Free An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao Page B

Meena woke up, put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and went out. She came back twenty minutes later with an ice-cream cone. I sat watching her. “Did you want one?” she teased.
    After she’d flattened the top of the ice cream, she raised the tip of the sugar cone to her mouth and bit into it. Then she sucked the rest of the ice cream out, like marrow.
    â€œYou’re disgusting,” I said.
    â€œHow so?”
    â€œThe way you eat that ice cream.”
    She licked a drop of ice cream from the corner of her mouth and smiled. “Are you sure it’s the ice cream?”
    I stood up and left the room.
    *   *   *
    I was curled in a hollow between the trash bins as the doorman stood over me. The wall behind me was warm and rough and cool all at once, like sand. After drinking the two bottles of wine, I’d drifted to sleep, dreamed that I was lying on a beach. The dark horizon in the distance pushed against the shivering gray sea. Shards of moonlight rusted and fell away. I could even see myself, marooned on the shore, lit by the white sand like the forgotten lamp of a firefly.
    When I blinked my eyes open, Jenkins was shaking me. “Wake up, my dear. This is no place for a lady.”
    I looked up at him at the word lady . I could feel the crusted edges of my lips, my rancid breath, my body bloated with despair. He lifted me to a slumped position. His skin was dry, flaky, like the wings of a butterfly, and his face contorted with the effort of pulling me up. I let go of his arm and leaned against one of the trash bins. I thought: I’ve tried to travel so far from Albany, so far from the girl at that party, and yet here I am again, breathing in a loamy, humid scent.
    â€œLet me take you upstairs,” Jenkins said.
    I studied his face: his eyes nested in wrinkles, slippery and placental as newborn birds; his sagging cheeks; shattered capillaries wandering across his skin like lost tribes. The forlorn white wisps of his hair reminded me that I had a husband, and that I’d lost him. Jenkins sat down next to me among the trash bins. We sat in silence for a long while. My head felt light, airy, and I closed my eyes to settle it. I supposed it was the scent but I saw the creek again, and Meena’s hand reaching toward me. And the fear returned. The fear that maybe it wasn’t what I’d imagined all these years. Maybe she’d wanted me to join them; that was all.
    â€œWhy is it,” I said, “that some people hold us like they do? Whatever they do only makes us love them more. Did you ever know anyone like that?”
    â€œI did, once. In India. In Pakistan now, I suppose.”
    I grinned. “Maybe we have a gift for it.”
    He fell silent. I recalled that long before we’d moved to America, years before the afternoon with Sean Finley, when Meena was five and I was eight, we’d been walking home from school and had cut across a stranger’s yard. We’d bought snacks at the stall outside our school gates: one rupee’s worth of spiced peanuts and fifty paisa for two thick slices of cucumber sprinkled with tangy amchur. Meena had finished her cucumber and was eating the peanuts one by one. “I only want the round ones,” she said. “You eat the halves.”
    â€œWhy can’t you eat them?”
    â€œDimple said they’re diseased.”
    I threw the bitter end of my cucumber on the ground and scooped out a handful of peanuts. “You’re both stupid.”
    We ducked through a stand of lantana and came out onto a sloped ravine choked with camphire and thorny hawthorn bushes. I held the branches with two fingers while Meena passed through. We reached the base of the ravine, a fallow bed of dirt and silt. The dirt kicked up as we walked, griming our white socks with a thick coat of our mother’s wrath. We rarely walked along this stretch of ravine, usually staying on the road until our block, where