"That’s it, man."
"Who did you marry???"
"Toys."
"Toys?"
"Toys."
"All of a sudden they ask for my green card, say they forget to look when I apply, so I ask her, ‘Will you marry me for papers?’"
"Flakey," they had all said, in the restaurant where they worked, he in the kitchen, she as a waitress. "She’s a flake."
Sweet flake. Heart like a cake. She went to city hall with Saeed – rented tuxedo, flowery dress – said "I do," under the red white and blue.
Now they were practicing for the INS interview:
"What kind of underwear does your husband wear, what toothpaste does your wife favor?"
If they were suspicious, they would separate you, husband in one room, wife in another, asking the same questions, trying to catch you out. Some said they sent out spies to double-check; others said no – the INS didn’t have the time or money.
"Who buys the toilet paper?"
"I do, man, I do, Softy, and you should see how much she use. Every two days I am going to the Rite Aid."
"But her parents are letting her?" asked Biju, incredulous.
"But they LOVE me! Her mother, she LOVE me, she LOVE me."
He had been to visit them and found a family of long-haired Vermont hippies feeding on pita bread spread with garlic and baba ghanoush. They pitied anyone who didn’t eat their food brown, co-op organic, in bulk, and unprocessed. Saeed, who enjoyed his basics white – white rice, white bread, and white sugar – had to join their dog, who shared his disdain for the burdock burger, the nettle soup, the soy milk, and Tofutti – "She’s a fast-food junkie!" – in the backseat of Grandma’s car painted in rainbow colors putt-putting down to the Burger’n Bun. And there they were, Saeed and Buckeroo Bonzai, two BigBoyBurgers spilling from two big grins, in the picture taken for the INS photo album. He showed it to Biju, taking it from his new briefcase specially bought to carry these important documents.
"I like the pictures very much," Biju assured him.
There was also Saeed with the family at the Bread amp; Puppet theater festival posing with the evil insurance-man puppet; Saeed touring the Grafton cheese factory; Saeed by the compost heap with his arm around Grandma, braless in her summer muumuu, salt-and-pepper armpit hair shooting off in several directions.
Oh, the United States, it’s a wonderful country. A wonderful country. And its people are the most delightful in the world. The more he told them about his family in Zanzibar, his faked-up papers, of how he had one passport for Saeed Saeed and one for Zulfikar – the happier they got. Stayed up late into the zany Vermont night, stars coming down coming down, cheering him on. Any subversion against the U.S. government – they would be happy to help.
Grandma wrote a letter to the INS to assure them Zulfikar of Zanzibar was a welcome – no, more than that – a cherished new member of the ancient clan of the Mayflower Williams.
He slapped Biju on the back. "See you around," he said and he left to practice kissing for the interview. "Have to look right or they will sus-pect.
Biju continued on his way, tried to smile at female American citizens: "Hi. Hi." But they barely looked at him.
The cook went back to the post office. "You are getting the letters wet. Taking no care."
"Babaji, just look outside – how are we to keep them dry? It is humanly impossible, they are getting wet as we transfer them from van to office."
Next day: "Post came?"
"No, no, roads closed. Nothing today. Maybe the road will open in the afternoon. Come back later."
Lola was hysterically trying to make a phone call from the STD booth because it was Pixie’s birthday: "What do you mean it doesn’t work, for a week it hasn’t worked!"
"For a month it hasn’t worked," a young man who had also been in line corrected her, but he seemed content. "The microwave is down," he explained.
"What?"
"The microwave." He turned for affirmation to the others in the office. "Yes," they said, nodding; they were all men and women of the future. He turned back. "Yes, the satellite in the sky," he indicated, pointing up, "it’s fallen down." And he pointed at the plebeian floor, gray concrete all stamped about with local mud.
No way to telephone, no way for letters to get through. She and the cook, running into each other, commiserated a moment and then he went on sadly to the butcher and she went to get some Baygon spray and swatters, for the insects. Each day of this fecund season scores of tiny souls lost their brief lives to Lola’s poisons. Mosquitoes, ants, termites, millipedes, centipedes, spiders, woodworms, beetles. Yet, what did it matter? Each day a thousand new ones were born… Entire nations appeared boldly overnight.
Twenty
Gyan and Sai. At subsequent pauses in the rain they measured ears, shoulders, and the span of their rib cages.
Collar bones, eyelashes, and chins.
Knees, heels, arch of the feet.
Flexibility of fingers and toes.
Cheekbones, necks, muscles of the upper arm, the small complexities of the hinge bones.
The green and purple of their veins.
The world’s most astonishing tongue display: Sai, tutored by her friend Arlene in the convent, could touch her nose with her tongue and showed Gyan.
He could wiggle his eyebrows, slide his head off his neck from left to right to left like a Bharat Natyam dancer, and he could stand on his head.
Now and then, she recalled certain delicate observations she had made during her own explorations before the mirror that had been overlooked by Gyan, on account of the newness of landscape between them. It was, she knew herself, a matter of education to learn how to look at a woman, and worried that Gyan wasn’t entirely aware of how lucky he was.
Ear lobes downy as tobacco leaves, the tender substance of her hair, the transparent skin of the inner wrist…
She brought up the omissions at his next visit, proffered her hair with the zeal of a shawl merchant: "See – feel. Like silk?"
"Like silk," he confirmed.
Her ears she displayed like items taken from under the counter and put before a discerning customer in one of the town’s curio shops, but when he tried to test the depth of her eyes with his, her glance proved too slippery to hold; he picked it up and dropped it, retrieved it, dropped it again until it slid away and hid.
So they played the game of courtship, reaching, retreating, teasing, fleeing – how delicious the pretense of objective study, miraculous how it could eat up the hours. But as they eliminated the easily revealable and exhausted propriety, the unexamined portions of their anatomies exerted a more severely distilled potential, and once again the situation was driven to the same desperate pitch of the days when they sat forcing geometry.
Up the bones of the spine.
Stomach and belly button -
"Kiss me!" he pleaded.
"No," she said, delighted and terrified.
She would hold herself ransom.
Oh, but she had never been able to stand suspense.
A fine drizzle spelled an ellipsis on the tin roof…
Moments clocked by precisely, and finally she couldn’t bear it – she closed her eyes and felt the terrified measure of his lips on hers, trying to match one shape with the other.
Just a week or two later, they were shameless as beggars, pleading for more. "Nose?" He kissed it. "Eyes?" Eyes. "Ears?" Ears. "Cheek?" Cheek.