The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [158]
These were the other volunteers for Mother Teresa.
What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn’t like? Mitchell had eaten breakfast at the volunteers’ table before. The Belgians, Austrians, Swiss, and others had welcomed him warmly. They’d been quick to pass the marmalade. They had asked Mitchell polite questions about himself and had politely supplied information about themselves in return. But they told no jokes and seemed slightly pained by those he made. Mitchell had seen these people in action at Kalighat. He’d watched them perform difficult, messy tasks. He considered them impressive human beings, especially in comparison with someone like Herb. But he didn’t feel as if he fit in with them.
This wasn’t for lack of trying. On his third day in Calcutta, Mitchell had indulged in the luxury of a barbershop shave. In the tumbledown shop, the barber applied hot towels to Mitchell’s face, lathered his cheeks and shaved them, and finished by running a battery-powered hand-massaging unit over Mitchell’s shoulders and neck. Finally, the barber wheeled Mitchell around to face the mirror. Mitchell looked at himself closely. He saw his pale face, his large eyes, his nose, lips, and chin, and something the matter with it all. The defect wasn’t even physical, not a vote of nature so much as people, or not people so much as girls, or not girls so much as Madeleine Hanna. Why didn’t she like him enough? Mitchell studied his reflection, searching for a clue. A few seconds later, responding to an urge that was almost violent, he told the barber that he wanted a haircut.
The barber held up a pair of scissors. Mitchell shook his head. The barber held up the electric shaver, and Mitchell nodded.
They had to negotiate the setting, agreeing, after a couple of swipes, on one-sixth of an inch. In five minutes it was done. Mitchell was sheared of his brown curls, which fell in heaps to the floor. A boy in ragged shorts swept them outside into the gutter.
After leaving the barbershop, Mitchell kept checking out his dramatic reflection in the windows along the avenue. He looked like a ghost of himself.
One window Mitchell stopped to look at himself in was that of a jewelry store. He went in and found the case of religious medallions. There were crosses, Islamic crescents, Stars of David, yin-and-yang symbols, and other emblems he didn’t recognize. After deliberating among crosses of various styles and sizes, Mitchell chose one. The jeweler weighed the items and elaborately wrapped them, putting them into a satin pouch, placing the pouch into a carved wooden box, and wrapping it with ornate paper before sealing the entire package with wax. As soon as Mitchell was back on the street, he ripped the exquisite package open and took the cross out. It was silver, with a blue inlay. It was not small. At first, he wore the cross inside his T-shirt, but a week later, after he’d become an official volunteer, he began wearing it outside, where everyone, including the sick and dying, could see it.
Mitchell had worried that he might run screaming from the place after ten minutes. But things had gone better than expected. On his first day, he’d been taken around by a friendly, broad-shouldered guy who ran a honeybee farm in New Mexico.
“You’ll see there’s not much organization around here,” the beekeeper said, leading Mitchell down the aisle between the tiers of beds. “People come and go all the time, so you just have to jump in where you can.” The enterprise was a lot smaller than Something Beautiful for God had led Mitchell to imagine. The men’s ward contained fewer than a hundred beds, maybe closer to seventy-five. The women’s side was even smaller. The beekeeper showed Mitchell the supply room, where the medications and bandages