All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I had found a job. This set me apart from my college friends. I was a consultant, or going to be. This despite my arty degree. A consultant in training. Three toddlers hiding in a suit. I did not consider myself a sellout. What I felt was that I had been saved from drowning. My classmates without jobs had moved in with their parents, were working unpaid internships at noble nonprofits. I wished them well. My parents were not with me, had left me to make my way in the new country. I was glad they did not, for now, need me to send them money. They had before.

So far being a slut had returned mixed results, and I suspected that, like swimmers with small feet or curvy ballerinas, I was not built for the championship leagues.

In undergrad I had been required to study a near-unreadable German novel about a young man who runs away from home to escape the pressure of his family’s desires for him. For years he roams around, joins a theater troupe, gathers the friends that become the extension of his family, but by the end he chooses his destiny, chooses the staid sensible life that his parents wanted, finds a wife, all of his own free will. That’s what a true adulthood had come to signify for me, a bowing down before the inevitable. For the lucky, this could be preceded by a period of freedom, the latitude of youth.

I wanted a friend. I wanted, too, a woman. I did not know if these longings were separate. Someone who would roll with me. A laughing woman, dapper, with a car.

In summertime Milwaukee is six-packs in parks, listening to free jazz, festival everything, gastropubs with the young and hip foaming out of them, home repairs, grilling out. All neighborliness, sweet like a laugh. The city is a clenched hand as it grows colder, its people chapped and flaking. Hunkered down. Shoulders stooped against the freeze rolling out from the north, barely tempered by Lake Michigan.

We had gone out for a martini lunch. Six toddlers hiding in two suits. This was at a Bar Louie near the client. There were decorative gourds on our table, a quarter sheet announcing fall specials: a pumpkin spice tiramisu, apple cider hot toddies.

Meeting Tig had made my own life slow and thicken, seem for the first time worth noticing. For the first time I felt as though I had stories to tell, once I had her to tell them to. It was a change from flapping between the fluorescence of work and the yeasty darkness of the dive bar like some perpetually camouflaged moth.

I glared at her. Within me thoughts hummed like flies. I did want to know whatever she was offering up, hiding behind her back like a child trying to bargain for a toy. But she could not get to have this kind of power over me. I need to use the bathroom, I said. Turning my voice soft and cold, I added, You shouldn’t feel like you have to divulge anything you don’t want to tell me freely. Thank you for the ride.

Thom had been blabbing about Engels, growing louder with every new Belgian beer. Now he was getting into how he didn’t think much of Obama. Imagine Obama’s actions from a white dude, no one would be impressed with him, he scoffed, and Isabel nodded seriously and obediently. To me it seemed possible that most people other than fancy-college types would love Obama way more if he were white, and it seemed explicitly because he was not that people were asking him to move heaven and earth. But I did not really follow politics.

It seemed to me that my good friend Thomas, while working in the stultifying fluorescent light of our client boardrooms, was slowly becoming some species of shaggy radical. Which was fine, I supposed, but for me he was near impossible to follow. For me a landlord was like a shopkeeper. They sold something people wanted. And as much as Amy was a demon out of hell, even my parents rented out a modest flat my mother had inherited in the city close to them, and this, given my father’s unemployment, was their primary income source. They had done this because the money helped, because the alternative was to leave the property empty and let it fall into disrepair, or—while he was still alive—have my sodden creep of an uncle reside there, which would ultimately produce the same outcome. I tried to say a gentle and reasonable version of this.

I was willing to believe that Keith LaMarchese—Rolex means more sex, let the ladies know—was a dues-paying member of the so-called ruling class. I knew at a cellular level that my father was not. And neither, horrible as she was, was Amy. I’ve never asked, I suppose, I said, my voice sounding choked and ghostly to me, what your mother and father do, like what they do for money. Thom looked discomfited for the first time. He shrugged. They work in medicine, he said. My mom works in medicine. Lots of different ways to work in medicine. What do they do? Thom ate a sausage with violent chews. Isabel said, Let’s change the subject, pals, it’s a Saturday night— Do they work in insurance or something nefariously embarrassing to you? I asked. Fuck no. I’d disown them. They’re just, like, doctors. Cardiology and family medicine, Isabel added helpfully. Two doctors, I thought. Making doctor paychecks in America. Living in the suburbs of Milwaukee while their son, miles away, dreamed of the Maoist uprising. My white friends with their white faces and their white lives. Their eyes watching mine. Assigning me a place on their political grid.

The two of us were sipping very hot coffee and trying my first oysters at the Milwaukee Public Market, which Tig said was modeled on the apparently famous Pike Place Market in Seattle. At MPM, you walked about the warehouse perimeter, where many little shops and markets huddled, you got your tacos or cheese knife or lobster roll and carried it upstairs, where there was seating. One stall sold a canvas bag of pink crystalline salt with grandiose writing about the Himalayas for twenty-five dollars. Only in America, I thought. St. Paul’s, which we were patronizing, had a little bar where they served food. The oysters on crushed ice. A bowl of lemon wedges, doll-size bottles of Tabasco. These are revolting, I said. Remind me of pussy a lil, honestly, Tig said, tipping her head back. Don’t have them with coffee, Jesus Christ, the oyster guy said. Please. Take these— He pushed toward us two glasses of white. On the house, he said. Only because I can’t stand it. Tig laughed even louder, took five dollars out of my wallet, and dropped them in the tip jar.

A barely familiar voice called out my name. Are you okay? it asked. At the wheel: Pulp Fiction. Her doll’s face, her swollen mouth. In the passenger seat was a disinterested-looking man in his forties, his hair a wispy nest. The married doctor. Are y’all okay? Pulp Fiction asked again. A smile cracking her face like an egg: a sweetness concealed in it. We’re just headed home from the airport, she said. Do y’all need a ride somewhere? — What I found difficult to explain in the years after was how much the people I knew in Milwaukee would ride for each other, for strangers even. A true neighborliness, this in a city with so much ugly, people getting flung out of their apartments by landlords, a city so segregated that I could walk four blocks from my apartment where older blond people nodded like their begonias and told me to have a nice day, and at the end of those blocks would find myself in a neighborhood five times as poor, not a white face to be seen.

This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man’s hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and motherhood.

I never did find my keys, and had to ask the Fiancé for a spare set. When I walked into work that Monday, Peter beckoned me over. Have you been enjoying the apartment? he asked. I nodded, eyes widening in fear. He showed me an email exchange on his phone. Amy had written a long letter of complaint about me to my landlord. Stacy had forwarded it to Peter with two words: pls advise. The email made it sound as though Keith Richards and Hugh Hefner had assumed tenancy. It made references to 3 a.m. parties where people climbed out on the roof. A vision of a future where I had an expired EAD, no sponsor, no option but to leave, to return dragging my suitcases up the red laterite of my family’s yard—this was what flashed before my eyes.

Even a week into this, Tig was texting less, calling infrequently. Perhaps this was the way of the world. Your best friend serving as placeholder for the real thing: the person who would audition to be your husband or wife.

I stabbed at wet broccoli. Ambition was a shiny layered geode of a word. Cut it through and you would see its variegation. To want to be a CEO, to want to be safe, to want to make your mark on the dance world, to want to buy a nice flat someday, to want to be on CNN, to want to sell enough books about philosophy that you might live in the Pink House in some hazy future—those all fell within the company division of ambition, but I knew that this stupid boy was not actually trying to get philosophical. Listen, I said, I want to make enough money to take care of myself and my parents. I want to own a house someday and not be an old lady renting, being terrorized by some Amy type.

Sitting in my computer chair as the IT guy complained with his Swanson beef breath about a change in scoring regulations for his bowling league, I’d realized that it was the great desire of my heart to have the trappings of a bourgeois life, soft and warm as a cashmere sweater. I wanted this, and I wanted this because it had been relentlessly sold to me with the aggressiveness of a Bangalore street hawker. Had been marketed to me since I was fourteen and looking at the advertisements over the airport phone booths while we waited in line for O’Hare Customs and Immigration. To shame me for wanting what I had been taught to want seemed like a callous cheat, a wanton shifting of goalposts.

From little hints they dropped and I ignored, I think Tig and Diana might have been interested in sleeping naked in the same bed, with me included. A bristly feeling inside at the idea. I did not know how to reconcile my love for Tig, the shimmering regard and gratitude I held for her, with the frank slime of want. I feared these two women could unearth something ugly in me. As their friend I was my better self: dry and laughing, spiky but kind, trying to peel the world like an orange, eat it by the segment. I wanted to keep it that way.

Still, he usually waited for me in the garage when I worked late and drove us both home. He’d negotiated a five-dollar raise with Peter, never mentioning me. He wanted to save up enough for a down payment in three years, which was, he said, around when he wanted to marry Isabel. My stomach hurt at the thought. I imagined it: my friends peeling off one by one to fall in actual love, buying three-bedroom houses in far-off suburbs, growing too busy to call. While I, either alone or in some airless marriage with a paid-for man, would crawl from bed to bed in the dark like a cockroach.

The specifics of the theory I recalled only vaguely. Quantum units in a box. Sometimes they were waves and sometimes particles. In fact they were both, but any one observer could only perceive them as one at a given moment in time. They collapsed into a steady state when observed. Something is either green or blue. That is true in most places. A young woman is a decent daughter, chaste and godly, educated but not too much, successful but not too much, on her path to marry a decent paid-for man. Seen another way: a girl migrates to a new place but is too scared to grow up, still a Mummy and Papa’s girl, traditional to a fault, clinging to the old ways, choosing obedience over happiness out of childish fear. A young woman, corrupted by the new place, turns into a pervert, wrong in the head, crawling from bed to bed, kissing another woman’s neck like a deviant. Seen another way: a girl comes to the new country and finds freedom, finds herself, finally lives in the truth of her desire and ambition, lives like her life is her very own, lives like an American.

Across the baggage claim aisles my mother called my name. There they were. Mummy and Papa. I was groggy from the long flight and smelled bad. My skin was dry. I should, I thought, have brushed my teeth before coming through customs. My father with his silver goatee and rimless specs. My mother in an organza sari of pale pink, her hair oiled into a bun with such precision it was as though her scalp was painted. At the edge of her waving hand a neat steel wristwatch. I saw it in her face: she wanted to run to me, but I was the child, and the parent does not run to the child. There is a way things are done.

My family is a geode of silences. You would need a hammer to smash it open.

I would tell her the lessons of this place. To bring water up from a well, you pull the rope hand over hand, as though you and the well are dancing a coy dance of seduction. To chop many red onions fast you need a very sharp cleaver and to slice down the onion half as though you are marking five-degree intervals on a protractor. To feel powerful, touch a thottavaadi, watch it shrivel and collapse at your finger’s brush. To know the limits of power, walk by it again in twenty minutes, when it is revived, standing as tall as if you were never born.

My mother appeared to be listening more carefully than usual. It occurred to me that this conversation might be driven less by her desire to discuss Goethe—my mother tended toward Dan Brown and Chetan Bhagat; her most-read volume was a Christian devotional for nurses—than by her need to wear a spot of the geode thin enough to break through, say what she wanted to say. Something in me wished to put off her speaking for as long as possible, and I kept on. There are some parts where it feels like it is just blabbing on forever, I continued, but this book created the idea—I suppose the Western idea—of youth. Before this, you were a child just until, fata-fat, you were grown up. Wilhelm Meister has a period of freedom in between. He gets to have this time. Time to become himself. Learn what it is he wants.

Ente mol, she said, her voice full of danger and love. She said it again in our language: my daughter. Those two words in my mother’s mouth: a branding iron. We are going, she continued, let us have an end to this talking back, okay? Don’t you make me call your father in here— Listen, woman, someday I will come to your grave and do orma and all. But that is it. Her slap popped my ear. Hand cradling my face, I bared teeth back at her. I was Susan after the conference chair had been thrown. Widely I smiled. He was not good to me, I said, as calmly as I could manage, since some form of explanation seemed required if I was to ever be left in peace again. He was not. Monchayan, I mean.

What ruined me, standing before his stone, was feeling, in place of the sweet creamy hatred I hoped to savor like soft-serve, a terrifying dissolve into pity. For this small cockroach of a man, who had never found a woman he could convince to marry him, who was so alone in the world that he chose a child. From pity my heart moved, sliding in a neatly fluid mass like egg white, to a terrible, shamed love. This despite every attempt at rescuing the calmly kinked malice that had protected me so well for so many years.

Subtract the coldness and dislocation that appeared to run through my personality like electrical wiring ran through a house. All this, the very facts of who I was, could be different. I could be a person refigured: warm, charming, loving, loved.

The finiteness of my own money was wearing on me, grinding me down like glass under highway traffic.

Tig nodded, seemed about to interrupt. I pushed on, trying to find the words. But like, respect is free, I said. Costs me nothing to call you what you want to be called, like maybe I’ll forget, but I love you. Generally our friendship is not work, whatever you may say, but an ongoing pleasure, pretty much any day. If this is what you want, if you feel like a galaxy or a rocket ship or an asteroid versus a lady, that’s fine, yo. I can do a bit of work and call you what-the-hell-ever you want to be called.

When we were about to be seated, Tig added, Can you get me? All the cash I have left till payday is five dollars. Sure, I said, beads of sweat beginning to gather at my hairline. I asked the server for the soup. With a luxuriant smile Tig ordered a Duvel and a chicken piccata. I glanced at the menu. A Duvel was the most expensive beer Trocadero even carried. Nine dollars. The chicken piccata was eighteen. And no doubt Tig would tip generously. With my money. What’s wrong, Tig asked, as my face reddened. Nothing, I said. We ate in near silence. You have to tell me what’s up with you. You’re making me anxious. I love you, but sometimes I think you think I’m comprised of cold cash, I said.

I’m sorry, I finally said. I am—quite—stressed about money. I haven’t been paid since December. What? Freakin’ Peter’s going to get me the money I’m owed when the client pays him, which will happen at the end of the project. It’s just stressful. The prospect of living off of savings for so long. I—I—I’m pretty low on cash. Antigone’s anger appeared momentarily blunted. Fuck. Wow. I am sorry he is treating you this way. Babe. You have to be fucking honest, Tig said, their jaw set tight. Be honest in your relationships. You have to be honest with me, your best friend. Otherwise you’re just skating on ice, and one day you’ll fall through. ’S not that easy, I said weakly. My skull was pulsing, my vision beginning to blur as we pulled onto my street.

For a time I was so happy that my own life appeared unreal, calling to mind phone pictures filtered to absurd saturation and luminosity, where dour midwestern skies were transformed to electric blue and everyone’s teeth blinded. So happy I was capable of setting on ice, for a period, any worries about work or cash flow or the consequences of my lies.

In my guts I felt a terrible churning shame, the sensation that I had backed myself into a corner, barking dogs bounding ever closer. Yes, I wanted to say, that’s all very nice, but these are my people. They are my people. Yes, I am glad that I am here in this country, for a thousand reasons, including the latitude to hold your hand in public and kiss you on the forehead, but the people of this country are not my people, and most let me know every day.

They would hold house meetings to process dispute and idea. In time they would build, on the Pink House lot’s southern edge, tiny insulated homes for people who were homeless in the city. They would share money, they would protect any family member who fell upon hard times, they would never have a landlord again, they would in this manner grow old together. Part of me was impressed. Most of me sneered. How would they get the money for this? What if someone in this idyllic-ass commune wanted or needed out, desired to leave? The 1960s called, and they wanted their ideas back. I turned the page. Tig’s blueprints. In smudgy pencil, they had sketched the house out, using the floor plan from its last selling. A wing of the house had my initials on it. On the next page was a hastily scribbled rendering of a garden, dotted by small cottages. One said Mama and Kelli Jo. One said Writing Studio. One by the vegetable garden said, appended by a question mark, Sneha’s Parents? I closed the small notebook and held it to my heart; I burst into tears.

Food was like that too; every real flavor a layering. A mango from back home was flowered sourness and honey, buttery heft, slivers of green bitterness in the flesh near its skin. But every part of the Wendy’s sandwich had a single note. The faintly sweet bun, the crunch and salt of the patty, the mayonnaised slick of wilted lettuce. I ate it like it was the food of the gods. This is what it is like to be hungry: you are on fire, smoke suffusing you, the heat inside impossible to ignore. What it is like to be hungry: time loses meaning, turns elastic and useless, traps you in knots. What it is like to be hungry: like no good thought can stay within you for long. Happiness itself metabolizes in minutes, your body sopping up its calories like bread with soup, reverting to the preexisting ache.

Her eyes grew wet when she said, Tell Mitty I’m sorry, okay? Feel like I let him down so bad. I want to get back to the program, but they make it so hard. It’s like some obstacle course shit, but your whole life. And it’s expensive as hell! Only reason I can do it at all is cuz Mitty pays for it. Amit loves you, I said, not knowing what else to offer up. I added, stupidly, It’ll be okay. KJ leaned forward. In this moment she seemed so young, younger than me. In my mouth I tasted a tenderness cut with exasperation. Like a rise of bile while you drink sweet tea.

All my life, when I imagined the future, I thought of each of us as small atoms, individuated, settling down, getting a flat somewhere, wearing out one job and then another, like successive pairs of shoes. You grew up, you were found a person to marry, you went sullenly to work, you kept a house running, you did the requisite paperwork or paid the price, and then for two hours of the day you might cultivate a pastime, like yelling at sports on the television or forcing the lawn into submission. It took a bravery to imagine something even slightly different, let alone follow that imagining through.

My laughter burbled up again, helpless, irrepressible. It was the first time I had been this disrespectful to a grown-up. If you cured me of all these, I told her, I don’t even know who I would be. It would be like getting lobotomized. I would not recognize myself. Setting the clipboard down, I thanked her, still chuckling lightly. Walked out.

I’m fucking—mortified, I said, almost in tears. It was the truth. They got to work. Each taking a corner of a room. Except the little boy, whom Diana placed on my bed with an injunction to play with his iPad. Tig blasting Swedish pop on Thom’s Bluetooth speaker, dancing with the vacuum Diana brought over. Years later I can look back on that moment and see it as the act of devotion it was, to pick up somebody’s disgusting mess and dispense with it. The kind of thing my parents would have done for me. That I would do for those I love most. In that moment, though, it felt like someone had lifted my head off, vomited into the urn of my body.

Still, she helped me prepare for the Skype interview. Did my makeup. Wished me luck. That is the problem with Marina. She believes various unfortunate things about herself, thinks herself bad, like so many of us have been taught to. But she has a clean heart, goodness pumping through its ventricles. She is nearly always generous.

If the cut was deep enough, Mummy told me, if it was still bleeding after five to ten minutes of pressing down on it, if its edges seemed lacy or refused to come together, then there was no help for it, and my friend should go to the hospital. She doesn’t have the money, I said, and my mother replied, in her blunt way—inadvertently reminding me that white men writing philosophy books did not invent collective thinking—Then you help her, no? She can pay you back? That is what money is for.

Somewhere within me a wound reopened at its lacy edges, a wild regret spurted bright and dizzying and carotid.

All this history unknown to me. Tig turned to me. Their face flushed, something new and fearsome in it. Don’t you dare forget this place, they said. I think you’ll eventually maybe make something of yourself out east. One reason why I’m letting you go. But don’t you ever, ever, ever become one of those people nose in the air, calling all this—Tig gestured around wildly—flyover country. Thinking we’re just about beer and cheese and serial killers and corn. Things happen here. Happened here. This place is part of why the rest of this stupid godforsaken nation has child labor laws and workplace safety and unemployment insurance. Why we have weekends and an eight-hour workday. We had forty years of actual socialist city government, democratically elected, here. Only city in the nation. FDR was inspired by what happened here. When he dreamed up his lil New Deal and shit. Milwaukee, baby. We have real history. Remember us right.

Marina in the dressing room. Staring at me. My mind a sliver of Jolly Rancher on pink tongue, a metal spoon licked clean. Marina, in a marbled kimono and shiny black leggings. Her hand moved to her clavicle, tugging at the thin gold necklace resting upon it in mute agitation.

It is—peculiar—to be bothering people like this, when they are carrying heavy furniture, and moving out of a flat, Mummy said. Look, the Fiancé began in tones of conciliation, I’m a nice person— We are all very nice people here, my mother said, with an air of getting the nonsense out of the way. I am nicely suggesting you and your wife go work somewhere else, while we take my daughter’s things out of this apartment, she appended, appearing, like Alice in the storybook, to grow large as the stairwell itself, staring her prey down with a dragon’s eye until he turned and scurried back into his hole.

The future, of course, is unaccountable, antiknowable. I came to Milwaukee envisioning the life of a fledging rock star in a blazer and hose, with three-martini lunches, steak houses and cigars, a different woman in my bed each week. All this until my youth, my allocated window of tolerated rebellion, ran its course. Instead I’d ended up with a biohazard of an apartment, a small nest of loving friends, a long wait in the line at St. Casimir. Was now leaving, bank account in tatters, to try to make good on a new coast of this strange country. I would say there is something especially American about second chances, but my father’s timeline gives lie to that.

I cannot speak a word. I’d followed Thom’s advice. Sent the email, expecting nothing. Heard nothing back, all the intervening weeks. Seventeen thousand dollars, she tells me. You got your money, whatever you sent worked. The bitch backed down. On lifting the shoebox lid, my bath bombs explode the air with scent. When I tip them in, the whole box’s worth, the chalky spheres bob in the water, harmless and bland. Fizzing slightly. Then they metamorphose. Pastel and neon and iridescent foam roars out their sides. They have names, somewhere. Intergalactic. Melusine. Sex Bomb. Twilight. Incredulously I laugh and laugh and laugh into the silence of the tiled room, beyond thought or language, ducking my head under the iridescent froth, only coming up, every part of me wild with glitter and color, once I can no longer breathe.

We had two often-happy years. And then we ended. The fights had grown worse as my avoidance did, as Marina’s drinking did, with the extension of long distance, with Marina finally moving to be with me, which didn’t help nearly as much as we thought it would. With Marina driving under the influence, with my withdrawn rages, with my saying, No, you cannot come to India with me, it is just too much. It is no slouch of a thing, bitterly arguing until you can see light playing the tops of rowhouses like piano keys, then waking to see your love reaching for you like a child, her face hot and waxy from sleep. The head spin of realizing that her sweetness is not contrition, not forgiveness, but simple forgetting, a blacking out. I’m sorry I said that, she’d mumble to me, I just don’t remember, so I don’t know what to do about it, I’m really sorry—

While we were in the air the boss sent me four emails. As did my father. Except his were Zillow listings, forwarded on. The plane Wi-Fi was too weak to allow the pictures to load; they stayed boxy outlines. A two-bedroom in Anacostia, a studio in Lanier Heights. A one-bedroom in Northeast D.C. My father, who with great pain and over years had finally accepted that he had a gay daughter, had since chosen to stay focused on her material advancement in the world. From two oceans away he called routinely to ask how my performance review went, whether I would negotiate a robust raise. My mother let his concerns take precedence but remained preoccupied with matters of my heart. Is there anybody? she would sometimes ask, shy and brusque at once. Three years in and she had never forgiven Marina for walking away from me.