Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [102]
“This is my room. Your room,” I said, correcting myself.
After dreading it all this time, now I was secretly thrilled that you would be sleeping here. You would absorb my presence, I thought. Without my having to do a thing, you would come to know me and like me. You walked across the room to the window, opened it, and leaned out into the darkness, letting cold air into the room.
“Ever go out on the roof?” you asked. You did not wait for me to answer, and the next thing I knew you’d lifted the screen and were gone. I rushed over to the window, and when I leaned outside I couldn’t see you. I imagined you slipping on the shingles, falling into the shrubbery, my being blamed for the accident, for standing by stupidly as you did such a brazen thing. “Are you okay?” I called out. The logical thing would have been to say your name, but I felt inhibited and did not. Eventually you came back around, seating yourself on the incline over the garage, gazing down at the lawn.
“What’s behind the house?”
“Woods. But you can’t go there.”
“Who said?”
“Everyone. My parents and all the teachers in school.”
“Why not?”
“A boy got lost in them last year. He’s still missing.” His name was Kevin McGrath, and he’d been two grades behind me. For a week we’d heard nothing but helicopters, dogs barking, searching for some sign of him.
You did not react to this information. Instead, you asked, “Why do people have yellow ribbons tied to their mailboxes?”
“They’re for the hostages in Iran.”
“I bet most Americans had never even heard of Iran before this,” you said, causing me to feel responsible both for my neighbors’ patriotism and for their ignorance.
“What’s that thing to the right?”
“A swing set.”
The word must have amused you. You faced me and smiled, though not kindly, as if I’d invented the term.
“I missed the cold,” you said. “This cold.” The remark reminded me that none of this was new to you. “And the snow. When will it snow again?”
“I don’t know. There wasn’t much snow for Christmas this year.”
You climbed back into the room, disappointed, I feared, by my lack of information. You glanced at yourself in my white-framed mirror, your head nearly cut off at the top. “Where’s the bathroom?” you asked, already halfway out the door.
That night, lying on the cot in my parents’ room, wide awake though it was well past midnight, I heard my mother and father talking in the dark. I worried that perhaps you would hear them, too. The bed where you slept was just on the other side of the wall, and if I had been able to stick my hand through it, I could have touched you. My parents were at once critical of and intimidated by yours, perplexed by the ways in which they had changed. Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had, my mother said, something she hadn’t anticipated and didn’t understand. There were remarks concerning your mother’s short hair, her slacks, the Johnnie Walker she and your father continued to drink after the meal was finished, taking it with them from the dining room to the living room. It was mainly my mother who talked, my father listening and murmuring now and then in tired consent. My parents, who had never set foot in a liquor store, wondered whether they should buy another bottle—at the rate your parents were going, that bottle would be drained by tomorrow, my mother said. She remarked that your mother had become “stylish,” a pejorative term in her vocabulary, implying a self-indulgence that she shunned. “Twelve people could have flown for the price of one first-class ticket,” she said. My mother’s birthdays came and went without acknowledgment by my father. I was the one who made