"One Amazing Thing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Divakaruni Chitra Banerjee)

12

When I was too young to know better, I was a pleaser. That’s what my parents tell me. Their story goes like this: “When you were little, you were so cute. You recited Chinese nursery rhymes whenever guests came over, whether anyone asked you or not. And now, look at you. We can’t even get you to come out of your room to say hello.”

Sometimes it’s like this: “Whenever your mom made dumplings, you insisted on helping, even though you made a mess all over the kitchen floor. But now that you’re old enough to be useful, you refuse to enter the kitchen, and you’re always complaining that eating Chinese food makes you smell bad.”

Or, “Remember that favorite dress you had when you were in kindergarten, pink with cherry blossom flowers all over it, and bows? You loved it so much. You insisted on wearing it to school every day. We had to hand wash it each night so it would be clean and dry by morning. Now-black, black, black, all the time. Do you even wash that T-shirt? And is that black lipstick?”

You get the idea.

My parents thought my metamorphosis from charming caterpillar to stinging wasp came from teenage angst combined with evil American influences, but they were wrong. I gave up on being a pleaser because of my older brother.

My parents believed-and I secretly agreed-that Mark was the perfect child. In fact, he hardly seemed like a child at all. He was polite and obedient and serious about his studies. Most of his friends were from Chinese school. He wanted to become a scientist specializing in cancer research, and by ninth grade had already written a paper that went on to win a national science award. My parents would have preferred that Mark become a doctor or a businessman. (In addition to the supermarkets he inherited, my father owns a large Chinese import-export business that my mother helps him run. They’re terribly proud of that business and were hoping to pass it on to Mark.) But they understood and admired Mark’s humanitarian calling-and made sure all their friends did, too. I’d overhear them at Spring Festival parties: “Anyone can get a medical degree and make money, but to spend your life discovering a cure for those poor, suffering people-ah!” They would stop there, overcome by emotion, forcing the listener to complete the sentence: “Now that’s true dedication.”

“AND THIS IS THE YOUNG MAN I REMIND YOU OF?” TARIQ ASKED.

I KNEW IT WAS USELESS TRYING TO COMPETE FOR MY PARENTS’ attention by being good. For a while, I tried to hate Mark, but my heart wasn’t in it. When he had time (which wasn’t often, what with his schoolwork and Kumon classes and music lessons and science fair projects), he let me come into his room and check out his old Dragon Ball Z cards or listen to his favorite bands (downloaded from illegal Internet sites, he confided to me). I would watch him play Knights of the Old Republic and give him advice, which he sometimes listened to. When I had trouble with homework, he tried to help, though most of his explanations went above my head. He spent weeks on science projects that awed me: elegant solar systems that rotated at different speeds around a sun, or intricate contraptions with beakers and burners that extracted water from ink. And he let me touch them. How could I not love him?

But I had to do something about my pathetic standing at home. I didn’t plan on being seriously bad, like the girls the aunties gossiped about who ran away from home and got pregnant. I wanted to be just sufficiently disobedient to force my parents to notice me. I started with little rebellions-not making my bed, refusing to go to Chinese language class, coming down late for dinner so the family would have to wait for me, not turning in homework on time so the teachers would send home a note for my father to sign. I slept late and missed the school bus, forcing my mother to drive me to school. I acted up in class and got sent to detention, where I became friendly with kids who smoked in the bathrooms and got into fistfights and drank cough syrup to get high and cut themselves.

Soon I was getting plenty of attention at home. Gramma cried and talked about evil spirits; my parents yelled, grounding me, taking away my iPod, cutting off my allowance. It didn’t satisfy me the way I’d thought it would; I only felt emptier. But I couldn’t just turn around and become my old good-girl self. I was too stubborn. I started dressing in black and experimenting with cough syrup myself-thanks to Gramma, who catches chills easily, we always had some lying around. One day I skipped school and went to this tattoo parlor with Kiara and got my eyebrow pierced. Boy, did that get me a lot of parental notice!

Things were going downhill fast when Mark came to my room one night. I told him to get out-I thought he was going to lecture me, like the others-but he didn’t get angry. Instead he gave me a long, narrow box, and when I opened it, I saw it contained his old flute. I remembered that, although now he played the violin, for a while he had taken flute lessons. He gave me a stack of music books and offered to teach me. “Let’s just keep it to ourselves,” he said. I think it was the idea of having our own secret that appealed to me. I suspect he knew it would.

We decided to meet for lessons after school at a park in another neighborhood. Mark warned me that he would be able to teach me only the rudimentaries of flute playing, but the very first time I put my lip against the embouchure, I had the strangest feeling, as though I had done it before. And perhaps I had, in some other lifetime. How else did I learn so fast?

I loved our afternoons in the park and the walk back home together, when I gabbled on about school and my friends (ex-friends, really, since I no longer hung around after school let out). Mark raised his eyebrows at the cough syrup but told me that cutting was not cool because kids who started doing it often developed serious mental problems.

Soon there wasn’t any more that Mark could teach me. He downloaded sonatas off the Internet onto his iPod for me. (Mine was still confiscated.) Bach and Handel and some Mozart. And he gave me a book about the lives of the great composers. I read and reread that book late into the night instead of doing homework. My favorite story was Beethoven’s-not so much for his music (I prefer Bach) but for his tragic life. I thought often about his troubles: his beloved mother dying early, his alcoholic father, his dead brother’s son, whose guardian he was, giving him all sorts of trouble. No one in his family appreciated him the way they should have. Mostly, I dmired his ability to keep going after he realized-early in his career-that he was going deaf. I would have thrown myself into the Danube, but he just went on composing.

I went to the park straight after school each day with Mark’s iPod and my flute. I’d find a bench hidden behind some overgrown shrubs and listen and practice on my own until it turned dark. Sometimes kids stopped to watch me, but I knew what to say to make them move on fast. My grades didn’t get much better. My parents yelled at me for coming home so late. And I still wore black. But inside, something had changed. I no longer wanted to waste my energy on being bad.

One afternoon, when I thought I was ready, I invited Mark to the park and played all the sonatas I’d learned for him, plus a few short melodies I’d composed. I expected applause when I finished, but he just sat there looking at me. Then he said, “Lily, you have a gift. You can’t waste it. I need to tell Mom and Dad so they can get you lessons.” At first, I refused, but Mark can be persuasive. Soon I was in our living room, playing the flute for my astonished parents and Gramma. I messed up a few times because I was so nervous. In spite of that I must have sounded pretty good, because afterward they all hugged me and my mother cried and said I should have told them. The next day they arranged for me to have lessons with Mrs. Huang, who everyone in Chinatown agreed was the best teacher around. My parents got me an expensive new flute, too (although they rented it from Brook Mays, just in case).

Just like that, I became the subject of much admiration at home and amazement at parties. (“Wah! Did you hear about that Lily? Learned to play Beethoven overnight, all by herself! Others practice until their fingers are bones, but that one, she’s a born genius!” Gramma would rush in to avert the evil eye then: “No, no, she makes lots of mistakes still, not half as good as your Caroline.”) I watched Mark carefully to see if he minded my ascension, but he appeared relieved. He was busy with college preparations. He had been accepted to MIT and spent much of his time on the Internet, checking out professors’ credentials and student ratings, deciding who he wanted to do work with. Dually blessed in their gifted progeny, my parents went around smiling all the time-humble smiles, of course.

Mrs. Huang was an ambitious teacher, and she pushed me. I didn’t mind. I was hungry. I listened meekly when she scolded me about having learned things the wrong way. I even stopped composing my own music-though I missed it-because she said that I must first get a full classical education. When she entered me in a local contest, I was nervous about playing in front of strangers. But I won. She entered me in a more important contest. I won again, and this second time I was less nervous. I began to realize that I was better than the other players. I enjoyed the attention of the audience and my parents’ excited hugs afterward. I asked Mrs. Huang for more competitions and practiced feverishly for them. I put away my dark clothes and Goth makeup and became positively suburban, additionally delighting my parents. Mark was away at college. It was his first semester, but neither my parents nor I paid much attention to how he was managing so far from home. We were too busy winning (a bigger high than entire bottles of cough syrup). And Mark was Mark, after all. We knew he would perform superbly.

When I e-mailed him details of my success, he wrote back congratulating me. At the end of the note, he added, Don’t do too much too soon. I thought it was a strange thing to write. I felt exactly the opposite. Music had come to me so late. I had to struggle to catch up with all those boys and girls who had been practicing since pre-kindergarten. How could it ever be too much?

But one Saturday morning, just a day before a major state-level competition, I woke up with a heaviness in my fingers. Actually, I felt heavy all over. I didn’t want to go into the room my parents had set aside for my practice (Mark’s old room). I didn’t want to play Bach’s Sonata No. 5 in E Minor, which was supposed to have been my opening piece, though it was one of my favorites. I wanted to call a girlfriend and go to the mall and giggle over girlish things-but I didn’t have a friend to call. My obsession had pushed my friends away.

When I realized that, I wanted to cry. Instead, I called my brother.

Mark’s voice on his cell phone sounded sleepy, although on the East Coast it was long past noon. I was surprised because he’d always been an early riser. I asked him what he’d been up to-we hadn’t spoken in a while-and why was he still sleeping. He said he’d been out late the previous night.

“Were you partying?” I asked. It was a joke; Mark never partied. His idea of a good time was meeting his geeky friends at the local Borders for a latte and discussing lesser-known scientific theories.

“I guess you could call it that,” he said.

Intrigued and amused, I asked if he partied often.

“Hey, listen,” he said abruptly. “Can I call you back? I have a terrible headache.” Before I could respond, he hung up. I waited around a couple hours, but he didn’t call.

My conversation-actually, nonconversation-with Mark made me feel heavier. By this time, it was afternoon and I definitely should have been practicing for the contest. Instead, I sneaked out of the house, took the 38 down to the ocean, and went for a walk, hoping the salty, stinging air would clear my head and help me figure out what was going on. Music had been my life for the past year. I heard it in my head while I went through the boring necessities of daily existence. The pieces I was dying to compose as soon as my teacher gave me permission flitted around in my sleep like colorful birds. Then why was I feeling that I couldn’t care less if I never saw my flute again? And Mark-was something wrong with him, as I felt in my gut, or was I just projecting my own gloom? Should I tell my parents about our chopped-off conversation, or would that be betraying him? I decided to wait until Mark came home for Thanksgiving and I had a chance to see himface-to-face.

I WAS HOPING THAT NEXT MORNING I WOULD BE BACK TO NORMAL, but by then a numbness had spread across my lips, and my fingers felt like they belonged to the Tin Man. I told my mother I didn’t feel well, but she said it was an attack of nerves and piled me into the car with all my musical paraphernalia. I’ll cut the painful details short: halfway through my first piece, I froze and had to be called off the stage. My parents took me home and put me to bed, sure I was coming down with the flu. Gramma felt my forehead, which was cool, declared that my spirit was sick, and burned some special incense in my room. She was closer to the truth. I’m not sure if the incense did its job, but the next morning I told my parents I didn’t want to enter any more contests and that Mark was in some kind of trouble. As I expected, both statements made them go ballistic.

At that time I was pretty ballistic myself, but now I don’t blame them too much. They’d tried hard to be good parents. They’d dedicated evenings and weekends to schlepping Mark around to his activities. They’d supported my sudden and expensive love affair with the flute. Most important, during all those years when we thought I wasn’t good at anything, they hadn’t nagged me about it. (For Asian parents, that’s as close to sainthood as you can get.) Now, it was as though they’d been handed a gold medal only to have it snatched away.

You can imagine the shouting matches. They took away my new flute and canceled my lessons. I retaliated by going back to black and putting on my eyebrow ring. Then they forgot about me because they got a call from Mark’s advisor. They didn’t discuss it with me, but by eavesdropping on their agitated conversation with Gramma, I gathered that Mark was failing his classes. I caught snippets of phrases: fallen into bad company, drinking habit, cutting class. Mark’s advisor had told them that this sometimes happens to kids from strict, traditional homes-they can’t handle the sudden freedom. I couldn’t fit my brother into a cliché like that. I was sure there was more behind his disaster. That weekend my stunned parents put a CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign in their office window (the only other times they’d done that was when my mother went into labor) and left for Boston.

Monday morning I knew that if I had to sit through a day of meaningless chatter in class, it would drive me nuts, and I would do something everyone involved would regret. So I took my backpack and hurried like I was late for the school bus, but once I was out of Gramma’s sight, I went to the park. I’d packed Mark’s old flute, and I sat on my favorite bench behind the overgrown bottlebrushes and played the Moonlight Sonata and some nocturnes that seemed to suit my melancholy mood. When I got hungry, I ate the sandwiches I’d packed. Then I took a nap. When I woke up, I played my own melodies, closing my eyes and making things up as I went along.

I don’t know how long I played-my lips were hurting, but in a good way-when I felt hands on my face. I must have jumped a mile high and yelled loud enough to be heard across the park. When I opened my eyes, there was no one. I remembered Gramma’s stories about the spirits of the dead, and my hands started shaking. What if Mark had killed himself and his spirit had come to say good-bye? Then I saw the boy, hiding behind a bush. He must have run back there when I started screeching like a pterodactyl. I beckoned to him to come out, and when he did, I realized that he had Down syndrome. I’d seen Downies at the park a couple times, holding hands and walking, with an adult on either end. Maybe they came from a special school nearby. The boy-he was about ten years old-must have gotten separated from the group. He came up to me a bit nervously, but when I said I was sorry for scaring him, but he’d scared me, too, he told me he liked my music. I asked if he wanted to hear some more. He nodded and settled himself on the grass near my feet.

I started playing something sad that I’d heard in my head as I walked along the beach after my conversation with Mark. But as I made my way through it, I found out that it wasn’t sad all the way through. It had leaps and trills and a ribbon of joy that kept looping back. After a while, the other boys heard the music and wandered over and sat down, too. My boy (that’s how I thought of him) might have felt proprietary, because he scooted up and put his hand on my knee. He smelled like strawberry jam. I played the melody for a long time, discovering something new with each pass-through, and then it was time for us to go home.

UMA THOUGHT HER BRAIN WAS SLOWING FROM A LACK OF FRESH air. After Lily finished, she found herself thinking of her father-but shouldn’t she have remembered him right after Tariq talked about his Abbajan? Shouldn’t she now be considering how she had always wanted a sibling, and how for years she had held a grudge against her parents for having deprived her of a ready entertainment that all her friends possessed?

During his college days in India, her father had played guitar. He fancied Elvis and was considered by his classmates to be quite a singer. He had told Uma this when she was about twelve, and she had collapsed in giggles, unable to imagine him as a slick-haired performer. Incensed, he had enlisted her mother’s aid. She had corroborated his story, telling Uma that was one of the reasons why, when the matchmaker had come with a proposal from his family, she had agreed to see him.

“Your mother, now, she was very fashionable as a college student,” Uma’s dad had said, sneaking a hand around her mother’s ample waist as he spoke. “She wore go-go glasses and stiletto heels and sleeveless sari blouses, and sometimes she skipped class and went with her friends to Metro Cinema to see American movies. The day I came to see her, she had painted her nails deep pink to match her sari. If I hadn’t had that guitar, you’d still be a speck in God’s eye.”

Uma had been intrigued by the images. They seemed equally fantastic: herself floating around in God’s eye and her pink-nailed mother floating around Calcutta in go-go goggles, discarding suitors at will. She had watched her parents, him balding, her plump and matronly, dressed in department-store clothing, leaning into each other with satisfied expressions, and felt a sorrow for the glamorous young selves they had discarded.

Her parents, however, still had a few surprises up their polyester sleeves, one of which her father would reveal during her first semester of college.

THE NINE SURVIVORS ATE THE LAST OF THEIR FOOD AS SLOWLY as they could, hunched against the dropping temperature. The hole in the ceiling was making the room even colder. They held their chewy bars and apple slivers close to their mouths as though they were afraid the morsels might disappear along the way. Cameron didn’t distribute the food this time. From where he sat, his spine wilting against Uma’s good arm, he raised an eyebrow in query at Malathi and Mangalam, and they cut things into the right number of pieces and gave them out. Uma noted that there were more snacks now than she had originally counted. People must have taken things out of their secret stashes and put them in the pile when no one was watching. There were a small bag of carrot sticks, one whole-wheat roll, and three small white-chocolate truffles, quite delicious, that Mangalam dissected with extra care. But all was gone in a few mouthfuls.

Cameron was whispering instructions in Uma’s ear. She announced that they could use the facilities one last time. The water would have risen almost to the lip of the toilet bowl by now. (What would they use for a bathroom after this? she wondered.) Since the bathroom door could no longer be pushed shut, people would have to wait outside Mangalam’s office to allow the user privacy.

A few people struggled into their wet shoes and climbed off the table gingerly. Mr. Pritchett, Uma noticed, stood at the end of the line. Hadn’t he just gone? But he was so proper that maybe the possibility of having to pee into a pitcher-or whatever it was that they would be reduced to doing next-made him nervous.

Alongside her, Cameron had stiffened. He, too, was watching Mr. Pritchett. When he whispered to Uma, she held up her broken arm and called out, “Mr. Pritchett, please, could you come here for a moment?” How could she have forgotten those cigarette breaks?

Mr. Pritchett looked irritated, but he could hardly refuse a cripple, could he? When he came near them, Cameron stretched out his hand and said, “Your cigarettes and lighter.”

“You don’t trust me?” Mr. Pritchett said, his shoulders belligerent. “You think I’d be stupid enough to light up and endanger all of us?” Uma was about to call Tariq, who was dozing on the adjacent desk, but Mr. Pritchett said, “You’re wrong, you suspicious bastard!” and threw a gold lighter and a crushed pack of Dunhills down onto the desk. He marched (as much as one can march in freezing, calf-high water) back to the bathroom line.

AS SHE WAITED IN LINE FOR THE BATHROOM, MRS. PRITCHETT was trying to remember something. Lily’s passion had touched her and drawn a memory almost to the surface. Something about her mother’s kitchen. But the cold water clutched at her legs with icy fingers, making her joints ache. The last few times, it had been hard to climb on and off the desk-her arthritis was acting up-but she hadn’t wanted to ask for help, hadn’t wanted anyone to know her body was betraying her. Dusty air coated her tongue, and a nagging smell she couldn’t quite place distracted her.

Mr. Pritchett distracted her, too. She could feel him at the rear of the line, emitting negative energy. She’d followed, out of the corner of her eye, the exchange between him and Cameron, the flinging down of the cigarettes and lighter. A great sympathy had risen up in her. She knew addiction, the way every brain cell focused on the forbidden substance, the way the nerves started to vibrate, guitar strings resonating to unheard music. She was planning to take a pill-maybe two-as soon as she was in the bathroom, so that when her turn to tell the story arrived, she would be at her best. She wished she could have shared the pills with Mr. Pritchett, but of course she couldn’t. She couldn’t even tell him how she felt about the kitten. There were people standing in line between them, and it would have embarrassed him.

The memory she’d been groping for came to her: she was sitting at that sunshine-yellow linoleum kitchen counter with her best friend, Debbie, each with a piece of celebratory peach pie in front of them. Mrs. Pritchett-Vivienne-had baked the pie. She had loved baking. The feel of warm risen dough against her palm. The joy of apples sliced for a pie, so thin that you could see through them. She had been good at it, too. Good enough for Debbie and her to plot all of senior year about running Debbie’s dad’s bakery once they graduated.

“Viv,” Debbie said, “I’ve got great news!”

“Don’t tell me-you’re getting married,” Vivienne said. It had been their standard response since ninth grade.

Debbie rolled her eyes. “Stupid! Dad said yes! He’ll let us run the bakery, on a trial basis, for six months.”

Why was Vivienne’s smile less dazzling than it should have been?

An excited Debbie didn’t notice. “We’ll be in charge,” she said. “Managing the employees, deciding the menu, buying the supplies, fixing prices-everything! Dad will teach me how to do the books. Mr. Parma will stay on and bake the bread, but you can make all the specialty items. If we do well, after some time Dad will let us buy the business from him. We won’t have to put any money down. We’ll pay him each month from the profits. What do you think?”

It’s perfect, Mrs. Pritchett wanted to say, trying to forestall her younger self. Let’s go for it! But in the memory, Vivienne raised her face, flushed with happiness and guilt, and Mrs. Pritchett knew with a sinking of the heart that she was going to turn her best friend down.

A LITTLE WHILE AGO, MRS. PRITCHETT HAD BEEN DISTRAUGHT because time was running out. What if she died before she got to tell her story? Now, having taken her pills, those small, round blessings, those miracles of science, in the privacy of the bathroom, she was equanimous and expansive. At the hospital, before leaving, the night nurse had said to her, If not in this life, then the next. Mrs. Pritchett repeated the statement to herself like a mantra. Even Mr. Pritchett’s announcement that he had constipation and would require more time in the bathroom, so could they please go back to their seats and give him some space, had failed to embarrass her.

But as she waded back to her desk, several realizations struck her. First, Mr. Pritchett never had constipation. Second, the door to the bathroom was being pushed shut, gradually and with great effort. Third, the odor that had been tugging at her subconscious was gas. Fourth, when Cameron had demanded Mr. Pritchett’s smoking supplies, Mr. Pritchett hadn’t been surprised. He had acted angry, but it hadn’t been the real thing.

She grabbed the arm of the person closest to her, who happened to be Mr. Mangalam. “I think Mr. Pritchett’s planning to smoke in there,” she whispered (she couldn’t bear to betray her husband to the whole company). “You’ve got to stop him-I smell gas.”

Mr. Mangalam sloshed through the water, as swiftly and gracefully as anyone could, and threw himself at the half-shut door. Mrs. Pritchett’s stomach knotted with dread as the door resisted. But finally it swung in with reluctance, bumping Mr. Pritchett, catching him in the act of lighting a cigarette. He staggered sideways, cigarette and matchbox flying from his hand and into the water. Mr. Mangalam landed on top of Mr. Pritchett. Both were soaked through immediately. Mrs. Pritchett saw Mr. Pritchett swing a fist at Mr. Mangalam’s head, but his heart must not have been in it; Mr. Mangalam avoided it easily. Mrs. Pritchett was afraid Mr. Mangalam might hit back, but he pulled himself up heavily, using the sink as support, and then helped Mr. Pritchett to his feet.

The men made their dripping, shivering way back to the desks. Mr. Mangalam mumbled something about having tripped in the dark. Mrs. Pritchett saw disbelieving looks, but no one wanted to pursue the matter. His voice an amphibian croak, Cameron instructed the two men to get out of their wet clothes. People gave them the blue rags to wipe themselves down, then handed over all the disposable tablecloths and any clothing they could spare. Cameron and Tariq took off their undershirts. Mrs. Pritchett insisted on giving Mr. Pritchett her sweater, and Tariq fetched the prayer shawl he had in his briefcase: he had put it up on the counter a long time back, Alhamdulillah, without thinking about it. He put the shawl into Mangalam’s hands. Everyone looked away as the men changed into their motley wear and spread their wet clothes over the file cabinets-a futile act. Nothing would dry in this damp mausoleum.

The thin ray of light from the hole in the ceiling was fading. Uma asked Cameron if he wanted to tell the next story. She was afraid he might not have the strength to do it later. But Cameron pointed to Mangalam. Mangalam’s teeth were still chattering. He would need a few minutes. Mrs. Pritchett searched in her purse and came up with a travel-size bottle of lotion, which she rubbed as vigorously as she could into both men’s hands. At first Mr. Pritchett made as though to pull away, but then he allowed his wife to chafe some heat into his palms. A faint smell of lavender spread through the room, reminding Uma that it had been her mother’s favorite scent. Before her mother’s birthday, Uma and her father would go to a specialty store downtown and get her a big bottle of lavender water from France. She remembered the heft of the bottle, its elongated, dark blue neck. Somehow, when she was in high school, the tradition had foundered. Uma couldn’t remember why.

“You wouldn’t happen to have your flute, would you?” Tariq asked Lily.

“I do,” she said. She felt around in her backpack, which she had placed behind her, and took out the slender silver instrument.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “It’ll use up oxygen.”

Tariq urged her on with a small jerk of his chin, and no one objected. She played a melody, short and serene, and the light fell through the ruins above them and shone on her for a few seconds before it died away.