he tell me a story? He takes Suriya’s chair and speaks for several minutes, the English binder in his lap. Suriya stands nearby, watching him closely. She looks at the ground when he falls silent, her face muddled. “This is hard to explain,” she says. “There is a girl in Jaffna when my brother was there. Twelve years old, thirteen, like that. She is the daughter of the man who has a good restaurant. Favorite restaurant of the soldiers.” This girl is kind and speaks Sinhala well. The soldiers have to communicate with most Tamil people in English. They are impressed that this young girl knows Sinhala so well and enjoy talking to her. One of Ayya’s friends wants to teach her to write Sinhala characters. So they sit together sometimes after lunch and practice writing in a notebook. One day Ayya and his friend go to the restaurant to take their lunch and there is a new family there. Slowly, the soldiers learn what has happened to this girl. Some people in her village started talking about her, saying she has a Sinhala boyfriend. Of course she is not supposed to have a boyfriend at all until she marries. And to have a Sinhala one is very, very bad. The people in the village say that the girl is so upset by what people are thinking of her that she committed suicide. But Ayya doesn’t believe. The story is that the girl took off all her clothes and tied herself to a tree and set herself on fire. That seems not even possible. Ayya believes the men in the village raped her and burned her alive. Suriya’s voice is quiet, coaxing the unwilling words to leave her throat.

“I’m sorry,” I say, without knowing why. Does it help anyone for me to know these things? For Suriya to know these things?

“But is it possible — weren’t a lot of the Sri Lankan soldiers raping Tamil girls?” My voice is small, embarrassed by the words, the pretension that this story has any use as a political lesson. It takes Suriya a long time to explain Ayya’s response. She keeps pausing, searching even for words she knows well. Most soldiers would not hurt a woman. There are only some bad soldiers, yes, who use the women. But the Tamil men do the same. Ayya heard of one girl, she was raped by a soldier. That is very bad, yes. But Ayya says something happened to her even worse. Men in her village learn she has been raped and so they raped her too. More than one hundred men. Because she is already ruined. That is how the men think.