Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“RISE UP AND TELL THEM THE TRUTH!”

“Why not!”

“RETICENCE WILL NOT WIN THE WAR OF MORALITY AND TRUTH IN AMERICA! ONLY THE FEARLESSNESS OF GOD’S SOLDIERS WILL DO IT! STAND UP AGAINST THE DEVIL IN HIS MANY FORMS! STAND UP!”

“Standing!!”

The food processor roared to life between her hands, and Kamala threw her head back a bit too rapturously, as though the Kingdom of Heaven itself were cracking through the kitchen ceiling. Amina watched from the safety of the courtyard until something soft and wet nuzzled her. She looked down to see Prince Philip, an old Labrador with a younger dog’s fetching addiction, staring at the stick he had left on her foot.

“Jesus H.,” she said, and threw it for him.

It should have been comforting enough that her mother had finally left the Trinity Baptist Church a good three years earlier, shunning their attempts to bring her back into the fold with a haughty disdain that confounded them. It should have been comforting to know that Mort Hinley was just another in a long line of preachers Kamala would love for a day, a week, a series of months, until she had decided (as she had with the Trinity Baptist Church, Oral Roberts, Benny Hinn, and a series of others) that he was getting between her and Jesus. But still, the Jesus-loving version of her mother took some getting used to. And watching Kamala raising her palm to the air above the churning food processor still sent a bolt of nausea up Amina’s spine, visions of Heil Hitler —ing masses running in black and white through her head.

“Everyone has a personal Jesus,” a newly saved Kamala had explained when Amina was in high school, believing, apparently, that Amina would greet this news with as much excitement as she would everyone having a personal Porsche. The following week she had forced her to come to a service at Trinity Baptist Church, where the congregants seemed to revel in the fact that Kamala was a saved Indian , a sort of born-again Bengal Tiger in their midst. Never mind that the Eapens were already Christians; Pastor Wilbur Walton had explained Amina’s presence as a sign of the Lord’s work being done. “Back in India,” he said, “these folks were following blue-skinned gods .”

“You think Jesus cares who got there first?” Kamala had asked when Amina fumed over it on the car ride home.

“But we were Christians while they were still praying to goddamn Odin!”

“Doesn’t matter! Jesus loves all equally! And quit quoting your father, you sound like an idiot.”

“Mom’s a lunatic,” Amina told Prince Philip when he returned with the stick, dropping it next to her ankle. The dog looked unimpressed.

Thomas came home a little early, and soon enough Kamala called them for dinner, which comprised not one but all of Amina’s favorite dishes — lamb vindaloo and bhindi baingan and chicken korma steaming quietly from the copper pots.

“You made too much, Ma,” Amina said, mouth watering.

“Speak for yourself,” Thomas said. “When you’re not here, she starves me.”

“Yeah, you look starved.”

Kamala put out several little jars of pickle. “This one Bala made; it’s lime but a little too salty. Raj gave us the mango. It’s dry. I made the garlic. That’s all you’re taking for vegetable?”

“I’ll get seconds.”

“You need the cabbage to keep you from slouching, and the okra will help with your lips.”

“What’s wrong with my lips?”

“They’re getting blackish.”

“They are?” Amina looked at her reflection in the microwave. Her entire face looked back at her in different shades of blackish.

“They’re fine,” Thomas said, helping himself to the food on the stove. “Stop giving her complexes.”

“Who’s giving anything? Not so much of ghee, Mr. Hardening Arteries.”

Thomas put the ghee spoon down with a sigh and set his plate on the table. “Amina, can I get you something to drink? Should we open a bottle of wine?”

“No thanks,” Amina said, sitting. “Just water for me.”

“Poosh. Party pooper.” Thomas grabbed a beer for himself from the fridge.

They ate. The lamb and rice were tender and pungent in Amina’s mouth, instantly settling whatever the turbulence had ruffled. Amina sighed deeply, chewing. Her lips buzzed with numbness from the heat. “So good, Ma. Thanks.”

“Thanking a mother for cooking is nonsense,” Kamala huffed, looking pleased. “Anyway. Did I tell you my friend Julie’s daughter is getting married this weekend?”

Amina gave her father a pained look.

“No talk of marriage,” Thomas said.

“Who’s talking marriage?” her mother asked. “I’m talking business . I told Julie you would have been happy to take pictures, but you’re leaving. Unless you can stay?”

“I can’t. I work weekends, remember?”

“This is work!”

“Anyhow, I’m sure Julie’s daughter has had a photographer picked out for months. That’s how it works, you know.”

“I know that, silly, I just told her that you were a better photographer is all.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Of course I do,” Kamala said, and despite herself, Amina filled with a sudden stab of love, like a breath she hadn’t counted on taking. She reached for the jar of garlic pickle, putting a generous portion on her plate.

“You don’t need that much,” Kamala said.

“I like it,” Amina said, and her mother ducked her head to hide her smile.

Evening escape was always necessary. After leaving Monica a message, Amina took a stale cigarette from an empty cassette-tape case hidden in her old desk and wandered down to the ditch just outside the gate at the back of the house. The magic of the smoke and the high altitude sent her head swimming, but when she exhaled, she had one clear thought: Dad is fine . The notion surprised Amina with its assuredness, and she turned it over in the coming dark, unsure if she was having a genuine moment of insight or her fear was conspiring to tell her what she most needed to hear.

Coming back to the house, she saw that her father was already waiting for their nightly conversation, the deep yellow of his porch light beckoning like a fire. She walked toward it, wondering once again how anyone could insist on calling the burgeoning mayhem on the back of the house a “porch.” Sure, it had started out as a verandah some twenty years earlier, but time and Thomas’s endless additions — platforms, nooks, shelves, newspapers, tools, inventions — left it floating in the backyard like a junk barge.

Large, darkened outlines grew clearer as Amina drew closer, turning from monsters to machinery — a router table, two planers, table saw, and drill press. Clamps of varying sizes hung across the back wall, along with several lassos of extension cord, three levels, and two wall-mounted shelves of tiny boxes that held everything from safety pins to masonry drill bits. Three headlamps, a hard hat, a cowboy hat, and a felt touk dotted the wall above a coatrack, on which a lab coat, a yellow rubberized suit, and a flame-retardant jumper were draped. The only actual furniture in the room consisted of two wingback chairs — one made of cracked leather and permanently empty, save for the times Amina filled it, and the other a patchy red velvet, in which Thomas was currently sitting. He shifted, looking vaguely impatient, as she came closer.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“You don’t think what?”

A lone moth cast a hand-sized shadow across the wall behind him, and he turned to it. He frowned and looked at his watch.

“Dad?”

His eyes zeroed in on her. “Hey, Amina! There you are! I was waiting.”

“Sorry. I needed a walk after all the food.”