Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [14]
“I don’t need to be entertained.”
“That’s not what I meant. Whatever you’d like, Baba.” Her confusion was followed by worry. She wondered if there was something he wasn’t telling her. She wondered how it was in the condominium, whether there were too many stairs to climb, if he had any neighbors who knew or cared about him. She remembered a statistic she’d heard, about long-term spouses typically dying within two years of one another, the surviving spouse dying essentially of a broken heart. But Ruma knew that her parents had never loved each other in that way.
“Are you all right?”
He looked up at her; he’d been leaning close to Akash, making faces to distract him as he finished the cereal. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you feeling all right?”
“I am feeling fine. I was just hoping for a vacation from my vacations,” he said. “The tours are work, in their own way.”
She nodded. “I understand.” She did understand, for deep down she knew that there was nothing wrong with her father. Though it upset her to admit it, if anything, he seemed happier now; her mother’s death had lightened him, the opposite of what it had done to her.
He took a worn white handkerchief from his pocket, wiped remnants of milk and cereal off Akash’s face. The gesture reminded her of being small, and the little ways her father had come to her rescue, pulling out a handkerchief if she’d spilt food on her clothes, or needed to blow her nose, or had scraped her knee. “Let a few days go by. Maybe then we can take a boat ride.”
After breakfast Akash had his weekly swimming lesson. She expected her father to stay at home, but he said he wanted to go, bringing his video camera along. He offered to drive them to the pool in the rental car, but because the car seat was in the SUV, Ruma drove. She had learned to drive in high school, but then for years she had lived in cities and not owned a car, so that until now it was an activity she associated only with visiting her parents: taking the car to drop off videos, or going with her mother to the mall. It was something she had to get used to in Seattle—having to fill the car with gas, making sure there was air in the tires. Though she was growing familiar with the roads, with the exits and the mountains and the quality of the light, she felt no connection to any of it, or to anyone. She had exchanged only pleasantries with her neighbors—a retired husband and wife on one side, two gay professors at the University of Washington on the other. There were some women she would talk to as she sat watching Akash in the swimming pool, but at the end of each class they never suggested getting together. It felt unnatural to have to reach out to strangers at this point in her life.
She was used to the friends she’d left behind in Brooklyn, women she met in prenatal yoga and through a mommy group she’d joined after Akash was born, who had known the everyday details of her life. They’d kept her company when she went into labor, handed down the clothes and blankets their children had outgrown. Those friends had been a five- or ten-minute walk from her apartment, some of them in the building itself, and back when she worked part time they could meet her at a moment’s notice, pushing their strollers through Prospect Park. They had gotten to know Ruma’s mother when she came to visit on weekends, and some of them had driven down to Pennsylvania for the funeral. At first, after the move, these friends sent Ruma e-mails, or called from their cell phones as they sat in the playground without her. But given the time change and the children always at their sides, it was impossible to carry on a meaningful conversation. For all the time she’d spent with these women the roots did not go deep, and these days, after reading their e-mails, Ruma was seldom inspired to write back.
The car was silent apart from the sound the tires