Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [106]
You were in the house as little as possible, walking in the cold weather through the woods and along streets where you were the only pedestrian. I spotted you once, while I was on the school bus coming home, shocked at how far you’d gone. “You’re going to get sick, Kaushik, always wandering outside like that,” my mother said. She continued to speak to you in Bengali, despite your consistently English replies. It was your mother who came down with a cold, using this as an excuse to stay in bed for days. She refused the food my mother made for the rest of us, requesting only canned chicken broth. You walked to the minimart a mile from our house, bringing back the broth and issues of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. “Go ask Parul Mashi if she wants tea,” my mother said one afternoon, and I headed upstairs to the guestroom. On my way I needed to use the bathroom. There was your mother, wrapped up in a robe, perched morosely on the edge of the bathtub, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.
“Oh, Hema!” she cried out, nearly falling into the tub, so startled that she crushed the cigarette against the porcelain and not into the tiny stainless-steel ashtray she held cupped in her palm, and which she must have brought with her from Bombay.
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to leave.
“No, no, please, I was just going,” she said. I watched as she flushed away the cigarette, rinsed her mouth at the sink, and applied fresh lipstick, blotting it with a Kleenex, which then fluttered into the garbage pail. Apart from her bindi, my mother did not wear makeup, and I observed your mother’s ritual with care, all the more impressed that she would go to such lengths when she was unwell and spending most of her day in bed. She looked into the mirror intently, without evasion. The brief application of lipstick seemed to restore the composure that my sudden appearance had caused her to lose. She caught me looking at her reflection and smiled. “One cigarette a day can’t kill me, can it?” she said brightly. She opened the window, pulled some perfume out of her cosmetics bag, and sprayed the air. “Our little secret, Hema?” she said, less a question than a command, and left, shutting the door behind her.
In the evenings we sometimes went house-hunting with you. We took the station wagon; the beautiful car your father had bought could not comfortably accommodate us all. My father drove, hesitantly, to unknown neighborhoods where the lawns were all a little bigger than ours, the houses spaced a little farther apart. Your parents searched first in Lexington and Concord, where the schools were best. Some of the homes we saw were empty, others full of the current occupants and their possessions. None, according to the conversations I overheard at night as I tried to fall asleep, were the sort my parents could afford. They stepped to the side as your parents discussed asking prices with the real estate agents. But it wasn’t money that stood in the way. The houses themselves were the problem, the light scant, the ceilings low, the rooms awkward, your parents always concluded, as we drove back to our house. Unlike my parents, yours had opinions about design, preferring something contemporary, excited when we happened to pass a white boxlike structure obscured by a thicket of tall trees. They sought an in-ground pool, or space to build one; your mother missed swimming at her club in Bombay. “Water views, that’s what we should look for,” your mother said, while reading the classified section of the Globe one afternoon, and this limited the search even further. We drove out to Swampscott and Duxbury to see properties overlooking the ocean, and to houses in the woods with views of private lakes. Your parents made an offer on a