Free If Today Be Sweet by Thrity Umrigar Page B

attempt to keep her tone light, Sorab heard the frustration in her voice. He felt a moment’s irritation at his mother. Why on earth did she have to go to the market on her own? She was forever telling Sorab that Cookie didn’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. Was this her way of rubbing it in? His mother could be passive-aggressive, he knew that. All bloody Parsi women were.
    To Susan he said, “She was probably just trying to be helpful. You know how much she wants to pull her own weight within the family.”
    Susan sighed heavily. “I know. Sorab, I know. It’s just that—why can’t she help in ways that are useful? I mean, the things I expect her to do—like clean the bathtub after a shower or vacuum on occasion, those things she won’t do. Do you know that I have to rinse out the tub every day before I can take a shower? And I’ve told her so manytimes, ‘Mamma, if you want to help, please take over the vacuuming.’ But she waits until I finally bring out the machine. And then she insists on pulling it away from me.”
    Sorab felt the familiar rush of heat in the back of his neck that he felt each time Susan said something critical of Tehmina. He heard the frustration in his wife’s voice, but behind his eyes there was another, older image—of his mother bent over the kitchen counter chopping onions, her face flushed from the steam from the pressure cooker and the sting of the onions. Do you realize that my mother spent—wasted—her entire youth cooking and taking care of five other people? he wanted to say to Susan. Dad and myself, my grandparents, and later, Percy. And that’s not counting all the street urchins and stray dogs that she fed. Surely she has earned the right to relax in her own son’s home? As for not rinsing out the tub each time, my mother lives in an apartment that has not seen a fresh coat of paint in twenty years. It’s not meanness, Susan, it’s just that the thought doesn’t even occur to her. And I’m too embarrassed to tell her to do it. Besides, I hate the thought of my mother, with her bad hip and all, bending over that tub, looking for every telltale gray hair. I don’t want her to feel like she is a guest in our home. I want her to believe this is her home.
    â€œWhat?” Susan said. “You think I’m being a bitch?”
    Not for the first time, Sorab marveled and bristled at his wife’s perceptiveness. Even as Susan became more shrouded in mystery to him, she could still read him like a book.
    â€œNo, not a bitch. Not that at all. It’s just that…”
    It’s just that…there are some things, some thoughts so elusive that they wiggle like fish out of the web of words. Some differences were so great that they were beyond language, beyond explanation. How envious Susan had been when he had first told her that his mother had always had servants. That the fisherwoman and the newspaper boy and the baker and the butcher all made their morningrounds to the house, delivering their wares. How easy, how luxurious Susan had imagined his mother’s life to be. And yet that’s not how he remembered her life, at all. What he remembered of his childhood was a blur of ringing doorbells and raised voices and his mother’s tired, flushed face and the complaints of neighbors and the haggling with the vendors and the arguments with the servants and the chain of unexpected visitors and demanding relatives who dropped in without calling first. And somehow, like the conductor of a mad orchestra, his mother had to manage it all—had to tame the crashing protests of the cymbals, hush the under-the-breath rumblings of the percussion, console the aggrieved wail of the violin. He had never asked and his mother had never said, but Sorab knew that Tehmina would have willingly traded in the servants and the vendors who came to her door for a dishwasher that didn’t