After the House Burned Down
Nandini Bhattacharya
She stood up, took the keys from the dining table where she and her husband always left them. She would go for a walk. She wrapped her hand around the keys, feeling their sharp teeth, their cold greeting, bite into her palm, wake up her hand.
The other woman lived in a place where there was no ocean. This one thing had always sustained her then: the difference between their two lands, hers sun-tanned and sea-hemmed, the other woman’s a torrid and barren desert. That, and the fact that the children were hers. Only hers. As far as she knew the other woman had miscarried once. But she didn’t allow herself to think of that now. She wouldn’t let the past creep slowly in her blood like an embolism till it reached her heart and killed her.
She saw up the smoky coastline ahead the land rearing and bending over the sea, the buildings on its tip like impossible Arabian Nights minarets or even Disneyland, at this distance, in this yellow-sugared light. She took note of the old women waddling out to sea. Waddling out to sea. Strange language, that. A strange way to think about the future. But not sad. Not sad, in a way.
The sea stretched out, way out, to her right, meeting the sky, the waves rippling like a dead sea monster’s scales. Soon it would be winter, and every day there’d be fewer people on the beach. She imagined for a second paper cutouts of people cascading sideways and down, leaving the beach clear. She smiled a little, imagining the beach emptying as if the silhouettes fell away in wonder and awe at her advent. The most beautiful woman in these parts.
Because of her beauty, in spite of the other woman, her life had been a good one. And now, they had made the other woman vanish, she and her husband. “You won,” he told her one day in bed after a spurt of sex—which they didn’t much enjoy now and she never had—that was awkward and painful for him because of this thing that had happened to him. With the other woman. She did wonder afterwards, after he’d fallen instantly asleep—how did he do that?—if he’d told the other woman the same thing, ten years ago.
His house in that ugly land where the other woman lived had caught fire when the two were asleep in his bed there. The daughter who’d followed her father there, whom she’d sent to spy on her husband and the other woman, said so. Her daughter was, unfortunately, a congenital liar. She admitted it. She had failed to raise her right, and now her daughter lived in the other land and wouldn’t talk to her. Not only that—she blamed her, the mother, for all her problems. Isn’t that what children always do. Well, not necessarily, because she’d always been devoted to her own mother, who was now dead—Oh Imma—but had kept her going during the ten dark years, till she was able to make the other woman vanish with her husband’s mild-mannered cooperation.
But even in spite of her daughter—the constant worry about her wore her down to a nub sometimes, making her smoke more though her lips were already forever cinnamon bark—she’d still had a good life. She’d defeated the other woman, got her husband back. After ten years, during which he made her suffer more than can be described, but then the house burned down and though he hadn’t left immediately the day it happened, she’d had a sense, a premonition, that things were about to change.
In those days she’d grown used to looking out her window and seeing light the same color as the days of her girlhood, less brilliant than the days of her reigning queendom—the most beautiful young woman in these parts—and thinking that her story would end with her return to that place called youth, to beginnings, into her mother’s then not-flabby arms; it would end in her vanishing, in something not unlike a waddling out to sea except it would be backward, vanishing into her mother’s body from which she came, before which there had been nothing and after which there would be nothing, her life and story rounded off but hollow like the loop at the end of the dog’s leash, like the collar around the dog’s neck.
She got used to thinking, some mornings as the sun was just stabbing the sky, that the only thing left for her now was that return, all alone; she’d come as far as her husband would let her on his restless search for something different, bigger, and now he wanted to leave her, like someone called Ariadne was left on some rock they say is actually the one beneath the jutting outcrop ahead with the miniature Disneyland on top, along this very coastline. Indeed, that she would walk back and simply fall, disappear, into the pitch darkness of Imma’s sturdy body, buttressed, her husband always said, by Imma’s hawkishness, her calculations. That the story of her whole life would be no more than the story of someone who had to go back to a more shaded but lonely place called a refugee childhood. Because it’s hard for really beautiful girls to find anything else when men no longer desire them. That she was being abducted by the same tidal surge of time and space that once placed her, one glorious day, before her future husband, who was then young but already unused to hearing “no”—on this very beach where she was now walking, the dog straining hard at the leash wrapped around her hand now, the keys safe in her pocket—but the surge much more vicious in its suck-back, its ebb.
That day, he’d said to her, simply, with his signature crooked grin, “Aren’t you a little young to be walking alone on the beach at this hour?” And that’s how the next thirty years had begun, with boy-girl banter.
And how she’d cried on lonely nights, alone in the bed he left after thirty years, wishing she hadn’t said to him, however flayed, in however much pain, when he told her he had a second chance, another opportunity, that he must take it, that she must come with him, she must leave behind the beach, her mother, her land, the sea, even the kids because they were grown: “And what’s in it for me? Here I have my kids, my friends, my mother, my country . . . and what will I have there? You?”
And she’d seen that frightening, inauspicious look that instantly climbed onto his face like a snarling monkey when someone said “no” to him, that paling so incensed that it was dazzling, and then the flutter of his bleached eyelashes and his eyes filling with incongruous but real tears. He’d never been able to believe that he couldn’t get something he wanted. He still didn’t understand how people could deny him anything. But she’d torn on, stupid with pain, reckless, wanting to hurt him badly enough that he wouldn’t be able to leave with such wounds, and also such wounds on her as she was telling him he was making.
If only she hadn’t said that. If only she hadn’t mentioned her mother, whom her husband had never liked and who never trusted or liked him either—always saying that someday he’d leave and she’d be like that Ariadne girl the educated people said once sat crying on that rock where now wedding videos were made because young people care less.
But she had said it, and then when it became clear he would go, he would definitely leave, and then later when he told her on a visit back—she, recognizing the lawless gleam in his blue eyes when he meant to hurt, and knew it was working—that he’d met this other woman, this fascinating, educated woman, yes a colleague, she’d thrown herself at him crying, desperate, begging to be forgiven, begging to go with him anywhere, wherever he wanted to go, away from her mother, her country, even her kids, because true, they were grown now; and he had let her come to him, taken her to bed. Then left.
The dog barked and pulled at the leash so she almost stumbled. She’d been so inside her head that she hadn’t noticed someone coming toward them with another dog on a leash, and now the two dogs barked at each other for a while till they began frisking around, and the other dog began to hump Goldie till the owner pulled him away, apologizing, their eyes meeting in mutual understanding and amusement at the behavior of their dogs. That was the thing about this land. Here people forgave each other, everything else insignificant after the atrocities committed against them at another place, in another time. In this country people were like a big family, a solemn tribe with a sense of mischief.
The other dog barked for a while longer as it was taken away; Goldie went on with her. Good girl. Animals. Howling even if incapable of the real thing.
Small, dark and sexy. That’s what he’d said the other woman was. He’d even shown her a photo.
“It’s my turn now,” he’d said to her. “Let me have my turn too. Let me be in my country, in my life. You could have come. You chose.”
Then she’d imagined him, in the lonely crying nights, telling the other woman how he’d told his wife that the other woman also had needs, she couldn’t wait too much longer, and then she’d set her jaw and vowed to make him wait forever, to never let him go, to never set him free.
And in the courthouse, she had looked him straight in the eye, and she knew he knew that she was saying, “How could you do this to me?”
Enough. All that was done and gone. She stooped to pick up a pretty shell. Iridescent and perfectly scalloped. Till she realized it was actually a hairclip—a plastic hairclip shaped like a shell. She threw it down and walked on. On her fingers was sand, sand that she and other children in the camp used to be told was just as good as water and soap for cleaning, their ancestors had used it for thousands of years.
She and her husband had decided not to talk about the other woman. She didn’t ask him what had happened or where the other woman was now or whether he’d loved the other woman—small, dark and sexy—more than he’d loved her when he was a young man, when he said he “wanted to jump her bones” all the time. There was Ariadne, and there was Penelope, another Greek woman she heard about from him when he came back.
Of course, the other woman had also returned him broken. His passion was fugitive; something important in him was broken for good, probably. He didn’t want to jump her bones much anymore. Still, just once in a while, after dinner and television . . . Whether or not the brokenness let him escape even a little, they worked on it, for old times’ sake. She never asked her husband if the sex had been much better, sweeping him away, with the other woman. That’s how you make a woman vanish after the house burns down.
