Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [112]
“My father,” I said, squeezing back into the bed beside her. For a while she continued pondering the puzzle as I lay curled at her side, the unfamiliar smell of her still thrilling. She knew nothing about my family, about my father’s recent visit to Calcutta or about my mother’s death the summer before I started college. In the course of our few weekends together I had told Jessica none of those things. That morning, after crying briefly against her body, I did.
After my exams I drove to Massachusetts, dropping off Jessica on the way at her parents’ farmhouse in Connecticut. When I decided to attend Swarthmore my father gave me the Audi he’d bought after we moved back from Bombay. He said that it would make it easier for me to come home from Pennsylvania during weekends and holidays, but I knew it was really an excuse to get rid of yet another thing my mother had touched, known, or otherwise occupied. The day we came back from the hospital for the last time, he took every single photograph of her, in frames and in albums, and put them in a shoebox. “Choose a few, I know pictures are important to you,” he told me, and then he sealed the box with tape and put it in a closet somewhere. He had wasted no time giving away her clothes, her handbags, her boxes of cosmetics and colognes. That is probably the last time I remember you from that period, you and your mother coming to the house one day and spending an afternoon going through my mother’s drawers as many others already had, fingering her things, lifting her sweaters and shawls to their chests to see if they would flatter them, testing to see if Chanel No. Five would react as favorably with their skin. The items you and your mother and the other Bengali women had no need for were sent to charities in India, as there was nowhere in New England to donate all those saris with their matching blouses and petticoats. This was according to my mother’s instructions. “I don’t want all that beautiful material turned into curtains,” she’d told us from her hospital bed. Her ashes were tossed from a boat off the Gloucester coast that a coworker of my father’s, Jim Skillings, had arranged for, but her gold went back to Calcutta, distributed to poor women who had worked for my extended family as ayahs or cooks or maids.
It didn’t matter to me that her things were gone. After Bombay she had little occasion to wear jewels and saris, saying no to most of the parties she and my father were invited to. Coming home from school toward the end, I would find her sitting wrapped in a blanket, looking out at the pool she no longer had strength to swim in. Sometimes I would take her outside for fresh air, walking carefully through the birches and pines behind the house and sitting with her on a low stone wall. Occasionally, feeling ambitious, she would ask me to drive her to the sea. “Be sure to keep my ruby choker and the pearl and emerald set for the person you will marry,” she said during one of these walks. “I’m not planning on getting married any time soon,” I told her, and she said that she wished she could say the same for dying. Ultimately, I disobeyed her. After she was gone I was unable to open up and examine the contents of all those flat red boxes she’d kept hidden in a suitcase on her closet shelf, never mind set something aside for the sake of my future happiness.
Late in the afternoon I climbed the road that led to our driveway. Our house was the only source of light for miles, amid isolated patches of hardened snow. It was not an easy, typically inviting place. Stone steps had been built into the uneven ground, flanked by overgrown rhododendrons leading to the entrance. I saw from the other car in the driveway that my father was home, and he stood behind the storm door, waiting for me to come in with my things.
“We were expecting you earlier,” he said. “You said you would be here by lunchtime.”
I knew then that it was true, that there was another person inside the house, a person who made it possible for my