“What are you looking at?” She starts to add the word Dad to the end of her question, but the consonant sticks on her tongue, and the question ends with a small thud.
“The garbage men. All they do is stand there and smoke. Company’s owned by the brother of the guy who owns the building. It’s a racket. My rent money goes to them so they can stand around and puff their Marlboros when all I can afford is generic. One of these days I’m going to do something about it.”
Suzanne nods, but her father’s attention stays trained through the window.
“One of these days I’m going to write a letter to someone. Maybe the newspaper, or that television station. Someone ought to investigate this racket. Maybe I’ll get a petition going around the building.”
“I just came to look in on you.” Suzanne crosses the small efficiency unit and puts the lasagna in the half-sized refrigerator. “I have a friend waiting for me, so I can’t stay.”
“I suppose you’ll want me to wash that pan after I eat.”
“No,” she says, and when he looks at her, she musters a smile. She says what she says every time: “It’s the kind of thing you can throw away if you don’t want to keep it.”
“I know you mean well, but that’s the problem with this country. Everyone thinks you can just throw things away. Pans, paper, marriages, babies.”
She feels a twitch in her ribs. “Well, you can wash and keep the pan if you want, and maybe you’ll like what’s in it. I grew the basil — no cellophane bags involved.”
She waits, but her father sees only the workers who have caught his ire.
“I’ll see you next time,” she says. “Take care of yourself.”
Alex often asked her why she would drive to Philadelphia and back when she could have Chinese food or pizza delivered to her father with a phone call. Yet he understood, as much as anyone could, that her relationship to her childhood is more complicated than that.
Her car is parked to the left, past the garbage collectors, but she turns right to circle the block rather than cross her father’s field of vision and earn a role in one of the myriad small conspiracies against him. Though she strides, neck tall and straight, she feels like a teenager disappearing around the corner to sneak a cigarette. Or an adulterous wife walking an extra block, hoping her lover will call her cell phone like he said he would.
Over her the sky is mostly the same concrete gray as the buckling sidewalk, though sun glows through the connective tissue between cirrus clouds, making their edges glint like metal. She can hear from above the sound of knives scraped against a honing stone and is terrified that she doesn’t know whether the sharp sweeping noises come from an upstairs apartment or from the hot-steely sky itself, an auditory announcement of impending cosmic retribution.
An Asian woman trundles three children wearing summer shirts through the narrow door to a vegetable market. She makes brief eye contact with Suzanne but does not smile. Suzanne quickens her steps, anxious to be sealed into her car, its roof between her and the sky, the vent blowing cool air through the dashboard and the radio pushing out any music at all.
Eleven
Pop songs from the 1960s crackle from the car speakers as Suzanne zigzags northeast on mostly one-way streets, toward the restaurant where she’ll meet Petra. She touches the hospital literature that Petra left on the passenger seat. The cover page is a medical illustration of aural anatomy. As always, it looks so much like a seashell that Suzanne is tempted to ascribe pattern not just to the universe but to her own life.
On that first day in Charleston, after Ben’s mother and sister finished their stylized interrogation over cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and too-sweet iced tea, his brother, Charlie, took her to Folly Beach. Ben declined the invitation, choosing to stay behind to read theory for an upcoming exam.
At the beach Charlie taught Suzanne to ride a wave with her body. Over and over she swam out, the saltwater and sunscreen stinging, her eyes nearly closed. Over and over she stretched herself long, catching wave after wave, at once thrilled by and afraid of the water’s lift and slam. Joyously tired, the way the beach would always leave her, she soaked in sunshine, waiting for Charlie to come in from surfing the farthest break line. She felt his shadow over her before she saw or heard him. When she sat up, he placed two shells in her palm.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? The one that looks like an ear makes no sound.”
He held the other one, a large conch, to the side of her head, and she heard the false sea in one ear and the real ocean with the other. They sat together after that, listening to the waves, the squawking gulls.
After a while, he said, “You sure you want to marry into this family?”
“I want to marry Ben.” Suzanne had never said it aloud before, perhaps had not even thought it. But as she said the words, she heard them as truth.
“Hell, he’s so hot, so do I!” Charlie laughed, but then his face settled into something serious, an expression Suzanne couldn’t read. “Does Ben ever talk about our father?”
Suzanne touched Charlie’s forearm, briefly, and shook her head. “Just a very little. A childhood memory or two. And that he drowned during a storm.”
“Out there somewhere.” Charlie stretched his arm toward the blurred horizon, where the pale sky met the darker ocean. “It’s kind of weird, don’t you think, that my mother keeps a picture of the boat on the mantel? There are other pictures of him, where he’s not standing in front of the boat he died on, but that’s the one we all have to look at.”
“I’m sorry” was all Suzanne could think to say, and she held the conch back to her ear as she studied the translucently thin shell in her palm, noting its imperfections, that it was chipped in two places.
She wedges the car into a tight parallel space on South Street and walks the few blocks to the Afghan restaurant where she will meet Petra, the restaurant where Alex asked her about her two most crucial choices in life: instrument and husband.
The establishment is small and made smaller by dark red decor: walls, carpet, chair cushions, tablecloths all versions of the same hue. Lining the foyer are teapots, samovars, rice pots, long-handled spoons, daggers, an antique machete — objects of cooking and objects of war — together with framed reviews as well as articles about how violence in Afghanistan goes on and on. Last time she was here, Suzanne asked Alex if it was wise of the place to associate death with its cuisine. “It’s fine,” he said, “because people want to be told what they already think. If the restaurant displayed pages of Afghan poetry or pictures of Afghan children watching television, people wouldn’t come back. Food and blood aren’t a problem. They’re what people expect.”
It is late for lunch but early for dinner, and Suzanne has the place to herself while she waits. She points to a table near the window, and the old man who seats her and will probably also cook her food leaves her with a menu that she does not study. She plans to order the precise meal she ordered the last time she was here. She cannot remember what Alex ordered, which feels like a crushing loss. If she can’t remember every detail, perhaps it is less painful to remember nothing.
What she does remember is their conversation, nearly perfectly. The place was more than half full that day, mostly with a workday lunch crowd, including someone celebrating a birthday at a table of six. Someone hummed the birthday song and, in a spontaneous coming together, everyone in the restaurant sang. This struck her as funny, and she laughed until she contracted the giggles.