Free An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao

sticks. You know, the ones they use to hold up the plants.”
    It had been a week since I’d found out about him and Meena. We three had been at the party together. I’d left the room and when I’d come back in, they’d been standing in the opposite corner. A crowd of people separated us but I’d had a clear view of them, though neither had looked up to see me. They’d laughed about something Vikram had whispered in Meena’s ear and then—with the sure intimacy of lovers—he’d taken hold of her wrist. Brought it close to him. It had been a slight gesture, tender, and yet its familiarity, its insistence, had been sexual. I knew, then. I had lived for an entire week, knowing.
    â€œWho the fuck cares whether it was a stick or a stem.” Vikram was at the door, his coat over his shoulder. He took a long look at me, taking in my pajamas, my uncombed hair, lips stained red with wine. This sudden change in me, over the past week, went unquestioned, unprobed by him, as if he’d lost interest not only in me but also in the basic machinery of marriage. “What does it matter?” He sighed and dropped his head as he opened the door. “Her heart is punctured.”
    *   *   *
    I was the one to take Meena to get her first abortion. She’d called me and said, “Anju, I missed it.”
    â€œMissed what?” I asked, thinking she was talking about a class. She was in college and I was in graduate school at CUNY.
    I picked her up at her dorm. She stepped through the door wearing sunglasses, a straw hat with a bright green band, and her hair in pigtails.
    â€œYou look like you’re going on a hayride.” I didn’t know what else to say. My eyes passed over her stomach and up to her face. But she was looking away, out the window. Her shorts crept up her thighs; their earth-brown flesh embarrassed me. I saw her as a man would see her, felt a shudder, a thin and submerged lust, and thought, How dare you dress like this? Today, of all days.
    When we got to Dobbs Ferry, there was still an hour until her appointment. We bought coffee and sandwiches at a café and drove to a trail along the Hudson where we sat on a bench. Meena drank in silence. I gazed straight ahead at the river. It was thick with summer runoff, and drifted languid and sallow with afternoon heat. “Do you remember that kid?” Meena said after a long silence. “The one who lived behind our house?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œSean. Sean something.”
    â€œFinley?”
    â€œYeah. Finley.”
    â€œWhat about him?”
    â€œYou remember that day? Behind that tree?”
    Yes, I remember, I wanted to say, I remember everything. “No. What day?”
    Meena smiled. “I was called a slut till the day I graduated high school. Can you believe it? From third grade all the way to high school.”
    I couldn’t think of what to say. In the distance, on the other shore, was a group of kayakers. They seemed about to push off and I watched them with a keen longing: their colorful kayaks enclosing them, their shouts and laughter as they called to each other. “It got to where I didn’t know if I was trying to prove them wrong, or to prove them right.” She laughed.
    One of the kayakers reached the middle of the river, and the others followed. Tiny waves lapped at the sides of the kayaks.
    â€œAre you afraid?” I asked.
    She turned toward me. “Of what?”
    And I knew she wasn’t afraid. Had she ever been afraid? Fear—sometime during that afternoon with Sean Finley—had left her body and settled into mine.
    *   *   *
    Meena was a sophomore in high school, and I was about to leave for college, when our parents visited friends in Buffalo and left us alone for the weekend. As soon as their car had pulled out of the driveway, Meena smiled and said, “Let’s have a party.”
    I was eighteen,