THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 55
Always it was the same demand. She
wanted Geeta to send jewelry to her
mother. Geeta lived in this big house,
she was rich, so there had to be jewelry.
Where was it?
Then one afternoon she found Rani
going through her cupboard. It was
kept locked, the key under a lace doily
on the dressing table, but Rani must
have seen her retrieve it. Now the door
stood wide open. One of Geeta’s saris
had slipped to the floor. Her piles of
nighties and petticoats lay slumped
against one another.
“What are you doing?” Geeta asked.
“It was like this already,” Rani said.
She sounded bored with her own lie.
“If you’re looking for jewelry, you
won’t find it there.”
A scowl creased the girl’s forehead.
“Bitch,” she said.
“I may be a bitch,” Geeta said, strug-
gling to remain calm. “But I adopted
you. Even if I give you jewelry one day,
it would be for you, not for your mother.”
Rani turned and thrust her hand
into the cupboard. Another sari fell to
the ground.
“Rani!”
Drawing a breath, Geeta stepped
forward and grasped the thin shoul-
ders. The touch seemed to inflame Rani,
for she began thrashing, but Geeta kept
her hold until they were both outside
the room. Then she let go, breathing
hard. Rani stood still for a second, then
leaped for Geeta, giving her arm a pain-
ful pinch before fleeing to her room
and slamming the door.
That night, when they were in bed,
Geeta described the incident to Sri-
kanth. After she finished, he lay silent
for a long time. Just as she began to
wonder if he’d fallen asleep, he said,
“This is what you wanted.”
She didn’t reply. Her arm, where Rani
had pinched it, was black and yellow.
“You said you were ready,” he con-
tinued. “I asked you, and you said you
were ready.”
She said nothing.
“I go to work every day,” he said. “Isit in an office and earn money for you.
Now the girl is my responsibility also?
I’ve already finished raising my daugh-
ter, my little au pair.” His voice sounded
far off. “You’ll have to find your way
with this one.”R
ani began making startling pro-
nouncements. One afternoon, she
threw her arms around Geeta’s waist
and said, “I love you, I love you, I love
you.” She said this fiercely. Her voice
tore into Geeta like hooks. Two hours
later, she told Geeta that she was ugly.
“You look like a black rat,” she said.
“Black like shit.”
“My mother fell,” she said, on another
occasion. “She fell into a hole and then
she tried to pull me inside. It was very
deep.” And on another day: “I saw my
father. He was not wearing any clothes.
He is very happy and he likes his food.”
And on still another day: “There were
many people hiding in the jungle around
my house.”
From these sinister fragments, Geeta
pieced together the mosaic of a short
and terrifying life. She saw a weak, pro-
tective mother, an absent, unpredict-
able father, poverty, the looming threat
of outsiders, the fear of corrupt author-
ities. She recalled her own parents, who,
despite their curtailed presence in her
life, had at least encased her in the solid
outline of their love. Her father, a timid
and coöperative tenant farmer, was given
to breaking into soft, worried mono-
logues that no one was allowed to hear,
whispering it all to himself so that he
wouldn’t burden his wife and daugh-
ter. Her mother, grave and hilarious,
could change her voice at will, now put-
ting on the staid airs of a village elder,
now the coarse twang of a city dweller.
And those voices had remained with
Geeta, even after the accident that had
killed both of her parents. The con-
vent-school years, the stone courtyard,
her work for the Bakers, even her mar-
riage—they all felt to Geeta like man-
ifestations of her mother’s never-end-
ing repertoire.
It occurred to her, of course, that Rani
could be lying, but Geeta had the sus-
picion that what she said was more or
less accurate. Rani’s lies were obvious
and lazy; these baroque narratives sug-
gested a more insidious truth. It could
not be prodded from her. She could notAUBADEAS FUEL
Your lip an abstraction of iris always arousing
the question of the bed. Which goodbye lasts?
Only yesterday my hands rich with dirt. I told you
Milkweed is my new salvation addiction. You know
I always need to save something, to control it.
I can make a pollen island, make your collarbone
a spiritual landscape, the air around us orange
and alive. The shape you left in the sheets
a Rorschach I read as a rattlesnake’s skeleton
in the silverware drawer, no, a fire in a cabin,
no, a cabin on fire, the absence it will make.
But look at me now, my heat signature a whole
bouquet of howling, straddling scarves of smoke.It’s O.K. that it’s over. Leaving is a lesson of
pleasure. My ribs, sets of parentheses. My heart,
an aside, an apple ready for the twist. My legs
around your hips, a pillory, our shame public
to the night. Tulip shadows on the nightstand,
an apology marooned and lightless, each bite
mark on your shoulder synonymous with grief.
You ask me to brush the match against the red
phosphorus of Goodbye in a way that makes
you believe it. I ask to be the one on top, the one
struck bright when God pours out the lightning.—Traci Brimhall